Good morning Thanks everybody for coming to our presentation I'm Geneva Henry and we're going to talk about some work. We've done in looking at the model of centers of excellence for information services and In this area what we want to do is talk about this project that we've done Which was a planning grant and then how we went about doing it the methodology looking at reasons that people and Both centers and funders have given for starting centers of excellence How people react to the term center of excellence? Look at the business models that centers of excellence have established and what seems to work What doesn't seem to work and then talk about our next steps as a group in what we're doing on the grant So first I'd like to introduce the team Jose Diaz He's with the Ohio State University Susan Fliss at Harvard University Heather Gendron She's University of North Carolina Chapel Hill Myself Geneva Henry. I'm at George Washington University Joy Kirchner University of Minnesota, and then we have two team members who are In absentia, but they're with us in spirit and that is John Cawthorn who is newly at West Virginia University And John Colshaw who's at the University of Iowa So what is this project? How did this all happen? This was a grant funded project And the thing that all of us have in common we have a lot of things But where this got started We were all part of the ARL research library leadership fellows cohort And one of the things that we did within that cohort was take a visit to the Mellon Foundation Don waters and Helen Cullier were gracious enough to invite us up and meet with us To start brainstorming ideas around, you know, libraries for the 21st century and you know What this next group of leaders coming up, you know, what were we interested in what kept us up at night? You know, what things did we worry about and what did we really want to do? So it was actually a wonderful brainstorming session about the future of library Directions and one of the topics that came came up was the number of services libraries are now being called on to provide and it's Requires skill sets that are not being produced in our library schools So certainly we are going outside of library schools to bring in the professionals that have this knowledge and expertise But when you try to scale that up to every Library as every research library and even broader every library To fully support the services that we're all being asked to support It you start to see it starts to break down It requires a lot of skills that are rare at this point So we looked at possibly exploring other ways of providing those services And we landed on this idea of centers of excellence And would that model work for information services would that model work? specifically for libraries to be looking to rather than developing their own whole Set of skills in all of these areas. Can we think more in terms of centers that provide these for multiple institutions? So Mellon did award us a planning grant to explore this idea of centers of excellence for information Services as shared expertise The kinds of services we're talking about for the 21st century library include digital archiving and preservation data management use of multimedia and teaching learning and research information discovery search Scholarly communications and digital humanities So what we were trying to do is assess the viability of this center model As an approach to provide the services for multiple institutions And then you know through our our research provide both funders and future centers with some guidance about What are the kinds of things you should be thinking about or looking for? in a center of excellence We started by developing Did a lot of exploration a lot of research on centers that exist out there and ended up developing what we call profiles for? 34 Centers that might sort of fit into this idea of a center of excellence and then from that we whittled it down to 19 centers that we felt warranted In-person or Skype interviews to dig more deeply into how they operate and then seven funders So we did interviews with this group of people to Arrive at our findings, so I'm going to Turn it over now to Heather gender and he'll talk about the methodology that we used Okay, so our high-level questions for this project Looked at you know, how effect how are these effective and successful centers actually formed? What was their Genesis story? How do they operate on a day-to-day basis and How are they sustained over time? We were also interested related especially to that sustainability issue What were the criteria we can identify through these interviews for funding both? the formation of a center and the long-term sustainability of a center and of course we were interested in understanding how these centers assess themselves internally and how They're required to do assessment so as Geneva said We conducted overall 26 interviews and these were all recorded interviews and transcribed and Some of them the interviews were with these funding agencies that you see here on the slide And then these are the centers And we did a lot of site visits most of these were site visits And we did as a team interviews with these 19 centers with directors for the most part and other staff as well And so these were hour-long interviews typically But sometimes it would go into maybe a two-hour time period and we would get a little tour of the facility if we did a site visit and These are our main questions And I just wanted to put them up on the slide not so you'd have to read through them all right here But these will be available to you on the CNI site So we asked basically 10 to 12 main questions per interview depending on the interview And there are a number of prompts that you don't see on the slide So if you want more information from any of us just about this process just let one of us know so We asked center directors to give an overview of their center and its desired impacts To talk about the ways in which the center fosters and or instigates innovation or entrepreneurship We wanted to know what types of assessments these to measure the performance and impact of the center our interviews explore the roles of partnerships and what successful partnerships look like to these center directors and We spent a lot of time talking with them about their funding streams and what an ideal business model for a center might look like We hope to develop this concept from these interviews of what a really you know a really good business model would look like for a center and then finally we talked about the center of excellence Concept and what it meant to them individually and if they consider their own center to fit this in within this category And so the questions we asked a funding agency program officers and directors Really mirrored these questions we asked of center directors and we were interested in seeing where their answers aligned with those of center directors and Where there was some divergence and so we asked funders additional questions about Conditions for funding a center of excellence factors that drive a successful center and they're you know From what they've seen and any perceived risk that they see in funding centers So this is really today what we're reporting is our preliminary analysis And this is what we've done to get to this point so far we started off with individual team members looking at the transcripts from interviews that they took part in and They started we started to harvest key quotes From those transcripts and then pull them all together and share a document And then as a group we met in person and we did these rapid fire analysis sessions We only allowed ourselves an hour to go through the transcripts from each interview And we tried really hard to stick by that because we had a quite a lot of work to do and many of us have become Directors in the last year library directors that we don't a lot of time so then we identified patterns and best quotes and Articulate started to articulate sort of high-level insights and reflective questions from these interviews And so this is the process that that we're going to continue with with the group So I'm going to pass it on to Jose who's going to start giving a Overview of some of our findings as Heather indicated we conducted a series of interviews with centers of excellence and funders What I like to do is to give you a taste of the initial findings These findings focus in two key issues What prompted the creation of the centers and what are funders looking for when they are considering whether to fund a center of excellence or not? to put it more succinctly What are the reasons What reasons did people give to start or fund a center of excellence? This quote I think sums up the urges behind the creation of centers of excellence It deals with the core of the academic enterprise the creation of knowledge and its dissemination That is truly the urge behind the centers of excellence, but all urges are not created equal Some seem more aspirational and amorphous from the start Others are more down to earth. I call the former the creative or initial or initial impulse And I dub the latter reality check There's nothing scientific or secret about these terms. I just made them up Yeah, I just made them up Many centers of excellence we interviewed told us that they wanted to do the following things They wanted to forge multidisciplinary approaches to address big issues They wanted to build common infrastructures that will reach beyond one institution. They wanted to bridge disciplines To respond to significant cultural phenomena To create a sanctuary for scholars to offer scholars a place to go away from committee work tenure and promotion office politics They also wanted to respond to specific questions and solicitations and to answer a particular proposal a particular request for proposals Notice some of these are very lofty reasons. They're good reasons. They're short on specifics the second section I dub reality check and Here you can see more granular answers. They verbalize or desires a little better In this set of answers the COEs told us they wanted to understand the ethical role of technology They wanted to understand the impact The internet's impact on society. They wanted to transform scholarly publishing into open access They wanted to enhance scholarship They wanted to increase the flow and accessibility of e-science. They wanted to advocate nationally and internationally and they wanted to reach a variety of audiences When you combine the creative or initial impulses and the reality check again, I made those terms up You get a fuller picture for example centers of excellence Want to respond to significant cultural phenomenon such as the internet's impact on society or COEs wish to build common infrastructures to enhance scholarship and to make open access possible them and other things At the end of the day though things coming to fuck things came into focus and we all arrived at the same place Centers of excellence are created because scholars and students want to forge build Create transform enhance increase and more importantly bring about change One thing we are sure of even at this early stage is that if you don't have money you can't create a center of excellence So what are funders looking for when they are trying to decide if a COE is worth their time and money? Well funders are looking really for one thing success Why because funders see themselves as a venture capital operation. They are putting their money into what amounts to a startup company Like good venture capitalists they want to put their money in a place. They think will be successful as One funder put it quote you really got to prove the concept and show that there is demand for that center or that specialty and a quote So far our analysis of the data shows That funders see the potential for success when they see the following attributes or a combination of these attributes I won't cover all of them But this is just a sample originality a funder might fund an entity call a COE if the center is doing something Nobody else is doing they want to see a distinctive mission and distinctive goals Passionate engagement leaders must exude passion trust between the PI and the granting agency is a key ingredient in this mix Impact beyond beyond the confines of the institution the NEH For example once the lead institution to bring scholarly expertise Manage grants well and bring in other good people from other institutions. They also want to see impact on scholarship Common goals funders will fund initiatives that are in harmony with the funding agencies goals and strategies Didactic potential Can others learn modify and adapt not only the center's model, but its products Leadership as I mentioned earlier there has to be trust between the funders and the PIs Funders want to deal with leaders who have done their due diligence in preparation for the project Who understand the necessity of risk mitigation and no less important They need to see leadership that has the skills that build collaboration in groups that are different libraries archives museums as One funder put it quote personal personality counts because ultimately you have to trust the PI Funders are also open to leaders who might not have all the expertise at the start of the project, but are sensitive to the important questions Let me end where I started What reasons did people give to start or fund a COE? The COEs want to push the boundaries of what's possible. They want to create new products Reach more people enhance all technologies and create new ones Funders want to make sure that their investment doesn't go to waste That the centers they fund are viable Innovative and sustainable that the leadership they entrusted with their money is trustworthy competent and visionary I will turn this over to Susan During our meeting with the funders and the centers we casually brought up the concept of center of excellence and What was interesting was that many of the centers and some of the funders were put off by center of excellence they They thought of it They thought it was a little pretentious and how do you become a center of excellence and do you just say that you're a center of? excellence They thought it discouraged Innovation and collaboration if someone claims they're a center of excellence then does that discourage others from trying to research in that same area? And if you're a center of excellence will others want to work with you because they may not feel that they have the Expertise or the funding to be able to work with you on a certain level one of One of our interviewees actually quoted Jacques Derrida and said there is no center at the center and Trying to be the center is the problem rather than thinking about what your goals are what are how you want to have impact So we then read a definition of the centers of excellence And we took the set the definition from Carnegie Mellon Software Engineering Institute a center of excellence is a premier Organization providing an exceptional product or service in an assigned sphere of expertise and within a specific field of technology business or government Consistent with the unique requirements and capabilities of the coe organization. We had to read it a couple times so that they could absorb it and interestingly Once we shared this definition. They started to identify with parts of it especially exceptional product or service and assigned sphere of Excuse me assigned sphere of excellence We asked them how broadly or narrowly they believed a sensor of excellence should be defined and if they thought they were one Overall humanity centers and funders were less comfortable with the concept of centers of excellence but the science and engineering centers and funders seem to understand it better and and Some of them did reply that they thought based on this definition. They were centers of excellence We went on to talk about so what would the characteristics of a center of excellence be and Coming up at the top was providing leadership or expertise in a field or specific area being innovative Collaborative and sharing in a deliberative way. So talking about collaborative But not for just collaboration sake but for a specific purpose and thinking about how one would how that center would share Where with whom and what the the transformative impact would be they talked about two elements to what it means to have to be transformative One is to allow researchers to do more and better research and the second is to serve future needs Not yet identified by the community. So pushing the boundaries of innovation Thinking for the researchers before the researchers even know what they need If you see in the last line the descriptors for the characteristics are aid agile nimble evolves adapts Explores all of these have a common thread signifying evolution with openness and Mechanisms to encourage or embrace change for a center of excellence It's not enough to enable change a center of excellence has to seek and embrace it as the center itself Evolves and that was a strong common theme So we asked them okay. Well, what would how would you define a center of excellence and? The common definitions are it's a center is it's really a network rather than a center One center decide described it as they were a node So it's less about the place and more about where they connect in that big network expertise and again mechanisms for sharing and Focused expertise delivered broadly Most of the centers and funders described a center having a narrower focus of expertise, but distributing sharing broadly and Producing an impact in the world Two other themes are Important to mention the centers brought up Certification for a center of excellence. So is there a way to validate what a center of excellence would do similar to lead certification? Secondly often mentioned was well, you would know that you could you could know you're a center of excellence if others came to you to want to work with you to Ask you for advice to ask you for your expertise So that's a peer validation that you are a center of excellence Then the next three bullets came from the funders specifically They described a center needs to be high-profile. It needs a public-facing personality Someone who drives the center and prevent I'm sorry presents the face of expertise That also came with a caution if you rely on one individual and that individual leaves that affects the stability of the center Selecting experts who will shine so people who are able to communicate Who are willing to go out and work with others on their what their findings are on the center and also? Recruiting different expertise periodically so refresh the team that you have That does two things it gets new ideas into your center It might get new ways of working it also draws attention to your center periodically So who you've drawn to the center and you would release that in a PR In a PR message Even changing the institution that a center partners with periodically it was a recommendation so for us for this part of the The interview what we learned in the words of one of our interviewees is that excellence is a very unusual term And now joy Okay, I'm gonna delve a little bit more deeply into the business models that we learned about in general, I would say that with all of the Centers that we looked at they were based in some kind of institutional setting and There were partnerships with other institutions typically that was because of the the grant funding requirement But also there was value in partnership with others To solve a particular problem that perhaps no one institution could solve on their own They also valued the institutional setting particularly if there were faculty Faculty who are also in departments could utilize their their graduate students to help resource the center and provide research in general Many of the centers had a variety of funding sources Grants being the number one a variety of different kinds of grants. There was also university funding state provincial funding Endowments, although not many of our centers had endowments. They all wished they had Memberships have a variety of different kinds of membership models that centers utilize to generate revenue some had partner dues Many had in kind contributions of various kinds There were others that also Were generating revenue through the sale of products knowledge products. Some had fee-based services others provided training opportunities that were funded or Had a fee-based service attached to it Many had conferences that they hosted that provided some revenue or Workshops some even went into a center and provided the training in-house in General when we looked at the overall picture of the centers Most established some kind of core funding and usually this was established with multi-year funds of some kind and Adalments state funds and generally that was with our data so far at least about one-third of the overall funding was Was associated with the core funding and then the shorter term Funding was around two-thirds so two-thirds soft money And this was the bulk of most of the centers. We looked at were very busy with Grant funding and pursuing grant funds When we spoke to the centers we asked one of the questions we asked is how much time do you spend on fundraising and All of them spent a lot of time on fundraising So it was difficult to get an exact number, but generally 30 to 50 percent of their time Some of them had a distributed model where each person in the center had some obligation to do fundraising 10 to 15 hours a week was an example of one of these Some spent a hundred percent of the time that one person was was dedicated or usually there was a team of people Dedicated to some kind of fundraising in a center What we learned even though it seemed to be quite a burden to do fundraising and pursue grants Almost all of them said that they valued the process of pursuing grants that although they found it time-consuming That they felt it drove a lot of innovation And I think these two quotes are fairly indicative of what we heard The last one I think it is really important to have grant funding model to keep us hungry and innovative is what we heard a lot This idea of the competitive edge the pursue of grants to keep them innovative And I will say that the grants the short-term soft money grants tended to be used for the innovative things they were doing the experimental projects that they were pursuing When we asked what our centers felt for an ideal business model Some of that most of them weren't quite there But they all said that it was very important to have a diversified funding portfolio So that kind of parallels a little bit what Jose said about what the funders Are looking at at these centers as venture capitalism is what you used And that the center directors felt the same way that that there was a real need to have a diversified funding portfolio And and a real requirement to have some long-term or permanent-based funding of some kind And so typically most of them especially the more established centers were looking for multiple revenue streams and Not a single source Many of them valued the institutional support To provide that permanent core support for for their activity When we asked about long-term sustainability the answers were slightly different so the obvious one is that Reliance on one-time funding is not a good idea for long-term sustainability But more importantly what was important for the future and sustainability is for the center to maintain a clear sense of purpose And a strong leader, so we've been hearing this constant theme over and over this need for a strong Leader who can really sell the vision into the future They also spoke frequently about What the center is providing? The need for the services that they provide to the community and to keep that fresh This was pretty a really great statement that said it all in our minds Nobody gives you money because you need it What they want to hear is that you're doing great things. You're confident. You're optimistic. You're committed and they support that and again that comes back to this notion of a strong leader that can sell the vision that can be persuasive in terms of pursuing grants and being successful From the funder perspective we also asked them what they felt was an ideal business model Again, they said they want first of all they wanted to know why a center was needed What was it meant to serve? How was how was it going to help with the synergy in a center on a given topic? They too like to see a blended revenue scheme or some kind of diversified funding and not permanence on dependents on grants Some of them said that they like to see that the center was starting a business of some kind and then use the profits to cross subsidize the work Others like to see production of knowledge products that could be sold to help with supporting the center They also wanted to see in this parallels what Jose said earlier They wanted to see evidence of trust that they could trust the center Evidence of stability and that relates to a clear governance model clarity in the proposal clarity in how will be run Most wanted to see evidence of partnership or cross-institutional collaboration And more importantly even though the funding may have been start-up funding They wanted to be sure or see evidence that the funding was going to support capacity for the future All of the funders said something about that this was going to help some future need and They all said a champion a trusted champion They wanted to see who they could trust to give the money to So I'll summarize some key insights so far The concept of diversified funding a funding portfolio was very important The funders are not interested in forever funding that they're Interested in startup funding and innovation, but they do want to see future capacity Grant funding model is difficult and time scoots time consuming But it appears to be a motivator for innovation for most of the centers and again coming back to the trusted champion the Personality to lead and influence And I'll hand it over to Geneva You'd like to talk about our next steps where we're going from here So we've got a few more things to do One of the the big things we're looking for is some feedback on our draft Findings once we put the draft report out there to start to get some feedback This is the first time we're presenting our findings on the work that we've done. So We were very excited to have the presentation accepted because we're looking to you As an audience to give us your feedback on what you're hearing today. Let us know your thoughts your experiences So that we can Take those into consideration as we draft the final report We've intentionally kept this presentation Short so that we have a lot of time to engage with you in discussion We also will be sending the draft report to the centers and funders the individuals there that we interviewed for the study One of the things we also realized when we got together after we've done all the interviews and you know We're pouring through the transcripts is that you know, why did we start this? We started this because of this problem that we're having with research libraries trying to meet the need for all of these new services And so then once we've stepped back after we have all this information we're excited about you know the findings that we have and We sort of stopped and said but you know what? Would probably be pretty good to get some feedback from library directors who would eventually bear the burden of Going after these centers or supporting them or being you know full champions of them And will they embrace this model? So that's another group that we want to get some feedback From we're planning to we're hoping to do a focus session with some library directors Since they're probably the stakeholders who are most likely impacted by these centers for information services And let's see it what if they would buy into the concept So our goal is to reach to release the final report by the end of June Clear has agreed to post it on their website. So it will be available there fully open And then we'll be delivering it to the Mellon Foundation and all of the individuals that were interviewed as well So with that I'd just like to open it up and invite your comments and your thoughts


Through these garden projects, getting the youth and the elders together, producing something that is locally grown and available, not only for a few select people, but for a community. And to take those teachings and pass them on so that it grows and grows and grows, and that we have more self-sustainability in whatever culture it may be.


Hey everyone. Hope your trading is going awesome. At the time of this recording, implied volatility has been on an uptick and that always means excellent trading opportunities for navigation traders. So hopefully this keeps up and we continue to get some amazing opportunities in the market. In this video I want to talk about why your opinion does not matter as it relates to trading options. And not only does your opinion not matter, but nobody's opinion matters.  It really is. And so when I say your opinion doesn't matter I'm saying you need to figure out your trading strategy and and and for those of you who follow navigation trading you know by now the philosophy that we follow. It's all about strategic positions utilizing implied volatility as an indicator to enter and exit positions along with all the other stuff that we teach in our courses.  Okay that goes for me, that goes for economists, that goes for the talking heads on CNBC, that goes for the articles that you read in Money Magazine. Their opinions do not matter as it relates to your trading. Okay and I want to point this out with an example and I want to make sure that that you understand the point that I'm trying to get across and it's not that hey look I was right they were wrong that's that's not the point I'm trying to convey in this example. The point I'm trying to convey is that you need to choose your strategy, be strategic around that, use high probability trades, understand implied volatility and how that affects your position and don't worry about what anybody else says. Okay so here's the example I'm going to look at. This is Amazon.com ticker symbol AMZN and the date was that I put this trade on was 4-3 so April 3rd 2017. Okay so what I did is I bought a put spread. I bought a long put vertical and the reason I did that is because a couple reasons one I said okay if Amazon turns around starts going down implied volatility is going to continue to rise. Okay plus it was under 50 and if you follow navigation trading you know that we sell premium or net sellers of premium when implied volatility is over 50 and we can we want to buy verticals or potentially buy premium when it's when it's under 50. Okay so it's barely under 50 however we know that typically when stocks go down implied volatility goes up. Okay so I was taking a bearish position on this so which would mean that if my opinion was correct which again don't follow my opinion you can follow strategies you can follow my strategies but don't follow opinion my my opinion was that that that Amazon had been on a big run massive run up the last few days and at some point over the next you know 30 to 45 days we would see a reversal or a little bit of a pullback. Okay so that that was my strategy and so I put on a long put vertical here on 4-3 and and then what happened the next day is Amazon shot up again okay and and it had a pretty massive move and I thought huh that's interesting you know this this thing's on it on a nice tear to the upside okay I was I was taking a little heat in my position at that point and I thought you know what I'm just gonna check out Google Amazon stock and and just kind of read up on it see what see what people are saying so that's a point I want to make as well it's okay to read articles on on positions on stocks on the financial markets and it'll help it'll help you just kind of understand what's going on but what up what I would tell you definitely do not do is don't read articles for opinions don't read articles for trade suggestions okay and this is the example that I'm showing so so it shot up the next day so I thought huh I'm gonna I'm gonna check out you know what people are saying or what's potentially driving this stock up and so I read an article in on CNBC online the title of the article and this was on this day on the title of the article was the best could still be ahead for surging Amazon and here's how to play it I thought okay this is interesting I can't wait to hear what they have to say and so couple of the couple of the lines couple of the quotes out of the article Amazon could see more upside ahead some strategists say following a first quarter in which Amazon shares gained 18% and logged eight all-time highs okay keep in mind this date Amazon hit a new all-time high at the time of this recording was $923.72 another quote out of the article was Susca Hanna which is a big investment manager one of the analysts said the price said there's a price target now of $1,250 okay now keep in mind if you've ever read articles and and and tracked analysts projections they they try to just jump on where it's going so if if it's skyrocketing upwards they're always going to be putting price targets ahead okay if it starts to if it starts to reverse and fall they're gonna start putting price targets below okay it's just it's just a follow the leader it's just a copycat type of system and there's absolutely no merit to it okay if you can internalize that and understand that and not follow that stuff it'll it'll serve you very well in your trading okay so so this guy says 1250s an upside target according to Stacy Gilbert head of derivative strategy okay so this is the head of derivative strategies for this big investment firm using options would be the best way to play Amazon now okay so now I'm intrigued right I'm an options trader I can't okay let's see what let's see what this this analyst has to say options in Amazon are about as cheap as we have seen them really because if you look at the chart I mean implied volatility is up here I mean you know had this been down here where implied volatility low that's when the options are cheaper or over here is where they're cheaper but right now really they're the cheapest you've seen okay interesting so so if you're uncomfortable that our 1250 price target is too bullish or you're just concerned that the downside could be higher then we're pricing the options are certainly attractive way to play it and what is that option strategy you're going to tell us for example investors may want to go out three months and buy an at-the-money call option hmm okay so you're telling me that you want me to buy calls so we've got we've got first of all we've got earnings coming up in a couple weeks and if you understand what happens to the options after the in earning earnings announcements volatility gets crushed which kills the value of a call okay you can see it here got crushed got crushed here that happens after every earnings announcement so they're telling us we need to buy an at-the-money call and and prior to earnings announcements okay interesting so so I read all this and I thought okay that's that's interesting this person obviously has no idea how implied volatility affects options but yet they're the head of derivative strategies for for a huge in investment firm okay and I say right here so you want me to buy into all-time highs you want me to buy a call into all-time highs and if the price of Amazon goes up volatility will contract so that'll hurt your position you want us to do it ahead of earnings where volatility will contract that'll hurt our position so in other words unless Amazon has just has a you know a two standard deviation move to the upside on top of trading at all-time highs you know that that's really the only way you're gonna profit from this at-the-money call that they're recommending okay so so here I am I'm short Amazon I've got a long put vertical spread on and that I did on 331 and so let's let's see what happened to Amazon and in the next few days okay went up again kind of like started topping out and then it started to go down didn't go down much but then here so here we are today and today is April 13th okay so I I got in right here on 4 3 on this day here on this little little green bar right here went up against us took some heat came back down it's basically trading at the very same area that I entered okay so I was bearish and it didn't even go base it basically didn't even go below where I put the trade on but I took the trade off today I I sold my vertical so I bought it for 20 21 58 sold it for 2377 13 days later for a profit of $219 on per contract traded okay so if you traded 10 contracts that's over almost $2,200 and that's over a 10% return on capital in 13 days okay so again the point of this lesson is not to say look at me I'm right there wrong because guess what this price target of 1250 that could still happen okay and that at the money call that they're that they're recommending that could still be profitable okay definitely not the strategy I would take even if I thought the stock was going up however you know who knows this this analyst could be right over the next few months and I'll actually kind of check it out to see what it ends up happening just just out of curiosity but the point of this lesson is their opinion doesn't matter okay had I had this position on I read this article two days later and thought oh my gosh this expert says that Amazon's going to 1250 I must have made a mistake I'm gonna get get out of this trade and take a loss well I didn't do that right I their opinion doesn't matter so I did not take their advice I stuck with my position I stuck with being strategic and putting on a position that benefited from implied volatility and like I said the price of Amazon didn't even go down and I put on a bearish position yet I made over 10% return on capital in in less than two weeks okay so I hope that's helpful I just I want you guys to get in the mindset of really taking to heart that saying that your opinion doesn't matter economists opinion does not matter analyst opinion does not matter other you know trading gurus who make these price projections and market predictions their opinion does not matter so I hope so I know I've kind of beat a dead horse with that saying but but if you can internalize that and really get strategic around your positions like we teach it navigation trading it's really going to benefit you in the long run so I hope that was helpful if you'd like to learn more about the different strategies that we use to make consistent returns come see us at navigation trading calm we've got a ton of free resources including the navigation watch list which is a list of the most profitable symbols to trade for each type of strategy we've got the volatility indicator which you've seen on my charts you can download this directly to your thinkorswim trading platform and we've got a free options course called trading options for income which is a step-by-step guide to get you making consistent trades right away we look forward to seeing you there


work. TFNN headline news update. Good morning everybody I'm Tommy O'Brien company live from TFNN at 9 a.m. Eastern time Wednesday morning 30 minutes to go until that opening bell and we got markets creeping into positive territory right now S&P futures positive by five points trading at 3142 we get the NQ's positive by 37 trading 10,570 the Dow positive by 25 points 25,795 the Russell flat right now 1410 looking at the oil contract positive six pennies at 4067 oil we get the inventory numbers an hour and a half from right now 10 30 a.m. Eastern time will be on the air live for those we got gold up $7 to 1817 90 the high currently trading 1817 right near those highs quite a day quite an acceleration for gold yesterday we'll see what today holds for it silver up about 14 pennies at 1884 and we'll start things off with the VIX volatility index 2890 as we wait the market open jumping back to the S&P's to see where we were overnight quite a little collapse towards the end of the day yesterday we make highs Monday after the session of 3184 we trade intraday yesterday to 3174 and then we trade down about 40 points into the low of 3132 and you can see just oscillating right around this level around the close currently trading 3142 in the S&P's terms of the NQ's 10,694 yesterday quite a high intraday and then we sell off about almost 200 points really we trade down to a low of 10,505 currently trading 10,570 you see we've been about 10 points higher on a couple occasions whether it was just about at 8 a.m. and also at 430 checking in on Walmart quite a day for Walmart yesterday they're coming out with Walmart plus $98 a year a bunch of perks free same-day delivery I believe with groceries cheaper gas etc a number of items really competing with Amazon Prime the market loving it trading from about 118 to 127 yesterday made it as high as 129 28 overnight currently trading 127 91 and checking in with the giant of them Amazon didn't really phase Amazon much at all yesterday currently trading 3025 and nowhere reaction to Amazon on that news at all checking in with some of the fang stocks this morning Microsoft making it all-time high yesterday of 214 67 for it sold off currently going to open positive though by almost $2 this morning on Microsoft Apple similar story closed under 273 yesterday we're going to open above 376 excuse me 373 going to open above 376 those fang stocks don't short that nasdaq folks watch out watch out for Larry Fezzvento coming up next with trade what you see we'll be right back


I want to walk with you through these streets of awakening. I want to walk with you through these areas of self-discovery and self-mastery. I want to be the guide by your side that helps you to wake up to the best, fullest, most authentic version of you, because without those people in my life, particularly at formative times, I think I would have stayed stuck and given up because I didn't know what to do next, where to turn to next. I didn't have the opportunity to find guiding voices in my life like there is opportunity for this now.


All right, I guess we'll go ahead and get started then. I'm Flynn, with me are Luke Shoemaker and Alice Vasco. We're all from Ambassador Labs. We all work on emissary. Ooh, we can take our masks off. So yeah, this is what we actually look like. All of us are working on emissary ingress. I've actually been involved with the project since the beginning back in 2017. Luke has been elbows deep in a lot of the low level stuff for, I don't know, a few years now, I guess. Not three years. Alice actually came over and worked on the support side of the world at Ambassador Labs for a while, got a good sense for what the customers need, what the users need, and then decided to join us at engineering. We have successfully dragged her over to the dark side. We're gonna talk quickly about, I'm gonna do a quick intro and a recap of some of the stuff that we've, some of the places we've been. Alice is going to talk about self-service configuration, about why it's important, about how to use it well and how to avoid getting burned. And Luke will then take over to talk about some changes that have been made and are being made to the CRD input language for emissary ingress and about, as you may have heard, the Envoy Gateway. So, without further ado, 2021. 2021 was kind of an interesting year for us. We donated emissary to the CNCF, got a new name in the process. We did the emissary 2.0 release, where lots and lots of things changed for those of you who are used to it from before. We made a lot of changes to the input language, where we retired, get ambassador.io v0 and v1. We switched fully to v2. We introduced v3, alpha one and also enabled it so that the system could automatically convert between v2 and v3 for you to make the upgrade path smoother. That happens with a piece of the system that's new called API-Xed. And we also found that we were having a fair amount of friction with having Helm manage CRDs for us. So we ended up yanking the CRDs out of Helm and that made things a lot simpler. Emissary can be used on top of other service meshes. Service meshes, excuse me. We improved our integrations with Linkerty and Consul and Istio. A lot of that work was around MTLS. Not all of it, but a lot of it. That's probably the thing that was most visible to folks. We ended up doing 30 releases that year across 2,300 commits. We ended up with something north of 7,500 users on Slack. Huge thanks to the community. There's no way we could have been here without you. So for those of you who are less familiar with Emissary, let me do a really quick intro. It's an API gateway. So if you have a Kubernetes cluster with services in it and you have some users who are not in that cluster, then Emissary's job is to sit in between those two at the edge of the cluster and mediate access from outside the cluster to inside the cluster. This is colloquially the Ingress problem. Emissary focuses on the Ingress problem because the Ingress problem is always the first one that cloud native developers have to wrestle with in a lot of smaller organizations from less complex situations. It can be the only problem that a developer needs to deal with here. Emissary is an open source cloud native developer-centric self-service API gateway powered by Envoy. It was designed from the beginning to make it easy to get started, to make it easier to take advantage of the power of Envoy without actually having to learn to be an Envoy expert. At this point, it is a CNCF incubating project. We started in 2017. We've seen pretty widespread adoption since then. We're running in thousands of places right now. And I want to take your attention back specifically to the part saying developer-centric self-service there. That's the bit that Alice will be talking about in more detail shortly. This turns out to be something that's been really important in terms of adoption is that particular bit of focus. Okay, it is an API gateway. One of the core roles of an API gateway is routing traffic. So if you have a user Jane who wants to request a quote from Sun Service, then she can do that. A user Mark can request a quote. They might not talk to the same service. That might just be something where they're getting started off for load balancing. It might be something where there are more deliberate things going on. Maybe they're users in different tenants. But this is a core function of an API gateway. It is not the only function. API gateways, in addition to being proxies, are a really good place to bring together more centralized functions that you really don't want your developers to have to worry about individually. So for example, application security. Maybe Jane is allowed to update quotes, but Mark is not. And you can centralize that in the API gateway. Let it worry about auth for you. And then your developers can just rely on that and not have to worry about it. Other things that are really useful for bringing into this area, there's observability, there's rate limiting, there's a bunch of resilience and development stuff. A lot of these things, and there are a lot more, I'm not gonna go over all of these. A lot of these end up overlapping with service meshes. And that's okay. The API gateway and the service mesh are different roles. You could, if you set things up correctly, you can mix and match these functions to take care of them at the level that makes sense for your organization and for your use case. I mentioned earlier that Emissary is powered by Envoy and some of you may be also familiar with Ambassador Edge Deck, which is in turn built on top of Emissary. Everything that Edge Deck can do, Emissary can also do, you just end up having to write more code on your end. And with that, I will hand it over to Alice to talk about self-service configuration and why that is an important and useful thing. Thanks. So Emissary Ingress supports self-service configuration. What's that really mean for the end developers? You take a look here, this is an example of some of the Git and Basterio resources that you use to configure Emissary Ingress. In particular, note how we separated them out based on distinct function. So each resource is generally focusing on what you're gonna be doing at any given time so that you can focus on exactly what you need to do at any given point. Note that these three resources are only about maybe 10 or so lines each. They can result in an Envoy config that's easily hundreds, if not more lines long. You can also configure Emissary Ingress using the Ingress resources should you need to. But we think that the best way to do this is using the Git and Basterio resources. Note particularly that the Ingress resource, you have to specify the host name you wanna use, you're providing your secret name if you're doing TLS, termination, and you're specifying the rules for what traffic you wanna send into what upstream service. Whereas with the Git and Basterio things, you can configure things on an individual level that you might not need to configure more than once or twice. If you wanna configure where you're listening for traffic, you can set that up. And once that's configured, then you can focus directly on things like mappings to focus on getting config straight to your services. We've put a lot of time and effort into the design of the Git and Basterio resources. That's why we really think this is the best way to be configuring it. We've taken a look at some of the challenges that result from configuring things at a scale with existing resources such as the Ingress and we're constantly revisiting it to look at what is working for people at a scale, what are points of conflict and friction in ways that we can upgrade things and make them better in the future. Obviously, we didn't design perfect resources on the first try, but that's why we continually look to improve them and see how we can make them better as Luke is gonna talk about in a little bit. Now the whole self-service point means that any one developer can do this as they need it and focus on pieces bit by bit. When an author is particularly relevant to you, you can start creating off-service resources to focus on that. You can do hosts and listening to configure how the traffic is getting into the cluster and then when you're ready to get it sent to your upstream services, you can just focus on the mappings. You get the most benefit out of this though when you have that distinct role separation where you've got your ops and your admin folks who can focus on kind of the cluster level tasks and more maintenance things, getting things set up and prepared so that it's ready for the developers who can just focus on deploying the services that they're developing and figuring out what kind of traffic they wanna send about service. As for the best practices with configuration, obviously you get the most out of it when you're using that separate distinct role approach so that you can trust that your operators are just gonna focus on making sure things are set up for you. Your developers aren't overburdened worrying about how to configure all these different things when they just wanted to play a service and then each person can focus on their individual tasks trusting that the other person is gonna be taking care of that side of the world for them. This really empowers teams to do independent releases without having to necessarily worry about what operations is doing or what the other teams are necessarily doing. They can just think about the services they're developing and how they wanna get traffic to those. It also means that you don't have to wait for ops to expose the services you're developing. You can figure out exactly how you wanna expose them and do it really quickly with a small amount of config. Each team benefits the most when they're trusting each other to take care of their separate roles so that each person can focus on the stuff that's relevant to them. Now the trust between teams doesn't necessarily have to be blind and you don't have to give everyone just total access to your cluster. You can use Kubernetes RBAC to set up permissions for who is allowed to use what resources, apply resources, configure and create things. In particular, we're a big fan of this tool called Qubectl Pseudo that can let you set up permissions for who particularly is allowed to use elevated permissions when working in the cluster and who might necessarily just have only read configurations. That makes it really easy for everyone to take a look at the config that's in the cluster but you can limit who's allowed to make changes without limiting who can inspect things, get logs, get information, see what's in the cluster and the status of all these resources. You can also use tools like GitOps and store your infrastructure as code to add additional control points so that you're not necessarily limiting who can make changes to the cluster but you're putting it behind that barrier of a pull request so that if someone wants to make new config changes they can pull request it and then you can have specific reviewers who can approve dynamic changes before that actually impacts your cluster. Other CD tools here as well can help make sure that you're automatically validating that config before you're pushing it out to your cluster. And now Luke's gonna talk a bit about the V3 CRDs and some upcoming changes. So one of the things that we mentioned that we changed in the last year is that we dropped support for the Get a Baster IO, V0 and V1 input languages. Now we had deprecated those and introduced V2 way back in Emissary 1.0 in January 2020. And so only just recently in Emissary 2.0 that we finally dropped support for those old versions. Now, even though we, you know, two years of lead time that was a pretty non-disruptive change for us to have that much lead time because the languages had been pretty much evolving additional only of we because we didn't have any real conversion mechanism to convert between the versions we can only make additive changes. Well now with V3 alpha one which we also introduced in 2.0 we have a real conversion mechanism and that's allowing us to make some changes that we've wanted to make for a long time but couldn't in order to clean up the interface. So one of the most obvious is a pretty simple one. There are a lot of things that were snake-case before that we were transitioning to the camel case to be more consistent internally and more consistent with everything else in Kubernetes. We've got a bunch of fields that were like timeout underscore MS and then an inter-number of milliseconds we're transitioning those to be durations to do both again, both internal consistency and consistency with everything else in Kubernetes. And when we'd have a field that we wanted to deprecate or replace with something else we'd have both options. And so now we're getting rid of some of those older things. So we used to have this use web sockets which we replaced with allow upgrade which is more capable and more flexible but we've been supporting both. And so in V3 we're removing use web sockets similar deal with hosts and configuring which host names a map and matches. There used to be this kind of clunky mechanism with host and host rig X. We were consolidating these things to make them easier to work with and also adding support for DNS globs. And so being able to make a lot of these cleanup changes is what's been going on in V3. And a bigger, those are all pretty small changes. A bigger one is that auth service, log service, rate limit service, tracing service and mappings all create what we call an Envoy cluster. And that's essentially a thing that Envoy can dial out to a cluster of IPs or whatever. And the basics of this is give it a set of IPs or give it a host name that it can resolve. But there are a lot of tunables on those like timeouts and stat settings and how you do that for each of these services and mappings. How you do that's all different whether you can even do a specific thing for one is inconsistent between all of them. And so we're gonna be factoring that out making that consistent and having parity between all of those for all of those resource types. Now I'd said so we're on V1 alpha one right now or V3 alpha one right now. We're going to be working toward V3 as we're making more of those changes. And so V3 beta one should be happening soon with most of those. Now point out that MSA3.0 is also coming soon and someone's gonna talk about that in a bit. Those, the progression of the input language and the MSA3 version number, they aren't tied together but the 3.0 is probably happening before input language V3 beta one, you could happens. They should both be soon but the 3.0 is probably is actually gonna be first. Sometime after that we'll probably have a V3 beta two that has those that cluster configuration consistency. And then sometime after that we'll say okay we're satisfied with all the changes we've made and let's promote to V3 final. Now a note on compatibility. So we've got this cool conversion layer and about how it works is that there's one version that you're allowed to store into SED in the API server. And so when you create a V3 alpha one resource today it actually converts it down to V2 to get stored and then converts it back up to V3 alpha one for MSA3 to consume it. And so because of that V1 is very central to how things are actually running. And so you can be sure that V2 supports not going to break and that you don't have to worry about that ever breaking. And that's going to keep being the storage version until at least until V3 final. And there are several reasons for that. A big one is to have a smooth upgrade path from MSA3 1.0 because of some bugs were there but it's gonna keep doing conversions. You can still, you don't have to worry about any of these changes breaking you. You can still keep using V2 or V3 alpha one and then opt in to the newer cleaner stuff as we come out with it. So not gonna break anyone. And we are trying to make this cleaner and easier to use. And so feedback would be very welcome about what are some of the friction points that we could improve. Now related to going forward with new API with new input languages on Monday you might have caught the announcement of this new envoy gateway project. So there are, we are one of the two CNCF gateway projects. There's another one called Contour. And a lot of ways MSA3 and Contour are very similar both functionally and like architecturally. And so we've been duplicating a ton of effort between these two projects. And so Envoy Gateway is less coming together and saying let's collaborate instead of duplicating the effort. It's not just MSA3 and Contour folks coming together. There are several other organizations coming in with Envoy Gateway, but those are the two CNCF ones that are very visible. And so does that mean that you would be a sucker to keep investing in MSA3? No. One, we're not gonna stop working on MSA3 tomorrow and start working on Envoy Gateway. We're gonna be working on both in parallel for a while. But what about after that? What's the long-term outlook on MSA3? Well, we're going to be transitioning the long-term plan is to transition MSA3 to being built on top of Envoy Gateway. There in, you know, I'm involved with both projects and so I'm going to be making sure that's one of my roles in Envoy Gateway is to be making sure that it's capable of hosting MSA3. And MSA3's long-term perspective is that there are a lot of things that it does that Envoy Gateway is just not interested in doing. And so Envoy Gateway is supporting Gateway API 0.5 and later, 0.5 is not out yet, but you should turn into tomorrow's Gateway API chat talk to hear more about that, hopefully. But so MSA3 can take that, get a master IO language that Alice was talking about earlier, it can take the K-native language, it can take the old Ingress API language, it can take the older versions of the Gateway API language that Envoy Gateway is just not interested in. And so this allows you to have compatibility between some different systems, that's your migration paths. And so MSA3 is still delivering value there, will continue to deliver that value. And also Envoy Gateway itself is interested in watching resources other than from Kubernetes. And MSA3 lets you do this, config from other places, namely console. And that will never be part of Envoy Gateway, that's not on its roadmap. And so MSA3, you can think of it, it's going to keep doing these things and hopefully have even a better base as we join forces on engineering for that base instead of duplicating all of this effort. And I'll hand back to Flynn for the recap. So Alice talked a lot about self-service and about ways you can use that without getting burned, ways that it's been important. We talked a little bit about the nature of the Ingress problem and why MSA3 has been focusing there. The self-service thing really does turn out to work very well, especially that separation of concerns where you can have developers worrying about applications, while other people are worrying about infrastructure, they can support each other, but they don't have to get tied up with each other. It does take a certain amount of trust, it can take some time to establish that trust, but in our experience it's been worth it to do so and to continue forward. Luke talked some about the input language changes. I'd like to reiterate that we really do believe that the version three stuff is the way to go. We're actively looking for feedback on that one. V2 will still be supported, we think that's important. There have been a lot of burned fingers getting us to V3 and the lessons that we learned doing that and getting burns doing that are things that we'd like y'all to benefit from. Luke also was talking about the Envoy Gateway. The short takeaway from that is really we are involved in the Envoy Gateway because we think it's better for everybody. For us, for y'all, for the rest of the community, we think it's a good thing. Three of us, to people who are not working at Emissary, will definitely be involved with Envoy Gateway going forward. You heard a little bit about Emissary 3.0. This is coming soon. Emissary follows semantic versioning, so the biggest reason that Emissary 3.0 is Emissary 3.0 instead of 2.0 or something else is that there's a massive breaking change underneath in that the Envoy version 2.0 configuration will no longer be supported in Emissary 3.0. This includes the transport protocols that Emissary uses to talk to external auth and rate limit services. So Emissary 2.0 already supports the Envoy V3. Yes, it isn't knowing that there's so many 2s and 3s here. I'm really sorry about that. Emissary 2.0 already supports the newer transport protocols. There is nothing preventing anybody from going ahead and switching to Envoy V3 right now before 3.0 comes out. Once Emissary 3.0 comes out, the old V2 transport protocols will not be supported. That's important. There are going to be new features in 3.0. I can't really talk about those yet, sorry. But the biggest driver for calling it 3.0 is that breaking change under the hood. So I'd like everybody to be prepared for that one. Kind of restate the obvious here. There's no possible way we would have gotten this far without the community. So thank you very much for that again. If you're interested in getting involved, please be interested in getting involved. A great way to do that is to just join our Slack channel. Three of us are easily reachable there. I'm also not going to lie. I have to acknowledge 2021 was kind of rough in terms of contributor friction. And we are actively working on making that better right now. So this is how to reach us by email. If you want to, we'll be here. We have a booth in the, it's booth S30 and Pavilion 2.0. We'll be there at various points. We'd love to see you. We have some time for questions, I think. Yeah, we have a few questions. First of all, congratulations on the Envoy Gateway. And I'm saying it from heart because I'm part of the contour team. I'm the community manager for contour. So good luck with that. Likewise. So anyone questions from the audience over here? If not, there's a question from the virtual attendance. Is there a point where you can integrate with external authorization service? There is. Yes. When I was talking about all of the resource types that create clusters, one of them that I mentioned is an off service. That's exactly what that is. That's configuring a service that you want Envoy to go talk to over the XDOT C protocol. All right. The off service. And the next one is actually, yeah, I was going to extend that a little bit. XDOT Z works by every request that comes into Envoy. Envoy turns around and asks the external authentication service. Hey, is this okay? And the off service gets to use really whatever resources it wants to decide whether it's okay and then come back and either tell Envoy, this is good to go, or come back and say, no, it's not okay. You should respond to the user. Respond to this request with a given response. So the off service actually has an enormous amount of power to do things in that world. It's a very, very flexible setup. Thanks. And another one from the virtual. Is there a way to do a smart rate limiting like based on payload field? Would you like to talk about rate limiting? So there's the rate limit service, which lets you use Envoy's rate limit filter to talk to an external service. You get several pieces of information about the incoming request. You don't get the full payload. You could do something like that using the Xdoth and an off service instead of the rate limit proto and a rate limit service. But you kind of wouldn't want to very much because you want the communications with the rate limit service to be pretty lightweight because that's what you're counting on to stop you from overloading all of the other stuff.  And so you can get several pieces of metadata and hopefully it's enough. And so even if you did want to say, okay, rate limit service for kind of tier one filtering and then more advanced stuff using the body with an off service that's acting like a rate limit service, you could do that and that probably wouldn't be bad but you probably don't want that level of everything in the first level rate limiting. Thanks. The heavyweight nature of that request is kind of why the rate limit services don't typically include the body because it can be really expensive. Yeah. First of all, thank you for your presentation and could you please specify in more details what's the relationship between ambasador edge stack and the emissary ingress? And I mean, sorry for straightforward question. Why do I need to buy for ambasador edge stack? So without diving too much into a pitch for ambasador edge stack, from a technical level, ambasador edge stack is basically taking emissary and bundling implementations of an authentication service and a rate limit service for you so that you don't have to do that engineering yourself. The underpinning is all the same. The way it handles traffic is the same between the two of them. And if you want to implement your own on-service and such, you're more than free to do that with emissary. Sorry, and a very quick second question. So if we are just looking for to switch to ambasador edge stack, do you prefer us to switch to envoy gateway after the latest news? So like we said, the long-term, so it's going to be a while before envoy gateway is up at parity with being able to do a lot of these things. It's just starting, it's going to be a while. We're not reinventing the wheel, there's a bunch of code from emissary and from Contra that we're going to be borrowing in envoy gateway, but it's going to be a while before it's useful. And then even once it is, emissary is going to still exist, still be built on it, still have some added value that you wouldn't get from envoy gateway. Okay. Thank you. And if you're still up by the booth, we're happy to talk more about that too. Any more questions? Thanks for the talk. And I wonder whether you supported the equivalent functionality such as the web application firewall protection for injection attack or, yeah, like cross-site scripting SQL injection. If it's not a support out of the box, then whether there is some extension point that could introduce those functionality into the system. So emissary doesn't release, emissary focuses on more on the English problem than on that particular kind of security issue. We've seen people have really good success with using emissary in combination with other products. And we have also seen people approaching that using wasm stuff in envoy, which I could see supporting in emissary as well. I gotta be honest, I'm not sure how well that approach is working for them yet, but we've seen people go after it that way. The most effective way right this second is probably partnering. What were you gonna say? Yeah, so there's no, none of that built in to emissary. I do wanna say that like with edge stack, some of the stuff that it does does its own cross-site request for protection for like the things that it does, but it's not doing it for your application. But we do have the extension points for it to integrate. There are WAFs I know of that use the Xdoth integration point to be able to see the request coming in and then also use the access log service to have the view of request to be able to notice suspicious patterns. And that's actually specifically why we added the log service in order to facilitate that WAF extension point use case. Thanks. Anyone else? Okay, thank you folks. Thank you. Thank you.


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I'm out here, bro. I see you over here drinking this Granddaddy whiskey. I'm in my hood, bro. Y'all didn't realize y'all was right here. Y'all right in my hood, bro. That's what you brought out to travel, isn't it? I think it's how I live. All right, man. I'm sitting here kicking flavor with my neighbor, apparently, man. This is one of the coldest niggas out here doing this artwork, man.  Ladies and gentlemen, I would like to introduce you to Frico Rico. That's how you got that name. Shit. But I feel like I got to. I got that name first off, bro. I appreciate y'all having me on, bro. I've been a fan of y'all niggas. I've been a fan of the whole show.   Titi's in the building. Yeah, bro. You want me to watch it? Draw me a building with just Titi's busting out the window. I think I've done it already. For real? I'm telling everyone, though. Got a Titi popping out.  We just started drawing. We just started drawing.  They were leaving. Where the arc have at, man?  Man, real talk. It's all on my Instagram. Real talk right now. I got to get a site going.  People going there. There's a lot of stuff on there.  So they got to keep going back, bro. Yeah, but I got my name, bro. I got my name when I was like in middle school, man. I got it. It was a joke, actually. I didn't like it at first.   Pretty much. Bro, every school got one in there. But your school... Hey, niggas shots out the middle-growth middle, bro. Middle-growth junior high.  It wasn't... Don't say it. She probably in the church now. I hope she is, bro. She was wild, bro. I had... I had did it to the wrong one. So everybody got me. You ain't freak, was it? Yeah, bro. Everybody...  I ain't catch COVID once.   I mean, I'm married, bro. Oh, okay. You know, I'm married with two kids, bro. I started doing it when I can. When you can? Yeah, when I can. Because I be in the dog house sometimes.  That's the best way to say I talk. That's how you get out of it. You ain't even here to talk about all that. Anyway, you know what I'm saying? We keep going. We started out great. Now we even present it already. I got the name and then my football coaches, they kind of kept making fun of it. And then people were making fun of it. And I went to like an all black middle school of course.  It was a name and that's someone in my real name, Richard. And I think it was like two other people who had the same name.  Oh, you mean free come? Oh, okay.  Then my time I got to high school, I kind of like, I kind of liked it. And so I kind of fulfill into like a role of it.    And then somewhere everybody just stuck, bro.   That's what's up. I've always loved to hear how niggas get their nickname. Yeah, bro. That's really a TV show.  You know what I'm saying? Like how niggas got their nickname? No, TV show? Yeah. You do it then. I might do it. You can do it, bro. You probably be on there.   It wasn't that I really was eating pussy. I was talking about it. So me and our niggas were scared to talk about it. You were a trendsetter, bro. I don't think so. My niggas was honest. Yeah.  They just be on some line. They just trying to fit in there and everybody else. I'm like, yo, I don't see nothing wrong with it.  So it's like, what? My uncle's a terrible rogue. I just thought about it. My uncle's from Memphis, bro. Oh, yeah.  My family's from Memphis, man. So the Memphis people, you know. Shout out to Memphis, man. Like a lot of people who come through here got Memphis roots, man. Bro, both sides of my family. Yeah. Memphis roots, bro. Man.  Hey, Carlos Miller here. Christmas time is here. And you still trying to figure out the perfect gift to get your significant other? Nah, get you some blue juice so you can give her the gift that she really wants. The gift that keeps on giving. Blue juice is a unique online service that delivers the same active ingredients as Viagra and Cialis. But intruable tablets and at a fraction of the cost. The first step is simple. You just visit blueju.com. Then you consult with one of the licensed medical providers. And once you're approved, you'll receive your prescription within days. This is a beautiful thing. So if you can benefit from some extra confidence when it's time to perform, Blueju can help. And we got a special deal for all our listeners. Try Blueju for free when you use the promo code black. That's BLACK at checkout.  That's blueju.com. Promo code black. BLACK to receive your first month free. Visit Blueju for more details and important safety information. And we thank Blueju for sponsoring this broadcast. How long have you been into the artwork, dude? So I've been doing art, man. My whole life, bro. My mom, my grandmother was an artist. But she didn't do it, like, professionally. But she could draw and paint and stuff. And so my mom, when my grandmother died, she told my mom that I was special and that I probably had the same thing she had. So my mom actually nurtured it. She watched me. She started noticing me. She started giving me paper and crayons and stuff like that.  And so it's funny because my little boy, my oldest son, he's got the same thing. She's doing the same thing with him. So she nurtured it, bro. Put me in little programs and stuff and got me out of my neighborhood during the summers here and there to do things and had me and had me a lot of things, bro. And so she nurtured it to me going into college doing it. And that's what I do now, bro.  I never thought of doing nothing else other than like playing football and stuff. But like other than that, I'm an artist. You know what I'm saying? Definitely proud of it, man. Definitely proud of it. But it's been almost eight years, man. I haven't worked a job. You know what I'm saying?   I'm a job. I'm a job. I'm a job, man. I'm a job. I'm a job. I'm a job, man. I'm a job. I'm a job, man.  I'm doing my thing. And really hadn't had the struggle.  I've been, I guess my work ethic from like, from and watching people just sit around and do nothing. That just just made me go and then bein' in a comedy. Yeah.    What's some of your favorite pieces that you got out on social media right now? Ah, goddamn.  Yeah, it did, bro. I ran into some copyright shit, but it's good now. It's good now.   I bought about timing, bro. Yeah. I'm all about like, like I don't have no luxuries at home, you know what I'm saying? I have a desk in the corner and like my kids know when they goin' to sleep I'm standin' up and doin' things or I'm back up at 4 a.m., 5 a.m. doin' stuff. So the luxury is sleepin'. Drunk off gin.  Y'all just go wanna sleep all one flight a day. I'll take coffee, water, gin and juice and that's it, bro. It's like, hey, I hopped on it, man. So right now those are definitely my favorite pieces, man. I hate that I had to hop on it, but it worked, man. But other than that, man, I be doin' comics, man. I love writing things.  So the stories and stuff I've seen in the streets and seen in my life, I like drawing that motherfucker, bro. So it's like, that's just fun. I used to make, I used to make fun of more people in my younger years. I stopped doin' that. Yeah. We need that satire, though, man. Yeah.   I got blocked by, I got blocked by Lil B, the rapper. And I wouldn't even... You talkin' about Lil B, the bass guy? Yeah, he blockin' us around.  But look, look. I start real out like, damn, bro, I really gotta stop fuckin' with people, man.  Right. So it's like, yeah, I just, the satire is my favorite, though. My satirical art. Yeah. But that stuff ain't really exciting me, bro.        I tried, bro. I didn't bomb, but like, I went too far. It got damn, R. Kelly doin' yoga, even though you stretch out in the pose, I did it, bro. I don't know what angle I'ma take from it. I drew R. Kelly a couple times, bro, and all him. People were like, you didn't even gotta draw him. He's a fuckin' friend.   That's what he doin', bro. That's why I'm takin' too far. Yeah, I know, man. That's why I'm takin' too far, man. That's why I can't do comedy. I can't do stand up or the crowd just like, all this niggas. Nah, I can take you to some spice or something. See, Rodney was like, bro, you and me ain't goin' to the right spice.   Bro, where can they see some of these pieces at? You definitely can hit me on Instagram. I'm real heavy on Instagram. Just Freco Rico, F-R-E-A-K-O, R-I-C-O. Or you can just look up F-R-K-O.  And then you can just Google it, real talk, real talk. Yeah, man, I was lookin' at my sad notes. You know I keep some sad notes, bro.   The last time he came out. Yeah. The first single other than that first day out one, All My Children, that was the first record label single he released and I did the cover and I did the video. Bro, cause, um... How much of a process was it for you to animate a whole video? I didn't animate. I don't animate. I'm an illustrator. It's a big difference.  Atlantic records didn't want to pay for to get a really high price animator.  But y'all thought they had me try it, but they didn't want to pay, you know what I'm saying? But it's just what it is, bro. They didn't want to pay nobody what they want. They're not going to pay nobody. They never, bro. Cause they know people want to be stars real bad. You see, it was this one lady, they said her contract was so awful. If she drop a song, she going to have to own herself some money. That's how it works, bro. That's how it works. So, you know, that's what, I don't really do the record stuff like that. I try to, I try to stay away from the rappers shit, bro. Cause the money really ain't there. People think it's there, but it's not there. People like six years doing stuff for different artists. A lot of stuff never saw the light of day. You know what I mean? I'm going to tell you if I'm right now, I didn't did work for GZ and Gucci at the same time. Literally.    But you know what I'm saying? So it's like, I was working on stuff for rappers shit and, and bidding against it. Like, I'm doing this right here for this much. So that's the business and that shit, man. It's a dirty game. Every game dirty. Every industry.     I'm talking to the young illustrators, man. Like I'm really about these kids and about these teenagers. A lot of them want to do what I'm doing. And I was like, man, get yourself, get yourself business.  They don't want to pay even that.  So you got to make sure your website is good. Your hustles is good on that. Take your commissions. I still take commissions. That's the thing. Like I still, I'm in the city. I live around the corner. So it's like people running to me. I'm not going to tell them no, like, hey, oh, I got a mixtape. I want you to do a cover for it. I'm going to give you my in the city price. I got an in town price for in town rappers, in town comedians that need things. I'm going to go to the city, man, until I'm out of here. You know what I mean? Hell yeah. Drop the social media again, man. So they can know to find you and go hit you and be like, bro, I got a little mixtape coming at me. Nah, don't do that.  Just follow me and enjoy the ride.  And then on, on Twitter, I'm back on Twitter too because when Instagram went down, I hopped back on there. I had like a six-year-old. Carlos Miller here. Are your orders to your small business increasing this holiday season? Well, our sponsor, ShipStation, is here to relieve some distress of this holiday season. With ShipStation, the hassle of shipping out holiday orders melts away, leaving you with happier customers and more freedom to run your business or enjoy some much-needed time on. ShipStation is not only affordable, but it's extremely easy to use. You can get access to any kind of rates that are usually reserved for 4,500 companies. ShipStation works with all major carriers, international, and local. We have a special offer for our listeners.  That's just enough time to handle the holiday rush. That's 60 days free at ShipStation.com slash excellence. ShipStation, make ship happen. That's kind of clever, make ship happen. I like that. ShipStation. Let me throw this to you. What type of advice would you give to that guy who got a folder full of artwork who don't know how to turn it into money quite yet? I would say I don't like telling people this because I don't know who they are personally. I'm an extrovert me myself, but a lot of people introverts don't like showing their artwork because I'm so, I'm like this, I'm like, yo, if you like that too, go ahead and get somebody to either photograph your work or get you a good printer and start scanning your work in if it's small enough for the printer. So start showing it. And also if you're going to do it on Instagram, talk about your work. Just don't post it. Talk about it because people want to know backstory. If you don't know how to write, then find somebody who can write for you. It ain't nothing wrong with that, you know what I'm saying? Me, I know how to write.  I know some, I know some artists that are out here that are awesome, man. And like, you know, they waiting tables and doing stuff they don't want to do.  You know what I mean? And that's when it should kick in to say, all right, I'm going to start posting my stuff. And I know plenty of artists like that, bro.  I'm not saying I was the reason, you keep getting put on or people putting you on something, bro.  You're going to be your own man. You know what I'm saying? So yeah, that's it.  Well, anything you want to leave them with? Shots out to all of my people I'm working with right now on the art and stuff, man. All the entrepreneurs. Thank you, brother. What's up? I didn't have to tell them that, but keep going. I'm just kidding. I'm going to roll call and shout out every good shot. Chill it out. Yeah, but not him. I got to get chili on here too, brother. Shots out to my wife, Bianca, my kids, bro. Mom and daddy, everybody. Everybody that got me this far in art, bro. I really appreciate everybody here. The niggas will sell you this jean.  That nigga was trying to overcharge me on the liquor store on Metropolitan.   Exactly.  Damn, they texting like that. He hates niggas, bro. That's why he said he wanted the liquor store. He hates niggas. I mean, they kind of come with the liquor store. Well, shit, man. Hold on.  Just don't let him know.  There it is. My man, Frico Rico. There it is.  Stay tuned.


Hello, my name is Dalia Simmons and I live in Dubai. I've recently completed the online T-Soll course and I'm pleased to say that I've passed. I'm very excited about this because it now means that I can teach people from other countries around the world how to speak English and converse in English at a pace that would suit them. At the beginning I thought the course would be very difficult to complete. There were 20 modules but I must say that the online tutor Peter was very very supportive and gave me some really good feedback and really good advice. I would encourage anybody thinking about taking a T-Soll or Tevall course to do so especially if you have a teaching or training background because it will enhance your portfolio and help other people to learn English at a pace that suits them.


Before this video begins, I need it to start with a disclaimer. Do not, whatever you do, try this at home. This is not an instructional video in how to do what I'm about to do by any means. And doing this is absolutely voiding the warranty of my Nintendo Switch console. Now, the first time I did this was at the start of 2019. It ended up being a two-day event where somewhere in the middle, I drilled pretty deeply into my head. We could go on and on asking questions like, would, why were you using a power drill with a drill bit? All that's important here is to note that I do not recommend doing this yourself. So these gorgeous atomic purple joy-cons are actually my original Switch joy-cons. And I rocked these for a long time on my Switch. I always kind of wished that I had changed the back to match it. But after dealing with the nightmare that was just changing these, which was an absolute nightmare, I was scared to try and change the back. What are we changing it to, you might ask? Well, I want to go into this holiday season and into new year with a fresh, clean new approach, not only to my Switch, but to life. I just want this year to be gone. So it makes perfect sense to change these suckers clear. So this time, not only are we going to be changing the joy-cons to clear, I'm actually going to take my Switch apart, void that warranty, and have a completely clear Switch. The reason why I'm doing this, by the way, it was definitely inspired by Satisfy. Whether you want to have a clear Switch or not, you're going to love this. I know. If you've been watching this channel for a while, you'll know that I love my Satisfy grip.  So yeah, Satisfy made a clear Switch grip. It actually looks really nice on regular joy-cons. If you for some reason haven't yet bought a Satisfy grip, now is the perfect time. This looks so freaking cool, and it's perfect for the snowy holiday season. The Satisfy grip has rubber inserts where you can easily slide your Switch down onto it, and it leaves a spacing around the Switch so it won't leave any scuffs or marks. Another handy thing about the grip is you can easily just place it down. You don't have to worry about the kickflip stand, which always flings halfway across the room anytime I try and use it anyway. Or when it actually does work, I knock the table and the whole thing just falls over. But by far the best part about the grip is just how it feels. The only way I can kind of explain it without you feeling it for yourself is it feels like I'm holding a PlayStation 4 controller now. And good news, if you click that link down below and use code WOOD20, you'll get for the first time ever 20% off a Satisfy grip. My discount codes usually stack with other sales they're doing, but this is already the biggest discount they've let me give. Go down below, grab this grip because it helps support the channel so much, and it's just the best product for me to get sponsored by. I'm really just putting off doing it at this point, but I'm excited, let's do it. Okay, if we're gonna do this, we need the right tools this time. I'm not making the same mistake as last time. So we're gonna need a level for sure. We're gonna need that stud finder from last time so we can find all the studs. We're gonna need our trusty hammer, and we're gonna need a pair of scissors, of course, to cut any ribbons or wires that get in our way through this whole process. I don't care what it takes to change all of this this time. I am not using this drill. This drill is cursed, and it's not going to happen today. So, you know, for safety reasons, in place of the drill today, we're gonna use a bus saw instead. So it's gonna, you know, we might need it at some point. Just to be on the safe side. I bought this Nintendo triwin screwdriver set again. I bought it for the last video, but that was two years ago. I lost it. I'm now remembering that last time I did this, I put cloth down on the table. How about I use this giant switch pillow that Kim made me? Yeah, that'll do it. I just don't want to scratch the screen. I'm not realizing I don't know what to do. I didn't get this far in my thought process. I'm gonna have to look up a tutorial. I don't know why I thought I would just open it and start. I don't know what I'm doing. You need to press a very... Yeah, that's what I did wrong last time. I used the triwin screwdriver, but you're supposed to push really hard and turn really slowly. I was just trying to undo it like a regular screw, but Nintendo actually designed these screws to be really difficult for normal people to just try and take apart. Two things. One, you need a special screwdriver that's a special size, and they also made the screws intentionally really brittle so that they're more often than not they break and they get stuck in so you can't take it apart. Unless you know what you're doing, which, you know... I do. Here we go. Oh, that's not the right one after a stellar start. Easy. You see that guy right there? No, because that's not on camera. You see that guy right there? I honestly did think about going out and buying a new switch to do this on because this switch has everything, but I decided, no, you have some confidence in yourself, would you? Have some faith. I'm not going to be like racking in an R-drive and breaking things with a hammer. Oh, this screw. This screw got stuck. That got it. What next, Mr. Tutorial Man? Yeah, I remember now. There's a lot of screws. Apparently there's one behind the kickstand, which means I need to take the SD card out. Oops. What did I say about I'm not going to break my switch today? That's not a screw. That's a stub. Oh man. All these screws are different sizes. One at either end, but there's like one, two, three, four, five screws in there. Focus. Focus. Focus. Wingardium levi- Focus. Whatever. Okay. There's five screws here and I just got to get the middle one. Why am I teaching you? I shouldn't be teaching you. Never mind. Unscrew all of them. That's even worse. So this should just come apart now. This doesn't feel good. This feels bad. There are so many people watching this that like work with like tech or you know, do this kind of stuff for a living or watch YouTubers that do this for a living and they're like, would calm down. What's the big deal? You have to understand. I don't know what I'm doing. I am not the kind of person that should ever see this. If I see this, it means something has gone horribly wrong and I need an expert to help me now. This might actually be easy. This part here needs to come off and be put on here, but that might be it. And then we might just put it back on. I might be worried about nothing. I think I'm done. Okay. The Joy-Cons are a nightmare. You have to take everything out of the Joy-Cons like every little part. I think I'm almost done on this. Okay. Well, no, there's a little bit more. Wow. That was actually pretty easy. All right. So now I got to take off this bit, which that's when I need to use this. So I mean that was actually a lot easier than I thought it would be. I'm really struggling to get this little screw back in. Oh, it's so fiddly. How do they put this together in the first place? Is it just like a bunch of people in switch workshops fiddling around with tiny screws and dropping them all over the place, spending half an hour on one part of the process? Okay. All right. I think I got it. I think I got it. Let's see if it works. Oh yeah, it works. Okay. All right, cool. Cool, cool, cool, cool. Oh, now I just put it back on. Side note, this guy's putting on a white case and I actually really like it. No, no, I'm sticking with Claire. This could go horribly wrong from here. I don't know how, but I wouldn't put it past me.  Okay. So now we just put the case back on. Could we take a second actually before I throw this case back on to actually look at the, never mind. I was going to say, can we actually look at the inner workings while we have it open? Because I've never seen it before.  I actually had that moment. I like it, but it kind of bothers me that most of the case is still black and not see through. Whatever, let's keep going. I need to try and remember where all these screws went. There it is. We could be honest with each other, right? You and I, we can share our feelings and it stays just between us, kind of like a therapist. I kind of hate it. All right. No, no, no. Hate it? Hate it's a strong word. I don't hate it, but on its own, it kind of looks like an unfinished switch. I'm really hoping once we put the joy cons on and the switch grip, it's all going to come together. Like I'm looking at it.  Like it's naked. It's naked. Hide it's shame. The cool thing about this is I like these purples a lot. But if you remember, Lestat Mott sent me some atomic purple joy cons with light up LED lights inside that I can change with my phone. I'll leave a video down below for that. But those atomic purples are so much cooler than these. You can still buy those, by the way, that he still makes them and they're awesome. He's refined the product now too to be at a point where it doesn't bulge anymore. It's seamless. It's really cool. But yeah, so I already have those atomic purple ones. I don't need these anymore. So let's go ahead and put these on him.  There's like three levels to each joy con. Yeah, my gosh. You know what? It's going to take so long to do this part and you guys have already seen me do it once. With me breaking my freaking fingernails for a sake of a video. So instead of me filming the next 24 hours of my life doing this, let's try something magic for the video, okay? Alecatebra. Alecazam. I don't like these anymore. Purple joy cons. Be damned. Wow. Oh my God. Yeah, it was really uneventful, honestly. I'm sorry. I already filmed it once. If you want to watch me change joy cons in a video, go and watch it, okay? It's a whole video. I drill into nothing. I know what you wanted.  You wanted to watch me change these because you are hoping I'd hurt myself again. Hey, I'm 30 now, okay? I've matured. I can make things now. There's no way it was going to happen again. Or be as intense as last time. But the one thing I haven't done, actually, I swear is I haven't put it all together yet. So we're going to do that together for the first time. You guys are going to see the other side as I put these on. For me, it's going to be a reveal. Well, I got to say, from this side, I love the look. It is gorgeous. It's for some reason making me want to drink a sprite or a Coke. Not a sponsor. It's just something about it. It's just really refreshing. I don't know what it is. Yeah, that looks pretty neat, actually. Yeah, thank gosh. I'm actually really liking it. Now that you've got the batteries too, you can see all the inner workings here. Suddenly, this makes a lot more sense. Without it, it kind of looks, but as soon as you start to see the entire backside, whatever. It looks really good. And the front. Oh boy, that is so... I want to say sexy, but I don't want to be a creep. I just really like it. All right. Next step, the whole reason we did this entire thing, the satisfied grip. Oh yeah. That's a mood. That's a mood right there. I like that a lot. I'm also seeing myself and realize I left my hair up. That looks really cool. All right. I got my new switch look for the next year. Okay. I know there is no way that I actually broke it, but let's go ahead and put the SD card back in and turn it on and make sure it still works. While this is booting up, I want to thank you all for watching. If you could like the video and subscribe, that would be great. Oh, and click the old bell as well. Look how many of you don't click the bell. My videos are pretty good. Hit the bell. Come on. Huge thank you to Satisfy as well for sponsoring the video. Remember to please click the link below. It supports me and it's just, it's a great product. It really is. I mean, look how cool this is. All right. Is the switch going to? Oh, there we go.