So my name is Jimmy Campbell. I am a developer on the Azure App Configuration team. I'm excited to be here today to talk about our service and also to celebrate.NET Core 3.0. I've been a.NET Core developer since beta eight, and definitely a lot of change since then. I think that Azure App Configuration is a great tool for a.NET Core developer to add to their arsenal. Whether they're developing modern global cloud applications, microservices, or maybe just sticking in the DevOps pipeline. Whatever, configuration is all across the stack, so a centralized configuration service really makes a lot of sense. So what ended up happening was we saw a lot of problems with configuration, the way applications are moving today. Some examples of some of these problems might be, how do I centralize configuration when I'm running on an Azure function. I'm also running in Kubernetes. I'm running on some VMs that I own, and I kind of need to share settings between them. Or maybe something like I'm running apps in North America and I'm running in them in Europe. I need to share settings, but I also need them slightly nuanced because the application just needs to behave differently in North America or Europe. To more advanced use cases, wherever I'm getting my configuration from, how do I dynamically update it during runtime? And so configuration is a very fundamental piece and there are some common problems. We saw people trying to develop their own solutions that comes with the cost. We also saw things like people try to use things that weren't necessarily meant for configuration. And then they would eventually get to a point where they got stuck because the solution they were using just wasn't designed for that. So it really made sense to make the service Azure App Configuration, which is then in preview now since April, yes, April. And we got on this and now it exists, so a centralized configuration service. For .NET Core developers specifically, we offer things like a configuration provider, similar to the JSON file provider in .NET Core. Things, we have a SDK, a configuration client where you can write, read settings. But I think, first of all, what I should do is get started saying, what is Azure App Configuration? It's an Azure resource. What happens when I create it? What do I actually get when I start using it? And so we'll kind of do like a getting started right now. So I'm gonna go into my command line and get started with Azure App Configuration from the CLI. .NET Core has a pretty good CLI and we're all developers here. So I think we can kind of enjoy the automation opportunities that come with the CLI. So I'll go ahead and get started creating my first Azure App Configuration. So I'm using the Azure CLI now as denoted by AZ. And then App Configure is our command group. And I'm going to create an azureappconfiguration.net.com demo. My resource group is gonna be Jimmy CA config, one I already have configured. And I'm gonna have a location of Central US. So what am I getting when I create Azure App Configuration? So it's an Azure resource. And I'm gonna get a place where I can store settings. Settings in our model are stored as key value pairs. So you may have a message which is hello world or something like that, just a simple key value. And that's really what we store at the foundation. We do offer metadata on top of that. So you're storing your settings and they're available to you through a web endpoint. So if you look at configuration instance that I just created, my endpoint that has been allocated to me is hdps.net.confdemo.azconfig.io. So now I have a REST API listening on this endpoint that was allocated just for me where I can start creating settings in a central manner, start consuming them in all my applications, my DevOps. Anything that really speaks of REST API can start writing and reading settings from this app configuration instance. And of course, the CLI is one of the things that can do this. We can go ahead and create our first setting here. Now that I just booted this up, azappconfig kv for key value, set. I want to set a key value. So the name of my store is .net.confdemo. I have a key I want to create color, pretty typical setting name, and a value of blue. All right, so now we just use the CLI, the Azure CLI, to create an app configuration instance and create our first setting. All right, this kind of shows some of the automation with the service. So you can kind of run these things in a script or whatnot. But now we're going to go into the portal and we can show the UI for this thing and we can kind of get the best of both worlds. So I'm going to go into the portal here. Let me refresh the page. I'm going to see this .net.confdemo. Now, everything I've done in the CLI can be done through the portal and also the things that I do in the portal can be done through the CLI. We look for feature parity across both. And so if I wanted to create my app configuration through the portal, I could have created it through create a resource and I create settings through configuration explorer. All right, so here we see the setting that I created, color and then blue. Simple key value pair to represent a setting. And then we see some metadata on top of it, label, last modified, content type. The one I actually do want to mention before we get too deep here is label. So key value are definitely important because you need those to have a setting. But label is something important to our service because it can be used when you're querying settings and it gives you a way to add a new dimension to your configuration. For example, I may have an application that runs a premium and a standard SKU. And I might want the color to be green and standard. And I might want it to be red and premium or something like that. And so I can kind of model this with label. It's not just a metadata, it's not just like a tag that when you get it, it's actually used in queries. So when you query configuration, you can say give me all the settings for the standard label, or give me all the settings for the premium label. So this is kind of what I talked about before where I have nuanced configuration, maybe like a West US or North America and Europe, stuff like that. So label is something important for our service layer. So now we have the ability to create settings. We know what it kind of means to have an app configuration instance, how I can create settings for it. I want to go a little bit further into the portal here before we leave it. Just kind of get the coverage. We see some other things down here in operations such as feature manager. Feature manager is a value on top of just simple configuration. I can probably go into that into another time. But we also have some configuration utilities down here. We are storing configuration and we're a configuration service. So it makes sense for us to have utilities like for example, I need to restore my configuration to what it was yesterday because it worked yesterday but it doesn't work now. You can do that through the restore tab. So you can select a day of what I want my configuration to look like. For example, on September 11th, I didn't have any keys. So it's saying, hey, do you want to delete these keys? I can compare settings. I can compare across app configuration stores. I can compare across labels. So like I said, I have a premium and a standard app. I want to compare these things. I can see red and green. And I can also do import and export. Import and export is really valuable. It's actually my favorite thing because especially when you're bootstrapping app configuration from a .NET Core developer point of view, you probably have app settings.json, something along those lines. And we support the ability to come in from a configuration file, import settings, we also allow export of settings to a JSON file. And this can also be done through the CLI. That's that feature parody I talked about. All right, so that is kind of the background for app configuration, the portals, CLI interacting with it. And now that we know how the settings are represented and how we can kind of get started, it makes sense to move into a .NET Core app that's actually utilizing this. And so before I do that, let me go ahead and use to another app, move to another app configuration that I already allocated. This one doesn't have any settings yet, but I'm gonna show the import I talked about from a configuration file. I'm gonna import some settings, appconfigwebdemo.json. I'll actually show that file. It's just like app settings JSON file, if you will. And I imported it into my configuration store. And now you can see I have all these settings here. They all start with webdemo colon. That's kind of a prefixing practice. I may have multiple apps configuration set stored in my single app configuration and one way to separate them is by namespacing them. So all these are from my webdemo app and they all start with webdemo. And now I have these settings here. I can start consuming them in a .NET Core application. So let's move into an ASP.NET Core 3 application that I have. This is a ASP.NET Core 3 razor pages application. It's doing very little actually. The main point to get out of this app is that it's pulling the configuration from app configuration. And the way we're doing that is we're binding our configuration to a model called settings. And you can see there's kind of a one to one mapping here, refresh rate languages. These all map to settings here. And we're binding them to that model and we're using those properties in our razor view. So essentially we have like a one page app pulling configuration and just using those settings to show what we're seeing on the web page, the very simple way to demo the configuration. Now the typical practice and .NET Core for configuration is to use a configuration provider. .NET Core comes with a few very common ones like JSON file configuration provider, environment variable configuration provider, command line, etc. We offer a configuration provider. It's the Azure app configuration, configuration provider. And so that is what's gonna be showing right now on my program CS. On top of the environment variable and JSON file providers that come by default and default builder, I'm wiring up Azure app configuration. So it's these lines right here. This API add Azure app configuration is exposed by the NuGet package right here, Microsoft.azure.appconfiguration.asp.NET Core. So I just need to add a reference to this to my ASP.NET Core project. And then I can go ahead and start using this API. Okay, so I go in, I call add Azure app configuration. And then I need to do a little bit of configuring to actually set up the app to pull the settings from my app configuration instance. The most important thing is I need to connect. Now what I'm doing right here is called connect with managed identity. This is a feature that we utilize on Azure platforms that are running applications that support managed identity. These identities can be assigned to these Azure platforms. In this case, I'm running an app service. So I assigned an identity to my app service. And I granted that identity access to my app configuration instance. So I can actually go into my app configuration instance and I can look at the role assignments. And I say, I granted access to my app service. And so using this flow allows me to short circuit the other way of connecting that I'm gonna get to. It allows me to, well I can short circuit connection stream basically. And I can take advantage of the fact that I'm running an app service. I'm running my.NET Core out there. But if you don't wanna do that, that's perfectly fine. You can just use connect and you pass a connection string. The connection string comes from our portal or our CLI. You can list it there and then you would just provide it into Bootstrap your app. But since I am running this app for the demo in app services, I can utilize this way of connecting. And one of the great things about this is I don't need any configuration to bootstrap my configuration. Because as you can see, I'm not using a connection string. All I'm doing is specifying the end point of my app configuration instance. Okay, moving on to some other options used in this. We have a little bit of filtering here. This use is just specifying a key filter because I mentioned that I kind of wanted to segment my applications. And in this case, I have them all namespaced by a web demo column. All right, and so I'm selecting only those. Then finally, we have this configure refresh. And this links back to what I talked about before where we have a notion of wanting to dynamically update configuration during the run time of our application. Because some application designs depend on this behavior. And so before I go into configure refresh, I actually want to talk about where the refresh is triggered. And so I'm going to go into program or start up CS. And we see this use azure app configuration. This is the only other place where any Azure app configuration code is found in the application. And what this does is it wires up a middleware inside of your ASP.NET Core app that uses requests to actually trigger a refresh of the configuration. If you were using our configuration provider previously, you may have been aware that we were using a polling model before. And now we switch to a middleware model. And the reason for this is that when you're polling for configuration, especially in a microservice world, you end up maybe just using a little bit of unnecessary resources if you're doing that continuously even if the application is dormant. With a middleware based approach, we can be smart about when we want to refresh our configuration. If you have 10 apps, maybe not all of them are always getting requests.  Only the ones that are getting a request need to really be triggering configuration refreshes. When the other ones start getting a request, then it makes sense for them to start triggering refresh as well. And so that's what this does right here. Request based refreshes. Now we can go back to where we're actually configuring the refresh. Because we know that refreshes are being triggered, but what does it mean to trigger refresh? And that's what we're configuring right here. Essentially what we're saying is, what do we want to keep up to date? What settings do we want to refresh every setting? Maybe one or two settings that are really important that need to be dynamically updated during the app. That's what's configured right here. In this case, I'm watching a setting called WebDemoCentinel. And not only am I watching that setting, I'm specifying something called refresh all. Which means when that setting changes, when I notice a change in that setting, I want to refresh my entire configuration just like I did when the application started up. So I want to go back to app configuration and just get everything again. That's what's happening right here. And so with that, that's the full setup of app configuration in my .NET Core app. Now I can actually see it in action. So I have this application right here. It's blank right now because I didn't have any settings before, but I uploaded some JSON settings. And if I refresh the page, you'll actually see that I have some configuration from Azure App, or some settings, some data that came from the settings. It came from my Azure App configuration. This came because I uploaded that JSON file. But to kind of give a better view of that, we can go in and edit some more things right now. Let me show the values for these. Let's change the background color to green, maybe increase the font size. Just kind of do what we can to make the changes very apparent. And also make a better message. So now what actually happens, if I refresh the application now, nothing is going to change because we're only watching that sentinel value, like I mentioned. But as soon as I update the sentinel value, I just need to change it. I don't really, it doesn't matter what I change it to. The application can start picking up the changes to all the settings that I updated. So we're going to start seeing the change to the green color, high.netconf, bigger font. And so this kind of just shows dynamically updating settings during the run time of the application. So to get started, all you really need to do, pull in the NuGet package, Microsoft to Azure, the app configuration, the ASP.NET Core. That's if you want to build an ASP.NET Core app. If you're just building a .NET Core app, ASP.NET Core is involved, we also have another package called Microsoft.Extensions.Configuration.AzureConfiguration. It uses that common configuration provider namespace. That one doesn't pull any ASP.NET Core stuff into it. So if you're just building a console app or maybe a hosted service, it makes sense to use that. It's still going to give you the ability to do refreshes. It just doesn't give you the request-based refresh middleware, but you can refresh the configuration yourself on demand. All right. So that's the .NET Core scene, but for .NET Core developer, just developing applications isn't the whole picture. There's also you need to build and you need to be able to release your applications. So we've been seeing a lot of mention of Azure DevOps for these kind of needs, and we actually have a DevOps build and release task. It is on the DevOps marketplace. You can go look for Azure App Configuration, and you can add it right now to your organization or project to start using it. And what this does is it utilizes all the settings we put in our app configuration and it injects them as variables into our build and to our release. So I can actually go ahead and create a new build pipeline to kind of show off using this. So create a new build pipeline here. Delete all the steps just to add in Azure App Configuration, my subscription, my configuration instance name. So now with this task, every setting that's present in here is going to be available to my build pipeline. And if I use it in other builds, it's going to be available in those build pipelines. So I can share my settings across builds now very easily if I'm centralizing them in my app configuration. And I can also put my app settings there. And so it kind of makes it easy to manage them in one place and have one interface that you're working with for settings, one set of pools, one CLI, one form of automation. And now to demo this, I will add in a PowerShell task right here. And I'm just going to echo a setting from Azure App Configuration message. I don't have that yet, but I can create it. Message, hello devops, cool.  And then what we'll see is it's going to very quickly pull the settings, put them in as build variables, and then say hello devops. And we'll kind of have that. And like I said, what this allows us is we can easily have one interface for managing our settings for the applications we're building. We can share these settings across all these builds, all these releases, just make sure to bring them in through this one build task. And then we can kind of keep with the semantics of how we want to add dimensions to our configuration with a label, things of that nature. And I even want to go a little bit deeper into the DevOps interoperability with App Configuration. I mean, configuration is really all across the stack. So applications using configuration, DevOps is using it. And there's even more room to talk about it here. Because Azure DevOps is very easy to interact with the Azure CLI. You can spin up very quickly an Azure CLI inline script to start doing something. And so this kind of ties in to a scenario where you may have an application and you can't afford to pull settings at the run time of your application. You can't make a HP request to pull settings. You can't talk to the service, possibly as a requirement. Well, if you still want to use Azure App Configuration, it's perfectly reasonable to have those settings pulled at build time or release time. Package them in an App Settings JSON file and deploy them with your application. So I can go ahead and show kind of what that might look like right here, and also show using the Azure CLI to talk to App Configuration. So let's hook up an Azure CLI task. Let's do a inline script. And we're going to use a functionality you saw import on the portal. But now let's do an export on the CLI. We're going to do an export all the settings in our App Configuration to a JSON file. So that's what we have in this right here. App Config, KV export. We're saying to a file. We give the file path, AppSettings.AzureAppConfiguration.JSON. It's a JSON file, the separator we want to use, and the config store it comes from. Finally, let me go ahead and publish these artifacts so that we can see them at the end of the build. And it demonstrates, as I mentioned, you want to pull settings during build. You don't want to pull them during the runtime of your application. You want to kind of have that very consistent, or it's just a requirement for when you're running our apps. So let me run this build. And then so this will take just a second for the Azure CLI to log in. That's probably the longest part of using the Azure CLI in this build. But it will produce the Azure AppSettings.AzureAppConfiguration.JSON file. And if you were doing this in a real scenario, you would just put that right next to your AppSettings.JSON. And then bam, you now have dynamic settings, but they came from during build time. So that's pretty much all I have right now for Azure App configuration, centralized configuration management solution. We have utilities for managing your configuration, a way to share your configuration across all kinds of different platforms. DevOps, it doesn't matter where in the stack you are. Azure AppConfiguration can help out provide the configuration there. And I guess real quick, I do just want to show the build artifacts of this. I did say published build artifacts. Well, there was supposed to be a JSON file there. I maybe typed something wrong in the build pipeline. But I think the idea is there. It basically produces the exact same file as this. And it would be present in the build artifacts. I must have just typed something. But yeah, that's pretty much it for me. All right, this has been a pretty amazing, Jimmy.  I thought this presentation was going to be about appsettings.json. Azure AppConfiguration is amazing. It's cool to have this other place to put that stuff and manage it. It was about appsettings.json, kind of. Kind of. And then the other one, which was interesting, which you answered there at the end, but I'd love for you to reiterate, what's the best way to do a fall back to offline settings? You kind of showed this a little bit in your demo. Why don't you see what, maybe he's going to tell me how to say his name. I'll say Matthew American nice. So how do you do a fallback to offline settings? That's a good point. So there are multiple different considerations when you're talking about fallback to offline settings. There's what I just talked about, about putting your settings there during build time and release time, so you don't have to make a query during runtime. So I just demoed that. That's exactly how you do it. I don't know. Like I said, I probably mistyped something in the build pipeline, but there would have been a JSON file there that could have been used as appsettings.json. Another aspect would be something that we have in our configuration provider, which is called an offline file cache, which if you're running on the same VM or something, and maybe one time when your app is starting out, it doesn't have network connection. You can use an offline file cache in our configuration provider library, and it will pull the last retrieved settings. They write them to a file and encrypt them, and it will pull them in case it doesn't have a network connection. So kind of two different practices for offline. So probably not the first one, but the second one is there as well. That's cool, because I thought maybe you just pull it and build, but then you also have a cache to fall back on as well. That's cool. Is Azure App Configuration recommended for secrets like connection strings? Another good question. All right. So Azure App Configuration is a completely secure way to store any key value, encrypting things. I mean, there's no worries there, authentication, authorization, all good. However, there is another service named Key Vault, which is better for management or management of secrets. They have things like, if you're managing things like certificates, auto renewal of certificates. Or if you have things like connection string, they'll expire connection string, and they have very granular access policies. So they are the best place to store a secret. So there's nothing wrong per se with storing a connection string in an app configuration, but ultimately for secrets, that's exactly what Key Vault was designed for. Whereas we were designed for just configuration, extensive querying mechanisms, things of that nature. And one of the things that we're actually going to be coming out with soon is a way to reference Key Vault secrets in the .NET Core Configuration Provider. So we'll go through to Key Vault for you in your app. It kind of abstracts Key Vault, but your secrets can still live there. And that's cool because Nick had the same sort of question. What's the difference between this new app config and Key Vault? So Key Vault is for secrets, app config is for, how would you finish that sentence? Yeah, Key Vault is 100% designed for secrets. Azure app configuration is designed for configuration. There's nothing limiting you from putting anything you want in app configuration. But ultimately, as we have configuration management utilities, Key Vault is going to have secret management utilities, the expiration, secret rotation, or certificate rotation, things like that. So those are values that we're not going to be able to give because that's not what we were designed for. That's awesome. Does this configuration service integrate directly into Azure Functions so I don't need to manage the config there? Okay, so two things. Our .NET Core Configuration Provider is net standard. You can use that in an app function and pull it right when your app function starts off. The second thing is I exported something to a JSON file in the last presentation. You can export it to an app service through the CLI or through the portal. And so other platforms within Azure, we want to integrate with to be able to push our stuff there. Azure Function, AKS, you name it. On our roadmap is the ability to do this automatically via sync tasks. And to just have your configuration live there, but you can still manage it centrally in app configuration. Amazing last question. Is there an app configuration Nougat package for the .NET framework? So there is, yes, there is net. The one I just mentioned is net standard. So you could use it in the .NET framework. Also, we do have a configuration builders Nougat package. The configuration builders was introduced, I believe, in 4.7 and it's kind of a net framework way to do configuration, well built into the framework there. And we do ship something for that. So it's an Azure configuration specific .NET framework configuration builder. Amazing. We have some feedback coming in on, may I say, they're Mika's jokes that I was asked to read. Okay, the jokes on .NET Conf, I told her that they may not work, but she was adamant. So maybe we should have a talk with her afterwards.


You are not free. Today we're going to be talking about how to be truly authentically, who you are at the core, getting rid of all of the crap and how to actually truly step into your full authentic self. And I'm going to give you a story as we go through this, but we're going to talk about how to also not give your power away as you go through this. And you know, if I want to tell you a story, if you've been listening to my podcast for a while, you're probably aware of the way that I speak, right? You're aware that I am a short to the point, no BS podcast. And I happen to cuss and guess what? I love it. I love cussing. I love cuss words. They just, they, they bring so much rich richness to a sentence, right? I love it. And some people don't love it. And I'm aware of that. I'm going to tell you about how I stepped into being more truly authentically myself and how I had a struggle with it and it's around cussing and it's going to help you understand how I stepped into it. And hopefully this story will help you step into who you truly authentically are as well. So I love cussing simply because I think it brings so much flavor to a story. Like if I were to say, Oh, what I went through was really hard. Or if I were to say, Oh, what I went through was really hard. Like it just seems like there's more emphasis on it, right? And at the same time, it's me being truly authentically myself. Could I not say a cuss word? Absolutely. I cannot say a cuss word, but that means that if I wanted to say it and I didn't say it, I'm holding myself back from being truly authentically who I am. And when I first started this podcast, actually I didn't cuss for a long time, like three and a half years. It was about 650 episodes before I started actually cussing. Maybe I'd throw out a couple of cuss words, one out of every 30 episodes, but I kept it really tight.  And so I made the decision. You know what? If people don't like cuss words, I'm not their guy and I'm okay with that. And what you have to realize in life is that when you step into who you truly authentically are, you're not going to be everybody's guy. You're not going to be everybody's girl. You're not going to be every single person's cup of tea. And that is completely fine.  I'm just, I'm just not that person, but that person probably exists out there. And so I'm okay with that person listening to my podcast and going, Nope, don't like this guy. But I didn't used to be okay with that. My question to you is are you okay with someone going, Nope, I don't like this guy or Nope, I don't like this girl.  Cause a lot of people think that they're okay with it until they get haters. They think they're okay with it until they get a negative review. They think they're okay with it and then they realize that you ain't okay with it. And I want you guys to realize that number one, first off, this is something that I want you to understand is that the true authentic version of yourself is somewhere in there.  And because you saw what you are in or not supposed to do that, you're like, I don't even know who I truly am. Well, now it's a, now it's a self discovery that you get to go on and find out who that is. But if you were to walk into my house, if you were to be around me when I'm around my friends, I cuss, I don't hold back. I make jokes. And I realized that I wasn't truly authentically myself for a lot of my podcast episodes. And I said, I can't not be that way. And if I'm not someone's cup of tea, then I'm not someone's cup of tea. That's okay. And I knew that things were going to happen the way they're going to happen. And maybe I would lose some, some listeners, maybe I'll lose some followers, but you know what? Some people are going to listen to me and go, yep, that's my dude. That's exactly the way that I think that's exactly the way that I talk. Because here's what's interesting. If someone listens to my podcast and then they decide, you know what, that's my guy. I want to go ahead and I want to learn how to build a business from him.  Maybe I should learn a little bit from him. And then they join and they see a different version of me in person, coaching them than they do. While it's on the podcast, then I'm attracting the wrong type of person in the first place by not truly authentically being myself.  And when we're talking about cussing, just side note. When I'm talking about getting your own power back, cussing is just a word. A word is just a sound and a sound is just coming from somebody's face.  That person has been programmed to actually not like a sound coming out of someone's face. What is the difference between me saying, and me saying nothing? There's no difference between and it's just a sound coming out of my face, but somewhere along the way, somebody said, oh no, intelligent people don't speak that way. Oh no, that's trashy to speak that way. That's not elegant to say that to talk like that. And I hear it all of the time and I see people send me messages on Instagram, Rob, I love your podcast, but could you stop cussing so much? And I'm like, sorry, no, that's not authentically me. And then I look at my reviews sometimes and sometimes like, like one, I got one the other day, two star review on my podcast. They love all of the stuff that I put out, but they said I sound trashy with the way that I speak. I'm like, Hey, that is the way that it is. And if you don't like it, then you don't like it. So that's why, you know, if you do like my podcast, please go give me a freaking review and let's get some five star reviews in there for instead of the two stars. Believe me, there's thousands and thousands more five star reviews and there are two star reviews, but there's people out there. They get offended by a sound coming out of somebody's face. And that is something that is programmed into them. And if a word can make somebody feel a certain way, that person doesn't have control of their own personal sovereignty. They are not a free being. If they're being triggered by a sound coming out of someone's face, Eleanor Roosevelt says, um, no one can make you feel inferior without your consent. The same way nobody can make you internally change the state of you without your consent. So if I say a word or you say a word and someone hears it and it makes them change their internal state, they have given up their own personal sovereignty. The way that they feel their emotions and their thoughts to everybody outside of them. There's no control. There's no personal sovereignty. And people who do get offended. I had this long conversation. I had talked with us in a podcast hundreds of episodes ago with my mom and her sisters came in town about four years ago, three years ago. And one of my aunts was like, Hey, do you, I, I don't hold back. I speak the way that I speak. And I, I said the word in my aunts like, Hey, don't speak like that. Can you not speak that way? It sounds, it sounds unintelligent. And I go, it's time for a coaching session. And so I go, okay, her name's Pam said, okay, Pam, um, what about that word is unintelligent? And she's like, Oh, well, it's just, there's other words that you could use. And I go, of course, those other words that I could use, but what about that word is actually unintelligent? Like we're in it.  She's like, well, I guess it doesn't necessarily show it. It just, you could use words that would make you sound more intelligent. And I go, so what word would make me sound more intelligent? So we had this conversation and we got deeper and deeper and deeper and deeper and ended up talking, I got to the point that my grandmother, who I love, and she said, people who are dumb cuss, that's how she, that's what people that are unintelligent use cuss words. That's how she raised her children. And so that program was set into their mind and now they're carrying it along with them in the, the book, the four agreements that he talks about, anything that somebody says to you and you accept into your mind and it changes your perception is like a virus put into a computer. Right? If my grant, my grandma spoke a virus into her children. I love her to death. Well, she is, she is dead now. So I still love her even though she has experienced death, I guess I could say, but she put a virus into her children. It's okay. There's nothing wrong with this. I'm just going to explain this to you. Right? She put a virus into her children and that virus played out over and over and over again. Same way that if I put a virus into a computer, that will affect the computer and the way that it runs forever until that virus is removed. And so we added this conversation. We ended up finding out that the reason why they didn't like the cussing was because when they were children, my grandma said this to them. And I said, do you realize that you're not free? If somebody can say a word and it changes your internal state, you are not free. You are under that person's control. If somebody can say a four letter word and, you know, instead of saying the word pool, they say, and it's a different four letter word. And one of them changes your internal state. You are caught in a program.   You need to figure out how to remove that virus and ask yourself, do I actually hate, you know, that word? Or is the word just something that doesn't really matter to me. And I've just been programmed to think that way. So that was a whole side note that I want you to think about because no one makes you feel inferior without your consent as Eleanor Roosevelt said. And Victor Frankl, who wrote an incredible book called Man's Search for Meaning, Victor Frankl was a psychologist who was a prisoner in Auschwitz and many other Nazi prison camps. And he saw what happened to people and he saw how their minds would go and how some people had strong mental fortitude and how some people didn't and how some people lived through and how some people didn't based off of the way that their belief system was. And one of the things he says is, is the last human freedom that we have is the is is to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances to choose one's own way. There will always be choices to make. So what he's saying is that your last freedom is to choose how you're going to feel in any circumstance. Also, how you're going to feel based off of what somebody says to you. And I'm not saying to go out and just start cussing directly at people. That's not what I'm saying any sort of way.  And that's actually your true self. Step into that true version of yourself. Are people not going to like it? Absolutely. When you step into true, authentic version of yourself, there's going to be people that are offended by it because they are stuck in programs that they can't get themselves out of. And seeing you at your highest version of yourself is going to offend them in some sort of way because you are the perfect example of what they wish that they could be. But their lack of freedom in their own mind is holding them from stopping stopping them and holding them back from stepping into that version of it. So you have to realize that that's going to happen. You're going to get some haters, but most people are going to love you. That's the beautiful thing about it. There's a small, small, small percentage of haters that that live out there.  So who are you? Like, what does the authentic you look like? Have you ever asked yourself that question? Have you ever sat down and said, what is the true authentic version of Rob look like? What is a true authentic version of you look like? What does it look like?    In any time you set up a new construct of this is who I truly am. But this is how I have to act at school. This is how I have to act at work. This is how I have to act. This is why I had to quit a job and I can't work for anybody else because I'm highly offensive, I guess. If I'm just cussing and being the way that I am, right, not allowed.  And it's like opening up your computer and going to Safari or Chrome and opening up a thousand different tabs. Eventually the computer is gonna start running way slower because you have so many tabs open. You have so many tabs open and so many constructs that you have to be, quote unquote, have to be for other people, when you're just truly authentically who you are, you don't have to worry about any tabs being opened because that's just you. You have a standard operating procedure.   So what does that look like? Do you like to dance around? Do you like to be louder? Do you like to cuss? Do you like to wear colors? Do you like to act a certain way? As long as it's not offending anybody else or I'm not offending, cause it's gonna offend. As long as you're not hurting anybody else, step into it. Be that person, step into your true authentic self. Will people enjoy it? Yes, you're gonna find that you will actually start to light other people up by being this way. Once again, there will be people who don't like it. It doesn't matter, you won't be everybody's cup of tea but you stepping up in being your weird, true authentic version of yourself is going to wake people up from the programs that they've been in and go, oh, yeah. I do like to be a little bit crazier. That person's actually waking something up inside of me. They're funny, they're fun. I like to be more funny and funny. You know what, I've been kind of dull this past week. Maybe I should be more funny and fun. Maybe I should wake up and just have more fun with each moment that I have. You know what, I like that person's shoes. Those bright neon shoes. I've been wearing such ugly shoes the past few years. Like I feel like I don't normally wear shoes like this. I used to wear bright colored shoes.  You start to wake people up. And it's like Mary Williamson said, it's not our darkness that scares us the most. It's our light from stepping into our true authentic version of ourselves because we're afraid, you know, it's the brightest light gets the most arrows.  So we dim our lights for other people. Thinking that we're going to, you know, stepping into our truest version of the self is going to offend other people or hurt other people. It won't hurt anybody. It will wake most people up. And you have to realize that you're, once again, I'm gonna say it over and over again. You're not gonna be everybody's cup of tea and that's completely fine. You don't need to be everybody's cup of tea. But the majority of people are going to love you. And, you know, if you have a podcast like I do and you haven't been your true authentic self, step into what that true authentic version of yourself is. Be the true authentic version of yourself. You know, if you're, you know, holding back from being a certain way and your true authentic self is the other way that you need to be, how can you start stepping into that? How can you go through a discovery process of going, who am I? What am I? What do I love? I'm gonna bring out my true authentic version of myself in everything that I do. Because we want to fit in. It's programmed into us. We're tribal beings. But there's no reason to fit in anymore. Like we want to fit in just because it used to keep us alive thousands of years ago when we were in a tribe. You didn't want to stand out because if you stood out, you could possibly be kicked out of the tribe.  So it's programmed into you. You're designed to be different. You're designed to be your own perfect, authentic version of yourself. What does that look like? And it's like Jim Carrey says, you don't need, your need to be accepted in this world will make you invisible, right? You don't want to be invisible. I know you don't. You want to be your true authentic version of yourself. You just might need to rediscover who that true authentic version of yourself is. Do you know who it is? Do you know who it is? Do you need to journal through it? Do you need to start thinking about it?  My hope for you is that you find out who you truly are and you have the courage to step into it. Because once you do that, life becomes a lot more fun, it becomes a whole hell of a lot easier as well. So step into that version of yourself. Hey, thanks so much for watching this video. If you want to learn even more about Master Your Mind, click right here and watch this video as well. Let's get really deep because you're always looking to the external to figure out who you are.


Today, I'm going to talk to you about the CRUS NMA. It's a new R package to synthesize the CRUS design evidence and the CRUS format data using Bayesian network meta-analysis. So standard network meta-analysis synthesized aggregate data from randomized clinical trials because it is easily accessible from the published literature. However, heterogeneity may be present across these trials and we include participant covariates or effect modifiers as aggregate information to explain some of this heterogeneity. Including being covariates could, however, induce aggregation bias. So ideally we would like to have or to include the covariates on the individual level from every study, but more typically we only have IBD from a subset of studies and then aggregated data from the rest. In terms of study design, most NMAs include only clinical trials in the analysis because they are typically at lower risk of bias, but on the other hand, they are conducted for restricted set of population and this makes the results hard to be generalized to the general population. On the other hand, an unrandomized studies or observational studies reflects better the reality but it comes with high risk of bias. We might need in some situation though to combine these types of evidence while taking into account the biases on each design. And this is what the CROUS NMA model is doing. It's a recent extension of the NMA model to synthesize mixture of data formats, IBD and aggregate data and different study designs. We built the CROUS NMA model by integrating these four different approaches which combine clinical and observational data into the three level hierarchical model that synthesize IBD and aggregate data. How does the three level hierarchical model work? First of all, we define an individual level regression model to include participant covariates. Here beta zero captures the diagnostic. Effect, beta W is the within study treatment covariate interaction and beta B quantifies the interaction between the relative treatment effect and the mean covariate value on study level. And then for aggregate studies, we have access only to mean covariates so we can only estimate the coefficient beta B. Then we combine the evidence across IBD and AD for relative treatment effect, delta and covariate coefficient beta B while beta W is combined only from IBD studies. Now, how do we integrate the four approaches to combine clinical and observational data into this three level hierarchical model? So the simplest approach is to not differentiate between the two types and fit individual regression model for both the clinical and observational studies and do the same for the aggregate studies. But we know that each type has different levels of bias and this model doesn't account for this bias. And this brings me to our second model which adjust the relative treatment effects to the bias on each study for individual model and aggregate model, we add this highlighted part, the bias effect of each study, gamma multiplied by the bias indicator of data study R. The bias indicator R takes values zero or one based on the assessment using the risk of bias tools. However, we know that the judgment using these tools is subjectives and carry many uncertainty and carry many uncertainty. And we reflect this uncertainty by assigning a Bernoulli distribution to the bias indicator which will provide zero or one to R. But now, and to estimate the probability of bias on each study, we either assign a beta distribution, low risk of bias studies are given, this distribution is q toward zero and high risk of bias studies q toward one. Or we could estimate the bias probability using study characteristics through this logistic model. There is another way to reflect study bias by directly modeling the bias adjusted relative treatment effect theta, which is estimated by a weighted average of unadjusted effect delta and the bias adjusted effect delta plus gamma. In bias adjustment model one in the slide before, this theta is either the unadjusted effect for low risk of bias studies or is a bias adjusted effect for high bias studies and not both of them. But here we allow theta to be weighted average of both parts but for low risk of bias studies we give greater weight to unadjusted and a little weight to bias adjusted part and bias versa for studies at high risk of bias. The last approach in combining clinical and observational data is using observational information as a prior to model the clinical evidence. It is a two-step approach. First step is to conduct network meta-analysis only for observational data using individual aggregated data or mixture of both. In Bayesian framework, we will get a posterior distribution of each relative treatment effect. Second step is to conduct network meta-analysis for clinical data but as a prior is we use the posteriors we get from the observational data. Now, some people could argue that usually observational data has a greater sample size compared to clinical trials and this makes the observational information dominate the estimate. So to control this potential high influence of observational studies, we download the contribution from these studies by increasing the variance from the posteriors here or make these distributions further. These models are implemented in the Kroosan-Amei package which is a suit of tools for performing network meta-analysis and meta-regression with individual participant data, aggregate data or mixes of both and each format can come from clinical trials or observational studies or mix of both. Behind the scenes models are estimated in a Bayesian framework using Jackson R the package allows for conducting the standard network meta-analysis when we have aggregate data from RCTs it allows the inclusion of IBD of these RCTs and it also enables each format include observational studies. So a workflow in Kroosan-Amei model is as follow. First of all, you start with your data sets, participant data and aggregate data or only a single data of one of them. There should be both of them in a long format which means one row bear R, bear aggregate study or bear participant in IBD. We then call the Kroosan-Amei model function to construct a JAX model and reformat the data. We might visualize the network and then we run the analysis using the Kroosan-Amei.run function and once the model is fitted we then kind of reduce summary of results, leak table or check the convergence. So let's apply this to an example. First of all, we have some individual participant data at the top here. So one row bear each individual and you can see that we have in this example a binary outcome. And then we have aggregate data below this. One row bear each other study with their outcome and covariates. On each data set you need to have at least these highlighted columns, study ID outcome, the assigned treatment and the design of the study clinical or observational. And for aggregate data you need additionally to provide the sample size column in. Combining these together in an Kroosan-Amei model. First of all, you need to indicate the name of your individual participant data and aggregate data. You need then to indicate columns name of these variables and you then choose which model to be used to combine treatment effects across studies either random or common effects model. You set the reference treatment. In this example, relative treatment effects will be evaluated versus A. And finally you indicate which approach you would use to combine observational and clinical data. Here goes one of these four approaches that I talked about before. To conduct network meta-analysis, a meta regression you could set a covariate. Here we use H to adjust all relative treatment effects. And also you could adjust the relative treatment effects to study bias using bias adjustment model one. And here there are too many arguments to be set as well. All will be described in the help file and the v-nit. You can also plot the network using the netplot function. You could pass to this function different arguments to control the colors, the thickness and many other features, which are very similar to the net graph function from net meta package. And then you can go away and fit the model using the cross-anime Dutron function. It takes the model we created using the cross-anime.model and you need to set the settings for MCMC samples, iteration burn-in and et cetera. Once we fitted the model, I can then print a summary of the results. So here it's showing us the mean, standard deviation, et cetera for each of the parameters. We have here the regression parameter B, the relative treatment effects D and the bias effect plus the two heterogeneity parameters. Also to provide the convergence information, the Gilman-Robini statistic and the number of effective sample size. You could also produce the trace plot to check convergence of each parameter. And finally you can create the leak table by cross-anime edit leak function. So here the values in each cell shows the relative treatment effects and the 95% credible interval of each treatment on top compared to the treatment on the left. So I really just gave a brief summary today if you would like to find out more and you can check out our package on GitHub website. Soon we will submit this package to CRAN with the Illustrator documentation and detailed example. We also submit our methods paper. Thank you very much.


What's going on guys, it's your boy DJ here today with another Destiny video and in today's Destiny video I'm going to bring you guys my Nightfall loot results for the past week. That is no point in even bothering mentioning the weekly hero anymore because you only get 9 strange coins for it and I got 9 strange coins, obviously across all 3 of my characters. But Nightfall is different and I will continue on this series as long as you guys want to see it and if you do, do drop a like and show your support, I do appreciate that. Now getting into the Nightfall and starting with my Hunter, I got the Give-Take Equation. Now this is a legendary Vanguard Fusion Rifle offering void damage, mudsword, unassisted kills with this weapon, reduced melee and grenade cooldown. As you can see, he's now 1-3-3-7, got the Plan C Exotic Fusion Rifle while my Pow Dog 1-1-7 got a Legendary Engram. Moving on to my Tide 10, we got a triple Exotic lineup. I got an Insurmountable School 4 offering 113 in Discipline. Doug 1-1-7 got the Armor Mentorium and Ezina 1-3-3-7 got the Pelgrine Greaves, which are the new Titan Leg Armours. Mud's R, Kayamore Ammo for heavy weapons and shoulder charge deals bonus damage when activated in the air. Absolutely epic.  Also our 3-142 Intellect, not bad whatsoever. Moving on to my Warlock, I got the Medi Multi Tool, which is an Exotic Scout Rifle. We all know about that. Ezina 1-3-3-7 got the Exotic Auto Rifle, the Hard Light and Doug 1-1-7 got an Atherite Light, which is indeed what helped him to be one of the first to get to a level 34 in the game. Getting an Atherite Light, as well as the ones you obtained from the Prison of Elders, helped him get to a level 34 before anybody else I knew. But yep guys, that is it. That's what I got from last week's nightfalls across all three of my characters. Did you get any of the new House of Wolves Armours? Like, Ezina did last week, let me know down below in that comments section. Did you get anything Q1 to do, anything you needed, let me know that also. Thanks for stopping by as always. If you could drop a like, I would appreciate the support and peace out until next time. Peace!


The NASCAR Cup Series playoffs getting underway this weekend with the cookout of Southern 500 out at Darlington. It's going to be a fun one, because I'm excited to see how these playoffs play out, because it's going to be interesting to see who emerges here, because all year it's been talking about Hendrick throughout the summer, but when going to play-off tracks, JGR has popped up, Penske has popped up. So I think there's still a lot to be decided for this year in the NASCAR Cup Series, and I want to see how things go. And that all starts on Sunday with the Southern 500. Welcome on into the Heat Check Fantasy podcast powered by NumberFire. That's right here on the FanDuel Podcast Network and NumberFire.com. My name is Jim Sonnis. I am a senior writer and analyst for NumberFire.com here to break down Sunday's Southern 500 from a DFS perspective, letting you know how you want to play things, what data to emphasize, which drivers I like in each salary tier, and much more. Lock is at 6 p.m. Eastern on Sunday. So you got time to fill out lineups. The starting order has been set, so you can actually do that right now, as we go along throughout the day for today. So check it out. Go to FanDuel.com. Pull up a lineup and fill things out as we go. Agree, disagree, whatever it may be. Feel free to get those lineups in now. And again, Lock is at 6 p.m. Eastern on Sunday. Pull those lineups here in just one segment. First, a quick reminder to make sure you are subscribed to the Number Daily Fantasy podcast feed. Wherever you get your podcasts, UFC Vegas 36 preview via Austin Swim is already posted. That is up on the NumberFire Daily Fantasy podcast feed. We have an MLB DFS podcast for Friday Slate. We have NFL coming back next week on Thursday. PGA will be back just around the corner as well. So a lot of good things coming up here on the Number Fire Daily Fantasy podcast feed. Find that wherever you get your podcasts, hit subscribe. And if you like what you hear, leave us a rating and review as well. Hey, football fans, the 2021 NFL season is just around the corner, and you've still got time to do some best ball drafts over on FanDuel. You've got daily contests launching up over there. You can also do private contests with your own entry fee with players you want to play with and all of that. Pick a league, desired number of players, draft your squad, let that puppy run, and see if you can win yourself some cash throughout the season. Head on over to FanDuel today and start drafting. Eligibility restrictions apply. Go to FanDuel.com or download the FanDuel app for more details. Let's take a look at the track breakdown for this week. And it's called the track breakdown because that's convenient, but a lot of it is about the circumstances for this race. The first circumstance is it's a longer race. We can go back to prioritizing lap leaders once again. There are 367 laps in this race that is 36.7 FanDuel points for laps led. This is the longest race we've had since June. And we've had a lot of place differential race in that time. This week is different. Last year, there were two drivers in this Southern 500 who led more than 110 laps in a single race. Martin Truex Jr. and Chase Elliott were pretty likely to get something similar here. If we do get that, if two drivers who lead 100 plus laps, they're likely to be must-have drivers. Luckily for us, the guys who could be doing that, the starting order is pretty helpful here because those guys who could do that are starting the top 16 spots. The 16 playoff drivers are in those top 16 spots of this race. They'd be the guys most likely to lead. So we don't need to balance place differential versus laps led for our studs. They will all be in play to lead laps because they are starting at least within the top 16 spots. And those are the best drivers. The top 14 drivers in my model's projected average driving position are playoff drivers. So we want to focus on those playoff drivers for our lap leaders. That's what we want anyway. So it lines up well. Both the strategy and the starting order mesh perfectly for this week. And when I say lap leaders, that's plural and it's kind of vague, but I would not settle for just two personally. I would get at least three playoff drivers per lineup, even if that does make our lineups a little bit top heavy. We had the same circumstances last year in the first round of the playoff, three longer races with the playoff drivers starting inside the top 16 spots. In both Darlington and Richmond, three playoff drivers made the perfect lineup. For Darlington, there were three drivers of salaries of $10,500 who made it. So it does force you to scramble a bit, but I think it's a worthwhile tradeoff given the upside you get via those studs at these tracks. I also think it's interesting this week, you don't have to make the bank to get some potential lap leaders. We'll talk more about some guys who could give you cheaper, lower salary lap sled in the tier by tier breakdown, but there are some guys who I think will be in contention on Sunday who don't have the highest salaries. One thing I didn't mention about last year's race when talking about the lap leaders is the guys who led a bunch of laps did finish poorly. Those were Truex and Elliott's and they hit the wall while fighting for the lead in both those guys had to pit. That's usually going to lend itself to a place differential race where you see guys lead a lot of laps finish poorly because the pool of laps led for drivers who finish well is smaller than in that scenario. And you'll often see a place differential come through, but we still had three playoff drivers in the perfect lineup. It happened because those guys are just the ones you expect to finish best. Finishing points matter a bunch, so there are very few ways I can see this race playing out where you don't have a minimum of two playoff drivers in the perfect lineup. I want three in each mine personally and I think we can get a fourth two. We'll talk about that again in the tier by tier breakdown, but have the emphasis on the guys starting inside the top 16 spots for this week. For the non playoff drivers, we will have some place differential options. Matt DiBenedetto and Ross Chastain rank 15th and 16th in my model. They are starting 30th and 23rd respectively. That's going to play pretty well. So we'll be able to get some place differential from our value plays, but for the studs and mid-range plays, we need laps led and I will be prioritizing that for this week. To figure out who will lead laps, I would lean on two things. The first one is course history because they actually got pretty good data there. They ran in Darlington three times last year. It wasn't a different rules package, but they ran it back in May this year in the current rules package. So if the drivers were fast in the Darlington race this year or last year, I would say they're probably going to be fast on Sunday once again. Outside of that Darlington race and the ones last year, I'd focus on other races with playoff representation. So what I mean there is Richmond, Phoenix, and Martinsville because we've seen some teams, primarily Joe Gibbs Racing and Team Penske, totally sell out for the playoffs. They let Team Hendrick Motorsports dominate during the summer because it seems like they've put all their resources and doing well this time of year. Others like Hendrick have had a more well-rounded approach and I think those playoff-centric teams will pick up here maybe even if they haven't done a ton over the summer. Truex hasn't done a ton this summer. Neither is Hamlin. I expect them to surge a bit this weekend. So the races I am emphasizing here most are Richmond, Phoenix, and Martinsville in addition to Darlington. Dover National and New Hampshire do help because they were in this rules package, but I would rank them below the other tracks this week. We're going to see every team's best this week and I want to make sure I'm accounting for that. So again, emphasizing playoff tracks, seeing what they've done there, and looking at past races at this track as well. So to recap here, we do need to prioritize lap leaders once again. I want at least three playoff drivers in each lineup. I might get a fourth. Again, we'll talk about that a bit. I am willing to go very top-heavy to make that happen. I know that is risky, but there are some punting options I do like and I'm willing to go there. You can get some place differential for your non-playoff drivers. When you're looking at who to pick, look at the first Darlington race, look at Richmond, Phoenix, and Martinsville, and then Dover National and New Hampshire slide in after that. I'll talk a lot about what drivers have done in this rules package this year. That will include Bristol just because it's easier to filter out that way, but Bristol easier to de-emphasize because it was run on dirt, whereas the others were run on pavements. And it is an eight-race sample if you include Bristol. So a pretty good sample. We should know who will be fast on Sunday. Speaking of that, let's talk about the elite tier in our tier-by-tier breakdown, starting off with Kyle Larson, who is $14,000 on FanDuel, through Denny Hamlin at $12,500, and the three most likely winners in my simulation are all in this tier. Those guys are Truex, Hamlin, and Larson. My wins, Sims have it in that order. Truex, Hamlin, Larson, I would personally put Larson above Hamlin, but that's what the Sims see for this week because those guys are going to lead laps. At least one of them is going to lead a lot of laps on Sunday. I can say that with a good amount of certainty, Truex, almost one last year, he dominated the spring and won the race. Larson has podium finishes and four of the past five Darlington races. Hamlin has had a top four average running position at all four playoff 750 tracks. So I love all three of those guys, and I'm going to have a lot of them. The guy I'm easily lowest on this tier is Kyle Busch. Busch's best average running position in the four playoff 750 tracks, eighth. His best finish is third. Now both that finish and the average running position came in Darlington, which is very good, but he led just 33 laps in this package on ovals, whereas Truex, Hamlin, and Larson all led at least 500 laps in this package. So I'm going to be pretty low on Busch relative to the other three guys in this tier. I'm going to write this one. Truex won Larson to Hamlin three, Busch four. I will also say on Vanduul Sportsbook you can bet Hamlin at minus 102 over Kyle Busch, and I think that is a pretty intriguing bet for me this week. The second tier on Vanduul is Chase Elliott at $12,000 through Alex Bowman at $10,000. Chase is going to be the first guy in this tier straight up. He nearly won here last year. He always has a race winning upside. So straight up Chase Elliott number one, but there are a lot of mid-range guys here who could win for a low salary. I mentioned before I want to jam in potentially four playoff drivers. These are the guys who allow us to do so. Get your Truex, your Hamlin, or your Larson and then pepper this range and one guy in the range below it. The guys I like here most who best fit that mold are William Byron, Joey Logano, and Alex Bowman. Logano leads the sport in average finish on ovals using the 750 horsepower package. Byron ranks third in that stat. They both also had a sixth place average running position at Garlington back in May. Logano ran well at other playoff tracks. He almost won Phoenix. He would have won if not for Lake Caution. He finished third in Richmond. He led 49 laps in Richmond, 140 something in Phoenix as well. I think he's undervalued in the betting market at plus 1800. He's 10-5 on FanDuel. He is my favorite of the mid-range guys. I was saying that Chase Elliott was first overall. If you give me the salary discount on Logano at 10-5, I will take that and rank him higher. So, Logano to me number one in this tier. Byron hasn't had the best upside. He has led just 30 laps in these three races or these eight races, I should say. Most of those laps occurred in Dover, which is a non-playoff track and pretty different from Garlington. Byron is crazy consistent. So, even if he doesn't lead laps, he should get us a good finish. I do like Byron quite a bit. The reason like Bowman is his record on tracks with heavy tire fall off. He won at Fontana last year. He won at Richmond this year. Both those tracks fall in that bucket. He was also runner-up in the first Garlington race last year and he had a top eight average running position in all three races. He's starting fifth, so you're not going to get any place differential out of Bowman, but I think he could win this race similar to Logano. I think that all three of those guys, Bowman, Logano, and Byron, are keys to jamming in more playoff drivers and potentially getting two of those guys in the same lineup can make that a lot easier on you. As for Kevin Harvick, I do like him at 11-5. I just don't feel as good about his upside as the other guys in this tier. I do still want to get there because my model really likes Harvick this week. It's more into him, I think, than it's been the entire year. I think it'll be hiring him next week in Richmond, depending what happened this week, but it's pretty high at Harvick and it hasn't been for most of the year. I'm going to rank him behind the others, but I will say I just want to be in this tier a lot. I would still like to get there at times. I'm going to rank this tier after considering a salary. Logano won Chase II, Byron III, because he has some place differential upside, Bowman IV, Harvick V, Brad Kezalowski VI. Kezalowski is starting 16th, but I haven't seen a ton from him in this package, so I'm okay being a bit lower on him. The mid-range is Ryan Blaney at $9,800 through Erika Merola at H2, to the fore that I might try to jam in a fourth playoff driver, and that guy to me I'd be targeting there is Christopher Bell. He's $9,200. I think I can make that work. He's starting 13th, so some place differential juice there. He has been awesome in this rules package. In the seven non-dirt races, he has two top fives and five top tens across seven races. He finished runner-up in the most recent race in this package at New Hampshire. I think that Bell is a dark horse to win a race this round. It may not be at Darlington, but I think he could be in contention at Richmond. He could do some stuff at Bristol, so whether Bell is the third driver in my lineup or the fourth, I want to be in on him this weekend. I think that, again, you can make a four playoff driver lineup work via Christopher Bell, and I really do like the thought of that for this week. Austin Dillon is the lone playoff driver in this tier. He's starting back in 21st. He has just one top 10 in this package this year. That was a 10th place run in Richmond. He did finish runner-up in this race last year, though, but he was 16th in the May race this year. I'm pretty wishy-washy on him. I will use him, but I do like some guys in the tier beneath him more. I'm going to rank this tier Bell 1, Dillon 2, Tyler Redick 3. He's starting up front, but he could run pretty well. I think that Redick, this track fits him pretty well, so I would like to get there at times for him, just not as high on him as I am with Christopher Bell. I've got Ryan Blaney 4th, Kurt Busch 5. Both of those guys are starting in the top three spots and might need a win to pay off. Blaney was much better here in May than he usually is, but still not his best track by any means. Kurt Busch, he can get the job done on slick tracks, as he showed in Atlanta, just not as good in this package so far this year. I'm okay being a bit lower on them. Eric Almerola is going to be number six for me in this tier. The value tier to me is pretty good. It is Ross Chastain in $8,000 through Cole Custer at $6,300. There are three, what I think, are really fun options in this tier, all starting further back. Those guys are Ross Chastain, Matt DiBenedetto and Chris Buscher. Chastain is starting 23rd. DiBenedetto 30th and Buscher 34th. Chastain has been especially good in this package recently. His average running positions at Dover, Nashville, and New Hampshire were 14th, 10th, and 9th respectively. He finished second in Nashville, so show good upside there. He's number two for me in this range if we're talking about cash gains. I put DiBenedetto ahead of him for cash gains. That's partly because DiBenedetto is starting 30th, so deeper in the pack, a bit more place differential upside there. DiBenedetto's consistent whereas Chastain is more volatile. For tournaments, I want Volatility. I want Ross Chastain. I want that upside that he has. His upside is better than DiBenedetto's. For cash gains, I would favor DiBenedetto, but the preference is to get both, honestly. I think the both are cash gain viable. Buscher is a guy who used to be brutal in Darlington. At least he was last year in this package. He was bad last year, but he's really good on high tire fall-off tracks. No surprise that Buscher finished ninth year back in May. His team has put a heavy emphasis on the 550 package. That's why I'm going to rank him behind both Chastain and DiBenedetto. They have not emphasized his package this year, so that's why he's lower than them. But Buscher, to me, is a cash gain consideration and a great tournament play, too. Ranked this tier, DiBenedetto won for cash games, two for tournaments. Chastain is one for tournaments, two for cash games. Buscher is three, Stenhouse four, Cole Custer five, and Bubba Wallace number six. The punting tier is not bad. That is Daniel Suarez at $6,000 on down. There are three guys in this tier who ran well at this track back in May. Those guys are Eric Jones, Chase Briscoe, and Ryan Newman. Briscoe is pretty interesting to me because he finished 11th in that race. That is his only top 20 finish at a non-dirt track in this package. But he did win here in Darlington in the Xfinity series. I believe he beat Kyle Busch. They might have been banging doors. I might be imagining this, but I'm pretty sure he beat Kyle Busch in a pretty tight finish last year in the Xfinity series. He does really well on high-banked tracks, so I'm okay taking slides at Briscoe. Jones was amazing here when he was with Joe Gibbs Racing back in the day, and it was not just the win. He also ran well outside of his win as well. My Sims account for his bad equipment pretty heavily, and they still haven't ranked 19th. That is the highest of anybody with a salary lower than $7,800, and he's $5,800. Newman is someone who's upside I always question, but he was 10th here in May. I am very interested in all three of these guys, and will consider jumping down here decently often to jam in more playoff drivers. The bell lineups can work a lot easier if I go to Jones, Briscoe, or Newman for that fifth slot. I'm going to rank them Jones-1, Briscoe-2, Newman-3, but all three at least considerations for me to jam in more playoff drivers for this week. Let's finish up with our win picks for this week. I'm going to trust simulations for this week and go with what they say. They say that the most likely winner for this week is Martin Truex, Jr. Truex was disgusting here back in the spring. He's had some rough summer races, but again, it seems like they're focusing a lot on the playoffs. He's three wins here coming playoff tracks, and I think that matters. Martin Truex, Jr. is my win pick for this week in the top range. Among the guys below $10,000, my simulations have Blaney, Reddick, and Bell all pretty even. I could go with any of those three. I will go with Bell. He has been pretty kind to me recently. We had him as the win pick down here for Road America. He finished second there for New Hampshire when he finished second. I do think that Bell grades out well. Blaney is still skeptical of the track history. That's why I'm okay glossing over him here, but Bell to me, a good win pick. The official win picks going all in on Joe Gibbs Racing with Martin Truex, Jr. and Christopher Bell. That is all the time that we have here for this week on the He Check Fantasy podcast, but as mentioned, a lot of good stuff here on the Number Fire Daily Fantasy podcast feed. UFC DFS podcast via Austin Slave is posted. MLB DFS podcast posted for Friday as well. We've got NFL beginning next week, PGA the week after that once again. A lot of good stuff. Make sure you are subscribed and also leave us a rating and review if you like what you hear. If you've got questions for me, I am on Twitter at Jim Sonnis, J-I-M-S-A-N-N-E-S. You can also follow the FanDuel podcast network at FanDuel podcast. Big thank you to everyone for tuning in for today. Good luck with your lineups. Enjoy the Southern 500. Enjoy the playoffs. We'll talk to you once again next week for Richmond. This has been the He Check Fantasy podcast powered by Number Fire.


All right, so I'm going to look at this guy first Walk cycle and go through your reel and I'm go through the questions that you have in your email Which I love by the way, it is all fantastically well detailed and laid out. It's great And then I also have the list in front of me of all the stuff you want to do Let's go one by one since you also want to do a lot of cycles I Think for review purposes What would be great, but what I like for cycles is in terms of presentation and it's easier and faster for feedback It's a I don't need a three-quarter. That's gonna always be at the end when you're done with the shop for like the final thing but you know, it's always kind of Camera specific sometimes you just want to animate to a specific camera to make certain Motions just a bit better, but in this case It would be great if you have it divided in half. It's my So walking front, but it's an orthographic front not a perspective front and then you have a side also an orthographic side And that way I don't have to Go one by one here where you know you go through this and in that but you do want to make it orthographic Just for a final detail on foot placement and stuff like that That being said and even if I cut This part out here The main impression was are you mentioning you're asking if it's too slow? I would say it's good question. I think yes It also depends what you want to do I mean you are mentioning it's a vanilla walk from vanilla walk. I feel like it has Some odd moments where the knees come in. There's a very fairly big dip up and down in Y or T Y And they're very distinct pauses on the steps. It's kind of except pause pause pause pause So it feels like someone who is more practicing a walk like it's almost like a model. That's kind of going Okay, I got to go walk this way and this way someone's really thinking about those steps And something that's part of it is are those little pauses that you have This is as she comes down and it's subtle But it's just something you can do to just give it less Less of that pause feel Also, you have a very wiggly arms in terms of Elbows a kind of pop you can see that hair until he pops to the right and it pops back to the left and so on and so on There's a lot of wiggle stuff here and in the elbows That's something that I would I would kind of look at same thing on Your legs or some moments where it's bent goes into a straight Then you got those moments here We're kind of pops and you got those one frame moments where the leg kind of sticks in space and suddenly moves forward again But looking at that in real time Without the whole thing. It's just ever so slightly poppy Can be smooth than it does a hair. This is subtle things I think the biggest things to me are the inward knees are kind of too much This goes more into a character walk And then the locked Arm bits the arm bits are the are the most jarring things the leg stuff is a bit more polished detail Something also in the up and down that add to that pause feeling where it's your up above Sun down and an up above up Sun down and it feels like I don't if you're doing a Bit of a stretchy thing in the neck Some moments might just be maybe in the movie here There's something that feels ever so nice a subtle thing whatever so slightly Disconnected where this is one thing and this is another thing feels like you have the head on them like an headline IK type of thing feels a slightly disjointed from The body especially given this this thing Step step and up and down up and down. You always want to feel a bit more up and down dragging overlap on the head Especially during those down moves it feels like she think here This is all one big unit that just moves down as opposed to at this point a slight dragon head a bit higher Boom and on this down the head will be bits lower come up again And so on not crazy over that not crazy Jar Jar up and down, but Just loosing it up ever so slightly But those would be my main comments On this guy was you also have a lot of crossover on the feet As they go over there, which is to get more into like a catwalk type of thing versus a vanilla walk So you can flesh this part out and make you more like a little attitude driven character walk or reduce all those things and make that a vanilla walk but And that it's good. I like it just the camera thing how you present it And then here you're asking me to reel. Please. Let me know which two shots you think You should work on first. So let's watch this first here. I mean, obviously you notice, but I want to just go through that Cute and I like that it's interesting to see I like that a presentation here with That wall in what do you want to do with the kid? Come down and I like this a lot just because of in terms of elevation change It's not all in flat backgrounds or a surface. There's a bit of a change there that gives you a good sense of weight Good changes there on the posing on the legs. I like this one. I'm gonna say I'm a fan of this guy Think of watching like that. This bit bouncy on the head here and that whole aspect Boing through that it feels a bit springy bit rubbery that would probably be my The main point I think for this guy something in my Audio that's only funky All right, and then we're going to Like sky here. Interesting mechanics. It feels a bit Draggy Those are the length, but I do really like the posing in this section here And the timing of it. I think this is It's very cool, it's borderline referencing. I'm curious what how you plan this Part it has a slight reference you feel to it That's probably so far my least favorite one just because I'm not a huge fan of Martial arts and song and dance stuff like that just because it it's mostly motion Without a lot of character in there And especially so far as you go through like you see bottom mechanics and pants of mine and acting in dialogue and stuff like that it's all super cool and in terms of Showcasing what else you can do. This doesn't really show much and in addition to what you just showed so far Like to me that I'll just take that shot out. This one's neat But it's borderline in the same category as this not that you have a swing but if you shouldn't really good grasp of Mechanics and nice posing and timing which in this case is the same here What I like about this one is that You go from lands to air with a bigger swing, but I'm quite sure I'm buying the mechanics of She's not really going back that far So for her to go back even if that swing happens here not quite buying that you can get that far, but then again That might be just too picky Neaposes and everything like all that but I Didn't know the day looking at what you're presenting. I think this one shows more variety and timing and nicer poses This guy's just a bit more simplified This ones are right.  She could have like a little sideways move in the head Just something a bit more Tied to the jaw and just to all use the energy of it just feels too separate It's just it's just an animation and then you just add a lip sync to it So it feels just for that moment and this feels super poppy Just given how the the beginning of the sharks presented style wise this suddenly is so post-to-pose into his big move And then a couple things where D there feels so a doesn't help that they only have four fingers I'm never a big fan of Four finger designs, but there's something where they're very evenly spaced.   This would be easier if that hand would be here and then you got the face and And that you know, that's your silhouette if you squint, that's kind of what you see This would be a bit cleaner. This kid also feels like you're out of this Rick supports it But like a separate like a IK head or headline or whatever those controls called depending on the rig But I feel just separated from the head through here again like there's a lot of Movements in here how she tilts over and goes up and down That doesn't feel reflected in here that the neck will go over there and then start taking that chest with her to start Moving that C shape over there. This feels like this is one section that goes up and down and this does the sideways tilt So it's a bit of a head thing that would fix on this guy But it's cute, but I'll I like it as a shock And you are Possible am shots Thumbs down a thumbs up It's wimmy on the legs like aish. Obviously they are IK but it's wimmy. They're Cuto. It's not bad It was is this with drag at the end. I don't mind the beginning, but I agree that the ending is a bit Because I need to be something so it's a button something's kind of missing But it's also really relying on the audio with that audio. It would just be kind of It's cute. I do like that jump and the timing of the of the hits and then after that, especially that hand super floaty But not too bad. All right, you're asking. By the way, I love your presentation over here all that stuff Yeah, I can see what you mean. I think the execution is good That is a bit popular Not you know, not like there's a one frame pop, but it feels like the swings are very pop pop pop pop interesting Timing there like that section It's almost pose to pose how both arms move and the heck that leg goes forward It's a bit really poppy there again not poppy as in a one frame pop it really synced That's cool. I do love this part though getting up and bring that leg up Into that that role is great. I really like that in terms of the posing how clean it is and all that Again, it feels slightly referencing In terms of the timing it's a fairly real looking move and then it goes back into this pop pop pop pop pop it do weirdly High frequency up and down pops and his arms of you know, like that It doesn't it feels like they contain a strain not to swing too hard. It's almost ballet Dancery as opposed to like bigger bigger arm moves where You know after that big jump Less contained and not so flat armed with just a wrist overlapping and this is goes on for too long This was a bit too simple here This is slightly confusing as to is he jumping on top of the tree what is going on here That transition was a bit odd. Why is he jumping in the air? There's nothing that indicates the drop that you see here. That's cool. It's a bit soft Mechanics are a bit funky. It's a bit slow and the legs are kind of not moving at all actually It's a weird moment there but I like the detail the ideas of the slippage and Detail of irregular slippage and it's getting stuck and Moving and sliding that's neat, but then it goes back into Feeling almost almost like a cyclic. It's activated and not quite buying the transition from here to here on to Boom for this would be maybe potentially hunched over a bit more. Just push it a bit more and Then again, and then it's a weirdly cartoony where it's very fast and very poppy up and down on left and right swingy Like this feels like a different character Then what's introduced here And these moves like this feels very referencey and real Especially all that stuff there and Then here it's suddenly a style breaker. It's just a different type of character. It's all right. I'm not sure Given what you have already if that shot adds a lot to it It's going through it as the mechanics. You've already shown so much in terms of what you can do I don't think this adds anything more that is better than all the shots previous Poppy things there and again, it's just dance thing where it is a very subjective I I'm probably the minority in this but this is just movement and it's not It's not character. It's just someone going through steps You know clean poses and all that stuff, but I'm just I'm more in favor of character driven work And again given all the stuff you have through instance like the kid at the very beginning with the fishing You know it has I would say similar like he's jumping and dancing, but there's something where you already show me that you can do Body mechanics, but on top of that is also pantomime and lip sync. There's just more to it versus this It seems too simplified compared to what you have already Don't mind this guy actually Just in terms of variety looking through this. I'm a big fan of this All right, you pantomime facial stuff and lip sync this I think shows, you know, you have different pantomime things and run Cool steps there cool posing. I like all of this This no This guy would take out this guy Not bad not on my Topless with everything else you have nothing that any of these are bad I'm just saying that what do you have before already showed off what he can do it Don't add that much to it now I like this guy in terms of Quirky Q acting why not could work um It's curious if that could be a shot with a bit more weight to it potentially doing a new one This feels like an older shot compared to what you're doing here This was like the qualities higher your understanding of posing and timing is different And here again, I'm not sure what this guy brings that you haven't shown here in Already know all of this in her This I would still I don't mind to sing that section this that That and that into this is cool and the rest you can leave out But I like that section a lot because it's also been a variety of styles. You know the kid cartoony Versus this feeling more real ish Where that's how in a dream work stuff feels sometimes bit referencey Also from the I anime aspect a lot of their show real stuff whose referencey and even if it is not used It just has that feeling and it's not very pushed Compared to for instance, I think Adam school has a very pushed sense of style anything that's like blue sky or anything or it doesn't feel like that for instance, but I like Seeing that in a real is to me shows range It's cool to have that in there. I don't think you need all this I don't think this brings anything to the real that you haven't shown yet same with this guy take that out But I like this one because it is You're mentioning that you might not want to have that because you don't want to you know ready yet I think even what you've shown I think this this would be worth tackling but in terms of contents I think this is definitely something you want to have on your reel To characters interesting, but also, you know a bit more emotional bit more serious bit more subtle Definitely something you want to have on there so that would be doesn't be my comment on on the reel now looking at your Your your cyclist my question These are the cycles you like to tackle artist. So are these just the ones you want to go through and And bang those out for exercises so that you've done them Because you're saying you create cycles to refine your workflow and to use for games and studio applications But which one so this is a massively long list especially I'm confused at the Lego man walk Lego man jump and I Feel like that ties into your wrote with animal logic which I'm personally again. This is just me and I know this is just me because I ask around a lot I'm always in favor of having It's pretend you have a reel with five shots. Well, let's say seven rights go balls out here. You have seven shots One of them in the middle is a shot that is relevant to the company That you're applying to so if you have all those things and in the middle of all this massive reel You have one Lego shot. I don't mind because you're showing that You did the research you can do something that the company is currently doing. They're obviously doing Lego movies So that they know, oh, oh, oh that person can do this. We can just plug that person in and Work within the pipeline and then the production Every time I mentioned is that work I mentioned is to other people other companies Everybody says no Because it feels like you're not original enough using other property You know standing on that property shoulders to do something You know, it's like there's two things a doesn't feel original You don't bring your own ideas and at the same time You're showing something that a company has already worked on and they're very familiar with it So if you're showing something Lego, it has to be at least as good as what's in the movie So you're gonna be harshly judged And you know, there's a big chance that you know, whoever might do this I think you're really good. I think you could be able to pull that off But probably majority of people wouldn't be able to and then it might be a big You know big down around there. We're like, yeah, they're trying to do this But it's really I mean we're doing this we know how this looks and this doesn't come close to what we're doing in The movie that person is just not ready. It's just a risky thing to do So that's my question to you is this because you want to get into animal logic and that's why you're adding stuff like this Would you be okay with not doing this again? I I don't mind. It's obviously your choice anyway but from within Within the experience that I have asking other people. It's always been shot down But again, I kind of understand a point of view but Anyway, not to linger on that You have all these like female human walk and run. That's all good There's some stuff with like a toddler crawl baby crawl toddler walk personality t-rex walk I tried seratops walk I mean, these are all awesome things to go through And this is just me because you know, I don't know how fast you are you're saying you can Pump these guys two out in a week if you have all that time and you can make it through that list That would be awesome. I don't know that many people that will go through all of that and have the discipline and the time to do it I think it would be fantastic practice and my only question is Do you want to go through all of them and just pick a handful to have on your reel? Do you feel like some of them are just there as an exercise and you don't feel like it to be in a reel? And on top of all of that You do have flight action And other pants of my mind, but this is just a lot of work and You be the first one to be able to go through all of that at a really high quality and finish it all Looking at your reel I think you have a really good grasp of principles and animation and posing and timing I think I would not be surprised put it this way with everything how organized you seem and The quality of your reel I think yeah, why not but I don't know anybody with Such a list that has gone through that so I'm just from my experience hesitant in saying Yes, do all of this only because I feel like you won't have enough time It's such a massive list and on top of that you have still the real stuff you want to polish and finish plus new shots You want to do This is my initial reactions. I'm concerned that you will run out of time and maybe you want to pick Certain things out of the list that you like the most But again, this is me being completely unaware of how fast you can be so as a whole I think list is great great variety the biggest note will be I don't think you should be doing Lego stuff Based on my experience with other people and their feedback And in terms of which shots I would do this guy for sure and It's a good question. It's like this guy is pretty far along just I'm keeping just that section here Of course, you know, let me know what you think about all those You know, like I'm not a Mac massive end of this guy another massive fan of this guy But maybe you love those and you want to keep them I Like this I can see why you think maybe it's too long and you want to do something shorter But I am in favor of doing something subtle and more emotional Probably say this guy and this guy to be honest, I really like those two and then this guy I Think you can do you could do another one if you do like in a brand new shot I would do something else with More weight. That's a bit more within this type of realm type of character and facial stuff I think you can do you can show weight with also a lot of facial stuff to show the strain and the struggle Do more interesting than just this faceless creature But yeah, I mean, that's kind of me it doesn't kind of my my thoughts and ideas you might be completely against everything I'm just curious You think and I think we can start a dialogue after that. So how you want to proceed and with what and all that stuff But yeah, that is it. Thank you. All right There's an email you can sign up you can start whenever you want you can submit whatever you want You get 16 submissions either way a like and subscribe would be awesome. All right. Thank you