Hello and welcome back to part three of our briefing series, reduce and reuse how to cut greenhouse gas emissions of building materials, plastics, and food. After tackling building materials and plastics over the past two days, today we will consider policies for reducing emissions by reducing food waste. I'm Dan Berset, Executive Director of the Environmental and Energy Study Institute. The Environmental and Energy Study Institute was founded in 1984 on a bipartisan basis by members of Congress to provide science-based information about environmental, energy, and climate change to policymakers. More recently, we've also developed a program to provide technical assistance to rural utilities interested in on-bill financing programs for their customers. ESI provides informative, objective, nonpartisan coverage of climate change topics in briefings, written materials, and on social media. All of our educational resources, including briefing recordings, fact sheets, issue briefs, articles, newsletters, and podcasts are always available for free online at www.esi.org. The best way to stay informed about our latest educational resources is to subscribe to our biweekly newsletter, Climate Change Solutions. I have a certain bias, and I acknowledge that, but these briefings this week have been really fascinating. On Wednesday, we were joined by two experts who helped us understand the greenhouse gas emissions associated with building materials, and they outlined some steps we can take to make the most use of materials we already have. And yesterday, we reviewed the climate consequences, single-use plastics, and the findings in two recent reports, the new coal by Beyond Plastics from October, and reckoning with the U.S. role in global ocean plastic waste, which was just released by the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine on December 1st. And one of the reasons I've enjoyed the briefing so much is the connections we're making. There are complex relationships between the materials we use that have both climate benefits and impacts. For example, blower agents used to spray insulation, hydrofluorocarbons, and various types of plastics all have climate benefits, even though they provide energy efficiency benefits. And we left off yesterday talking about plastics and plastic alternatives to single-use food packaging. Of course, wasting less food would lead to reduced waste from packaging. These briefings have encouraged me to think more holistically about these topics. They're really more interrelated than they seem. We say it a lot, but it's true. Climate policy is everything policy. You can access all the resources for the entire briefing series online, www.desi.org, and I really encourage you to check them out. They've been really good. We're joined by a special guest today to help us think about policies for reducing emissions by reducing food waste. Representative Julia Brownlee represents the 26th District of California. She was first elected to Congress in 2012, and today serves on the committees on natural resources, transportation, and infrastructure, and veterans affairs, as well as on the select committee on the climate crisis. Of special note, given the topic of today's briefing, Representative Brownlee is the sponsor of two important pieces of legislation, HR4443, the Cultivating Organic Matter through the Promotion of Sustainable Techniques Act, or Compost Act, and HR4444, the Zero Food Waste Act. Thank you so much, Representative Brownlee, for your leadership on these and other climate change issues. Thank you for allowing me the opportunity to join you virtually for today's environmental and energy study institute's briefing on reducing emissions by reducing food waste. I wanna thank Dan and today's panelists, Dana and Emily, for this important discussion on the climate impacts and the solutions to reducing emissions from food waste. As you know, nearly half of all food produced in the United States is lost or wasted, which means an estimated $400 billion is spent on growing, processing, transporting, storing and disposing of food that is never consumed. To make matters worse, food waste is a major contributor to climate change. Landfills are the third largest source of methane in the United States and food is the single largest product sitting in our landfills. As a member of the select committee on the climate crisis, I've introduced two bills to address these issues. First, my bill, the Zero Food Waste Act would create a new EPA grant program to help communities across the country identify food waste mitigation projects or develop the strategies that will reduce the amount of food waste that their localities generate. The cultivating organic matter through the promotion of Sustainable Techniques Act or better known as the Compost Act would add composting as a conservation practice under the USDA's conservation programs and making such practices eligible for conservation program funding. Under this bill, both the act of producing compost from organic waste and using compost on a farm would qualify as a conservation practice. The bill would also create a new USDA grant and loan program for composting infrastructure projects for large-scale composting facilities and farm, home, or community-based projects. In addition to these two bills, I've also been working to advance these food waste and composting policy goals in other legislative vehicles. I'm very pleased to report that the House Pass Build Back Better Act includes provisions to help address food waste issues. The Build Back Better Act provides $190 million for investments in waste reduction infrastructure, incentives, and related activities located in or directly serving low-income and underserved communities. Composting is also an eligible activity for the use of these funds. The bill also includes $30 million for schools to purchase equipment to offer healthier meals, improve food safety, and increase scratch cooking. This will help schools to reduce food waste while helping to ensure that children have access to more nutritious meals that include more fresh food and vegetables. While the Build Back Better Act is now in the hands of the Senate, I am hopeful these critical provisions will make it into the final legislation that President Biden will sign. I'm also pleased to report that the House Pass Fiscal Year 2022 Appropriations includes language directing USDA's natural resources, conservation service to direct more funding toward community compost and food waste reduction projects. Because food waste is the single largest contributor to landfills, making up 22% of municipal solid waste, the bill also directs USDA to work with EPA to incorporate best practices to use composting to avoid food waste and to share education and other resources with those entities involved in food production and use. As Congress continues to negotiate the final appropriation bills, be assured that I am fighting to keep these provisions intact in the final legislation. If we are to achieve our U.S. climate goals, the federal government needs to step up its efforts to eliminate food waste and promote composting practices. These are the bold climate smart actions we need to protect our resources and our environment for future generations, develop a more sustainable food system and address the challenges of the climate crisis with the urgency it demands. Again, I wanna thank EESI and all of you here today for your efforts to prioritize food waste reduction and recovery solutions like composting. Our country's food waste problem and its impact on our communities and our environment has become too big to ignore. We must take action and develop a green and sustainable food economy. A federal investment in the reduction of food waste will not only be an investment in our planet, but it will be an investment in our future. I look forward to hearing about the outcomes of what is sure to be a productive dialogue as we continue to explore solutions for reducing food waste in the United States and around the world. Thank you so much to Representative Brownlee and her wonderful staff for making that possible today. We really appreciated hearing your remarks. I also like to just say thanks for your leadership on policies to reduce food waste. And I am also looking forward to the upcoming discussion because I know it's gonna be really good. Before I introduce our panelists, let me remind everyone that we will have some time for questions after our experts make their remarks and we'll do our best to incorporate questions from the audience. If you have a question, you can send it to us via email at AskASK, ask at EESI.org or even better, you can follow us on Twitter at EESI online and send it to us that way. And now I'm gonna introduce the first of our two panelists today. Dana Gunders is Executive Director of Refed, a nonprofit focused on advancing solutions to U.S. food waste. Deemed the woman who helped start the waste-free movement by Consumer Reports, Dana is a national expert in one of the first to bring light to just how much food is wasted across the country through her 2012 report, Wasted, how America is losing up to 40% of its food from farm to fork to landfill. For almost a decade, she was a senior scientist at the Natural Resources Defense Council. She launched her own business next course to strategically advise on the topic. Some of her career highlights include authoring the Waste-Free Kitchen Handbook, launching the Save the Food campaign, appearing on John Oliver's program, testifying in Congress. And when not worrying about food professionally, she spends far too much time convincing her two young kids to eat broccoli stalks and not throw food on the floor. Jock the Pen always says the broccoli stalk is the best part, you just have to peel it a little bit. He's exactly right. Dana, welcome to our briefing today. I will turn it over to you. Thank you so much, Dana. I'm gonna attempt to share my screen here, so let's see how this goes. Hopefully you're seeing some beautiful-looking peaches there. Well, thank you so much for being here, everyone, for having me today. Dan's remarks at the beginning of how integrated waste issues are reminded me of when I got into this, which was actually before I got into this. When I, 20 years ago, was in school, I actually focused on energy efficiency. And that was my concentration and everything. And then 10 years later, working in the food sector, started to realize that, wow, there's a ton of food going waste. And here we are so focused on how it's produced, but not really paying attention to what happens later. And so I see some real parallels, and that's always what's been driving my interest in this issue is how much of a parallel it does have to energy efficiency and the idea that we need to think about how we're using our resources in addition to how we are producing things with them. So thank you so much for having me. And I'm hoping to give you a little bit of, kind of a lay of the land on this issue before we dive into specifics around policy. And so I'm the executive director of an organization called REFED. We are a national nonprofit that is entirely dedicated to reducing food loss and waste here within the US. We do that through three main pillars of work. The first is providing data and insights on the topic, which sometimes can be pretty hard to actually get. The second is by bringing more capital into the space, private, philanthropic, and public, and really trying to help attract that, inform it, and then once there's interest, help figure out where that capital can go and really be aware and fostering the innovation that it can match with. Third, we act as kind of a hub and connector in the space. We host the big annual summit on the topic every year, which we actually used to do in partnership with our other panelists here with the Harvard-Huland Policy Clinic. We host the big summit. We host a network where we do a lot of programming on the issue from all sorts of angles. So if you're interested, please come check us out and join that network. But just to give you a sense of the issue here within the US, believe it or not, about 35% of all the food in this country went unsold or uneaten. These are 2019 numbers, but it doesn't change that much, about 35%. The vast majority of that is going directly to landfills or other waste destinations. When you consider the value of that product, it's about $408 billion worth of food that is not being eaten in this country. That's nearly 2% of the US GDP. And then when you start to think about what it takes to produce that food, right? Everything that it takes to grow, harvest, cool, transport, store, transport again, store again, cook, and get it to your table. It's a huge amount of resources that we are throwing out when we're not actually eating that food. We estimate the footprint to be about 4% of all US greenhouse gas emissions. And in addition, 14% of all the freshwater use, 18% of cropland. And then to add insult to injury, food is actually the number one product entering our landfills today. Now, just last week, the EPA released a new report with their estimates of what the impacts of this are. And they actually estimated the greenhouse gas emissions to be equal to that of 42 coal powered, coal powered fire, coal fired power plants. And the energy and water enough to supply 50 million homes. And the land use is really the one that blows me away. An area of agricultural land equal to that of California and New York combined. Just imagine a farm that size producing food all year. That is how much food we are not using today. And of course, much of that food is good food that could be eaten. Today, as I'm sure many of you well know, one in eight Americans are considered food insecure. When you take a look at the quantity of food that is not eaten, it is vastly more than we would need to feed all food and secure Americans their full diet. That is the quantity that we're talking about here. Now, where is this happening? It is happening all along the supply chain. And part of the challenge is that because it happens in little bits and pieces everywhere, it can be hard to really see and get a handle on how much is happening. Just some key notes to point out, households are in fact the largest contributor of food going to waste. Right behind that are consumer facing businesses, but this includes everything from retail to your local diner to a hospital cafeteria. And when you look at those food service, the restaurants and food service, one surprising thing is that the most, like the highest volume in that setting is actually food that's been served and on people's plates.  And then another source is on farms. There is actually an enormous amount, even in non-pandemic times, an enormous amount of produce that is never harvested and it's left on the farm. It's perfectly edible. Some of it is even marketable quality, perfectly marketable.  But there is a lot of good nutritious fresh produce being left on farms. Now, what's been happening over time? Our analysis, and we conducted a large analysis on this topic, began going back casting to 2010. And our estimate is that it actually, surplus food started to increase all the way up until 2016 when it actually has started to level off. And that timing really matches in my experience with when businesses and others started to pay somewhat attention to this issue. If you look at it, this is absolute, if you look at it per capita, it's actually gone down about 2%. So I think that's slightly good news. It means I like to think of it as past peak waste. However, we have a national goal that matches with an international goal to reduce food loss and waste by 50% by 2030, just about eight short years away. And that 2% gets us nowhere near achieving that goal. And so we really need a massive acceleration in efforts around this issue if we're going to reach that. This here is something that the EPA put out quite some time ago that they call their food recovery hierarchy. And it's almost akin to the, if you've ever heard, the reduced reuse recycle mantra in plastics. It's kind of that, but for food. And what it says is, hey, the best thing is to not have surplus in the first place. Let's use food as we intend to and let's actually eat it. But if that's not possible, well then let's capture it and feed it to people. If that's not possible, let's get it to animals. And then and only then let's look at uses like industrial uses, rendering, turning into plastics, things like that. And then composting and last resort being landfill. The EPA just a few weeks back did something called reinterpreting the goal. So now the whole national government, well, at least the agencies of EPA, USDA and FDA have joined forces to adopt this 50% goal. The only things that count towards that goal of avoiding are these top four. Composting does not actually count towards that 50% reduction goal. In fact, the way they are telling it now, the number they are trying to cut in half includes what's going to landfill, but also food scraps going to composting. And they did that mainly to align with the international definition as that's what's been kind of raised and agreed upon internationally. All right, so how in the heck do we do this? So at ReFed, we conducted analysis. We took over 50 data sets. We spoke to many 10s and 10s of different solution providers who are creating solutions in this space. And we analyzed 42 different solutions to the problem. And what we came up with is that it is indeed possible to reach that 50% number, but it will take an investment of about $14 billion annually. Now the good news is that a lot of times when you save food from going to waste, you actually save money. And the return on that investment, we estimate it to be about $73 billion in net financial benefit. A lot of that actually is saving to consumers as well as depending on the solution, savings to the businesses that are implementing them. In addition, of course, you get a number of benefits in terms of water saved, greenhouse gases, 75 million tons of greenhouse gases is equivalent to about 16 million cars being taken off the road, as well as four billion meals for people in need and creation of 50,000 jobs. Now I should say this analysis differs a little bit from the EPA's new interpretation because we were going off their old interpretation. So it does include solutions like composting, which are now considered food waste management. And just to reemphasize, this is a five to one return on investment in terms of what's needed. Now, where should that money come from and where does the government fit in? So for all of our 42 solutions, we actually analyzed who should be investing in this, who's paying, right? And we found that actually about 50% of the cost needs to be covered by businesses themselves, right? It's them buying new software, it's them changing their waste management processes, whatever it be. So that's about half, but there was an important role for government. Yeah, sorry about that. Which is project finance, I'm sorry this box is sort of misplaced for this conversation, but both project finance, tax incentives, and then grants. And those dollars can be very catalytic, right? So not every dollar is the same. There are a lot of new innovations, there are bottlenecks, there are pilots that need to take place, there's infrastructure that needs to be built to enable other things. And so that government money is really critical for unlocking some of those bottlenecks. And that's why we like to call it catalytic capital. So what do we need to do? So as I mentioned, we analyzed 42 solutions, we actually had another 40 that we couldn't analyze, we just could not get the information and data to really model them. But that left us with a list of 80 solutions. And when we took a close look at it, we realized you knew it, these really boiled down to about seven categories. For the most part, when you step back and think, well, what needs to happen to really solve this issue? It kind of boils down to these seven things on the screen. So we call them our action areas. And the first is to optimize the harvest. So not only do we need to harvest what we can up the field, but even before that, we need to right size our production. In fact, both in the US and across the world today, we actually produce more food than we consume. So how do we right size that production? And then once we do that, make sure to actually harvest everything off the field. Secondly, we need to have airtight product distribution so that we're not losing product as it's traveling around the country and around the world and being stored. There's a lot of great technology coming out in terms of sensors and other intelligence to really help with that. Third, we're finding product management, really matching supply and demand. There's a lot of guessing game that happens if you're a restaurant, if you're a grocery store, but there's also new tools coming out to really help be more precise in that. So how do we match that supply and demand equation and use new capabilities and data to do that? And then there will always be surplus. So how do we make sure there are alternative marketplaces as well?  Let's use that broccoli stock that we were just talking about and not just the top of the broccoli. Fifth, reshaping and consumer environments. I think this is really critical, especially in the policy-making realm, because as you saw, households are a huge part of this issue. When you add sort of the consumer out of home, consumers and restaurants and the influence they have on food businesses, they really are driving a huge part of this problem. And so how do we shift our culture around that? How do we change the environment that we are all operating within to really encourage less waste, as well as speaking and asking consumers directly? Six, strengthening food rescue. As you saw, only 3% of all that surplus food is being donated right now. There are so many things that can happen to improve that. And lastly, there will always be banana peels. There will also always be rotten bananas. And so can we have the infrastructure in place to recycle all of that, whether it be some of the exciting things happening to create animal feed out of food scraps? There's some exciting innovation there, composting or other recycling destinations. So I won't go through this all, but just to give you a sense, under each of those I just went through, there is a whole list of solutions that you can explore. And there's also a whole lot of innovation in all of those categories. So just tons of startups that we're seeing. We just had our first unicorn in the space, appeal, reach a billion dollar valuation, and there's a couple others not far behind. So really exciting times in the innovation space here. A huge amount of investment pouring in, just a few weeks ago, the Wall Street Journal wrote an article on that, but we're just, it can't go a week or two without seeing several million dollars go to one startup or another. So if you'd like to learn more, please visit our Insights Engine. It's a really fun tool. You can play around on there and see things like the top solutions. I won't go into the details here, but the best solution really depends on what you care about, right? Is it economics? Is it greenhouse gases? Is it meals served? On our site, you can actually play around with all of those different impact areas and tell us what is most important to you and we'll show you. But as you can see from an economic standpoint, things like portion sizes, meal kits, consumer education campaigns, very consumer focused solutions. Similarly from a greenhouse gas perspective, because consumer food, it has so much more of a footprint embedded in it. But then when you get to just straight up tons, you do start seeing more of these solutions like composting and rubic digestion, where those recycling solutions come into play. So on policy, there is a range of things that can happen all along this hierarchy. I know Emily is gonna spend her whole time talking about these, so I won't, but I'm really excited to be part of this conversation. I hope that you can all take some ideas away from it. And with that, I will pass it to Emily. I'm gonna intercept your pass so that I can introduce Emily, but that's totally fine. Dana, you shared with us some amazing slides. I just would like to remind everyone that if you'd like to go back and take a look at your slides and we're gonna revisit some of the things you talked about in our Q&A, I have a feeling. But if you'd like to go back and revisit Dana's slides, you can do that by visiting us online at www.esi.org. Dana also was nice enough to provide lots of additional resources, reports, and policymaker resources, and all of those are posted on our briefing page as well. Thank you so much for your presentation. And our second panelist, like Dana was just saying, is going to help us get through some of the policy issues. Emily Broadleib is a clinical professor of law and the faculty director at the Harvard Law School's Food Law and Policy Clinic, the nation's first law school clinic, devoted to providing legal and policy guidance on food law and policy issues. She is a recognized leader in the field. She focuses her scholarship on teaching, practice, on the big scholarship, teaching, and practice, sorry, missing a comma there, on the biggest health, economic, and environmental issues facing our food systems to promote sustainability and equity and to reduce the waste of healthy, wholesome food. Emily, welcome to the briefing today. I'm gonna throw it over to you. Okay, can you, everyone can see my slides. I presume. You look great. Great, thank you. So thank you so much to EESI for organizing this and I want to give a big shout out to Dana. We've been working on this topic together for about 10 years. So it's always fun to get the tag team on these kinds of presentations. And I'm just really glad to be here today to talk about this. So as you heard a bit, I direct the Food on Policy Clinic where we work directly with clients and communities to champion community-led food system change, production and food waste, healthy food access, and equity and sustainability in food production. So in that work, we often play a role in helping others understand the law and the systemic barriers that can be addressed through policy change. So we do this by working with non-profit organizations, startups, social enterprise, government agencies at all levels. And through that, we learn a lot about some of the systems-wide barriers. So I'm gonna raise a few points today that are policy areas that I think are most exciting or good opportunities at the federal level based on experience working on food waste policy with all of these different stakeholders. So to just say a little more about what we do, the work that we do at the Food Law and Policy Clinic in food waste and food recovery is by far our largest area of work. So why is law and policy so important? Kind of picking up where Dana left off. Law impacts food waste in a lot of different ways. One way that it impacts food waste is that food is heavily regulated at all stages of the supply chain. And this means that sometimes food is wasted because there's either confusion over those laws or there's just a lot of cost involved in getting food pass along and diverted and it might be cheaper to actually throw it away. So this means law can sometimes act as a disincentive or confusion can be the barrier. And then also law and policy are important because policies can provide incentives or drive changes in habits. So here's some of the work that we do at different levels of government at the state and local food waste policy level. We provide technical assistance to states. Right now we're writing back sheets for partners in New Jersey on the laws in New Jersey and at the federal level that impact food donation. So we've done that in now about 15 different states. We're also working on recommendations for gleaning and making it more clear that gleaning is protected in New Mexico. And then we also do state bill tracking and maintain a database of state policies on the refund site actually. At the federal level, we've offered numerous recommendations to minimize food waste and I'm gonna talk in much more detail about that. So I'll kind of gloss over that right now. And then at the global level, we are running a big project that I'll tell you about where we're comparing laws on food donation across different countries. So on that front, this is the Global Food Donation Policy Atlas which is a partnership between the Food Law and Policy Clinic and a group called the Global Food Banking Network. The key missions really to analyze and compare the legal landscapes in different countries as they relate to food donation and to food waste reduction. So in each of the countries, we work hands on with food banks and other partners like government, businesses and other NGOs. And we've created an online map. You just have a static view of it here that compares and contrasts the laws in different countries. And one of the things that's been really interesting is actually building on our knowledge of the laws and policies around the US and really the comparisons across states, we've been able to look at the global level and see places where the US has the best practice or places where we can import models from other countries. We prepare legal guides and recommendations and executive summaries with detailed analyses for each partner country. And at this point, we've published those materials for 14 countries and we have six countries in production right now. And then we lastly offer opportunities for our country partners to engage. So we've hosted a series of webinars that are targeting government officials across countries. Our last one was actually last week and it was on tax policies to support food donation. And we had about a hundred participants from, they're all government officials from around the globe. And we also prepare issue briefs on really particular topics. And you can see one here on bait labeling. So the most interesting finding from this work has actually been that there are kind of six major areas of law that impact whether states or plus food is donated or rescued or whether it goes to waste. And we, in the first year of the project, we compared, we really looked at five very different countries, the US, Mexico, Canada, India and Argentina. We had an open mind going in and just asked all the different stakeholders what we've met with about what were the barriers, what were the questions they had, what were the policy goals, and the same issues came up in every country. So these are really the standard issues that we're now tracking from country to country on our website and in our reporting. And some of these were really issues we know very well from the US and that I'm gonna talk about right in a few minutes. But some of them were new like tax barriers, which is something that comes up in some countries that have a value added tax, but not something that we've really seen in the US. Closer to home, earlier this year, we partnered with Refed, so Dana knows this intimately and also with NRDC and the World Wildlife Fund to put out a US food loss and waste policy action plan that really called on both Congress and the administration for kind of the most important things that can be done right now to address food waste and increased food recovery and diversion in the US. I should say in addition to our four organizations working on this together, we now have over 60 different signatories, including other NGOs, state and local government, and a number of private companies, hotel chains, grocers, et cetera, some really big companies. So the link is there and you can check it out and you can see the list of all those signatories. But I just raise that to say there's a lot of coalescing of opinion around some of these key policies. So in first, in terms of investing in prevention and keeping waste out of the landfill, I'll talk a little bit in a minute about funding really for states and localities to support policies that reduce waste and landfills. That was one of several recommendations within part one. In part two, enabling surplus food donation, and as you can see this tracks as well with the hierarchy that Dana showed is if we're gonna prevent first and then next is really enabling donation. There's a lot of questions outstanding on things like the liability protection for food donations, on things like the food safety rules that apply to food that's donated and on-date labeling and not only the consumer level questions, but also questions around donation. So we talk about that in that section. In terms of showing leadership at home and abroad, again, there's a number of different recommendations within the action plan. But one of the things in there was really an opportunity for Congress to provide support for the Interagency Food Loss and Waste Collaboration, which is something that was created as a cross-agency collaboration between the US Department of Agriculture, Food and Drug Administration and Environmental Protection Agency. They've done amazing work, but they haven't actually had a formal mandate or funding or any need for reporting. So that was something that could be really useful. The next section is really on educating and activating consumers. As you saw from Dana's slides, waste at the household level is one of the biggest areas that we see waste. And there's opportunities to really provide awareness to consumers, both adults and also children and really think about schools. And then lastly, it's standardizing national date labeling, and I'm gonna move to that next. So I wanted to talk through a few different particular policies that I think are most exciting and timely and could have a lot of impact now, and then we can have more discussion. First, in terms of date labels, so this is actually where Dana and I got started working together about a decade ago, but here in the US at the federal level, there's no definition or requirements for date labels with the exception of infant formula. In the absence of any federal law, more than 40 states regulate date labels and 20 states restrict sale or donation of food after the date. The challenge comes up because more than 90% of consumers believe that these dates are safety indicators. So the majority of consumers throw food away after that date. But when you actually look into it, what you'll find is that companies report most of these labels are suggestions of peak quality. And in fact, it's not even really possible to put a date that's based on safety for most foods because for most foods, there's not a date at which they become unsafe. They'll start to spoil, but people will notice that they're spoiling. I won't consume them. There's not any kind of hidden foodborne illness in most foods that's gonna become worse over time. And then the other thing is that standardizing date labels is one of the most cost effective opportunities for reducing food waste. And this is partly because there's already labels on so many foods. So just changing them to be standard and educating people about that could divert lots of food that's currently wasted, bring a lot of savings to households, but wouldn't cost that much to implement. So in terms of opportunities, a couple of years ago, the Consumer Brands Association and Food Marketing Institute partnered to develop a voluntary product code dating initiative that now a lot of particular big companies in the US are in compliance with that. And what it says is that foods should be labeled either with a vested use by date if they are labeled to show that that's a freshness indicator or probably indicator. And then foods where there's really an increased risk, like a foods that may have been contaminated or could be unsafe after the date would have the date label used by plus the date. And it's great to see this leadership from industry. The problem is that since there are so many state laws we found that actually more than half of states have a state law that conflicts with that voluntary initiative for at least one or more categories of food products. So that's really stymied the ability from this voluntary perspective of having kind of comprehensive standard labels. So we've really looked also globally the Codex Alimentarius which has a voluntary kind of recommendation for countries. And it matches a lot with what we've called for in the US which would be similar to the, again the voluntary dating initiative. One standard label for safety used by one standard label for foods, a label for quality which is best used by allowing donation of food past the date that is freshness or quality based because often that date is set very conservatively and then most importantly really educating businesses and consumers about this. And I just want to fly that we have a webpage where we are including a lot of information and resources and data on opportunities in the food ways, sorry, in date labeling as a leader for food ways and in terms of policy opportunities. Next policy I want to briefly talk about is liability protection for food donations. There's lots of opportunities to increase food donation and I think as Dana mentioned now that EPA has really realigned some of its goals to really focus more on prevention and donation. I think it's a place where we can dig in. We in the US I could confidently say we have the strongest liability protection for food donations from around the globe which is in the Bill Emerson Good Samaritan Food Donation Act which protects food donors and nonprofits that distribute food when they distribute it to people in need for free. The problem is that more than 50% of companies say that they still don't donate because of fears of liability. So in digging into this one challenge is a lack of awareness and the other is that after Congress passed this act there was never any regulation or clear guidance that interpreted the terms. The good news is it's never been used in court which should bring some comfort to companies but because there's not been any interpretation lots of questions remain and I can't tell you how much of my time I spend trying to help companies answer these questions about what would be protected. And then the other issue is that there's comprehensive protection but it's limited. For example, if a company donates directly to those in need they won't be protected under this. They also won't be protected if they give to a nonprofit that doesn't give it away for free. So there's opportunities here to make it more clear and more protected. One last area I wanna mention quickly is around donation requirements or waste penalties. So this has been an area really heating up in state law the past few years. At this point there are eight states around the US and about 10 major cities that have some restriction on food going to the landfill. For example, in Massachusetts we prohibit companies sending more than a half a ton of food to landfill per week. That was recently reduced from one ton per week. And then in California there was already a requirement of diverting food to landfill or digester and they now implemented on top of that a requirement for some food, 20% of edible food to be donated. State and local governments know what's gonna work best for them. These are all crafted really differently. A lot of them have taken a lot of input on writing the regulations. The problem is that they cost a lot. It costs a lot to plan them, to implement them, to raise awareness and enforce them. And also to really think about supporting businesses and making these transitions. So this is a place where I think there's a real opportunity to support from the federal level. And I think we just heard from Reverend Adam Brownlee the Zero Food Waste Act which is just one amazing opportunity to really support states and localities in finding the policies that work best for them. So just lastly, this is outdated because it's from last year but we do track a lot of state bills in this space. Last year the biggest areas were tax incentives and liability this year. And I will have it hopefully by January. The number one area we're seeing are actually weight organic waste bans and waste penalties as an area of interest in state legislation. Oh, sorry, I wanna mention one other thing which is that we also have put out some reports that really think about different policy vehicles and how food waste can be incorporated in them. We did one earlier this year on the child nutrition reorganization and a few years ago one on the farm bill that was really successful in some of the ideas got picked up in the 2018 farm bill and we'll have an update of that coming out next year. So I think we heard already a lot of opportunities. I love working on reducing food waste because there's not only planet opportunities for the planet and environment for people if we can make sure that safe surplus edible food gets to people, but also there's a lot of opportunities when we really treat food as a resource to create more jobs, more wealth. Massachusetts has seen an increase in revenue and in job creation just by requiring food not to go to the landfill. So it's a great area to work on. I think there's a lot more opportunity. And thank you so much. Thank you, Emily. And we'll have to have you back next year with your updated charts and we can walk through and talk a little bit about more what's happening in state legislatures. We are gonna now have about 15 minutes for Q&A. There's still an opportunity for people to ask questions. You can send this an email, ask ASK, ask at ESI.org. You can follow us on Twitter at ESI online. I am going to pick up, Emily, where you were just talking about and I'm gonna let Dana go first since you were just talking about it, but it's the idea that policies regarding food waste vary across states. A lot of times we talk about briefings about states being laboratories for great ideas and new policies. It sounds like from your presentation, Emily, in fact the lack of consistency from one state to the other might actually may not be a great thing. We may need to clarify that. So we'll definitely give you an opportunity to weigh in but I'll start with Dana. How could the federal government be supportive to standardize or fill gaps between what states are trying to do for all the right reasons when it comes to reducing food waste? Yeah, great question. I think the straightforward answer and the realistic one is funding. Really trying to provide funding to states and local governments that are doing innovative things. And of course they're all watching each other. So a handful of those really successful programs can really travel across the country relatively quickly. The less realistic, but I can't help myself answer. And after, as Emily said, working together for 10 years, she spent 10 years telling me this is not actually possible, but I have to say it anyway, which is my dream would be to see a national ban on food and landfills. It's something that's been done across Europe. It's probably when you speak with businesses in Europe, the fundamental thing they bring up. And in the states that we're seeing do that, you see not only does it get the food out of landfills, recycle it, et cetera, but also, but it also actually increases food donation and it helps to drive businesses to prevent waste as well. So a lot of benefits. And if we can't do that as a national law, I think supporting the states and local governments that are doing it through funding is best. Emily, what are some other things that we could do to help sort of level what states are trying to do? Sure, thank you. And let me just respond to that point because it's our fun debate that we've had. So my sense is as a lawyer, I think it is legal. It would actually be legal for the federal government to do it. I think it would just be really tricky because states and localities are the ones that take the lead on waste and landfilling. And so I think that's why, while I actually do agree with Dana that that would be an incredibly effective way to address this, I think where we are now, it's more, it's easier to give money to states and localities and say, you can only have this money if you implement one of these best practice lists of policies, whether it's a waste ban, a diversion requirement, et cetera. But I also like Dana, dream of one day where we just say food can't go to landfill. I think what you're alluding to, Dan, which I wanna kind of pull out is that sometimes it's good that states can go above the federal level. So actually on some of the liability protection things, we've seen innovation in states. For example, lots of states have now offered protection where food is donated for free to a nonprofit and the nonprofit can either give it away for free or sell it at a very low cost, which helps provide like innovative models. It's helped during COVID to offset the price of just, transporting that food to people's homes and keeping vulnerable individuals out of like big crowds. On the flip side, there's some like date labeling where the state variability makes no sense. If there is a scientific reason to date label, then all of the policies should follow the science. And the fact that no two states have the same policy doesn't make sense. So this has been a challenge for us on the refed site where we track policies. We try to really show the places where having a state policy as a negative versus ones where having a state policy can build on top of a federal floor. And I would say like date labeling and I think restrictions on feeding food scraps to animals are two areas where the state policies actually make things more restrictive and lead to more food being wasted. Thank you very much. And now I'm gonna refer to Dana's slides, that give Emily the first chance to go. So Dana, you had those great slides. I think you called it your insight engine. If I remember correctly, if I took my notes properly, I love those charts, those slides where you sort of ranked different solutions. You also talked extensively about the idea of things being delivering a bang for your buck return on investment. I'm curious from either a climate perspective or from an economics perspective, some additional things that you might wanna pull out from this part of the conversation about what could we do differently that would provide us the greatest bang for our buck in terms of reducing food waste. And Emily, I'll let you go first there and then we'll turn to Dana. I'm happy to go first, but I do think this is Dana's sweet spot because we've done such a great job of really showing the cost effectiveness, what is the cost of different things. I do think it is really, really important. One of the biggest challenges in both enacting policies in like measuring their success, et cetera, is that it's hard to measure prevention of food waste. And so I think that's, if we think that that's a challenge, that that's also a great place to invest. And I know EPA is actually starting to develop a food waste production strategy. So even kind of placing that squarely as a challenge around how do we better measure and support innovation and prevention, I think is a worthwhile endeavor. Best bang for buck, huh? You know, I think from a policy perspective, the, there's probably the best bang for buck is what we just talked about is supporting the state and local governments. But I would also point out, our analysis really shows that, the bang for buck comes in these big consumer efforts. So trying to reduce portion sizes, trying to educate consumers on this issue and help give them tools and tricks and things like that.  I think the caveat with that is that it needs to be a long-term play. You can't just do that in a year, right? It's just like a, it's like a not littering effort. And you know, it's a long-term kind of large scale campaign style thing accompanied with a lot of other smart interventions that you need to get there. Thank you so much. I'd like to turn to some of the questions around environmental justice and climate equity and your presentations covered the idea of food going to waste when it could be diverted in part to people who need it, who are either food insecure or, you know, or schools maybe that are having a hard time providing lunches to students. I'd like to hear from you about some of the environmental justice concerns involved in food waste that we should be sort of especially aware of. And if you have any thoughts about sort of which of the policies we've covered today might help us make progress. And Dana, you have your mute off, so maybe we'll start with you and then go to Emily with what your thoughts are about this issue. Sounds good. Yeah, you know, I think that providing more food into the emergency, you know, food system is an important, like it addresses a surface cause of injustice, right? It doesn't really get to the root cause of food insecurity, but it does help kind of address that surface issue. It allows lower income people to spend money on other things and not spend it on food. So I think, you know, there is an important role that food donation plays in making that all happen today. You know, beyond that, I think there's some things to just be aware of, like a lot of landfill and then proposed composting sites are in lower income neighborhoods, right? And so I think there's just some watchouts for things like that as well. I totally agree. I'll build on that a little. I think, you know, in the food system in general, the benefits and the burdens of the food system aren't shared equally. And a lot of that is economic, but even more so, you know, racial and ethnic grounds.  And then the benefits are kind of re-filed larger companies that are dream really well. So I think any ways that we're being more efficient for our food system, if that means that we're, you know, we're producing less food because we're more efficient with it, then we also reduce some of the burdens on communities that are nearby runoff from farms and those kinds of things too.  And we know that, you know, there's a huge injustice in terms of who's going to be burdened by climate change. So, you know, in that big picture, one thing I love the Zero Food Waste Act that we heard about from Representative Brownlee does have in it, the way it was constructed that there's a provision for increased funding for marginalized communities. So really trying to make sure that as we invest in new infrastructure, new composting, new digesters, even new food recovery infrastructure and donation infrastructure, that it is equally available to those same communities that are burdened right now and making sure that we're making those opportunities for, you know, available across those communities too. Thanks. And now I'm going to refer back to Dana's slides. You had the great, it was very busy slide, but it was a great slide and you talked about your first unicorn. I think you said it was called Appeal, which is a great name. And there was a lot of public sector, excuse me, private sector innovation. I'm curious, and I think this is going to have, probably have to be our last one, but innovation I think probably plays a large role in our potential to reduce upstream food waste. What are some of the innovations that you see on the horizon or that are entering the marketplace that make you especially optimistic about our ability to handle food waste and are there things that policy makers should think about as they're putting things together that might encourage innovation, whether it's technological innovation or programmatic innovation or any other innovation that might help us attract, get to the bottom of this. And Emily, I think maybe we'll, actually I'll start with you, Dana, you're unmuted and then we'll go to Emily, she'll have the last word today. Okay, sounds good. I think there's a ton that can be done and, you know, I would love to see more incentives for innovation. And I think that there are, what I'm excited about, I'm excited about machine learning applied to data in a new way that's really allowing the whole system to get more precise about how food moves around, when it's used, where it goes, how much to order, things like that, as well as being able to kind of alert the food donation world when there is a donation possible, right? A lot of this stuff is last minute and it's unexpected. And so if you, you know, with our new ability to kind of broadcast information and share it in different ways, I think there's a lot of opportunity. So there's a, we have a ton of solutions, you know, within our playbook that are showing really great results. So I'm excited about that. I do think the policy play there is, you know, a combination of potentially some kind of mechanism to unlock like an energy start type of certification that can then unlock money that could flow to that, right? Incentives. So if you can get that, you know, businesses get an incentive to adopt anything with this certification, that sort of thing. And I think that would not only unlock federal, you know, potential federal incentives, but also state, government philanthropic and just signal to the private sector as well. I think Dana covered that really well. I would agree with everything she said. You know, I think it's sort of to me, and you know, I think I'm kind of saying again, but there's two sides in terms of innovation. One is supporting more innovation, more funding. And we recommend, I mentioned before, we've done recommendations for the farm bill, for example, like certain areas where investment could kind of bring those innovations forward. But then once we know what things work, I think it's really figuring out the incentives for companies to use those technologies or mechanisms. You know, I mentioned briefly there's, we have a great tax incentive for food donation. It works really well for big companies. It doesn't work at all for farmers. It doesn't really work for small businesses that don't make enough for a deduction to benefit them. So I think there's areas too where we could create alternatives. In particular, I think about with farms that that's also some of the freshest, healthiest food. So when we think back to the equity question, you know, any food on firm that's getting tilled under that could have gone instead to people who need it is a real waste of that. So this was really fun. Thank you so much for organizing and for the opportunity. It was absolutely our pleasure. This was such a great panel today. Dana and Emily, thank you so much for your excellent presentations and such an interesting and engaging discussion. Thank you so much for entertaining our questions and helping our audience think about all of this. Also like to say special thanks to Representative Brownlee for her video intro, to say thanks to her staff for being such great folks to work with and helping her available for today. And I'd like to thank everyone in the audience. I know we have a big crowd out there today and I really appreciate you sticking with us through part three of our series this week. If you missed our briefings earlier this week on Wednesday we talked about building materials. Yesterday we talked about plastics today, food waste. Of course, you can check everything out online. You can visit us at www.esi.org. I'd also like to take a moment to thank all of the folks behind the scenes at EESI who makes these briefings possible. Special thanks to Dan O'Brien. Special shout out to Savannah Bertrand for pulling this all together today. Thanks also to Omri, Allison, Emma, Anna and Amber and Isabella for all their efforts as well. The next slide will be a link to a survey. If you have a moment, we would really appreciate if you would share any feedback that you have. We read every response. If you had any issues with the live cast, the webcast, the audio, the video, any issues at all any ideas for how we might be able to do better when it comes to providing educational resources for policymakers. We are really all ears and we'd really appreciate those extra two minutes or so you might take to share with that feedback. We're a couple of minutes over. Sorry about that. I think it was definitely worthwhile, such an awesome engaging discussion today. But we will end there. I wish everyone a very happy weekend and we will see you at our next briefing which will be in early January. It's a really interesting topic. A briefing notice will be in your inboxes before too long. I think you're really gonna like it. We've got some great stuff lined up for 2022. But in the meantime, enjoy hopefully a restful and relaxing holiday break and we will see you next year. Thanks so much.


Hey everyone, this is Brian. I just wanted to do a quick video test here. I switched from Ubuntu Whatever newest version. I'm not really a version person To the latest version of Linux Mint. I think it's Linux Mint 18 Sarah There's a horrible bug in Qt and I think I posted a couple times about this where you would have a QML file And let me just crack it open in case you haven't seen it And you have this code editor where you do all your obviously you're typing and stuff And if you would just simply run this in Ubuntu it would run and you could see it working and stuff Like this but as soon as you close it whether you click this or you click the little red box here didn't matter Suddenly this area would become unusable you couldn't select anything you couldn't type you couldn't do anything And it just brought my QML tutorials to their knees because well if you can't really Run it more than once it's kind of hard to show people what's going on. So As much as I love Ubuntu, I just thought I'd try Linux Mint It worked beautifully in virtual box on my Mac So I said you know what screw it just wipe my partition on my desktop where I dual boot Windows and Linux and Just said me oh, we're gonna do this and as soon as I installed of course It wouldn't be Linux if there wasn't some sort of bug and it wasn't seeing my sound or I more appropriately my headset Well, it saw the headset, but it didn't see the sound coming out of it and Chris Brunner I hope I'm pronouncing your name correctly Big shout out to him. He told me to try PAVU control and this is in the void realms facer group If you're not in there, you should join it. We've got to date 726 other programmers in there, but the point being you know, thank you very much Chris It seems to be working now. I hope I can actually see myself talking, which is really awesome So if anybody else does like I did and they're not getting their sound use PAVU control and then just Amp the volume up and then mute the other devices and it should work just fine hoping That we can get moving on some tutorials here soon. It's gonna take me a little bit of getting used to Mint although it's very very similar and I've got some more travel for work coming up, but That's all I just wanted to say hi to everybody and let you know I'm not dead. I'm still gonna be doing tutorials. Thanks guys


A short time ago, an American airplane dropped one bomb on Hiroshima.  It's an extraordinary question when you think about it. Would you order the indiscriminate killing of millions of people? Nations still threaten to incinerate entire cities to destroy life on earth, to make our beautiful world uninhabitable for our future generations. It's got one country against the Netherlands. But what we've done is negotiate a categorical prohibition of nuclear weapons that makes it clear that these weapons are illegal or unacceptable.


A couple months back I put out a video talking about some of the struggles some of the trials and tribulations I've been having on the channel and most of them were self-inflicted wounds So today I want to give you a very useful video on how things have been going these last couple months how you can Implement them into your own channel if you have one or if you're just a fan of me or hate me and want to see How things are going for the better or the worse you can celebrate afterwards. I'm here to tell you today First I want to say this Things are going great on the channel if you've been following me for a while You know that hasn't been the case in the last couple years I've been hemorrhaging subscribers every time I'd upload a video I would lose like six to ten on average never gaining a sub there was a Probably like a year or so back where I was at I don't know 58,000 subscribers. I dropped down to 56 I've eaked my way back into the 57 range now Subscribers in general don't really matter much the number is very Inflated especially if you've been on YouTube for over a decade or around that time or if you've just been off and on Over the course of ten years like I have the number has value initially But when you stretch it out a lot of people grow up and change their tastes or did they just move on and they Don't have any interest in you also your content changes and it pushes people away I had both things going on. I'm not gonna go into a whole woe was me thing about the channel and all the mistakes I've made I think I've probably done that enough in the past And I also want people to get value out of this take some advice and and implement it into whatever they're doing All right, so to do this quickly and simply I'm gonna give you the cons list number one I was losing subscribers Adam. You said that doesn't really matter subscribers don't matter Well, they do and they don't like I said over time that number seems to matter less But when you're losing subscribers on upload and you're not gaining additional ones That's a problem. That means that I'm turning off the people that were here and I'm not pulling anybody new into the fray So my videos aren't going out to the mass public They're staying within my community and my community is not liking what I'm doing It's normal to lose subscribers especially when you upload a video you might lose two or three or even five or six However, you should be gaining more than you're losing to make up the difference So if little Johnny and little Timmy aren't a fan of you, you know uploading another Marvel review They might bounce they might be DC guys and for some reason you can't just like both I guess online But then more people will come in, you know, maybe there's a Rebecca and a Sally I don't think I don't think women watch my show actually Hey, if you're a woman comment and then let me know because my analytics say otherwise It's a it's a sausage fest up in this thing. Anyway, I think you get what I'm saying if two leave two should come actually Three or four or five should come you need to make up that difference Second problem the views were horrendously bad when I was uploading videos for a while there for like a six-month period I was getting like 500 views maybe 700 if I was lucky It was rare when I had any sort of consistency on occasion I'd upload a video that would do well and it would get you know a couple thousand views, but there was no steady Consistency which meant again the subscribers are just randomly watching They're not they're not being referred to by YouTube to check out the new video because they haven't watched in a long time So because of how YouTube's algorithm works, it's not gonna feed you stuff. You have no interest in Especially over time.  Why would they let me come off my list for a second and say this I don't blame YouTube for what happened to my channel I blame myself and I think that's the responsible thing to do for the most part does YouTube screw up Oh, God. Yeah Google screws up all the time. Do they recommend things that are kind of toxic and awful for people to watch? You better believe it Buster. Are there secret little games probably being played over there?  We have loss of subs loss of views Loss of revenue is number three Thankfully Thankfully, I don't rely on this as a source of income or at least I didn't for a long time now is a different story Because I have a full-time job. So this was just a passion. This was a hobby of mine now I had a gig with screen rant that was pretty profitable. I was doing a show called real rivalries It went for I think eight months and 31 episodes plus I was doing some documentary episodes for them and some shorts the all that stuff's gone Some of it my choice some of it theirs. They canceled real rivalries. It wasn't bringing in the numbers. They wanted It wasn't doing you know Which sucks because they did tell me before I told my wife that she could quit her job and stay home with our kids Like she wanted to they did tell me that the show was looking really good And they didn't see it getting canceled and then your future and then a month and a half later They did after my wife quit her job. It was a miserable job. It wasn't she wasn't making much money anyways So it's it's not all bad, but that really killed us financially. So Instead of her finding another dead-end job. She said Adam just put your time into this just really focus Treat this as a full-time second job instead of a part-time second job Which is a recommendation I'll give to you when we get to the pros list I get I mean, I guess it's not a pro or a con. It's just a recommendation. So yeah treat this like a full-time job If you want to make if you want to be really successful, you have to the lightning in a bottle flash in the pan Quick results are so rare now and yes It's possible to post two or three videos and somehow you just hit perfectly and you get like a million views That is not something you should rely on though revenue was coming in here. I didn't pay attention to it I had the gig over at ScreenRant, you know fueling what we were missing from my wife's job now that that's gone Now that the wife's job's gone. I had to turn back to my channel and say all right It's time to put the big kid pants on. What can we do to make this channel profitable and still maintain quality?  I'm working on it But these are things like the YouTube join membership button, which I highly suggest you you join or Patreon at patreon.com slash Adam does movies which I suggest you you join if you like me in the channel These are just a couple ways, but there's also, you know a merch store that I have but don't really use that's not updated I got it. I got to work on that There's tick tock that I have to be posting more regularly to just to pull in traffic to this channel You know Twitter Facebook, which I just can't see myself using I just that place sucks so bad So to summarize one more time on the cons lack of subs lack of views lack of revenue Lack of using any of the tools available to grow the channel. That's the bad stuff now Let's talk about the good news. It's been a little over two months since I implemented my new changes to the channel I'm gonna bullet point those for you as well I'm gonna talk about how things have been working out because of it number one and also the most crucial to the success here Focusing on one or two specific shows that are related to movies and are my actual voice This was big and this was very tough for me to do It's like giving up some of your children because they're not a success in your eyes or really in the eyes of anyone I have done Probably a dozen or more shows on this channel and they've seen various levels of success With movie feuds of course being the primary that I have I have a few videos that have over a million views I have you know a bunch of videos that have half a million views or more so that show isn't just Accidentally doing well people were drawn to it for many years now Lately recently in the last few I'd say that it's definitely tapered off and those interests have moved elsewhere That is where I think the algorithm does come into play and where people's interests Maybe have just changed away from that style. I don't know. I'm still focusing on them They're still doing okay, but I'm not too thrilled with how they're doing overall because they do take longer to make The biggest thing that really hurt me was getting rid of the cringe It was a satirical show. I did where I played a character named Khaleesi Grimes 82 He was a corporate shill.  I didn't sign up for this guy Although I thought it was obvious and plenty of my viewers did It just wasn't smart to keep the show around on the main channel So then I pulled them and moved them to the second channel. That was a disaster. They lost all their views They weren't getting thrown into the stream of uh, you know the youtube videos because I think they saw duplicates in there Even though I pulled the other ones just a nightmare just a bad idea Now I still do the cringe once or twice a month and it's exclusive to youtube join members and patreon members It was One way that I could think of giving them something that was only for them and showing my thanks for for joining me there I mean, I don't do a whole lot else and I think they don't care They just they just want to show support But I wanted to give back somehow and that was the perfect way for me to do it So the cringe is exclusive. It's been exclusive for a few months It'll continue to be exclusive because otherwise. They just don't do it That's the other option Or I put it on a third channel, which I don't have time and I don't want to get you know I don't have to work up the subs again And it doesn't make sense to have so many random videos on the secondary channel I just yeah, it has to be where it's at So I cut all the fat essentially all the skit based videos anything where I'm being You know more playful and satirical I can still do that in my regular adam rance movies videos And I have started to incorporate some of those different flavors into it while retaining my true voice So people aren't confused So the main focus is just adam rance movies. It's on movie reviews You know reactions to popular things in the the movie stratosphere And then there's the movie feuds videos and that's it Those are the two shows and I even kind of blended the format so that they're more cohesive I'm not in front of a brick wall with a tv monitor now It has that kind of you know consistent blue background that people are familiar with You know what you're gonna get now. There's no surprises people don't like surprises for the most part And that's another piece of advice. I'll give you don't constantly shift up things It's okay when you first start out to try to find your footing and try to find what people are resonating with But don't do this five or six years in and keep throwing out new shows and confusing people That that's what I've been doing wrong for very many years and it's so sad It's so pathetic that it took me this long to realize it Because even me as a viewer works this way when I subscribe to a youtube channel I expect to see the one video I subscribe to I don't want 14 different shows thrown at me all that are Kind of different from each other. I want a familiar voice and someone that I can say you know what I get this guy He gets me.  Wow. That was a very long first bullet number two putting out content constantly consistently getting out new videos My goal is to get out three to four to five videos every single week Monday through friday having a video queued up taking two days off on the weekend But pre-planning getting shit typed out Saying okay on monday. I got this coming Tuesday. I got this and actually filming the majority of it in one sitting So I don't go back every single day to the camera Have to make sure the lights are set up the audio set up all that stuff is a pain in the ass I just want to focus on Doing a set of videos and then get to editing. I know I'm gonna see a new movie on thursdays So it makes sense to film fridays and then get everything ready for the next week So get a get a few days ahead You know stay ahead of it for once instead of days behind like I always was doing in the past I know i'm gonna put out a movie for you every week or try to that's the goal So what popular videos are coming out that I can put head to head? Usually something's remade every week. So it's not too hard to figure that out But it's good to stay ahead of the game when I was losing subscribers and views. I looked back There were some years I think last year I put out one video a month on average. It was pathetic Like 12 videos over the year the year before that wasn't much better I was maybe getting out three videos a month at the best That's really sad and that's why I wasn't seeing that growth on the channel Having a game plan is essential if you want to make your channel grow If you want to see some form of viewership, you need to have consistent videos put out What's even more challenging about that is you can't let the quality dip So you film a bunch of stuff and you quickly try to edit it and spit it out That's not gonna work because you want your engagement up for my third bullet point, which is revenue Yeah, we just we just did a very beautiful segue into the revenue bullet point And then I slipped up on saying the word revenue So this whole thing is a wash polish needs to be there as I just demonstrated with me tripping over myself And then not redoing it and editing a beautiful cut together. I just left the garbage version in You have to keep people engaged if your retention rate isn't there your revenue is not there youtube sees Oh, these people are averaging like 20 seconds on your video and they're bouncing and you think we we should pay you for that This happens in a few ways one getting lively or in front of the camera There was many years where I look back and I think man, I am Really going through the motions here. This is not the most exciting thing to be watching to Having other things to look at besides my ugly mug putting in more video clips And I know it's tough on this video because it's probably just gonna be me talking most of the time This is for you get value otherwise You don't have to have you don't have to be looking at me, right? You can just have this on in the background while you're you know playing a video game or something Or maybe working on your youtube channel if you have one having the retention rate high is crucial And this is one of many things I actually learned while working for screen ran Not only did I get value from them from a revenue standpoint, but also just a learning standpoint You can always learn more about this shit Always the third thing I did to capture viewers and to make sure people that were subscribed Were watching and seeing me was to put myself on the thumbnails I've been doing this for a while But just having a more templated consistent look throwing review in the bottom left I know it's cliche so many people do it, but they do it because it works Again, I've said this so many times, but I'm my own worst enemy and part of me is just so Pathetically against the norm that I refuse to look at what works and do the same thing I want to be different I want to think outside the box and not just sit down in front of a shelf of videos And talk for eight minutes with with no video clips and somehow think that's gonna work Even though it doesn't work for anyone else. It's gonna work for me No had to put the ego down Take a look at what works elsewhere and start doing it But still having my own voice and that's a major thing that I can tell you The last thing was the social piece and I'm still like I said a little rough on that because time is still kind of a factor for me With two full-time jobs now plus being a father being a husband It's hard to keep it all going. But if you have the passion the drive and the energy Anything you can do it you can do it. I've been trying to post to tiktok a few times a week It's basically just splicing up the reviews. I've already done on youtube getting into that 60 second format I've also been putting those same videos on youtube via the youtube shorts They have to be under 60 seconds And that that works nice because it potentially goes out to new people And it brings them here to my channel and that's the goal at the end of the day It's not to make revenue on tiktok. I don't actually even know how that works. I haven't looked into it Although I am going to be doing a more exclusive tiktok slash youtube short Coming up where I'm basically inside of videos. I used to do them all the time They seem popular on tiktok. So you know why not? That's one of the things I did in the past here that not many other people were doing at the time So if if there's something that's being done that I had done already Hell, yeah, I'll jump in on that at the end of each video now I talked directly to the viewer more and I and I pushed my patreon I pushed the youtube join membership So that's another way that i'm trying to leverage those platforms further without being obnoxious about it I figure if you make it to the end of the video, you liked me enough, right? I'm not going to push it right away 10 seconds in which I am told is the smarter play But there's still that part of me that you know, I still want to have A quality show without the ads all over the place with all the changes implemented How is my channel going? It's going excellent and thankfully youtube has a nice little snapshot of the last 30 days of the channel To let me know how things are doing in 28 days It got almost 84 000 views across the channel Which is up just a tad from the average 24 000 to 32 000 it was doing prior That's that's incredible impressions went up 101 percent at 1.6 million impressions watch time improved It went up 34 percent to five minutes and 25 seconds on average Absolutely awesome. That's great results. This is the most insane number My subscribers went up 999 percent in the last 28 days The best part is the subscriber addition was only 183 Plus 183 subscribers. That's a gain of 999 percent. That's how bad I was doing on youtube So again, I increased 183. I'm still losing a ton of subscribers You know just just people that has subscribed years and years ago That are maybe starting to see new videos show up in their feed and like oh this asshole No hard pass That's all that means but i'm gaining enough new people to make up for that and those are the people that matter Those are the ones that are they're like, yes I like this stuff more of it and they're gonna get more of it because i'm not doing all the other stuff There's no new show. There's no movie boss showing up. There's no cringe. There's no Trailer trash. There's no car side reviews all these different random shows that I did in the past. They're gone And it's sad, but also I have to do it and it makes sense and clearly it's working. I'm not going to tell you what I'm making on youtube Believe me. It's it's not going to turn any heads But when I look back five months ago I would I looked at the number and I said, okay I want to double that number in the next month and I did and then I looked at that number and said I want to double that one in the next month And I did and now when I look at the new number I say, okay I need to bring this up a lot more How can I continue to grow it and so I look at what i'm doing and what's working? And i'm just gonna keep hitting it harder keep getting videos out that people want to see Keep the watch time up keep people invested keep people engaged and most importantly keep having fun with it When you put in the work and you see the numbers actually working in your favor It is such a beautiful thing Let me tell you after years of struggling because I just didn't want to go all in because I couldn't I had kids to raise I had a wife working Constant things juggling, but now with the extra freedom.  Maybe you have some college classes or maybe you're in high school But you have our believe me. I was in high school back in the day. I know how much time I had I made I made amateur videos all the time with my buddies. We had so much screwing around time It was remarkable. So take it if you're passionate and just put it to use Because in the future that's just gonna keep growing I had it and I lost it. I dropped the ball Goddamn kids goddamn family But now I'm picking it up and now I'm running again and I see I see the goals way down there Many years from now and I'm just gonna keep on running for it Sappy analogy aside. I want to thank you truly. Thank you for continuing to watch the show Continuing to support the show any way you can. I hope this was somewhat valuable I'm sure it ended up being very long I tend to ramble and talk a lot when I don't script out my stuff But I think it's more natural and people seem to enjoy it more than Than me constantly trying to come up with one-liners and jokes that may or may not land Anyway, I gave you a list of ideas things to try Stay consistent. Say true.  Don't experiment 24-7 It's okay to try new things But know what works. Look what other channels are doing Don't copy, but it's okay to take inspiration It's so it's okay to look over there and say, you know what this guy's continuing to grow I should probably pay a little bit more attention to what's working for him And see how I can take it and make it my own. As you probably know, I have plenty of more content coming out So stick around the channel. If you're new, please subscribe Like the video if you had some fun learn something maybe possibly and I'll see you around Thanks again for watching. This is one of those bumpers I was talking about where I promote some of my stuff. So again, I'm on patreon at patreon.com Slash adam does movies or you can hit the join right here on youtube If you just want to do a dollar though patreon has that ability whereas I think youtube starts at 4.99 Which is for that's a big roller, right? Or you could go to patreon and give me like 20 bucks a month That would be amazing. I'm on tiktok at adam does movies. You can find me on twitter at adam does movies You can find me around look for that handle or check me out on my second channel adam olinger that That's also a disaster that I probably should fix at some point, but Baby steps nothing grows overnight


Hi everybody, Joe for Jasper's case breaks.com here and that is 2021 Panini flawless baseball One box one brief case break random team number 17 Some really nice stuff here big. Thanks to this group for making it happen. Appreciate the people buying their spot straight up And I appreciate The people that got into that filler and congrats to the 10 that got in All baseball teams are in all 30 teams are in let's do it Let's roll it and randomize names and teams four or two six times one two three four five and six and final time Ryan down to Michael after six four or two six times for the teams one two three four five and six and final time After six guardians down to the cubbies All right, Ryan H Guardians Andy with the Brewers Brian with the Marlins Carl with the Red Sox Niko with the Tigers David with the Mariners Michael with the Giants Craig with the Rangers Carl with the Orioles and Cardinals Niko with the Diamondbacks Craig with the Angels Carl with the Braves Ryan with the Mets Carl with the Rays Craig with the Nats Carl with the Twins Gregory with the Royals Craig with the Phillies Justin. You got the Blue Jays Carl Yankees white Yankees And then Craig has the White Sox and Astros Ryan with the Reds Kevin with the Rockies Craig A's Pirates Padres Ryan you got my Dodgers and Michael with the Chicago Cubs Let's alphabetize by team I'm gonna pause the video when we come back We're gonna see if there's any trades and then we'll pop open this fresh case and see Which briefcase we're gonna do so stick around we will be right back All right, welcome back ladies and gentlemen. No deals were done. So here on the 17th break number 17 The list remains the same. Thanks everybody for getting in I think Craig ended up with that last spot mojo gets the White Sox there before those last spot before the filler So here's the fresh case And now let's let's see which briefcase we're going to do All right, so we're going to Select a die I like that one We'll go one two three for the top box and four five six on the dice roll for the bottom box Two top box Bottom box will save for next time So this is random team 17, right? Yeah, so this will be random team 18. I'll be in focus right there There you go. All right now. Let's see what we got in here Good luck everybody. Now sometimes if we're lucky, there'll be a third Encased hit right there, which usually means a some sort of bat knob or a cleat or something like that So we'll use those blank cards to hide the hits We'll do that slider box first No, no third hit All right, so looks like the autograph is on the right side I'm trying not to peek too much. I don't can't really see it. I see like a shadow of the player And then the gem on the left side And here's the slider box right here that we're going to do first We'll flip that around here. You can see those cards on the on the top camera As well and we're also gonna I'm also going to hide the Nicely branded Blank right there. We're going to use this blank card to slow play the hits All right, first one out of the gate Eight out of 15. Jose Abreu. Nice dual relics Sorry Carl. We do not send these briefcases out Unless you you want to come visit the shop we give them way to the to the kids in the neighborhood A four out of five. Vlad Guerrero, Jr. Nice two-color dual relic So that's for Justin and the blue jays The Jose Abreu went to Craig and the White Sox last spot mojo And that's a train whistle Out of fives and under Justin get the world famous train whistle. Here we go All aboard the big hit express Next is another train whistle Ken Griffey, Sr. One out of three It's a pretty thick card sock. Is that going to fit into a 180 top loader or I'm going to need a slider box No, I think that's The exact perfect size I didn't realize that Ken Griffey, Sr. Was A Yankee. Is that a Yankee uniform? Yeah, red and then Yankees After that then Braves then Reds then uh, then Mariners the last couple years of his career with junior All right, there you go Yankees Carl with the Bronx bombers and All aboard the big hit express And for the Reds Eugenio Suarez Seven out of 20 That's Ryan Heinz with the red legs Love this flawless stuff really nice. All right next is wow Taylor Walls half of the Nike swoosh Rookie patch and signatures. That's a one of one for Carl and the Tampa Bay Rays No, I don't think this one's going to end up in a I'm just going to put this into A slider box that we have here And we have we even have some some sponge right there from one of those Baseball boxes that we opened them in the mixer a few days ago That's nice Not sure what the story with Taylor Walls is right now, but Is he with the big club? I think he I think he is Let's I don't know what kind of playing time he's getting But uh, it's only hitting 174 a home run A few run scored three rbi's five stolen bases though So if you get the hitting on track That'd be nice So we're rooting for him. We're rooting for Taylor Walls now Carl and the Rays And all aboard the big hit express All right, we still have a few more to go Nine out of 15 signature prime materials. That's a rolled his Chapman It's another one for Carl and the Yankees I don't remember Steve Steve Virch is like which product had that had where Ken Griffey jr And Ken Griffey senior it was a dual autograph. It might have been flawless. They signed in the wrong spot Might have been 2020 flawless, maybe there's Aussie albies That's pretty sweet seven out of ten. That's flawless honored ink Seven out of ten autograph for Carl and the Braves All right. Ooh Wow Is this going to be one happy person one sad person? I think so That's Casey Myers relic an autograph on top And Nate Pearson relic an autograph on the bottom two out of five two young up-and-coming pitchers He he's a highly-tied prospect. That's a former number one overall pick making his way off the il right now Two out of five Yeah tigers Nico Blue jays Justin One happy person one sad person. We'll do that randomizer at the end All right, that does it For the slider box, which was pretty nice. Let's see If the the trend continues with the encased cards All right, so we got a seven out of ten 1959 MVP Let's play two Ernie Banks seven out of ten diamond For the Chicago Cubs. That's Michael with the cubbies Nice All right, so that little card just says these those gems right there naturally mine not lab grown Okay, what do we have here? Is it portrait mode landscape mode? I didn't really notice green mode That's usually an out of five, isn't it? Landscape mode Looks like a catcher's helmet catcher's gear five out of five Joey Bart patch and autograph For my rivals The san francisco baseball giants That goes to michael locia Michael got both of the encased hits got the Ernie Banks with the spot that he won in the filler And gets this Joey Bart with the spot he bought straight up Wow Might be some of that some of the lettering Looks like the Giants font right there. Maybe some of the lettering either in maybe a city Or name maybe I'm not can't quite make that out But I'm all almost certain that those are the those little points right there Could be from the font from the lettering nice autograph as well And hopefully Giants fans are hoping future star Good replacement for Buster Posey tough shoes to fill but very nice And a train whistle of course Michael Thanks for watching And all aboard the big hit express Now we're going to close out with another train whistle So the case is not closed yet. We still got to make Uh one person happy and one person sad Not my favorite part of the job, but That's how it goes. So let's go back to random.org We got Detroit Casey Myers on top and Toronto Nate Pierce on the bottom and a train whistle It's two out of five team on top after 10 Six and a four 10 times Good luck. Uh Nico Good luck Justin Six and a four 10 times Team on top after 10 one two three four five six seven eight nine And 10th and final time After 10 times Detroit is on top Justin. I apologize No go this time But congrats and Nico with the spot that he wanted the filler got randomized the tigers and another dice roll helped him get this dual relic dual auto Casey Myers Nate Pearson two out of five Nico All aboard the big hit express What a briefcase ladies and gentlemen, this could be the makings of a hot case We got the next briefcase in the store right now on jastescasebreaks.com We can run another one back tonight So let's let's try and make that happen. I'm Joe. I'll see you next time for the next break. Bye. Bye


Hey guys, welcome back to my YouTube channel. This is Daniel Rose Leherman just outside the Damascus Gate Called an Arabic Babel Amoud. We're here during the intermediate days of the holy month of Ramadan