I'm a journalist who recently published a book about climate change, about how people are preparing to live with and perhaps make money off the world we're creating. And I take a lot of pictures when I go do reporting trips. It's a sort of way to cheat as a reporter. If you don't want to take lots of notes and you're lazy, you can just take a picture. And then you can look at that picture later and see what there was to see. So if ever you read anything I've written and it's well described, it's only because I took a photo. I'd like to share some of those photos today with you. I've traveled a lot for this book. I went to six years, 24 countries, a dozen states. I started reporting up in the Arctic near Barrow, Alaska, ended near Key West. So the book ended the country. And just made everyone I took a very long time, which meant lots of photos. I'm starting with this photo here because it's Greenland. And two things are important here. One is that the Arctic is where we're first seeing the effects of climate change. Not just talking about what could be, but the Arctic is warming at pace about twice as quickly as the rest of the world. And so if you go to the Arctic, you can see not just the physical impacts, but you can see what I found most interesting, which was how people are reacting to the physical impacts. And then in this particular photo, there's the man and the woman in the bottom right there. I find it interesting because that guy was using climate change as a pickup line.  And he was putting his arm around her. It was the weirdest thing.  This is where the most productive glacier in the world is on the west coast of Greenland. They'd flown there and there in this very nice hotel, which is where this promenade is, looking at the Cavian glaciers. And he's somehow comforting her, but it's all just a ploy to get her in bed. So this is my way of saying that as I traveled the world, I saw people who saw a very different view of climate change than has been discussed. In Greenland, it's a mineral rush in the Arctic in general, and Greenland in particular, because they want their independence. There are 57,000 people in Greenland. They are right now part of Denmark, and they want to be free. And the issue is that they've always gotten a lot of money from Denmark to sustain their very nice villages. We're talking, here's a village that voted 100% in favor of independence and a recent referendum. The villages look like this. They're beautiful. They're prettier than those in Alaska or Canada in the Arctic. They have many more, you know, they've got plumbing in some places, you wouldn't imagine it, airstrips, schools, stadiums, all these amenities that you would never imagine that something that we only hear about because of its melting ice and the potential sea level rise from it. It has people who live somewhat well for how remote it is. And they'd like to keep this up. Denmark, you know, the Danes are very, very kind people.  I think it amounts to about $27,000 per person per year. And Denmark or Greenland needs to find a way to get that back. And the way they think that is, is minerals. They think that the melting ice will help their, both their terrestrial mineral, terrestrial mining and offshore oil. This is the Black Angel Zinc Mine in Northwest Greenland. It has some of the highest grade zinc in the world. It was tapped out in the 70s, they thought. But in 2006, when zinc prices were high again, some miners went around to see if it was worth going in again. They found a couple things. One was that the fjord to go into the mine, here it is, was about a, had a six-week longer shipping season. More important, one of the geologists was on a hiking trip coming down from the old mine and found where a glacier had pulled back. And at the foot of the former glacier was a deposit of zinc just as big as the first. So they've reopened the mine. Between this and the melting of the sea ice that will help with oil exploration, Greenland hopes in, not immediately, but in the next 10 or 20 years to be free of Denmark. I did a road show, if you could call it that, and a place with no roads with the, all the leaders of the political parties. There are five. And four of which were pro-independence. And they went from village to village saying, this is why we're having this referendum. We're going to vote on half-stepped independence. And I think the country voted about, excuse me, about 79% in favor. Another place I traveled to was Israel. As is the case in Australia, Singapore, Spain, even California, places that are water stressed have developed means to deal with it. And water stressed not because of climate change necessarily, but historically. And these are now becoming exporters of this technology. Desalination is a major export in Israel. There's an entire water tech industry that has grown up around, well, basically, they, Israelis had to learn how to thrive in their own desert environment. Of course, being a people who, in many cases, did come from nicer, not nicer, but wetter parts of Europe and wetter areas. And they wanted to recreate that world. They did so through all sorts of techniques. Of course, we have drip irrigation. It's partly from Israel, but also desalination. This guy was one of two engineers who spread desalination through Israel and then eventually through the world. And here's the biggest plant at the time when I visited Ashkelon. Israel expects to get about 10% of its water, of its drinking water from desalination. It may have already done so at this point. Desalination is interesting. It is a good technology if you're getting the water. It has some major downsides, one of which being if you're using carbon-intensive energy to produce your water, it's sort of like a snake eating its own tail. And desalination creates quite a bit of carbon. So it's a, like many of these tech fixes, a very local fix and helps you. The other thing that came out of the desalination project in Israel actually came out of Russia when some of these engineers were, they were Russian-born and they had been sent to the gulags for being capitalists or for being Jewish or for other reasons. And one in particular was sent to a very dry part of Siberia, cold but dry. And the way they dealt with getting fresh water was that they would make a lagoon next to the ocean. They would let the saltwater come in. Then they dammed it off. And there are two ways to, of course, one way to get fresh water is just to freeze saltwater. Ice doesn't have any salt in it to speak of. So they would freeze the ocean in this lagoon. And then as the spring melt came, they would let out the hypersaline water out of the bottom of the lagoon and taste it as it went. When finally it was not too salty to drink, they would dam it off, let the rest of the ice melt and they'd have a pond of fresh water. This became one of the first desalination techniques brought to Israel, a vacuum. A vacuum is a nice way to freeze something when it's too hot to actually have freezing temperatures. Turns out to not be a very good way to do desalination at volume, but if you're looking to make snowmakers, which is the other recent Israeli export, some of the world's all-weather snowmakers, they've sold in the Alps. This is one in Austria. They've sold some in Switzerland. They tried to sell some in Sochi in Russia. They, as they joked to me, we found a way to sell snow to the Eskimos. These snowmakers work being a vacuum, they can work above freezing, which other snowmakers can't. So even as the ski areas can't even open when they should because it's not freezing when it used to be, they have a problem. I'll rush through. In California, I spent time with the for-profit firefighting company called Firebreak. They worked for the insurance industry. The logic of it was simple, they said. The fire season is growing. The private or the public firefighters are cash strapped where we have less spending on this. And therefore, private industry needs to step in and they will, of course, protect your home if you pay them enough money as an individual client, but they found that the insurers would be the best bet. So AIG and farmers were hiring these guys. They would dress up like real firefighters, sneak behind police lines, usually by having their lights flashing, and then spray down homes. Doesn't work very well, by the way. So equity issues aside, this guy was trying to figure out where one of the homes that belonged to AIG actually was as he's calling on his phone frantically, but cell phones don't work very well in an emergency. And in order to their maps, they were downloading. So the private solution was not actually as good as the public one in this case. They saved ponies. The person on the right here is a hedge fund manager from New York City. The one on the left is the son of one of the most feared warlords in South Sudan. And the prize here was farmland. After the so-called global food crisis, even before it in 2008, the hedge funds, big investment banks, sovereign wealth funds from various countries decided that they wanted to get into the food business. And there are lots of ways to do so, but one of which is to actually go get farmland. There's thought to be an area the size of France within Africa that has been sold or traded or leased to foreign investors, sheep or flying to Vietnam from the Gulf, getting fed and being flown back and slaughtered. You've got Arab farmers in Ethiopia and you've got hedge fund managers from the upper east side in South Sudan. The reason is the Nile, by the way, for those who wonder why Sudan. Sudan has a lot of water, at least South Sudan does, not in Sudan. Of course, some of the generals he partnered with were later part of the recent insurgency. There's been some fighting in South Sudan and the new air generals he was with. Some of these fighters, in fact, were involved. And lastly, dengue fever outbreak in Key West a few years ago may have brought about the first genetically modified mosquitoes being released in this country. It hasn't happened yet, but disease is one thing that's thought to be affected by climate change. Certain things will get worse. Certain things may get better. Allergies will probably get worse. Dengue fever is one of those things that could spread along with malaria. And there is a solution, they say. The private company has come up with a way to make what they call super sexy male mosquitoes. The males don't bite, only the females do.  If you release hundreds of thousands of them, they'll mate with the females if they're super sexy enough, as they said. And the offspring will die. They'd like to release these in South Florida. And of course, this is all for profit, everything I've mentioned here. And some of which seem like good solutions and some of which I have to wonder. I will say that for Key West, this makes a lot of sense because the alternative is spraying tourist cars with this spray. This is what they're doing now. Millions of dollars spent on helicopters that fly low over town and just blanket all the cars. So I'm not sure GM mosquitoes might be better. And for that, I think I'm done.


Keep going a little back and forth with this we started with arbitrary vector spaces actually we started with matrices then we went to abstractions thereof by considering arbitrary vector spaces then we introduced the notion of coordinates and showed that after all all these objects can all be mapped if they are finite dimensional they can all be sort of seen as similar as the structure preserving one to one correspondence through this assignment of coordinates and then we said okay let's investigate the matrices a little closely now again we'll go back and forth so it's like there and back again like Bilbo Baggins okay so what do we do now we say that well look since this matrix is really nothing special in just the n tuple when you're looking at vector spaces the n tuples then it is this matrix that captures a certain type of operation on objects in n tuples so can we not think of something similar that carries out something some similar sort of operation on arbitrary vector spaces in other words now we want to abstract or get a more abstract notion of what a matrix does to n tuples yeah and we want to cook up something more genetic of which probably the matrix will be a special case so two of the key properties of matrices that we have seen are that they are linear in some sense what is that sense we say that you take this fn and you take v1 and v2 from fn and if you hit it with a matrix say a which belongs to fm cross n if you hit v1 plus v2 then you can actually write this as a v1 plus a v2 yeah apart from that there's also this other property that if you have a acting on some c times v1 then it is written as so in this manner right so basically this matrix is taking objects in n tuples and mapping it to objects in m tuple note that we have very frivolously used this notation plus here but what's actually happening is this addition is happening over n tuples of course they look similar so we don't even worry much but this addition is happening over n tuples and this addition is happening over m tuples but what this allows us to do is to say that it doesn't matter whether you first add those two fellows as n tuples and then operate the matrix on it to get an object in fm or whether you act on them individually convert each of them to m tuples and then use the notion of addition as defined in the set of m tuples yeah so this addition notion of addition carries over now when you're looking at n tuples and m tuples you say okay that's just a padding I mean the idea of additions are very similar you just take n you just take m what's the big deal but when you're talking about arbitrary vector spaces where you don't have fn and fm but rather v and w and objects that map from v to w then the notion of addition vector addition in this vector space v and that of addition in vector space w may be quite different is it not of course they have to be over the same field but the the additions may be defined in different manners but if you can cook up something that inherits this property or that carries forward this property of a matrix then it seems like doesn't matter what the idea of addition in v is and what it is in w it doesn't matter how you act on them whether you first add them in the parent vector space in the domain v and then hit them with this a or whether you first act on them individually and convert them to objects in the co-domain so what I'm saying is if now this is my v and this is my w and suppose I have a mapping phi which takes objects in v and maps them to objects here in so suppose this is v1 and this is v2 so this is say w1 and say this is w2 all right what I'm saying now is that if you want to cook up a new variable which is v1 plus v2 suppose this is v hat is equal to v1 plus v2 this maps to some object here w hat okay the claim is that this w hat has to be nothing but w1 plus w2 yeah you see what's going on if there is an there is a mapping that sort of preserves the nice property of a matrix of what a matrix does on n tuples and m tuples then this is what we would expect it to do I mean if you just take the sum of these two fellows in v itself according to the rules of vector addition in v you'll get v hat then you act on it using this mapping phi and you will get some w hat here so this phi maps v hat to w hat on the other hand if your friend decides no I'm going to just hit v v1 with phi so I'm going to map v1 to w1 here first and v2 to w2 here first and I like the addition operation in w so after having obtained w1 and w2 here I'm going to add them according to the rules of vector addition in w your friend will also end up with the same object you will end up with w hat as a map of this v hat your friend will obtain w hat as a sum of w1 and w2 in w see the difference yeah this is very important to observe otherwise these things do not often appear like very different but when you look at different vector spaces so this phi is a mapping from v to w okay and okay just before I make that point about phi and erase this let's also point this out here this multiplication is happening in fn but here this object is already in fm so this multiplication is happening in fm exactly the same thing holds for multiplication as well so now I can get rid of this matrix and let's take the general what we call a linear transformation okay so okay let me erase this suppose v and w are vector spaces over f okay then this phi then phi which is a mapping from v to w is said to be a linear transformation if one phi acting on v1 plus v2 is the same as phi acting on v1 plus phi acting on v2 once again this addition is according to rules of w this addition is according to rules of v maybe I should use a colored chalk so this addition is happening in v this addition is happening in w right and secondly i acting on c times v is equal to c the scalar multiplication thereof of c with phi v once again this is scalar multiplication happening in v this is scalar multiplication happening in w of course where are these v1 v2 and v coming from so this is for all v1 v2 coming from v and this is for all v coming from v and c coming from the field so you need the same field of course because if they are not defined over the same field because this is a scalar multiplication over w scalar multiplication over v if they do not if they are not defined over the same field then it does not even make sense yeah so if these two properties are true of any mapping from v to w then we say that such a mapping is a linear transformation that's the definition right furthermore if w is equal to v then we say phi is a linear operator or an endomorphism okay so when it maps from v to itself if it's a linear mapping from v to itself it's a linear operator or an endomorphism that's just a name you can often encounter such alternate names in different contexts so just don't get scared through that term endomorphism all that's being said is it's a linear mapping from v to itself okay so let's see a few examples of course the first example is the trivial case of matrices because of course f to the n f to the m these are all vector spaces so let v be equal to f to the n w be equal to f to the m then a of size m cross n over the field f is definitely a linear transformation has to be because that is what inspired us to go ahead and define this we have already seen that these properties are true of matrices right okay so let's take some examples so suppose suppose now we have v is equal to f to the n w is equal to f to the m and phi of x sorry phi of x is given by a so phi phi is basically let's say phi which is a mapping from v to w maps what maps x to ax for a belonging to let's say small x yeah a belonging to f m cross n that's a first example a second example would be let's say v is the space of okay let's say I'll just write phi so that'll be easier so phi is a mapping from let's say the space of symmetric matrices real symmetric matrices to real symmetric matrices okay such that you push in a symmetric matrix p of size n cross n and phi gives you a transpose p plus p a for so let's call this phi a sum a which is let's say yeah r n cross n you can go ahead and check that this is a linear you know it's a linear operator in fact it's an endomorphism you can just go ahead and check yeah this is symmetric right so it takes us takes a symmetric matrix p and if you look at this then what is the transpose of this a transpose p plus p a it's the same thing so it's a symmetric mapping no problems with that right let's say so suppose we take phi as a mapping from what sort of a vector space okay let's say r m cross n n so let's say this phi a b r m cross n to r m cross n where it picks up objects here so this is x of m cross n matrix and maps it to a x b where a is some m cross m matrix and b is some n cross n matrix so when I'm giving you these examples what I expect you to do is to check not just believe me what do you do to check you take two arbitrary fellows here and in fact would you believe it if I tell you that the check for this is exactly very similar to the check for a subspace yeah because there are two properties you just take c times a vector or alpha times a vector plus the second vector and c that if it gives you alpha times the operation plus the other operation which I which is by which I mean that you take two arbitrary objects v1 and v2 from v and then you check if so check if phi alpha v1 plus v2 is indeed equal to alpha times phi v1 plus phi v2 for all for all alpha in the field and v1 v2 in v that's just the check in each of these examples just try out that check if this checks out its linearity you see you put this one zero and you've checked the scalar multiplication you put this alpha as one you've checked the vector addition so it's the same check there you check the closure here you check if this is indeed true yeah so you for example here you pick out some p1 and p2 which are both symmetric matrices and then you take alpha p1 plus p hat as alpha p1 plus p2 and check that if it is indeed turning out to be like so right so if you hit if you had fed in p hat here let's let me just do this as an as a check so that you can try out the rest so consider p hat is equal to alpha p1 plus p2 right so what is phi of a on p hat this is a transpose alpha p1 plus p2 plus alpha p1 plus p2 times a yeah because this is what p hat is so this is equal to what because of the way in which you matrices and their multiplications and their products get added you can obviously write this as alpha a transpose p1 plus alpha p1 a just rearranging the terms plus a transpose p2 plus p2 a but then clubbing these terms together what is this this is just phi of a acting on alpha p1 but you can also stick this alpha outside right so you can just pull it outside plus phi of a acting on p2 it's because the rearrangement and all is so simple that this is definitely a linear operator right so you can go ahead and check it for all of these examples that I have given you and convince yourself that indeed and that will also give you some practice on how to check whether something is a linear transformation or a linear operator right so this is an important class of transformations or operations that you can see which is a linear transformation or a you know from arbitrary vector space to arbitrary vector spaces right much later in this course not much later I mean a few lectures we will see that each of these operations that is this phi can be captured through some matrix okay and again the secret ingredient to that would be the assignment of coordinates right so every vector space that you have get a basis for it an ordered basis for it and then every vector in that vector space gets mapped yeah to some n tuple right so then all that it boils down to is some finite dimensional vector space to another finite dimensional vector space means mapping from some n tuple to some m tuple for some values of n and m where n and m just happen to be the dimensions of v and w and it turns out that well matrices are definitely a class of linear operators or linear transformations but matrices are all that there is when you are dealing with finite dimensional vector spaces there is nothing beyond it that is not so obvious but that is what we will see after a bit of basis constructions and seeing how these linear transformations are represented in terms of basis and change of basis we will see that it is in fact just matrices and matrices alone that capture whatever is being done through these linear operations here all right so before we close today's lecture since we have already introduced the idea of linear transformations I might as well tell you or talk a bit about certain properties of these linear transformations but these are not necessarily properties of transformations or linear maps defined over vector spaces rather as it turns out these properties are also true of mappings from one set to another and you have heard of these properties before okay so to be precise the properties I have in mind are the following first it is known by many names a one-to-one mapping or a monomorphism sometimes it is also called a monic mapping very rarely though and also an injection yeah or an injective mapping yeah and the other type of mapping that we shall concern ourselves with is onto or an epimorphism or an epic mapping or a surjection right and then you have the type of mappings which satisfy both of these properties that is they are both injections and surjections those are the mappings that are called bijections injective and surjective it means it's bijective do you know one of the most handy uses of bijective mappings I'm not even talking about linear maps I'm just talking about maps that are what is it's what is one of its uses you can actually show or compare sizes of sets yeah the cardinalities when I say a map is one-to-one so suppose there is a set S1 from which you map to a set S2 just in a very naive set theoretic way if I'm saying something is a one-to-one what is the definition of one-to-one I'll define all this more formally but what is the definition of one-to-one loosely anyone would care to volunteer what is the how do you define a one-to-one mapping yes so in other words if I have this mapping f yeah which maps things from here objects from here to here I can say this that f S1 is equal to f S2 if and only if yeah S1 is equal to S2 in general unless you pick up the same object on this side it will never lead to the same object here on this side so this is the condition to check now with that in mind you see if you have a mapping that that is defined over this entire set S1 that means every object here gets mapped to a distinct object here so at least this fellow S2 contains as many objects as the number of objects in S1 countable uncountable I don't care you see that's the that's the idea of a mapping right so that's that's that's the reason why it says that if you have one-to-one mapping it definitely means that the cardinality of S1 is less than or equal to the cardinality of S2 and in that same manner this surjection turns out to be a dual of that notion what does it say surjection says on the other hand so what is the definition of surjection a non-to mapping so every element in S2 must have a pre-image in S1 that means for every element that I pick up here I should be able to find out some object here yeah what does that tell me that this fellow yeah sorry so what is the cardinality so for let me just write that down so if for any S belonging to S2 there exists S hat in S1 such that f of S hat is equal to S yeah this is the definition of on to then f is on to so anything that I pick out from here S2 I should be able to find out a fellow that maps me to that fellow here what does that tell me in other words so I'm picking out arbitrary fellows from here so now my base is here I'm picking out an object here I know there's someone here I'm picking out another object here and there's someone here yeah so if I keep picking out objects here because there for every fellow I'll be able to do it let me exhaust every fellow here and what have I ended up with is it same but I may not have exhausted every fellow here right for every fellow here I have picked out someone here no of course the same fellow cannot map to multiple things that's a one-to-many mapping that's not a proper mapping right so it's either one-to-one or many-to-one it cannot be so so every fellow here is at least taking out one fellow here if not more if it's a many-to-one then for every fellow here there might be multiple fellows sitting here but nonetheless for every fellow after I've exhausted this set entirely there might still be fellows here even though even if not if there was a many-to-one mapping in any case this set is richer or this set contains more number of points or more objects than this set so in this case I would definitely be able to argue that the cardinality of s1 is greater than or equal to the cardinality of s2 so now it is just a trivial step to see that if you have a bijection and mind you I'm not even getting into linearity we'll talk about it in the next lecture when we talk about linear transformations and their properties vis-a-vis I'm just talking about simple mappings set mapping from a set to a set I'm not even talking about vector spaces right I'm just saying that if you have this sort of a thing and if you have a bijection it means it's a way it's a convenient way of showing that two sets have exactly the same number of points is it not and these mappings need not always be expressed in an analytical fashion for example if I take a line segment like so I've probably shown this example somewhere earlier and I take a line segment like so and I take this vanishing point here all right and I draw lines from here from here from here from here and I this is a mapping it does not have to be like x is equal y is equal to some fx so I'm taking a point here it maps to here look at this that's a 1 to 1 on 2 from basic geometry right so this is a bijection which tells me that no matter how long the line is there are exactly as many points in this line segment as in this line segment so any two finite line segments have exactly the same number of points there are very funny things these need not be linear all the time in fact that that's the same way you can cook up maps and you can show that the number of points in r and c yeah you can try looking up some of those interesting conclusions that they actually turn out to have similar cardinalities of course with the caveat mappings are not linear but again that's a matter for different discourse we will not get there in the next lecture we shall look at these two properties in the light of these linear transformations that we have learned and see how we can massage them to have a nice convenient check so if someone tells us that a linear transformation is 1 to 1 what are the sort of immediate conclusions that I can draw for a linear transformation and someone tells me it's on to what are the conclusions I may draw and if someone tells me it's a bijection why is it the case that I'll always be able to invert it why should it always be invertible we'll see all of those things in the next lecture thank you


What's up everybody? I am back with our contest contest winner Matt King. What's up Matt? How we doing? So we want to do a another follow-up video. So today is Wednesday, October 18th, so we've essentially been doing this kind of coaching trading of our $50,000 account for the last 18 days, a little over two weeks, and we've got some positions on so I just wanted to kind of update everybody, share everybody, share with everybody where we're at. We're currently on the monitor tab in the thinkorswim platform and you can see we've got four different positions on. So we've got a position on in Gold Futures. We've been we're we're up about 190 bucks 200 bucks on that one currently. Our second position is we've got a natural gas futures trade-on and we're up about 50 bucks on that one. We've got the NASDAQ forward slash NQ and down about 80 bucks on that one and then the fourth position is the 30 year bond forward slash ZB and we're up a little over 200 bucks on that one. So total up around 400 bucks. So not too bad. We're in the green. We're in the positive so far. So so far so good, right? Hey, that's extra money we didn't have to work for, right? That's right. Well, this is actually hard work, Matt. Okay, so so what I wanted to do today, so go ahead and go ahead and drop down in the upper left-hand corner of your screen where it says account info. Go ahead and drop that down so we can get an idea of the buying power that we have in the very upper, very upper left-hand corner where it says account info. Go ahead and drop that down. So you can see our total count value of 50,000 for 18 and available funds for trading 39 over 39,000. So we're using a little over $10,000 in capital right now and so that's you know about 20% of the total. So we're just you know implied volatility is pretty low across the board right now. So we don't want to jump all in and put on a ton of positions because if implied volatility does spike, we want to have some dry powder. We want to have some cash available to to take advantage of those opportunities. But I think it's a good time to put on at least one more position and as we talked about in the previous sessions, you know, we're really focusing on for this contest. We're focusing on trading options on futures. For a couple of reasons. One, Matt is not that familiar with trading options on futures. So it's a good coaching learning session for him and he gets to do it with our money, which is kind of the best of both worlds.  And so I think this will help kind of get people to help grasp the concept of using those and in this case With a $50,000 account, you know, I don't I don't have any reservations using naked options So all the positions that we've put on so far are Strangles which are undefined positions, you know, we're obviously staying pretty small so far We're only using 20% of our capital available And so we just we want to continue to add positions on and in this case the the position We're going to add to is the Nasdaq so instead of adding another symbol We're going to keep this very streamlined very simple and really just trade a handful of symbols But go ahead and go to the analyze tab Matt on your Nasdaq there So you're actually already clicked on it over there on your actually already good to go So just click on your analyze tab And what you'll see is this is our this is our visual graph So as you can see price is kind of in the upper upper part of our range, right? So it's it it hasn't breached our our upper short strike. So Technically it's not in a position where we would make our mechanical adjustment, you know in our inner How I maximize profits trading options course, which is all about trading short strangles remember the mechanical way to make an adjustment is to wait until price breaches that upside that upside short strike and then we would roll up the untested side and And manage it that way the second step that I that I like to do if implied volatility warrants Is I like to add another strangle So we're going to do this a little bit backwards and I want to show you just you know as you scale into positions as your Count grows and and and you want to manage your trades In this case, we're not we're not necessarily waiting for Price to breach we're simply just adding another strangle here and the reason we're doing that is is two-fold one For this case for the for this situation. We've got we've got money that we want to get working for us So that's one number two implied volatility has gone up a little bit since we initially put this position on and so to illustrate that Matt click on your charts tab and Let's just see where implied volatility is in the NASDAQ currently, so if we take a look at And remember on this one we have to we have to use the corresponding ETF So go over to your watch list there and click on the QQQ So scroll up a little bit. Yep. Click on QQQ So this is the power shares QQQ the NASDAQ ETF So you can see implied volatility the ivy percentile is at 58 So it's in a nice position where if we didn't have any position on You know, this would be a good symbol to put put a new premium selling position on because implied volatility is over that 50 level which is kind of that line in the sand that we like to see implied volatility to put new trades on That all makes sense so far Yeah, I'm good Cool So go back to go back to your current account watch list there down in the bottom left and and click on the the NQZ 7 the the position that we currently have on and Then let's go to the trade tab and let's go ahead and like I said, let's just put on another strangle and Essentially what we're doing when we do this is we are going to be widening our break evens And we are going to be collecting more credit So this is gonna enhance the amount of potential profit we can get and with implied volatility still nice at a decent level We should be able to collect some decent premium for putting this trade on So Matt, I'm gonna put you on the spot here and and ask you a couple questions So looking at the option chain here. We've got we've got we've got our position on in the cycle with 30 days to expiration what is What's kind of the timeframe that we want to be entering new trades putting them on how many days to expiration? Ideally we're looking for 45 days Yep, 45 days and and really anywhere between 30 and 60 is okay So we are we're at a we're at a point now in time just happens to be on the on the day that we're trading this We've got we've got really two choices and there's no wrong answer But we could either choose the November options and remember in the NASDAQ to stay in the ones that have the most liquid We want to do the ones that that are highlighted in white Either the week three or the regular monthly to make sure that there's decent liquidity and So we can either choose the one that the same cycle that we're currently in with 30 days to expiration or We can choose the one with 58 So we're kind of in a situation where we could choose either one and it really doesn't matter the that the things that you want to weigh when you're trying to make this decision of which one to choose is Okay, I know that if I choose the one with 30 days to expiration I'm going to collect a smaller credit Okay, in other words my potential profit on the trade is going to be lower than if I chose the 58 But the benefit is that profit could come quicker because we have less time to expiration those profit those Those options are going to decay faster so what I would say and and And so if you choose the the one with 58 days, you're gonna collect more credit Your range is gonna be wider, but those options are gonna take longer to profit It's gonna they're gonna take longer to decay does that make sense Yeah, good sense. Okay so Unless you have a preference mad and I'll I'll I'll go with what you want But you know with with because we we still have 30 days to expiration in that one I would I would probably lean towards doing the 30 days to expiration just to keep it in the same cycle And as we add new positions we can always We can always roll out to the December cycle because we've you know, we've got 58 days So that's gonna be available for the next 30 days for us to trade in as well That's kind of what I was thinking was that one seems like it's in the you know for time purposes That one seems like it's in a good spot For us to jump into and things can happen a little bit I know things will happen probably a little bit faster in there, but But you know whatever it's I think that's where we should be okay Yeah, sounds good. So open up that 30 days to expiration cycle And then go ahead and scroll down to the at-the-money options So we can get an idea of kind of which strike the different deltas are trading at a lot of strengths And so we'll set this up just like we normally do so you're gonna chew go down to kind of the Anywhere from the 17 to 20 delta range on the call side And I mean you're kind of you're kind of splitting hairs between which ones you choose So, you know just pick one of those anywhere 17 19 20 anywhere in there would be would be fine Yeah, it's definitely splitting hairs we go with 19. Sounds good medium sounds good. So just go ahead and right click on that sell strangle And so we Yeah, so we So we've got our we've got our call strike selected and then it just defaults to the 6270 on the put As soon as the the platform kind of updates will Then we'll need to go in and choose the strike that we want to utilize on the put side So, okay, it looks like there's a Like that's the information. It's coming back there. Yep So go ahead and keep keep scrolling down till we find One looking about the 19 delta on the on the put side as well. So keep scrolling there There we go. It looks like that was good. That's got a strike of fifty nine hundred Yes Changed the put to fifty nine hundred There we go, then right click anywhere on that red and Analyze this puppy you good with the one one contract. Yeah, let's keep it at one And I'd like to yeah, I'd like to keep it at one just because that's going to allow us to continue to scale scale in and out of positions and Since we're only going to be utilizing a handful of symbols Then we want to you know, we want to have that ability to keep our position size small and be able to scale scale in and out Okay, so go ahead and go ahead and click and drag that graph up a little bit so we can see our positions down below That's kind of a kind of toss is kind of finicky. He got it. You got a grab. There you go So so right now so we've got our current position and then we've also got our other position clicked on so When we have both of them clicked on together now, you can see what happens You can see that's a combination of the two positions that's depicted in the graph up above and So go ahead and click off of your current position. So uncheck all the boxes except for the red one Okay, look like that Yeah, so now this is just our new new position that we're that we're getting ready to put on so As you can see, it's just kind of a normal strangle. You can set your slices. Yep, like you're getting ready to do there to break even Yeah, and so you can see you've got about a 64 Little over 64 percent probability of profit and that's if we held it all the way to expiration Obviously, we like to book our winners before it gets to expiration So our our probability is making money on this trade are much higher than that and So So, yeah, I mean so so this is this looks good. I mean we're again. We're just kind of scaling into implied volatility adding position collecting more credit widening our break-evens on the overall trade and So, yeah, it looks good Okay, here we go a little bit easier to see like that. Yeah Yep So Yeah, so go ahead and go down to the red box there where and where it says the price of forty six twenty five We're not gonna get filled there go ahead and click that down to about let's say forty five seventy five Remember on these Nasdaq futures you have to do it increments of twenty five cents. Otherwise, you'll get rejected so Forty five seventy five so go ahead and right-click anywhere on the red and confirm and send Scent And And you can end Yeah, I was just gonna send I'm holding on to okay. Yeah, I was just gonna show it where it says buying power effect You can see we're using a little over thirty four hundred bucks In capital to put this trade on So pretty similar to what we we did before our max profit is nine nine hundred fifteen dollars and We're we're most likely gonna book this profit assuming it stays in our range We're gonna book about forty to fifty percent of that and then redeploy that capital into another trade So yeah, go ahead and hit send I Had my finger pressed on there ready to go get your finger on the trigger. Yep So not getting filled there So go ahead and click that little arrow at the bottom of the screen there and let's go ahead and cancel and replace that order Go ahead and move that down to forty five fifty And confirm and send and you know that like we like we Saw last time You know these the Nasdaq futures are not as liquid The bid ask spreads are a little bit wider than others But there you go So we got filled it at forty five fifty and I think we talked about this on the last video too But you know those that mid-price that I mean that's kind of a theoretical mid-price that toss gives you to give you an idea Of where price is trading but that doesn't mean you're gonna get filled there So you've got to do a little bit of price discovery and kind of adjust that like we did now We got filled so we are in the trade Sounds good to me is there Anything else that we needed to do with With with this one There's there's nothing else to do at this point You know you can you can just to just to look at the others Go ahead and and click on all right go back to your analyze tab Yeah And we can kind of take a look at where our other position stands so click on that one for slash gc z7 This is our gold position So so if you click on that you can see and you can You see price is still very centered You know we're up a little bit of money on that one not enough profit to to take off yet You know like I said we want to if we got 30% of max profit Within 10 days, we'll we'll book that if we got you know If we got 40% of max profit within 15 days, we would book that Or if it takes longer where we're typically looking for about 50% of max profit And and this is this is all outlined in the course. It's outlined in our e-book Kind of those optimal times to manage these trades So not enough profit in this one to take off yet, but we're we're sitting pretty Assuming price kind of stays in the nice range We'll just kind of give it a little bit more time for these options to decay before we book a profit in gold Are you looking at a 10 within 10 days or within 15 days of the time that you put that trade on or exactly? within okay, I just want to make sure it's on the front side and not like 10 days from The from expiration 15 from the expiration correct clarify. That's all yeah, just yeah The sooner you know if you get if you get profits quickly It just makes sense to book those profits There's no reason to wait around and try to get a little bit more You're better off just booking those profits and redeploying that capital into other high probability trades Okay So click on your natural gas symbol. Let's see where that one is Same kind of story. We've got a little bit of a little bit of profit in there right dead smack in the middle So nothing to do there We already looked at Go ahead reading that right about thirty thirty five dollars Be Or that's just the price that it's at yeah, no that that's where prices right now So whatever the profit line is at so you're up about thirty five bucks on that trade. Yep Okay, I just want to make sure I was reading that right. Yep, and then that would be nuts That's not real not nearly close enough to get out of right And we already looked at we already looked at NASDAQ. So go ahead and click on the bonds Okay, got a nice nice down move in bonds today. It's down 65 basis points over half percent And so that's actually helping our position if it moves down a little bit more even that'll that'll even get us a little bit more in the profit So you can so you can see where price is it's still well within our range And we've got a little bit of profit in there But not enough to to take off yet. So if you hover over the little hash mark Over the right there so you can see we're up about 180 180 bucks And the easy you know, I just wanted to kind of show this the the graphs because I'm a visual person I think a lot of people are You know the simple easiest way just to see where you're at on each position is exactly where we started our Coaching session here, which is just click on the monitor tab And that gives you the the breakdown of how much you're how much you're up on each position and then kind of your total portfolio So there you go Yeah, now just by looking at this you can't really tell What percentage of work? Can you are like what percentage you're at of profit like I would have to go into that to see okay? I'm at I'm at a hundred and ninety dollars here, but That's But I don't know what percentage total profit that yeah exactly So that's when that's where I typically just go into the analyze tab and kind of click through the different positions To see where I'm at relative to max profit. Yep Okay That's good to me. Um, yeah I like that then Aaron's kind of taking a look every day and kind of poking around to see See what it is make trying you know make decisions and as to what I would do whether it would Move forward with something. You know, even if I'm not gonna do anything You know, it's good to get in here and try and make that decision and then see if it matches up with what you would do Absolutely, and that's that's just a that's just a big part of trading is just staying engaged Kind of watching the different symbols and then you kind of get a good feel for for what you know How much they move each day and kind of what you can expect As a range and all this is priced into the the options and it's all kind of built into the platform But it helps keep you engaged and the more it's just like anything right any the more you the more you do it The more you practice the more you see it the the more second nature It's gonna become and you know before before long I mean you're just gonna be able to quickly glance at it check through in five minutes boom Add a trade if you need to take one off if you need to and be done and so, you know We talk about all the time In in in teaching our methodology and she teaching our strategies you don't have to be glued to your computer screen all day You know, this isn't day trading. We are we're I mean you can literally trade less than 15 minutes a day and be be extremely successful with the type of strategies that we teach Yeah, just wake up a few minutes early and you know jump in take care of what you need to do Actually, I guess you really couldn't do that because you have to kind of wait until you're inside of the Trading hours, I guess Yeah, as long as it's between 8 30 depending on what time you wake up Matt. Maybe you're late.  So it's 930 your time. So yeah, if you're waking up at 9 30 and that's early to you. Yeah, no problem Yeah, I was thinking yeah, just wake up at like 7 30, but I know that it's not gonna be 7 30 everywhere Where the Days are open or where it's gonna open up. So yeah now keep in mind What you know, one of the one of the advantages to trading futures is that they actually trade about 24 5 So 24 hours a day there and they close for You know a little bit a period here and a period there because they have to reconcile on the exchange and stuff like that And then they're obviously closed on the weekend and they open back up around 5 o'clock on Sunday evening But if there was some crazy situation going on where we needed to get out of a position or for some reason We really wanted to get into something and it was not in normal market trading hours Which is 8 30 to 3 central time Then that that is one advantage of futures is you can you can trade those in off hours Whereas if you're just enlisted stocks and ETFs You actually cannot trade those until the actual open market hours between 8 30 and 3 p.m. Central time Yeah, I mean I I never do I I never I oh I shouldn't say never I almost never trade outside of normal market hours just because a Lot of times you'll see the the bid ask spreads widen and there's not quite the liquidity there because there's The trading is not really going on so I you want to make it a practice a best practice to only trade during normal market hours But but that is that is one thing that is different from futures to the listed option places that Technically if needed you you can trade outside of those normal market hours Well, cool, well, let's wrap it up for the day say bye to everybody and we will connect here shortly All right. Thanks a lot. I appreciate everything and I will catch up with you on our next session sounds good. Talk to you later


What's up everybody? Jason here for JaspysKatesBricks.com. We just sold out 2021 Panini Spectre basketball, 2 bucks R&B randomizer here for number 6 This R&B holds the Hornets, T-Wills, Warriors, Lakers, Pistons, Bucks, Pelicans, Knicks, and Cavs. So again guys This is an R&B for only these teams above in this specific break guys. Remember there should be unnumbered base cards And that is the case. Of course, it'll be randomized in one lot So here we go guys So Here we go guys, I don't know I blanked it for a second So Brian Frank actually down to Dusty got those straight up and then Carl won these in a pack filler there And then we got zero through nine Let's roll it We got ourselves a five and a three Eight times good luck One two three four five six seven eight Boom eight times eight times Carl down a coral one two three four five six seven eight eight times eight times four down a one Also two guys. I mean if there's also like a color blast in here, which could be potential Obviously that'll still be randomized to everybody too. It's just we'll do like color blast one Rest of the unnumbered base go to number two, etc. Like that, but everybody still gets a shot at it So here we go Offomatize it the way it should be there and Dusty had zero Carl with one Brian Frank with two Dusty with three Carl with four Dusty with five Carl with six Dusty with seven Carl with eight and Carl with nine. So it's the way it came out. It's just already like Alphabetize it for you right there, but the same thing As you can see right there. So just putting it back to the way it was here now. So appreciate you guys and again Coming up next is the Rick itself


that you can share about rainwater harvesting? Is you've got to have a source of water, right? Now, what if you're in a village, which is in a very arid area, and there aren't wells or sources of water. Most of these villages all over the world, even in very dry parts of, say, India, have a monsoon season where they have more water coming down than they can possibly deal with than it runs off. If you design rainwater harvesting systems, that is, each of these even thatched homes of people can catch water. The thatch tends to have dust on it, but you can then let the first rain wash off. But then you have to design a really classy but effective storage system that is in closed storage. So all of those systems were involved with all of that stuff at various places. And in some places, there is enough water that you can get from a tube well or from a pond. But the technology we use, electro-chlorination, is the cheapest way of killing bugs, fecal pathogens. But if the water has arsenic or chemical or mercury, then you have to do something more complicated. So when you get rainwater and use it for, you can use it for both income generation through drip irrigated horticulture and for drinking water, then there's a whole bunch of other methods that come into play to help with both these systems. But water is critical. When water is scarce, you have to promote ways of distributing that water to plants or to fish so that every drop of water is leveraged to optimize income it generates. And so that's sort of broad strokes, but there's lots more about this stuff. Yeah, you're in a very important area. So with spring health, in conditions where water isn't very available, you're catching rainwater off of various types of roofs. You're cleaning that water. You're using electro-chlorination to make it into potable water. You're storing that water. Overage is being used on plants. And then that stored clean water is being distributed through rickshaw drivers and jerry cans to households that have been paying for that water. And then those income streams combine to pay off that rainwater catchment system. Yes, and each business has to focus. You can't get too far a field from the main business. The main business of drinking water is you're providing drinking water to people in rural villages. And you're doing it through your partners who are shopkeepers. Now we hope to expand to 600 shopkeepers fairly quickly, but once you've built that distribution system, the real opportunity in the future is the marginal cost of adding additional transformative products. Once you've paid for the distribution system, so if you've got an auto rickshaw visiting every home in a village, you can add selected products, but you have to be disciplined in terms of the market, not just from typical charitable operations. The most likely things that you can distribute are fairly low in weight and volume and comparatively high value per volume and weight. So once you're already distributing, adding the marginal cost of adding other products. So if you had an area that was desperately short of iodine in their diet and needed iodine and iodine sulfur, for instance, you could distribute iodine salt or critical medicines or a whole bunch of other things. And the cost of that, once you've covered the cost of the last 500 foot distribution, that then becomes an attract, the next generation of opportunity. So many opportunities. Is there any final parting words, any wisdom that you'd like to share or opportunities?  I guess I tend to be like that, but in the end, if you enter a process of continuous learning from the customers you're serving and change both the technology and the process and the aspirational branding strategy on an ongoing basis, your odds of success go way up. I mean, I'm involved, this is one of three companies. The other two companies are involved in energy. And contrary to my expectation, all of them are still alive and well. I thought at my age, I'll start three. And if one or two of them survive, that can be a model for how to do this. So far, all of them have survived. And so I'm in a bit of a pickle trying to keep up with it all. But I'm having a great time. Excellent, thank you so much. I'm gonna put up some links so people can learn more about what you're doing. Also a link to the Rainwater Book for people that are interested. And thank you so much for your time, Paul. Thank you. All right, see you soon. I've enjoyed it.


What's going on everyone? Sam with Layton Sports Cards. I've been here for about eight months now and I've been doing group breaks and personals for about five I want to say. It's been a great time. I really appreciate everybody that I've been working with, everybody who's taught me and trained me into what I've been able to do today as well as the best customer face in the world which is Layton Sports Cards. Bar none. Hey everybody, this is Matt. I am the group breaker for LSE Baseball and I've been with LSE for about four years. I started off with my own breaking company, got recruited to come down to Florida and I've been down here since 2019. Everybody, I'm Forrest. I've been breaking with Layton for a little over two years now. What's up everyone? It's Kenzie. I have been working here at Layton for a little over a year. I've been breaking for about a total of two years. Again, I'm a group breaker on the sports side and I'm super happy to be here and be a part of the Layton family. How's it going everyone? Caleb here with Layton. Of course, if you guys know me, I rip all the time on our Layton gaming side. Always appreciate everyone coming over and hanging out with us there. I wish you guys all a very, very happy holidays as well. Thank you as always for the supports. Honestly, there's a lot, like I feel like the easy answer here would be like flawless or national treasures but from like a card collecting standpoint, I love Topped Museum Baseball. I think that's a lot of fun. One-in-one basketball produced some huge hits this year for us. That's been a lot of fun and then some of the flagships like for some basketball, for some football, as well as select basketball and select football. My favorite product to rip is Bowman's Best Baseball. I think it's a great mix of current stars and prospects for autos per box and it's a blast. I've ripped a lot of it for myself and I also love doing the rip breaks with it. My favorite product to rip would be Topped Gypsy Queen Baseball. I love ripping through and looking for variations. Two-on-card autos per box. I do like the City Connect variations as well. Just a fun product to rip through and take your time with. One of my favorite products to rip, definitely more basketball and football. Those are my favorite sports that I love playing grown up. But as far as products, I would say Immaculate. Any sport of Immaculate love that product as well as Chronicles. It's a fun mix of little bit of everything. My favorite product to rip is probably Pokemon Evolving Skies. It's just a classic set. Massive pull potential and we've ripped so many boxes on the channel. Just love it. There's been a good amount recently. I'm a big Ravens fan so I would say probably the Flawless Triple, One of One, Ray Lewis, Jamal Lewis and Ed Reed picked it up off of a customer here actually. That was a lot of fun as well as a couple other random like pretty cool patches in the mid-2000s. My favorite card to pick up from my personal collection. I'm always, always looking at through dime boxes and quarter boxes for the 87 Thompson Markham Wire card. It's my all-time favorite card and right now I'm actually working on the Rainbow for 2021 Topps Chrome Platinum Anniversary Edition Red Shandings. So I've had a good time picking up those variations and I think I'm down to about four left to complete the rainbow. So my favorite card that I've picked up from my collection is an older Boston Bruins card. It's a dual autograph of Patrice Bergeron and Phil Kessel. And I think it's a Fleer. It's like an 06 or 07 Fleer dual autograph of those two and I like that one a lot. So my favorite card that I currently have on my PC that I've recently picked up actually from here. It's a TJ Watt rookie auto camo at a 25 BTS 95. For my personal collection it would not be something I purchased it would be something I actually pulled. I'll credit my girlfriend actually with the pull and that would be a gold super from the second year of WNDA Prism. It's a color match with her jersey gold from Prism number to 10. Love it. Man there's so many. Probably my favorite because it has the best memory was back when I first started doing Personals. For one of our customers bought National Treasures football first off the line. I pulled Trevor Lawrence Stars and Stripes RPA to 25 and this is the biggest card I pulled at that point for months and it was just the reaction was crazy and it was so so awesome to do that. Because we did it everybody. Trevor Lawrence 19 of 25 Stars and Stripes rookie patch autograph for the Jaguars. Congrats Haas. Boom. Let's go. My favorite card that I've ripped during a break at Leighton would be the Jackie Robinson cut autograph from 2021 tops diamond icons. That was I love history and that was just really special to be able to pull that from somebody. No dude. No way. Oh my god. Oh my god. I'm going to be very careful picking this up. Oh my god. It is a racing. One of one. Jackie. I have to set this down. I'm like I'll show it again in a second. Oh my god. Let's go. My goodness. Oh my goodness. Oh my god. Look at that. Look at that. Look at it. Jackie. Oh my goodness. I don't have a specific card that's my favorite that I've pulled. I think it's awesome anytime I pull a card for somebody that's going to be a meaningful addition to their personal collection. It's always a blast pulling big huge valuable cards but when there's something that I know is going to be treasured by somebody in their collection for a long time that's especially rewarding. This is Yankees. One of one. Super Bractor Arizona Fall League patch. Austin Wells. There you go. Congrats Yankees. Our first super of the day. My favorite card that I pulled this year is going to have to be the Shohei Otani one of one MLB Logo Man Auto.  We have a one of one MLB Logo Pack. So my favorite card that I've ever ripped for a customer at Layton would probably be the Hidden Fates Charizard for Jimmy C. What a tough, tough pull. It took us months, many boxes, cases, just an insane pull for Jimmy but that Hidden Fates Charizard. Oh my god. No way. No way. It's the people. Everybody I work with there's never been all the customers. I mean a lot of our customers have turned to my, you know, good friends through social media through our streaming platforms. So I would say honestly it's got to be people. I like working for Layton Sports Cards because we rip a lot of product and it is a blast for ripping packs and interacting with the chat. We have a great following, great customer base and a great community. I think it's really cool. I'm a part of the LSE Collectors Community Facebook group and it's awesome seeing our customers interact and see in the community aspect of the hobby. Seeing people post stuff on there that they've hidden breaks, seeing them buy, sell, trade. Once in a while getting in on that of myself and to me that's my favorite part. It's just we have a great group of people working here and, you know, great community, great customers and we rip a lot of product and like I said that's just a blast. I like working at Layton honestly because of the team and it feels good to be a part of somewhere I could walk in and, you know, we're basically all friends and, you know, cut up talking sports, talking cards, talking about anything. We always have each other's backs. My favorite part about working here is just how much fun it is, you know, the atmosphere. Everyone who works here is super nice. I love interacting with the customers, joking with them, ripping really big cards for them and just the opportunity to rip some super high-end product and have a lot of fun while being able to work, you know, full-time doing this. The big reason that I chose to work for Layton is just the opportunity to expand and grow the gaming for Layton. This is something that Layton has always been interested in and the opportunity to expand it alongside Rich is something that I could never pass up. Probably Dave and Buster's. There's a lot of smack talk that went down for the few weeks before we were going and, you know, we really settled it on a couple of those games that Dave and Buster's of who was supreme in different games, whether it was basketball, football or just random games. It was a lot of fun, great time with everybody. My favorite memory outside of ripping here at Layton Sports Cards is actually just happened the other day. A guy named Riley, one of our customers, came into the shop and I knew him from the breaks for years and when I get to meet the customers that are part of our community and they come into the shop or see him at a show or maybe in a convention, I think that's always awesome. My favorite memory at Layton not ripping would be the first national that I went to, which was 2021 in Chicago and it was actually the first national since 2019 at that time, since 2020 for all the shutdowns, but that was sort of my big introduction into show. It was the first show I actually ever went to, which was which is kind of crazy because it is the biggest one. It's just a real big deep dive right into collecting, buying, selling, breaking the whole thing. It was awesome. All right, so I've got two favorites. Going to the national for the first time this year was definitely up there. I've never been able to go before so that was really fun. As well, I'd probably say the funniest moment was when Brad fell out of his chair. He went to hook something up and sat back down, but the chair rolled out from underneath him and he fell flat on his butt and we were able to pull it up on the security camera and like rewatch it. It was hilarious. My favorite activity with Layton outside of breaking would probably be attending the Derek Jeter event with Rich, his entire family, Sarah, the baby, Sam, Forrest, Layton. It was a great, great time and just not something we get to do every day. Really, really thankful and appreciative of that experience.


OK. Welcome to this session. Please welcome Jackson Isaac, who's going to guide us through his introduction to Google Cloud and Python. Come right up, which is Jackson. Thanks. Hi, everyone. Hello. Yeah, it works, right? Hello, everyone. Good evening. I'm Jackson Isaac. Today, I'm going to present how to use Google Cloud with Python. Mostly, I'll be focusing on how to use ML APIs. And we'll see a demo on how to do OCR and do a number plate detection from the images using Google Cloud. And I'm a GSOC org admin with the MacPorts project. And I also professionally work as a big data developer at TCS India. So I'll start now. So what is Google Cloud? It's a cloud computing platform provided by Google. So there are more platforms like this, like AWS and Azure. And Google has also come up with their own services in this field. And some of the popular products are Cloud Vision API that we are going to talk about today. And then there's Compute Engine, where you can launch your own virtual machines and do some processing on it. You can have Linux machines on that. And then there's App Engine. So what App Engine does is you can launch your web apps or mobile apps using that engine. And then there's Cloud TPU. So if you're from machine learning or deep learning background, you will know about TensorFlow. So you create some TensorFlow. And then you design your machine learning model. And then you run it. So this TPU specifically, it's designed for TensorFlow. And it performs much better than even your GPUs. And you can use the TPU on cloud itself. Google provides it as a service. And then there's BigQuery, which is used for big data querying. And there's Kubernetes. And then there's CLI. CLI means command line interface that I'll be using from my terminal. So that's gcloud, which is an interface to GCP. Then next is, first we have to set up Python. And here, we can see how to set up Python if you don't have actually. How many of you are Windows users? And Linux or Mac OS? So here, mostly people are Linux users. So you can simply do yum install or apt-get install Python. And here I have mentioned Python 2.7. That is what Google documentation asks for specifically. But even you can use Python 3. And Windows users, they can just download a package from Python website. And they can set up Python. Mac users, probably they get Python 2.6 by default. You can even install 2.7 or 3.6 using Mac ports. Or as well, the .package file if you want a GUI installer. And then for running Python, you can just enter Python hyphen v, which will show you which version of Python you are using. And yeah, that's about Python. Next, we'll see how to set up gcloud SDK. So this is a software development kit by gcloud. We have to download this and install it to use the gcloud CLI and use it through our Python code, which can be downloaded from cloud.google.com slash SDK. Here it will auto-detect your operating system and give you the installer. And then after you have the installation file, you have to change into the folder and then run .slash install.sh. So what basically it is, it is a shell script to set up the gcloud CLI on your machine. It will install all the components. And I'll show you quickly on how the components will look like. So when I do install or here components list, because I have it already installed. So here you can see my SDK version is 193, which is the latest version.  So these things are not installed by default, but you can use the ID and install it. So what comes by default is the command line cloud storage, gsutil, and the core, and the BigQuery command line tools. And then next, we have to run gcloud init. Before that, I hope you can see the screen, the terminal. It's readable. OK. So when you run this gcloud init command, what it will do is actually initialize the authentication. So it will first redirect you to Gmail or Google account. And then you have to log in. OK.  So you don't have to again and again log in to it. And there is also a quick start guide here on this link. I don't know how the presentation will be shared, or you can get it from Dropbox. So you can just refer to this presentation and click the links. But here you can get the quick start guide on how to set up all the code and all. And for Python, there is a specific API manual here on the Python link. And then there's also some example files on GitHub platform. And then next, also, after doing gcloud init, what we have to do is, OK, so I did here. So it says me, OK, what is the account that I'm using, the configurations, and if I'm reporting all the usage and the project, which project I'm using. So I'm using for Asia 24 March. So on gcloud platform, you have to create a project and where you define which APIs you want and what kind of roles you want to create for users. And here I just created a sample project. And when you have multiple projects, you can select each project by entering gcloud project, set project, and project ID. Here you can see that I can reinitialize with the default settings or I can set a new configuration. So here I don't want to do this. Next is doing installation of Google Cloud for the Python package. You can just run simple pip command. Pip install Google Cloud. This will install all the Python packages required for running gcloud command. So this is about setting up the gcloud SDK. Now, OK. Let's create a VM instance on GCP and see how it works. It's just a simple drag and drop. So here you can have any number of CPUs or GPUs. I think very soon they are also going to launch a TPU. So what you see here is the Google Cloud platform, the UI, where you can select all the services provided here. So these are all the services provided. So we are more focusing on Compute Engine and Cloud Vision API. So this is how it looks. So when you click on Create, it will take you to another window on tab. It's pretty slow. So feel free to ask questions in between if you have any doubts. Here, there are some even templates which you can select if you don't want to create your own instance. So here, you give your name, the zone. So I'll select East 1c. I'll have, say, I want four CPUs. And OK, I want to customize.  So let's say here GPUs, yeah. So amount, when you configure this, it will give you an hourly estimate on how much the cost will incur. But actually, it's based on per second billing. So you only pay for how much you use. It's not like, OK, if you select for one hour, you'll be charged for the whole. But it's like how much time it is running. And they have a good collection of GPUs here. There is a Tesla K80 and P100. So P100 only in this few selected regions they have. That's why I have selected East 1c. So if I select P100, it is one for deep learning. So OK, this is per month cost. Effective hourly rate is just 134 cents. So that's pretty cheap. I can just run it for, say, 24 hours. My total cost incurred will be just $2.50. And I can train a model, a deep learning model in this time. And even you can configure how many cores you want up to 96. But that's, you have to play around here. It's like a trial and error on how you can configure it. OK, so any doubts here? OK, so I'll move forward. And then here, what I mentioned was GPUs. So if you go to this link, there it's mentioned which GPU is available in which region. Because it's not available in all the regions. Say probably in Singapore, only P100 or K80 might be there. And TPU, you can set up TPU as a beta thing. They haven't launched it officially.  It costs around $6 per hour. But it's pretty much cheap as compared to running GPUs for hours. And probably we can even give a try on how I can enable TPU for my project. Hi, come on. OK, so here, so basically it's just simple click or drag and drop kind of interface. So it's pretty simple. It's not like you have to configure something or write scripts to configure anything. Here you can even select which tensor flow you want to run. So here you can see $6 and 1 half hourly rate. And then you can create it easily, a node, a node running on TPU. Let me know if I'm going fast. The next is computer vision, which I'll be focusing more on. And we'll be talking much more about Cloud Vision API. So it helps us to detect faces from images. Do OCR? OCR is optical character recognition. So here you see this banner, right? So if you take a photo of this and send it to Google Vision API, it will print out all the details what is written here. Like FOSS is on the first line, ASHA is on the second line. And then there's logo, there's Google Cloud return, or even the dates and all. And then there's label detection. Say you post an image of a tortoise. So it will say, OK, it's an image of an animal. Or even it will recognize, OK, it's a tortoise or a bird, if you upload a bird. Here if you upload this image, you can see some logos. So it will even detect logos from the image. And next is web detection. So web detection means if you have used Google image search, you will see some similar images will be recommended. So say you upload a water bottle. This is a company. And it will give you similar images for bottles. And OK, so before we actually start calling the API from our code, we have to enable the API on our console. So by default, everything will be disabled so that you don't incur cost or there is no fraudulent usage if someone knows your account.  You click on dashboard. So here basically you'll get all list of all the APIs which are there. And then whatever is your requirement based on that, you can enable the APIs. Say I require Cloud Vision API. OK, so this is my Cloud Vision API. I can click here and just disable it from, say, I have launched my app on multiple platforms and everyone has my code. And I don't want them to access it anymore.  The app won't be any longer usable unless they get a new credentials from me. So this is Cloud Vision API. But if you go back, you can see a list of other APIs. And then it will also give you all the statistics on how much requests are there or how much errors were there. And what kind of API calls were there. So here you can see compute engine API. There were 21 requests. For TPUs, there were four requests. And for how much time and what latency was there. Anyone doubts? No? OK, I'll move forward. So next is demo. I'll try. If I can do it here, there is some issue with the network. OK, yeah. I actually had it run before. I started the presentation. So here I have a piece of code which takes image as an input. It sends it to Google Cloud. It detects a text. And from there, I only take the first key text annotation from the whole bunch. So it's actually a JSON response. You'll get all the text that is available in the image. And then from there, I just take a number plate. So this demo is basically a number plate detection from an image. And I'll show you how the image looks actually. So here you see there's a car. So it's from India. There's a number plate from India. And if you see here, I have sent the image to Google Vision API. It detected the text from the input image. And then here you can see the number plate. It's written Ka, space 51, space P, space 69. It looks like 3, 1. And that's what is there in the image also. And I'll also take another image. Probably it works fast enough to not go over the time limit. Meanwhile, I'll show you how I have it in the code. I hope everyone can read this. I don't want to open it or else it might take some time to process. You can't read it? OK. Or else? OK, I'll probably not open anything. It will take some time. So OK. So from here, from Google.cloud, I have imported the Vision API. This is the packages that we installed using PIP. PIP installed Google Cloud. So this packages will be available from the Python code. So that's really important you install Google Cloud package. Then there's from Google.cloud.vision import types. So there was some recent changes to the APIs. That's why I had to also import types. And the main code for Vision API is over here. This function that you see, detect text. It takes a path, the file path. It creates an initialized object of Vision API, image annotator of client. And then I read the image file as bytes. I save it in a variable. And I send it to types.image.  So here, what it actually does is it sends the image, the content of the image to Vision API as a request. And then from there, I get a JSON response, which is also stored in text variable. And then I print it using text.text annotation of 0, the first key value pair. And then from there, I take the description. Probably if you want to know more details about how this works, I can show it after the talk, or else it will just consume more time. So here, it has run. So here, I have sent rickshaw. It's a public transport in India, this. So you can see the number plate is very small here. And there is also some mobile number written here of the driver. And then when it detected the text, here you can see that it extracted the number plate properly. But along with that, it also extracted the mobile number. So how do you tackle this thing? So when you get this response, you can write a regular expression. Say, I know that Indian number plate is two characters, two numbers, one character or digit, and then four digits. So some kind of regular expression, some patterns you can write to extract only this particular number plate instead of the whole thing. So this is some post-processing that also you have to do because you can't completely rely on the vision API. So this shows you that even minor details, minute details, very small details from an image, it is able to analyze completely. So here I'll give some insights why we went with this. Why didn't we go for in-house model? Because the accuracy was not that great. It was around 70% to 80%. But with Google Cloud, we got around more than 95% accuracy. So that is why we went and OK. Then it's a bonus video. I think I have some time. It's just one and a half minute. I can show this. So here what I have done is, since I'm a big data developer, I thought, OK, let's use some big data tools also. So here I use Kafka. Kafka is a message queue. So you send messages to the broker and you consume via client. And then it OK. I can't play the video here. I'll play it here. So here what it does is you keep on sending the images via Kafka producer. And OK. So there are four tabs. Here are the input images that we are sending. This is the producer. This is the consumer. And here we will cut out this particular plate using OpenCV and just send that itself to Google Cloud so that we don't get a text from anywhere else. That is what happened in the previous image that I showed. So here I'm sending an image through Kafka. Here it's processing. It will take some time. I'll fast forward the video a little bit. Not so much. So it's getting the number plate. And then it has cut out. OpenCV has cut out the plate and send it. I'm not sure if you are able to see this, but it's MH12BG7237. And then next I send another image. And then this code is still running because it's reading from Kafka. There is no loss of any data. Even if here I send one more image. So you can see KA03MG2784. And this is how you can just keep on analyzing multiple number plates. You keep on sending through Kafka and consuming from the client side. So when you launch this app, say you have the client of Kafka, the consumer, on your mobile app. You send it from somewhere. And then you get the number plate detected for you. So yeah, that's about it. And I think, yeah, I'm done. So that was about it. Thank you. If you have any questions, you can contact me on hijaxsonatbackports.org, or even you can tweet me on hijaxsonisac. So mostly I'll reply on both Twitter as well as mail. So you can expect within some hours a reply from me, unless I'm sleeping. So yeah, thanks. Thanks for attending. OK, I see three questions. No questions? Yeah, that's great. If you want to know more about how the code works or the internals, you can ask me. No problem, yeah? Thank you, guys.


Welcome to Off Topic Tuesday episode, I don't know, nine. It could be. That'll be figured out later because we just want to jump right into it because that's where you go. Seven. Seven. All right, episode seven. Marvin keeps way better notes. There's a reason Marvin works sales here. Because details matter. They do. They do. So we've had a lot of topics with AI and of course it just devolves into things. So now we're going to talk about things AI should be doing besides creating fake porn. Right. I mean, there's other uses for it. So drug companies submerged. I like that they submerged them. Right. West Virginia in Opayeds. One town of 3,000 got 21 million pills. And how many pills is that per person? For 7,000. So this is where AI could go, wait a minute here. Hold on. You sent 21 million pills to a town with 3,000. And I know Graham always had a big pill bag. There's a lot of things once you get older. You seem to need. I don't know how all that works. I'm not into medicine. But it does seem though if you had an AI system tracking anomalies, they would say wait a minute. Yeah, you would think. There appears to be more pills than population.  Everyone's really likes coding in Opayeds. The sad story of this is if you are outside of America and watching this, we got a drug problem here if you hadn't heard. And specifically related to this. This is very tragic that we have these we know where they're going. And but these are some of the frontline problems with it is where you have systems that go I don't know. They filled out the paperwork that says they're a valid place for this. And this is where sometimes I think AI can just look for anomalies in the system. And if it doesn't decide to kill all humans, it can also find you can stop the humans from killing themselves with drugs. Maybe that maybe this is how they're planning to kill us is to let 21 million pills go to maybe the AI systems authorized. Look, the other way to fix you is to make you all go away. We have concluded this. Uh-huh. Well, yeah, because I assume right like they're gonna order from different companies, whatever. So each company they're not gonna track like what other company like how many pills some other company sent you. Yeah, I can find can find it. This is actually some of the useful things is looking for anomalies in the system glitches in the matrix and 21 million pills sent to only 3000 people glitch in the matrix. It's a big glitch. So I think there's a lot of efficiencies that efficiencies they can be done. So this is we were actually coming up with things were like, okay, this is an article of this could happen like this and this is a better use for technology. So as soon as the person grows up a little bit that was creating all his powers will be used. You could when it's adulthood. It reaches once he needs some pills. Now, I love products that I don't know why they exist. Okay. But do so. Buddhist go high tech. Acer to launch smart prayer beads. I okay. I have a feel I'm not a Buddhist, but I feel like when I there you're trying to look seek enlightenment and maybe get away from technology a little bit. They're like, hold on. You put your phone down and you got a prayer bead. Let's let's see if we can blue tooth enable that. I'm like blue tooth enabled prayer beads. Alright Taiwanese compute computer tech and technology film Acer sits a launch a new smart product Buddhist prayer beads that automatically count the number of times a mantra is recited and transfers merits to a social media platform. So it brags online of your prayers like this seems I'm not a Buddhist, but this almost seems counter is that is yeah, that seems counter. Yeah, it totally is. I have explored the merits of Buddhism and I use a prayer. I use prayer beads on the surface. I see where this would be cool as far as like because the point of the prayer bead is that you know you in fact I should have brought mine in you like you you have what's called the guru bead and like you kind of start there and as you do your mantra you just pull the beads around. It's like an abacus kind of when you get back around to the guru bead, you know you've done however many beads are on the thing, right? I think it's a mental thing and but that's the point is that you use the beads so you don't have to think like did I count how many did I count how many did I get to the different beat now I think that's and that's one of those things part of the anytime you're if you're doing meditating or I do things to get away from technology where you just kind of be mindful my things my motorcycles and off-roading but it's because you become focused on that and not thinking about other things and now you're like I had to think about this and concentrate but I don't know because I got it there's an app for that. Right. How many counter you up to Marvin? And that's the part to me that goes like against like whether against Buddhism is that like you don't brag about that kind of thing. Yeah. I'm totally with it if it will count and like give me and like if I say that's where I want to know how that product beating went. Right. You know what Buddhists don't do enough of brag on social media about how many prayer beads they counted today. Yeah. I mean I'm not trying I'm not making fun of the vision at all here I'm just kind of saying from a product standpoint like are you are we getting desperate trying to pitch products we kind of have a covered some of the stuff at CES but the I gotta admit the space toilet was pretty cool. I still want one of those. I mean it had different attack patterns from my butt. Attack pattern Delta go. Yeah. I mean we still really enjoy thinking about I mean that that is at least a piece of technology that may have been slightly useful but sometimes I think you know prayer beads and bragging on social media about how many you've counted today. I don't know I'm going to I'm going to go with I want to know about their product feet. I guess it'll separate the fake Buddhists from the real Buddhists I guess. What does the Dalai Lama have to say about this. That's what I want to know. Yeah. When he chimes in then I will know that you know what does he had to say. Yeah. And what was the science lover and what was the market research done. How many Buddhists in the interview for this. Do you have trouble counting your prayer beads. Do you do you feel you'll be easier on social media if you had a Bluetooth enabled prayer. Well and that's the thing I'm trying to think like I don't think I've ever seen anybody post like ooh did 74 mantras today. Yeah. Good for you. I've never seen anybody post that. Now we like to Uber things. Yes we do.  So you know Uber being the car company which maybe we're going to do I want to do we'll maybe do an off top too say of why Uber's an awful company. There's so many things that they have done wrong and they have a new CEO who's been uncovering some of the wrongdoings and he's being smart. He's getting ahead of the curve by releasing some of the wrongdoings and the yeah. So he's you know uncovering some of the things. So when you Uber something I don't know that it's always a good thing. Okay. And we're going to talk about this one. This article is really great.  And there's a video of course. And basically you don't want to go to work because it's snowing out and someone like to stay home occasionally when you know because you don't want to deal with the roads and so we can have Marv here. We'll just got to find a you know there's some someone who has nothing better to do and we're just going to tape an iPad to his face and we'll have Marv FaceTime the iPad because that's the whole concept here. So it's a person literally walking around with an iPad strapped to his face. And you just tell the person where to go. I mean, eventually this will be replaced with robots. It makes me think of remember the the robots on sticks with the iPad faces but it was that demolition manhattan. I mean this is a long time ago. They had them when they had the meetings. Yeah. So this the concept's not new. We know eventually robots with robot on a stick with an iPad will run to replace human. But until we can afford robot on a stick we got unemployed human who goes, I'm in college and I got nothing.  And that's when somebody will be yelling that they took our jobs. Yeah, we have robots on a stick. Yeah, then we then we're like, Oh, my job was taken by robot on a stick. So we're what else could we uber marvin like what other things require this?  What are what are some of the other things that need ubers? I guess is what other markets? I don't know. It's it seems absurd. Like we just put the word uber in front of all of it. So what are some of the other absurdities I wonder?  I mean, send you can send an actual a task to go do that. You send the uber to car and then well, they and if you don't want someone to come in, our Kroger's has a cool thing called the click it order.  And then you just have a task grab it do that like, I don't know, could I send somebody like to the doctor like in my place. So like I could be like and get a clean bill of health. It's like, wow, you have lost a ton of weight and your cholesterol is fantastic. There we go. uber doctor. Um, yeah, any of those like the dentist, you know, like, oh, I really don't want to get that root canal. This guy can go do it for me. Yeah, it's just it's a mess. Okay, and we were debating should we cover this topic? But I, I kind of want to cover it. So we're gonna have to go here. This is an interesting security topic. And the graphic for this is outrageous. The internet of dildos a long way for you to a vibrant or marital aid from nearly yeah, from iot to iod. So you can't you can't make that up, right? So the security implementation of this is where we're really going to focus because we'll get really unfocused if we talk about anything else. Yeah. So the iod and it's as bad as you think. So they had a whole list of security vulnerabilities on this. So an insufficient authentication mechanism, insecure direct object reference due to flaws in the authorization scheme and authorization bypass for ability allows an attacker to get now this is crazy. So cross site scripting they didn't I mean, this is all like, these are not things that shouldn't be on there. This is even worse. They have an exposed administrative interface on the internet via PHP admin installed on there. Now, this is insane. So this company basically an internet enabled marital aid marital aid.  And then they can hack and turn these things on because who thought you needed to connect this to the internet. So I didn't think this. And here's this is some legalities are coming up around this entire topic. So there's a whole list of the insecure vulnerabilities in here. We're gonna release to the does this post directly to Facebook? How many times you've used it? Yeah, there's a thought. It definitely posted a world but because it allows the world to take control over it. And if you registered it, they have your name and information on there. Maybe you want that. Maybe you don't. But that being said, is it a sex crime if you did this? That's the question. If I hack your marital aid and turn it on and not the right time. And I mean, yeah, I guess you're not consenting to change time. So this is insane. And this is actually a legit problem. So in our effort to Uber everything and then in our sorry, I just saw one of the names. Oh my God. Yeah. Yeah, we'll let you research that we're gonna release to the security implementations of this. And the fact that here's a question that they even fix it. Oh, no, no, no, this is awful. PHP admin is still this was released the other day and they still haven't closed his holes like and I'm not hacking this is a poor choice of words. We could poor choice of this. Well, actually, so I'm looking at this not I'm seeing the one that they're actually talking about. And I think it it would be completely possible to commit a sex crime by hacking this because it appears to be something that a lady would wear all the time. They have that as an option. And so if you hacked that and turned it on while she was wearing it, like, I would think that's non consensual. Now, here's what's even crazier about this. So the vulnerabilities were first discussed on 118 of 2017. And the public advisory release. Yeah, this is they haven't a whole timeline of all the contact they have these companies. So if you're considering buying a marital aid, you may stop before you get one that's Bluetooth enabled and think about did they consider the security and safety of this device, maybe just keep it old school, maybe keep it old school. But we just want to this is a public service adoption. So we the the IOD. I got Oh, man, not quit putting toasters and other devices that could destroy things on there.  No, no need for that. There's no need for that. So we're gonna leave you with that. We still had to have one topic related to sexual we couldn't help it that it just reading the disclosures and the fact that they don't appear to all be fixed at all. Yeah, there's actually company before and I look I forgot to find the Eric way I can find it leaving links. But one of the other there was a company before they got sued over this and had to settle class action for the same thing. So this is just another company doing the same bad idea. Apparently worse than the other company that got sued go bigger go home. That's what I say home. So all right, that's it for off topic Tuesday. We got to get to work today and more videos and all that fun stuff coming. Thanks for watching. Like to count in here, like, subscribe, watch the rest of the off topic stuff. If you're offended by this, don't watch any of the other off topic stuff, right? Or just skip past it. Skip.  No, don't just don't don't don't get an internet don't get an internet enable you do this is not a thing that needs to be internet enabled. Just throw it out there. Just whatever I do what you want in private. That's all right. It's all consensual. I'm whatever. But you don't need to put this thing on the internet. I'm just throwing it out there. Unless unless what we will we'll leave you with this. I have heard there are people who want the general public to hack. I mean, this is like a webcam girl thing or something they want the general public to be able to access it. So there's maybe they may be even the internet may be creating a new fetish that we didn't even know existed. It's a fetish of of hack my webcam.  All right. Thanks.