Thank you. So, when to use the rest APIs. As Monique just said, my name is Sean Blakely. I'm a senior technical architect at Pragmatic, which is a UK WordPress agency. I work largely on enterprise scrum-based projects and I've been working with WordPress, as Monique said, for about a dozen years or so. So this talk is aimed mainly at people who are considering using the API in their projects or, indeed, tentatively using the API in their existing projects. So, what I'd like to look at is why the API, the rest API, is important. I'd then like to look at what the... Sorry, guys, there's some animation on these slides. Is it possible to put it into presenter mode? I'll carry on talking while I'm just waiting. I'm going to talk about what an API is. So we'll look at an overview of a couple of metaphors of what APIs are. And then we'll move on to look at when to use the API. So we'll look at some examples of when we've used the API. And then briefly, we'll look at what tomorrow may mean. So what the rest API may mean for WordPress tomorrow. So why is the rest API important? Well, I think it's important for a couple of reasons. So firstly, it's important to us, the community, to developers. And secondly, it's important to WordPress itself. So prior to the rest API, WordPress was a monolithic application. It was essentially a black box where data wasn't able to come in. Data couldn't come out. It controlled the publishing sort of process, end-to-end process from beginning to end. Now, the rest API changed that. The rest API allowed us to move data into the system, but it also allowed us to move data out of the system. So it really liberated our data out of that, out of WordPress itself and made it platform agnostic. So we were able to start integrating with other services and other systems. And then why the rest API is important for WordPress? Well, this is a breakdown of adoption of content management systems. And so WordPress has a seemingly unassailable dominance in the marketplace within CMSs. But counterintuitively, this actually creates a vulnerability for WordPress. So these were some ideas introduced by Clayton Christensen, who talked about the innovator's dilemma. And what he was saying is that when you dominate a market to such a degree, you actually become vulnerable to the agility of these smaller pieces of software or smaller organizations that are much more nimble and much quicker to disrupt the marketplace and being the dominant player, you're not able to adjust quickly and you're not able to adjust your position. And so you become vulnerable to that agility. And so his recommendation, his solution for that problem was what he called the disruptive innovation. So that's where you start challenging your own position. So WordPress starts challenging its own dominance and deliberately disrupting its own position. Now, that's exactly what the rest API does. Starts challenging up. And indeed, it's exactly what Gutenberg does as well. So what is the rest API? Well, I like to, sorry, just for a moment. Is there any chance we can put it into presentation mode because there is some animation on the slides? I'll leave that with you guys if that's possible. Great, thank you. So I often think about an API similar to a power socket in a wall. So whilst it has lots of potential and offers us power, it really doesn't become useful until we actually plug something into that power socket. So this slide isn't going to make any sense to you at all because this is animated as we gently move from one section to the other. Let me try and recreate it for you. So you might have to close your eyes and imagine this as I walk you through it. So I've recently just got back from Guatemala. My wife is Guatemalan, so we're going there to visit family. And it got me thinking about APIs and connecting systems in this way. So behind the WordPress logo is me and over there is my father-in-law. Now, my father-in-law speaks a smattering of English. A few words that he remembers from his primary school days. My Spanish is criminally bad. So it's really difficult for us to communicate, but he's got things that I'm really interested in. So I'm really interested in Latin culture in the music and the food and the sort of parties, the fiestas. And equally, he's interested in English culture. So he thinks he doesn't understand why we all drink warm beer in England, for example. He's interested in fish and chips, and he genuinely thinks that we're all pirates in England. And so my poor wife, who's in the middle here, has to bounce between my father-in-law and me trying to translate, as I'm speaking English or terrible, terrible Spanish, and my father-in-law is speaking Spanish, so she's translating back to English. So this is a bit like an API, but we can do a bit better than this. So imagine that I and my father-in-law decide to learn a shared language. So let's say that that's Pigeon Esperanto. So we decide to learn this shared language. Well, now my wife can put her feet up. She doesn't need to translate anymore because we can communicate via this shared language. Now, this slide would be animating as we're talking. So what we would see is a transition to WordPress. This might be a COBOL install. And, of course, it's unlikely. And, of course, our Pigeon Esperanto would be JSON and wouldn't be Pigeon Esperanto. And we're not going to be talking about pirates and piñatas. We're going to be talking about user objects and legacy data tables and so on. So when to use the REST API. And I'd like to give you a couple of a few architectural examples, so ways that we've utilized the REST API to help us create an elaborate architectural solutions where WordPress is already part of that solution. And then we'll talk and look at some specific use cases where we've used the REST API. So WordPress is part of the solution. This, and again, I'll talk you through this. This is a startup company. This is a sports startup company. And this company is interested in promoting information around sports that aren't necessarily in the public eyes. So the football and rugby and cricket and so on, the most popular sports. But there's a huge long tail of other sports that there's a lot of interest in. And so this company wants to promote those sports. So they're really interested in using that classic and the traditional WordPress. The content team will be creating content within the WordPress space. They'll then be enriching that within WordPress. So adding their taxonomies and images and so on. And then pushing that out into the front end of the website. However, this presents us with a few issues because one of the things they also want to do is to ingest news feeds. So that news feed might be the press wires or might be from other sources. But these are articles that they want to pull down into the system. They want to select the articles that they want to publish on the site. They want to enrich them but also add a sort of summary and contextualize those articles. Now, this presents us with a challenge because we have some performance issues around this. Now, this, our WordPress layer, our business layer, is running a subscription. It's running a sort of user management on all sorts of other heavy lifting within this website. So to then start ingesting this feed as well, we're going to start putting pressure on that core system. So we're likely to hit some performance issues creating pulling this into WordPress. Equally, we're going to hit some scalability issues. So as new sports are brought online, we're going to start exponentially growing this system and this architecture isn't going to support that growth. And then the third thing that would be a real concern is that if you're taking this news feed and pulling it directly into WordPress, you're very vulnerable to any changes that are happening in this source. So anything that's happening in the news feed, you're not protecting your system from those changes. So what we'll be implementing, so the architecture that we'll be using is creating a content API. So this API will be a sort of node server that will be ingesting those news stories, so pulling those in from the press wise or from whatever the source is. WordPress will then be pulling in from that content API. So we're protecting ourselves here with an abstraction layer. We can make those changes from the source. We can make those changes in the content API. We don't need to change anything in our WordPress layer. And then we can push those articles. So once the content team have enriched them as they need to, we can then push them to a published section of the content API. And the value of doing this is it then frees us up to change our front-end technology. So we might use React or View and so on. But we can also push to other services. That would be a newsletter service or a dedicated app and so on. So let's take another look at a slightly different example. So this is WordPress as an API delivery system. So this is a simpler architecture where WordPress could do the heavy lifting here because we're not doing any sort of user management or e-commerce and so on. This is for a startup company wanting to show details about swimming pools all over the world so that you might be in Belgrade and you're looking for a swimming pool close to this venue that's open after 7 o'clock. So as you put those details in, the system would return you relevant details. However, there was no website at the front of this project. There was no website to query. It was a publicly queryable API. So you might be pulling this down from another site, from a widget or some other sort of service, and you'd be pulling that relevant information in. So we were able to rely on WordPress to do this heavy lifting, but we did consider some performance issues and those issues were around data retrieval. So when we were doing these unique searches where you're combining a number of parameters before then returning the results, we were finding quite a slow performance issue. So we used the API. We integrated with a service called Elasticsearch, a sort of flat distributed storage system which then returns almost lightning fast results. So we were then able to complement the WordPress architecture and start moving our data storage and improving the data storage. So in this example, although we're using WordPress as the graphical interface, so the way that the content team are uploading their content is via WordPress, we've actually decoupled the front end. It's a headless CMS. And we've also changed the storage systems or using an alternative storage system. So let's have a look at integrating with existing systems. Now, this is a project by HumanMade. This is a Fairfax project. Now, Fairfax are a large Australian publishing company and they have an existing content API with over a million articles within that content API and also an existing media API. And I think that has well over a million multimedia entries which then connects to a cloud service. That's a cloud network that's storing those images. Now, what Fairfax were interested in was utilising the publishing flow, so the workflow of WordPress. They were interested in their journalists and for their editors to be able to utilise WordPress as their interface but then wanted to utilise their existing architecture and to integrate with their existing architecture, so the content API and the media API. So that's exactly what they did. They utilised the content API, allowed journalists to create stories in the normal way or pull them down from this dedicated content API. The editors, once they were flagged for review, the editors could then pull them down, enrich them with images and the taxonomies and so on that were required and then they would push them to this published section of the content API. And then a react front-end, so the front-end would be pulling in this data from the rest API and also pulling in images from the media library. And so what we see in these three examples is that each time the client has requested WordPress as to core graphical interface that they want their content teams to work in. The architecture that sits around WordPress, be it the storage or the front-end, changes for each project to adapt the requirements of the client. But that core experience for the content teams are consistent and is within WordPress. So let's have a look at some examples of working with WordPress. So I like to think of working with the API as being as easy as pie and by that I mean presenting, integrating and experimenting. So let's have a look at the first example of presenting. So this is a plugin that I've been working on for a while. This is a plugin called Site in Numbers. And what this does is presents to a site owner, indeed their users, all sorts of information, data and revealing statistics about their site. So it might be telling them the total word count of the entire site, giving you a breakdown of where that content is, giving you an insight into the publishing times, the publishing days, your most popular and successful content and so on and so forth.  So the way that this is structured is we have an administrative interface, a graphical interface where the site owner can drop and drag these different sections that they want to show onto the front page. We then have our business layer. So this is our API, rest API construction sort of layer where we're creating a large JSON object and that JSON object contains all our statistics and all our data and all our raw data. And then that's pulled into the front end. So pulled into our JavaScript layer which then constructs that data into the sort of visually rich charts and so on that we're presenting to the end user. So let's have a look at another example. This is a project called IM Team GB. This is a project that Pragmatic worked on with ITV and the National Lottery and the British Olympic Association. And so this was introducing Britain's biggest sports days. There were many thousands of events happening simultaneously around the UK and among many of the challenges that they presented us with was enabling a user to put in a search so you could search wherever you were in the UK and we would then return you relevant events within distance from your front door. So the way that we did this was that we and again I'll talk you through this, you're missing the animation unfortunately. So we used WordPress as our core to do the sort of the core of the site. We had our JavaScript layer. So as you input your city, let's say, well it has to be in the UK, let's say Liverpool, as you inputted your city we would fire a request out to Google Maps API. We'd make sure that where you were searching for was in the UK.  So as we had many thousands of events to make it a manageable load we took and chunked the country into a number of sections and then pushed that data and pulled that data back into the JavaScript layer and then presented it to the end user and this would happen in a matter of milliseconds as a user experience. So using the rest API to integrate with systems. What you're seeing here is Sage.com, the Sage.com home site. Now this is a home page, so this is a site core site, so runin.net. However, almost everything you're seeing on the screen is coming from WordPress. It's coming from a WordPress site. So within Sage there's a number of systems, an ecosystem that has a number of different content management systems and different solutions of which WordPress is one that runs the Sage advice service. So we created an endpoint for any of the ecosystem, anywhere within the Sage ecosystem to pull and request relevant contextualized data and sort of results and posts. So as you can see here we had an endpoint where and this turned out to be quite important for the system that it was an opt-in solution. So you could add as few of these parameters as you wanted so you might just define a category and so we would return you relevant results to that category but you could add a multitude of different parameters and so you'd be turning up the relevancy of the results that return to you. So sat behind this endpoint was what we were calling a relevancy engine where we would take all those parameters to take all your search parameters and then start scoring, so essentially creating a league table of relevancy and then returning those results. So what this enabled us to do was to create this a number of connection points so these are touch points between the different systems. So a site core site on the left here and the WordPress site on the right site core might be showing content that's actually generated by the WordPress site and vice versa. So what we're creating are these numerous touch points across these two different systems and it leads to a seamless user experience where the user has no idea that there's actually two different systems built in completely different solutions and different languages because it's an entirely seamless experience for them as they're moving from one system into the other and indeed there's portions of each site which are being delivered by the other system. So let's have a look at experimenting. Now unfortunately you're not going to see this. It's animated but I shall again briefly talk you through this. So this is an ionic app and this app is run by WordPress. So behind this app where we can do full crud rights we can create and edit and so on a WordPress site is running that information. So you will have seen if this was running that there's an article that's around Charles Darwin and so we add the name Charles to that article and then what you'll see is that that then persists into the WordPress install so we're making a change within an app on your smartphone and that change is persisting within WordPress and that really takes us back to that point we were looking at very early in the talk when we were talking about that free flow of information where data can move freely into WordPress and move freely out of WordPress and that's exactly what's happening here is that we're really removing the reliance of our data on WordPress and it's becoming platform agnostic as we can be changing it editing it and moving it within the ecosystem of our whole service. So this is an example of something slightly different. We challenged ourselves to start thinking about WordPress in a different way and thinking about ways that we could experiment with WordPress in ways that maybe we hadn't before and so we decided to set the challenge of creating WordPress as a game engine and what could we do could we create a game using WordPress so the game or the type of game that we settled on was a football management simulation and so we created these tournaments like the World Cup you might have teams and so the team object is linked to a league so tournament objects and in turn they might be linked to a country object and you have players and so on and so forth so it's a really interesting exercise to think about this interconnectivity this lattice of objects and data and how they interconnect but we used the REST API to solve the problem of time within the game so it's an interesting challenge to try and think about creating a time machine and how time would persist in this virtual world and so we created an endpoint where we would fire this time machine which we called Herbert and we would fire this API request our time machine would then move on and we could fire events in the game so that might be a World Cup fixture or injury to your best player or whatever it might be so this is and I'm sure interfaith now this is something that I've been thinking about for a while that as we've modularized our built files so we think of our sort of SAS partials and our javascript files as we break them into modular chunks so I think that content has the opportunity to do the same modularization to our content so I often think of posts and pages within WordPress as being like that black box so that's sort of self-contained black box that we were talking about before as WordPress was before the rest API well so posts and pages are at the moment they're really a sort of binary you're either displaying the content or you're not but Gutenberg gives us the opportunity to change that so Gutenberg splits our content into discrete blocks and one of the really positive consequences of that is that we can then access those discrete blocks and start displaying them and manipulating them in different ways and so one of the things that we've been experimenting with is something called content so much as you think at the post level you add post tags well we would add content tags so contents to individual blocks and so what we'd be able to do is then create these dynamic pages which are generated from those content tags and pull out hyper relevant blocks that you've searched for and then pull those blocks out and display them there's some really exciting things we can do around AI and using certainly what Google call intent which is the dialogue flow service where we can utilise that intent and really start making this a dynamic service but that would be the next iteration on this so let's have a brief look at performance so whilst using the rest API there's a couple of things that we've found that has been really useful with regards to performance so the first is and I don't think this is going to work because this isn't animated so again I'll talk you through this the first is when you're creating large JSON objects so the example that we looked at before was a site in numbers where we're creating a very large JSON object so all those statistics if you remember you can pull into the JavaScript layer well that's a heavy payload and so we were finding some big performance hits so we've got about four and a half seconds that could get up to five six seconds at a time so we started looking at transients and transients is a way of storing and caching that data so transients are a way of caching data within the database temporary data and so by implementing that and we can see it here transients we could slash that down to about a tenth of what it was previously at about 0.40 0.5 seconds so however I mean using transients comes with a number of caveats you need to be very careful so we have we need to be aware of the sort of expiry dates of transients we need to be aware of our bloating of our database we also in fact if you have a very popular site or you have a lot of users on your site you need to be aware that if the the transient doesn't exist then the user generates that new transient but if another user comes along at the same time and requests that transient then they too will be generating that transient and so what we create is these racing conditions where we have a huge number of people generating the transient and causing our system and a huge problem so there's an async transients which is a 10-up plug-in which sort of addresses some of those issues there was another saving a nice performance saving that we made so this is the plug-in that we created at Pragmatic a very simple plug-in it's a must use plug-in where the boot sequence of WordPress we go through a very standard flow as WordPress loads and for an API call and indeed for any call we continue with that standard boot sequence however we created this little plug-in where we intercepted an API call so we recognized that this was an API request and then when the boot sequence got to the the plug-in folder we diverge so not download these unnecessary resources we diverge and go straight to the construction plug-in for that for that endpoint and so that resulted again a huge saving about two-thirds shaved of our performance by just intercepting those API calls and then diverging and taking them elsewhere combining those two services those two approaches to performance pay huge dividends when working with the REST API so here are some resources some information some dev resources around the REST API I'll leave these up on the screen for a second and then equally here oh and what I will mention just briefly is the accelerator plug-in that I was just talking about is on GitHub so you're more than welcome to go and have a look at that and here are some wider resources around the API including some white paper and the Slack channel and so on so what does Tobro bring for WordPress and for the REST API well for me I don't think it's important if we move away from the REST technology and we move into an alternative technology for me we've created the beginning of something so we've created this opportunity where we can start looking at sort of integrating with other services integrating with other software that simply wasn't possible before we can start collaborating with other agencies and other teams that we weren't able to whilst we were that black box and that monolithic application and I think this is me and my Guatemalan father-in-law and I think it's really important not to forget that in fact this is us sharing a moment and this is made possible by Google Translate and by technology and I think it's really important to remember the huge human impact that the work that we do can make to people's lives thank you thank you Sean for saving the moment by improvising maybe another applause because you did really well so you know we're running late a little bit but we have time for maybe one or two questions long questions with short answers or short questions with a short answer so who wants to have a go we have Micron as in a venue does one here in the middle hello thanks for the great talk you mentioned using work process kind of a headless CMS and integrating it that way with other services so in that scenario how do you handle for example post previews how do you handle post previews previewing content from admin excellent it's a really good question so unfortunatly had we had the animated slides we would have briefly got into this so where we were talking about Fairfax which is that Australian publishing company where they had that pre-existing content API when the editorial team pulled down the contents pulled that content back into WordPress they enriched it within WordPress they would then push it to a preview section content API now that section was only accessible on the front end with a query bar that would then enable you to sort of unlock that preview and so you'd be able to view it in your React front end or your standard front end in the standard way and then flag it for publication and that would then trigger it into the publish section of the content API and the front end would then pull out so it's a really good question because it is something you need to consider it's not out of the box when you start creating this architecture so you do need to if it's part of the publishing flow that's required you do need to create this dedicated section of the content API for that and for the previews okay one more quick one on the side can we have a microphone there that's an WPRS API expert so forgive me if this question is perhaps a bit done do you have an experience with loading entire pages through WPRS API is it something that REST API allows if it does allow how does it handle page builders because page builders are something in a WP ecosystem that I simply can't fit with WPRS and other changes okay thank you was it page builders did you ask page builders like WPRS Korean okay so it's an interesting question I mean in answer to the first section of your question we wouldn't use the REST API to pull down the whole page so it's really best to start thinking about your pages as components and so component elements that might make up the page now those components might have their own REST API calls or they might be triggered within your JavaScript layer to decide which of those components need to be pulled in you may indeed use a GraphQL service which is where components can actually dictate which small section of the data they want to pull down so that's really addressing the issue we're just talking about where we're talking about that sort of component modernised approach as the page builders would that be something to discuss at the hallway track no I'm going to have a go I'm not a fan I'm going to put that out there now I mean when you see the output I'm not going to mention any names when you see the output of some page builders that they take over the content area they just fill it with spaghetti code of short codes and all sorts of other gumpf that then as developers we have to unpick and try and turn that back into something that the system can use however, with that said I entirely appreciate that for clients it's a really valuable tool and sometimes that's actually a deciding factor for them using WordPress adopting WordPress Gutenberg, God bless Gutenberg I think is going to help us and is going to improve that so we can say goodbye to some of these page builders but in answer to your question it's really tricky if that data is embedded in the content area we're pulling in that in via the REST API we're going to have to have some sort of regular expression hell to try and strip out all of that additional data or we're just going to have to sort of rethink our architecture and I'd suggest that the latter would be the better solution so they're not really compatible as they stand at the moment Great question I can imagine there are other questions but we have no time left so will you be at the conference today and tomorrow and will you be available for questions? Absolutely People can just walk up to you and say hi I want to know something about the REST API James Bond, Harry Potter, anything All of the above, of course they can Can they contact you online if they have any questions There are some contact details in the corner there Thank you so much and another applause for Sean Blakely Thank you


Welcome to another episode of the nonprofit show. You can tell we're already having a lot of fun because we have our guests here from Bloomerang's booth. Josh Meyer, welcome you too. Let me get through a little bit of housekeeping because we want to make sure that we let everybody know where we are, who we are. I'm Julia Patrick. The nonprofit nerd is joining us today in New Orleans at the AFP Icon Conference. Again, we would not be here without the largesse and sponsorship from these amazing partners. They include Bloomerang, which is where we are producing our live show from. We'll get to Bloomerang in just a second. We also want to give our thanks to the American Nonprofit Academy, your part-time controller, nonprofit thought leader, fundraising academy at National University, staffing boutique, the nonprofit nerd herself, and nonprofit tech talk. Hey, if you want to find any of our nearly 800 episodes, you can find us on all these streaming platforms, podcasts, and now we have a new app. Go ahead and download it and we will get to you. You can just scan this QR code and get to it. It's really a lot of fun and super magical. Again, we're coming to you from New Orleans, the AFP Icon 2023 Annual Conference, and we are super excited to toss it back over to you, Jared Ransom. Who do you have with us today? Thank you, Julia. This is none other than Josh Myers at Bloomerang, and I have to say, today is his birthday. That is true. I wasn't seeing that coming. I should have expected that. You should have expected that. I had a company that would have been here to you, but really excited to have him. As you know, Bloomerang has been a fantastic supporter of the nonprofit show since we started in March. Josh, I'd love to know, what are some things that have really stood out for you? I know. I mean, it's great. We love being here because we're on the ground and just chatting with people. A lot of customers stop and buy. A lot of people stop and buy to find new solutions. We did a session yesterday that was really interesting, some new research that we just released. We were in the field in November of 2022, asking fundraisers, how did 2022 grow, and what are they looking forward in 2025? What are the new things that they're looking for in 2023? There's some really interesting takeaways. I think one of the big things that we saw is that we really focused on the small to medium nonprofits. So nonprofits that are $5 million or less than annual revenue. There's a ton of them. And there was a really key takeaways. One was around board and board engagement. And it's like, we saw that 75% of them that responded, roughly 75% were all of their board members were making gifts to their donors. But there's still 25% where the board wasn't participating. And we had a really great conversation with a couple of our friends. We had friends yesterday, the session, Kishana Palmer, Rachel Mere, Jen Shane from University of philanthropy.  And are you setting up the right expectations? And we had a really nice thoughtful conversation on that, about tips and tools, so should we get your board more engaged? Another really big thing that we saw in that research was planning. We all like to plan, but like to find the time to planning is a lot of work. It's a lot of work. You have to plan the plan. And what we saw in the data was that about 40% of the respondents had actually had some sort of development. And it was like, all right, how can we help them? So there's a lot of good conversation around where can they find resources? And I think we probably could do several shows out of this and bring some experts in. But it was just really good to have that dialogue with the folks on the ground, really understanding their perspective and how, and then trying to connect them because I can't really show, I wish we could share the camera around here, but there's all these other vendors and partners here who are looking to help them out of the community. So I think there's, there's a good kickoff to the day. Yeah, there's a lot of excitement going on, right? There's tons, and right now it's lunch hour. So 9 30 Pacific is 11 30 am here in New Orleans. And so there's, there's tons of people here on the show. We're grabbing their box lunch, networking, talking to so many of the vendors and the sponsors that are here. So there's just as last year, right? Like so much excitement. You know, Jared, it's been such an interesting thing to see how things stopped because of the pandemic. I, you know, AFP icon has always been such a resource. And then to have it, you know, go away and change and morph. This is really this particular, you know, conference in New Orleans is really the first time a lot of our nonprofit are coming together. So it's really an exciting thing. Yeah, I mean, we were talking to the AFP organizers and I think they have over 3700 people, which is like a record for them. Yeah, I know. Exactly. And so we are seeing a ton of traffic. We're seeing friends that we haven't seen in three or four years and it's just so great to be back in person. We did it last year. It just wasn't quite the same. People were masked and we're all, the hugging was, I'm a hugger. Right. So that was my biggest challenge last year. Yeah. So we're just hugging and seeing our friends and, you know, it is, it's been really phenomenal. I think a lot of really good interacting. It's great. I mean, the cocktail reception is the cocktail receptions and they were like full last night and a couple of hurricanes here and there. The drink, not the whether or not they're rich, they have some bad water. Anyway, the drink. But it was, it's just really good to connect with people and see, see how they're doing and how we can help them and allowing them sort of to connect together. Right. Sharing best practices. What's working, you know, what's working in New York and allowing them to sort of, you know, across the globe. Really, I think there were 40, 30 to 40 people coming in here and actually a ton of people from Canada. I have a handful of people from Mexico and then just, I was like, I was trying to, I think a couple of years, like all over the place. There's really, it is such a central one place to bring other just chat fundraising. And you're out about it. You got about it. Nerd out. Nerd out. There is an AFP icon app. So everyone who's here has downloaded the app and you can see, you know, all the speakers. You can see the breakout specialist, the showroom floor, you know, everyone who's here. So it's been a great time. Yeah. And I'm going to say that people are back this year, even more leaning into it. Yeah. Jared, one of the things that you mentioned last year at AFP icon, which was held in Las Vegas, you're amazed at the technology. Now, Blumerang is a technology company and we've come to rely upon them for all of the different things that they can offer, you know, our sector and the things that are going on. What is it that you're seeing as well? Are you seeing more technology? What are your thoughts about this? And then maybe Josh will share his thoughts as well. Yeah. Absolutely. Josh, last year I shared how it was such a large technology forward conference, right? It's fundraising at the focus, but so technology forward. The showroom floor definitely has a lot of tech. That has not changed. I'm also seeing quite a bit of individual consultants that have booths here, right? So how might they be able to support using this tech or be able to support organizations to view X, Y and Z. But currently, like if we, you know, move any degrees right now, we are definitely seeing tech booths. Yeah. What about you, Josh? A lot of technology. I think some of the new cutting edge are more stuff that we haven't seen before. Vendors, so also software vendors and partners looking at crypto, looking at stocks, looking at automating donor advice, like how can you make that easier? If they know some of the smaller mid-sized nonprofits, like they want to get in that space because there's money to be had and their donors want to donate that money, right? But it's sometimes hard to sort of navigate that process. This is another thing that we're starting to see in a lot in the sort of the data piece of this, right? It's AI, right? So our friends over at Donor Search, right? Our friends at Windfall, right? They're all using AI to try and match and find that new donor, whether that's, you know, a major, major donor, right? There's also automation and AI around sort of ask strings, right? So using the technology to ask the right amount, to put the right levels, giving levels on a reply device, right, or in an email. And so that I think was on the precipice last year, but we're definitely seeing more and more of that. The world has been taken by chat GBT, sessions around like how can you use chat GBT and your fundraising and things. So really, really thoughtful, interesting conversations. You know, it's so interesting because we've been noticing that as well. And we're just taken by, and Jarrett and I have talked about this from the beginning. It seems like there's two camps, people that lean in and that get really excited about these opportunities and a new way of working. And then other organizations that are more reticent, they kind of stand back and step back. And I'd love to get your opinion, both of you, on what that looks like with maybe somebody that comes to AFP icon, and they're like, whoa, this technology is too much for me versus those that are really embracing it. Yeah, you know, for me that the AI has to say I love that really leveraging your data to maximize the gift of your donors that are already engaged. And so really that's putting into your data database to say what was their last gift or maybe what's that donor's average gift and how can we lean into that. So I do think that I'm seeing more of that junior. And I think the reason I'm seeing more is because what it's been around now. I mean, really, if you look at AI, it's not new. The adoption, I think, is what's new, right? And especially the adoption into our sector. So I'm seeing where this technology is much easier to adopt for this technology. And it's not a price point. I think that makes it a little bit more affordable for them, right? And some of the software that's out there, it's just easier. You didn't need a software engineer, right? A lot of these partners have been able to kind of see what's going on. You know, but I hear you, right? I hear it changes heart, right? And so I think if you're a small and medium-sized nonprofit, that may not be the right thing for you right now. But maybe it's just sort of getting your donor database in order. Or moving to a donor database and spreadsheets, right? Creating a plan. Or creating that plan, right? And so I think for our friends that are listening, chat, you know, I wouldn't feel overwhelmed. I think you need to, you know, take the steps that make the right sense for you right now. If you don't have a donor database, if you don't have a fundraising plan, I would say start there, right? You need the foundation before you can then sort of layer in things like chat to your AI or crypto and stock, right? You want to be able to at least accept that there is a kind of harder check, right? And make sure that you're really functioning, work stream on that on your website, right before you start learning. So it's the foundation. You got to get the foundation and then start out. And that's what you think of stewardship, right? It's like, I would steward and steward and steward even more and even better before adopting a new process or before adopting a new implementation. Because if you're not stewarding the donor, you're constantly at acquisition. Yeah, retention is so important, right? In fact, that I would say is also part of the process. You have to have the tools to sort of steward and retain your donors because it's so much easier, right, to retain and to renew versus the program. Like I'm basically repeating what she said, but like, it's brilliant, it's brilliant. And this is right up off a note, right? And I just recruit you, right?  I want to know where the venue station is. I know we might be missing it. Oh, geez. I mean, I've never said no to a fried food before. What other questions do you have here, Julia? I, you know, honestly, I haven't walked much of the show before. I did a quick circle around. I wanted to get set up for today's, you know, episode and then we'll be back tomorrow, of course, for another episode. I'm excited to have more representatives of Bloomerie with us tonight and have a dinner. So we're doing a dinner, not only for someone's birthday, but also, you know, just to connect. So, you know, this conference really is about connection, building upon those industry relationships and, you know, talking and support one another. Yeah. Yeah. So, for Shawna Fomers, working with the Bloomerite team, for anyone who's here at Anthony, I kind of, she's above the chat with you. She's not sort of gathering. What does it mean? What is community? And how can you build community? And how can you tie that in before the work that we're doing here at Bloomerie and really strengthen the community both for our Bloomerie users, but also the greater fundraising interaction? One of the favorite things or one of the things that really do need to Bloomerie is all of the free educational resources that we provide, whether that be the weekly webinars or blog posts or the eBooks, right? And so, Shawna is taking all of this in and helping really distilling a lot of data around what people are working for in community and how can we use that track to strengthen the good space, right? And then also, you know, get people tied into Bloomerie so that they are aware of everything that's available. You know, I think that's one of the things that Jared and I have both said from the get-go how much we've admired Bloomerie because it seems like you give so much information away that is frankly proprietary in many ways and that you could hold on to that, but you really are amazing at strengthening, you know, the sector and I think it is truly remarkable if you go to the Bloomerang.com website and go to the resources tab, you will see so much information that is really quantifiable which can help your nonprofit organize many things for their future and so it's pretty remarkable. It sounds to me, Josh, like you're really like as an organization digging in on this and actually doing more research more than ever, is that just me observing or is that true? No, I mean, maybe. Oh, yes. No, I mean, we just value that, right? Because we feel like the nonprofit succeeds in the resources, right? And if they need the data to better understand if they need the data to be able to go back to the executive director, to go back to their board and say, we need to do X, Y and Z and here's the data, right? This is a much better conversation and say, I just want this, right? Because it's hard to justify that if you're on the other side, if you're the board member, the head of the board or the executive director, right? And so if we can provide that data to help our fundraising friends to all their mission, then everyone works. And so I think that is one of the things that dreamens of the Bloomerang because we are able to leverage the profession that we're in to sort of prioritize it. I've noticed that I'd like to say Bloomerang plays well with others, right? Yeah. Even to my right, we're not able to see them but maybe tomorrow we can bring them representatives if we're into it. And that is a wonderful integration that Bloomerang CRM offered. And as it happened here to share how these integrations are because Julia, you remember we have had actually your part-time controller on, right? To talk about the best practices to work between the fundraising team and the accounting team. And so Bloomerang is also leaning into that relationship, leaning into the data that brings all of that together. So it's really cool to see the integrations but to see how it all comes together. When the nonprofit wins. It's really true. And I think that, you know, Josh, before we let you go, I mean, I'm really curious as to when we have these conversations that we can have IRL in real life. It's something like AFP icon. Do you see things moving forward more quickly or is it just, you know, kind of business as usual? I mean, I think, I don't know how to talk about that. I think obviously when you're a person, right? You can get done. You can move a little bit faster in a space where everyone is spread out throughout the country or the world, really. And so I think it does allow for those moments of clarity, those moments of things that pop. Oh, I never thought about it this way. Oh, I should try this. And that's what conferences are for, right? And I think you can do it virtually. And I love that you all do this virtually every day. But I think being able to do it once or twice a year to bring these brilliant minds together to bring these practitioners in to share what they're seeing and how they're growing their teams, it's just, you can't compare it. And so I do think it does help accelerate things, move things forward, and get people who have the idea to bring that to the conferences. Well, I'm getting real hoarse. I'm so excited to be here. There's a lot to want to share for our friends at Fundraising Academy National University. This duo will be there at the Cultivate Conference as well. Yeah, if you haven't signed up, join Jared and I. We're going to both do the June 1st, San Diego. And that is, I'm really excited about that news last week. Yeah, that's right. So, and I've seen the Fundraising Academy team, some of the representatives, and they had a session this morning. And I know that they're going to pop on tomorrow with us here for the show. And so really looking forward to pulling in some familiar faces. So many guests that have been on the show before and really looking at asking them a lot of the same questions. But I don't think any of them will be nearly as well.  We're going to do, we're having some, we're doing some hurricanes in our booth later this afternoon during half the hour. So I just felt like I needed, you know, to make sure we got to get rid of all this stuff. I'm not sure that that should be a worry. I love it. Well, I'm just so thrilled that you would invite us back again. Blumerang to be in your booth. You know, anyone who's ever done any type of conference work, space, is it a premium? It's expensive and you go inch by inch by inch trying to figure out where everybody needs to be and what you're going to do. And so this is very, very generous of you all to allow us to come and broadcast live because it's really an exciting opportunity for everyone. You know, things are opening back up and we're going to start to be seeing more and more things. I mean, for example, you brought up, you know, the Fundraising Academy National Universities event in June, you know, AFP icon in New Orleans. This is really going to start to be something that we return to, albeit in a little bit different capacity, I think. And so, again, I want to express our gratitude to you for allowing us to do this. Jared, if I might, I want to spend just a little bit of time thanking our... Hi, thank you all. Are you going to head out? Well, I can say. I didn't know that was my cheer. Friend, you're part of the show. All right, I'm not leaving. I'm not going anywhere that I'm seeing right here. Don't leave because I got to keep that jacket close to my heart because it's like one of the best things I've seen. Hi, hi. I know it's been great. Hey, again, we want to thank everybody who's participated with us. Bloomerang, American Nonprofit Academy, your part-time controller, non-profit thought leader, Fundraising Academy at National University, Staffing Boutique, the non-profit nerd, and non-profit tech talk. These are the folks that join this day in and day out. And today this is special. If you joined us, you will have noticed that the non-profit nerd is flirting with her beads and her glasses and her boa, joined by none other than birthday boy and crew captain, Josh Meyers coming to us live from amazing New Orleans at the AFP icon 2023. Jared, it's been a lot of fun. Thank you so much. Well, thank you for putting up with us. The energy is high. It's going to be high again tomorrow, I know. But yeah, a lot going on. And maybe tomorrow, I'm able to share where I thought it would be next year. Oh, yeah. It's, yeah. We'll keep up until tomorrow. But it's exciting. It's exciting. I'm excited. We'll keep that secret. Yeah, I don't know. I love it. Yeah, it's going to be for next year, but I thought you could think about it. That's right. That's right. Well, thank you for having us. Thanks for our sponsors. Especially thanks to Josh and Blibbering for allowing us some of this prime opportunity here at AFP icons. Thank you, Julia. Hey, it's been a lot of fun. And as we end every episode of the nonprofit show, we want to remind everyone, especially our friends throughout the country that are in New Orleans, to stay well so you can do well. Have fun, you two. Have a beignet for me. Oh, thank you. Bye. Bye. Thanks, you two.


Well, it's everybody Jason here for jazzy's case race calm 2021 Nt football first off the line one box break because number three sold out with this last random number block here for the 49ers Bangles and Giants. So these last three teams here were put into a random number block 10 total spots everybody gets a random number and the way those hits are distributed if they do pop out will be random number blocks Now so we go by the first number on the left side of the serial number dash There's your examples there in the bio and of course any one-on-ones go to spot one any in all redemptions go automatically It's about zero and of course if there is any non-numbered cards, which is rare, but it may happen Who knows everybody gets a shot at it in at the end of the break So here's the dice really here's a customer names Corey down at David and then we got zero through nine. There's a Doc roll it snake eyes two times. Good luck one two perfect to Paul down to Robert Put you right there Two times down the numbers one two Perfect six down to nine Also, Paul you have six dusty with one any one of ones Alan with eight dusty with three David with four dusty with seven Alan Any of our redemptions as well as two Corey with five and Robert with nine Alright, so there's the list guys and now coming up next in a separate video guys is pick your team number three. Good luck everybody


thing today, when we're talking about regulation, and this is all about with Tim Draper, the billionaire, is really just how bad it actually is and how you have to fight against the powers that be. And again, if you're looking forward to, to deal with a bully, there's only one way to deal with a bully. That's punch him right in the face. So to help me make sense of all these things, I've got Randy here from Ms. Team Crypto. Randy, welcome. This is your second time, I think. Yeah, it is my second time. Thank you for having me. I feel extra zesty today on a Sunday hanging out with you. So, so I asked Randy to come in because after we, we did an NFA live show on Thursday, and I'll be honest with you, if you watch it, you'd be like, wow, that's not a really upbeat show because we were talking about the things. And I said, you know, maybe I'll do a little bit more upbeat stuff. So I did a couple of videos and I wanted to bring in Randy who sees the positivity that's going on in the crypto space. And if you haven't checked out Randy and Ms. Team Crypto on her channel, just know she's been everywhere and she's interviewed everybody. She's had here, this would be Michael Saylor, and then she's been on Fox News, Fox Business News. I don't, I think twice, three times, four times, something like that. She said, yeah, Mark, Mark Yusko, you've had CZ Binance on, and he've actually had on this guy, Tim Draper. And so if you're looking for like some of the big insights, go no further than Randy's YouTube channel. So let's talk about this, Randy. You know Tim Draper. First of all, well, this is what's happening. Tim Draper, just I'll give you guys an overview. Tim Draper is going to invest heavily into U.S. platforms for crypto and digital assets. And if you don't know Tim Draper, he's a VC. And I know some and VCs get some pretty bad wraps because they dump on you guys. They dump on us sometimes. But really, that's the fault of the projects themselves and having no lockups and no cliffs. Tim Draper himself did pretty good as far as investors, as far as traditional wise. Baidu Hotmail, Skype, Tesla, SpaceX, SolarCity, Ring, Twitter, DocuSign. He had some, some stinkers there like Theranos and things like that, but not too bad. Coinbase, Robin Hood, and also he's one of those investors in the small companies like Ledger, Casper Labs, Robin Hood, Coinbase, EtherScan, Early Ether, Ethereum, Ethereum, and so on and so forth. So before we get into this, Randy, I'm glad you're here. So when you had Tim on, what was that guy kind of like? What was his insights? Did you feel like he was good for the space? Just his overall overall view? So I met Tim Draper in person before I actually had him on the show. So I was actually able to get his like in person vibe and he was very sweet. He was very nice. I had at his event. I was interviewing people for security token summits where I met the mayor of New York. I met Liz Claimant from Fox Business, interviewed them all and that was really great. So I thought Tim was good. I think he's really an advocate for the space and advocate for Bitcoin. He wants to see it succeed. I know, obviously he has the big bag. So that's part of him maybe wanting it to succeed like anybody else that's invested. But I think that definitely he wants to see it progress and he wants to see entrepreneurship actually prosper because he has his own little school. I forgot it off the top of my head, but he does have a school where kids go and people go and learn and how to kind of create their own business and jumpstart like he did. So I think he's definitely involved. He's kind of like on the ground in terms of like, what's next in the space? He's always looking for what's next. Like as you saw, who's an early investor in things like Tesla, Coinbase, just wanting to be progressive. So I think obviously people with big money are always a little skeptical, but I think he's doing the right thing as of right now.  But I think as time goes on, people who have been here for quite some time and have actually lasted through the bear market, everything happens bad in the bear market. You start to see like, like they say, when the tide comes out, you see who's swimming naked, Warren Buffett, right? And we can see stuff like that, especially with somebody like with Tim Draper.  But this government's Bitcoin, he did and he bought it for a mint. I think you bought it for like between 600 and 800 bucks or something like something crazy low or something like that. Yeah, I don't know the exact number. I could probably find it. But it was it was an insane amount of Bitcoin from Silk Road. And he did he was he still I think he still has it. I think we're all good. And then he lost some amount gox, but he's still holding Bitcoin. He's still he's still a prominent in the space. Oh, Randy, we've all lost. I've lost Voyager and Celsius people watch FTX and block buying stuff like that. So yeah, it just happens. However, yeah, I know. We don't want to talk about that. But it is it is a great learning experience. So here's what we got for this story. So Tim Draper unveiled a new crypto centric venture studio mission to accelerate DeFi layer to and gaming and social experiences. I don't know how far you've gone down that whole Web three gaming. I know you've had Kage on your show a couple of times, and you've actually been for around the cryptoverse or metaverse with stash those guys. But I think games going to do pretty well moving forward. Absolutely. So just as Randy just talked about, he had been investing in the Bitcoin for quite some time. We just did a price prediction video yesterday. And we talked about Tim's Tim's price fiction 250,000. We'll see if it pans out. I don't think it's gonna happen 2024, but I hopefully am wrong. But here it is, the specifics of Draper Gorin blockchain's approach is they don't intend on running it like Y combinators or tech stars, which is just pretty much put some money in. Hopefully it works. If it doesn't kick in the curve, they're in the long haul with each company. We plan on spending the next 10 years working with each company. Let me say that again, 10 years. If you're putting that much, it's not just about money, but it's about time.  So you're going to put that much money or that much time into it. I think there's something behind that. He said he's going to invest about 25 to 100k in pre seed startups. There'll be additional focus on partnering with select entrepreneurs to build companies from scratch. And of course, the title of this of our live stream was US regulatory S show. And I got to tell you the way to fight somebody, especially like the SEC is to do something like this to move things forward. If you don't have these types of VCs, I mean, the good ones, we'll see if it all pans out. I think there's going to be problems on the horizon. But Randy, what do you think here? Good for the industry? Or do you think like Tim, even though you like him, maybe he could be like evil on the inside doing something crazy? I don't know if he's evil on the inside considering he's partnered with Alon Gorin. And I think that guy like he loves this. He loves his board apes. He loves this space so much.  Yeah, there's there's a little along with the glasses over there. Yeah, Alon Gorin, he's an OG in the space. He's been around for a long time. He you know, he's been a part of Draper Gorin at home for really for a while. He does his own blockchain and boost show.  Like I said, I went to their event security token summit to interview all the Tradfi bankers. So they're into like both like crypto into Tradfi, trying to just bridge that gap, which I think is something that's very important. The conference I went to was more of like, you know, business-esque, rather than the traditional crypto conferences, which they do have, I think they have LA blockchain summit, which is actually where I interviewed Charlie Lee. It was over the interwebs, because it was during COVID, it was the 10th anniversary interview for Litecoin. So they're progressive. They were here to stay, especially Alon. I know he loves this space like more than anything. So yeah, I think they're, they're all right. They're all right. Yeah, I'm always I'm always impressed how many people have actually had on the show and you've interviewed and things you've done. It's looking pretty good. Like I said, CZ and all of it's under the live. Yeah, all of that's under the live in the missing crypto show playlist. If you guys want to track that down, because yeah, I do the Daily Zest. So it's like everywhere. I have the Daily Zest playlist, NFT gaming playlist. Yeah, I'm trying to rack up like a good amount of people on the show just to have like more people that like have their voice heard like who's like what their story is like Michael Saylor. I wanted a lot when I had him on the show versus like what I've heard over the interwebs. So very nice. Very interesting. Yeah, thank you. Because these things it's hard to keep up. I need people like you to help me out. I forget a lot of stuff. Okay, Rob. Yeah, you're great. So that will take care of that. Again, I think Tim Draper is good for the space. We'll see how it all works out. Also, what's good for the space. Again, coming back down to regulation. And here we've got Tom Emmer. He is one of the Congressman, I believe I can't remember if it's Ohio where he's actually from Republican. And he's a pretty staunch proponent of crypto is actually one of the good guys that is for us. And this was a story that happened. Was it three days ago, Randy? Yeah, I think it was it was a few days ago. Yeah. And then and the thing about this one, I didn't I wasn't really up to speed with it. So I know you had covered this, but just give us a quick overview about what the heck's going on with the CBDC bill. Is this oh my gosh shot down or did it? Alright, I hope it doesn't. But here's the thing. We know that it has to go to Congress. So that that's really where things could get spicy. However, I think it's extremely bullish for crypto and our freedom if it does pass because essentially what this bill does is the anti see it's the CBDC anti surveillance state Act. So basically what this prevents is a Federal Reserve or Central Bank from directly issuing a retail CBDC or digital dollar directly to consumers. Because once that happens, then again, they're able to surveil you, they're able to stop you in your tracks, actually integrate artificial intelligence, which is something the Bank of France has already says going to be implemented until the digital euro, where they basically prevent what they basically predict what you're going to do before you do it. And if they could geo fence you.  Once the CBDC comes in, basically every single thing is monitored, don't have privacy anymore.  Gotcha. Hey, real quick, I know like, like, I don't have many people from China listening to my show. But apparently, I know that on one of your streams, I was watching and you talked about this, he said some of the people that I guess they either use a VPN or something like that. And they chimed in and they actually showed you or if it was live or if it was showed you the social their their their score and how they would shut them down. That was that. So that was insane. I was at Columbia University, like a month ago or two. It was so awesome. Yeah. I went to Columbia University to teach students about Bitcoin and crypto. They were kind of doing their own blockchain course, but the teacher has been in the space for years. He wanted me to come hang out with them. Essentially, what a lot of these kids are from international places. So like I had kids from Hong Kong all over. And one of them, like three of them came up to me with different credit scores, depending on where they lived and things like that. Basically, I couldn't really read the app, but they were explaining it to me. And all I saw was like, you know how they have like the fear and greed index on on like, you know, for Bitcoin and things like that. So that's how you could kind of think about it for their social credit score. So the kid was like in the middle. His score was like 520 something. I asked him, what does this mean? And why is your score relatively low? He's like, I can't get lower than this. I said, what happened? He said, well, I went to go get a power bank. And if you don't know what a power bank is, basically a portable charger. So he rented one and he didn't return it in time. So he got points deducted and also they took an extra charge from his deposit that he put down for the power break. So exactly that's what it looks like. So he was pretty much a neutral where if you made one more mistake, it was oopsie daisy for him.   So it was very scary to see that, you know, this isn't just something that people put out there to scare you. It's something that actually exists. So, see, see, that's just it. Like, I've never, I've heard about it and people talk about it in the chats and I'm like, that's really real.  That's, I think it was like an Alibaba type. So I thought it had something to do with Alibaba. It's like on there, like AliPay and things like that. AliPay, WeChat, that type of that whole super thing. Yeah, very, very scary. I hated it. I was like, I felt like bad vibes holding the phone. I was like, I can't believe that this is real. And that's, it's so easy to do that, too, where, you know, if I still have a video that I play on my show of a girl that didn't have the right identification or didn't have the right score and they had to like scan her face on the app. And if that didn't work and she couldn't buy food, she couldn't buy anything. So this is like really dangerous. And they kind of already kind of laid out the roadway for this with FedNow. They have HBar integrated with that, which is now a new Fed coin where they're doing DLT testing with that. But, you know, at the end of the day, if they roll out a digital dollar, it's something that's private. It's something that's not permissionless. It's something that controls every single thing you do. Now, as an American, you're going to ask yourself, OK, we have three nailing of rights, which is life, liberty and property. What takes that away instantly? That's a CBD easy. That's a digital dollar. But what enhances it instantly and gives you more power is Bitcoin. Exactly. Well said, Randy. That's a good way to look. That's a great way to look at it. And then just to just to keep going with this piece, because this apparently and again, you cover this pretty well on your on your show. This apparently it looks like it's going to be shot down. But what it says, what it says here, and this is from Tom from Minnesota, not from Ohio. I think I was thinking of Warren Davidson or something. But it bars the treasury from directing the Fed to issue a CBDC. So they're kind of that without congressional approval. So it looks like this is like one of the things like, look, you can't do it. You can't take in your hands. But if Congress comes out and says, let's do this, baby, then it looks like they can actually do it. So hopefully not. Hopefully not. In previous hearings, some Democrats also voiced reservations against the CBDC. That's good, because, you know, a lot of the times I try not to be too political on this channel. But, you know, like I've said it before, I voted Democrat at some point. I voted right in the middle and I voted for Republican as time has gone on. So I've been around the board. But as far as Democrats, yesterday's debate on this bill was divided between party lines. Representative, I believe this is Maxine Waters, Democrat ranking member of the committee, strongly opposed the bill calling it the CBDC Anti-Innovation Act. So this will permanently shut down the important work the Fed is doing to research a potential U.S. CBDC and the benefits, different types of CBDC could bring to our payment system. One of the Democrats voiced CBDC concerns in a previous hearing, Representative Sherman saying that this is actually pro-crypto and the one that he goes against. I believe Sherman is the guy that's been really anti-crypto so far. And of course, if he hears CBDC, he thinks this is the greatest cryptocurrency that's out there, but that's not the ethos of crypto. And then just to finish up, again, Maxine Waters, I believe the Chinese, and this is her argument, the Chinese CBDC, the ECNY is already involved in both wholesale and retail CBDC pilot projects with other central banks around the world aiming to trade directly with each other's currencies instead of going through the U.S. dollar. This raises grave concerns regarding the efficacy of U.S. sanctions and financial crime laws. So basically what she's saying is like, look, if people are using CBDC and it's not an American CBDC, then we've got problems because we can't lay on sanctions and we're going to be behind the curve. Randy, what do you think about this one? Total sheesh. Listen, man, if we want to be a hug of the curve, let's create something like a stablecoin that is more decentralized in its reserves, maybe backed by something, maybe backed by Bitcoin reserves or gold reserves, something that's real intangible, and go about it that way. Because what they fail to realize is that China, again, they don't want their E, you know, yuan to be used outside of their jurisdiction. So they don't really want other people using it because then they could maybe trade and people in their country could trade their yuan for something else. And that's not what China wants. They want to lock you into that system. So if other people start joining China, they're basically a part of their system and they're trapped there. What our US government fails to realize, as Sherman's like, oh, you know, we could be print more money because we're the government, he fails to realize that if you release a stablecoin, that's actually good. It works. It's backed by something. He gives them more reason for people to see value in it and it brings hyperdolarization to the entire globe where people could just effortlessly like how they could effortlessly like buy Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin, they could enter a US stablecoin. And that way they have more access to the US dollar.  That's when people are actually pricing things in dollars now in Argentina. So why wouldn't the US say, hey, let's bring a global stablecoin that everyone could jump in and actually boost the US economy and the dollar itself, giving it that reason to stay the global reserve currency and the most dominant currency, which it's losing right now, as Janet Yellen says, it's only natural for people to diversify. Yeah. But yeah, that's my argument there. You know, they're just missing out. They're they're they're missing out. But you know, as if you take a look at it, as time goes on, as these CVDCs get actually get rolled out, just like what happens in China, right? Because like you said, you saw the actual app. You saw how people were being abused by that by that power that the Chinese government is inflicting on their people. Also, it's going to here's what's going to happen. At some point, CVDCs are going to go across the world. There's this there's this term called F around and find out, right? So if you want to use the CVDC, you can. But as soon as everything gets started to take away and people will eventually rise up and they will try to overthrow the government and it's happened before, especially with the collapse of different fiat currencies that are around the world. We took we took a look at the Turquillera, the Venezuelan currency itself. So I think if even if this thing does go does move forward, it's only going to take one time for people to go, hey, I can't buy my food. Hey, I can't do this. Hey, I can't move forward. It's for them to say, you know what, this is going to this is going to really destroy us. And then for the digital you want things that are going out right now, I think there's a reason why China is collapsing, especially in the real estate market and it's going to cause a global issue financially moving forward. So if they want to do that and they think it's going to actually help, I think there it's going to be a collapse moving forward and it's going to be a lot of problems. So we'll see how it all works out. Hopefully cooler heads will prevail. But we'll see. And then lastly, just to just to accentuate a point, the reason why this is so important and we've talked about this on the channel, Governor Ron DeSantis and a couple different states in the US have already proposed bills to ban CBDCs. The problem with that is that if you do that state by state, that's fine. The problem is, and we can take a look at a prime example be like marijuana. Marijuana is legalized in certain states. In other states, it's not. In the federal level, it is not. That's why all the different marijuana companies can't bank in America. They all have to use cash. And it's a big problem because marijuana is listed as a very high, I forgot the classification for it. So if the CBDCs go through at the federal level, here's the problem. The first issue to address is whether Florida has the power to regulate central bank currencies. Article 1, Section 8, Clause 5 of the US Constitution explicitly grants the federal government the power to regulate money, both foreign and domestic at present. Coins and silver certificates issued by the Treasury and Federal Reserve are by law legal tender, specifically Section 31, USC 5103. The United States coins and currency, including federal reserve notes and circulating notes of federal reserve banks and national banks, are legal tender for all debts, public charges, tax, and dues. This statute means that all US money, as identified above, is a valid and legal offer of payment for debts when tendered to be a creditor. If the Federal Reserve would accredit digital currency or CBDC, it would be legal tender just like coins and currency. And that's the problem with some of the laws moving forward. So I don't know a way around that I'm not a lawyer. That is just what I see. Randy, any thoughts about this one? You know, I'm thinking of the economic report of the president, and I don't know if I have it on me right now, because when they were talking about things like CBDCs and crypto within the economic report of the president, this is the one that just came out this year. They were saying that basically Bitcoin and crypto is not money and that any that money is defined as legal tender or value that comes from a sovereign country. And that sovereign money is issued by the central bank. So anything that's not issued by the central bank, they don't consider money. They also said that they don't consider a central bank digital currency to be crypto because it has no relation. It's controlled. It's centralized one. And two, it says in the economic report of the president that they're not mandated to have distributed ledger technology to have that be transparent. So effectively, yeah, they could say, oh, yeah, we're testing with H-BAR and Fed now for DLT. But then they could come out and say, you know, we have our own private blockchains and you look at who's already doing that, who's already testing that, Project Hamilton, which was the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston and MIT, Full Out Infrastructure Project that already said the trusted transaction processor is a central bank. San Francisco, I think, was where it was, where they were putting LinkedIn job postings. The New York Federal Reserve already teamed up with a bunch of central banks outside of the US, Bank for International Settlements, which controls 95% of our lives.  So everything's interconnected. Everything is misleading. And basically, again, CBDCs, they don't consider crypto because it's not because they don't have to have any sort of transparency or distributed ledger technology to make it work. It could just be what China is, which is just here's your money and if you don't like it, then too bad. Then too bad. And that's it. Hey, imagine this. Imagine if Bitcoin was ever created. Yeah, that'd be dangerous. I mean, that's why we needed it. That's why Satoshi was like, hey, man, I'm going to create a decentralized electronic cash like peer-to-peer system here, where we don't have to worry about the intermediaries and the banks failing on us. I mean, I remember telling family in 2019, even before I created the steam crypto, the banks are going to fail. And they they said all types of different things to me because they said that would never happen. And it got vulgar because people can't believe that what they've grown up on is going to disappear. And I think that's where this whole Bitcoin thing shakes people is that it's something new, something. Oh, wait, I have to trust myself. I have to do things myself that there is no bank that's going to hold my hand and promise me that with the FDIC insurance that it's going to save me, even though Janet Yellen said herself that unless it's her her committee and a little unanimous decision by them in addition to a signature by the president, the FDIC insurance is not going to kick in for you and your bank. It's only if they feel it's going to cause economic collapse. Yeah. Hey, you know what? You just touch on some. And before we get to the last section, we're going to talk about JPMorgan and Ethereum and stuff like that. And then some some different things we need to look at as far as adoption moving forward. Randy, when you talk about to trust yourself and to do things yourself, you're talking about, of course, cold storage. What do you use personally for any cold storage devices? Well, I suggest a bunch. I love cool wallet. I think cool wallet is awesome. Very underrated. I think ballet is very underrated as well. I love ballet. And we also I think Arculus is cool. Arculus. Yeah. Arculus is cool. And I know I know people like Tangem, too, because it's open source. But, you know, you make sure you get your seed phrases with that one. Oh, good news. So I love Tangem. I like Arculus, too. I met those guys, very good guys and Ella Pal and some other stuff. But with Tangem. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. With Tangem, I just talked to me yesterday. They're rolling out in October 12th or 11th the ability to extract your mnemonic phrases. So yeah, I thought I thought that was I thought that was interesting. I yeah, they're all right. Tangem team. They're all right. Everybody's got their things. Everybody's got their things. So to move forward, Ethereum and this will be the last one, especially when we talk about adoption metrics. So JP Morgan came out and said that everything's been disappointing for Ethereum since the actual merge. And what they're talking about is they say, look, daily transactions, daily active addresses and total value locked in Ethereum have all fallen since the upgrade. And, you know, in all in all fairness for daily active addresses, you can find this on Etherscan. And you can see that since because the merge was September was it last year, roughly, September, August, 2022. Somewhere around it. It's been roughly a year. We'll just say that. So we can see that if we come up here, active addresses.  Of course, this is when it came up to and then September 15th of 2022 was the merge. I got the exact date. Perfect. So you're looking at, I mean, still we're I mean, we're down from what they thought. I think what what JP Morgan is always looking is like, we wanted to explode. We really wanted to, you know, massively go on. Of course, we're in a bear market. So what we're still holding, I think, relatively strong right here. Those I don't know what happened here on December 9th, 2022, 1.4 million. Hey, didn't you want me to talk about this? Binance was doing something and all of a sudden it that was like a few days ago. Yeah, I think it was Friday.  Yeah, which I think, again, is something that's scary. Like we don't want one person to like pump up the gas fees for the entire ecosystem. And then the rest of us are like, ah, we can't transact because it's too expensive, you know. Well, I will tell you there is utility there because you got to use it. So yeah, so active addresses, I think we're just chopping along. And then if we take a look at one of my favorite sites in the block, we can see that as far as like, because everybody looks at this and says network fees. And then we look at that and they say, this is the big metric. Me personally, I don't really like high fees, but apparently for businesses, they like that because that means revenue. But what I really want to take a look at is, is there a stability in the actual fees? And we can see that since, let me blow this up. June, July, that's $20.23. So you had 12 point, let's go forward. 9.75, 12, 14, 18, 11, 15. I mean, in all honesty, the fees look pretty good. I mean, as far as like, I mean, what we got to pay, not that I'm like ecstatic about paying high fees, but if you're looking at it, it's roughly stable. It's not like craziness over here in 2021, but that's when everybody was getting crushed. And then also we take a look at the TBL at DeFi Lama. We can see that over time, again, whoops, going in, Ethereum still holding around 55, 56% of the overall total value of lock for DeFi across all chains, 56, 57, 58, 59, and moving backwards, let's keep going backwards. Yeah, roughly the same thing. I think the big drop off was April, actually before the merge, so go figure. Anyhow, Randy, what do you think about this Ethereum? And actually, what do you think about the metrics that we're looking at? Should we be looking just at price or should we be looking at different things? I think we should be looking at like who's using it, on chain analytics are always great. Like, you know, who's making big moves on the network. I like to look at will alerts for all cryptocurrencies to know like who's moving what where. So that way you kind of like, I feel for like how much it's being used and like the value that people kind of like, you know, I think value when people use like cryptocurrency, they're like, okay, if I'm moving millions of dollars, I trust this, you know what I mean? So I like to look at that type of stuff. So people are moving things all the time. And I think, you know, Ethereum moving from proof of work to proof of stake, do I think it helps anything really? No, but do I think that that was always their goal? Yeah, they've always wanted, I think proof of work was just so they could get it started and because they were so early and then proof of stake was just what they wanted to do but in the end, do I think that the exaggeration of the difference between proof of stake and proof of work energy consumption is crazy? Yeah, I think a lot of, it's really not that big of a difference. I think it's a lot of that is just fun. So yeah, you know, proof of stake, I just think it makes it a tiny bit more centralized than if we were to say proof of work, that's the only thing I love proof of work. I love decentralization and I don't like when that could maybe be put in jeopardy, but I think at the end of the day, Ethereum is the first. It's the first thing to kind of open up the doors for smart contracts and DeFi and give people an opportunity to not only transact peer to peer, but also have something where they could take part in a real decentralized financial ecosystem where if they wanted to take out a loan or do any sort of real investing in traditional finance, you have to be an accredited investor, which means you have to have hundreds of thousands of dollars in your bank account. So you already have to be ahead to get even farther ahead, whereas DeFi, you could be a regular person, have $20 and make a difference in your life and play around with new technology. I think there's something that could come out tomorrow that maybe has a better consensus mechanism than both proof of work and proof of stake and something that could scale and that we don't have all these egregious gas fees and that is quicker than Ethereum. You don't know and we're still so, so, so early. Less than, I think less than 5% of the world owns Bitcoin. We're unexplicably early, where in the next bull run, we're not gonna recognize the space. It's gonna be different people that are making content, different people that are developing, different projects that are coming out and you're just gonna say, wow, it's so simple. You can even look back 10 years ago, 2013, the BIP39 standard for your seed phrase is it didn't even exist yet. That was 2014. So 10 years ago, you didn't even have self custody. Now you have all of these different wallets and different ways to generate your seed phrase. It's different ways to store your crypto and it's gonna continue going that way. So despite every little bear market where people got washed out, there's always great development happening here. So I'm extremely happy. But I think, again, proof of work to proof of stake, meh. Meh. So, meh. So we're well said as usual. So before we, everybody, we're gonna transition to the Q and A section. So if you got a question for me or mostly Randy, who knows why there's a better answer for you than I do, then just put that in the chat right now. And as you guys are writing in your questions and going from there, it makes what you just, there's two things. First of all, the thing you said about, there could be a new consensus mechanism. There could be something that comes out that's way better and we don't have to have the feeds and we have a more decentralized and just awesome. I know people will talk about, well, you know, I have my crypto project and it's awesome and it's gonna be great. I just tweeted this out this morning, as a matter of fact. I took a look at this was all the different coins or cryptos from 2017 and 2021 for the highs and the lows. And what I took a look at was out of the top, I used the top 53. First of all, let's just do this. Let me show you something. Does anybody remember, this is the snapshot I used, 17th December, 2017. Look at the ones that are in the top 10. Bitcoin Ethereum, Bitcoin Cash, I guess. XRP Litecoin Cardano. But moving forward after that, how many of you guys recognized? Iota, Dash, NEM, Eos, Neo, Qtum, Populous, BitConnect. What's the, what's going on? Lisk. BitConnect. Stratus, BitShares, Ardor, Bitcoin. And remember, this was December 17th, 2017, when we were at, I mean, we almost hit the all-time high for Bitcoin and a lot of different alts. So when you take a look at this, what I did is I just said, well, how many of those at the top 53 were actually hit their all-time high in 2021? And out of all of those that I put together, it's only 11 out of 53. 11 out of 53 from 2017 to hit their all-time high. What does that mean? That means that you, as you were going through this, if you thought that Quash or Electronium or Salt, Oracetium, Status, Arc, Verge, all these ones that you thought were awesome back in the last bill run, they weren't. And they actually showed it. And I think this is what comes to your time, Randy, is that these next things, these next projects could be enormous, which just depends on which one. And then real quick, before we came on, you talked about NFTs and the different ways that you used in Mensum and the different projects that you're looking into. So real quick, just talk to us about that. And anyway, anything you wanna talk about right there? Yeah, so I've been minting NFTs since November, December, 2020. So I was really one of the first content creators to do it. I know Stash was before me and Ken Bozak. So they were kind of the people that onboarded me into Wax NFTs. So I thought, you know, and even still, I think Wax Blockchain could be, I think it's underrated now, where again, it's basically no gas fees. You could create, you could mint, so just have like a really good time and blend certain NFTs where it's not, where if you transfer it using in a game, stake it, it doesn't really cost you anything and it's super fast. So that's why I loved it, where I minted on Ethereum as well. And for my 20th birthday, I did an auction on Ethereum for my NFT as well. So I'm a fan of anywhere where creators can create. And I think that basically the way I see NFTs and the reason why I did it is because I feel like it's a way to empower content creators, bridge that gap between a content creator and their audience, where if you're an artist, you can be your own art gallery, where you don't have to go to a physical person and say, oh, they, and say, hey, can you put my art here? And then you give them a cut, you never get any secondary sales. And they have to, of course, be that intermediary that approves you to do it all. So you're basically stuck with relying on other people where this takes that out. If you're a musician, then you could be your own record label where if I'm buying an Ariana Grande song, am I really supporting her? Does she really get anything? That's why they're called starving artists because a lot of these intermediaries just take everything from them. They take their rights and they don't own anything. So this gives ownership back to creators and it gives them the opportunities that they've missed out on. And of course, you could bring so much more utility to it where if you buy a certain NFT, then you could get a Zoom meeting with somebody or you buy, like even someone releases a token, like fan tokens were a big thing in 2020 where if you bought a certain amount of this token, you could go to an artist and say, hey, I bought X amount of this token, let me give it to you and you could do a feature for me. So there's a ton of different things that you could utilize this with. And I think NFT gaming specifically is gonna be something that really spearheads the next bull round where people are gonna see like, oh, this technology is so simple, so easy to use it. I didn't even know it was NFTs. I didn't even know that this was something that I could sell on the secondary market, trade with a friend. That's something that I struggled with when I was younger. All my family, they gave me iTunes gift cards and what was I doing with that? I was buying virtual gains on a virtual app store with virtual currencies and virtual items within the game. The only difference is it all went to zero once I bought it and I couldn't give it to anybody. I couldn't rent it out so maybe someone could use my assets and I get a cog of their earnings. And there's no economic learning there where I think people learn economics, like how to trade on a secondary market, how to value things through things like NFT gaming. So I'm very bullish on creators and I think NFTs in the next bull run are gonna look very different than they did previously. I think this was just the groundwork. What can we do with this technology? How can people use it to their advantage and people will look back on these NFTs, like their artifacts. We wrote on stones like hundreds of thousands of years ago, whatever, and people are finding that now to learn about them. I think people are gonna look back at the blockchain and say, oh wow, this is what people were doing. They were putting animated things like I did or they were board apes or rocks, literal rocks. ETH rocks. ETH rocks and I will squiggle. Yeah, squiggle. No, it makes no sense. So yeah, so Randy, good points.