Hello friends, Myself Ilya Arsandhani, Assistant Professor from Department of Electronics, Walsh and Institute of Technology, Solopur. Today, we are going to see the topic frequency generation part 2 from the subject analog communication. So this in this, the learning outcomes are at the end of this topics you will come to know or you can design FM and PM modulator by different methods. Also you can describe the different applications of FM and PM as well as you can discuss the limitations of FM generation system. So generation of FM is done in two ways. First one is the direct method, second one is the indirect method. The direct method includes reactance modulator and vector diode method, whereas the indirect method includes Armstrong's generation method. The reactance modulator generally includes this circuit. So this circuit basically it is a two stage amplifier circuit. This is the first stage and this is the second stage. Here the audio input is given to the first stage amplifier and the carrier is generated in this circuit by itself and the output is generally taken across the RECB configuration. Here the CC generally acts as a coupling capacitor which then is connected to the second stage, here the RFC, here the two RFCs are used. These are generally the inductors which are used for the tuning of the first stage and the second stage transistorized amplifier. Here the CC which provides the coupling output to the second stage, here in this second stage there are variations in the frequency with respect to the carrier which is being generated and the output is generally given to the LC tank circuit where C1 and C2 and a variable capacitor is used. This generally provides a tuning circuit at which the output is taken that is the FM generated output is taken across the secondary windings. The capacitors C and C1 and C2 are tuned to a particular frequency at which we get or we want the particular output. Here this circuit is majorly used in the communication type of the application. Here a diode modulator here this circuit majorly consists of a virector diode which is shown here at D1. The modulating input is given through the coupling capacitor C3 and which then passes through the RFC coil or the inductor which is tuned for a particular frequency. The R1 and R2 generally provides the biasing for the total circuit. Then the positive peak of the signal goes to the virector or passes through the virector diode and through the capacitor C2 the C2 starts charging and then at a particular point that is at the negative stage of the signal it discharges. The virector diode generally maintains the current that is ID for a period and then the output is taken across the L1 and C1 capacitor. The generally the L1 C1 acts as a tank circuit where the output is taken and it is then given to the carrier oscillator. So this is the working of the virector diode modulator. Similarly FM transmitter generally includes the Armstrong method. This method is generally known as the indirect method. In this first the signal is converted into the first the signal is converted into the AM signal and then it is converted into the frequency modulated wave. Here the carrier is provided by the crystal oscillator. This is then given to the buffer which then gives to the combining network. Here basically the combining network has a second input through the audio equalizer which is nothing but a modulating signal which is then given to the balanced modulator. Here balanced modulator gives an output of a single sideband only because here it has another input of 90 degree phase shift due to which only a single sideband is passed to the combining network. Thus the combining network combines the single stage single sideband and the carrier and according to the AF or the sideband the carrier is varied in accordance with the frequency of the single sideband. Then it is given to the first group of multiplier where the carrier frequency and the modulation index is maintained in this first group and then it is again given to the mixer. Here the mixer has another input from the carrier oscillator because here the signal in the mixer has a very low carrier frequency and hence it becomes necessary to give the carrier signal by which the frequency of the carrier will vary in accordance with the sideband of the modulating signal. Here it is then again given to the second group of multiplier so that we get a high carrier frequency and modulation index. Hence the output is taken across the class C power amplifier where the power of the signal which is a FM generated signal is increased before transmitting and hence it is transmitted by using a transmitting antenna. So what are the limitations of direct method? First in this method it is very difficult to get high order stability in carrier frequency. Secondly as a basic oscillator is used the circuit is not stable and hence it is controlled by using a modulating signal. Thirdly in this method we get distorted FM due to non-linearity of the varactor diode which is in terms of the current and the discharging of the capacitor. Next what are the advantages, disadvantages and applications of FM? Basically the advantages of FM are transmitted power remains constant in this type of generation technique. FM receivers are immune to the noise that means noise can get easily affected when the signal passes through the channel and gets received at the receiver. It has a good capture effect, no mixing of signals can be done in the FM. What are the disadvantages of FM? The greatest disadvantage of FM are it uses much of the spectrum space, the bandwidth here required is more that is the bandwidth is wider. Modulation index can be kept low to minimize the bandwidth which can be used. That reduction in modulation index reduces the noise immunity. It is used only for the very high frequencies that is VHF and UHF. Applications of FM here FM can be used in radio broadcasting, secondly sound transmission in TV or police wireless and FM can also be generated by using the IC566. So this is the circuit diagram. So you have to tell the operation of FM that is discuss the operation in which FM can be generated by using IC566 for this you can refer the previous slide. And next you have to discuss the advantages, disadvantages and limitations of direct and indirect FM method FM generation method. So these are the references for you people for the further study. Thank you for watching the video.


This paper proposes a mathematical model to calculate the risk of failure of locomotive diesel engines based on their fuel consumption rate. It also develops a maintenance process for 5D49 diesel engines at a locomotive depot. The results show that the optimal mileage for these engines is 45,000 kilometers, resulting in a 2.4% increase in resource availability compared to the existing maintenance system. This article was authored by Dennis Baranovsky, Marina Bulek, Adam Mikejlisyn, and others.


Gold. Now what we're going to do is we're going to measure gold. We're going to put the price of gold up here because a lot of people consider the price of gold to be a valid measure of preserving wealth, maintaining, preventing money from depreciating. When you look at this thing, when money goes from $100 to $100 to $3.70, that's a currency, right? That's not money because one of the things money has to be has to be a good store of value and currency is not a good store of value. So when that saying comes along that says cash is money, it is true. You need to be liquid, right? But cash is only money for short periods of time. You don't want to be in cash too long, right? We'll talk about this a little bit more when we graph some of these things. But let's put gold on here. In 1900, gold was $20.67. So gold, I'm going to put this $20.67. Okay. And this is gold. So let's put gold as gold, right? Use the gold marker. So this is gold. So gold was $20.67. And what we're going to do here, we're not going to adjust for inflation. We're not going to, because $20.67 in 1900, in 2017, was $517. So $20 was equivalent your purchasing power if you take this into consideration, right? So if you had this money, not money, I keep using the wrong word, but this currency, if you had your wealth in this, right? And inflation was doing this, right? If we're going to measure how much $20.67 was equivalent to in these dollars, it was worth $517. But we're just going to use the value there. This is 10 here, this tick. So 20 is around here, right? So if you put, you know, you bought $20 worth of gold in 1900, and the government didn't confiscate your gold in this period because the US government is a period in 19. I wrote this down. I knew this history before. Oh, I wrote it down in the previous iteration. I didn't copy it over to this one because I wasn't going to talk about it. But there was a certain period, a few years here, during World War II, where the US government confiscated everyone's gold, right? And sort of everyone had to take into the banks, and the banks took that gold in at this price. And then a few years later, the government raised the price of gold because this was not fluctuating the way or controlled the world. It was completely controlled. It was set. It was set in stone. Right now, it's supposed to be fluctuating based on market principles, but it's really not. It's sort of controlled as well in a big way. But during the World War II period, or built up to World War II, the US government confiscated people's gold, and the banks took them in. And a few years later, the banks sold on a higher value, right? So they made pretty good money, pretty good returns, considering the amount of time involved, right? So $20, if you put $20.67 of gold in 1900, right now, gold is trading at a few days ago anyway when I look this up. It's trading at $1,230, right? So let's put that on here. Oops, I got the wrong set. $1,230, $1,230, right? So this is $1,000. This is $1,000. $2,000 is up here because that's $10,000. So $1,230 is like pretty close to $1,000. Let's say it's both here. So right now, if we just think about these as straight lines, this straight line, this was a bad place for you to be in. You would have lost everything because your purchasing power has also decreased, right? It's a double whammy. Your money, value of your money has decreased and your purchasing power has decreased. This is supposed to be a measure of this, but it's really not, okay? So keep this in mind. And gold basically mirrors this, right? To a certain degree, because one thing we can do once we start putting things on grass visually, we can do a table format too. It's more difficult to visualize the stuff in table format. What you can do is start doing calculation, taking ratios, some stuff we're going to talk about in series four of the language of mathematics, but what you can do is take the slope of this graph and take the slope of this graph, which is basically rise over run, right? And rise over run and see which one is a steeper slope. The one that's a steeper slope. If you're invested in it, that's better because it's giving you faster returns, right? So for this graph or this visualization, what we're thinking about is which one is going to be a steeper slope, right? On the upside, not on the downside. This is one of the, the only one that I took or found where the price has decreased over time. Actually, I think textiles are looked at as well, but I didn't really bother graphing that because that's very small scale. And technology actually goes down as well. The cost of technology goes down over time as well. And that's really cool to look at, but we're going to take a look at at a different time and different video that we've set up for, right? So gold has gone from $20 to $1,200, right? And you can do a multiple of this, right? You could do this if you want to figure out what the multiple is for the CPI, 244 divided by 8.9. That's 27.4 times. And 1,2,3,0 divided by 20 points is 59 times, right? Wow. So if this is, let's say this was 30 times, this is 59, let's say 60 times. So the slope of this, even though that doesn't appear so right now because we're on a log scale, right? Gold has increased twice as fast as the CPI, which is a good indication of gold based on government measures, based on measures, is a good place to store value, right? Is it a good currency? Do people, does everyone trade gold? I don't know how to, well, I do know the geology. So I have, I can test it and figure out if it's gold, if it's malleable, right? If it's not metallic, you can figure out if something is gold. I know, I've talked to someone where they said some people go to, if you want to find, use a method to find gold in places where they might be gold, right? You don't have to go out in the forest and to the rivers and start pan, pan as a pan, they call it and start looking for gold. Some people take magnets and they go to thrift stores, right? And they take anything that's gold colored and they put a magnet to it. And if it doesn't stick to it, they buy it because gold is not magnetic, it's not ferrous, right? I think it's ferrous if I remember terminology correctly. Then if magnet doesn't stick to it, if it's really gold colored, then it might be gold. And that's one of the things you could use to go searching for gold, right? Go look for treasure, right? So gold is a good place to preserve wealth based on CPI numbers. But this double slope really doesn't do anything to help you compensate for the price of tuitions going up, stuff like that, right? Now, the next measure we're going to look at, we're going to look at the S&P, S&P 500, the stock market Wall Street. Sort of what we talked about in the previous video, or reading Mr. Armstrong's article, right? So the S&P in 1900, okay? And this is sort of, it wasn't called the S&P in 1900, it was called the Composite Index and the Composite Index. I found only one source, which gave me the 1900 number, there's multiple sources I found for the 1920 number and stuff like this. But the 1900 number, the S&P 500 if you want to think about it as the S&P 500, was 6.1, 6.1. So 6.1 is under the 8 somewhere around here. I'm just going to put it far enough down that we can actually see, here let's move this guy a little bit higher up. Now we're a little bit more accurate I guess and get rid of that 10 value and give this guy a row. So 6.8, or 6.1 is around here. Just a straight up S&P value is, the last time I look is 2459, 2000, let's say 2450, right? 2400, oops, knock this one up, 2450, 2400, 2450. And that guy, that's 1000 here, this tick, so 2000 is going to be up here. The slope of this is much better than the slope of the other two, that's for sure. Let's look at the multiple on this. 2450 divided by 6.1, 401 is the multiple, 402 is the multiple, right? That's pretty good. Now one thing with the S&P is you can't just, well you can, you could buy the S&P and just let it ride, right? But one thing with the S&P happens is the stock market, if you buy the right number of stocks, what happens is they give you dividends, money back a certain percentage per year. And that's basically the main gist of our current economic system, which is just chasing growth. And that's a certain flaw in our economic system as well because everything, things don't grow in forever, right? So our current system economy is based on growth and a certain percentage, I want to, S, let's put the S&P up here, another thing as well, right? So it's based on growth and this slope is much better.  So it varies the fluctuates, it goes from anything from less than 1% up to like 6%, 7%, 8% more aggressive ones, right? But the average S&P return during this period, I looked it up and seemed a little sketchy some of it because first of all, not, you know, no individual is going to be invested in for 117 years. It's not going to happen. It's going to be institutions with a certain degree, right? And what happens is basically if you take out the inflation factor, the CPI, the devaluation of the currency, you lose a little bit of percent there as well, right? But one of the measures on the high end, if you include, you're getting dividends and not spending your dividends because what happens, most people invest in dividend stocks because they get a certain amount of income, they call income stocks, I believe they call income stocks correctly, and you get a certain percentage back every year and they use that as expense money, right? Funds that they want to, they live by, right? But if you, on the extreme end, if you invest the 6.1 dollars, right? In 1900, in 1900 dollars in the S&P and took out your dividend, right? You didn't reinvest that dividend, you just went for this growth. This is what you would have, right? But if you took that dividend, all of that dividend being given to you and put it all back into play, right? And this is concept of compound growth. The value jumps up a lot and this is on the extreme side. And I found some numbers in the calculation I did was, I basically took it being a 7% growth, okay? Because average, I believe, the dividend return for the S&P was 4% per year if you averaged it out for this period, for this period of time. Actually went for a shorter period of time, so I'm not sure even if dividends existed here. So we're thinking about absolute extreme, okay? So 4% dividend return and the growth rate was 2.8%. So I took it to be 7% growth, right? If you put 6.1 dollars in 1900 into the S&P at 7% growth for 117 years, that's what we're talking about, right? Your return was 16,000. No one would have done this. Most people that I know and that I've known that play Wall Street, play the stock market, they don't reinvest all dividends into the same play, same game. It wouldn't be a smart decision to do, but basically, well, it would be to a certain degree depending on what you're in at certain points in life, I guess, but 1600 would be here. Okay, whoops, squished it. Okay, that would be 1600. So your growth could either be this on the minimum side if you took out all your dividends or the growth would be this and that multiple is way more. 1600 divided by 6.1 is 2,622 times return. That's very good. That's very good, right? Now, let's take a look at some other measures. On the same level, if we take a look at, and I took this and it comes up, the reason I took this because this company is having a huge role to play in our current political and economic system, but basically renaissance technologies is a tech company that was started, not a tech company, it was an investment company, hedge fund managers basically that came about because of the advent of technology, because of the advent of computing, what we talked about in the previous video, really, all these videos are sort of connected, which Martin Armstrong talked about behind the curtain, the full Monty, how automation came into play in our current political economic system. And this company has had a huge role to play in our current political and economic system. They were one of main backers of both parties in the United States last year or this year, last year, I guess, right? So they were one of the main backers, main players and policymakers to a certain degree, because those funding and election get to decide the policy of that governing body to a certain degree. So this company came about in 1900s, not 1900s, 1980s, because of the advent of technology, computer power. And what they were able to do, they were able to come up with programs to do trading on a more frequent basis and use algorithms. And their return from 19, their main fund, one of their main funds, from 1994, okay, if you invested $100 with them in 1994, $194, I'm just going to put a little dash $94, is that going to show up? I don't know if it's going to show up for you. $100 and that's $94, right? In 1994, so we're talking about, this is 2020, 2010, 2000, 1990, right? 1994 is here. So if you invested here, $100, and we're talking right here, somewhere around here anyway. If you invested $100 in 1994 in this fund, if you were given the opportunity to do so, your return $100 would have gotten you back $22,661, right? $22,611, $22,000, that's, oh $16,000 is not up here, my apologies, gang. If this is $10,000, that's $20,000, right? So $16,000 is here, my bad, somewhere around here anyway, right? So $22,661 is higher than this. So that's $10,000, $20,000 comes up here. So take a look at this, the slope of this dwarfs, like these guys, right? And this sort of plays out for us in something called differential accumulation, something we talked about in ASMR math previously, right? When we talk about disruptive animation and basically what we're seeing right now is automation in regards to trading stocks, right? From the 1980s, right? 2010, 2019, 1990, 1980, coming into play, technology coming into play here, where the people playing that system at this time in 10 years were able to create a fund that in 1994, if you put $100 in it, gave you a return of $22,661, that's pretty impressive, that's pretty impressive. And the multiple on that is that I do the multiple calculation. I don't even think I did the multiple calculation. The multiple calculation is, oh, what is it? It's just $226, right? The multiple is 226 times in a matter of, oh, and one thing I forgot, this isn't in 2017, it was 2014. So we're actually here, 2010, 2014. It's actually here, right? A little bit out. So it's a dot. It's not on the tick, right? So you have 226 times a return. And for fun, I just, I punched it in because what this return is for this period was 71% return compounded yearly, right? So 71% return. Now think about this. The CPI, the purple, actually let's put the table on here, the purple here, or sorry, not the purple. Oh yeah, the purple here. This was the minute, oh sorry, the pink. The pink was the CPI, right? The pink is the CPI. This was supposed to compensate for inflation, right? And inflation is supposed to be around 2 to 3% per year. These guys were getting return of 71% per year, right? Renaissance. Rentech. Let's call it Rentech. Okay. That's these guys here. And for fun, what I did was I took that measure, that growth, and I applied it. Come on, stick away. And I applied it, hey, and I applied it from 1900. And I took, we did the thing here, I took $100 and I did it from 1920. I didn't even do it from 1900. I did it from 1920 because initially I was just going to do things from 1920. Your return was to, if you put $100 in 1920, which is 1910, 1920, we're not going to write the numbers because it doesn't make sense, right? If you put the number here, $100, 1920, right? Your return was 2 times 10 to the 23. 2 times 10 to the 23, 71%, the same rate of return as this. So if you want to visualize where this graph is, because all you really need to do is take the line created here, right? Over here. Let's do it with the ruler. So because the growth rate is going to be the same, right? The growth rate to a certain degree is rise over run, right? Basically, it's going to be, right? The percent rate on it anyway, compounded. But what you can do is just get an approximation of where this is going to go. Use the same slope and just transpose this over here. And keep in mind that each one of these ticks is log 10. And what this was is 10 to the 23 of the world, maybe, is past trillions, right? I should have actually figured out what that word is to describe 2 times 10 to the 23. Now, going back to more realistic, or not realistic, this is realistic, right? This company, the same company had, and this was private fund, by the way. You could only have connections to be able to buy in that fund, or a lot of wealth to be able to buy in that fund. It wasn't open to the public. This same company had funds existing for a certain period there where they lost a certain percentage. So the slope was down, right? Those were the public funds that you can invest in. The private ones, those were like this, the two I looked at. And the public ones, there was only two public ones they had, or one public one. That one public one was a declining investment, not a good investment, right? Take that however way you want. Now what we're going to do is take a look at another place where you could have stored your wealth in a big way, in a big way, okay? And that's in art, right? Because art has been one of the greatest investments you could have made over time, okay? And that investment, we're going to talk about something that's dear to my heart if you're watching these videos. We're going to take probably the most important comic book on the market since we've reached a level where we're talking about extremes, right? As soon as we hit this, it's extremes, returns, right? So let's do something that's compatible to this. Art is one of the best places you could invest in. Paintings, well-known painters, their prices, their astronomical, I don't follow that market, but I do follow the comic book market, right? So if you bought Action Comics Number One, the first appearance of Superman, I'm just going to put Superman here. Superman. But it's Action Comics Number One. I'm going to write this the other way. Really, it's not Superman. Action Comics.  Superman. So if you bought Action Comics Number One in 1938, because it came out in 1938, its price was 10 cents, right? Its price was 10 cents. So 19 and it's 1938. So let me put this here too. 10 cents. Okay. So that's 1910, 1920, 1930, 1938 is here. So let's see. 10, 20, 30. So we're here. 1930. And you bought it at 10 cents. So you basically, I should have had another scale here. My bad, right? I totally forgot about that, right? Because one, then 10 cents would be here, right? So let's not make it 10 cents. Let's make it, you bought 10 of them just so we can put it on this graph, right? Initially, I'd gone, and by the way, 10 cents in 1938 was equivalent to $1.73 in 2017 dollars, right? So 10 cents was $1.73 in 2017 dollars. So even the price of comic books hasn't stayed up with, you know, surpassed the CPI measure, right? If comic books had only stuck with CPI, it took the rate of inflation into consideration, we should have been able to buy comic books at $1.73 in our stores right now. But comic books cost $5 right now. Three, well, anywhere between $3 to $5 right now, your basic comic book, right? So that's gone up huge as well. That hasn't, that's sort of showing you where the CPI really doesn't take into consideration certain things. So instead of buying one action comics number one, let's say we bought 10. So that makes it a dollar, right? So let's say it's $1, 1938, and we're sitting right here. 1910, 1920, 1930, 1940, so we're sitting right around here. So that's action comics number one. Okay. Since I only did the calculation for one of them, I'm going to have to multiply this. But basically what happened in 2014 and 2016, I believe as well, action comics number one, the higher grade ones, which is grade nine, nine means it's very fine near mint, right? Near mint minus, like that's, it's in good quality, it's in good shape, sold for $3.2 million, right? So 10 cents, if you bought it, and if you kept it in good shape, would have returned $3.2 million, right? $1, you know, 10 of those, if you assumed it was going to keep the same value, okay? Because if you had, if you had 10, then it wasn't as rare as now, right? Because I don't, I believe it's less than 10 that are graded at point 9.0, right? I think there's only four or five of those around. But I actually live in a city right now, Victoria. I talked to a comic book store owner that told me that he actually personally knows five people that have action comics number one in their possession, lower grades. I don't know what the grades are, we didn't talk about it, but I assume it's lower grades as well. But supposed to be there's five of them in my city alone. That's one reason I moved to this city as well. It's got a huge comic book history to it. A lot of comic book people here, okay? But 10 cents would have got you 3.2 million. So 10 of them would have got you 32 million. Pretty sweet. If the value kept the same. And just to give you a comparison of five, a 5.5 action comics number one sold for about a million dollars. So the different price between the nine and the 5.5 was $2 million three times, right? But basically one dollar investment in action comics number one in 1938 would have got you 32 million dollars. How am I going to put this on here? 32 million dollars. I didn't plan on doing 10 comic books. So we're actually up here, right? We're above scale. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to extend this. And we're basically up here. If it kept kept the same value, right? One dollar 32 million dollars, 32 million times a return. Wow, right? And the slope of this is compatible to this one, right? It's compatible to these guys. The return of these guys. One big difference. It is less. These guys were able to get that kind of return a short period of time, right? Now let's kick it down a notch and take a look at the wages that we earn. How have wages varied over time? Okay. Now in 1938, I did it for 1938 because we had data available for that. I also looked at salaries. So let's talk about salaries. In 1938, basically hourly wage was 25 cents an hour. Okay. So if that's a dollar, so we're back down here again below this. So we're not going to look at hourly wages, but just to give you a heads up, the minimum wage was 25 cents an hour. And right now the minimum wage is 7.2 dollars an hour. Okay. In 1968, the minimum wage was 1.6 dollars. So 1960. So if we're talking about, I should make the ticks here, what do we have? That's 1940, 1950, 1960, that's 1970. 1970, the minimum wage was dollar something, dollar 60. And right now, it's at 7.5, the 7.2. So if we do the minimum wage, right? Min wage. Min wage. Let's throw this on here for the fun of it. So minimum wage is this guy here, the orange. Minimum wage was a dollar 60, dollar 60 in 1968, dollar 60 in 1960, 1940, 50, 60, 70. So dollar 60 is like here. And minimum wage right now is 7.25. 7.25. Okay. And that puts you about here. If you're doing minimum wage, you're out of the game, right? Because one thing you have to consider is, you look at these guys, right? This was the S&P. Okay. This was gold, right? So gold was above S&P. If you come over here, the S&P, both the minimum and the maximum, are above gold. So that means, if you consider these to be systems, right? And they are systems, they're different economic systems. If you're investing in gold, you could have easily bought into the S&P, right? But over here, if you're investing in gold, it's not as easy to buy into the S&P. You get less of the S&P for your gold. So what's happening? When you see a crossover, with the slopes, with the lines, when you see a crossover, basically jumping from an upper system to a lower system is easy to do because it's based on US dollars, based on its currency value, is valued more so you can jump into it. But when one system is above another system, it's way more difficult to jump into the other system, right? This economic system, if you want to invest in, right? Or you have to buy a smaller chunk. So over here, you know, I don't know what gold prices were here, $100. But if you're investing in gold here, and these guys are up here, or Action Comics is up there, you, hard time, hard time. If you look at 1938, the minimum wage in 1938 was 25 cents, right? So you could have bought, you worked two and a half hours, you could have bought one Action Comics, right? If you worked, you had to, sorry, you could have, for one hour, you could have bought two and a half Action Comics, right? So if you worked an hour, right, you worked four hours, which is a dollar, you could have bought 10 Action Comics, right? If you bought 10 Action Comics in 1938, with your 25 cent minimum wage income, right? You were in the game for all of these, right? In 2017 and before that. But the price of Action Comics hasn't gone up in that amount. I believe in 19 or Superman number one, I can't remember if it was Superman number one or Action Comics, I'm pretty sure it was Superman number one, not Action Comics number one, which we're talking about in 1970 was worth $100. In 1980 Superman number one was worth $1,200. And I remember in 1994, which is right here, 1992, 1993, Action Comics number one sold for $160,000 and at that time was breaking records, right? So Action Comics number one, let's put this up here too, Action Comics number one, because I know this, I heard about this in a convention, I believe, $160,000, 94. Let's say 92. I think it was 92, okay? And let's put the dot there. So 1992 cost you $160,000, that's $10,000. I forgot to put a little tick on the $100,000 here. So 1992, which is about the same as 1994, this thing costs you this much, $160,000, right? It's not $200,000, $200,000 would be up there a little bit more, $160,000. Whoops, 94 is going to be further over, isn't it? It's going to be here. Hopefully I'm doing this right. Maybe. So it was like here. That would be Action Comics number one. Pretty much fits a linear scale on a log, like graph, which is a good thing, right? It could have maybe done this a little bit, price gone up, or fluctuated, it comes down on a log scale, it's difficult. Looks like a linear line to a certain degree, right? So if you bought four Action Comics number ones in 1938, working minimum wage four hours a time, stored that over time, right now in 2017, you could have $32 million. So keep this in mind, in every period in our lives, right? There are times where even though you're not in one of these systems, there are investments you can make that could possibly increase your slope, give you a better return than what you're in right now, right? If you go back to the minimum wage here in 1968, the minimum wage, is that where it were? The minimum wage puts you $7.25, right? That's the slope there. So if you're here right now, you should be thinking, what kind of systems can you invest in? Here, possibly closer to your range here, that can kick you up down the road into a higher return, right? You're looking for a steeper slope. Are there any steep slopes coming in, right? And there are, there are. While we're on this actually, let's do the salaries as well. Because the salaries, we're just going to do one salary from 1900, because that way we can put it on the scale here, right? The average income in 1900, okay, individual income in 1900 across the board was $438, which is equivalent to like $12,000 in 2017, dollars, right? If you take the deflation or rate of inflation in consideration, the evaluation of your currency, but we're still going to stick with the $1,900, right? So $438. In 1920 was $1,400, but we're going to stick with the 1900. So 1900 average salary was $438, okay? $438 minimum wage salary. So this should really be salary as well. Wage, $438 would be around here, okay? And the average salary right now, this was, you know, depending on different measures, you could measure average salary, individual salary, or you could measure average income per household. I took one of the measures, like personal average for one person is $30,000, household is $56,000. That's basically usually one person full-time at least, one person per time or two people full-time. But the average I took as being $48,000, okay? On a log scale, it's not going to, these numbers, and based on the other graphs that we have, are not going to make that much of a difference, right? So $48,000, so that's $10,000, that's $22,000. $48,000 would be around here, maybe a little bit lower, but I don't want to overlap too much, right? So what we have to do is take a look at the slope, and that's the slope there, that's the slope there, right? The multiple is 110 times, and the multiple here is not 110 times, the multiple here, we could just do it, but the multiple here is, oh let's just do it. We got 7.25 divided by 1.6, it's 4.5 times, and there's different states have different minimum ranges, Massachusetts has the highest one right now at $11, okay? So if you're making just a salary, right? If you're making hourly salary, you need to think about systems, if you want to function in the society, if you want to have better returns, better growth, because that's what this is sort of about, then you need to think about different systems that you could put your money in, okay? One other thing we're going to take a look at, two other things we're going to take a look at, we're going to look at home prices, okay? Home prices in 1900 were seeing a bubble, they were seeing a peak. In 1900 home prices, an average home cost around, this is what I came across, it was hard to find this information, really difficult to find this information, was around $5,000, okay? In 1920 the average home price was $3,000, so $5,000, $3,000, so they're saying $5,000 here was the average home price in 1900, and in 1920, which is this tick here, is around $3,000, so around here, so what I'm going to do, I'm going to take the average, I'm going to make it $4,000. Home, let's make this home, not home, but house, so light green is house, and let's put the average price in 1900, $4,000, and keep in mind, you know, what type of houses you were getting at that period, keep in mind that most places didn't have electricity, right? $4,000 will be around here, so those are houses, I should have brought out a table, I do have a table, let's take these down, that way they're not sticking up, let's take these kids that were at it. So $4,000 was average house in 1990, and in 2017 the average house in the United States, the median, then the median house, it's not the average, the median house, and the median is, we're going to talk about this when we do this, but median is the middle number, is $370,000, $370,000, that was a median, so 300, so I put in too many zeros on this one, silly me, that's a million, we got, let's make this one, and that should be $100,000, of all the places to make little mistakes, right? So that's $100,000, so it's going to be $307,000, which is going to be somewhere around here, right? That's what a house is, and that's the slope there, right? And the multiple on that thing is going to be 307 divided by 4,000, it's 76 times your return, right? Gold was 20, was 61 times, right? Inflation was supposed to be only 27 times, right? Your money's devalued 96%, right? This loss is purchasing power, what's this guy? That's the minimum wage, your wage has only gone up, was it 100 times? 110 times? But house prices have jumped up 76 times, not bad, considering your wages, I guess. You have to work 10 years to buy a house here, well less than 10 years, it's about the same, okay? But there's a big difference in living expenses, right? Your purchasing power, your cost of living, interest rates, actually interest rates are pretty low right now, very nicely, okay? Now we're going to look at one more thing, one more measure. And that's something that's playing out right now, it's coming to play because of the same reason that these guys weren't playing, right? Renaissance technologies, Renaissance technologies, how they've come to play, right? Using automation, computer power to generate wealth, right? Wealth that we can measure with US dollars, okay? One thing that's coming to play recently is something we talked about, I sort of gave you my opinion on it, which is cryptocurrencies, right? And when it comes to thinking about them as investing or thinking about them as currency or thinking about them as commodity, for me, cryptocurrencies are sort of faith-based, trust-based, and they also have certain aspects of a commodity because they're based on scarcity. One of the reasons that the US dollar has depreciated, lost 96% of its purchasing power, right? Is because there's more and more being printed, right? It's just being flooded with currency, with US dollars, right? To a level where 10 years ago in 2000, and I can't remember 2008, 2009, 10, they stopped reporting the M3, I believe. How much money was being on the large scale? How much money was being dumped into the markets? And that's one of the reasons we're seeing the S&P, the S&Ps are this guy, the S&P at these levels, right? So let's take a look at Bitcoin as far as cryptocurrencies goes because they're considered to be currency, but they're based on scarcity. And to a certain degree, the hurdles that Bitcoin faces or cryptocurrencies face that are based on scarcity is to get them into circulation, to increase their velocity, okay? And once they increase their velocity, then what happens? They start changing hands more often, but since they're based on scarcity, most or a lot of people might be holding on to them, expecting for the value to go up because it's based on scarcity, right? That gave you my opinion regarding cryptocurrencies, and right now I'm not holding any cryptocurrencies as of mid-July, okay? And if you want to know my opinion regarding cryptocurrencies further, that video is the place to be. And again, please keep this in mind, this is not financial advice, okay? So cryptocurrencies, the history of Bitcoin is this. Well, you can take a look at history, but the price of Bitcoin is this, okay? I believe in 2008 or so, 2009 or so, someone tried to sell a thousand or 10,000 Bitcoins for $30 and there was no takers, okay? So it was very hard to get rid of your currency. It wasn't very liquid, right? Yeah, it lacked liquidity and liquidity, and it was very volatile, and it is still very volatile, but in 2009 you couldn't really sell Bitcoins. You know, we're talking about hundreds or thousands for a little bit of money, but in 2010 the price of Bitcoin was six cents, right? Again, we're off the scale, we're in the decimals here. So six cents, let's convert this to a dollar. So all we do is just one divided by six, oops, not one divided by six, one divided by 0.06. You could have bought yourself 100 divided by six. You could have bought yourself 16. You could have bought yourself, I'm just checking, making sure, because in 2017 dollars, six cents was only seven cents, but that doesn't really make a difference. So you could have bought yourself 16 Bitcoins, right? So let's make this leave, this is a dollar. We got the Bitcoin up there, so $1, $1 in 2010. Let's put that here. $1 in 2010, so that's 2020, 2010 is right here, that's 2000, so 2010 right here. That's really when the game began for Bitcoin, okay? And Bitcoin right now, the last I checked, its price was around $2,600. So if you bought 16 of them times, $2,600, oops, 16 times $2,600, is $41,600, $41,000, $41,600, $41,600, make sure I got all this correct. I don't want to give you guys the wrong data, $41,600. Okay, so we're here. Bitcoin, $48,000, $41,600, so we're here somewhere. In 2017, I'm going to put it a little bit off. No, no, let's put it on the line. Now, the slope of this is much steeper than the slope of this. Much steeper. How much steeper? You could take the slopes, you could take the slopes, but I'm not really going to get into that game right now. Basically, the multiple from these guys, Renaissance, was 260, 230, let's say. The multiple of Bitcoin is 41600 divided by 1. The multiple of Bitcoin is $41,000, right? This is what happens when you use trusted calculators, you refer to them for the most simple calculations, right? So, this was 230, and this slope is 41,000. This is blowing away anything else, really. Okay, Superman was pretty good. Superman is really good, right? Superman's fantastic. Oh, did I divide by 10 on this one? No, the multiple was $1, $1 of this, yeah. Same deal to a certain degree. Okay, so this is something you have to really keep in mind when it comes to economic systems at play. And, you know, this ties into what we are talking about in series four of the language of mathematics, when we're talking about jumping from one system to another system, because this is what we really have to keep in mind when we're thinking about personal finances is different economic games at play, right? And we just talked about two, four, six, eight, nine of them, only nine, right? There are multiple other things you can invest your time and energy and your funds in, right? There are different types of, if you're thinking about buying a home, there's real estate, there's different types of real estate you could buy. There are different types of cryptocurrencies you could buy. There are different types of funds. There are different types of comic books, right? This is one of the best returns, but there are other comic books that have given you phenomenal return in shorter periods of time as well, right? Walking Dead, Walking Dead Number One, Harbinger Number One, right? First appearance of Venom, right? First full appearance of Venom, amazing Spider-Man 300, right? Not phenomenal return like this one or Walking Dead return, but there are other returns, Saga Number One. Those are shorter periods of time. Those are in this timeframe we're talking about here, right?  So if you're, you know, think about it. Which system are you functioning in? If you're sitting and functioning in a lower-down system where your returns aren't as much as you'd like, then you could take a look at these systems, see if their models are valid, if you plan on saving to jump into those systems, or if you're in this system, there are lower-down systems that are coming into play which are going to surpass your growth rate. Your, you know, over time will preserve your wealth or increase your wealth at a lot better rate than the system you might be invested in, okay? And again, keep in mind that this isn't, this isn't financial advice. This is just quantifying the different economic systems we have at play and taking a look at how they vary because when it comes to personal finance, when it comes to wealth, we're thinking about growth. But this is only the things that seem tangible to us right now. There are nontangible to a certain degree things that we haven't quantified that are worth a lot, worth more than this, give you returns much more than this, right? There are different types of currencies at play. This is the U.S. dollar, there are local currencies at play, right? When certain economies to a certain degree go under stress, all of a sudden disruptive innovation comes into play and new opportunities arise, right? Greece being one of them during the financial crisis for Greece where basically if you look at government statistics, they give you unemployment rates that are huge, they give you GDP that is very low, all the stuff happening. But GDP is a measure of what the government is keeping track of or can keep track of and the taxes that they're collecting. So GDP, I know I'm going off a little bit here, but we are going to touch up on this stuff. But I want to really emphasize the point, using Greece as an example. But Greece, the GDP of a country is basically how much taxes a country is taking in and how much money they have, how they can manage their finances, right? They're basically looking at this but at a larger scale, right? But once the financial crisis hit Greece, what happened was the taxes went up, the services that the government was providing went down, certain banks closed their doors, they confiscated certain types of funds, certain funds, especially in Cyprus, right? All of a sudden people had to scramble and had to adjust to the system and they basically came up with disruptive innovation and in Greece there were basically barter systems put in place where people were doing trade on a personal level, right? They weren't trading everything into a currency and then using the currency as the exchange of medium, right? What they used to be able to trade between each other, they just bypassed the currency and did straight trades and websites came into play and different types of technology came into play where people could go on there and offer certain goods and services and exchange those for other goods and services, right? This isn't the only thing on play. Everything is not necessarily measured in dollars or currencies that lose their value over time. But since most of us are forced into the system, we really have to think about other systems that have more potential, more growth that will either preserve our wealth and or give us a certain type of growth, whatever type of growth we're thinking about and one of the most important things we have to keep in mind when we talk about the beginning of this video is make sure you diversify. Do not, do not be in one system because if things go wrong, some of these things may do a about turn and start having a negative return, right? Devaluing, losing their worth, losing their, you might start losing your wealth. So make sure you're diversified, but diversifying systems you either know, right? Or systems where you can get the information and spend the time required to understand how those systems operate or hire someone to give you financial advice regarding whatever it is that you're planning on investing your time and energy on, right? I think that's enough. Yeah, that's a fair bit to think about and that's a good place for us to sort of do a pause, sort of finish off these set of videos anyway when it comes to personal finance. It's pretty important to think about these things and you know, your weighting doesn't have to be the same in all of them. You could do what the CPI does, right? Have the measure, your wealth invested a little bit in this, a little bit in that, a little bit in that, a little bit in that and keep in mind things that are usually generally more steeper slope, they have a faster income growth rate, exponential growth rate, that only lasts for a certain period of time. Keep your time frame in mind, right? Are you going to be invested for 117 years? I don't think so. Average lifespan in the United States and Canada's, I think for males anyway, it's 82, high 70s, let's say 80 mark for both counties, it's both male and female, right? Well, if you're 80, you know, where are you going to function?  For a certain period of that time, you're not working, right? So what's your work timeframe, timeline, right? From when have you started working to when can you continue working or will you continue working to generate income, to invest in certain systems where you will not lose your wealth, you will at least maintain your wealth, right? I hope this did a good little summing up of what we've talked about so far and what we have to keep in mind and this stuff is directly going to link into series four of the language of mathematics and we're going to talk a lot more about this and delve down into some of these systems. One of the ones we're going to delve, I'll give you a little heads up, one of the ones we're going to delve into at some point is comic books and I've laid out some videos, a set of videos I'd like to do on that and basically quantify investing in comic books a little bit more than the way they've been quantified right now because it's very subjective of what a worth of a comic book is. If you're in the industry, if you know what I'm talking about, the grading system is one way people are going with slabbing comics and stuff like this but I'd like to take a look at the numbers and quantify some of those numbers and I've done some research into it and I've put together some data, some tables and at some point we will be talking about this a lot more. I guess that's about it. I hope you enjoyed this set of videos. It was fun to create. It took a little bit of time. Sorry for the slow progression of these videos but I really lost myself in the data and really enjoyed looking at the stuff and trying to figure out a way what a good way is to present this information. That's it for now. I'll see you guys in the next video.


You tuned into the COVID-19 community report here on KDRT LP, 95.7 FM in Davis, California. I'm Autumn Lab A-Reno and today is Tuesday, March 2nd, 2021, and this is Episode 54. We're sharing local news and resources focusing on what's impacting Davis and nearby cities in Yolo County during the COVID-19 pandemic. This month, I've been focusing on the return to in-person instruction in the Davis Joint Unified School District. I've interviewed administrators, teachers, and parents, and now I'm speaking with students from various grades throughout the DJUSD. Today you'll hear from Harper and Henry, who are sixth and seventh graders, respectively, and next week I'll chat with two high school seniors. In the youth advocacy and mentoring work I do, I believe it's critical to hear directly from young folks, especially when they're so deeply impacted by decisions that adults are making for and around them. I want to be clear that I had no agenda when I talked with these kids around school reopening. I just wanted to know how they were feeling about it, and with the two student voices you'll hear today, you'll learn they have very different perspectives on the matter. From my perspective, these may be among the more important interviews I've done in the past year. 50 years from now, many of us won't be around, and it's this younger generation who will be asked to share what they remember about the COVID-19 pandemic. What has this time been like for them? Stay tuned and we'll start finding out in just a few minutes. Before I get into that, I'm going to take just a moment of silence for the over 500,000 Americans who have died from COVID-19. I also pause to honor the tragic death of Davis resident Jennifer Comey last week, who was killed by a falling tree limb in a local park. And in local news, last week, the state of California announced that Yolo County would move into the substantial or red tier in the state's blueprint for a safer economy after we'd met the red tiers metrics for two consecutive weeks. As a result, many local businesses and activities have been allowed to expand capacity or resume operations. Numerous restrictions will apply while Yolo County is in the red tier. For example, gyms can be open but at 10% capacity and indoor dining at restaurants can open but at 25% capacity. Rather than read you a long laundry list of what's open at what level, I'll simply refer you to the COVID-19 resources at the county's website, YoloCounty.org. I do want to note that we're all still asked to exercise caution and good judgment as we're far from reaching herd immunity. On a public information call last week, Dr. Amy Sisson, the county's public health officer said, that's important so that we can avoid the roller coaster we've been on. Our numbers improve and we move to the red tier and then our numbers get bad again. So the advice to not mingle freely and to mask up and distance is still very much in effect. You may have noticed the big tents in downtown Davis. The city placed them there in partnership with the Davis Downtown Business Association last December to further support an initiative called Open Air Davis. The tents were funded with a county CARES Act grant and the tents and tables were meant to aid local restaurants while state guidance restricted businesses to take out food only. The city became aware of a large gathering that took place recently at one of the downtown tents sites. Contrary to COVID-19 safety protocols, changes were implemented. The city has removed the large tent from G Street between second and third streets and the slightly smaller tent from the East Street Plaza area. There is no general open container zone on G Street and all tinted areas will now be assigned as temporary use permit spaces where businesses are responsible for space management, cleanliness, and alcohol use. And you can visit cityofdavis.org for more info. In other news, Healthy Davis Together has made significant changes in the past week. The collaborative effort between UC Davis and the City of Davis provides free saliva-based asymptomatic COVID-19 testing to anyone who lives or works in Davis. In the weeks and months ahead, federally qualified healthcare centers Communicare will serve as a key conduit for getting vaccines to the county's hardest-to-reach populations, including the uninsured, undocumented, and low income residents. And yes, this is being funded by Healthy Davis Together. According to a recent report in the Davis Enterprise, Communicare serves as many as one out of every seven county residents providing primary, behavioral, dental, and prenatal care regardless of insurance status or ability to pay. Now Healthy Davis Together will provide staffing and administration for a Communicare vaccination clinic scheduled to open the week of March 8th in West Sacramento, which is home to some of the most culturally diverse and disadvantaged communities in Yolo County. Healthy Davis is also expanding its testing sites to include a location at Marguerite Montgomery Elementary in South Davis, and that joins three existing sites at the Mondavi Center at UC Davis, the Davis Senior Center, and the Veterans Memorial Center. And again, I'll direct you to HealthyDavisTogether.org for more info. We'll take a moment for music and be right back with our interviews. Some of the biggest impacts during the pandemic have been felt by our school communities. At the start of the pandemic, learning was temporarily disrupted and for the better part of the last year, schools, teachers, students, and their families have all had to learn how to work within a distance learning framework. I've recorded many firsthand accounts about how challenging this time has been and I wanted to make sure right now that we're hearing directly from students. So joining me right now is Harper Pfeiffer, who is a sixth grader at Birch Lane Elementary in Davis. Thanks for agreeing to talk with me today, Harper, and welcome. Thank you so much for having me. Okay, can you tell us a little bit about yourself? How old are you? Maybe, you know, do you have siblings? Do you have hobbies? That kind of thing. Yeah, so I have one sibling. I've got an older brother and his name is Ryan and right now my hobbies are La Crosse and that's the sport I play and also sand volleyball. So sports were one of those things you couldn't do during this time, then I imagine, right? Yes. Okay, so in normal times when you get to go to your school campus, what do you like about Birch Lane? Well, what I like about Birch Lane is the teachers there are fabulous. I love my teacher and it's just so nice to be able to have friends there and that's really what I like most about it. Right. So it's been almost a year that we've been in this pandemic now. Can you think back to last March when you got the news that all of a sudden you couldn't go back to your school campus? Can you remember what you felt like then? Well, I remember that on March 13th, I remember that we were excited to like, oh, yeah, we've got time off of school. This is going to be so much fun. And that was the first time at school I'd ever gotten to do the marquee and I was so excited to do it. And then when I finally got the news that we weren't going back, I kept asking my mom, do you think we're going to go back? Do you think we're going to go back? And she would just say, I don't think so. So then when I finally heard the news that we weren't going to go back and we are going to go into distance learning, it was kind of like, wait, what? Like I didn't even really know what it was or what we were going to do. So I was sort of confused and I didn't really know what was going on. That sounds about right. I think we all felt that confusion. Yeah. So let's talk about how you got used to doing school online. Before the pandemic, had you ever spent this much time on a computer before? No, never before. I'm not really like a screens person. I'd rather be reading a book. And I had never spent this much time on a computer before. I had never looked at screens for so long before. And it was really hard adjusting to that instead of the in-person, like everything's just right there for you. And it was just really difficult trying to figure out everything on Canvas and the Google classroom.  So many new things to learn when you're operating. Your job is literally learning every day, right? All right. Harper, can you tell us right now what a typical school day is like for you? Well, I think a typical school day would be like every morning. Gotta get up and I've got an 830 class. So each class I have is about 30 minutes. And each day, I've got three classes a morning check-in, then I've got two other classes. And one's at 10.45 to 11.15. And then another one is at 11.30 to 12. And in between classes, I work. And after classes, I work. And it's been hard adjusting to distance learning. But I've gotten the hang of it this past year. And so it's going better now, but I'd much rather be in person. Yeah. So I know your teacher well because all three of my kids had her at one point at Birch Lane. And Mrs. Palo is a lot of fun. So what is she doing to try to make this experience a little bit more fun or engaging? Well, she's definitely making it a lot more like regular school. We've still got a transition jar and every 10 stones that we get, we get a story from her childhood, which is always so funny. And she was a very naughty child. So she did a lot of bad things.  And I love listening to those. Has she dressed up like a cave woman this year yet? Yes.  She has dressed up like Benjamin Franklin. She has dressed up like a rapper. She has done all these crazy costumes that we just absolutely love. And they're super funny. Yeah, she's a really fun teacher. Okay, so let's talk about your friend relationships right now. At the age you are friends are so, so important. So what have you done to stay connected to friends during this time, especially you don't have your access to your teammates and the sports you play. So how do you stay connected? Well, something that we've been doing with our school librarian is me and some other friends we've gotten together with our school librarian. And we've done book club. And book club is one of those things that keeps us connected. We all read a book. Then the librarian comes up with some questions. And we meet over zoom. And we talk about the book. And it's just super nice to be able to be with friends even on zoom. And we've done face times. And sometimes we can see each other if it's if we're doing like, maybe like a craft day. And we all do social distancing and masks and everything. And we meet up and we do crafts and we do really fun things. So that's how I've been staying connected. Excellent. Okay, I have two more questions for you. Right now, all the grown-ups in your world are talking about how and when to go back to the classroom in person. What are your feelings about that? Would you like to go back this year? Would you like to start in the fall? Do you have an opinion about it? Well, I mean, like I know everyone I know, all my friends, we would love to go back to school just because we miss the in-person learning. We miss teachers. We miss everything. And but right now, it's really just not safe to go back. Probably the best option would be going back in the fall. And which is sad because I know that going back would just be awesome. And I think that it would be fun, though, if we could do something this year that we go and we've got so in school, we've got small groups. So maybe small groups could go outside and do something or do something at school so it feels like normal. But I just don't know if it's that it just doesn't seem that it's safe to go back right now. Full time or yeah. Yeah, I realize this is a very confusing time.  None of us have all the answers right now for sure. Okay, I'm going to ask you one last question. And it's maybe a challenging one. But I want you to think many, many years in the future, you're going to be much older than you are now. What would you hope you remember about this time? Well, that's a tough one. But I think I would really want to remember my friends and how we've stayed connected and how fun whenever I see them, how fun it is to see them. And I would want to remember all the fun things I've done with my brother over the pandemic and all the fun things I've done with my family and some small, tiny trips that we've taken to like Tahoe or just to the beach or something like that, which I would want to remember. And I'd want to remember kind of like looking back at it a few years ahead. I think it would be like, oh my gosh, that was just such a crazy time. And then I just want to remember all the really good things. Nice. Your generation is going to have some real stories to tell out of this time. No, we sure are. Okay, I want to thank you so much for joining me and sharing this conversation. You take care and the best of luck with the rest of your school year. Thank you so much. Some of the biggest impacts during the pandemic have been felt by our school communities. At the start of the pandemic, learning was temporarily disrupted. And for the better part of the last year, schools, teachers, students and their families have all had to learn how to work within a distance learning framework. I've recorded many firsthand accounts about how challenging this time has been. And I wanted to make sure that right now we're hearing directly from students. So joining me now is Henry Shoemaker. I want to say welcome to you, Henry, and thanks for joining me. I'm happy to be here. Okay, could you please tell us a little bit about who you are? Okay, so I am currently 12 years old. I attend right now this school year. I am attending Holmes Junior High School as a seventh grader. This is my first year in middle school. And I really like sports and getting outside. Yeah. So I imagine that's been extra challenging during this time when it's hard to get together and play sports, right? It's pretty hard. Okay, Henry, it's been almost a year that we've been in the pandemic. Can you think back to last March when the news first broke and all of a sudden we had to shut things down and you couldn't go back to school? Do you remember what it felt like to find out you couldn't go back to school for the foreseeable future? So it was about, I think it was announced on a Tuesday or Monday. And the weekend before that, my dad said it was possible that we would be shutting down because of COVID. And I'm like, God, it would just be like a few weeks if it does. And it would just be like sort of like an extra spring break. I thought nothing of it at the start.  Like I was honestly a bit happy about it for the start because I mean just three weeks and then we'll get back to school. So just a nice break before summer. And then after a bit, it didn't, we didn't come back and then it just kept happening where we thought we were coming back, but then we didn't. So here we are now and we're still in it like 11 months later. Yeah. It's been a long year, hasn't it? I think you had an especially challenging experience because when the pandemic hit, you were a sixth grader and since then you've had to start at a whole new school, at homes, virtually. Yeah. I think that's a big challenge. Starting a new school is hard enough. So can you tell us what a typical school day is like for you right now? So I get up early-ish, early for most people. And I start first meeting 8.45, go for an hour meeting, break, hour meeting, break, and then hour meeting. Now I'll have lunch. But it's really split and weird because of how they're doing it in distance learning. Quarters are divided, there's like different classes and it's not at all like a normal school year. Yeah. And so right now I'm having three classes and next quarter I'll have four classes. It's weirdly divided and just a bit interesting to think about. But I typically end about probably two 30 to three-ish when I can. So it takes a bit of time. So that's a long day. How is it sitting in front of a screen all day like that? I mean, I do that for my job too, but you're 12. You're not used to that, are you? It's challenging, an hour or two. I mean, that's okay. But then you go into the realm of three hours, four hours, five hours at a time sometimes even. And it just gets exhausting. And then after that time, I don't want to go outside because after a long session at the computer I'm tired, but I want to go outside and refresh. I'm so tired that I can't go outside. So it's just this whole cycle of being tired. Yeah. So usually when you start middle school, you kind of transition there with some of the friends you had in elementary, but you start to make new friends and develop a new peer group. What are your friend relationships like now and how do you say connect it with your friends? I, to be honest here, I haven't really connected with anyone in this new school. I've just strengthened older bonds. And it's kind of tough because a lot of those bonds are outside of school. And so I have like one or two friends that I wanted in my classes and they're there and I can interact with them, but some other really good friends I had aren't in my classes. And that's really tough because it's hard to make new interactions on distance learning. I mean, if it was real school, then I probably wouldn't have trouble because I couldn't make those connections, but it's a lot harder to make connections on a screen. Do you play sports or have hobbies that you've done during this time? Yeah, I play sports. I play a lot of different ones. I do archery. That's not competitive. I just do it on my own with my, well, me and my dad. I do baseball. We've been doing this hybrid thing, you know, Mass John, pods, super safe. And I mean, it's baseball, but it's not. Those two sports, also, I've been wanting to pick up paintball, but that I wanted to, I started wanting to like last year, right? When course pandemic struck, I started like, oh, I want to play paintball, play it after the pandemic. Nope. So what do you do when you're not sitting in front of a screen for school? What kinds of things are you doing to keep yourself busy? Okay. So I have two cats and one dog, and they are great during this time. And I, I hope I'm great to them. And it's really nice to have someone there for you when, you know, your parents are dealing with your other brothers and her sisters, the siblings. And it's just nice to have someone there to come for you.  Just, you need to get that fresh air and it's really hard now. And I try to interact with my friends as many ways I can safely zoom meetings, you know, like 10 feet mask on meetups, all sorts of things. And so it's, it's, I try to go outside me with my friends and interact with my pets. Basically. It's really important to get out there and move. Okay. So right now the schools and all the grownups are talking about when and how to reopen schools. And this is a question I'm asking to all the kids I'm interviewing right now. How do you feel about returning to campus now versus in the fall? And what would you like the grownups who are making the decisions to know? I feel like we should be going to schools back to schools. We should either be going now or in a very, very close future because if you look at the studies now, it seems to be very safe with ventilators and masks on. If you do the right precautions, you can see private schools doing this. You can do to see schools, other states and in California, some in California as well. And they're all doing it safely and the numbers haven't gone up there. And so I think mask on at all times, no lunch there, no water, just mask on all the time. And ventilators, in my opinion, would be perfectly safe. And I, I think that it could very easily be set up in a month or two and people who don't want to can stay on Zoom if they want to be precautious, which I understand. But I feel like people who should want to be doing schools should be able to right now. Okay, thank you. Okay, last question for you. So your generation, many years from now, you're going to be asked to remember what it was like to live through the COVID-19 pandemic. What do you think you might remember from this time? I think I'm going to remember. I think I'm going to remember probably the start of COVID, where I was not at all prepared for it. And I think I'm also going to remember probably the end of COVID and how nice it's going to be to see friends and family again. And I'm going to be able to interact, go to real school, no mask on, no ventilators, just it'll be awesome when this is over. And I think memories stick into your mind the most when they trigger the most, you know, emotional response. So I think I'll feel a lot of joy then. So I'll remember that very well. Great. Okay, Henry, those are my questions for you. I really want to thank you for talking with me today and I appreciate hearing your perspective. Oh, it was great talking to you too.


Yes. Hello. It's really been, you know, you asked if we had a good time. I'm actually grateful. A sense of gratitude for being here. To the people I've met, there's, I was just telling someone, thank you, about the great enthusiasm for learning and for doing good work. So I've been most most impressed and really pleased to meet everyone. So I want to speak with you as leaders because that's how I see you. You're here at this conference. You're working in design and user experience in a country and a world that needs that so much. You're eager to improve your ability to create things that matter to India and to the world. And so, and I think even just being here at the conference is kind of an active leadership on your part. So that's the view from which I prepared my thoughts. And I'll say that, you know, for most of my career, I think I'm getting close to 35 years of industry, which is why I have hardly any hair left. And, you know, for a good part of that career, I worked on products. I worked on processes, services, interfaces, interactions, all kinds of things. Mostly the focus was on the things that you can see on the on the visible outcomes of the work. Even if it's an interaction, it's still kind of visible, yes? And so all of these kinds of things were what I was hired and paid to work on, the kinds of things that I've been teaching people to work on. But I had a sense, a growing sense. It took me actually a long time to recognize that my sense of discomfort with some of my work, that this is what it was about. I couldn't find the words. That there was something, so we'd be hired to go find an unmet need or some actionable insight. And then they would make a product to try to fix it. But that need came from somewhere. There was a kind of roots in soil of what was going on in people's lives. And it has to do with their relationships with one another and the way they communicate, the way that they go about their day, the systems that they participate in, what they really care about, their values, good or bad boundaries, all these kinds of things are the roots in soil of life, of the things that we can see. And I was not, only was I not being asked to work on those things, I didn't feel equipped to work on those things. So my question is, how can we advance the practice of work that really, truly, no joking improves life. And that has led me, like business and the things that we're teaching now have been trying to work in social complexity, where the starting question is a social question rather than a business or technology question. But it turns out that this is a mythic question for, I don't know, 10,000 years, thousands of years, people have been creating together, trying to, sometimes succeeding. Some of those people were poets, some of those people were able to talk to us about what it was like to be someone who was, who was trying to do such work. And there's some common themes. One of the common themes is that the person on this journey of creation in the world, their identity, you know, the question is not who are you, the questions who are you becoming? Not the kind of the poetic imagination, people are not defined by their history, their biography, by what they've done, but their identity is tied with the questions that they're engaged with, kind of the questions, especially the scary questions, the frightening questions that they're stepping into and trying to work on. And also by the possibilities that they bring into the room when they arrive, by the possibilities and questions. And another common theme is this, the metaphor of a journey shows up over and over again, all over the world as a metaphor for going through life. And for sort of along the way, we encounter some of the great aspects of life, like marriage or partnership, like work, expressing ourselves through our work, like our relationship, like our inner life. So I wanted to have kind of two chapters to this talk this morning, which, given what we've just seen, you know, I'll tell you, this is not directly about user experience. I'm not going to talk about methods or approaches or tell you about project stories. I'm, as I say, I kind of want to speak with you as leaders about what it's like to do work that's deeply creative and what it's like to become someone who does that kind of work or be becoming. So the journey of deep creativity, the journey of becoming, taking your creative place in life. So let's start with the first journey. This is an old idea. It's often talked of, not often talked about in professional life. The way we pay attention to the world shapes what we create. So let's explore that a little bit. It is a key to this journey of deep creativity. Here's a, here's a work challenge, a design challenge. We have the current situation. And we have a desire to better situation. We like to get across the gap. How do we get across there? How do we get from the way things are now to a better way things could be? Well, one method, a shallow method is to just do something. So people say, I know what to do. Maybe we're concerned about traffic in Bangalore. So someone is a traffic engineer and says, I'm an expert. I know what to do. And I don't know what the answer would be. Maybe it's more roads or maybe it's more taxes or something. The point is that shallow attention and shallow attention gets you shallow results. It's easiest to be the expert. To see and do what you already know or to think you know. It's easiest to project your vision onto the situation. And then try to persuade the situation to conform or comply with your vision. And maybe if you're working for one of those people it's easiest to just go along. To kind of be polite or sort of go along because you think that's what they want. Yes, so that is a has a terrible track record as a as a source of good good answers in the world. Well, here's a little bit deeper, a little bit deeper creative journey.  You allow for the possibility that you don't already know. Or that what you did last time is going to work this time in this new situation. And then you prototype the thing and you iterate it until you allow for the possibility that your first try may not be the best thing. So this is very common in industry. Many of us receive these requests to go look for, you know, observe and look for an opportunity and produce a thing. There is, though, as you have probably found yourself or people you work with, there is an enemy of observation. If you're going to go look at the situation. And that is judgment. We so here's your point of view in the middle of the circle. And the circle is your beliefs, your presuppositions, what you think is true, what you think you know about the world. So whatever's coming in that you're observing or perceiving gets changed, gets filtered by these beliefs. Or another way to look at it is to say we're always kind of projecting onto this screen, this bubble, our view of the world. So when we look at the world, we're actually seeing our own projection overlaid onto the world. It's an enemy of seeing clearly, of clear observation. So each move into deeper creativity requires a kind of courageous inner step. And in this case, that step is to open your mind, open your mind to see what's really there, to just pay attention to your senses, not your own interpretation of what you're seeing, including the things that don't align with your expectations, that don't agree with you. So we can learn to move our center of attention. And that is part of a deeper creative journey. There's yet a deeper way. Having observed the situation and seeing what's going on, you could ask the things that I see, what's under that? Where does that coming from? So you can immerse in the situation and see the traffic from the point of view of the drivers and the city planners and the pedestrians. You can look at the situation from many different points of view. Maybe in our little story, we explore the idea that some of this traffic is coming just from goods, getting the stores getting their supplies, food getting to the food vendors, for example, shoes getting to the shoe vendors. So there's these trucks.  And what you're seeing is the organizational processes and structures and the city's processes and structures that are underneath the things. That's where the things come from. Why did we ever think it was good to have cars in the first place? There was a reason for that, yeah? Well, this thing of immersion also has an enemy and that's cynicism. So when we see the world through other people's eyes, we've moved our center of attention to the edge of our beliefs and understanding. We'll start to see complexity that we didn't see before and we're going to see people that don't really do things the way we think we ought to do them, you know? So our creative work can be blocked by cynicism. We can say these people will never learn. We can say we've tried that before and it didn't work. It'll be too expensive. It's way too complicated. We get cynical based on our past disappointments. So the antidote to cynicism is to move your attention outside yourself. So you're no longer the only person or team or company involved. You're part of something bigger. You see yourself as part of the whole system, shoulder to shoulder with the other people that are living that situation. When you realize that you're just one part of this much bigger set of possibilities and you open your heart to working with everyone who is part of what's going on, much more becomes possible. There is one more yet deeper step that this can go. Observe the situation, immerse in it, see from many points of view. And if you've opened to truly see and let go of your presuppositions, you let go of the idea that you're the one that's supposed to fix it, supposed to make it better. You make room for something new to be born. Because those processes and structures aren't the root of the situation after all. There's an existing system in its full of people who also have their beliefs and their ways of seeing the world and their stories about what's good. So you can't get those new processes to come to life until you work with their root source, their roots, the priorities and possibilities of the people who are living out that situation. So and I tried to think of an example in our story. And I don't know. I mean, maybe you've discovered that that some things don't have to go to the store, they can go directly to from the warehouse to people's workplace and they pick it up and it's by scooter and there's fewer trucks and so I don't know. I'm not I'm not trying to think of solutions, but I'm trying to give you examples of how the people together who open in this way who let go of the old of the way things are to make room for the way things could be something really surprising now can arise that you wouldn't have conceived of before. So this is the place where something profound can happen because you're working at a profound level. And you reframe the purpose, reframe the principles. So now when you work with the with the new processes and structures, your prototyping those, they're trying to bring to life a completely new way of seeing the situation. But of course, letting go of the way things are the way things we do the way we do things around here also has an enemy. And that is fear. It is, it is scary to change. It's, you can you can feel inadequate. You can feel like we're going to fail. You can feel like this is too big for me. It's scary to collaborate with people. Do you trust them? They're unlike yourself.  So the step that the the courageous step in this journey, this this creative journey is to open yourself in such a way that you see yourself as part of the larger thing that's happening, your your beliefs and presuppositions kind of dissolve.  And what you're working with is the sense of possibility that there's a kind of a future that wants to be born now that everybody is just kind of seeing this as a part of a whole is kind of new. And and you're you're working from raw possibility of this of this group of people together. So that that future, it becomes your customer. Now, I'm not saying that this is like the process to follow. I'm not prescribing a process. I'm saying this I'm saying that work that that touches the roots and soil of a situation work that has a chance of bringing something better. Meaning full something meaningful for people and something that really lasting it requires deep creativity. And deeply creative work means connecting your insides, your sense of care, your sense of connection, your sense of who you are to the situation you're working with and the people that live it. artists do this, you know, writers do this, engineers do this, positions do this, teachers and mothers and religious leaders, lots of people do this kind of deep creative work. And yes, designers do it too. However, it has certainly gone out of fashion in industry. It's something that it's almost lost. Although it's very thriving and other other parts of life. So whatever your personal story or whatever the story of your team or organization, we're all invited to participate in work that's bigger than ourselves. And the truth is that our work is already bigger than ourselves. We are already having impact in the world, we can't help it, our decisions affect the world all the time. So when we embark on it, and trying to do this, this kind of more deeply creative work, the heart of the work and the quality of the work is not related to the intelligence of the team, or the your ability, your, your, your skill, your craft. Those are useful, we all have gifts to give, but the heart of the work is our openness to the world, and responsibilities are openness to taking our place in the creation, taking place in the in part of something that's growing, that even sometimes even despite ourselves. So that turns out is has been a challenge for people throughout throughout the centuries. This thing of moving from I to we creatively has been a challenge for people. Maybe I don't know since the Stone Age, for all I know. So that leads to the second, the second journey. The reason that great poetry and literature is popular is because it reports on the experiences that all humans share. And I've, I've made a shift and been in the process of making a shift to work that starts with social questions, as I said. And as I've been doing that, I've been been learning from people who have studied that kind of the more soulful or or mythical stories about this kind of work. And I thought I would kind of synthesize and and pass some of that on to you. So this isn't this is a synthesis, not a particular myth or a particular story. It's kind of a combination of things I've pulled together. sources I'm using, by the way, I should say that some of what I just showed comes from a fellow at MIT named Otto Sharmer. And David White, a poet and Joseph Campbell scholar of mythology or some other sources I'm drawing from. So this story begins with being asleep, a kind of creative snoozing, a state of kind of comfort with the way things are, it may be working to please others following the script that was handed to you by your by your culture. So I don't know about you. But for me, that's meant things like living up to please others, others expectations, or choosing mostly by criteria I was given by my upbringing, feeding as often like I was, you know, kind of numb, my intellectual passions were growing, but my emotions are not connected to my work. And kind of living on the contingency plan, living until waiting for the right job, the right money, the right invitation, the right request. So that, you know, there there comes a point, I mean, a lot of people live a fair amount of their lives in this state. Yes, we all do sometimes. There comes a point, though, when you've had enough, David White says, you know, with all of our goals, mission statements, positive thinking, bonus mileage plans and future career moves safely to the rear, we can look around and find ourselves slightly chilled in a small unfamiliar clearing and a dark wood facing that stubborn not to be accepted life we've made and must call our own. One day we wake and see our life as we've made it. And that leads to this kind of the next chapter waking up Dante, in his inferno, was he 16th century? Think this is the opening lines of the inferno, in the middle of the road of my life, I awoke in a dark wood where the true way was wholly lost. And in the middle of the road of my life, I woke in a dark wood where the true way was wholly lost. White says in three lines, Dante says that the journey begins right here, in the middle of the road, right beneath your feet. This is the place is no other place and no other time. When you do wake, you are rousing a different part of you, a barely experienced life that lies at your core. Having forgotten this central soul experience, you do not recognize where you are. The part of you that loved your sleep feels as though you are lost. So the poetic tradition is that this is a scary place, but it's the necessary place of beginning. So if you feel like, I can't see, and I don't know where to go, then you've begun. So this sense of inadequacy, and a kind of setting out from home, setting out from your comfortable place. So now you're going to pay attention to the world in a little bit different way. Now, after Dante woke in the woods, he walked not too far, he got to the edge, and he could see the sun shining off the mountain peaks in paradise. And that's exciting. So he's walking along, and it wasn't very far before he encountered three monsters, a leopard, a wolf and a lion that represented some of his flaws and temptations. And that's just a repeating theme, starting out on the journey meeting a monster. In Beowulf, Epic, it's a different monster. It's a monster named Grendel. And so I use this story and the interpretation of this story meant a lot to me at a certain time. So I put Beowulf Lake in here. If you don't know the story, a king, Rothgar, had this great hall in the north, and he had a problem with a monster named Grendel, who kept coming in and killing his warriors and dragging them off into the into the night.  So Beowulf and his men wait, Grendel comes in, tremendous fight. He manages to tear off Grendel's arm, Grendel goes off and dies. So big celebration, drinking and jewels and rewards. And something else comes into the hall and drags warriors off into the night. It's Grendel's mother. And when when David White tells this story, he says, it's not the thing you fear, it's the mother of the thing you fear. So Grendel's mother lived at the bottom of a of a black cold lake.   The point of the lake is that there is something for each of us that holds us back, that kills our courage and kind of drags it off into the night. Something that keeps us from living out our true desire. There are things about yourself that you're not proud of are things that you've come to feel are inadequate or ugly. But they're still part of you.  The refusal to go down into the lake is the refusal to be eaten by life. The delusion is that there might be a possibility of immunity from the failures that accompany our exploration in the world. But the story says you're going to be swallowed by something greater one way or another. So the real question is not one of winning or losing, but of experiencing life with an ever increasing depth. The storyteller says, why not go down at home or at work into the lake consciously, like Beowulf?  The stakes are high. Well, having gone into the lake, thought the monster dove into life. The next step in this mythical story, recurring theme in the story is coming home and taking your place in story after story over centuries, the hero leaves home on a quest. And after a long journey, he eventually comes to a place that he recognizes as the very home that he left.  He's able to integrate all the parts of himself. And and and along the way, kind of the in the act of returning a spark was lit, that his his creative fire. Yes, coming home and taking your place means this, it means accepting yourself just as you are as enough. Those things that made you afraid to go on the lake, you've accepted them as part of you. It's not that you banish them or conquered them. It's not that you became perfect, you just came home to yourself, you understand that that's part of you. So I'm going to read a couple of poems. I have two minutes. I'm probably going to use four. This is an example of a poet working with with these themes, Derek Walcott, Love After Love, the time will come when with isolation, you will greet yourself arriving at your own door in your own mirror. And each will smile at the other's welcome. And say, sit here, eat. You will love again the stranger who was yourself.  Take down the love letters in the bookshelf, the photographs, the desperate notes, peel your own image on the mirror, sit, feast on your life. This is a poem about coming home to yourself. Yeah, welcoming your whole self. The last chapter in this story, you know, for a long time, I thought, oh, I took my place. I'm feeling some creative fire. I'm more okay with my flaws. I'm just going to bring them along to work with me. That's it. Now I will do my work.  The lake was the first and maybe kind of one of the scariest. But I now I kind of see maybe that's how life is going to be. I see life as involving a series of frontiers I experience new beginnings all the time, in my family and I work personal life in cooking. And I come to see them as like coming to a river, or coming to the top of a ridge and seeing new territory on the other side. And then I'm faced with the choice. Do I go there? Do I make that crossing? It's not comfortable. And often, I've realized that I've been at the edge of something for quite a while, and not even recognized it. Oh, that's why I've not liked the last four projects. Because I've already moved on. I've already I've already wanting something else. Yeah. So here's David White. We can experience a kind of frontier identity. No matter what threshold we find ourselves in, in each stage of life, there's a way of understanding the particular threshold you're on. And living a life that's up to the conversation you're asked to join, continually invited into new and bigger conversations. I will skip a little bit in the interest of time. And say that, say this, this story of our lives with all of these possibilities, this this continuing growth, this journey is held together through a kind of a of central imagination. In in poetic tradition, imagination is not just the ability to think up new things. Some of the European boats would call that secondary imagination. Primary imagination is your ability to form a central image inside yourself, or to discover that image inside yourself, an image that makes sense of all the thousands of images you're involved with in your life. There's a faculty of imagination and human beings is able to make sense of any level of complexity, and to give you a place to stand at the center of it and a ground from which to step into your new life. So I'm just going to close with a poem. Another one. This is David White, Santiago, and I've kind of extracted parts of it. It's kind of dense. So I encourage you to ask Google about it and read it line by line, but we'll just read it. I think it's a nice another nice journey story. The road scene than not seen.  And the way forward always in the end, the way that you followed the way that carried you into your future that brought you to this place. So that one day you realize that what you wanted had already happened long ago, and in the dwelling place you had lived in before you began and that every step along the way you carried the heart and the mind and the promise that first set you off and drew you on. And that you were, I love this line, you were more marvelous in your simple wish to find a way than the gilded roofs of any destination you could reach. As if all along you thought the endpoint might be a city with golden towers and cheering crowds and turning the corner what you thought was the end of the road. You found just a simple reflection.  So welcome to the frontier and thank you for very kind. Thank you. Yes, thank you so much. Yeah, I will.