Welcome to PR Tech Wednesdays, the weekly webinar where thought leaders discuss the latest in PR Tech. If it's Wednesday, it's PR Tech Wednesdays. I'm your host, Eric Schwartzman. We do this every Wednesday from 12 to 1 p.m. Pacific time. It's free. And you can sign up at PRTechWednesdays.com. Our guest today is Steve Lore. He's a senior writer and technology reporter from the New York Times. He's a leading expert on the corporations that dominate computing today. Steve, welcome to PR Tech Wednesdays. Glad to be there. Thank you, Eric. I want to start with a quick shout out to the EFF, the Electronic Freedom Foundation Champion's User Privacy, Free Expression and Innovation through Impact Litigation, Policy Analysis, Grassroots Activism and Technology Development. The Electronic Freedom Foundation is a U.S. 501C3 non-profit and you can donate online at EricSchwarzman.com forward slash EFF. Our Bookster Gram of the Week is brought to you by the 2020 Startups Guide for PR, which you can download and learn how to sequence PR campaigns based on your growth stage at EricSchwarzman.com forward slash startup. So this week's Bookster Gram is the mom test by Rob Fitzpatrick. Rob is a tech entrepreneur who learned the hard way that what people tell you in the early stage about your company is generally wrong and how to avoid getting and acting on bad information when you're at a tech startup searching for a product market fit. Now this book is about how to talk to customers and learn if your business is a good idea when everyone's lying to you because they don't want to hurt your feelings and just want to make you go away. It has all sorts of practical tips on asking the right questions. It's a quick read and if you're not at a tech startup and you do any kind of market research, this book will help you cut through the niceties and capture better insights. It's a wonderful little book. Check it out. All right, let's do this. I have I have plenty of questions. So be as brief as you like. I promise we will not run out of things to talk about. Okay. So now, since the last time we met, it was 2006, you key noted the PRSA Technology Conference. And at the time, you were not 100% allocated to technology news. And today, tech crosses over into economics and politics. It's really so much more than just a business newsbeat. Absolutely. It's it's it's, you know, it's part of the fabric of everything really. So tell us what you cover primarily these days. I think it might be this technology and economics and that covers a broad swath of things. So recently I've done a lot on competition issues in big tech antitrust. Since in the past, I was the cover the Microsoft investigation and trial in the nineties. And it was along at the time, along with the OJ trial and Limburg trial, the only one we wrote about every single day. And now with the four big tech companies, Google, Amazon, Facebook and Apple to some degree, you know, a lot of these issues have come back. So I'm doing doing that and I do a lot of kind of workplace stuff, you know, you know, kind of my classic description of this is, you know, 1520 years ago, I remember asking Bob Reich, who was then the labor labor secretary had left being labor secretary. What's your best bet for good jobs? The modern economy for the two thirds of Americans who do not have 40 college degrees. And his answer at the time was a geek squad for everything else, you know, the best buy people and the care and the feeding of all machines in all kinds of industries. I mean, it was pretty good answer then. The answer today would be more software inflected. But so I'm interested in a lot of those programs that try to prepare people for careers which happened. I mean, tech is only part of it because there seems to be demand there. And you can actually measure the skills. So there's a number of programs that have looked at that mostly nonprofits are the ones I've written about. For everyone that's on the call, I want you to know that the chat room is open for questions. So if you have questions for Steve, put them in there. Walk us through. I mean, you know, here we have a little porthole into the gray lady, you know, in Manhattan and we see activity in the newsroom. Walk us through if you would sort of the process behind how an idea becomes an article in the New York Times. It depends on the subject. I mean, if you're in Washington covering breaking news and stuff's obvious. If you're in a more feature writing beat, you propose a story to your editor and they say yes or no. We think this is a good idea, but you'd like to steer it in this direction. And then it's up to you to do it. It's not particularly complicated. Newspapers, you know, news organizations are just incredibly decentralized organizations. So nobody has carte blanche. Like you can't go and say, look, this is what I want to write. You still have to get approval from someone? Yeah, yeah, I mean, basically tell them you're going to do it.   There's not too many noes. Is there some sort of a meeting that you have everyone in your department where you come together and the tech group has a meeting Monday, midday. It's one 30 hour time, 1030 San Francisco time.  I mean, we also have a kind of list of stories that you're working on so forth. So it isn't sure isn't, you know, everybody go around show and tell. But it's mainly kind of what to be aware of, you know, the current week and then any other kind of things to have to discuss. Is there any sort of technology platform that you guys have so that everyone can see what everyone else is working on so there's no overlap. Yeah, and we've got a Google Doc with the story list. That's, you know, available to everyone. It's simple. It's a simple Google Doc. Yeah. How many people in that meeting in that tech meeting. It sort of depends. But yeah, people come in from different places. Yeah, 1516 kind of thing. And several of them I imagine teleconferencing in. Yeah, I mean, the China and London people only rarely do. But yeah, people it's Washington. I mean, half the San Francisco Bureau kind of shows up it doesn't. I mean, they all cut the awkward, you know, they'll work from home for largely or a lot of them do to be fair, not all. Is it a structured meeting? Is there like a set format or how does it go? How long does it take? It depends. Pewing Tam is the is the technology editor and she starts it out and says what the agenda is. And if there's not much to say with it can be a short meeting or it can be it can range from 20 to 40 minutes. So once you get the go ahead on a story, talk to us a little bit about, you know, if it's a if it's a story that involves a company. Talk to us about whether or not you use that company's website to gather information. You care about a company's website. Does it matter? Yeah, it's one thing I was checked as I do LinkedIn for anybody I'm talking to. I rarely do stories on individual companies themselves. I mean, the throwaway line I was used to people is, you know, I'm not going to write about an individual company unless it's a large one in trouble and then I have to. But and that's not entirely true, but not most of what I do are kind of theme stories that that include individual companies. But yeah, I don't look the company website, particularly for startups, right is illuminating. It can be it gives you a good overview of what you know what they do. So it's yeah, it's one thing to look at. Is it enough if it's on a company website or do you need to sort of verify that like you trust information on a company website? Well, it depends what it is.  You know, and different websites are done different ways.  Others are, you know, are more marketing. So this is a question from Mark Morganstein comes in on the chat room. He says, What's the balance for you and your team regarding day of news and long form features? And when do feet and and when do went and when you do features, do you like to find characters on your own? Or do you like to be provided with characters? Yeah, look, you like to be like to find characters on your own usually. As far as the first question, the mix of daily stuff versus features, it's, you know, you're always aware of what's going on daily, many really daily stories for us.   I mean, that way lights madness. You know, it's just, you know, that's, that's not what we do. And that's not where we add value.  Do you pay attention to any corporate blogs? No, except when I'm referred to them. You know, if I see a link to something we took, we took up this issue here, you ought to take a look at that or something on Twitter refers to what I do. But I don't, I don't, there's no routine blogs, corporate blogs I'm watching. Are you using any of the public relations newswire services, you know, the ones that are used by publicly traded companies to make non selected disclosures? No, again, I mean this, you're talking about like the PR newswire, right? Or business wire or newswire. Yeah, there's quite a few of them. Yeah, I mean, only when it comes up on a search. And so when it does come up on the search, do you read press releases? Yeah, sure, I can. Do you read them or do you just skim them? I mean, do you ever actually read all the way down to the boilerplate and read the boilerplate? Well, the boilerplate is that, you know, that part at the bottom that says, you know, what the company does, right? Yeah. Yeah, I mean, that can sometimes be the most illuminating. But mostly, I mean, those kinds of press release, you look for what people said in the past.  I'm going to jump on this, you know, no way.  That's kind of interesting. This question comes from Jill. She says, what holds more weight in securing a story? Numbers, you know, quantitative information like revenue, user count, or uniqueness of the product, something new, new and useful?  And something that catches your attention is one thing. But it's, you know, usually it's the whole point of doing all these stories is that there is a, you know, something is reflective of something broader, right? Some broader trend. And that is usually, you know, these days, if you can't measure that, it probably is not there. Let's break it down. I don't want to just be generic on this next question. But I want to talk about, you know, engaging with public relations people. And I want to talk about your preferences. So let's say it's hard news, something breaking that is, you know, of importance. How do you want to be contacted in that case? Not only rarely. I mean, in a sense, it's got to be pretty big news. I was, you know, before IBM announced that Jenny Rometti was going to step down, right? After the close of market one day. I mean, I did get into it. I got a call from, you know, all the top PR guys there at IBM, almost at the same time as crossing the wire, right?  It's got to be pretty big. It's got to be very big, actually. I mean, for us to cover it. But if it is really big, do you want a phone call or an email? I want, if it's really big, I want both. Just so I don't miss it, you know, don't miss it. How many emails are you getting each day? How many email pitches would you say you're getting each day? I don't know about pitches. But, you know, I've got an old email address which is kind of widely used and let's just see. My inbox has 310,493 emails. Just to frame it, you know. So, you know, I can get 40, 50 emails a day. But usually 40 or 50. But usually, you know, some small, tiny percentage I will open. Some of them, you know, if you're working on a story and people are back and forth, and you're fact-checking, I mean, that stuff is what you're looking for. Other things that come in, I, you know, might do it at the end of the day to sort of take a look at what we've got. Do you use any spam filtering technology to screen out bulk email sends? No. I mean, but the New York Times has some. And so, of those 40 to 50, what percentage would you say you open? Ten percent. And you open it based on the subject line, the sender? Yeah, the subject line. Also, the sender, I would imagine, if it's coming from... Of course, yeah, yeah.   Right to reply.  Whatever. But, you know, so I, and I look at just some of it's just arbitrary. Something comes in if you can, you know, it's obviously not for me. It might be of interest to somebody else at the time. So I, you know, reply and pass on the email address of the other reporter. And what makes a good subject line? Are there any trigger words?  It has to sync with something I'm looking at or interested in.  Right? That's good. Oh my God, I got to open that, right? You know, Green Carter had those empty modifier words that are so famous that everyone talks about. He had this list of like empty modifier words that could not be included in stories. And they were words that were so overused that they were devoid of meaning. For me, the one I keep seeing in tech that just comes up over and over again is effective and efficient.  Are there any sort of empty modifier keywords that if you see them in a subject line, it's like, yeah, I'm not opening that. Oh, I won't say I'm not opening it. But, you know, I mean, look, they're the usual overused marketing terms. I mean, everything is AI now. Right?  There's no company that doesn't engage in AI. So, so, you know, the filter there to get over that towards something substantive is pretty high.  I mean, it just, you know. So how do you feel if, you know, someone goes around you if you don't reply?  Totally free market. I'm fine with it. There's no, I mean, if you're proprietary, you're doing too little. There's plenty to go around. I don't, I don't have any problem with that. I mean, you know, it's one thing if you're halfway into a story, right?  But other than that, I just, you know, look, I, it is, it's, you know, people have a different time. They're not focused on one thing at a particular time. I wouldn't care almost what it is. You couldn't get to something else for three days. Yeah. You know, all that kind of stuff goes into the mix. So I think it's, to me, it's a free market. There's no proprietary stuff. It's like what I was overseas for a decade from the times. Tokyo, Manila, London, bunch of the places in between. But in London, we were in the same building as the Wall Street Journal. And I, you know, they wanted to ask what the, what, what working with the bureau chief was like. And the journal, I mean, bureau chiefs were filters. And they, you know, they could control what story pitches went in. You had to get it past them to get the pitch inside. Joe Leligo was my, was the bureau chief when I was asked this. I said, Hey, I don't think he reads it. My stuff when it goes in the paper, let alone before it goes in. I mean, it just, it's a, you know, it's a, it's a pretty free market place. And I always ask him. This next question is from AB, Amy Robin. She says, do you ever take in-person meetings with corporate folks for background or introductions? Yeah. Yeah, I do. I do.   But if, you know, look, if somebody's in an industry that I'm looking at or doing something that looks particularly intriguing, I, you know, yeah, I do.  What's a good length for an email? Introductory email, sort of a query just to take your temperature on whether or not you're, might be interested in a story. Three paragraphs. I mean, arbitrarily, but yeah. Attachments okay or no? Yeah, sure. I mean, it depends. I mean, but if the first three paragraphs don't get you interested, the attachment is, you know, you're not going to go to it.   Who's on your team? Who's back in you? Right. That's, you know, to get attention for stories, it's, you know, it's somewhat individual companies. It's somewhat the same. This next question comes from Garrett. He says, what are your pet peeves when reading story ideas, pitch emails? Somebody has no idea what I've done or what I, you know, I mean, you have to know who you're dealing with. I mean, it's so obvious to see the stuff that somebody just pasted your name at the top of it. And it's, you know, right? And it's, it's a carte blanche email.  Does any of this resonate with any of that or not? I mean, you know, that's, that's a pretty good indication.  Yes. Are there, is that what you're most interested in right now? Or is there anything else you're tracking closely? And that question's from Sarah. Yeah, I mean, look, there's themes. That's one of the themes. Again, this kind of, you know, the progression of modern, you know, AI technology through the workplace is another one.   So that is, yeah. Are you, are you looking pretty, you know, intensely at AI right now? Is that something that you are covering? Yeah, sure.  Like analyze the sentiment of a story. What's your opinion on that? Yeah, I mean, sentiment's probably pretty easy actually of the things it can do because what, you know, what those sentiment analysis stuff does is, is link words to sentiment and then it's a matching problem. So that's not hard.  Right. And that's, that's, you know, you don't have to worry too much about that. It isn't going to happen anytime soon. There's a young guy who is in here, who's an AI expert and he was, he's got to start up. And as he said about general AI, that's a very few people drinking large amounts of Pule. It's, you know, the kind of, one of the nice things about the quotidian stuff is it actually, that's where you're really going to get productivity gains. You're going to build businesses. You know, things like robotic process automation.  The least intelligent form of artificial intelligence. And that's, I mean, that's where it kind of rises up. And then there are big questions. I mean, how, how, how broad can natural language processing go? For example, I mean, because that eats into all the knowledge professions. And what with the great advances since 2012 in deep learning have been in, you know, classification and recognition problems, that image recognition, speech identification, translation and so forth.  And even playing go board games, board games are great. They're a bounded world, you know. I'm writing a report now on the state of media monitoring. And so I've been briefing with a lot of the CEOs of the news and social media monitoring platforms. And then I've been kind of gut checking what I hear from them against academics at Stanford and other schools that are doing natural language processing.  Let's say, for example, there was an article written about maybe a roundup story about mobile phone services. Comparing the quality or rather the richness of the of the subsidies of various services against each other.  There'd be so many different topics and subtopics in a story like that, comparing the services to each other that if you tried to reduce, you know, the sort of the final judgment on whether or not that piece was positive or negative to a single sentiment, it would be impossible. And if what you're doing is counting words, right, and processing language rather than understanding language, right, that information would not be accurate. And so what I'm hearing, what seems to be the consensus I'm hearing from most of people who are much smarter than me is, you know, when it comes to something like natural language understanding, you know, that is a form of AGI and we are not there yet. And so human assisted AI when it comes to interpreting sentiment is, you know, very reasonable, but to automate that process is really risky. I'd agree. It's, you know, for example, I mean, this is a few years back that there was a piece that did artificial intelligence in legal profession, right? And they, you know, in earlier years, individual, you know, kind of electronic discovery and so forth had been, there were these predictions that lawyers would go away, right? And what happened was that MIT labor professor and North Carolina law professor got a hold of billing records for how, you know, lawyers really do spend their time and then seeing what could, you know, looking at what could be automated and not, and part of that was then looking at, you know, legal startups. And one of the guys who, for a Toronto firm is who had worked on the Human Genome Project and he was asked by a friend who was a lawyer and was head of the startup, take a look at this. He figured, oh, that'll be like a weekend's worth of work. Well, four years later, he was still at it, right? I mean, all of this, and it works best with specific domains. I mean, it's, you know, if you can do a legal profession, medical profession, specific words and things, it's, you know, you can make a lot more progress than you can in just, you know, generally, you know, with conversations, trying to figure out what people are saying, right?  I mean, machines do it differently. So that's not necessarily a problem. It doesn't have to be like humans do it. I mean, the way humans do it. But the output has got to be something that we would recognize as you put it, understanding. Talk to us about your policy on news embargoes. Usually I'm fine with them because they're not going to be stories anyways. I mean, look, if it's something, in a sense, if it's something that's coming, look, this is how something came to you and you wouldn't have know it otherwise.  If it's fine that's taken embargo, then you're not going to look at it. You know, it's, yeah, I don't do a ton of daily stuff. I mean, I think the guys in the journal take a different approach to this, right?  You have to, you know, you don't want to be held back by the company, right? And then there's other things. I just got a piece for, we'll run tomorrow. It's based on new research that a bunch of scientists have done, which was being published in the journal Science at 2 p.m. tomorrow afternoon. Do I agree to that embargo? Sure.  I think it's, you know, it's a judgment call as to how interested you are. And, you know, it's one thing if you, you know, if you follow the company so closely, you kind of knew this was coming anyways. I mean, I think that's where a lot of really deep beat reporters were. But that's not, that's usually those things are so granular that they're hardly, you know, they're not stories for us. Well, let's say it really is a story, like Microsoft has some serious new product.  And you know, they're briefing the journal and they're briefing business insider and whoever the other usual suspects are. You know, when, before you get into that type of a situation or there are certain questions, you're going to want answers to before you decide whether or not you're going to cover it. What would the terms be? I mean, what I would have to do is get some indication that like product announcements I almost never cover. I mean, companies got to sell their own stuff. That's not what I mean. What if it's the Apple Watch or something of that magnitude? Yeah, sure. Then we do. I mean, Brian Chan does, I'm sure, right.  No, that, if it's, if it's, if it's open and shut, sure. I mean, and then there's the debate here. I mean, some of these Apple products we've actually, I think, I think, we actually fronted, you know, it's, you know, something when I first joined the paper that never would have happened taking a commercial product. Are you kidding me?   So I'm still glad I don't have to do it. I mean, I can just remember being involved in so many embargoes that were such nail biters because we were so afraid that someone would go early and screw everyone else over. Is that not something you're concerned about in an embargo situation?   I mean, some of these embargoes move around a little bit. They actually wasn't conscious in one case. There could be mistakes. They could be, you know, they can move around and then you kind of miss an email or something.   I don't think so. What about exclusives? Are you doing a lot of exclusives? And it's so, do you have a policy around that?  And that's what animates most of my stories. So I don't, you know, I'm not, I don't have the issues that, on that front, that, you know, Dai Wakabayashi who covers Google would or Micah Isaac who covers Facebook would or Jack Nickas who covers Apple would or Karen Weiss who covers Amazon and Microsoft would. Right. So it's, it's, you know, it's just far less an issue for me than it is for them. But I mean, you know, always you would prefer to have it exclusively than be part of a pack. Talk to us about some of your favorite news sources. Are there any sort of underground kind of niche news sources that you really like and pay attention to? No, but it's underground niche news sources. But I mean, you know, I look at the National Bureau of Economic Reports, you know, working papers and those are circulated every Monday. You know, there's ideas, you know, things that are going on there. I used to, I used to follow Techneme more than I do now, just to see what's the kind of out there. You know, look, then there's all the kind of basic stuff.  I mean, we, you know, I live in a household where we subscribe to them all, including the Daily News, only the New York Post we do not.    I mean, if you're really actually doing work, you're not following Twitter, right? If you're an editor, you are. If you're a reporter, you're not. I mean, you're going deep on individual stuff and talking to people, right? And so how much time you then pull out and look at some of this other stuff or have, you know, have tweaked that going all the time is, you know, that's just not something I'm going to do, but I do follow it. I mean, you know. Do you listen to any podcasts? Yeah, but most, I mean, I catch the weekly or the daily at the end of the day. And then there's just different ones.  He does some really terrific stuff.  These are in episodes. He gets experts to come in.  I Spy is one that Foreign Policy magazine does on the international stuff. So I don't, you know, but I'm not, you know, I listen to Care Splishers once in a while. You know, but I'm not. Sorry, I missed that. You listen to who? Cara Swisher. Okay. All right, Kyle. Recode. Yeah, exactly. Which is, you know, which is more in the, you know, the category that you're talking about. You know, right? I mean, business related, right? Do you find like, if you're working on a story and you haven't spoken to the subject that, to characters who might be key to the story, do you ever go on to sort of the podcast world to find them and listen to their appearances on other shows or maybe, you know, is that a resource for you podcasting? Are you using that? Sure. Or, you know, YouTube has a lot of presentations that the person's given in the past.  I mean, that's all potential. When you're looking to add YouTube videos and there's a bunch of them and you've got some which are presentations at conferences and some which are presentations in an academic environment. Would you favor the academic environment? It depends what the subject is. And there aren't usually that many. And I, you know, I find them this way. Everybody else does search. Talk to us about your search. I imagine you must have very advanced. I mean, my, I would think, I don't know. I mean, I would think you don't just put a keyword in. You do an advanced boolean query. Is that true? No, I use a lot of words, though.  Are you using negative keywords? This and this, not that or? I'm not. I'm not. I'm not.  You know, you can put in the filters. But I mean, for, for regular search, I do not. I'm so surprised because you're covering these enormous companies that I would think you would get so much noise. Yeah. Although I'm not, I'm almost never trawling randomly. Right. I just, you know, it's, I mean, I'm looking for something specific usually. So it's not. Can you give us an example? Yeah, sure.  I mean, that is, that's a revolution. And then there's, you know, freedom of information at filings, which are a kind of a dark art. I mean, some, some places are really good. Some places, you know, you could go forever, right? Your federal agencies and, you know, maybe in the next year, right? Where sometimes, you know, bang, you go right away. So if that is, and to be honest with you, people who are FOIA experts, you know, and that kind of do that. I mean, both the Washington Bureau here and here in New York. So there's, you know, there are people who've mastered those arts or as well as one can. This question comes from George Bradley and Ashlyn Lepore-Russi. And they're basically interested to know, like if you're a PR person that has a stable of academic experts that are genuine experts in different domains, how do you promote that as a resource to the media to comment on stories that they're writing? I try to be a matchmaker. In other words, you know, see what somebody, you know, pick your venue that you like this person to appear in and see who's been writing about the subjects that they're experts in.  I should, you know, I'm not in that game. I should know more than they do who the best people are. I mean, most of these fields, you know, that's, but in some, if you've got somebody that's done, particularly in any kind of really recent, you know, relevant research in the area that the person's writing about, you know, just let them know. That's interesting. And to be honest, the filter for academics is lower.  But the assumption, true or not, is that, you know, it's a more disinterested inquiry that they're making into the subject.  So what I heard, it's one of, repeat it back to you to make sure I understood. Because of your domain expertise, after 30 years covering this, you feel like you know the academics that are worth talking to. You don't necessarily need to be trotted out as stable of new experts every time there's a story because you know them already. Yeah, although you're always looking for different people.  I mean, there's a real effort to balance out these things to make sure they're women and minorities.  But, you know, imagine tenure at a university.   Right. And so, so it's no different.   No, there isn't. But there's, you know, there's a leaning toward that direction. So, I mean, new people, I'm not, you know, it's not like I know everybody, right. And new people come up all the time, including in antitrust, right. Or any of these kind of familiar fields.  Aren't very helpful. Here's an interesting question from Greg Wise. He says, do editors or publishing folks judge coverage in the times by how many clicks it receives or how many times it gets shared? Yeah, everything's measured. And that's a signal, but it's not, you know, it's, you know, you're guided by it, you're not ruled by it.  I mean, the amount of people in Rod Norland, for example, was there, you know, I mean, the resources spent on that are immense.  No, I mean, if we did it only by, I mean, we do, do a lot of opinion, we do a kind of smarter living stuff and then any big news, right? I mean, that's just not, I mean, that's not what we're going to do. So, yeah, you do it, but it doesn't have an effect sure it does.  It's just, it's, it's, it's, you know, it's good subject. It's, we ignored otherwise, yada, yada, yada. And it gets, you know, 20,000 page views, which is nothing for us, right. You know, you say, am I going to do one of these again? Right. Next time around, because they all take more time than you think, right. So, yeah, no, it has, it has, and we measure everything. There's not, I mean, to pretend that that's not a factor. This is case, but it's also, it's not, you know, I don't really know about his feet, but then my, my impression was in the day.  And, and also what's really changed, of course, is that advertising is a false God.  From between like, It's, it's a vlog, remember. But like 2011 to 2016, it ended in 16, right.  That was a PR person's dream. Because then a product announcement, you know, you kind of get two other calls, right, or two or three other calls and put in a short story. And you could write it in a looser tone, which is sort of fun, but it, you know, a proper job took the better part of the day, right. And so, you know, and they were set up, they were often pegged to some sort of announcement or something, right. They were brought them out, but basically this was, you know, the people who were involved in this, who were part of the announcement were, you know, the Amen chorus for the product, right. And part of that, the big, the rationale, was that we needed to create more content to sell ads against, right.  But everybody who's making it is a subscription business now in publishing. It's us, it's the journal, it's the Washington Post, it's, you know, it's the FT, right. I mean, the economists, I mean, I see the things that I subscribe to and how, you know, the New York Times never gave it away, the printed it, it was never, you know, it was never cheap, which was always, which was always good, right. Whereas, you know, the journal, I used to get it for like $90 a year, and then they had this big hunt to find out so much through companies, this big hunt to find out where to send things on the weekend because, you know, they didn't, you know, right, they were corporate subscriptions.  So ads don't matter anymore. So then they're all changed, you know, no, fewer better stories, right. And yes, is there a journalistic rationale? Sure there is. But, you know, the business context changed a lot of what we're doing.  And some things are much more, you know, if you're writing for, if you're in the cooking product or the crossword puzzle, or some of these specialized things, right, which are pure service journalism or entertainment, depending on your point of view, right.   At the Times, a lot of people on it, including on the editorial side, the op-ed page stuff. You know, it was an institutional commitment to do that. And if some of these stories don't get a lot of coverage, that's fine. You know, a lot of, you know, we're going to keep covering and keep covering and be honest. So that when things do get big, you know, you're there. And it's considered an important subject. So, in his book, AI Superpowers, former Google President Kaifu Li argues, China's disregard for personal privacy and personal property rights and a general nonchalance for personal privacy among Chinese consumers puts China in a stronger position to lead on AI. Because there's no data like more data in a machine learning world and there are fewer data collection restrictions over there. Do you think AI is going to, that China is going to lead on AI? In certain areas it might. And then there's the question of how much it can export it. You know, this is Belt and Road and stuff, right?  But I would argue there's diminishing returns to data.  It only gets you so far. So I, look, the only honest answer is it remains to be seen.  I think China is much better positioned, for example, to do these things that we feared Japan was in the 80s. I think China is much better positioned to fear Japan was in the 80s. And I was over there in the early 80s, right? This is just after Ezra Vogel at Harvard had written Japan as number one. And this is where, you know, there was concern about Americans being reduced to sweeping up around the supercomputers and flipping burgers to McDonald's, right? That was Mondale's famous line. My sense. I mean, I don't know China as well as Japan. It's, it's a more individualistic place. So there's more upside, you know, for China.   Why didn't they develop, you know, software business? You know, that were really competitive with the United States. And, you know, it's not, it's also 125 million people. It's not, it's a big market, even there. And his, you know, was, you know, individualism and so forth, right? I think China is a much better place than that than, you know, in some ways.  You know, all the Chinese students everywhere in our university. So I, you know, we'll see. We'll see. But I don't think, I don't think just data is manifest destiny and AI. You know, that line, there's no data like more data was coined by Cambridge Analytica founder Robert Mercer. And Cambridge Analytica used psychographic profiling for political advertising. And so obviously the more data they have, the better they can target those ads. Any thoughts on how psychographic profiling will show up in the upcoming presidential election? Yeah, again, I mean, we have people who, that's a full time beat here. So I assume more of the same. I'm personally unconvinced that it does more of the magnify what's already there.  You know, only responding to the stimuli they have. But that said, I mean, let's face a lot of this has, you know, this is deterring some people from going to the polls, encouraging others revving up the base and so forth. And everything we've read suggested, you know, the current administration was extremely good at and others are kind of trying it as well. So I, you know, one would think wouldn't say that the more of this fake stuff's around the higher your filter is. But, you know, we'll see. Steve, thanks for taking the time to do this. You've always been so generous. I want to do a final shout out to EFF, the electronic freedom Foundation, protecting your personal privacy online. More information at our source.com forward slash EFF. I want to thank our gold sponsors, Flux Branding, a world-renowned resource for defining your visual brand. Flux Branding is a group of creative visionaries and graphic designers dedicated to helping clients conceptualize and realize their brands online at Flux Branding.com and Digital Dragon, where children can develop the skills they need to prosper in the age of machines. Digital Dragon teaches digital literacy to tomorrow's programmers and technology entrepreneurs. More information at digitaldragon.com I want to invite you all to join us next week for a discussion beyond the newsbeat and conducting accurate, timely journals research so you can deliver your news to the right reporters with Muckrak CEO Greg Galant. As I mentioned earlier, I'm currently completing an extensive report on the state of news media and social media monitoring platforms. If you'd like a free copy you can sign up at for my PR Tech Secrets email newsletter at EricSchwarzman.com. That will cover using AI to monitor for relevancy and sentiment, monitoring articles behind paywalls, advanced boolean filtering, monitoring for business impact, PR attribution and more. You can get that again, sign up for a copy at EricSchwarzman.com. If you're not watching this live, you can go to PRTechWednesdays.com and register to attend these free weekly PR Tech briefings every Wednesday. If you're watching on YouTube, please like and subscribe to the channel. This has been EricSchwarzman. Thank you so much, Steve. Thank you. We'll see you next Wednesday. Thanks. Bye-bye.


A woman accused of murdering a baby she wanted to adopt remains behind bars tonight without bail. While she sits police are still trying to put together some major pieces of the puzzle. 30 year old Sarah Corten is charged with secondary murder and is accused of killing a two month old baby named Josephine two weeks ago in her Red Lake Falls apartment. The medical examiner concluded the baby died from multiple skull fractures and having her eyes detached. Corten said that's because she accidentally dropped the baby. The medical examiner said those injuries don't happen from a simple fall. I mean, everybody's got some ideas and things like that.  We have an adult sized person in a in a very small infant.  This is the first homicide case in Red Lake County in more than two decades. If you enjoyed this segment of Lakeland News, please consider making a tax deductible contribution to Lakeland PBS.


Hello, everyone. Welcome to federal joint six next talk. We are a community engagement ninjas who help newcomers feel right at home in the community and we're slowly getting started with contributing to the community as well. I'm Akash Deepad and I'm accompanied with Alberto, Andrea and Ripple. Let's get started with the presentation. Let's talk about what we plan to accomplish with the joint seg and the things that we wish to make happen. Starting with engaging in active communication among contributors, both prospective and existing ones, then giving self-contained and well documented issues to the new contributors for them to get a feeling of things that they're getting into. Then we lead and assist the prospective contributors to a point that they turn into successful ones down the line. After that, we build a better mentor-mentee connection among existing and prospective contributors. Finally, we move and provide a comfy communication channel that folks would want to use in order to dive into our world. Now, let us discuss more about how newcomers can feel right at home with us. One of the very first thing that new contributors would like to do is they would feel like picking up an issue ticket or to start working to get traction. All of this can be very functional in terms of approach and theory. It is one of the things that connects the contributors to the work instead of the community and we see them as not a friend but a person who wants to get stuff done. So a newcomer would really want to first get to know the folks around them in the community, then talk about relevant, latest and upcoming stuff, and then explore the teams and sub-projects that they would want to contribute to. We like to believe that for newcomers, discovering about new things should happen organically in a way that they would be able to figure out what is it that they would really like to contribute to. Moving on. Then the newcomers appreciated to go deeper into the things that they have singled out and picked that they would want to be a part of it, be it about designing shiny looking badges, packaging stuff into RPMs, making documentation, writing code or translating software. Everything could use some reading up and knowing about. So a newcomer would really want to first look around a documentation and applications and channels. There are always folks around you who definitely know more about a certain thing and they can be a source of information for you. Secondly, take the project that they're interested for for a spin to have a first-hand experience and thirdly to inform related teams and sub-projects if they come across any kinds of bugs or discrepancies or mistakes. We like to believe that for newcomers should not be assigned any issued tickets to start with. That is not what we do unless well they ask for the assignments of the tickets and that's entirely a different case. Finally, when newcomers become friends with the community and they know about the projects that they're interested in and they are literally into what they're doing in the community. It is now time with the exciting stuff that is to start with contribution. They literally get to decide the way they want to contribute, the team that they wish to be a part of and any extent of time and effort that they want to devote to the community, they get to choose. So, at this point in time when a newcomer is not a newcomer but a celebrated member of the community, they can get started with any of making pull requests for adding new features or fixing old issues or embracing their imagination by coming up with great designs or writing about the translating things that people should know about. Now for newcomers that they can call themselves a friend of Fedora and we really appreciate the time and effort that they put in into participating with the community. It's really the only way is up. I will now pass it over to Alberto who will delve into explaining how good we have been in our initiative so far. How successful has our initiative been so far? Well, we've done a lot of classrooms with a very great quality. Mostly in video classrooms are in YouTube and in YouTube channel of Fedora. So I will put the link soon in the chat. We have a complete session for the classrooms and yeah, the most recent was the RPM packaging. So, it's a great classroom. Thanks, Ankur, for that. And well, we had a lot of material to share with newcomers so new contributors benefit from these videos, from the documentation. Also, we have a lot of moderation and some questions on Fedora. It's a great part of boarding in the Fedora. So, we can do a lot of things here for newcomers, for users, for new contributors. So, helping these parts of the Fedora UNC are very important. Thanks, Luna. Yes, these videos. Okay, next slide, please. Okay, in Fedora we have a lot of words. You know, the last year we had well on 5,000 discussion posted, new posted. Mostly we sold with 500, maybe. Most of this work was done for no heroes. Here's the list. People can take the forum like on and make it a great place to search for questions for solving problems to contact the community. It's a great place. It was a titanic word from Ankur and other moderators to maintain Fedora like a place with great quality material. Now it's a great work. Next slide, please. So, who is this in numbers? The new forum to get newcomers, well, to trade newcomers, new contributors is open a ticket, mostly yes. I don't see the slides. Okay, there it is. We open mostly 63 new tickets. No. Our current rate of success more or less are a, I think, at 28% done new contributors graduate. We have some cold tickets, you know, past some time from the, the wind up when we opened the ticket to now. We got some relative advance of these are 34 mostly the 50% of the, of the tickets are in this part. Well, we have some people that say, hey, well, this is not for me. Thanks. Now this is a, I need to experiment these and know who is this and say, well, this is not for me are more or less the 7% of the tickets. Maybe we can say, hey, it's not so good numbers, but really they are. If you think a little bit about for this, you know, when we can imagine in a talk with 100 people. If you ask, oh, we, we, we went free open source, high quality operating system. Well, of course, we are talking about Fedora. And they say, mostly everyone, we raise the hand and say, oh, I went that. No, this would create. And if you ask, well, okay. How many wants to open a but still a ticket. Mostly 10 mostly seven will raise the hand of 100 was okay. Seven 10% 10% of the people website. If you ask, okay, we want to submit the patch or, or open it or a package the, the software you want or translate the, the documentation you wanted you in your mother language. You say, okay, maybe one of the 100. I think mostly in this a contributors or fellow contributors are a people that have the value of the, oh, have the value are more value of people know are very rare are very, very difficult to to get. These numbers are great for, for these things now we, we, we now know is not, is not easy. Get people to contribute in the project or in every free and open source project is very difficult. And we want to make, make it easy. So, thinking about it. This is a great numbers for the sick. I think we can do better. I don't know who. And now we are working and we are research who can do this better. So, thanks for her minutes. I, I, I said the words for Andy. Andy, you are prepared. Yes, I prepared. So, thanks Alberto. Yeah, how do we plan on incentive raising participation. So, next slide. Yeah. So, we're shiny sparkling recognition. How do we plan this so become a part so help newcomers and become a valuable part of the community. And this is, this are badges we have designed and they're coming soon. So, and so the ideas and there, for example, the first bet. Yeah. What it wants a person becomes a proud member of join. So, those of you who may be familiar with the badges system know that getting a badge or receive badges for participation, volunteering in several stuff stuff in Fedora. Let me say QA testing or translation wiki. QA testing is also a good place to start and help. By the way, is my opinion always a good feedback of Fedora and to motivate newbies to to stay and to work on Fedora. This is a kind of, in my opinion, giving feedback and appreciating the world into work. The other batch is create a better onboarding experience to the ecosystem awarded to once a person closes a welcome ticket as complete. Yeah, a quantified batch which can be earned with more involvement. Is it so that this if you actually, I will say this later, but okay. Anyhow, therefore, this, this batch will be awarded if you are. Well, yeah. Our order close the welcome ticket as complete. And so, and all it's fine. Then next slide, please. So ideas and specialist. This is awarded to the person who comes up with an idea to improve the process. Well, this is, in my opinion, a really nice idea of this batch, because many of the interest on newbies new volunteers have awesome interesting ideas. And they, and some of the ideas are really help always helpful and improving Fedora. And we're really great and grateful because to be honest, if you're in a system, you know, maybe from work or from other groups. Not maybe Fedora social groups or other sport groups. If you are long in this group, you, you, you may be not really open for other ideas or you don't think left or right. And so newbies are always an inspiration. If they have really nice ideas. So, yes. And the last batch was onboarding specialist just awarded once a person completes process related to join sick. Yeah. This would be depending on his interests. Like, let me say if someone is a good wants to translate or wants to is has coding skills and want to prove RPM package or fix something about etc. So this will be in his specific interest. This batch can be awarded. But as I said at the beginning, these pages are created, but they are coming soon. So stay up to date and be surprised at the next slide, please. So how do you get started with contributing to us like this slide. So the first, first thing first is you have to create an AS account Fedora account system. And this is in the important step. Well, I remember I can say this. We've recently talked about that you are the one have welcomed me and guided me to Fedora. And this is really so, yeah, I guess we talked about two or three years ago, three years maybe probably. And yeah, and you say I'm still here because of this wonderful, awesome community and team here and well also things. Yeah, now, as part of presenting Fedora join sick. Thank you, Alberto and Akadish. Yeah. Then if you have created the your FAS account, then we are going to open up a welcome ticket. And with this welcome ticket, which you will find on a page, you I have to sometimes I say, but you will say, find you very, very important steps to go through. A lot of things to wait clear instructions and and one of the important aspect is also I'm in the next slide is because I'm talking about it. One of the important steps is you have you introduce yourself. We prefer. Yeah, still on may join mailing list. Because all can read this for sure you and this will be attitude as well to the joint Peggy group. But we say writing introduction email to the joint mailing list because everybody recognizes sees and can write back and welcome you in personally. And then, um, yeah, you are open actually to explore the right field of our Fedora ecosystem and to explore the sub projects and 16 we have to your interest. So, you can just drop in in several groups you can read the wikis and if you have an idea or you're unsure where whom to ask or how to join. Therefore, we are also to help you Okay, here's the link to the telegram group or ISE channel or in the email or just ping person X, Y or for example, let me see uncle uncle for example, you're for us Fedora. Yeah, if you want to contribute. And then you will. We will help you out. Yes, from time to time we check the progress. I have keep in mind it's two, three weeks we check to almost two or three weeks we check house and the status. And we're asking, okay, are you feeling well? Are there any issues problems? Are you unsure? Isn't there something maybe it's normal that miscommunication or other problems. Yeah, we try to there to help out and yes, and yeah, and if you have all the steps done and you're still alive. And not a dead account. Then we are we are very happy to have you as a new prospective contributor and Fedora Fedora family as a value member and yeah it's time to celebrate and it's actually always time to celebrate if somebody joins Fedora telegram group and this is always for us. Awesome. And I, I'm always happy I guess Alberto and I can agree to this and that we are all happy to open new welcome tickets to help new users and to see and to listen to their ideas and it's, yeah, giving so much back for our voluntary work that we're doing all in well in our free time. Yeah. So, and yeah, maybe one aspect to add is you don't have to be afraid of voluntary work. Yeah, it's free time. One of our principles is as well we say, first things first is always real life, your work, your family work life balance your friends, and it doesn't matter how many hours you spend for Fedora. It's better to spend one or two hours in a month or in a week. It depends on your capacity and we all know I can say I have also times where I haven't much time or I have was it's normal then I do less. And this is nothing to fear because we're, it's so normal and it's, and this is friendship, friends, friends, friendship building. You can talk openly to the persons do you like and know what one nobody would say, oh, no, sorry. So it's, it's always to say, yeah, quiet, it's good. Thanks for saying this. And this is also for me a part of to be open awareness, not to be ashamed if you're feeling, I say weak. It's not, it's not, it's, yeah. Join us, join us. Okay. Some questions, little questions. And maybe we can answer from the Q&A session we can do it in this is you went asking some for us and in the next slide, we have no contact information. So if we don't have a lot of time to respond in this session, we can join us in telegram on element in ERC via Twitter, or you can get a ask everything. So a thank you. Thank you very much. Every one here in the special. Andy. So, oh, we have questions. No. They are questioning about the, if the local tickets are created automatically. You can reach it in the join seat via the, I don't know the telegram of element or ERC. We can open these, this ticket for you. We can ask some question about your interest. And we can help you to engage your with the people can help you in, you know, I do want to. Some translation. We help with that though. Look in the correct people in the, in the project to can help you know. And many, many times we can help you directly with, you know, you want to be part of the come up sick. Well, I'm in the come up sick. I can help you. So it's not automatically we need to present to use those in. In the chat or be a main. So no, no, are. Automatically. Well, you can put to fast account here. And we will contact you for mail or or IRC is. I don't know if this respond your question. Steven. We don't seem to have any more questions and thank you, Alberto for the answers. So we have a lot of answers to the poll and I'm surprised that there are folks who have been a part of joints. Again, they have been contributing to Fedora when they had their own welcome tickets. That's a great thing. It's a sign that our initiative has been helpful and we aim to make it more helpful in the coming times. So thank you very much for attending our talk. It was pleasure to have you folks here. Thank you.


Income Tax 2021-2022. Why and how to learn tax law? Get ready because we're setting refunds to the max with Income Tax 2021-2022. Why learn tax law? For most people the answer would be that they want to save money and they want to be in compliance with the tax law. So we want to make sure that we're doing what we need to do meeting our obligations under the law for filing requirements as well as paying our taxes but not paying more taxes than we're required to pay under the law therefore the objective will be to meet our obligations for filing and pay the minimum amount of taxes that were legally required to pay. These are going to be the objectives for most people in the United States. If you work in the industry of taxation either in a CPA firm or tax firm or you have your own business and it's related to possibly taxation and or some type of consulting then you are generally getting revenue or trying to generate revenue by helping people meet the objectives above of complying with the tax code and paying the minimum amount of tax that they're legally required to pay. So this is the most common type of objectives that we would be coming up with with regards to the tax law and while those are important and practical reasons for learning tax laws they're not as intrinsically motivating of reasons in other words most people think of taxes as kind of like a hurdle that they need to go around they want to think about it as little as possible as they go around it and then continue on their path towards whatever they're doing even if we're working in the field of taxation many people think of it as just a series of steps that they need to mechanically do in order to just generate revenue and especially if you're working in the field of taxation it could be a lot more enjoyable if you look at some more kind of intrinsic reasons for learning the tax laws one way to do that is to think about tax law as government policy made manifest these are the actual steps the end products of the government and when judging a government like when judging an individual you really want to look at the actions and put a lot of emphasis on the actions what they're actually doing as opposed to what they're actually saying and the tax law is a huge component of what the government does not just to generate revenue to do what they need to do such as defense and so on but also to influence us in certain ways so whenever the tax law goes into place we can ask the question well why did that tax law go into place what are they trying to do with that type of tax law what is this action that they actually did mean and how did it get put into place and when you're thinking about other types of areas and you're trying to compare and contrast say one country to another country or one state to another state you can tell a whole lot about those places by following the money and with the government the money is followed through the tax code so for example in a democratic republic we often ask questions to ourselves and compare ourselves to other countries asking questions such as how should we judge our government what is the purpose of government what should government do what is justice what is fair these are questions that we often see raised in things like news outlets news outlets being a form of entertainment forms of entertainment that are used to generate revenue just like any other form like a Netflix or anything else the fact that we see these kind of questions on news outlets is a reflection that people are interested in them that's why they're there and so and that's good that we're interested in them but obviously when you see them in an entertainment type of platform we don't really get a step back or a nuanced view we get the view that is going to basically generate ratings typically so you're often not going to get a view of the actual policy oftentimes or say something as mundane to most people as the tax code but the tax code is a huge component of the way governments influence people so when we ask these types of questions if we were to take a step back and think of them in a more objective way we would be looking at things like the tax code if we were comparing state to state which state is doing better well let's look at the money let's look at the tax code from this state to another state that was the purpose of the United States so that we can have different states run their own tax system as almost a testing ground to see which states are doing better and worse and a lot of that can be looked at as following the money how how are the taxes being affected what's the influence on the economy as the taxes are affected in that way if you want to see if something is a a tyrannical type of place versus more of a free type of place oftentimes you can tell a lot about that but by looking at the money and how the money is going to be collected so and and when you look at these topics down here these two words are kind of catch words that we have to often be careful of when someone says something that's fair the term fair is often a catch phrase that basically carries all the weight so you'll often see say politicians talking about the tax code with no nuance whatsoever just saying I want a tax code that it's fair and the problem of course is that of course you do everybody does no one's going to disagree with a tax code that is fair the problem is what is fair the word fair is covering all of all of the all of the weight carrying all the heavy load there because fair could be anything to any different person it's a very vague form of language what you really want to do is dive into the actual tax law see what is being done why it is being done and then define your terms what does fair mean and then dig into some of these kind of topics so if so the tax law can be a huge a huge way to look at that in in recent years here we've had of course the pandemic and the response to the pandemic a huge component of the response to the pandemic has been with the tax law changes to the to the tax code even before the pandemic we had changes to the tax code so as you can see the tax law changes that is a huge indication of basically what the current what the current system is generating in terms of what's manifesting through the through the policy that the policy and having a more nuanced look of it is can be quite you know interesting in answering some of these questions that people often see as more internally interesting how do we learn tax law then I would say the best way is to question it to engage with it if you're just thinking about the tax law as a passive observer of the tax law and just going through a series of steps that doesn't mean anything to you it's going to be more difficult to kind of internalize make it interesting and when you have questions say from clients if you're working in the field of taxation the client wants to know more than just basically this is what you do because that's the way they said what to do obviously when we're just filling out the tax code that's enough to fill out the tax code but really when you hear these kind of questions people are asking the types of questions we looked at above is that fair why is the tax code put together that way that's the stuff that's more intrinsically interesting it's the stuff that kind of sticks into your mind a little bit more so we want to question it we want to reason with it we want to debate the law we want to argue with the law why because it's going to help us to understand the law a little bit more it'll help that law to stick in our mind it'll help us to talk to clients and other people about the tax law it'll help us to understand what the end result of government policy is a large part of that being following the money which of course is going to be the tax law and the tax law is used for more than just revenue generation it's also used to try to influence our behavior and so on so it's a huge component we should be questioning those types of things because it's applicable it makes it easier to remember and because it's more fun


Hi there, I'm Sandy Olnok and today we're going to be talking about glazing to achieve the right kind of color that you want for a white rose. So let's get started. In my previous video we talked about layering and layering is very much my comfort level. I love rich color and strong contrast and we talked about that and I now want to discuss glazing. Glazing is much more subtle and it's for the purpose of changing the tones of something and with a white rose there's a whole lot of tones going on in here even though it's a white rose. You can see from just looking at that thumbnail picture the center is warm so I've got a mixture of some very warm colors for that very middle. It turns into some kinds of greens and then you've got grayish colors around the outside but I'm not one of those painters who's going to sit and swatch out a bunch of mixes of color and then have to remix them in order to paint with them because now I've used all my color on swatches and maybe if you're better at mixing large amounts of each color then you could actually get away with that but I don't paint that way. What I do is just create a large puddle it's one of the reasons I like this palette it's an expensive palette but you can do the same thing with any palette that has a large mixing well and if you don't have a large mixing well if you have a palette that's just got little tiny ones then get yourself a plate or a tile from Home Depot or something and mix on that so that you can have a lot of areas of color to pull from because what I ended up with here was some of those golden yellow colors at the very center because those were very very warm and then it started moving into greens and with every flower you're going to get a lot of different tones as you move through it but it's really obvious in a white flower because what the heck color do you color a white flower so I was looking very specifically at each section as I was painting to see out of the the tones that I had in this palette what colors did I need to add to it to make it look like what I saw and I had these golden yellows but I pulled into my my mixing well a little bit of cascade green because I could see I was going to want to use something that had a greenish tone as I moved out from that center so it seemed like it would be a good color to mix with some of the yellows and brownish colors that I already had in the palette to knock them back a bit I added a bit of a color that I was suddenly freaked out by that top section was done in Oriolan and that did not feel anything like what I wanted it to be so I added in some new gambos to warm that up just a bit because it was just a little bit too light and too pale now as you start working back into areas that you'd previously worked on if it's completely dry then you can do some brush strokes right over top and change the tone so I had a lot of brown going on and I wanted to green it up but then I got to the center section and I went uh oh I didn't want to green it that much because that that center section is still more in those warm tones so I went back to my yellows in order to both add layers of color remember layers add the depth the contrast and to work toward the overall color that I'm going to want for each of these sections but the good thing about all of this is that I knew that in the long run I have control over those tones by using glazing glazing is when you start using very very pale layers over a dry painting to change the overall tone of it so any of these areas that end up feeling too green or too brown I'm going to have options to fix them later and if I try to fix them right now then I'm going to be doing wet into wet because the paper is still wet so patience is key so I'm adding more of the colors from the green sections as I start moving out because we're getting away from the yellow moving more towards something that feels a little more greenish and then we get to the outside because we start moving toward that grayish color and I wanted some of the that grayish color to pull toward the inside of the flower because when you're looking at any kind of white object it has tone to it it has some color to it and kind of the overall color I saw in certain petals was a pains blue gray type of color and that's what I'm using very watered down there's not very much pigment in this mix at all although I put some thicker pigment into my palette so I'd have it as an option if needed and I'm just painting the shadows on the white areas the whitest areas around the outside and while it feels like maybe it matches the the petals at the very bottom of that flower I'm starting to already see I'm going to need to use glazing because the colors on the top side of the flower are a little more golden and not by much but there are enough golden that I'm going to have to do something about it but what I chose to do here was instead of just constantly changing colors as I moved around the flower that I would use the glazing technique to achieve that and that the pains blue gray layer that I'm putting down is basically going to be to create the actual tones of the flower itself and create all my shadows because I wanted to have something consistent around the flower I didn't want it to change so much because knowing me and knowing the way I paint that was potentially going to be an issue for me to try to make them match all the way around and if I could paint the outside of the flower in one consistent fashion with the pains blue gray then I can use glazing to get the overall tone to where I need it to be on the flower itself it takes an eye to see subtle color when you're talking about painting white objects because you can see how much gray I'm putting in here and then using water to soften it out and lighten it up further if you need to use a paper towel or a baby wipe or something to lift color off do that if you're you put down too much but painting white requires a lot of subtlety because white objects still have shadows they still have some shape to them and everything that our eye sees we see it because of contrast even if it's subtle contrast like in a flower like this whether you're working on a white flower or a scene with snow in it or a white dress whatever that is look very carefully for the shadows for those subtle subtle shadows that you're going to see and that's where you want to put your focus because that's what's going to give that white object form I started bringing in some of those grays toward the center so I could get some good transitions going I'm going to be doing some wet into wet before I do some glazing because I want to show you the difference between how the two perform here I wanted to take some of these colors I already had in my palette and pull them out into the rest of the flower it's going to give the flower an overall sense of harmony so it doesn't look like I've got all the yellow in the middle all the gray on the outside and I'm letting some of those edges blend in really softly if you're using a very pale gray and very pale yellowish brownish color you can get away with that there will be times when you get to a stage in your painting or you get to the very end and the paper is dry and you're like oh no now what do I do my my painting is not the right color that's where glazing comes in and here I'm doing a combination of glazing plus layering because I'm trying to change the tone of some of the shadows because the shadows either became too greenish or too brownish I've taken away the photograph at this point too if our goal as a painter is just to replicate a photograph that's already been taken it's already been photoshopped it's already been perfected all of its blemishes are taken away all of its colors are just you know whatever it's been manipulated if all I want to do is replicate that there's already a photograph taken of it so now is my chance to bring myself to the painting and to bring my own expression of what I see in a flower what I want to paint it to be so at this point I already knew where these colors were headed I knew where the colors were that made me happy I knew the ones that made me feel like okay that's looking like a decent flower center I wanted to bring some more of those colors out into the petals and get a better transition of color than I could see in the photograph I wanted to put my own spin on it so I'm adding a little bit of green shadows and then using a wet brush to just very softly blend them into that color on the very outside edge and increase the shadows under particular sections so that some of those petals would start to pull upward that wasn't in the photograph and I didn't really want to try to replicate what was in the photograph if I didn't get the kind of realism that I was looking for now here is where I decided I hadn't changed the tone of this outside petal enough and there it was dried but it was still feeling very blue gray it didn't have the tone of everything else so I'm glazing over top of it to just change the overall tone of that petal and you can see I'm glazing over just parts of it so that I can add that other tone that brownish tone into just certain areas of the petals I can add in some veins into them I can add in whatever I want it's a painting I'm the artist and I can adapt any way I wish now I also knew that some of this was going to end up changing again and that's because I was going to paint those darn leaves and everything we see we see because of contrast and I wanted something that was going to have that deep rich contrast in the painting because that was going to bring more reality to the whole thing rather than just the flower itself and I wanted to see how much more dark was needed if I added in leaves the leaves I also did not go back in and add many many layers many passes of color so that I could make them look all hyper realistic or anything like that I wanted them to be soft and muted and I wanted them to basically disappear from the painting because they weren't the important part that center of the rose was the part that I fell in love with and anytime you do a painting or a drawing or a card or whatever it is that you create focus on the thing that you loved about it what what caused you to want to make it and then pay attention to that and help your viewer to see that so now I had all that contrast I realized I could afford to go much darker with some of these center areas I could afford it because now I had the contrast of all that depth around the outside edges and the more contrast I add on the inside the lighter all the white is going to start to appear because now I've got all that dark color in in contrast to it in the center pulling your attention in so if the outside gets too dark then add more darks in that center portion these center sections as I add that depth I'm also adding in more desaturated colors I'm toning down some of what's there because the more toned down sections I get the more the areas with color are going to pop because they're popping in contrast to what's there so even at this phase you can continue to change the tone of the flower you can change the tone of a leaf by just using very watered down paint to do so or you can change the tone of a shadow by using a very fine brush and thicker paint thicker paint is going to give you darker richer color and glazing over top of anything is going to give you a change in tone so I'm using both as I put finishing touches on the petals of my flower and I'm adding shadows that were never there in the photograph shadows that the photographer blew out but boy does it add a lot to allow some of these leaves to pull forward remember that as perfect as a photograph may look a photograph is also making choices about what to show the viewer because the photographer can set up their lighting in a particular way they can edit their photos in different ways in Photoshop later to remove or add or at contrast or whatever to the details that they want to show and you can do the same in your paintings by using glazing and layering to make your own choices about depth and saturation level and hue and all those kind of things that make a painting yours so there's my finished white rose and if you haven't seen it yet you can go back and watch the previous video I'll put a link to that on the screen as well as in the doobly-doo down below if you need to see that one so you can get some more ideas on watercoloring with flowers or with whatever your subject matter might be all right thank you so much for sticking with me hit the like button if you haven't share this with a friend subscribe if you have not and I will see you again very soon take care


All right, what's up, coach? Welcome back to my channel. Now, if you have missed some of the videos that I posted this week, I've been posting a video every single day, Monday through Friday, I think for the last six weeks, maybe a little bit longer, and go check out some of the other videos that I posted this week. I think those will be very helpful for you if you're wanting to really grow your business. I talk about a lot of mindset stuff that I feel I can absolutely help you, all right? So today, this is something that I've been kind of waiting to talk about for a while, and it's a question that I get. Coaches that are new to business will always ask me, and they'll say, hey, Ben, what is better for me at the beginning? Is it learning how to be a better coach or learning how to be better at marketing and sales? And what I wanna try to do is give you some insight on what I think you should focus on, and this way, I feel like in the future, your business is easier to run, right? Now, let me just get one thing straight here. If you are a bad coach, or you lack knowledge and coaching, and you try to start a business, it's going to be very hard, no matter how good at marketing you are. If you're the best marketer in the world and you are a garbage coach, well, you're not gonna be able to hang on the clients for very long, right? So let's be very clear about that.  No matter how much money you have behind you running ads or how great you are at sales, you have to be good at coaching, right? And long-term, to really succeed in this business, you have to be great at coaching, right? Now, that is the first thing I want you to know. You have to be great at coaching to have a long-term successful business. I'm not talking about the side hustle thing. I get hit up all the time, hey, I wanna turn this into a side hustle. And then I just don't even text coaches back when they ask me that, because I'm just like, that's not what I do. I don't teach people how to do a side hustle where you make $500 a month. That's not me, right? So first is, as a coach, if you don't have knowledge or you don't have experience, then one thing I would tell you to do before you even start a business is go get knowledge, go get experience, go be a volunteer coach, go work for a club or an AAU team, like go be a high school coach. Like, there are so many different opportunities within coaching that you could just like, literally go do very quickly, like tomorrow if you wanted, to gain experience. And from what I've seen, right, the coaches who are knowledgeable, the ones who have experience, the ones who are confident in what they're doing, when they become business owners, it's easier because they're like, they already know what they're doing, right? And coaches who are newbies that like, have never coached anyone in their life, that try to start a business, generally fail.  So there's a small select group of people that can do that, most people can't, right? Most people just can't do that, all right? So need to learn coaching skills, need to learn how to communicate, you need to learn how, like your craft, that's so important, right? Now what I will tell you though, if you know your craft, all right, and this is the difference, if you know your craft and you're really good at it, and you don't know marketing and sales, then your business is always gonna be limited, it will always reach a peak and you'll never be able to surpass that peak because the inability to market, promote and sell, right? And this is why I always tell people, if you're great at what you do, you know the craft, you understand it, you get it, like if you're a basketball coach, like you get basketball, you know how to help a kid get better. If you're a soccer and you know how to technically develop players, if you are a football coach and you're an amazing mentor and coach and you can coach kids that are quarterback or wide receiver or running back, whatever, like if you get the coaching side of it, but we lack the marketing and sales side of it, your business is going to reach a level and never go beyond that level. And how do I know that? It's because I've already been there with my business. There was a time where I was like, gosh, like I know how to train kids, I know how to do this, but I'm not able to grow my business because I was waiting for leads, I wasn't proactive getting referrals, I wasn't proactive with any marketing, and I was scared to sell. And I thought I sucked at selling because I didn't do it often. I didn't get my reps in. And so if you're great at what you do, but you cannot sell, you can't promote yourself, then your business won't go so far. And that's just the facts. It's like that with anything, right? It's like that with anything. So my advice to someone who's great at what they do, right, you get it. You know how to train kids, like which I can't say is a super difficult skill to learn, like a lot of it just comes down to experience, right? And just doing it and then learning, right? And there's so many free resources on YouTube now. I mean, you could learn how to do any drill on YouTube for free, which is crazy, that's awesome. If you have those skills though, I would tell you straight up, if we were on a call right now and you're like, yeah, like, you know, then what should I be focusing on now? I would say marketing and sales and your coaching that you do is going to evolve and continue to get better and better. But it gets better when you take on more clients because now you're getting more experience. And you only get more clients when you market, sell and promote your program, right? And this is the way I look at it too. You could take two people, all right? One is pretty good at coaching, they're great at marketing though. They're awesome at marketing, they're awesome at sales. And you have someone who, this other guy, you have someone who's awesome at coaching. He's like a genius, knows everything, but he doesn't like to market and sell and promote what he does. The guy who's like pretty good at coaching that's great at marketing and sales is going to absolutely crush this guy who's a better coach. Like on paper, this guy over here who's a better coach is going to get absolutely trampled by that guy who's a better marketer, right? And that's just how life works. And I hate to make it that blunt, but that's how it is. This is how it is in this business. Like the best marketers that are good and great coaches will always be the best. They'll always have the most clients. They'll always have clients who stay with them long term, right? People who are afraid to sell, they'll reach a limit. And typically what happens is when coaches reach that limit, they do one or two things. They either are just like, all right, well, this is the best I'll do. And they go into this turtle mindset that I call. It's like, all right, well, I'm good. This is the best I can do and I can't go any, I can't go anywhere beyond what I'm doing now, right? Which is a limited mindset, right? And that would be like you telling one of the kids that you work with that this is the best you can get. You cannot go beyond this, which is crazy to me. Like that's crazy talk, right? So coaches either do that. They go into turtle mindset, right? Or they're like, all right, I know how to do this. I need to learn marketing and sales. I need to like, maybe I need to change my pricing. Maybe I need to change how I get paid. Maybe I need to change how long clients stay with me, right? And when coaches make those tweaks, their business gets so much better, right? And only when you become better at marketing sales. And the only way to do that is by learning and getting in the trenches. Like you can read all the books that you want. Like I have books on marketing and sales. They're right there, right? I read those, but like I don't just look at them and like, oh, that's a good idea. Like I execute what's in there and I tweak it until it works, right? So I hope this video helps. You could be the best coach on the planet, best coach in your area.  And that doesn't mean you need to be this Hollywood superstar on the internet. I'm not saying that either. Like you don't have to have this huge following on social media. Like some coaches that I work with don't even use social media and they're just absolutely crushing it with their business. Making more than $100,000 per year, right? So that's all I got for you today. Have an awesome weekend. I know today's Friday when I'm filming this. So do you want more business help? Go check out my website, buildmysportsbiz.com. I have a button at the top of that page. You can check out what we have and schedule time to chat with me. Pretty simple, pretty straightforward. If you wanted my help, like the way I am in this video is the way I am when you join my program. I'm to the point, I don't make things sound good, right? I like to like actually help people grow what they do and by laying out the fundamentals with business, that's normally the thing that people skip, right? So that's why I know in this video, like you could be the best coach in the world and not have any clients. And ultimately that's no one else's fault other than yours because you haven't spent the time learning marketing and sales. Which in my mind, it's the best possible skill any coach can have is because when you have that, like anything could happen in your city. If you had to pick up and move tomorrow, you know you could go get clients. And having that level of confidence within your business is unstoppable and it's unbreakable. All right, that's it, gotta go. Have a great weekend and I'll see you later.


All right. Good day. This is Professor Resnick again, and I want to introduce you all to Marx's famous book, Capital. So let me begin in the first volume of Capital, which I've asked you to read. Marx begins by discussing the relationship between different kinds of commodities. There he discusses, as you will read, one coat equals 20 yards of linen. Let me put that on the whiteboard here. One coat equals 20 yards of linen. There are three aspects of this relationship that I want to focus on following the logic of Marx. First, as a use value, and remember what a commodity is. It has a use value, it has an exchange value, that is, it's produced for exchange, and it's produced by concrete labor. As a use value, each of these commodities has a unique characteristic, a unique qualitative characteristic associated with it, which is of importance to the buyer. So the linen has, I don't know, linen is, I'm not sure exactly what that is, the coat has coatness. That's a relationship between the buyer and a commodity. So it's something unique, it's something that gives pleasure, satisfaction, whatever words you want, to the buyer of the commodity. In other words, there's a demand for that commodity. It has a use value to the buyer. Let me put another one on to make this clear. This is one that Marx uses, but let me put this on. 40,000 toothbrushes is equal to one Mercedes-Benz. A little bit more dramatic than Marx's example. So here, a Mercedes has the driving capacity of an automobile, a Mercedes to give people pleasure when they buy it. By the same logic, a toothbrush has toothbrush capacity, whatever that means, that gives pleasure, utility to the person who buys the toothbrush. Second, so each of these commodities has a use value and notice these use values are different, they're not the same. Second, as an exchange value, these different things, these different entities have a relationship with one another. They're exchanged in a certain proportion. And third, don't forget now, each of these is produced by concrete labor. That is, coat-making labor produces the unique and interesting characteristics of a coat. Those use values associated with a coat, by the same logic, the linen maker, produces the interesting and useful and unique characteristics of a linen, and by the same logic, we do it. The concrete labor of Mercedes-Benz labor produces the driving capacity of a car. The concrete labor of toothbrush labor produces the specific qualities of a toothbrush. So each commodity is a product of concrete labor, a specific kind of labor associated with that commodity that produces its unique and interesting features to the buyers of the commodity in society. Next, having defined this, Marx comes back and asks, why are these different things the same in a certain proportion? When you confront the world of exchange out there, economists, before-marks and after-marks, ask the question, a common question, why are these different things the same and why in this proportion?  So it's silly. So you have to ask then, why are these different things the same and why in some proportion? Well, Marx begins. He argues that what makes a coat equal to linen and what makes linen equal to a coat and what makes it, in my example, toothbrush equal to a Mercedes and what makes a Mercedes equal to a toothbrush can't be the unique characteristics of each of them. Why? Because they're unique. They're different. So you can't use that which is different as an argument for why these things are the same. So something is going on here to make them the same, but it's not the use value of each of them. Marx makes an argument that you can't see, you can't conceive of why these different things are the same by looking at the equation, by thinking about the equation itself. In other words, that which is making them the same is not present in this. It's missing. So Marx has to provide a theorization, an explanation of what is this missing property that makes these different things the same in some proportion, a theory of that missing property. He calls the missing property value. So he's presenting a theorization, a theory of value, that missing property which makes these different things the same in a certain proportion. This is a footnote to this. That's the Marxian theory of value. There are non-Marxian, or at least I only know one other, non-Marxian theory of value that makes these different things the same. That's called neoclassical economic theory, but that's a different course. We are staying with the Marxian theory of this missing property and he presents that in capital of volume one, and that's one of the reasons we're reading it. Okay, next step. In exchange, a seller of the commodity, the seller of the commodity, that person that's selling toothbrushes or selling Mercedes or selling coats or selling linen, is getting rid of the use value of the commodity. In fact, the seller of the commodity is alienating that use value, separating it to the buyer. The seller has no interest in the use value of the commodity. That's another way of discussing what production for exchange means. When General Motors Ford and so forth, when they produce cars for exchange, they're getting rid of the use value of that commodity as sellers and the use value is only of interest to the buyer because the buyer is buying it for use and getting its driving capacity, toothbrush capacity or whatever. So the moment of exchange is the same moment for any seller when there is a separation, a dichotomy between the use and exchange value of a commodity. Once again, the seller only has interest in that use value of the commodity insofar as it is of interest to the buyer. That's one of the reasons for advertising, to stimulate a use value. That is a reason for advertising on the part of the seller to stimulate use value so that the buyer will purchase that commodity. So the buyer, of course, is interested in the use value of the commodity because he or she is going to consume it for whatever pleasure that gives to the buyer. So the relationship of the buyer to the commodity is one of a private relationship whereas the relationship of the seller of commodity is a social relationship because he or she is only interested in the exchange value, which is a common to all commodities, and is alienating this private feature. The seller, as I said again, is not interested in the use value. Why belabor this? Well, this separation between the use and exchange value of the commodity turns out to be crucial to understand Marx's theory of the origins of surplus value or as we've done so far in the course, the origins of class exploitation. That's its importance. In capitalism, workers will sell something that they own, which is their labor power. So labor power, which means the capacity of a person to work, the capacity, the power of a person to work, to use up his or her muscle and brain tissue in the job, the capacity to sell that to a buyer, to a capitalist. Labor power is a commodity. When workers sell that commodity, following this logic now, they receive its value in exchange, the wage, but what they alienate, what they get rid of is the use value of that particular commodity. Just like if it were a person who's producing and selling an orange, the buyer of the orange gets its use value. Well, in a parallel way, the buyer of the commodity labor power, which is the capitalist, gets its use value. And here's the, I don't want to say trick, but here's this breakthrough of Marx. The use value of labor power, that singular commodity, the use value of labor power has the potential to create more value in production for the buyer than it costs the buyer in exchange in the market.