Wow Okay, so thank you guys for coming I got here a little bit late, so I haven't had the chance to meet very many of you So I appreciate it My name is Jonathan Lampell and I work for a CG cookie as a blender instructor and I'm also on the blender markets team So this presentation we're gonna be taking a look at the blender market specifically So if you're not familiar with what that is, it's the first online marketplace or the only online marketplace That's exclusively for blender products. So that's models Materials textures add-ons anything that you can use with blender you can sell through the market so the the market started in July of 2014 and it started out as as a collaboration with Jonathan Williamson from CG cookie And Matthew Muldoon from blend swap who has since joined CG cookie and they've been working on the market for a little over two years now so in this talk I'm gonna go over, you know Why we started it in the first place and where we are today and what we think about going forward So when we first launched the market, we definitely got a lot of good positive feedback but of course there was the obligatory Vocal minority that made sure that we knew that we were selling our souls for profit and We're harming the blender community by by injecting commercialism into the blender ecosystem But of course we saw things a little bit differently. We hoped that by creating a commercial side to the Blender community that everybody was able to participate in we hoped to be able to increase the quality of both free and paid add-ons and assets So the reason CG cookie exists is to enable independent artists to succeed and also to be a positive force in the community So we're hoping that the blender market is an extension of those goals so we wanted to build an ecosystem that rewarded creators for creating products for quality over quantity and we also wanted a place for artists that they could go to and get all of the tools and the Assets that they needed to make quality artwork faster So that was a dream, but we didn't really have any idea if it would take off or or whether it would work So selling models and textures from a technical standpoint turned out to be relatively easy The challenging thing came in when it came to selling add-ons with GPL So if you're not quite familiar any add-on that's in Blender also has to share the same license So it has to be open source and GPL And so if somebody hasn't developed for Blender before They can be a little bit skeptical of course on you know, why should I create something specifically for Blender when by definition? Other people can you know after they purchase it shared out with other people who haven't purchased it or also? You know build on top of it themselves and sell it as their own product and and kind of you know There's a potential for for being ripped off that way. So it goes against a little bit of the Traditional business business way of working So before we tried to go out and convince other people to do it We decided that we had to do it ourselves So this came in the form of Ritopo flow that was created by Jonathan Williamson and Patrick Crawford and John Denning And so the Ritopo flow is an add-on that makes Ritopology much much easier But that did really well so far it sold over a hundred thousand dollars Since it since it came out and that's particularly interesting given the fact that you can find it on GitHub for free And so the reason it's on GitHub is we wanted to make sure that we were in the spirit of Open and sharing communication with our users You know, we wanted people to be able to learn from the code and be able to dig through it themselves and learn things from it And since this was one of the first large-scale paid add-ons that you know is a pretty hefty price We wanted to make sure that we introduced it in a way that was you know open and still in the spirit of sharing So of course putting things on GitHub has had positive and negative results. So First thing it's been it's been great for communication between us and our customers and it's been great for better bug reports And so development has been able to go along much faster because of that Now of course the obvious downside is we don't know how much money we've actually lost from that We have no way to you know calculate how many people have downloaded it and not paid us for our work. So that's definitely a downside but What's definitely clear is that it's not helpful to be Too precious about your work There's nothing really good that comes out of putting too many walls between you and your customers. It stifles long-term growth So One thing that we we talk about a lot at CG cookie on our retreats and stuff is how much is too much to give away for free Because we have to find that balance because of course if we're not making money Then we're not around to give things out to other people for free So it's kind of a cycle and we're always trying to find exactly where that balance point is But of course not everybody is in our position when it comes to selling things with GPL for example Allogorithmic the company that makes substance substance designer and substance painter they have a really cool plug-in for Maya and they have a really cool plug-in for unity and They kind of hit a roadblock when it came to Blunder because of the GPL license and in their case the way that the Plug-in works for unity is you can take your procedural material from substance designer and Take that file go right into unity and tweak all of the parameters inside the game engine directly So this is really fantastic if any of you views it, you know how awesome it is But the reason it works the way it does is because it has some of the source code from substance designer So in order to you know make that with Blender They'd have to open source, you know that part of substance designer, which is a really big deal And that not something that they're willing to do But that's a really specific instance, and you know it's likely not something that's going to happen to independent creators an example of a company that has created a commercial product with Blunder Communicating very well is Pixar and their render man render engine. I'm sure some of you are familiar with so Brian savory has done a great job of creating that add-on and the way that it works and avoids any issues with GPL is Actually, if you download render man for Maya and have Blender the add-on just talks between the two apps and creates the UI for Blender and so none of the source code from render man is actually in there the add-on is just for communicating between the two apps So if you are definitely Concerned about releasing your source code or anything like that. You can just create a separate app and have an add-on that communicates between the two So another thing that's pretty clear right now is open source does not equal free They're they're not the same thing because somebody is always paying for the work that happens so in the case of Blender a lot of people donate and that's how they get money, but You know if somebody is not paying for it, then it's being paid for by somebody's time so It's always being paid for it by somebody and when it comes to selling add-ons We're just kind of switching which end of the equation the money is coming in at but there's always money or a significant amount of time involved So on the market, of course, you're not just paying for the code itself That's something that's really important to us. It's also about the experience So we want to make sure that our products are our quality and so you have that peace of mind When a creator puts an add-on on the market or you know a model or anything like that Part of the terms and agreements that they sign is that they have to be available for communication with their customers so if You know, you have an issue you have that peace of mind of knowing that you can you know immediately contact whoever made it Submit a bug report and they'll get back to you and if they can't then you know You can talk to us will either you know, we're happy to give you a refund if anything goes wrong but you know if we have an issues an issue with Developers, you know not getting back to you or anything like that. We had one instance where Or a creator just didn't have enough time to support his products So we had to take those off the market. So that was definitely unfortunate No hard feelings. He just didn't have any time anymore for that But we wanted to make sure that all of our customers can get the access To the support they need as soon as possible. So it's also about that that peace of mind things should just work You shouldn't have to worry about it whatsoever So that's what we started with that was the dream in the vision But let's take a look at where we are today in terms of hard numbers So these are all 2016 year-to-date. So January through October where we're at so far First of all, we have about three hundred and thirty three thousand dollars of revenue coming in So that's up 31% from last year, which is definitely awesome We also have two hundred and eighty two thousand about in operation costs. So that is Development a chunk of that is development for the market 2.0, which I'll talk about in just a second but that's also just you know regular upkeep Paying for servers and the plugins that we use and of course paying Matthew and occasionally myself to go through products Make sure doing the quality assurance reviews communicating with creators Everything like that. So it's definitely not a cheap thing to run day today and So far we've paid almost two hundred thousand dollars to our creators just this year So vendors that are on the market In addition, we've donated nineteen thousand dollars to the blender development fund So that's something we're super proud of because that's not our donation This is actually just out of the generosity of our vendors. So we have a separate donation for CG cookie. This is not that When a creator creates a product, they have an option of donating a certain percentage. It's totally optional. They don't have to But they have the option of donating just a certain percentage of that directly to the blender development fund and by making it easy to do So a lot of them are are happy to do that and so far that's resulted in about nineteen thousand this year So if you look at these numbers, you'll notice that well, they don't quite add up And that's because right now we're running at about a hundred and fifty eight thousand dollars under So CG cookie is is eating that loss right now and that's certainly a chunk of change So Another couple couple numbers 31 percent More in sales since last year and our our users are in this case just web sessions The users were about the same graph have stayed pretty consistent But it's a valid question to ask you know for if our users are staying the same and we're operating at a Net loss, you know, why are we still going? Why are we still? Continuing to do this and not only that why are we continuing to invest more in the project? so that's definitely a valid question and The way that we see it is that the blender market is kind of like CG cookie zone little mini startup And so far we're pretty happy with the results So a lot of businesses don't start making positive money until you know the third or fourth year So it's nothing completely unexpected But also just for having it be a little over two years old It's close to generating You know half a million dollars to put into the blender ecosystem that wasn't there before so people that are using blender people that are selling and and Creating things with it. That's half a million dollars that wasn't in that space at all before and with you know Close to $20,000 being donated to the development fund that also wasn't there before that's definitely something. We're happy to invest in and Also, I don't have a lot of testimonials Matthew gets gets most of those But I've definitely seen more than a couple that have said that you know Since they've had a successful product on the blender market that they don't have to work as much over time and can spend more time doing the things that they love and so We know that we're on the right track and we're happy to invest in the success of people So I've talked a little bit about blender market 2.0. I've mentioned that a couple times. So what is that well? This is a complete recode of the market as it stands So we were hoping to have this ready yet in time for the conference last week But unfortunately there were some server issues and it'll be out coming this week So we're definitely excited to have you take a look at that But the reason we decided to create a completely new version of it is because the old blender market was created in Wordpress and that came with its with its own slew of issues. So it started out. Okay. It worked. It worked. Okay But there were definitely some some hardships and one of those was we had to rely heavily on third-party plugins So we couldn't create everything ourselves and we had to you know, use other people's stuff And so we didn't have as much control as we would like over the actual process of what happened And if you know for some reason they broke something in one of their updates, we couldn't really fix it We didn't have anything we could do about it And so we just kind of had to eat those costs as they came up And so since we were relying on quite a few that definitely had become an issue Another thing is we couldn't iterate very fast. We couldn't make Very many new features Development was very very slow and it was time-consuming to upkeep So now we're creating everything completely from scratch using Ruby on Rails And that's allowed us to make a very smooth web app That's a much better experience and this solves a lot of the headaches behind the scenes for sure it'll make it much faster for For Matthew and myself to go through products and review and we've added some new features that will definitely make Experience for everybody quite a bit better So we've made it easier for customers to purchase. So that's definitely important. We want that to be as streamlined as possible But we've also made it a whole lot easier to submit your products So before that was pretty A cumbersome form that was really ugly and you had to fill it out all at once There was no saving it as a draft you had to type out everything all in one sitting and submit it that way And it took a really long time to get reviewed. So we fixed that with a really smooth form quick process you can submit it whenever you'd like and you can leave us comments and We can email you straight from there Another thing that we've added is reviews So before you purchase a product you can see what other people have thought about it And you know if you had a good experience or bad experience you can let the creator know right in their reviews And so that's definitely something that's been proven on on multiple Websites to increase sales. So that's something we're looking forward to having Another interesting feature that's worth mentioning is the inbox So I know we all have enough inboxes in our lives But this one's super cool because all of the communication that happens around the market is all in one single place So if you have a question about a product, you can ask it right on the product page But the creator gets that in their inbox The same place is if you have a support question the creator also gets that in their inbox And so they can handle everything all in one area And it allows really easy communication between either the customers and ourselves or the customers and the creators or the creators and us So it definitely is is more helpful in that So that's what we've been up to recently Going forward we have a few ideas. So these are things. We're just spitballing. We definitely know that we're going to continue forward with London Market 2.0 and refine the experience as much as possible. That's the Sorry, that's the big plan But also in addition to that we've been spitballing a few ideas that are not set in stone But things that we might think would be interesting. So one of those is to incentivize creators to make things that we know will Sell well. So one thing that's an issue with online market places is people create a lot of really random things that you Wouldn't really expect people would want to buy and that's totally fine. It kind of you know fills it out And you get some some really interesting products But a lot of time there's things that we know will sell well, but creators just haven't made so for example Modular asset packs for James. We know that's a huge thing But there's only like one or two of them on the market So an idea would maybe be to incentivize people to make those either with like a reward system or You know giving a bounty for the first person who creates it or something like that. I just create a fun system for Getting the right products to attract customers Another idea and I think this was from Tom. I'm not entirely sure I wasn't there for this conversation But it sounds interesting is use the fund Use the money that's going towards the Blender development fund and hire our own Blender developer and so the way that that would might work is instead of bothering the The Blender foundation with all of our bug reports or issues that our creators have We can just hire our own developer and have them work on issues So if somebody's trying to you know make the infamous make render perfect button But they have this issue with you know some small thing in Blender That's just not working instead of bothering the Blender foundation We can just hire our own person and take care of it for them And so we'd make sure that those those changes are in alignment with the Blender guidelines and make sure that it gets patched for everybody So it would benefit benefit everybody. So those are a few ideas that we have There's definitely a lot of stuff going on. So that's just a quick overview of where the market's at so far. So That's that's all I've got today But if you want to talk we definitely want to be as open and transparent as possible So if you have any questions whatsoever feel fleet feel free to flag me down in the hallway I'd be happy to talk. So thanks for listening and have a good rest of the conference


All right, it's 1115 and we're going to move on to Michelle, I believe is with us this morning. Is that correct? Yes, I am, Senator. Thank you. All right, okay, here we go. So I am going to share my screen. I've got a presentation to give you an update on the status of our planning for more extensive engagement to bring additional equity to our planning and project selection processes and how we deliver those. So let me just get my presentation queued up here. Michelle, this is related to the four page report that we just received that gives us an approach and then the status update. Yes, that is correct, Senator. All right, I shouldn't have bothered to read it if you're going to present it to us, sorry. Well, it's only four pages.  We never know who's going to read those reports, that's for sure. So you'll recall last session that there was a requirement in the T-bill that we move forward with an equity framework and provide a report to you, which initially we were thinking would be the actual product of this process, but it turns out this is much more involved than we had anticipated in the timeline is now different than we originally expected. So in addition, simultaneously, at the federal level last January, the Biden administration issued what's called the Justice 40 executive order. And this is, we'll have requirements that states invest 40% of their federal investments and that those investments floated disadvantaged communities. And the guidance on that is still under development. We're not exactly sure what that will mean for Vermont. I think in Vermont, the characterization of disadvantaged communities would likely include the lower income communities throughout the state, might be sort of income-based, as well as other specific census block communities of folks who are historically disadvantaged in their participation or their receipt of benefits from federal programs. So this is something we're still monitoring and we'll be incorporating into our process. When we think about equity and transportation, I like to use this block, which really talks about the different kinds of equity. So we have basic inequality where we have unequal access to opportunities, which is shown up the top with a person who has a terrible road and can't sort of get from here to there versus somebody who's provided a nice highway. And then are we making sure that when we do provide equitable access that we are providing that across the geographies and across the different user communities? And then social equity to sort of identify and address these inequalities. So being able to understand the sort of foundation of why there is inequity. And then ultimately we arrive at a sort of a point of justice, it may be called to assure that we are using appropriate tools and approaches so that we are able to distribute the resources that we're charged with in an equitable manner. So we have moved forward and selected a consultant after a pretty lengthy process to develop requests for proposals, which included consultation with both sort of agency and regional planning commission partners as well as the state equity director and also our federal highway administration director. And I think I might have a slide on that later, but it is a multi-layered team. The consultant that was selected is Resource Systems Group, which brought together both a good internal team as well as bringing forth the Rights and Democracy Institute, Kaia Morris, who many of you may have heard of. She worked on the climate planning process and has assembled a team who is working now also with the Agency of Natural Resources on some of their equity advancement. So I think that she'll bring some good insights into this process. The way we are setting this up is that we'll do the initial project initiation and research, examine existing programs and prepare an assessment of where we stand. And then we will have a very lengthy stakeholder and public involvement process, which will be led by the Rights and Democracy Institute. And there will be very focused research and outreach to specific types of marginalized communities to help us form the basis for how we would engage with these communities across the state going forward. So the Bennington BIPOC community, Winiski Burlington Second Generation New Americans urbanized residents within Barrie and Newport and Rutland area persons experiencing low income. And there will be a whole range of engagement strategies that the Rights and Democracy Institute have utilized successfully. We do have some pretty good information available to us on this topic now. This is an index prepared by UVM, School of Natural Resources, Rubenstein School. And it basically looks at environmental disparity. And there's a variety of tools, not only here in Vermont, but that are evolving nationally. Here's another equity index created by the Oregon Department of Transportation's Office of Social Equity. And so we will be looking at utilizing and then enhancing or developing similar tools for our efforts. And you'll have this slide in your packet.  Michelle, I think you think the slides are advancing, but all I'm seeing is the same slide, Inequity, Equality, Social Equity, and Justice. Oh dear. Am I unique in that or? Yeah, that's all I'm seeing, yeah. Okay, let me go, I don't know what's happening here. Let me go to another framework here. If you have two screens, you might just be looking at the screen with your PowerPoint. Oh, I see that, yeah, somehow I'm having, I'm gonna stop sharing and get this straightened out. What are you seeing, Senator Chittenden? No, yep, there's better. Oh, now we're seeing each other. All right, let me try this again and see if I can't get this up. Thank you for letting me know about that, Senator Chittenden. Yeah, I really had some great slides for you to see, but okay, let's start sharing again. Okay, are the slides advancing now? Yes. Okay, so those are all the slides that I showed you before that you didn't see, they'll be on your website, but they're just depictions of the resources that are available. And then we will be working on a vision statement and guiding principles that will help inform how we advance this and how we apply it to our work. And then the final report will basically be a compilation of all of the research and will result in best practices, recommendations and methods for implementing the plan. And this planning process will apply to everything from our public outreach to identify projects that may be needed in a region or a community, all the way to scoping processes where we engage the public in the design concepts for projects, the 502 hearing where we're bringing out information related to the sort of near-final designs and the right-of-way implications. And then our on-the-ground implementation of projects so that we have a good way to approach this. Very good, Joe. Yeah, I'm just wondering, Michelle, the metrics that are gonna have to be developed to comply with the federal requirement that 40% of investments flow to disadvantaged. Just take Burlington. You've got within the city of Burlington, you have many neighborhoods, some are very affluent and some are much lower income. And so within your planning, are you gonna have to identify and set standards or definitions around, I would think you'd have to, around what is a disadvantaged community and it's a community gonna be a subdivision of a town and city. It's just, when you think about what it takes to implement and report and for compliance, I know that certainly you think about historically what we've done. When we put interstates through, what do we do? Put it through the poorest neighborhoods, split them up. We did that with the Boston North End or whatever and or the people who live along a railroad line to historically have had maybe lower income. So I'm just wondering what is the thinking or will the federal government provide those metrics? So I'm anticipating that the federal government will provide some guidance relative to the metrics. They've done that with other types of investment requirements that they have placed upon us in terms of maintaining our bridges or roadways, et cetera. And I expect a similar approach to this. In terms of breaking it down, I suspect it's going to be really looking sort of the investment side will perhaps be a little different than the outreach side. And I can't really speak to the investment side on the Justice 40 piece until we have more guidance. Yeah, because it's only certain federal investments. So obviously there must be identified package of investments that this requirement would apply. And I don't know what those certain are. Well, it seems pretty broad from the executive order when I reviewed that. So I'm just, I'm sort of curiously and anxiously awaiting more details on that. I mean, I think if you, I think compared to other parts of the US where you consider our rural context and other factors related to income, I would imagine that when we sort of look at our transportation system investments, whether it's transit or roadway or bridge, we're making a lot of investments in communities where there are economic disparities. And then I would expect, you know, we're going to have some acknowledgement of that when the final guidance comes out. In terms of the specific outreach we do relative to our planning and our projects, that would really be more at the sort of neighborhood level, so to speak, depending on which communities we're delivering services or projects to and how we may need to approach the engagement for those processes. All right, so just to give you an idea where we're going with this, January, we're going to kick off this process and start the setting up the advisory group. And then May through September will be that intensive community outreach that we had talked about with basically later this fall working on the recommendations of the implementation plan and then having this ready around February of a year from now. So that's the timeline and that's the status of this. And I believe that is my last slide. So I'm going to stop sharing and see if there are any other questions. Questions, anyone? Boy, no questions. So when you're reviewing a project, then this would just be part of that criteria that you would be looking at in that decision making or that would translate down into probably the RPCs and the TAGS as well. Yeah, the RPCs will be an integral partner in this whole process. And I think a lot of the outcomes in terms of where we will need to place more emphasis on engagement and even to the point of helping certain communities understand and be ready to participate in our processes. In other words, it's not just knowing that there's a public meeting coming up. It's, okay, there's a public meeting coming up and what do these things that the Transportation Agency are going to be talking about? What do they even mean? How do they impact me? What concerns should I have? So it's a pretty broad sort of effort. And then for some communities, is there a need to assist by creating a liaison who is from that community who can help us in understanding the needs of a particular community? Say if it's a new American community where they might be impacted by a major roadway project and what are the considerations we're going to have to create to address to make sure that they are not impacted in a way we would not intend to impact them if we had not been deliberate about this. Yes, Senator Perkley. Thank you, Michelle. Do you see this impacting the work that's happening today or is it something that the agency is trying to get in place so that for future projects? So today we already have a process within our public outreach plan to make sure that we are identifying potentially impacted communities when we are doing projects. And a good example of that was the recent engagement through the NEPA process for the Champlain Parkway for communities in the sort of north end of that project. So we do actively and intentionally use tools now, but we are anticipating that there will be other approaches and perhaps better screening data and better screening processes so that project managers are trained to understand what are all the steps they need to be taking to assure that they're addressing these objectives of the agency. Well, I understood that. I was thinking about the Champlain Parkway project. If you saw this work affecting projects like that, I think you would go back and redo some of the engagement or this is really more going forward. Right, like in that example, the engagement was already redone as part of the NEPA requirement that the record of decision be reexamined. And so that occurred in the Champlain Parkway process. I would say that projects that are underway are not going to sort of be placed on pause to conduct additional engagement because we would assume in particular those that require some sort of NEPA evaluation that we are catching sort of those areas where we need to be doing adequate engagement to address the concerns that would arise from impacted communities. So I don't think we're in a position to say, oh, we're not gonna let things go forward until we make sure we've done this, but where we can and where we're early in the processes, we are going to be applying the tools, at least the tools we have. Thanks. When did the federal rules become effective? So that Justice 40 executive order became effective last January, but it's been a very slow rule out on the guidance. I've attended a couple of webinars put on by the federal agencies overseeing this and at the USDOT and they've been pretty high level. So we're still waiting for more details. Questions, comments? Anything else, Michelle? That's it for me today. Okay. Well, thank you very much. Thank you. All right. Thank you. Okay. Anything else the committee has on the agenda? You'll probably get to have lunch today. I've got a meeting for lunch. Okay. All right, unless there's anything else, we will see you all tomorrow morning at nine o'clock or I'll see you this afternoon.


Creative thinking, the name is showing that something creative, something innovative, that one person has the idea to express in front of others and to make something creative. Or creativity, sometimes you can get it through genes and sometimes you can get through environment.  So sometimes going through systematic process we can be creative and sometimes we have the born traits of creativity. So creative thinking means that it is the ability to make or do something new that is also useful or valued by others. Yes, you have created and it is useful and informative for others and it means it's a positive attitude.  Some of the things of the house are useless things. We can paint the flowers with a bottle cart and we can do a lot of creativity and the training of it is given to the children in schools and art work is given to them. Art training is given to them through which they bring useless things from a house and make them useful. So that is called creativity. So through this process of creative things making process children can learn the creativity as well. And divergent thinking and convergent thinking, two types of thinking create creativity. Divergent means that your thinking can make a teacher divergent. He will say that you bring his information from multiple sources and if this is his direction, then how can his direction be like this? You can take his points from different angles. And the part of the convergent is the divergent and we say that it converges. You see one color in the divergent while you see a different color in the divergent. And after seeing different colors, you say that these two colors are blue. But if we add a little more red with blue, then this will be dyed with multi colors. So it will look great with a plain suit. We bring it with multiple angles. We like the eyes and people buy it thinking it is unique. Always remember that unique things attract people. So to be successful in marketing, if you present the same idea to new people in a new mode, mobile phones used to be big and then we started bringing them in a very small size which was easy to carry. Then people immediately transferred their attention to it. When you introduce new features with innovation, people are attracted to it. So creativity is a very important trait that people can polish and improve by going through the process of creativity.


All right, today I'm gonna give it a go without my glasses and I gotta say this Brio camera in this light definitely does a number on a 47 year old man but we'll see how it goes. All right, so first thing that I wanna discuss in order to be a better listener, you have to know what you're listening for. So number one is to understand the difference between relational listening and critical listening. And the way that you can tell these apart is they're both focused on different aspects of the conversation. Critical listening is when you're listening to somebody because you have the intent in helping them solve a problem. You're listening for information that will lead you to a solution to a problem they're having. You have the best intention. And even though you're listening intently and you could repeat everything that they've said, when you went to offer a solution, they maybe yelled at you that you weren't listening only because they were reaching out and having a conversation with you to connect, define commonalities, to be in a situation where they can get some sympathy and empathy from you where you were looking with the best intention to help them out, trying to find the solution to the problem. Therefore you're focused on data point. Relational listening is all about connection. It's about looking for emotional bids, commonalities or shared experiences or relatable emotional experiences that you're able to share with the other person with critical listening. It's listening for information, misinformation or disinformation that would help you lead to a solution. Number two, making sure that you're giving to the person you're speaking to all of your attention. We tend to be in a world now where everything is bothering us. We've got notification bells going off, push notifications, we're looking at our phone, we're putting it down, we're giving our attention to the other person. And the reality is in human nature, our attention span doesn't work the way a computer does. I can't just go to another tab or turn my computer on or go to another platform and it comes right on. As a human being, my attention has to go from one subject to another subject and I have to allow for that transition. This takes five, 10 minutes before our attention can be fully focused to where it needs to be. If I'm speaking to you, I pull out my phone, I respond to a text and I put that phone back in my pocket. My focus, my attention is still in the conversation that I was just having on that phone. It's going to take a few minutes for me to fully transition that focus to the person that I'm speaking to. That takes time. We live in a world where we have this on-demand culture and it is getting us in trouble in our relationships. I can watch whatever movie I want at any time. I can listen to whatever record I want at any time. I can go on YouTube and watch some interview podcast movie because everything in modernity is on-demand. I tend to bring that sort of mindset to my relationships. I go into a conversation, I give the person my attention and I expect them to fully unload and have a comprehensible conversation about whatever the subject may be in an instant, on-demand. Reality is humans don't work that way. It takes time for us to feel comfortable to open up. Number three, your body language. Closed body equals a closed mind and a closed mind is going to equal a closed body. There's a famous experiment that's usually cited to prove this point as an example. They had set up an experiment where they had taken an auditorium and had half that auditorium listen to a lecturer speak with closed-off body language and the other half of the room listened to that lecture with open body language and they quizzed everyone to see what sort of information both sides retained. Well, believe it or not, the side with closed-off body language in general retained 30% less information than those with open body language. It's easy to see that closed-off body language equals a closed mind. So if I'm in a classroom or having a conversation with somebody I care about, I'm gonna make sure that I listen to them with open body language so I'm able to retain and have complete comprehension of the conversation.  Think about cells. You wouldn't wanna try to pit somebody who has their arms crossed who isn't listening to you, where somebody with open body language can hear everything that you're saying and they're taking in the full conversation. Keep that in mind the next time you're trying to pit somebody or you're in a room talking to an audience who's actually really listening to you and who's listening to you. And number four, we have context, the emotional tone of the conversation. At the beginning of this video, I talked about two types of listening. I talked about relational listening, which is all about connection and critical listening, which is all about problem solving.  If certain fragments of that conversation are taken out of the context, it's difficult to understand what is the emotional tone behind it? Why are they telling me the information that they are telling me? We see this problem on social media where we're having asynchronous conversations and we're pulling conversations out of context, out of the full conversation in order to examine it. If you don't have the complete context, it's going to make it difficult for you to actually know the intent that was behind the conversation that was going on. Let me give you an example of this. The other day, I was on Twitter and somebody was giving me an example of a recent conversation that they heard with Joe Rogan on Spotify. Now, I have a listen to Joe in quite a while since he had moved from YouTube to Spotify and I had mentioned that some of the guests that he had seemed rather safe or they were just comedians and they were discussing it. The point that my friend was trying to make is that he had heard some edgy conversation coming from Joe. Well, Joe has always been known for some edgy comedy but edgy humor and edgy discussions are completely different. When I was given an excerpt of a conversation that Joe was having without the context, I couldn't tell whether it was supposed to be humorous or that they were actually having a discussion to work out an idea, whether this was a clipping from a paper or whether it was a conversation that rolled into a humorous one where they were egging each other on for the sake of humor. You can understand where those two conversations are moving in entirely two different directions. So why is this person telling me what they are telling me? What is the context and the communication that is going on? And that gives you a better idea and how you're going to be able to respond. And then lastly, point five, which is summarizing. Summarizing allows you the opportunity to reiterate everything that was just said so that both parties can mutually agree on not only the context, but the emotional tones of the conversation. Summarizing also goes a long way in allowing the other party to know that you care enough to get what was said correct. You can also use summarizing for both parties to mutually agree on what was exactly said and the context that the conversation was taking so that you may proceed to whatever that natural conclusion is, whether it be problem solving, a sales pitch, or just general good nature connection. So guys, these five tips can allow you to not only be a better listener, a better communicator, but also someone who's better at understanding. And if you're better at understanding, you're going to be a better salesman, a better leader, and a better instructor. This is going to put more money in your pocket and it's going to allow your relationships to be more fulfilling. So until next week, I will talk to you guys later. Make sure that if you enjoy this video, hit the subscribe button, hit the notification bell, give us a like, give us a share, leave a comment, and we'll see you guys next week.


A place where you can chat with random strangers all across the internet This isn't a horrible idea. I mean we all know megal It is home to some of the most down bad people on the planet, but today we're gonna use it for good using only people on Oh megal I'm gonna build the absolute best team. I can I don't expect a lot of here. Hey, what's good, bro?  Yeah, do you can you name it NFL player for me?  Hey stay in school get good grades. This is a great pick amazing work Let's get my guy Hey, what's good? How you doing? I am Jake Paul Yeah, I got a boxing match coming up. Are you gonna be supporting or what? So do you know NFL at all? Do you think you can name it one NFL player for me? You said Dwayne Johnson. That's in the rock Did you did you get American football player yet Tom Brady Tom Brady? Thank you so much. That's all I needed today I hope you have an amazing day stay in school get good grades. How you doing? What's good big baller? What are you up to today? My guy just open sick Why say hi if you're just gonna dunk on me. What's good my guy you chillin you having a good day? Hey, hey, can I ask you a favor? Yes. Do you know American football at all? No, do you know any players? Shit. All right. Hey, no worries. I hope you have an awesome day. Hey, what's good my guy? Hey, where are you from UK? Ah, you can okay that you might be able to help me You know anything about American football. It's like the rugby ball kind of one Oh, the rugby ball. Yeah, yeah, do you know any players? All right, hey, no worries, bro, I appreciate you. I'll be having awesome day. Nice cut off. I see you big baller Hello, hey, where are you from? I'm from India. You tell Bob. I'm from the United States Dude, do you know American football at all right? No, sorry real football like American football No, it's good, bro. How are you doing? I like your mask. That's pretty cool. Hey, where are you from by the way? Are you American? This is harder than I thought it would be. It's way harder than I thought it would be. Hey Hey, where are you from? Hi, bro. Hey, what's good my guy? How you doing? Oh, we're out of room. I'm from the United States. What are you? Oh Wow, wait, that's awesome. I can't understand. I don't know what he said. He's from Egypt. That's pretty cool Hey, what's good? How you famous? You are famous. You are I know you.  You watch me? Yes. I know you That's awesome. You're videos and on YouTube. Really? That's awesome, bro Keep going, bro. Keep going. Yeah, okay. You want to help me for a video today, actually? Yes I'm building a football team an American football team. Can you help me add a player to my squad? We were right there, dude. So that guy had seen me on YouTube and he didn't know American football He 100% thought I was Jake Paul dude.  Hello. Hello. I very much like your ceiling.  I can't put your face on this video. Do you know anything about American football? Yeah, um, cool Could you name like a do you know any NFL wide receivers?   How are you doing? Yeah? Hi? Hey, where are you from? I'm from India I see it's already Christmas time. It's Christmas time at my house a hundred percent. Yeah We got a good month of Christmas, but I like to bring it out, you know Do you you know American football at all? No, not this one, but I I know one Tyree kill.     Let's go. Can we talk about this for a second, bro? It's fully adult guy had a wedding ring on his finger. Did you see that? He went up the nox and he had a wedding ring on there and bro. He's I'm Matt. What are you doing? Hey? Yo, it's a hit song for me It's really cold in here. I can do it. Are you kidding? That was awesome.   Yes, I'm making a video I'm trying to I'm trying to build a Madden team right now just from people on Omegles You want to help me build the squad? So I probably need some defensive players. You know any NFL at all You can do a Cowboys player. I can think of some good defensive Cowboys players Aaron Donald Aaron Donald I knew that was coming. What else they got in there Reggie White. Oh a legend. That's sick All right, give me one more and I'm cash money Ray Lewis, I don't know if he has a card actually one more on top of that. Sorry to be picky I don't know if Ray Lewis has a card large here. Ah, he definitely has a car. Let's go. Wait. What was your name? I got Matthew.   You have an amazing day my guy I appreciate you Take care. Are you from the United States? Yeah, I am fuck. Yes. Do you watch American football at all NFL?  I'm making a YouTube video. I'm having Omegle build my chat Wait, is this all time or current it could be all time, but current's probably gonna be a little easier So like we can do prime time, but you really can't do much more than that Yeah, if we're going current tight ends you gotta go Kelsey or Mark Andrews Yeah, let's go Mark Andrews because I don't have a Raven yet. So go Mark Andrews and then corner safeties partner.  I love that. Yeah, he's a savage. We go for safety. You got safety though Yeah, no good safety. What what's your guys team? What are you guys from? We're from like, uh, West Virginia in the States You guys don't have a team For the Raiders, but they don't our defense sucks if you root for the Raiders, bro I'm so sorry.  You've lost That's tough man. Hey, well, I appreciate you guys. This is like immensely helpful No problem, man. What are the odds you know American football? I don't know. Hey, what's good, bro? Yeah, how you doing? What's good? How you doing?   Good looks. I appreciate you, bro. Thank you so much Of course, you have a great day, bro. All right, dude We actually got a kind of nasty squad to build I mean I kind of cheated I kind of coaxed some of these people into helping me out, but nevertheless, we're gonna make it work So from the top we got Deandre Hopkins next up was Mike Evans who sadly still only has a core elite card He's still a big boy though. He'll make some catches Patrick Mahomes also only has a core elite 87 or at least only that on the auction house I think this was the first player we got though and he is a beast even though it's only the 87 He's still a beast. I think my favorite one though.  This is an insane card Nice would not mind Aaron Donald. He's got his beautiful core elite in the old Rams Unis I love that the guy who called Reggie white that was actually so clutched because Reggie white has a sick aka Auction house.  Whatever. I guess we're getting 82 Reggie white, but he'll still get the job done Lawrence Taylor still has this amazing all-matter card. It's actually crazy. Good. He does have a 93 harvest card None on the auction house, but whatever. He's still a beast and we got Lawrence Taylor, so I'm happy and tight end We got marky mark Andrews, right? Yep 53 five for one of the best tight ends in the game. I wish he wasn't injured. That makes me so sad him and Travis Kelsey were both just gonna have these crazy years and of course if you need Madden coins make sure to go to instant Madden coins Com they sell coins on every single platform You can also directly buy players or training points buying limited and quick selling them is probably the safest route So I recommend that this is a significantly better deal than what EA is gonna offer you and you can get 10% off when using the code MMG just use the link at the top of the description Dude the guy that said sauce Gardner What a clutch pickup because corners are so important. I literally had no corners on this team sauce got a really good card Didn't he yeah, you got this 90 overall signature team of the week and he's a big boy That's a six three corner and the final player from our last guy. He said the bus That's gonna be our half bag Jerome bettis has a full legend. I believe yep. There it is 89 overall Jerome bettis. I remember when this card was a literal million coins.  This is Jerome bettis the bus. You made him an elusive back with jukebox Can I help you 86 speed 89 truck 87 break? He'll still be really really good But it's just criminal to make this an elusive back is criminal So I've got some halfway decent sub in players for the rest of the squad, but I'm actually really excited They're all lines mid. We got Mark Andrews Tyree kill Mahomes Jerome bettis Mike Evans Deandre Hopkins And then I'm defense it actually move Lawrence Taylor to left end which I don't mind I'm gonna try that and then Reggie White at detaile Aaron Donald at right end the sauce Gardner at corner We'll be able to make it work. It's not the best team. I've ever used but this is my own megal team So we're gonna make it work. The good news is there is a really fun house rule. It's probably one of my favorites Tug of war you just got to be closer to the end zone after four plays or you can score a touchdown. Oh I like this uni matchup. Let's play a little pass pro.  That is not good. That is not good. I guessed pass. So yeah, that'll go poorly every time I'm so tempted to just airmail it to Tyree kill.  Good defense though. Good defense at three yards But we got to get some serious yards or we got to slowly take our way back. We're not in a great spot here Oh, look at that laser down the middle to the hop we cross the 50 with that play huge This is his third offensive play and he's going nowhere that time great work. It's funny It says after four plays like when you line it up, but it then it says three plays here I think we just got to pick up decent yardage here. Dude. I might just hand this off I'm gonna try and hand it off just oh his user made a great that actually had a lane But his user was right there get there get there get there. Let's go. We might have just won I think I won so I don't get sacked. I won right there laser to Mike Evans. I think that's ball game I didn't I could have just ran the ball. It didn't matter. I won there. Let's go That was mostly enjoyable. All right brand new game. He's got Josh Allen in a Panthers uni We're in the Mexico Stadium. I'm gonna send this left side. I want to get the bus rolling, dude His defense kind of got it boxed up Hey Exactly what I'm talking about way to get to the quarterback.  Oh I knew that was going there, too. I just didn't get there fast enough darn it Yeah, we need some significant yards boys. I don't know who's gonna be open, but just wait.  He might just run this ball. Okay. He does and he's going nowhere I have one play to get across the 50. What's our one money play? I almost want to go mark Andrews on a corner I just don't know if he goes that far. Ah, that just made it like mega deep. We have to get to the 50 I'm going Mike Evans. That's my best odds. Dude, this guy had me box like a fish great defense to my opponent tough L All right, baby I kind of want to oh, he's wide open. Let's go to mark. What are you doing? What is he doing? No? No, I will not win in such a fashion put sauce gardener, dude That guy really wanted to lose. I I respect I respect it. I respect it. I Got to I gotta get the bus rolling. Hey Let's go. It's any art rush Beautiful and you know what this guy may actually want to win the game, too So that's a pretty big factor or lacker. Oh, I just barely missed him good hit good hit. Oh, okay This is a good start here. Oh, he's got a blitz. I've got the middle mark.  All right. That's too offensive place for me This time award like play counter has no idea what it's talking about. I got that. I got that. Oh My god, this is a ball game. This is a ball game. I'm going for a verse, baby I think he's a d-line user so I should just be able to keep hitting these seams. There it is again. Maybe nice cat So, no, I didn't get as many yards. I want that was my third play dude. I gotta get to him. I gotta sack him here I'm on this. I'm on this. Let's go. All right. All right now I can get across a 50, but then we got a lock up again. This could be tough. This could be really tough It's a blitz though. It's a blitz. Let's just hit him with the play action. We know he's blitzing He's been blitzing every time. Oh, he's not blitzing is why in the middle with a ball Let's go.   We just can't get dotted up deep. I'm back there. I'm back there with Urlacher Yes, a little defensive pass interference goes a long way. Dude, he almost gonna got that. Let's go big win Dude, I keep forgetting I could just score touchdown.  See what we got in the store defense Oh nice move shady McCoy. I'm going to absolute yard. We're going to score, baby.  Oh the whip row nice work D hop. Oh D hop down to the 30 Let's go Tyreek. Yeah, this guy's got some glitchy blitzes, but we're holding on as best we can here nice play Time already gonna get a tackle that guy was really good. It was kind of a miracle. I was even in that game What are these unis? I don't know what these are, but I kind of like them. I see Terry kill in the middle Oh, we just played defense on ourselves. We just set a pick on ourselves That's fine. That's going nowhere. Nice hit. I think marky mark gets open here. If not, I'll hit I'll hide your own.  It's here. Let's go get through him. Ah air truck jukebox air truck 40 nice Nice ball. Oh, I didn't think he'd catch that. I'm gonna run inside zone. I really don't know actually. Yes. Yes.  I've one left. I've one left. Oh, I can't sell this.  I respect it. Jude on's there. So it's all good. Oh, marky mark. Let's go Can we get around? Yes, beautiful. What a play. That was awesome. Let's just keep sending heat Let's keep sending five and oh, okay. He's five wide. I'm on the middle. He can't throw here He can't we're playing defense on ourselves I did all about that. This was actually such a funny video. I hope you guys enjoyed if you want anything else Weird like this. I got you. Thanks for watching as always. I'll see you guys the next one. Peace


What are we doing? I'm admiring that pretty fantastic mug. It's not really a controversial statement either. No, it really is.  I'm Corbin. I'm Rick. Instagram, Twitter. Twitter. I remember when we got called today we're racking to an informational video this is called read this whole thing Truba gosh demonstrates the Sarangi This video Is a demonstration about the instrument called Sarangi? You have reacted to a couple of videos where Sarangi was played among other instruments But you haven't done an in-depth video about how it works and what it can do with notes and compositions be it Eastern or Western music using different types of bows. It is a very complex instrument, very hard to learn. Sarangi is also said to be the most closest to resemble the sound of the human voice. P.S. watch the namesake. That's right up there, that's right behind Bahawali too. The namesake. Now there's one guy that keeps telling us to watch and it's this gentleman right here. Alright, here we go. Yeah, we've seen this instrument. Yeah. Beautiful instrument. All strings cry. This one mourns. This sounds like Mahesh Kail. Yeah. All strings can weep. This one like, like the resonance makes those other strings vibrate. One piece of wood into which the wooden pegs are inserted. The belly is hollow carved out, covered with parchment, gold skin. The foot of the bridge touches the rim of the belly that itself transmits the sound. We have three main strings, mostly of all gut strings and about 30 to 35 symphonic strings of thin gauge steel. Could you say 30 to 35? The three main strings are of gut, but I use the lowest one. I use the metal string from the cello. The strings are tuned. The main strings, the tonic of the middle octave, lower fifth and lower octave and there are 30 to 35 symphonic strings made of thin gauge steel. They are tuned to the notes of the Hiraga or the scale. There are four sets of symphonic strings. There are two on top tuned definitely to the scale and you see the small bridges which give a special timber, some twang to it, which excites the other sets of strings. So we have the side series which is again and also tuned to the scale and there are underneath chromatic strings. It has an easily playable range of three octaves and the fourth is used only for harmonics. We don't press the string downwards like in the cello but we play with the cuticles of the index, middle and ring finger. There are two styles of playing. One is on the edge of the cuticle and the nail which I follow and the other style is purely about the cuticles which forms thick calluses. When I began learning I played with the second style purely on the cuticles and then I gradually came across a teacher who a great master who showed me this technique of playing the chord. I'm sure it is when you start. That's all on the cuticle. Looks like he cut himself. Things like which I borrowed from string instruments, plucked instruments. This is never done on the sarangi traditionally. They would play violin. The traditional sarangi bow holds the same emotion you hear from a whale. Contravers bow, German style and I would hold it like this, like this in that sense to come to very low energy levels. This is a very, actually it's an adaptation of the western bow but used in India for a string instrument which is a hybrid between the sarangi and the star. It's called Israj. I use this because it gives me shorter strokes and I can paint more number of strokes with this. I rate it much volume with this because of its weight is light. Now some Indian bow maker has tried to make a hybrid between the traditional sarangi bow and the contravers bow. I guess they're like other string instruments that kind of like this rather than flat like on a guitar. Free grace notes are executed in high speed. Variations is the reverse of that that becomes the third one. Another variation. The most common is murki or what you call mordent. Instead of going like this horizontally, we take an arc. We would keep the finger on the middle point and go rip your finger open. The finger goes like an arc. If I do the arc system, slide within the arc but move over many notes instead of 1, 2, 3, 4, point A, 2, point B, like one another. Another use is funded vibrato, what we call Andolan. Like you need of doing that. You can't be doing it. Vibrato in slow motion. Mali is going to start lower and then go up. You know that about Afghanistan. What that's used is this. Oh yeah. You really cut.  If I play a few routines, some more combinations can happen. But these these are more building up of my brick by brick. But if I want to take artistic leaves, so I'm not playing. I want to do whatever I would think of is what I'm playing. So this gives this small touch phrase helps me to get more, opens up many more windows for unfolding. Like what I do mostly is to make my own transcriptions below the staff in the Indian Sarakama. This is one. Sometimes I just write the idea, how you want it. If it's a passage where you don't dictate a set of notes, but you say you want this kind of nuance to emerge, then I would make some kind of symbolic things there. And maybe if you indicate certain notes, I would write just grace over those notes, you know, ideally recording and notation. Because I would at the subliminal level try to make a picture visualization of the notation. I'll not use it, but it still plays a role in giving the timeline. Pulu, Rock Pulu, the basic scale, uses flat seventh and sixth natural, natural third, ascending and descending orders, sitting in a freaking music class at a doctoral level. I'm sure he's like a, whatever you call the math and ustagia, whatever. But it's like if ustagi sat down and broke down the tabla, which would be insane for you. But that's what it felt like. And you understood a lot more than that than I did, because he was saying a bunch of words that I know are musical words, but I don't know what they mean. Well, there's some I didn't know, but there's several in there, like when you're talking about grace notes, which are any grace notes or notes that are outside of whatever you're going to be playing or supposed to be playing, which is a lot of those. And there's different styles of grace notes where in rock music, you would know that. It's anytime they're taking a note, they're bending it and it's not written that way and they're adding their feeling to it. And then vibrato, you know vibrato. Singers control their vibrato or at least should be able to control the vibrato. It's the capacity in the voice to have a tremble in it and then come out. So they go, ah, that's the vibrato. You can do that to any, because these are strings.  So any string instrument can have a vibrato as long as it's, I mean, the hardest one to do that on is the piano, because it's just a straight hammer strike on it from inside. But those, any bowed instruments that you have that, and I didn't even, did you realize he was doing cuticles until he explained it? I thought he was just doing, I didn't know a string. I thought all string instruments were on the tips of the fingers. That's what I thought. That was painful. Very painful. That looks like, because I feel like it's really sliding, sliding on it. And we can't tell especially the times when he put his cuticle under and he's doing the arc, because I don't know how tight those strings are. Obviously he said he has calluses, but like when you're starting, do you just bleed all the time? Yeah, because that happens with guitar. Like Brian Adams said, play to tell my finger who's bled.  Yeah. When you start playing, your, your fingers are going to blister.  Yeah.  That's insane. That sounds painful. But no, this is the sound. It's a, it's a, it's a, it's a beautiful, it's a beautiful, beautiful weeping sound. With a wide range of, yeah, you could do an entire score with just an instrument, I feel like. That would be very cool. Yeah. Maybe they have. Yeah. They very well may have watched Saatchajit rise down and never even knew, right? That was cool though. Super, super cool. Just learned so much. So if you have more videos like that, please send them our way. You know, we like stuff like this. I hope you do too. Let us know what other reasons we can react to down below.


The issue about how much gas is there came up a number of times, not the least of which was ten years ago the president of the university asked me how much gas was in the Marcellus. And I gave a very huge number which of course was sensational at that time and brought the industry to the state of Pennsylvania. Over a period of ten years we've demonstrated by drilling and production that the state has not been disappointed by the predictions of gas production from ten years ago. And right now as much as anything the issue appears to be how long these wells will last and generally the rule of thumb right now is that anyone can go to the department of environmental protection production reports and look up a particular well and if they want to know how much gas that well will produce in all what they can do is look at the production over the first five years and we say that the total production of the well one half of the gas will be produced in the first five years. Now the other half of the gas will probably be produced over a much longer period of time. It could extend out as much as thirty years.