Our first speaker, I'm delighted, I just was able to meet yesterday for the first time. He's a remarkable fellow. Dr. Ben Goldacre is an award-winning writer and broadcaster. He's a medical doctor, and actually, last night we had a small, minor little medical problem at the reception, instantly taken care of, and I noticed we had nine physicians surrounding the person who was feeling poorly, two nurses, a couple EMTs, and I thought, at this conference, the only thing that could get quicker response would be if someone would yell, my laptop won't boot. But Dr. Goldacre is with us today. He writes for The Guardian in the UK since 2003. He's regularly an expert on TV and radio, and we're delighted to have. Please welcome Dr. Ben Goldacre.  And I won by having a small wedgie corner cut out on my right thumbnail so that I can use it as a stylus on the screen. That's one of the most useful things you'll learn in the next 30 minutes. Am I on the screen yet? No. Yes. Ah, so excellent. That's the closest I'm going to get to a magic trick today, I'm afraid. I might be one of the few people on the stage who's never worn a cape, but I can put my tweed jacket around the collar, if you like, and that's the sort of academic equivalent. Right, what I wanted to talk about today is the squabbles that have happened around homeopathy, not just now, but for the past 200 years, really, since its inception. Not because I think homeopathy is the most important thing in the world, because it's not.  I was very pleased to see that verbatim in the UCL timetable. And what I find interesting about homeopathy is that you can apply the same tools that you use to assess whether a medical drug works to homeopathy, but because the issues are so much simpler in homeopathy, it makes a very good teaching tool. But this won't be my clinical trial methodology lecture. You'll be relieved to hear. And I think there are some very interesting rhetorical issues and historical issues to be found in the ongoing discussions that have happened around homeopathy for the past two centuries. So why would you care about homeopathy? Well, firstly, if I do that, I can see the screen and the microphone. Why care about homeopathy? Well, firstly, it's just interesting and fun to pull things apart and see how they work. That's why we like Linux, that's why we like PDAs, that's why we like thinking about psychics or alternative therapies because when we see how these things really work, then that's often much more interesting than the sort of magic story about quantum distortions in the hysteria field or whatever. And they're interesting even if you can't put them back together again. I think also thinking about alternative therapies is important and interesting because at the moment, particularly in England, alternative therapies have pretty much full spectrum dominance in the newspapers. And by distorting the public's understanding of evidence, by promoting the public misunderstanding of evidence, they undermine all of the good work that's being done by doctors at the moment. And this is a relatively modern phenomenon where doctors try now to work collaboratively with their patients towards an optimum health outcome. That's what it says in the communication skills textbooks that I teach from. But what it means is that doctors are keen now to talk with their patients, discuss the evidence and come to a decision with them. And that requires that people aren't being constantly misled about what a trial means and how evidence works. But honestly, and this is by no means the most important, there are practical consequences obviously. In Britain recently, somebody sent a student to 10 homeopaths and said, look, I'm going to this high-risk malaria area. What shall I do? I'm not very keen on taking malaria tablets. And the homeopaths, 9 out of 10, said, oh, just have some of our homeopathic malaria prophylaxis pills. They'll do you fine. It's not desperately responsible. Well over half of all the homeopaths approached undercover, recommended a mother not to give the MMR vaccine to their child. And the Society of Homeopaths, the biggest EU membership organisation for homeopaths, had a conference in December on treating HIV and AIDS with homeopathy, which is just childish, really. I'm going to try and break this laptop by pulling it up here so I can see it without breaking my airline. If everything goes horribly wrong, I apologise to the owner. Seamless. Okay, so what is homeopathy? Well, it's based on a few basic principles. Firstly, the idea that like cures like. So Samuel Hahnemann, the chap who first concocted the idea of homeopathy, I think concoct or decided, I'd probably the right words rather than discover. He took some quinine and said, oh, well, the symptoms that I'm getting from quinine, which turned out to be an idiosyncratic reaction.  So maybe if you take a microscopically small amount of quinine, then that will help to treat malaria. So like cures like is one principle. But the second and more important principle of homeopathy that everybody would recognise is very extreme dilutions. Now, when we say extreme dilutions, the Society of Homeopaths says 30C, which is the standard homeopathic preparation contains less than one part per million of the original substance. To my mind, that's something of an underestimate. 30C dilution is one in 100 done 30 times over. So that's 100 to the power of 30 or 10 to the power of 60. Or to put it in the terms of the Society of Homeopaths, less than one in a million, million, million, million, million, million, million, million, million. Just for clarity, you understand. To put that in perspective, in an Olympic swimming pool, if you count up all the molecules, that's your job, not mine, you'll find 100 million, million, million, million, million water molecules. So you'd need about 10,000 million, million, million, million of those to have one molecule. If you imagine a sphere that's diameter is the distance from here to the earth, from here, anywhere on the earth, really, you'll do to the sun. Takes light about eight minutes to travel that distance. In that sphere, and one molecule in there, that's roughly equivalent to a 30C dilution.  And if you imagine a universe filled with water, so that's three times 10 to the 80 cubic meters, I'm aware that the chapel next is from NASA, so I don't want to get these figures too wrong. But three times 10 to the 80, that's a perfect space to start a family. Fill out with water, that would only be a 55C dilution, and commonly you can buy 200C dilutions, perfectly standard from homeopaths, and that's more than a number of atoms in the universe. So is the employability of how it works, the way to go in a discussion with a homeopath? Well, it certainly gets entertaining your childish quite quickly. They say, well, you're barking at the wrong tree because water has a memory. And you go, okay, fair enough. But you don't actually give water, what you do is you drop a drop of your water onto some sugar pills, and then you shake the sugar pills in the little pot, and then you hand those out. So what about the memory of sugar? And also you start thinking through the sort of inconsistencies, like you say, well, how does the water remember the arnica that you're trying to treat me with the homeopathic arnica dilution? Why does it remember that? And not the fact that it was once in the coin's bladder. God bless her. Or Hitler's eyeball, or Nelson's barnum. And they say, ah, wow. You see, I made this point in the garden a little while ago. In a long article, it was all about sort of critical trial, critical approach to the clinical trial methodology, but it made a reference to this ridiculous dilution thing and the inconsistencies. And the homeopath wrote in and said, no. The way that the water knows to remember only the special thing that we're diluting in it is because of succusion. You bang it 10 times firmly against a hard but elastic object, ideally a bespoke wooden striking board covered in water and leather.  So has this line of argument worked over the years? Well, I would contest no. Firstly, it's very easy to get bogged down in detail around the memory of water issue. I know that there's a subtitle, isn't there? The skepticism in the internet age. And actually there are some very good illustrations of how valuable the internet can be in the memory of water squabbles that have happened over the past few years. What happens is periodically a homeopath finds a junior physicist or just some laboratory equipment and will do a study that shows some small, absolutely minuscule difference between two different sets of water, one of which has been prepared homeopathically and one of which has been prepared, which is just normal water. And they'll do this with exquisitely oversensitive equipment. But in fact, nine times out of 10, it's either a false positive due to a failure to correct for multiple comparisons, which I really promise not to bore you with right now. Although if you like the Bonferroni correction lecture, I could give that later in private. It's not very interesting, Bonferroni correction for multiple comparisons. Or they're just very obvious methodological flaws or obvious if you're the kind of guy who knows how to use a, you know, Raymond's spectrometry machine or whatever, because they prepared the water in obviously different ways that we're inevitably gonna get picked up by very sensitive equipment. And what's great about the internet is that somewhere out there, there'll be somebody who can be bothered to go through these claims, go through these papers, critically appraise them and post on their blog, like Spelman, for example, or Donnie Custina's blog, post on their blog, a critical appraisal of these claims of these papers. Recently, the journal, Homeopathy, published a whole string of papers purporting to show the memory of water. And I got in touch with the publisher, I got their permission to reproduce the contents of them online on badscience.net.  And people went through, they critically appraised the papers and then we summed up all of the criticisms at the end and this also happened on the JRF forums when everybody came together and they produced a letter which they sent to the journal and which was published in the academic journal, which I think is an extraordinary coup, really, for a bunch of jokers on the internet, you know. There's a very good XKCD joke about people being unable to let things lie on the internet. There's a really hot chick and this guy at his laptop and she's saying, come to bed dying and he says, I can't, somebody is wrong on the internet. We need to harness that power. But the most important reason not to bother with this, you know, the memory of water, the implausibility argument, I think is that as rhetorical strategies go, it's had 150 years of fail, which is a word I enjoy using as a noun. I'm in America, this is the home of neologisms. So this chap here is John Forbes. I've modeled my facial hair on him, as you can see. He was the Queen Victoria's physician and in 1846, he was talking about the implausibility of homeopathy. So he is, the blah blah is added by me, homeopathic globules side by side, blah blah blah, would reach from the earth to the sun, blah blah blah, 100 million, million, million, million, million, million. This was 162 years ago and it hasn't persuaded anyone since and he wasn't just talking to himself or Queen Victoria.  In fact, the Queen's physician is the director of the Royal Women's and Homeopathic Hospital. So that's how things have changed and we lost the empire. Can they be related? I don't know. But more importantly, the argument about the implausibility of homeopathy is completely irrelevant. There are, I think, dozens of doctors here, which is unsurprising. And lots of women, I'm very pleased to see. I mean, that wasn't a, it's not, I'm not, you know. I mean, the doctors will know.  Supervised, I say to her. I've delved in there, I pulled out his appendix, I've chopped out the dodgy bit, sewn everything up again, and he's been fine. We have basically no really good story for how anesthetics work. We just don't know how anesthetics work. But we do know that they work. And that's the difference with homeopathy. We don't know how it works. But actually, when you look at it, we know that it doesn't work. Or at least it doesn't work any better than placebo. Now this is kind of what doctors do for a living. There's an entire industry of people who do evidence-based medicine, medical statistics, you know, tens of thousands, possibly hundreds of thousands around the country, around the world. I've gotta remember I'm outside of England now. I've never been to America before. I'm temporally, culturally, and morally completely disoriented. So this story of how do you know if a pill works, this is bread and butter. You know, it doesn't get any easier than this. So let's imagine that we're having a chat with a homeopathy fan, a patient who likes it, or a practitioner. And you say, look, we should try and reach an accord, you know, and they say, look, all I know is, I feel better with homeopathy. So you go, great. Okay, fine. So perhaps that could be the placebo effect, because the placebo effect is incredibly powerful and also incredibly interesting. Psebo effect isn't just about taking a sugar pill. Psebo effect is about the cultural meaning of a treatment. So for example, we know that four sugar pills are more effective than two sugar pills at clearing gastric ulcers. This is an extraordinary finding. Gastric ulcers are a pretty unambiguous finding. You stick a camera down somebody's throat, and you look there, and they're either there or they're not. Four sugar pills a day clear gastric ulcers faster than two sugar pills a day. We know that saltwater injections are more effective at pain relief than sugar pills, not because saltwater injections have any pharmacological action on the body, but because it's a more dramatic intervention. The placebo effect is possibly the most interesting and extraordinary thing in medicine. We know that the pale color has an effect. And of course, the pharmacy industry know this as well. That's why, you know, anxiety treatment pills are blue and green, not bright red. And we know that packaging, packaging makes a difference. Classic study, Brownthwaite and Cooper. They did a forearm study where they had either sugar pills or pills with proper painkiller in them. And they were packaged either in blank packaging or in the proper big brand name commercial packaging. And they found there was obviously a significant benefit from having painkiller in the pill compared with just a sugar pill. But they also found a significant impact on pain just from the packaging alone. Now this has important ramifications for everyone in this room because you're all clevered skeptics and you like to walk around saying things like, mom, why do you buy brand name Neurofen instead of own brand? I'd be broken when it's exactly the same molecule in both. But actually your mom's right. Neurofen works better than supermarket brand. I'd be broken. She's right, you're wrong. Embrace that. And that's what being a skeptic is all about. So the placebo effect is extraordinary. Works in animals, works in children. There's a biological story about it. You know, we know that you can set up in an animal a conditioned response between taking flavoured water with an immune suppressant in it and then you take the immune suppressant out, just give the flavoured water and you'll still have the immune system changes. We know that you can give human subjects a placebo sugar pill which they're expecting to be a dopaminergic treatment for their Parkinson's and it will change the amount of dopamine being released in their basal ganglia. The placebo effect is probably the most astonishing thing in medicine. And certainly a lot more interesting than any kind of fairy tale about morphic resonance and quantum stuff in sugar pills. So we go back to our long-yielding theme and we say, look, maybe it's the placebo effect and they say, well, look, all of them know is, I feel better with an amyopathy and you go, fine. So maybe it's regression to the mean. So regression to the mean is absolutely fascinating. We know that basically as new ages, like say when things have a cycle, when your back pain gets bad and then it gets better again, your menopause comes on and it goes away because it's self-limiting. You know, menopause doesn't last forever despite what the manufacturers of HRT might like to try and persuade you. You know, if you have a viral cold, it'll get better. And it's natural to assume that anything you do when your symptoms are at their peak are what caused you to get better. So in the case of a viral cold, if you took an amyopathic pill, you might get better. This is an increase in the number of ridiculousness. If you dangled goats and drills around your neck, you might think, oh, that's what made me get better. Brilliant. Result.  It is a distraction just because I'm obsessed with this area. The correct thing to do when a patient comes to you with a sore throat that's very clearly a viral cold is to empower them and to say, look, it's fine. Just go home, plenty of water, bed rest. You know, look after yourself. That'll all be great. Doctors prescribe antibiotics to whiny patients just to get them out of the door because we think it's going to get us a quieter session in clinic. But that's actually not true. People have studied that. And if you turn away 100 people who are demanding antibiotics for a viral cold and a sore throat, 33 fewer will believe that they're effective. It's a false belief of which they should be disabused. 25 fewer intend to come back and 10 fewer come back the next year.  You just keep giving out the pills. So you go back to your homeopathy fan, you say, look, maybe it's just about regression to the mean and the placebo.  Is one person's word ever useful outside of a statistical context? I mean, it's an interesting question. There are cases where anecdotal evidence is useful. Maybe if we had a really clear, kind of ambiguous case of someone getting better from cancer, terminal cancer, would that be impressive? Well, the reality is, we're in Vegas. Amazing things happen. People win huge amounts of money. This entire city was built on a mixture of irrationality and that fact. There's a study here from the Australian oncologists where they took 2,337 patients with terminal cancer. They died on average after five months, but 1% were still alive after five years. If they dangled the goats in trails or had the homeopathic sugar pill, they'd be attributing it to that. But amazing things just happen. So to get through this, you do a trial. And I'm sure everybody knows in this room how to do a trial. You get maybe 200 people, split them into two groups of 100, half of them get the proper homeopathy pills that have been treated with all the hocus pocus. And the other half just get normal sugar pills. This is not a new idea. I mean, people have been doing clinical trials for a long time. I don't know much about Christ or any of that stuff, but I do know that Daniel... Is Daniel Old Testament or new? Old? Okay, good. I was gonna say, I don't know much about Christ, but I do know that Daniel is, and then I thought, I don't. So, and Daniel is Old Testament, and I knew that. And here's the first ever clinical trial on record. It's from the Old Testament, Daniel 1.16. The king was saying, you've all got to eat meat to be good soldiers. And he said, we don't want to eat meat. Just give us vegetables. And they said, no, no, you've got to have meat. And he said, it was this eunuch that was sent from the king.  And he said, look, we'll do a trial. We'll see what happens, you know, six weeks later. And six weeks later, they were just as strong. So they were let off the meat. Don't know what was wrong with the meat. So here's something with, there have been 200 trials done on homeopathy. I have like 10 minutes to explain the entirety of evidence based mid-sinty. They're going to do a short slot, tough crowd. Here we go. This is my magic trick. 200 trials have been done on homeopathy. People who know about evidence say, well, homeopathy works no better than placebo. Homeopaths say these trials show that homeopathy works better than placebo. How do you explain this mismatch? How is that possible? Well, firstly, there's cherry picking. People just pick out the positive studies because there are bound to be some positive studies just by the play of chance. But that's not enough to explain it. So you put all the trials together. You do a meta-analysis.  Now just to hit, this is the emblem for the Cochrane Collaboration, probably the most important new institution in medicine of the last 100 years. This is a program. God's insanity is trying to explain this. But basically, in the 70s and 80s, lots of people were doing studies looking at whether steroids improved pre-term babies' survival. And all of the studies came out being kind of borderline negative and basically negative. You can see the horizontal lines are all touching a big line that goes down the middle. That means they didn't have a significant positive result. It wasn't statistically significant. Somebody's union already. All of these trials were negative and people were going, well, we don't know if this works or not. So people generally weren't doing it. Then, after 10 years of people ignoring this treatment, somebody came along and did a meta-analysis. That little diamond shape at the bottom doesn't touch the middle line. They showed that in the aggregate, when you pool all of that data together, actually steroids do save lives in pre-term babies. The evidence was always there, but nobody had bothered to add it up in that special way. We had to wait for Excel to be invented or something. I don't know. So these ideas are important. They save lives. But there's even dispute over the meta-analysis because the homeopaths say, oh, the meta-analysis show that homeopathy works better than placebo and people like us say, well, no, the meta-analysis show that homeopathy doesn't work better than placebo. And that's because it's not just about doing a trial. There are good trials and bad trials. I'll skip that slide. This is a lot of trials with quite serious methodological flaws on another day. So what are the kind of flaws you can have? Well, actually, on this one, so third one down, you can see on the right-hand side, there are 41 dropouts. You can see that very clearly. 41 dropouts out of 100 people in a trial. That's a phenomenal dropout rate. We know that when people drop out, they're more likely to have done badly. They might not come back to clinic, for example, because they didn't do one with tablets. They had horrible side effects. They couldn't be bothered to take them. Or they're dead. So lots of dropouts is a bad sign in a trial. Lots of these trials, there were no statistics done. The numbers were all too small. Sometimes you can get things like inadequate blinding. If there's inadequate blinding, then people don't know. People can't know if they're on the tablets or if they're on the real treatment or the fake treatment, right? Because if they know, then that spoils everything. So here is a study on acupuncture. You can see on the left, when people didn't know whether they were getting real acupuncture or sham acupuncture, there was no difference between the two. But on the right, you can see the two bars, if they knew that they were getting real acupuncture or if they were told they were getting fake acupuncture, who's going to get better when they're being told they're being given fake acupuncture? Where's the dignity in that? And that's the problem in all trials. We know that in all trials blinding, failed blinding overestimates treatment benefits by 17%. Or even a bad randomization. It's, you've got to randomize people into the treatment group or the placebo group because if you're allowed to put people in whichever group you want, then that's ridiculous. Obviously you're going to put all the punters and I use the word punter advisedly in medicine because it reflects the element of chance in all clinical contact. If you put, if you get to choose which group you put people in, then you're going to put the patient so you know we're going to do well in the treatment. I'm the patient you know we're going to do badly in the placebo home and then suddenly your trial looks really great. Or you might do it unconsciously. Randomization isn't a normal idea. 1662, that's not bad is it? Why would you ignore an idea from 1662 when it works so well? Or you get dodgy randomization in trials. And there's no point in doing a trial with bad randomization. Alternative therapists of all flavors always say, well you know we don't have the money to do proper trials as if it's really expensive as if it's really difficult. Common sense doesn't cost anything. Randomizing properly doesn't cost anything. Doing trials with inadequate randomization is a waste of money and a waste of the patients who have given their bodies over to you for you to do an experiment on them on understanding that you're going to do an experiment that produces information. That's the ethical transaction. Bad research is unethical. So overall, the dodgy trials, the trials that are methodologically inept, the trials which are not fair tests, the ones on the left-hand side of this graph, show that homeopathy is better than placebo. As the methodological quality of the trials improves, so the result tends towards homeopathy is no better than placebo. And if you look at the meta-analyses that homeopaths quote, they say, exactly the same meta-analyses which I would quote as negative because I only quote the figure for the most rigorous trials, they quote the figure for all of the trials, including the unfair tests. And that is a spectacularly ill and detailed explanation of the homeopaths in the room. Are they lying? Well, I think that's a very interesting question. There's a man called Henry Frankfurt who's a philosopher at Princeton.  He says, it's impossible for someone to lie unless they know the truth. The honest man says what he believes to be true. The liar considers his statements to be false.  He's living on the side of truth, not on the side of the false.  These trials for homeopaths are window dressing. But more importantly than anything to do with homeopathy, the background issues, the placebo effect is amazing. It's amazing. It's so much more interesting than homeopathy. People with terminal cancer sometimes live. And that's amazing too. Evidence-based medicine is extremely interesting as you can see there. You enjoyed a bit about the blubbergram and the big diagrams of meta-analysis. And lastly, skeptics and homeopaths have been having the exact same score goals for 150 years. Thank you very much.


Good evening. I am Mark Hughes with the Vermont Racial Justice Alliance and welcome to Justice Position. We're here for the first time starting this back up after the pandemic. We want to, well, we shouldn't say after the pandemic, but we are here. I have a special guest here with me, Debbie Ingram from Vermont Interfaith Action. Just sharing a brief blurb with you about what we're doing here at Vermont Racial Justice Alliance to secure sustainable power and ensure agency, provide security for American descendants of slavery while embracing their history and preserving their culture. That's what we do. We're doing that through a lot of ways and we're going to be bringing some of that to you. So welcome again. This is Justice Position. This is a program about issues affecting black folks and black folks effecting change in our community. So welcome. Tonight we're going to, this afternoon we're going to talk a little bit about the constitutional amendment. Again, like I said, I have Debbie here. Debbie, thank you so much for coming. Thank you for asking me. It was like a last minute thing. I'm always ready to jump on and talk with you. I believe that. You always are. As a matter of fact, just starting a conversation out. I know you are a freshman senator in 2017. That's right. I'm proud to say that you were the one who sponsored the constitutional amendment, the first constitutional amendment in over 240 years to affect change to address slavery in our constitution. You want to talk just a little bit about that before we get started about your experience with the Senate and how that played out? Sure. Sure. Yeah. Well, yes, it was because of you, though, because we were at a debate and I was a candidate for the Senate, as you said, and you asked all of us if we knew that the constitution that we swore an oath to actually had exceptions for slavery, actually allowed slavery in Vermont. I did. And we were all sort of our mouths kind of dropped. And we all kind of stammered around answering it. But I do believe that I was the only one who said, Well, if I get elected, I'm going to do something about that. You were the only one. And I'm not going to out anybody. I'll call them all out. This is all Chidman County. But it was. That's what started it. And I think it was in 2016 leading up to the election. That's right. Yeah, that was the election year. That's right. Yeah. Okay. And then what happened? And then what happened, right? Well, you can only introduce amendments to the constitution every four years. So we had to do what we do then 2019 is right. And yeah, so then I worked with you and you gave me some ideas for what the language should be, how it should be changed. And yeah, we had, we got a lot of sponsors actually, to the senator's credit to that proposition. But then it began quite a process, a long process to work with the Committee of Jurisdiction, which was the Committee on Government Operations, and to really hone that language and make some persuasive arguments, because not everybody was automatically on board by any means. So finally got through the Committee and then it got onto the floor. And I had a little, that was quite an interesting day when we when we debated it on the floor. And but we got across the finish line. She's going to step around that conversation. You're not going to talk about when you address the senator down. Okay, so it's this this this sister here was basically, well, I'm not going to go into it, but it was it was a good conversation. So you'll have to go and look it up yourself. So yeah, it was it was interesting. The whole process was interesting. And it was frustrating, because we we sought to amend the Constitution in a certain manner. We wanted to bring language in the language that we thought was appropriate. We wanted to use, because often when we're when we're changing, when we're writing policy at the statewide level, we always have an intent, like a legislative intent. And then there's legislative research and so forth. And there was language that we were trying to connect it to systemic racism. Racism, we were also trying to connect it from an intent perspective to the 13th Amendment. But we didn't really have as much success with that as we would have liked to. Do you think that has contributed to the I guess the maybe the the lack of attention that's that's on this and maybe the disassociation that many people have when we when we're talking about this in different places? Yeah, I do think that a lot of demonstrators don't really get the whole context of what we're trying to do here. And definitely some of the legislators themselves, many of them, didn't want to go didn't see the connection between our legacy of slavery and the systemic racism that exists today. And so they couldn't they couldn't make that connection. And then some weren't even aware of the 13th Amendment to the United States Constitution and the exception for punishment of a crime, which has been enthrined in our in our own federal Constitution since 1865.  And lots of white people, you know, I know I've been on a journey to understand better the fact that people of color have had a very different experience of the United States of America than than I have as a privileged white person. And I think that white people of goodwill are trying to educate themselves and trying to to understand better. But it's a journey. And it's a step by step process. And, you know, at least in Vermont, we have the ability to to talk to one another. But sometimes we also have to kind of light a fire under one another. And sometimes, yeah, you know, so it's finding that right balance. And, you know, I'm glad that eventually it came around so that all but one senator voted in favor of it. Yeah, but there's such an education involved in this. Absolutely. And I know that, you know, it's almost like folks, just as as it is, almost have to be incentivized just to, you know, to learn something these days. And as I said, you know, there is a downstream connection to our Constitution as it pertains to our statutes, as it pertains to our rules, our institutions, so on and so forth. And because what we know is is that, you know, if there's this thing called and then here's another term, and here's another, you know, class one must take is this thing called systemic racism. And everybody's Oh, boy, here's another one. Because now we have to unpack that and define what that is. If if that's the case, then by its definition, which will maybe spend a little time in a minute on by its definition, what would it would it actually suggests is that, of course, there are disparities that exist across all systems of of state government or all of these determinants. So when we look at the numbers, like if you look on our website, you'll see that, you know, we reflect how housing and education and employment and health services access, economic development and so forth, that there are adverse disparate outcomes, not by accident. It's not it's not like Lemony Snicket's or something like that.  And when we start to look at our history as a nation, then we're able to put those two things together and understand that there is a legacy of slavery. So I think that I think on one count, there may be a lot of folks that still struggle with that alone, because when one says slavery, you know, one has to embrace what slavery may have meant in 1777. No matter, no matter whether it was for the conviction of a whether it was for debts fines or the like or whether it was a person's own will, or whether it was, you know, because they're under the age of 21, which are the three exception clauses that that exist in our Constitution. But still that making that connection, I think, why people have difficulty with that? It's very true. Yes. Yeah. Well, absolutely. I mean, it shouldn't be that hard. But, but, you know, because any anytime we develop an institution like slavery, human beings develop this institution. The the idea basically is that some people are completely dehumanized. You know, that that we're saying it's okay for some people to own other people. And of course, that mindset that and the and the culture that gets that gets built around it will then bleed into every every possible institution. You can't just say because, you know, we, we fought the Civil War and and some, you know, a few laws were changed that everybody's thinking automatically changed. And, and in fact, what happened after the Civil War when reconstruction started, you know, there were some good ideas. But very, very quickly, you know, the Supreme Court basically invalidated both the 13th and the 14th amendments that it opened up the way for black codes, which imprisoned black people for petty crimes that white people wouldn't have even been cited for much less imprisoned for. And that opened the way in turn to Jim Crow laws, segregation in all kind of every walk of life. These things, right, you know, and then now we have what has been termed the new Jim Crow, which is drug wars where, you know, black men especially are imprisoned at much higher rates than white people. And just on and on and on. And, you know, our, the way that we developed our suburbs. Do white people like you?  But, but no, I certainly sounds like you've done your homework. And I think it's exceptional. Well, thank you. You've that you've gone and you've done the work that you're doing the work. And because these are not only are these not easy conversations. In fact, they're difficult conversations. But it also, you know, it takes it takes a lot, it takes effort and time to go in and unpack all of this. You know, we're talking about education. So we're dealing with so many different things that got so many moving parts. Here we've got our Constitution, which we haven't even covered yet. So we haven't even talked about what we're trying to resolve. Here's, here's the proposals that actually fixes that. Here's the definition of systemic racism over here. So there's so much that feeds into that. And there's a slide later on the 13th Amendment, which, you know, our folks at the Abali Slavery National Network, our national partners, one of our national partners, the numbers from them, they say that only 22% of America realize that there is a clause in the 13th Amendment that still has allowed slavery since 1865. So for the last 157 years, there's been a, there's been a clause, excuse me, there's been a clause in the Constitution that says that slavery is permitted and nobody, most folks in the United States don't seem to know about it. Yeah. Oh, I know it's that is true. Well, I do want to put in a plug for the white people that in the congregations where I've been doing these presentations.  And then the Black Lives Matter movement has really has stirred up a lot of white people to understand things better. And they are, and you know, many people besides me are trying to educate ourselves and, you know, trying to take that journey as I was talking about before and understand better. But, but yeah, it's so true that they're, they're still and a lack of awareness. And you know, we've been taught, you know, the things we were taught in our schools, you know, Vermonters were taught that Vermont was the first state to abolish slavery when now we know that's, that's not true. Yeah, people don't like to hear that.  People weren't taught that in school. I got a lot of hate mail for that one. Yeah, the whole this we weren't the first state to abolish. I mean, but it's true. It is true. It's the truth. And the truth is, in fact, that in 1777, and this, you know, listeners would really do well to kind of tune in on some of some of this stuff is because before 1777, when in Windsor, our state constitution was written, there was never a constitution, any state's constitution that contained any language about slavery whatsoever. So when our constitution was written in 1777, we wouldn't go on to be a part of the union until 91. But understand that 10 years later, in 87 was when the United States Constitution was written. There were also three or four other states that wrote constitutions in the Northwest territory, wrote a constitutional document as well. They would emulate Vermont.  Because Vermont was the the trailblazer. We were we are the what we call the grand daddy of all exception clauses. There are there's never been an exception clause in any foundational document before Vermont. And that's something really super duper to process. Because when you start thinking about that, what that means is we actually establish something, right, really important to think about. And as we start to think about the fact that it was an exception clause in the 13th amendment that really led to Jim Crow, right? It really, you know, through convict leasing and chaircropping, it led to Jim Crow. We start to see this legacy. I think the other thing is that we don't understand about, you know, this how this all this stuff connects is obviously poverty. Right? Yeah, absolutely. Because obviously, pornographic levels of wealth were were were handed down generationally. But benefactors of poverty were largely black people. And of course, later, there would be the creation of or the exacerbation of poverty in our white rural communities as well. So I think there's so much to learn here. How are we going to do it? How are we going to get folks to the ballots to understand, you know, how I mean, folks are going to look at this, and they're going to be like, this is either a joke, or else, I'm just going to vote no, because I don't know what it means. So what's what's the strategy? Yeah, well, let's partner together, Mark, and use and use grassroots organizing methodologies. No, that's what that's what we've been talking about now for quite a while, right? So, so yeah, that's, that's the basis of Romano Interfaith Actions methodology and on lots of issues. But, you know, we're working together to reach across the entire state to we've been via has been doing presentations, congregation by congregation to explain some of this to do some of this education. And then we've used those to start recruiting volunteers who are going to be involved in a campaign that is going to have people writing letters to the editor to calling up their the people having personal conversations with their friends and their neighbors and their coworkers, doing phone banking, doing all kinds of things like a any kind of campaign. But we're we're really building a network of people all across the state, just, you know, ordinary regular Vermonters who are people of goodwill who who are willing to be educated on this and who want to understand and to to really support something that will that is very meaningful and very important. Yeah, we're happy to be partnered with Vermont Interfaith Action in in the in faith, the faith in action at the at the national level with our with our partners as well at the Abali Slavery National Network. We we know you guys probably represent what about maybe 16,000 folks across the state, maybe 70 congregations. That is right. You got that right. I did my homework. Yes, you did. So so yeah, I mean, so there there's that. And I think for folks who are watching is so important. You know, when we start thinking about, you know, what we're doing here is is, you know, when we start talking about this whole idea of eradicating systemic racism is just to make sure you get the opportunity to take a look at, you know, at at our website and maybe come out, you know, because we're also doing some stuff on Thursdays, every Thursdays, checking and come out and hang out with us. I know you guys are there as well. Here's what the Constitution says. I have to read it. I have to read it. It says it says that all persons are born equally free. I'm going to stop there for a minute. And the reason why we're going to do this, I think is because this is where the education starts. Right. Yeah. And taking this time for folks who are watching us live today, this is an opportunity for folks to say, Hey, proposal two on the on the ballot in November, actually amends our Constitution and it definitely removes language in our Constitution that suggests slavery because it's right here. Here's what it says, folks. It says this watch. It says that all persons are born equally free and independent and have certain natural inherent and unalienable rights amongst which are enjoying and defending life and liberty, acquiring, possessing and protecting property and pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety. Therefore, no person born in this country or brought from overseas ought to be holding by law to serve any person as a servant, slave or apprentice after serving to the age of 21 years unless bound by a person's own consent after arriving to such age or bound by law for payment of debts, damages, fines, costs or the like. That's it. That's what it says. So it's there. It's right there. It's black and white. It's right here. It's in the Constitution. So that clears that up. So we can so we can move forward from that. And I think there's another piece, though, because if if we're if we're really, you know, I know right now there's there's other things that are happening across the state, across the United States, you know, the cannabis things, you know, there's because this cannabis is a schedule one drug, but we just rolled out a market. So we basically told the feds, we're going to do what we're going to do because our values are XYZ. Well, our values concerning slavery in this state, that's what we're really trying to define in this in this what we would call a referendum. Yes. So the other thing we should share is the 13th Amendment. Can I give it to you? Can you read it? Sure. The 13th Amendment. Yeah, it's shorter than the article in the Vermont Constitution. It says, neither slavery nor involuntary servitude except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted shall exist within the United States or any place subject to their jurisdiction. Thank you for that. You got the short one. Yeah. I should have read that one. So I think the point that we're making here, that I'm making here, is by amending our Constitution and we should share the language that they have proposed the Constitution be amended to. The language just says that all persons are born equally free, independent and have certain natural inherent and unalienable rights amongst which are enjoying and defending life liberty, acquiring, possessing and protecting property and pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety. Therefore, slavery and indentured servitude in any form are prohibited period. So that's that's that this is your constitutional amendment. So just to just put a really fine point on it, what we're actually doing is two things. What we're doing is, is number one, we're removing three exception clauses from our Constitution, which have had to what extent we don't quite know yet and we shouldn't mind answering the question like that when folks say, so what implications have this language had on our statutes, our rules, our laws, our institutions? We'll get there. We'll figure that out and we are doing some of that. We're figuring some of that out. I'm not going to spend a lot of time with that and I think it's kind of like peeling an onion. So it just so happens to be we're at the fourth year so now we can go back for another constitutional amendment and we have one. We'll talk about that later. And there's also statutes and I think maybe next week we could talk more about them. But yes, there are downstream implications by removing that language because there are some things here in the state that we think may not necessarily stand constitutionally because we know that the Constitution is the litmus test for all legislation being passed and also the litmus test for any appeal that comes up through the courts challenge in any law. So if the Constitution changes then of course our nice judges would have to take that into account. The second thing that it does, which is super amazing, is that it negates the loophole in the 13th amendment which means no thank you federal government. We would prefer not to have slaves. So I'm wondering with the work that you are doing, is that hard for folks to catch on to as we're getting around to the congregations and having the conversations with the clergy and organizing the communities? Is that something that we're having difficulty with? Well certainly a surprise to a lot of people. I mean I kind of when I do the presentation I sort of stop and say you know this language about except for payment of fines, damages and costs. Does that remind you of any other kind of language? And very few people there only been one or two presentations out of you know we've done about 15 of them where somebody was able to say oh yeah that sounds like the 13th amendment to the U.S. Constitution. So you know people are you know again we've just been taught that oh yeah no we you know 13th amendment just you know it ended slavery and it's like well but actually read it. What's the biggest challenge with folks? I mean I'm just curious to see what I do hear what because I've been you know I was in training on Saturday. I heard some great questions and I was kind of like I ain't saying nothing right but what's some of the biggest challenges that that you're seeing as you're going around the state? Well just you know people just don't know they haven't been taught you know and I think finally we're beginning to realize in this country that the things that we were told in the past aren't necessarily all true you know not completely true and it's it's but it's hard right it's hard for people if they've been taught something all their life that it's one way to go oh oh my goodness I gotta switch gears here and change and and go wow it doesn't say what I thought it said and then well what does that mean then then in the bigger picture you know what what does that mean so that's that's where we are it's a difficult place for for folks to be and I think the other connection that's so because this is this is stuff that people need to care about in order to stop and take the time to learn mm-hmm yeah and when you start thinking about generational wealth yeah you know we were talking about restrictive deeds a little while ago back in the legislative session and that's a whole nother show but when you start thinking about you know property ownership there of black folks who own property in the city of Berlin in the city of Berlin 13 13 houses belong to black folk in the city of Berlin so that's so you've got to be able to stop and take a step back and say there has to have been some kind of contiguous connection to this thing called slavery and things like slavery and badges and incidents surrounding slavery but even if that weren't the case just to be able to step back and say okay throw your hands up like we did on Saturday and say do we want slaves or not that's just a simple question do we want to be a state do we want to own slaves or not as a person right now as tax pay tax paying folks in the state of Vermont do we want to walk around saying we own slaves right yeah right so that it's okay to own one person to own another person right isn't cool is it cool yeah right exactly we hope everyone will say obviously not but some people won't right yeah it's and I think that's that's really what we have to come to terms with too is is to find our people yeah find our people and and that's fine you know of course you need to talk to you talk to your uncle the guy who's sitting at the table that person you never want to talk to find our people um Debbie thank you so much um it's been great you are amazing i'm so glad you came out um i want to um before we close out i will share a little bit about um we're having a we're having fun at the Richard Kemp Center and i want to talk a little bit about that and invite you out to come down and join us uh because we're doing some things we're shooting some things for those of you who don't know what the Richard Kemp Center is is is again as some of these challenges manifest themselves in our neighborhoods you know we know we systemic racism the legacy of slavery it has created significant wealth disparities and cultural disempowerment um amongst black verminers one way in which this manifests itself is as i just told you a little while ago is the housing ownership here in in the city of Burlington uh we know that adverse racial disper uh disparities they exist across all of these social determinants as we said earlier and these disparities in addition to cultural erasure in appropriation directly and indirectly affect the health and the wellness of black um black folks and individuals and communities around here and it also watched this it also threatens economic development democracy and even social health and the wellness of all verminers so what we're doing here in uh Burlington is is we're centering the needs of black the black community in the work of rectifying historical racial inequities uh we're accomplishing this work by serving as cultural brokers uh in the city of Burlington in the expansion of the programs and the services uh to these marginalized communities where they have historically uh been ineffective in a lot of cases they've been inefficient and sometimes even non-existent and so we're creating new systems that empower black verminers denied equal access uh to public or private economic and other opportunities and we're creating space in Burlington where black communities uh wellness and culture and youth they all intersect so i just needed to get that plug in that was my responsibility i had to say that to y'all before we got off of here again debbie thank you so much for being with us stop being and hang out with us at the kim's center thank you for the work that the vermont interfaith action is doing um and thank you for taking this thing to the ballot with us we're gonna together we're gonna win we are thank you for inviting me thanks again and thank you all for coming as well we'll see you next time here we are juxtaposition the racial justice alliance we're glad to have you good night


Now this video right here, the snippet that you have to see is talking about diversity. It's a subject that we've talked about a lot on this channel. But there was an interview that I did with TJ Chapman, BOB's manager and he specifically went into what BOB goes through as a truly diverse artist and I'll wait to the end before I get into some stuff. That's perfect because I would like to, I mean, you're the perfect person to ask because for me, you know, he's such a unique artist, right? And like he's very diverse and so many artists want to be diverse, like so many people say they want to be diverse and they aren't diverse for real, but he is like truly diverse. And I remember like, you know, the Cloud Nines and things like that and then, you know, the, it was a track that was, that would be on the radio everywhere and then I'll be in the sky. Exactly. Those tracks were like some of them were a little bit smoker. Some of them were a little bit more Atlantic to cater a little bit hood, then he'll have the ones that are more poppy or I treat the thousand s, but when he blew up with the nothing on you, right, that was straight pop. And what I saw, because I was just, you know, but it wasn't though, if it wasn't Bruno voice on there, it could have been urban and it went number one urban. True. But it was a universal sound, but go ahead. But from like a kid's perspective, and I'm just reading YouTube comments and stuff like that at the time, like you knew you had the airplanes and stuff like that. Like that, that introduced them to such a pop world. And then when I started to see just watching as more music got released from a comments perspective, I would see he might do something back more on the, you know, Atlanta hood or tight side sometimes. And then the pop fans will be calling him a sellout.  It's like, it's like as an artist. You work all your life to become a superstar. That's what you want. That's what you're working for. Bob come from the hood. You know what I'm saying? He don't come from no suburban night place of fan.  He come and that's what he, how he grew up. It just so happened that he makes worldly music. Yeah. And so when he got on, he just made universal song. He, he never wanted to be a pop guy, you know what I'm saying? And, and, and really that don't, it don't even sit well with him. You know, a lot of people always wonder why.  But, you know, he wanted to be embraced by his, his people. And he just, he just made really big music. And, you know, it ended up becoming, it's a gift and a curse. Having all these different types of fans and being able to make all different kind of records and having all this success. The fan base is so huge and so diverse between the age groups to the cultures, to, to everything. It's almost impossible for him to make something nowadays that's going to go well with everybody. And, and so then it, it, it, it, it, you know, becomes something that you have to deal with. And people on the outside really don't, really don't get it. And they don't understand.  Yeah. Never, never tried to, you know what I'm saying? Never tried to do the only poppy record that was on the album that was like, okay, damn, this, this thing is, is, is pop. To pop was magic.  It might be triple now, but, you know, that was the pop record. Yeah. We did airplanes on BT with Keisha Cole singing it. You know what I'm saying? And so if you had Keisha on there over Haley, now that song because an urban field, there were universal records of what they were pop. It was what was put on them, they made them, it took them that route. Yeah. Well, yeah. So he never tried to do that. And so, you know, so it's been a gift in the curse.  It's crazy from a management standpoint to, to know, no matter what he does and no matter how good it is, it don't matter. It's going to be a segment of people that's going to hate and bash, you know, and it's just like, wow, boy, that's just, that's just hard. It's weird. That's why I was asking, because I was so deep into it. And I would literally, I have a hundred before you say that before you say that. Let me say this because I just have for an artist that gets confusing. You know what I'm saying? OK, so you're making this sound and then your fans started talking about, hold up now, you selling out and this and that, and this ain't what you're trying to be. So now you're trying to make something to please them. But when you do that, you know, then you got these people over here and now bashing you and this is OK. Should have done if I do, damn if I don't. That's exactly what I was actually about to say. I know you're not. OK, I know how to interrupt it. That was it. No, that was. It was confusing me because I have a diverse like type of music that I like because of just how I grew up. It would be so many different types of my dad and I saw I could enjoy both sides and then knowing the journey of where he came from and all that stuff. So I'll be looking at comments. I'm like, bro, what do you mean, bro? What do you mean? But it was it's I always imagined that was a wild situation. And he came out with no drama trying to make a point. Like, you know what I mean? Like, there was so many. But yeah, I always wonder how like what that was. So that's why when I hear artists talk about being diverse, especially when it's truly diverse, like some people are stylistically diverse. You can do a lot, but you're still in this pocket like Tory Lane, right? He's like he might he can write and do anything. But it's stuff that he might write for people and do that stuff that's right outside the pocket. But as far as his music, he keeps it pretty much in a pocket, you know? And it has similar overlapping fan base. But like to just do it how Bobby did it. And like he never came out with that rock album that I remember was talking about. At least I didn't catch it and he's got it. He got all that music and he got he got a whole bunch of projects. That's all he does is record. So I imagine he makes music a lot. I just want to know for like for the airport and artists, I definitely wanted to get your opinion and your insight, which you shared a lot because I think artists don't know what they're what it actually looks like. We always they hear the message of organic so much and they hear the message of it doesn't matter, just make what you want. You can be diverse and consumers are not as trained for diverse music as you really think, like they just aren't. They are not they are receptive. Yeah. All right. So that's the snippet. And I definitely have some things that I want to say. But before I get into that, just want to remind you that if you haven't seen the whole interview, you can check out the entire interview by just Google searching. I mean, YouTube searching TJ Chapman, brand man, brand man, Sean, and that'll pop up because I don't know if I'll remember to put the link in the description below. But the things to actually keep in mind about this is yeah, we have a lot of artists that say they're diverse, right? But really diversity is kind of kept within a box, right? And there's still the same fans that you're speaking to. You're really just speaking to the same fans from a different direction. But when we get into diversity diversity, then you're talking about types of music and types of sounds where one fan base might hear it, but then you have a completely different side of your fan base that does not even relate to it at all. Right. And that's when we start to find these troubles. When you're a truly diverse artist, when you're a widely diverse artist, you have this conflict of interest that we talked about in this interview snippet. Right. And that's when you find a lot of trouble. That's what I'm trying to get a lot of people to avoid when they're starting off because if you put out some music and on one end, your fans are loving it, but then on the other end, you have these other fans that literally not just say, that's not the song for me, but he's selling out for creating this type of song. And then I drop another song and now finally, this fan base side is completely okay with it and they're back in love with me again.  You're always going to be in this conflict and it's just a hard thing to work with, but even greater than that for artists aspiring to blow up.  Again, a lot of these artists that you see that are diverse, quote on quote, right, a lot of air quotes, they blew off, off of one song or one sound, right. And then they found other ways to get their fans to like them. Either it's the personality that they had that became larger than life, right. Or it's something like, let's say they create songs that have different sounds, but that those same fans like it. They like the content of it. It's more about the content than the sonics itself. There are so many ways to get around that stuff, but the more you focus on trying to be completely diverse and maybe you aren't as diverse as you might seem. And that's what I want people to think about as well, because some people, some people I honestly feel like after talking to some artists, they feel like they have to be diverse. They're aspiring to be diverse when they're not capitalizing off of what they already are, right. And then it's really just creating confusion in the music. And that's just the honest of guys truth, where sometimes you aren't super diverse. You aren't really good at a lot of different types of music, but you're killing it in one area and you're not capitalizing on that because it became cool and trendy to be diverse. Everybody wants to be diverse, but in the 90s, it wasn't this huge, cool thing to say, I listen to all types of music. But now you ask people, what do you listen to? And a lot of people say, I listen to a little bit of everything. But then when you go down and look and do their playlists and the things that they actually listen to based on their real behavior, they don't really listen to everything, right.  You see people like giving people big ups, right, and praising people for being diverse, but then you actually find out once you go be diverse, they don't really feel that way, right. And it's not exactly what it seems. So that's just something to keep in mind. There's no better way to see that other than what was in TJ at Chapman's interview talking about this real experience of what it's like, this real conflict of what it's like when you have a truly diverse, not just sound, right, but more so even a diverse fan base because your music is so diverse, it actually speaks to different people, not just please, it's the same people from a different way and how hard that could be as a career. Other than that, man, as always, this video is brought to you by BrandManNetwork.com. And if you like this video, go ahead and like button. If you like it, you might as well share it. And if you're not subscribed, you know what to do. Hit that subscribe.


S-N-S drunk! Ever play one of those Koei strategy games for PC or one of the ports on Super Nintendo? I'm talking about games like Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Genghis Khan, Nobunaga's ambition, you know, those super long and complicated turn-based strategy games. They usually had incredible cover art, which always got my attention as a kid, but when it came time to play one of those games, uh, they weren't exactly intuitive. They're extremely slow-paced with a really clunky interface. You have confusing scenarios to complete with these big complicated maps, and to me, these games were pretty boring, and they definitely weren't what I was expecting, based on the badass cover art I kept seeing. And that brings me to Knights of Valor, a weapon-based beat-em-up made for arcades in 1999 by IGS, or International Games System, based out of Taiwan. And this is more what I was expecting. This game is loosely based on the romance of the Three Kingdoms novel, so if you've played through one of those old Ko-A games, you'll recognize some of the names and characters here, only instead of turn-based strategy, you're kicking the crap out of anyone and everyone in settings and environments that are similar to another beat-em-up from the 90s, Capcom's Warriors of Fate, with the main difference being that this game has an experience system that allows you to level up your character. Knights of Valor is the first game in a series that received an installment as recently as 2015 with Knights of Valor 3D, and there's a total of ten Knights of Valor games, with only Knights of Valor 3D being briefly available on PlayStation Plus, and Knights of Valor the Seven Spirits eventually getting a homebrew release on Sega Dreamcast, but otherwise, these games all stayed in the arcades. You start with five different characters to choose from, representing the five Tiger Generals, and you gotta get through ten long levels with your typical beat-em-up controls. There's four main buttons, a regular attack, a jump, a block, and a special weapon button you can hold down to select one of eight different items that you can collect throughout the game. Everything from daggers, arrows, darts, poison gas, saw blades... Oh man, that's brutal. That's some cum laude stuff right there. There's also a secondary meter you can power up three times, and that unleashes a huge special attack, and this game does not skimp on the visual and sound department. One reason I wanted to keep playing this game is to see each character's most powerful attack, and they do not disappoint. This game gets all the usual beat-em-up stuff correct. There's good hit detection, although you can't grab enemies, but each character has a few different moves you can do using typical fighting game inputs, and the game cuts a pretty good pace as well.  You carefully navigate a series of barriers as enemies toss grenades at you, with the occasional crazy guy pushing a battering ram through the middle of the action. Then you face a boss named Dunn. What, like Trevor Dunn from Mr. Bungle? Then you fight through a burning jungle. What are those polar bears? Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I should warn you, there is plenty of arcade jeepness here, especially in this section before the level 3 boss, which has stuff randomly falling down from the ceiling. Ugh. What's cool though is that the game lets you juggle enemies. Once you get a guy in mid-air, you can just keep hitting him, so long as you time it right, and that helps curb the difficulty quite a bit. Occasionally, you'll run into this guy, who's getting hammered in the middle of a battle. If you leave him alone, he can actually help you.  Whiskey, Brandy, or Small Potato Kill You.  If you kill him at any point, you just keep going forward. But if you give him Whiskey, or Brandy, he opens up this door, which has lots of extra points as well as plenty of extra weapons. But first, you gotta get by these giant panthers and these dudes with wheelbarrows, with crossbows mounted on them, I guess. But yeah, you run into that guy every once in a while, sometimes you have to answer a question, sometimes you have to defeat a number of enemies within a certain time limit, and since this game has a leveling system, points are everything, so you're always gonna want to go along with what this guy wants to do to help your character get stronger. There is one negative I have to point out, however. Knights of Valor has so many boss fights. I like a good boss fight as much as anyone, but she's Louise. Some of these fights are incredibly cheap, and every one of them takes forever. This game is already long, beat-em-ups aren't usually 90-minute playthroughs, but it felt like at least a third of that time was one-on-one fights against a boss, with a comically large health bar that looks like it'd stretch off your screen and into the next room. Also, I gotta point out the music, which is good for the most part, but sometimes you run into some weirdness, like this section here. What, am I playing Goof Troop all of a sudden? But anyway, it's kinda cool that some folks out there were still cranking out Final Fight-style beat-em-ups for the arcade, even as late as 1999, and while Knights of Valor isn't perfect, it's still a fun playthrough with a second player, and it's a good introduction into a huge series of beat-em-ups. So if you dig this game, there's lots more for you to check out, and since most of those games were only released in arcades, that means that if you want to play them, then you gotta check them out any way you can. Alright, I want to thank you for watching, and I hope you have a great rest of your day.


We're both adamant about brushing our teeth and this one right here if he could brush his teeth three times a day he would. We're actually very particular about a number of things in regards to hygiene. And that's what we're going to be talking about today. And a big thanks to Pronamel for sponsoring this video. Pronamel mineral boost helps make teeth stronger and white. What's also cool is that it helps your body's capability of naturally replenishing minerals. So you can buy Pronamel mineral boost anywhere you currently buy your toothpaste. Or by just simply clicking the link you see in the description below. I have to share the story really quickly while he's brushing his teeth. Adam and I actually compete with each other who has the most clean teeth. We went to the dentist and he won. She did say I had very clean teeth though. Just saying. I was born with a sensitivity of smell. So I can smell anything when he doesn't.   Pretty much. She will sniff it out. I will sniff it out when I want to and even if if I don't. Your breath cannot be bad. Halitosis I don't do well with at all. And I'm that chick. If I smell it I will find a very kind nice way of saying it. And this is the thing though. I expect it in return because I would hate to be walking around in the world with that. Oh she asked me that question all the time. And how do I can we show them how I I literally go. It smells like salad right now. But it doesn't smell bad. Nope. It smells like salad. And then the other thing is body order for me. Like I have to have all my cracks and crevices smelling nice. And I will tell you this. My friends say my natural scent smells like chai tea. I don't look at you and think of food. But like smell that. I have no perfume on. What does that smell like? Kind of like a light baby powder. See cleanliness is next to godliness. That's that's always been my saying growing up. Just saying. My friends were like to marry you never smell. They actually went through my hamper to see if they can find anything like smell and they couldn't. You that's baloney. That's what they said. You smell me after I worked out. That's different. She can smell for the record.  No but that's what they said.  That's what they said. Well they're wrong. When I was younger I hardly would sweat. Like people would dance or work out like oh my gosh Tamara like you don't you don't sweat. So I really didn't have really bad body order until I actually turned 35. So I had this moment of who is that? What is this? You went to puberty at 35. No I swear it happens to women. I became a little bit insecure about my about my underarms. And that's why now I am I am so careful about if I raise my hand or if I do that I'm like I'm okay. I'm good. But yeah it happened at 35 and I it knocked me out. Now you know it's bad. If it knocks yourself out. I will say this about you Adam. I love the way my husband like smells. He always has to put cologne on like every day. But it's not like I'm bathing in it. No I love spray. I know but I love it in a way okay this may I never told you this before but it's when you put it on and you leave for work and the the smell is still in the room it actually makes me smile. Is that weird? No I like that. You do? That's good to know. Do you think that about me?  You're in a good way like we see. I know that's sweet. That's a good thing. Yeah that's so sweet. Thanks Halsey. You're welcome. Your showers you take very seriously. They are quick. I don't need to sit in there for very long. Get in get it done. I know but and you smell good. I think you inherited that from your dad. Art whenever I hug him that's my father-in-law it is a hug of yumminess and I knew that when we started dating I was gonna be okay because you inherited that like my husband smells good all the time. Your natural scent of your under arm I actually like and at first people thought that was really weird but it's a primal thing that really means I love you. It's a good thing. It's an attraction. Really? I'm not making this a shot by the way so I love sleeping next to him at night and putting my head right there. See like right now it's. This is embarrassing. It smells oh. I started taking multiple showers a day when I played actually minor league baseball because you shower when you get up in the morning you go to the yard um you have batting practice and usually after batting practice especially when you're playing like in the south where it's 148 degrees and 150 percent humidity and after batting practice for an hour 15 minutes you're just drenched so you go and you take a shower and change into your uniform for the game. I'm not a big bath guy.  Tamara has a routine as we've seen on the housing life and there's a lot of routine. It can be long. One of them is her facial routine which we know is a is a thing. Always go up ladies up and out up and out. I can wash both cars driving to and from the car wash in the time she takes to do her yeah I mean literally she's aging backwards she's the female version of Benjamin Buttons. Thank you. I will say that the only negativity of her whole routines are when she's like really into it and she's maybe rushing a little bit and then you walk into the bathroom oh and it's like holy wow the in every drawer every cabinet everything is out you're like wow a that's a lot of stuff b i it's gonna take a long time to clean it up but my stuff does have a place so once it is cleaned yeah it's tidy. Number one thing about teaching our kids about hygiene for me was clean face make sure your face is clean and your hands are clean and then brush your teeth that was my main thing huge my parents instilled in me you don't want your teeth so yellow that it could look like a flashlight that's what my dad used to say and yeah he said oh when you smile it's like a flashlight I agree with Adam on that I wanted to make sure that our kids you know teeth are clean their face is clean I'm working on the little eyeball geese because they're a little frayed to like really really get in there and their their ears behind their ears all the all the cracks and crevices in your day we went to the beach we'll hit aniraya I rolled over and my bed with me there was they there was so much sand in the bed I'm like people seriously I put you both in the bath how do you not get the sand out of your ears or whatever they were in they are taking baths and showers yep themselves right now so I gotta give them kudos for that um so that's good let's work on the quality the quality of quality is there the quality yes they really have to like scrub behind your ears yeah my parents instilled the terror in me of going to the dentist and having a cavity so we brush our teeth morning and night because my dad had a couple of cavities as a kid he used to say oh man they don't a drill it hurts and so from the time I can remember we brushed our teeth every morning every night when you're five six seven eight you don't think about breath you just think about you don't want to go to the dentist I kind of put the same fear in my kids that is true I'm like hey you don't like needles man if you don't brush your teeth you never know you're gonna have to put a needle in and a drill and then a rise like a drill so they're into the brushing teeth thing too have you ever had a cavity before not officially wow so all that brushing really did help um in more ways than one in more ways than one I actually had a cavity before it was on a wisdom tooth but they pulled it out anyway but I only had one throughout my entire still counts life still counts well dang um you won that too not only does he have the most clean teeth in the family he's never had an official cavity you know what bothers me a dirty feet I don't have dirty feet no we may have a bunion no one does my feet are not dirty no and we and the kids we always take our shoes off at the door I'm always like you know when someone says up and they put their feet up on the couch like whoa what happened the bottom of your feet so no dirty feet a big no no for me I don't know if my dad's gonna appreciate this my dad worked hard so if your dad took off his shoes and you could smell it from across the room that just means that they worked hard however I never wanted my feet to ever smell like that toe jam is not my jam you're really good about your fingernails too for me your fingernails tell me about how clean you are yeah they're clean I always like to have clean clean nails clean breath clean hair clean ears you're really not supposed to clean your ears every day I did that for years with alcohol and they said that it actually just pushes the earwax in your ear canal and I got it stuck we had to send her to the doctor the emergency room because she was thought she'd punctured her eardrum the doctor said yeah no you just got too much here so the years of me just doing this doing this doing this piled up and one day I just couldn't hear and it's I literally started getting an ache and I thought something I thought I had an earache and he looked in it he was like oh my god your hair also not good your hair and nose hair that's what I feel like I need to do what I want to try the wax that you put in there and you just pull out oh no it looks really good on women that sound no but that's what you can don't wow but that's what women do we wax everywhere like the pain of cleanliness no you don't no I don't do I have hair in there no is that a sign of age when you just like get tons of hair well your ears and your nose always grow to your back what do you find odor offensive like what are some of the things you're like oh are what are some of the worst things that you've seen leave it in the comments down below you've seen or smelled and a big thanks to pro natal for sponsoring this video don't forget to subscribe to the house we like uh it was nice it was together forever


CRISPR is a molecular scalpel that we can program to cut any DNA sequence of interest. CRISPR is one of the tools that is making biology become a new digital. CRISPR allows you to essentially cut and paste different pieces of code. It's molecular scissors. It really came on the scene only in 2012, but since then we've now used it to engineer dozens of species, including come up with a way of altering a single organism with CRISPR and then potentially having that alteration spread through organisms in the wild. So malaria is so devastating, kills 400,000 kids a year, that I have yet to meet any scientist or ecologist that can come up with any possible set of unexpected side effects that they can dream up that would be worse than malaria because malaria is just that terrible. Instead of spraying DDT everywhere, what if we could alter the handful of mosquito species that spread it so they can't do that anymore? Or if necessary, to remove them. So when you're evaluating whether to do this, you have to say, okay, what could go wrong? How bad could it be versus how bad it is? Malaria is just so bad that it tips the scale regardless of what you put on the other side. I think one of the most exciting possibilities is creating more sustainable production with biotechnology and dream up new things in partnership with nature. Instead of speaking to nature with bulldozers and toxic chemicals, we can speak the language of DNA. That is the language of nature. It could revolutionize virtually every industry that involves making something that a living organism can make. Any material that's even remotely biological. CRISPR-based gene therapy has tremendous potential to address many different genetic disorders, particularly those of the blood. It could address many different diseases. It will definitely make a lot of sick people well. People always love to ask about worst case scenarios. The modification of our genetic code, modification at the embryo stage, I think that we need to be really sure about what we're doing before we engineer something that allows all humans to be more frail. Or we engineer systems that allow us to be more susceptible to disease. Worst case for CRISPR, it's the usual risk that someone's going to create a nasty pathogen that could end up affecting us all. That's always been the risk with bio, but some human could do it deliberately or by mistake. CRISPR just accelerates everything that we do in the laboratory with biology. I think one of the biggest challenges is how we can worry in a productive way. It's important to think about all the things that might go wrong, but not to hide it away. We're going to have to change how we do science, because right now we do it behind closed doors. And it's just not right that a technology that could affect everyone be developed behind closed doors. We have to change the way we do science, because this is just training wheels for the technologies that will follow.


I know Jake wanted to ask you a little bit about the change up. Yeah, it's, it's, it's on my tongue here. And I just, well, well, because there, I know your, your fastball ticked up, I think in college at some point. So I'm wondering that moment's got to be like when a young point guard has that six inch growth spurt and now they're like, Hey, I'm a small four now. I can ball was it the fastball developed and then the change up became that much better? Or when was there ever a moment when it's like, Oh, this is it. Like this is nasty. Yeah.   But at the time me throwing like 88, it's just like eye opening.  But to be honest, I've always thrown a change up ever since literally like I didn't even throw a breaking ball.  I want to say I started throwing like curveball, but one of those kids that listened to the coaches, my dad, not my coach. Yeah, my dad, of course. He always tried to, he always wanted me to throw change up instead of a curveball, but I always developed a change up basically throughout the year. So what I started out with was always a circle change up. And it's very hard to control, but when I went, when I throw it, it's really good. But when I went to college, I was mainly fastball curveball. So I developed like a knuckle curveball. It was actually pretty good. My freshman year, but then my second year just completely disappeared on me. All I had was a fastball didn't really throw change. I had to just throw fastball change ups.   It's something that breaks. College is all about the breaking ball. That's definitely one thing. But I mean, I just slowly kept throwing my change up more and more as it went on. But when I first got drafted by the Yankees, they already knew it was good. So they, what happened was in the first couple of years in the minor leagues, they didn't want me to throw it that much just because they wanted me to develop a slider and really just continue throwing that. So they would try to limit us from throwing like our best off speed a lot just so we would get used to throwing our set, our other secondary pitch. That's brutal as a competitor. That sounds like, come on, but I mean, I get, I get what they're trying to do. So like if I, we would throw two, three innings and really try to develop our pitches, but at the time, I just never really got a feel for a breaking ball after my first year of college. It just disappeared. No idea where I went and more or less in 2011, I actually, so I went from throwing a circle change up to basically like a two steam change up. And in 2011, when I was in Charleston, my, I was just throwing like a side before the game one day and the pitching coach, Carlos Sanchez comes up and he goes, he's like, how do you hold that? Cause it was good. It fades a lot. It was slow, but I showed him and he's, he's like, why do you hold it like that? When you, how do you hold your fastball? I was like, four steam.  I was like, uh, all right. Next thing you know, I started getting more bottom out of it. So I was like, wow, all right. It looks like we're throwing this. He's like, yeah. And, uh, so basically from there in 11, it just took off and I just started throwing that instead. And I mean, I didn't really use it a whole lot until I want to say 2015. When I couldn't throw a fastball for a strike. So I needed to throw something for a strike. You know, that was a change up at the time. Yeah. And then it looks like I'm looking at the baseball Sabant last year was the first year you threw your change up more than your fastball. Was that just happenstance by, I mean, facing a lot of lefties and the way that you were used out of the pen, or was that a cognitive decision by you guys like, Hey, let's, let's switch this up. Yeah. It was, uh, it was more of a kind of like analytic thing. I mean, if they really want, they would want me to throw my change up every pitch, but you can't do that. But I mean, I get where they were going with it. It was working. So I mean, just to keep them, keep that kind of ratio was pretty good, but that's why I was kind of still weary of it. Cause I was, it's basically a 50-50 chance, I guess, that the hitters guessing if it's going to be a fastball or change up, but that's why I really was like trying to develop a slider again. Cause in started throwing one towards the end, right? Yeah. In 17, I had a pretty good one and then it just kind of disappeared on me in 18 and 19. And then I guess it kind of came back last year. Not really, but I'm still working on it now. I mean, I'm trying to throw like a true knuckle curve and a slider now. I think Otto said like you, you texted him was like, I got a knuckle curve now, right? Yeah. So I've been really working on it big time because that's what Chad came into the spring throw. And I was like, this thing's gross. The first day I threw it to me, I was like, whoa, hey, what are we doing here?  Like I just started from like short distance and then worked my way back and then I'm telling that thing's pretty lights out. So I was like, now that we got this second, like kind of off season, I just, I said, screw it. I'm going all in. I got on it again because that's what I threw in college was the knuckle curveball. It was pretty good. I used to throw it like anywhere from 78 to 80. Pretty good spin. So I definitely want to try to get it back. I mean, I need something that just isn't as fast. I guess I just need something slower. Yeah. Really to like get the speed difference away from the hitter. That's that's basically what I'm looking for. But the ad kind of a sharp breaking ball and a tighter sliders. I mean, that would that would be great for me.  Because sometimes, like watching, you can tell before I think there was some at bat against, like, it was a white socks hitter. You just threw three in a row. Just three changeups right down the middle in a row. And it was like, that guy's not going to hit that at all. Like, do you have that confidence in the changeup when you're feeling like at your best, you just like, well, here you go. I will say there are, I would say not always do I have like a confidence when it leaves my hand. I mean, obviously, as I throw the pitch, I do. But there are times where I let one like great, great as I'm releasing and I know it's a good one. But I would say for the most part, I would I wouldn't say I definitely think it's going to be a good, like the ones down the middle, I get pretty worried about. Not a lot. I think it's just that they're guessing and they just guess completely wrong. It's got so much different. Yeah, it's a big difference with the move. And it does a lot of people have said, like, they can't see it out of my hand. So that's cool. They're just guessing fastball at that point. And it's they're just way too ahead of it.


AJ's got his cheese head. You got your Wisconsin, your Green Bay team. I'm picking. Your pick is in. I'm excited for him to get here. What was your rookie experience like?  What was it like being a rookie in Green Bay? It was crazy. Obviously, I really didn't know too much about Green Bay being from the East Coast. Obviously, you know, that line of guys. But, you know, it was sick coming out. I was in that COVID class. I was in that 2020 class. Yeah. We didn't have training camp. We missed training camp. So really, like my first really experience, we had like a week of practice, a couple weeks of practice when we were playing. Obviously, every other year besides COVID, like you get training camp. You get all season OTAs to like learn the playbook. I was out there like still learning install one, like everybody from 2020 class. Like you're really just figuring it out when you get out there.


Miguel and do our out here at about 3 o'clock this afternoon working with none other than Yankees special advisor Alex Rodriguez you see him talking right there Rodriguez was actually here yesterday as well and he spent a lot of time with and do our in the clubhouse they were discussing perhaps some things to get better defensively and Rodriguez asked if he wanted to work together today and do our obliged and they immediately went to work I asked and do our exactly what they were working on and he said it was more of getting his routine right making it as game speed as possible believes if he goes through it that way that he'll have less mistakes in game because he'll be duplicating it will be like second nature for him he does feel as though he has made strides defensively but acknowledged that he still has a ways to go he wants to be more consistent and he is going to continue to work to get there overall he called the session with Rodriguez productive and Chris this is pretty cool in talking to him he also told me that he watches a ton of video not just of him defensively and what he can do different as far as footwork and throwing his concern but he also watches other third baseman around the league like Adrian Beltran Nolan are not out to see exactly what they're doing to see if you can pick up anything from them translated to his game just to get a little bit better it's clear he's putting the work in he is putting the time in this is a guy that doesn't want to be just known as a great offensive hitter he wants to be solid defensively as well