So what I would like to tell you today about is the work we've been doing over the past few years on transition metal decalcogenides It's it falls in the in the in the class of 2d Materials so so materials like graphing can be exfoliate to become perfect to decrease those The people here are people in my group. We've been doing the experiments. I'll show you Different things. I think the scope of thing that you can do is is quite vast You need materials for this work Elmwood, Belga and Ike Janini are the people who provide these materials and we've had Different collaborations depending on the specific topic that we've been working on and so These are the kind of different thing I like to tell you about I would first like to tell you about some specific property of these materials in term of just Bear semiconductors. They are Interesting because they have a good number of transport and that allows to look at many different effects both interesting from a fundamental point of view And for device applications. I will also touch upon a valuable effect, which is very closely related to Leonid's first part of the talk. I'm sure you can induce gate a superconductivity electrostatically starting from an insulator just by applying a gate voltage And if I have time I Talk about how you can use these materials to induce phenol but in graphene to announce very strongly spin orbiting graphene due to inter-official interaction and then we'll have lunch and If there is not enough time, I'm afraid we'll have to skip the last point of the Of the talk so so let me give you a little introduction about these materials. This is a Typical say crystal structure. There are different special structure, but this is the most common crystal structure for many of these transgeometallic alcogenites and This these material have been studied in the bulk for for a long time And because because there are many different phenomena that have been observed like for instance superconductivity charge density waves They can just be bare metals. They are semi conductors semi metal and and even in the bulk It's totally not exhausted the kind of scope of phenomena that that that can be seen depending on the composition because because the composition Because there are really a huge class of materials about maybe about 70 different But they have been re-iscovered recently because you can exfoliate them and get them to the monolayer level and and and not all the materials are easily stable chemical at the monolayer So so initial work has focused on these kind of compounds which are semi conducting and they are very stable in air And one thing that has been noticed in the early days, which is a few years ago is that if you take a bulk I'll say a piece of bulk of these semi conductors is an indirect gaps material but if you exfoliate down to the monolayer the gap become direct and you observe that and people have observed that by looking at the Quantum yield of photoluminescence which which explode exponentially as you as you lower the thickness So this is for the photoluminescence on a single layer and in absolute scale This is the the bilayer So if you zoom in you still see for the monolinescence for photoluminescence But on a linear scale is is almost not detectable and this is confirmed by by Benz structural calculation We show that the bulk is an indirect gap and as you lower the thickness and you go to the monolayer you end up You end up with a direct gap and so So this is this is this will these are the experiments which trigger the interest in these materials and the reason why They are particularly interesting especially coming from many years of work on graphene is because a monolayer is an hexagon and so as a Say values at a K and K point and and Contrary to graphene this valley because there is a there is no inversion asymmetry this valley are kept Also, there is a huge spin orbit interaction So this is shown here that the red and the blue are different spin direction We enter perpendicular to the plane and as you go from from the K point to the minus K point because of crumbest degeneracy The spin direction is inverted So you basically have only close to the to the deal to do this K point You have that an effect environmental that describe the system correctly is basically a Gapped Dirac fermions we've a strong spin orbit interaction meaning that the gap depends on the spin direction is just like as Leonidas Explained then you can have among other things a lot of phenomena Which are interesting which come from the fact that the electrons here have a final buried curvature Which means that basically you have They there is a whole conductivity associated to a valley and And and say the annoying thing if you wish is the opposite valley and I'm knowing from experimentalist at least is that the opposite valley as an Opposite whole conductivity So if you just measure the whole effect at zero field you see nothing because you see compensating effect So and so it would be interesting to see what you can do and and to Reveal this effect and one thing you can do is and I will come back more in detail is you can explore exploit Selection rules in optical transition which only which you can Use to only couple to one of the values and therefore to to generate a valley imbalance and and and and break this compensation between the two values So one technique that we will use quite a bit is is in part of the talk is I only liquid gating and which is a which is a way to Accumulate a very large sharp density on top of different materials by gating and it's essentially instead of using a solid dielectric You use a liquid made of charged particles These are pretty large molecules say one minute one micron one million one nanometer in size Which electrostatic is basically like a metal meaning that there's a very short screening length of say about one nanometer And so when you apply a gate voltage in the liquid The voltage drop at the interface between the metal and the liquid there is no actual voltage drop across the liquid And so it will all drop across The the the voltage will all drop across the gate and the liquid and then between the liquid and your semiconductor If you do things properly, it will basically all drop across The liquid and a semiconductor which is a way to have a huge capacitance because then you have a capacitor With a with a dielectric stress of thickness of one nanometer and you can actually charge density up to few times and then to the 10 to the 14 plus square centimeter that you could never do with conventional Dielectrics so so so this is this is just a technical point, but it's not an important one So let's first look at the basic semiconductor property of this system and we'll focus on tanks and disulfide But if you use a different one of these semiconductors who basically be the same So the first thing you see is this this possibility to have a very large charge density accumulation You we sweep the gate voltage and so this is an example of a device You put your your your ion liquid on top you stick a wire in it and then you sweep the gate voltage And you see that you can with a fairly moderate gate voltage or a few volts you go to You can accumulate a large amount of electrons and up here you are close to 10 to the 14 or of holes So on the same system you can just by switching the gate voltage in the lab You can go from large whole density to large electron density in transistors if you look at the What is called the subtraction swing which is this quantity Normally there is an intrinsic limit essentially this is coming from how steep this can be it's coming from the fact that the finite temperature the the Fermi Dirac distribution as a as a as a finite width and in the best case if the gate capacity is huge, which is what what would be the case here you find that Say the steepest value you can have for this for this for this look is given by this number And if you actually use this ionic with gate transistors on these materials You get exactly the number that means that this capacity is basically really really large It's it's not a conventional transistor It's a trans or is a conventional transistor in which the gate capacity is you can take it in a first approximation to be infinite if you want So let's see One consequence of this is that you can already use these devices because you see Holes and electrons to to measure the gap and the idea is very simple to the band gap the idea is very simple you can sweep the gate voltage and and when you sweep the gate voltage these cause typically a shift in Fermi energy and a shift in electrostatic potential and and and The electrostatic potential is you can in a parallel paid capacitor. It's just the the charge by the By the density divided by the by the capacitance But if you're in the gap that as your state is very very small So you accumulate very small amount of charge and the capacity is very big So this term you can forget and so the if you if you compare the Gate valve the gate voltage value when you are starting to so the threshold for whole conduction a threshold for electron conduction This is just exactly equal to the gap and in fact if you do that you find it for bulk Thanks, and I saw that you find that the gap that these difference in threshold voltage is 1.4 1.4 Which is exactly what the gap is known to be in tanks and I saw fight throughout that this technique Works for even for device which are not as As ideal as this one just because the capacity is always very large of the unit liquid gate And it's actually very convenient because now you can use it for instance to measure gaps in semiconductors Which are very very small flakes which should not be you easy to measure with other experimental techniques So since you you're able to to to see and the polar transport another thing you can you can do is try to to see if you can Basically inject electrons all at the same time and and get light out and and so these are the typical curve of a transistor You see the typical saturation on when you accumulate electrons Well, I think actually holes here when you accumulate electrons They all look normal except that when you go to large drain voltages You see these upturn that you normally don't see in transistors And if you look at like you know typical book like the same book on on semiconductors You typically do not see this curve So this curve only happened as a large source of voltage because that means that locally what is happening here is that locally on one of the Contact you are inverting the effective Potential of the of the channel and that means that that you're injecting on one side one polarity of One say charge carrier one polarity in the opposite side charge charge carrying of the opposite polarity So the way you can think about it. You can think that you set the gate to zero and you go very large With the potential on opposite the contact on opposite polarities and that that means that locally the potential of the channel is different And you have different kind of charge carriers. So if you if you do that you send current You have a leckos and and holes coming together and then they recombine and they should emit light Well, they should emit light if the semiconductor is a direct get semiconductor. Otherwise, there will be Things will be dominated by by no radiative or combination So in the bulk the gap is indirect and indeed here we don't see light But if you go to the monolayer level then the gap is direct and we should see light and again We can do all the all the same business here. We can measure our nice and be polar transport We can extract the gap find it is much larger as you expect for the monolayer is instead of 1.4 is 2.2 V And and again, you see the zombie polar injection regime or a high source to in bias The the current shoots up and now the question is whether when when we bias the device in this regime Whether we see light or not and the answer is yes We do so this is you can see it with your bear eyes under a microscope basically and this is the right spot here It's just like coming out of the device you can compare the spectrum so the Frequency dependence of the light that is emitted with the one with the light that is emitted not by electrical injection But by illuminating the device with a high energy light and see at the light which comes out Which is photo luminescence and they basically perfectly match So this is a this is a and and what this is is a recombination of excitons And in fact since we are able to to measure the band gap and we are able to measure the Exit on energy we can get the axiom binding energy just by directly from the measurements Which in this in for these devices is about 200 millivolt Theoretically is predicted to be even I mean there is a spread of experimental value Theoretically is expected to be even larger than that 200 millivolt is already pretty large So this is to show that this is This system in term of off electronics have quite a bit of potential They're allowed to do things which are not easy to do with other semiconductors because they are un-be-polar and and and there is there are other things which are interesting which you can do when you Combine optics and transport and one is the value of effect and since Leonid has discussed this already I will go fast but but the idea can basically from graphene and in fact from gap graphene And just like Leonid has said there is a there is a finite very curvature And that means that each valley is a conduct a whole conductivity which is equal and opposite So under equilibrium you see zero voltage But if you would be able to To to unbalance the population of the two valleys the contribution to the whole effect of the of the total contribution to the All effect would not would not cancel and you would you see a finite whole voltage at zero At zero magnetic field if you are in this situation So the question is how can you do that and the same people who did this work They also predicted that the one way to achieve this situation is to pump the system with a circular polarized light because there are selection rules that tells that that if you if you ever say one say One circular polarization you can you can only couples to one valley and the opposite circular polarization couples to the Opposite valleys therefore if you shine a shine light with this light you will according to this theory Excite electrons on the balance to the conduction band and and of course this electron can relax But under stationary condition you will have a different population of the of the two valleys So they predicted by by by measuring the whole effect a zero magnetic field Under circular polarized light you would see a whole voltage which is a manifestation of the of the of the very curvature in the in the two valleys And in graphene is not okay as I've already shown is it's it's possible to see effect related is with different techniques But not so easily with light because the gap is small and and so in the inside in these materials the gap is is To EV and so you can do it with visible light Which has a short way which are short wavelength so you can make a small device and in fact last year This has been this phenomenon has been observed by Mack in McEwing's group So what what you see here is a piece of molybdenum disulfide another one of these semiconductors again They're conceptually very similar in which they send current and under circular polarized light They measure the whole voltage and they see that indeed there is a whole voltage when light is circular polarized And if it if they if they change the polarization the whole voltage change sign and if they use linearly polarized light there is no whole voltage and And they interpret this this phenomenon in this term in terms of single particle picture but actually there is a little problem with that because They shine light at 1.9 EV and one not 1.9 EV in molybdenum disulfide is exactly the exit on energy and the exit on binding energy is large So we certainly don't have Interband transition of that energy and so the question is how is it possible to get a Whole voltage from exciting exit on which are neutral particles and they have no charge So even if you'd accumulate the exit on one side of your device It would not be possible. I mean they being neutral. They will not generate a voltage So we have been looking at this problem in tanks and disulfide and made a very similar device at first in which Again, we see the same phenomenon if we if we look at the if we have if we eliminate the device with Circular polarized light we see a whole voltage We change sign depending on the polarization and these appears when we have a linearly polarized voltage and The whole voltage is a black line here So the whole resistance is speaking exactly at the same position as the photoluminescence, which is the exit on energy There is a second a second exit on here that you don't see in photoluminescence But let's focus like this and these energies again quite a bit smaller than the than the back band gap in tanks and disulfide So so how does that work? To understand what is happening I mean we went we went back to look at other phenomena which which have say a similar problem And one of them is is photo current in photo current as well You can illuminate your device and you see that an announcement of the photo car and you see appear in photo current at the exit on Energy which again is strange because you generate an external which are neutral And so why should they give any photo current at all? And and and turns out that in this case though the answer is known because people have studied photo current much more And essentially if you have a device like this whether you see this photo current or not depends on the position of your laser beam So if you put your laser beam in the center, you don't see anything Because what you do you generate exit on that they diffuse and they recombine Before anything can happen, but if you put if you put your laser being close to one of the contacts What happens is that you generate an exit on these diffuses and if it diffuses towards the contact It will be split in the electric field associated to the shawty barrier The minority carrier will escape into the contact and the majority current will stay into the semiconductor And we create a valine balance population of charge carriers and so and so in fact if you now put your laser beam close to the other contact You see the same effect but with the opposite polarity because the same charge carriers escape in the other contact So opposite current So this is telling us that if we are able to map But so in photo current this phenomena is very clearly visible by doing a spatial mapping of the signal And so we do the same thing for the valley old effect and and So basically we fix our light at the frequency of the exit on so bill well below the interband transitions We apply a current and measure the value all effect and fix the bias here We see a value whole effect and then use a device like this and scan the laser beam across and see how this voltage That we measure depends on the position of the laser and the result is shown here Well, we see that the we actually see valuable effects only when the laser beam is quite close to the to the contact So what that what is happening is again you generate electros? Exitance this exit on diffuse if your laser beam easier they will recombine and nothing happens But if it is closed if they are close to the source contact where you also put your your your whole probes They they will reach this the the contacts They were splitting the the action was split into the electric field and the majority carriers will go back and give you a Valipolarized distribution which is why you see our signal and that's the signature of this phenomenon is the fact that the Magnet of the signal it becomes larger the closer is your laser beam is to the contact You could think okay. Why doesn't it happen that our contact? Well, because here you also split your excitons, but The the particle will lose its this distance too far is beyond the interval is scattering length And so you don't have valipolarization reaching the region in between the contacts so so this part this basically shows that By mapping the valial effect at different frequency you can you can this you can tell something about the origin of the process Which give which give rise to this whole voltage? Let me move on to Another part of the of the talk which is how we can still use exactly the same materials Which are semiconductors now to turn them into a semiconductor into superconductors by accumulating enough charge And a breakthrough work here is done by I was done in the group of Yoshi Vasa a couple of years ago Who took basically thick? Layers of molecular disulfide basically bulk and by using a gate voltage We usually was able to turn them from an insulator, so I'm dope semiconductor Or maybe slightly dope semiconductor due to impurities and accumulating charge at the surface Then he was able to see a to see a Transition to a superconducting state with a maximum temperature of 12 Kelvin and he Discussed these in the context of superconductivity Seen by intercalation which in the same material was was also seen earlier Which I think is a bit more Questionable, but but the observation of superconductivity with gate voltage starting from an insulator is really an impressive result So we're interested in this and see also how this varies when you go to the atomic When you bring the material to atomic thicknesses and we've been doing experiments to do this So what you see is a device again on which we put ionic liquid This is a six layer molybdenum disulfide and you see that we've applied gate voltage We are able to see a superconducting transition. However, what we find in basically all our devices There tend to be quite a bit in homogeneities because more for technical reason related to the to the property of the ionic liquid Still the maximum to see that we see is always is pretty comparable to what Yoshi Vasa so in his state crystal So six layers is basically is basically Bulk and if you look at the critical field actually, this is impressively large is then close to 10 Tesla already and and I think Yoshi has recently done for for tick sample as measure the critical field in the plane and it's immense can Reach up to 80 Tesla or something. So So we were interested in going to to smaller thickness and so in particular to the monolayer if you go to the monolayer Well, again, you see superconductivity, but now this is quite a bit lower and also the critical field is much smaller And so basically in the monolayer you also see superconductivity But it is much less robust. You don't see it in all the samples and and when you don't see it You can see phenomena like we can't localization which which which come from the fact that you have a strong spin order interaction So what about ticker layers like by layer trial a well as soon as you go to the by layer It resemble much more the bulk in the sense that we always see superconductivity The transition is more robust and TC is already quite a bit larger So whereas you go from 1.5 Kelvin or close to two to to basically Almost seven in the by layer and if you and larger critical field from point one to two three Tesla And if you go three layer four layers you you basically get superconductivity or vastly with with TC Which seems to to depends on thickness and become slowly higher and reaching the bulk value So it's interesting to compare all these thicknesses and see what happens So this is this is basically putting together the measurements of the of the critical temperature versus Versus thickness and critical magnetic field and you see that basically there is And again because of the enormity you have to do quite some statistics Which we have done a bit of and what it looks like is that you have a trend with TC and the magnetic field now This is log scale. So the fact is less pronounced but decreasing as you decrease the number of layers Field is movely and then going from by layer to the mono layer. There is a much steeper drop And these okay We are not since we have charged density in a virginity is difficult to tell what is a density dependence But but this doesn't seem to depend on density pen as a density pen is kind of a measure from whole effect is a bit All over the place and TC does not depend too much on that As long as it's high enough if you don't put an high enough density, you don't see superconductivity So why is that why could the TC be be much smaller in monolayers compared to ticker layers? Well, there are different reasons one of course there will be There could be I mean if you have if you have a Decumulation length or the accumulation thickness of the electron layer that you do that you that you put with the gate As a certain thickness which they mean by screening and and turns out that this ticket is about 1.5 Nanometer and the mono layer is the first layer in which this that has a thickness Which is really thinner than this 1.5 nanometer to nanometer, which is the by layer already as as a thickness comparable to the To the screening length which means that you'd be able so so it could be the superconductivity is suppressed If you if you try if you go below this screening length But what we think the most likely explanation is is that if you look at the band structure in the mono layer You accumulate electrons at the k point whereas in bilayers and ticker layers according to calculation You should be accumulating electrons Are a different part of the brilliance in a different part of the brilliant zone because it's an indirect gap and Essentially your accumulated electrons here, which is which is called the Q point So then it's not so strange that that superconductivity is different because the denser state will be different And the electron phonon coupling will be different In fact is if you want is strange that you see superconductivity for all thicknesses because in principle these materials are all different So they all have different electron phonon coupling and different denser states So there is no guarantee that if you see superconductivity for the bulk you should see superconductivity superconductivity for the bilayer or the mono layer a priori And How much time? All right, so let me go very fast to the last topic Which is how we use these materials to induce spin off the interaction in graphene This is a work we did also in collaboration with the group of Allah McDonald for theoretical calculation And there is there are clear reason why you'd be interested to try to induce spin off the interaction in graphene because we know from the work of K and a millie that if you take pristine graphene and if you if you consider the effect of spin off the interaction in principle conceptually This material is a topological insulator a gap opens But of course in graphene is by now known that this pin of interaction is way too small to see this topological insulating state experimentally Nevertheless, it'd be interesting to find a way to Amplify spin off the interaction much more to try to to be able to see these things And there have been attempts attempts typically have put graphene on metals because there are metals I don't like platinum or with very large atomic numbers And they with these in this case you can induce very strong spin off the interaction graphene But the electronic state of graphene hybridized so much with the metal that that you lose completely a direct fermion character of the of the like once in those cases You can also induce another interaction by creating impurities of certain types And again that works up to up to some extent, but but again you damage graphene and you you decrease the quality So what we want to do is to try to induce pin of interaction but preserve the quality of graphene And what we do we put graphene which in this scheme is the black layer on top of a tungsten disulfide Tin crystals and then on top of basically a gate So this is a conducting layer with a with an insulator And let's not go to the details But but basically on these kind of devices we still see perfect quantum all affect exactly as you expect for the art formulas in graphene And and this is a first generation of device with mobility, which are okay like 13,000 But by now we are able to get basically one order back to bigger So we have these kind of devices with mobility which are hundred thousand or bigger And then what do you see in transport? So we use weak anti-localization to detect spin out the interaction And so if you measure the conduct as a function of magnetic field and gate voltage Well in these devices, which are actually pretty small You see is difficult to do you might see a hint of something here at zero magnetic field But but UCF universal conductor for operation are too big and you don't really see a clear weak anti-localization What you can do is an ensemble averaging by changing your gate voltage By as little as possible But enough to to sort of change a microscopic character of the device of the sample and then average of the of the traces And so here you see one trace which is one cut here Then if you average nine of these traces you get the red one and if you ever 25 traces You start to see that something emerged at small magnetic field and at the same time the The the the UC at the amputee the root miss square of the UCF decrease like the square root of the number of ever So so this is what you're doing. These these are basically reproducible things And so if we have done this for different gate voltage ranges, and you see a very nice weak anti-localization signal which increases you lower the temperature and that the lowest temperature is compiled is Is a large fraction of the square of the age? We can feed this data with a theory of Edward McCann and our chairman and extract basically the spin orbit relaxation time the spin relaxation time if we do that we find that the spin relaxation time which are these black dots are Say hundred two on say hundred or more times Small shorter than then than the spin relaxation time for graphene or silicon oxide and a boronite But meaning that spin orbit interaction is much much stronger and in fact is comparable to the Intervalis scattering time on that the people have measured on a bunch of different subsets These these are data point from different groups on different materials. So it's quite remarkable And so this this measurement by themselves show that spin orbit has been has been Increased a lot just by putting graphene on on tanks of a soul fight And the fact that the interval scattering time might be playing a role in relaxing spin could also explain why neither the Diakonov perl know the leotiaffet mechanism have been have been found to really account for spin relaxation in graphene But these we are not able to tell so We can be localization does not tell us what is the kind of the functional dependence of the spin orbit that we're inducing and And and a la McDonald and his post-ocular watch and have done ab initio calculation to try to figure out what according to you We should expect and what we should expect is is is is well described by a close to the direct point is well described by a Continuum Hamiltonian given by this expression so the the dots here are result from ab initio calculation and the and the red lines have fits to the dispersion relation obtained by this Hamiltonian with these parameters and they find that that this coupling depends on the distance between graphene and and thanks at a soul fight and Basically for reasonable value experimental values or by using codes that allow to relax this distance They find that these numbers are a few millivolts So compared to what you have in pristine graphene, which is a 20 to 50 micro volts We are talking about the 200 micro the increase in spin orbit interaction now These terms are not the same don't have the same functional dependence that you would have in pristine graphene Because they are violating inversion symmetry. So in pristine graphene that would not be possible but when you have graphene on a subset that is possible and Depending on the on the relative value So if you would have these land eyes speaker than land I are then you would open a gap And these would be a topological insulator although not of the time predicted by cana mille So I guess the next step is to decrease this order and increase this This coefficient even more experimentally to try to see whether we can get ourselves into the regime or because now we have a few millivolts Spin orbit interaction a few mille volt a few mille volt gap, which is small But it's not unthinkable small in terms of being able to put your Fermi level in there and try to and try to see Edge states if this is topologically really So with this I would like to conclude and So here's my summary that topic I've been telling you about so thank you for your attention


Hi, so I'm Cheryl J. Lipton, I'm a landscape designer and I'm an ecologist. Very glad about this symposium going on now because it is going to bring to light to the masses the terrible injustice of burning biomass. In other words, burning trees for energy or anything is egregious in this time of climate change and climate crisis and biodiversity crisis and water. Trees and forests are there to help us survive and live in a healthy way and to burn them up is doing the exact opposite. People are not being honest about the actual damage that happens when we burn biomass, especially for electricity. It's bad for our health, for human health and health of the forest and all of the other biota that lives there and it's bad for climate. It puts more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere than burning coal does and it's a well known fact that burning anything other than wood is less damaging to both the climate and to the environment. The forestry industry is so strong and the wood products industry is so strong in Vermont and in many places that people think that it is good to keep it local or you know and it's not. It's causing more and more damage.  As a matter of fact, Vermont and I'm talking about not just McNeil and burning biomass for electricity but Vermont burns the most amount of wood of any state in the entire nation and we put more particulate matter, fine particulate matter which is 2.5 particulate matter into the air than any other state in the country. Per capita, per capita, Jared Omer of the Vermont Department of Health has given a good testimony on that to both the Vermont Climate Council and also to the Senate Natural Resources Committee expressly saying that burning biomass, burning wood is bad for the health of humans and the Department of Health suggests not to do that. The American Pediatric Association suggests not. The American Lung Association asks to stop burning wood and this includes the high efficiency new wood burners. This includes pellet stoves, this includes pellet burners that Vermont is encouraging schools and municipalities to put in for their municipal buildings. These are all very unhealthy and in the winter, when the wood is being burned, the air quality is greatly decreased. I'm Zach Porter, I'm the Executive Director of Standing Trees. Here at Burlington City Hall today to educate city counselors and residents of Burlington about the perils of biomass electricity. Students of Burlington have been fooled for going on for decades now into thinking that biomass electricity is a part of a clean energy future for Vermont, for our planet and we're here to set the record straight because the science is very clear that biomass electricity is actually worse than even coal for electricity generation. It's absolutely taking us in the wrong direction and it's polluting our cities and it's a public health menace. It's also destroying the water quality of our rivers and beloved Lake Champlain and it is threatening the biodiversity of our forests. So biomass has all of these problems and it's time for Burlington to look for truly low carbon energy solutions. In Vermont we're so accustomed to wood heat and thinking of our forest as an energy source and there's a big difference between even wood heat and biomass electricity. Biomass electricity requires heating to incredibly hot temperatures and it's incredibly inefficient to burn green wood as anyone who burns wood in Vermont knows and what we're doing is we're burning green wood in a massive boiler to create electricity and the efficiency of our power plants here are worse than coal-fired power plants for creating electricity. So for every four trees that are burned in the McNeil biomass power plant just one contributes to electricity. The McNeil power plant is a far better producer of carbon than it is of electricity so it's a real dinosaur of a power plant and it's ancient technology that we need to move off of and move towards something that's truly low carbon. We can't keep living in this myth that it's renewable or that it's a sustainable fuel source. What we need is low carbon energy and biomass is anything but. So today we have two global experts Bill Mooma of Tufts and Dr. Juliet Rooney Varga of UMass Lowell who are among the world's leading scientists on climate and on biomass and they're here to help educate city councilors and the public about the perils of McNeil biomass which is Vermont's single largest source of carbon pollution and the city of Burlington has somehow tried to magically greenwash for four decades now claiming that it's carbon neutral and we know that that's just not the case and we can't keep fooling ourselves into thinking that anymore so. To feed this massive wood boiler at McNeil requires an incredible amount of wood and literally tens of thousands of acres a year are required to feed the McNeil biomass power plant. The telephone gap project on the Green Mountain National Forest targets almost 12,000 acres of very mature forest some of the healthiest forests in the state of Vermont and from those forests from state forests like Camels Hump State Forest and many others around the state we are shipping our mature healthy forests here to be burned and at the McNeil power plant so there's a direct connection between what's going on in our public forest and what's happening here in Burlington with McNeil of course private forest lands provide a lot of the timber supply also but the presence of a biomass power plant creates incentives for really poor forest management practices because it really encourages loggers and landowners to strip forests of really important standing dead wood and woody debris on the forest floor trees that may not be perfectly straight and tall but are extremely important from a biodiversity perspective from a climate perspective get stripped from our forests and brought to McNeil to be burned because they can't be turned into saw logs so what it does is it creates a market for wood that would otherwise be left in our forest and that's a real problem from a water quality perspective because that wood would trap water as it's falling down you know when they are increasingly extreme rainfall events and warm ups after large snow falls you know that woody debris in the forest prevents our rivers from flooding and instead we're removing all of that and taking it here to be burned so it's a terrible incentive for you know the very worst of our logging practices in forests and again we need to get rid of it for all of these reasons not not even just the climate reason our forests can't keep pace with the amount of emissions that you know we're putting out there from any source of carbon whether that's you know wood burning or fossil fuel burning but our forests do an incredible job today you know Vermont's forests sequester incredible amount of the emissions that we put up into the atmosphere every year but they could do a lot more if we simply let them grow old and there are very few Vermont forests that are allowed to grow old my name is Dan Castrigano I live in Burlington I'm an educator and a community organizer here today to call on the city of Burlington and BED to stop burning trees for electricity we need a phase out plan for McNeil burning trees produces more pollution than coal unit for unit and just call on the city of Burlington to stop greenwashing to say saying things like it's renewable or it's carbon neutral or it's green so we need these trees standing right now because of the climate and ecological emergency we need a phase out plan for McNeil there are a lot of things that they don't talk about or they might not talk about tonight so the impact of biogenic emissions in the first place the impact of carbon being released from the soil when trees are clear cut the impact on water quality or air quality or the extinction crisis these are all these things that just are simply not acknowledged by the city of Burlington or by the electric department and we needed a different plan so we need wind solar geothermal we need to weatherize everything and we need to just use less energy as a species and so pouring more capital into this district heating plan and basically keeping McNeil online for a long time is a terrible idea we need and we need a phase out plan we need an end date we need to stop burning trees for electricity thank you I'm Steve Goodkind I am the retired city engineer and public works director for city of Burlington and I'm here tonight to encourage the city to begin to look real hard at the McNeil plant in its wood burning I call the McNeil plant the McNeil carbon dioxide generating plant because it actually generates a pound of carbon dioxide for every pound of wood that it burns it's it did its job back in the day it helped us fight the air boiling margo but its time is way past and in an age where climate change is important the burning of wood is probably the worst worst fuel we can be using at this point in time so I think it's time for McNeil to begin to look to phase out close down and not to expand its use and continue its use into the future by running a steam pipe up to the hospital whatever it's time to phase it out and not increase its use we can have all the benefits of good forest management without burning it in the McNeil plant and probably do even a better job if we didn't burn it burning is the worst way to use wood and the worst way to burn wood is in a factory type of setting like the McNeil plant which is only 25% efficient so it's really just taking a bad fuel and making the worst use of it and creating literally the most carbon dioxide per pound per kilowatt of energy created of almost any other fuel you could think of you don't need McNeil wood to have a healthy forest products industry in Vermont you just do not and they're trying to sell it that way also but you don't and there's other better uses uses that actually fight climate change that can use use the wood that McNeil is using even the so-called scrap wood that they're using that can be put to a much better use and actually not emit carbon dioxide but be in the battle to prevent emissions by using it for insulation or for wood products much better use time to close it down start closing it down this information was continued that we really need to stop burning anything and I think a lot of not being able to have their living any longer but that's not what we were discussing here and that's a different issue and unfortunately that kind of took a high place in the comment section talk about forestry generation after logging but that still is not even the issue because we're not discussing biodiversity right now we're discussing climate and carbon and greenhouse gases and I think that that's really important I think we'll need to have another couple of at least one more symposium and I think that there ought to be longer time and questions with other informed individuals my name is Scott Zenz I live in Fetford and Straford Vermont over in Orange County and I have training as a silviculture professional done timber supply analyses for the state of Washington for the whole state long-term estimates of timber supply and I have a PhD in forest ecology as well my big concerns about Burlington Electrics expansion into district heating is that it is going to make permanent in our community turn a structural pattern that we shouldn't participate in the very worst use of a top of a tree or the limbs of a tree are to burn them in McNeil because when we do that we give up the carbon sequestration and we lose the nutrients in the soil when this pattern has been implemented in other areas in North America forest productivity goes down and it's that forest productivity that will lead us to have the strongest carbon sequestration possible what counts the most are the greenhouse gas emissions that come from burning things it is not just fossil fuels but also biofuels and you know we cannot afford our children cannot afford to use wood in this very expensive way for such low benefit anything that we do to help landowners keep their properties in forest would be a good thing but we should not be using this mechanism this terrible mechanism that produces such greenhouse gas emissions those the real slash that comes from the residues that are left over from harvesting need to stay where they are and the high quality forest products that come from our forests we treasure and will keep and in that way the carbon that gets stored in those trees gets kept out of the atmosphere we need forestry in the state of Vermont but we cannot afford to be burning it thank you policy initiative to pay landowners to leave residuals to our society greenhouse gas emissions is so high I have to say it again the very worst use of the piece of woods to burn it in yeah it is so inefficient and it is very likely more efficient to burn steam there it is way too hot to travel over long distance waste heat in the ground from such a long large pipeline reduces the efficiency of McNeil down almost a single ditch that is that is worse by order every other way to the VCC so recommend that it be phased out McNeil and riding phased out but also I am a Burlington resident and a information it puts forth on their website and it really ratepayers expense they have a very effective essentially propaganda arm that provides misinformation around biomass burning at McNeil and a lot is said about electricity from McNeil being 100% renewable and it's one of you know it's one of those terms it sounds great and we don't know what that means renewable it really depends upon who is using the word and how they're defining it and in the case of McNeil it does not acknowledge carbon emissions and if you care about climate you need to be concerned about carbon emissions we don't really care about renewability we don't care about where the carbon is coming from so McNeil for example and their net zero energy plan is wanting to reduce and eventually eliminate fossil fuel use great but it's only half the story we really need to be concerned not about strictly fossil fuel use we need to be concerned about carbon emissions and when you have something like wood that emits one and a half times the amount of CO2 as coal burning and you are simultaneously removing the very things the trees that are sequestering the carbon that are supporting biodiversity and clean water you know it just I really tonight when I was speaking I really was angry and I had it with the greenwashing and I was upset by the false equivalency that we've all grown so accustomed to around discussions of climate change where you have the scientists and you have the deniers and they're given equal equal consideration in equal time before the camera and I think we saw that tonight even though I really appreciate the fact that Duke is doing this I truly truly in my heart appreciate it what I don't appreciate is that false equivalency so you have the absurdity of two world renowned scientists juxtaposed against biomass promoters and so that was as a mom who is just concerned about ecological collapse I get angry sometimes and that's so that's why it wasn't my finest moment speaking but it had to be said and I'm certainly glad to have the venue and I hope it leads to more conversations because we are about to sink 42 million dollars into district heat they call it's not a district it's a steam pipe running from McNeil to UVM Medical Center that will increase the amount of wood that's burned at McNeil and thus increase carbon emissions so that's that's what we need to be focusing on is that problem that will that will ensure that McNeil plant that needs to be mothballed is standing for many decades to come so that that's something that needs to be shut down right away we need to get the truth out about that project and I guess that's all I have to say right now because we've got to go home to our sweet 10-year-old boy


Hi, this is ThinkTech. I'm Jay Fidel. This is ThinkTech Tech Talks, as a matter of fact, with Larry Jordan. You really have to know who he is. Actually, Larry, you have to be one of my biggest gurus. And it goes back to the days when you were teaching movie editing, video editing, I should say, on Linda. And there were some things there that really appealed to me, the way you taught, the way you developed those courses. And then you left Linda and you started your own, gee, it's a multifaceted shop, isn't it? Thank you for coming on, Larry. And tell us about your shop. Jay, thank you so much for the invitation. I've been looking forward to our conversation since you first had the courage to invite me on. Actually, back in the old days, I got my start in broadcast radio. And that was back well before you were born. And I lasted in broadcast radio for three months, three months. And the program director called me into his office.  What we need is a baritone. Enjoy the rest of your life. And that quickly, my broadcast radio career was over. Fortunately, I got the same day. I got a job as a camera operator at WHA TV in Madison. I shifted my focus from radio to TV and I've been TV for 45 years ever since. So talking about this stuff is one of the loves of my life. Yeah. And you know, you've been riding it for the period of time in which it has come out over the clouds. I mean, it was not an everyman kind of experience when you started, but now it certainly is, which makes it all the more interesting. You're following a social change more than a technological one. Social and psychological and technical and distribution and business model. It is so completely different in the old days, which is what I call when I was in broadcast. In order for me to do what you and I are doing, I'd have to have a crew of five people and a half million dollars a year. I'd have to set up the day before with lights in your home for us to be able to do an interview. Now it costs nothing. We're talking trans-planet and it's instantaneous. Plus, it's distributed to the world without any gatekeepers. This is such a mind-bendingly different shift in terms of how we communicate, both good and bad. And I'm sure we'll get into that in just a bit, but the world has changed in ways that were unimaginable even 20 years ago. Is it done? Is it finished? No, no, no. We're right in the middle of it and I'm not even sure we're in the middle of the worst of it yet. I think it's going to get worse before it gets better. For instance, Jay, look at this program right now. You're the CEO of this company that's got, what, 28, 30 shows, but how much money, I don't want the answer rhetorical, but how much money can you make from these shows compared to what a broadcast network could make from their network show 20 years ago? Their revenue then is measured in tens to hundreds of millions of dollars per show and I have a sneaking feeling that you probably are not recognizing that kind of revenue from the shows that you're doing now. Yet, look at your distribution. You've got every major social media distributor. You've got 28 shows. You've got millions of views and you're making no money. That's, I'm not saying no, but I'm using by dramatic comparison. The business model is so dramatically different. The access is incredible. The quality is beyond all imagining and the business model is a disaster. So this is why we're in the middle of it. Until we figure out how content creators can make money, continue to make money, have copyrights honored around the world and be able to reach the audience they want to reach. All it becomes in is a very nice hobby. Well, there are psychic benefits for us. I mean, no, we don't. We're a nonprofit to the fullest extent of the word, but there are psychic benefits for everyone involved. We're all volunteers. The staff is paid, but the hosts are volunteers. I'm a volunteer. I'm a vice president volunteer and we all have huge psychic benefits. We trade newspaper clips all week long. We're always talking to each other, trying to keep each other at a level of awareness and bring other people to awareness. There's a great benefit in that. I hate to say this, but it's more than money can buy. Oh, you're absolutely right. You're absolutely right. And for many years, Hollywood took great advantage of this, is that they would get people to work for nothing in return for the fame and in return for boosting their career, while people that had the money were able to make more of it. It was an upside down business model. What's happened now is that, absolutely, we have the ability to communicate about the subjects that we love to people around the world, which is huge, but I still have to pay the rent. So when you ask where are we going until people can earn a living the way they could 15 years ago, producing media for weddings, but we can't distribute on Blu-ray discs or DVDs because that's a dead technology. People don't pay to stream the way they used to pay when they hold something in their hands. So what's our business model? Now, I don't want to spend our time talking about finance because that gets boring, but you're asking, are we through it? No, because we haven't resolved how we're going to earn a living. Not how do we do what we love, but how do we pay the rent? And right now, we can absolutely do what we love and make it look gorgeous, but it's a real struggle to pay the rent. Yeah. Oh, I have so many questions. I want to ask you about that, but you're right. We need to get into the tech for a minute here. You can invite me back. We'll talk about this a second time. I will, absolutely. This is a really important question for us, not only to talk about in public, but to talk about among ourselves. So let's talk about what you're doing these days.  I'm not even sure it was called Final Cut Pro at the time. And Adobe Premiere was just sort of emerging as a competitor. And then something terrible happened.  And the New York Times wrote a really stinky article about what they had done. Then everybody ran over to Adobe, including us. But you're doing a lot with Final Cut, still you're doing with both, I know. Can you talk about the comparison in terms of the marketplace and the technology? I started my company back in 2003. I was a freelance producer and director. I'm a member of the director's guild and a member of the producer's guild and have been for decades. But I decided there was a market opportunity in 2003 to train people in terms of how software works. Because software is a very intimidating thing for people that don't think the way a computer does. So I started my company in 2003, worked for Lynda.com starting in 2005 through 2010. But the focus of my company was training. And the day that I started my company was when Final Cut 1.2 was released. It was before Final Cut Pro was the very first Final Cut. And the challenge was to explain to people who were used to cutting film physically with their scissors or razor blade or editing with videotape how this new digital stuff would work. And I was very fortunate because my background was in broadcast television. So I knew video. And I'd been a commercial developer. So I wrote software. So that's my software background. And my TV background merged. And for once, they actually merged into an industry that was growing as opposed to horseshoes. So I was in, Lynda asked me to do training. So I started with Final Cut. And then I branched out into audio. And then I realized before Final Cut 10 was released that Adobe was a significant product. It was older than Final Cut, actually. And I'd never trained in it. So now I train in both Premiere and in Final Cut. Final Cut 10, I think when it was released six or seven years ago, got a bad rap because Apple made three bad decisions. Apple decided for political reasons, not technical reasons, that they would instantly kill Final Cut 7. And it was only Final Cut 10. They didn't have to. It was the hubri of the person that was making the decision who will go nameless. But that was a political decision. Second technical problem they had is they did not provide any transfer capability between Final Cut 7, which the industry is using. And Final Cut 10, you had to drop the old project and start the new. Now, from a media creator's point of view, you say, how brain dead is this? Because all of our life is based on working with our past assets. But from Apple's point of view, Apple was thinking like an engineer. And an engineer says, when the new version comes out, the old versions just stick to the curb because it's always the latest version. So they were thinking like an engineer. They weren't thinking like a media creator. And the third big problem was that they released Final Cut too soon. If they had released Final Cut, run it in parallel with Final Cut 7 for a year and provided a conversion utility, the industry would have said Hosano because there is so much cool stuff in Final Cut 10. But the ego of the person making the decision and thinking like an engineer led to the train wreck that was the launch of Final Cut 10. If you compare Avid Media Composer with Grass Valley Edius and Adobe Premiere and Final Cut 10, every single one of them does professional grade work. If you do an edit that doesn't include titles, because that becomes too distinctive, but includes color grading, and you did a show and you output a color graded, non-titled show in Avid and DaVinci Resolve and Premiere and Final Cut and Edius, you'd be unable to tell them apart. How interesting. The quality is outstanding. So what you're really paying for is you're paying for effects, which vary widely. You're paying for titling. You're paying for programs that hang off it, whether it's motion and after effects, or whether it's Fairchild, or whether it's Adobe Audition. You're paying for the ecosystem, but you're not paying for actual quality. The quality is indistinguishable. So you're paying for the interface. And so, for instance, Jay, if you like Premiere, which is perfectly okay, the reason you like Premiere is not that you turn out better images, but it's the interface you use to create those images. And that's a personal choice of what car you buy. If I like to drive a truck, or if I want to drive a sports car, or if I want to drive a school bus, I still get from point A to point B, but the interface to get there is different depending upon the vehicle that I pick. Well, this goes back to that video I saw on YouTube that you made in 2013 with your attempt to get an assistant video editing job with a French woman who had an award. And that was very instructive. And it was great to listen. It's a great story. It's like a three-minute video. It's a great story about the award and your experience there at the bottom line of this. I wish people could go find it. They should go find Larry Jordan. I will repeat the story for you. If you did it the way you got it on your website, it was many years ago. And I've become certified as an Apple certified trainer for Final Cut. This is well before the launch of Final Cut 10. And back in those days, there was a thing in the industry that you may have heard about as a small child that was called Print. And in this Print magazine called Hollywood Reporter, at the back of it, there were want ads. And there was a want ad in the back of the Hollywood Reporter about this big. And it said, wanted assistant film editor. Must know Final Cut. Well, I said to myself, I know Final Cut. I can do that. So I dialed the phone number. A woman and a French accent answered the phone. I said, I am your Final Cut assistant editor. He said, come on down.  A woman about, oh, mid 50s, six inches shorter than me, answered the door and invited me. And I sat down. I sat in the wing chair. She sat on the couch. And we started talking. Now, I know yourself. You are a very well-behaved and polite individual. And when you go to visit somebody new, you focus entirely on them. But me, I was very interested in scoping out the environment and looking around. And there was furniture in the room. There was a hallway that led down to the kitchen. And there were bookshelves and painting on the walls. But on one of the bookshelves, I saw something I don't see very often. It was an Oscar. Now, you think Rackentour and the trainer that I am, that I need Oscar-winning people all the time. But this, I think, was the first time, second time only, I'd met someone who had actually won an Oscar. And I said, Francoise, for such was her name. Francoise, I said, what is that? I said, oh, it's my Oscar. I said, I know what's your Oscar. What's it for? She said, build that thing. Oh, my gracious. I've spent my life in video. I looked at Francoise and Francoise. I'm not the right person for this job. I've spent my life in video. I haven't edited a, I've edited one film and my own mother did not like it. I am not your assistant for this film. But I would be really grateful if you and I could chat for 15 minutes. And I promised never to darken your door again. She very graciously said yes. And I wish, Jay, I could remember even word one of the 15 minutes I spent with an Oscar-winning editor. And I can't remember a phrase except one. When I said to her, how, how do you know when your films are done? She looked down in her lap. She looked up with a small smile and she said, done. Done. My films are never done. They take them with my arms wrapped around them and they rip them from my grasp and they release them to the world and I can still make them better. And I said, that just changed my life. Because it isn't a question of making our films perfect. It's a question of making our films as perfect as we can in the time that we've got. Which means that we can't focus on achieving perfection. We need to focus on achieving efficiency. And that changed every book that I've written that changed every class that I taught. Changed how I think about teaching video editing. It isn't about perfection. It's about being as efficient as we can be with the time that we have. Make it look as good as possible. But can we make it look better? We can always make it look better. The perfect is the enemy of the good. Absolutely correct. Absolutely correct. Jan Federico who used to work at WSTV in Chicago has a phrase, it's better than perfect. It's done. And that's a motto I've got written on my wall. Well, that takes me back to what you were talking about before. Namely, the two competing or actually the half a dozen competing video editor programs that are out there in the, what do you want to call it, the video editing world these days. And choices are based on many characteristics and all that. But it seems to me that one of the characteristics, how efficient is the program? How efficient is it for you? Because I think some of this is subjective. I mean, take a person, he might gravitate intuitively to one and not the other. He might be better at one, not the other. Not a matter of training or experience, just some kind of inner Gestalt that he likes one rather than the other. But, you know, am I right to say that you want to take the program that is most efficient for you, where you can finish the job in a fraction of the time that you would otherwise spend? Am I right? I think you're close. I think you want to take the program that you're most comfortable with that allows you to best realize your vision. Because really at heart what we are is storytellers. And we want to be able to tell our story to as wide an audience as possible and get it done and still have time to get some sleep and eat. From my point of view, if you're an experienced, I'm Mac based. So forget all the Windows stuff. I just I can spell Windows, but I don't use Windows. If you're brand new to video editing, and you've never edited before, you can learn Final Cut in half the time and you can premiere. If you want to work in Hollywood and work for one of the studios, you need to know avid, not necessarily because it's good or bad. It's just that's what you have to know. If you've been editing for a long period of time and you're comfortable with the whole concept of editing, especially if you were working with Final Cut 7, premiere is an easier way to move. Neither of these is better. Neither of them is worse. It's a question of what you bring to it. And when you think about it, the reason that we edit is not because we like to use computers. The reason we edit is because we want to tell stories.  And that I think is the important part is that you're really you're trying on a suit of clothes, which one feels good to me, which one can I understand the quality is the same? How do you feel with it? You mentioned in your story about efficiency that what I want to say is we are moving away from strictly video. As you say, there's video in this film. Those things are different. Then there's video and there's streaming. And that's what we do. Those things are different. And then there's video and there's zoom and the like. And those things are different. All of these things perform editing functionality, but they're all different. And the time involved, the result involved, the learning curve is different. Are you following these things? Or are you talking about film and video? I disagree with that. I disagree with that. There's two ways that we can communicate, basically mass communicate. One is via text and words and one is via pictures. Whether we go to a cinema, at some point we can, I hope, whether we go to watch broadcast television, whether we're watching a video on YouTube, in all cases, we're looking at different forms of distribution. We're not looking at different ways to communicate. We're still communicating with pictures, with moving pictures. And in fact, I just wrote a book, which I will do a shameless plug for, which is called The Techniques of Visual Persuasion, which looks at exactly this one concept. And the concept is if we're trying to affect an audience or change an opinion or effect change, we're going to be much more successful at it doing video with pictures than we are using text. For instance, why are you and I talking on video? There's not a single visual element that's essential to this conversation. It could easily be done in audio, on radio, it could even be done in print for that matter. Why is video that much more compelling? Because we want to see, our brain is wired to see pictures. And the way that we compose those pictures, why do you have your camera positioned in such a way that you've got a nice medium close-up? Why do you have the background selected that you have? Why couldn't it be a different background? Why did you decide to wear that shirt versus a different shirt? And the answer is you're looking to tell a story with the visual environment in which you present yourself, with the lighting that you use, the costume that you wear, the background that you have. All of this is designed to represent success, casual, informed, conversational, believable. Those are all words that you want to have applied to yourself as you look at this image. Same thing with other communications. If you want to persuade someone to an opinion, first you have to attract their attention. And then second, you have to deliver an effective message. How do we attract attention?  Why are we using video? Because our brains are wired for pictures. And that's really what fascinates me right now is how do we use pictures to influence other people, whether for good or ill? There's definitely a two-edged sword, but how does visuals fit into that? And that's what my book is about, how to deconstruct an image, how to build video, how to create a presentation that doesn't induce death by PowerPoint. How do words support your picture? And how does colors and fonts support the picture? There's actually, designers have known this for years, but now people like you who haven't been in broadcasts for years and years, but now find themselves a worldwide celebrity without a broadcast background perhaps, yet you have all these tools at your disposal, wouldn't it be useful to know how to use them? And it's expanding.  Next thing you know, you're learning how to stream. And that's like on steroids in a certain way. I mean, if you want to do color correction on a regular video editing process, that's one thing. And you have, although you don't have a lot of time, you have time to check it out, you bring in add-ons, whatever, you know, to make it as perfect as you can. But when you're doing this on streaming, like we use vMix, which is like Telestream, and what happens is it's real time. And you can adjust it while it's happening, and you can try to achieve the same quality of color correction, but you better be quick. So, you know, it's different than just making a video or a film. It is. Well, if you think about it, it's the difference between filmmaking and live broadcast television. Yes. Look at the technology that you use for filmmaking is designed for each individual shot being perfectly crafted. Broadcast television uses entirely different gear to be able to do efficient chroma keys, to be able to do color grading on the fly, to be able to live switch between cameras. You know, I don't have switchers on a film set. That's just meaningless. But I do have switchers and I do have audio mixers on a live broadcast because I'm dealing with all these different inputs. It is the technology we use is in response to the distribution that we pick. I still think, and my heart is in live broadcast, there's just nothing more fun than doing a live show. And I believe that for 50 years. But at its core, if we don't have a compelling message, if we don't have a compelling story, we don't have a reason for people to listen, the fact that we've got $5 million in here in blinking lights over our right shoulder is not going to excite anybody except me. I've got to have some information that people are interested in learning. And that's that's really the other side is what's our content versus what's the technology. I teach the technology because it's hard. People don't understand it, but the technology is in service to the content. Yeah. And it's the story and everything contributes to telling the story in the way you want. And certainly you have to have content to start whatever you do. But before before we, you know, get run out of time, I did want to cover one other thing with you Larry. It's really important and it drives off something you called a warm voice. A warm voice. You wrote an article about it. It says EQ, warm of voice and improved clarity. You can say that the video, the color, the framing, all the elements of the video do contribute to telling the story. But the story is mostly, will you agree with me? Mostly in the voice. It's mostly in the sound because that's what that's where people are getting more information about the substance of the content, I think, with some exceptions. And you mentioned before the show began that you were the voice of the, did you say the NAB show? That's quite something. National Association, of course, a huge thing. It hasn't met in the last couple of years, the last year anyway, but this is a huge organization. I've been there a couple of times and I know how big and important it is. And you were the voice there. And you talk about warm voices. How exactly do you achieve that? I know part of it is personal. You got to have good pipes to start with. But from there, how do you get where you are? Visuals show us what's going on. Audio tells us what to feel. So the way that we make a connection emotionally is more with the audio than it is with what things look like. When I say warm of voice, if you imagine a straight line with bass at this end and high treble at this end, our hearing goes from very low frequency to very high frequency. It's what's called a 10 octave range from 20 cycles per second to 20,000. Human speech is a subset of that. It goes about 200 cycles to about 6,000 for a guy and 400 to 8,000 for a girl. Women's voices are an octave higher than a man's. That which provides the sexiness, the warmth, the characteristic of a voice are the low frequency sounds, the bass. That which provides intelligibility are the high frequency sounds, the letter S and the letter F, P, P, K. Those are all high frequency sounds. In fact, the difference between the letter S is in Sam and F is in Frank is the hiss. That hiss is at 6,100 cycles or hertz, we call it now. If that hiss is there, you hear an S. If the hiss is not there, you hear an F. They're formed the same way with and without a hiss. Well, one of the things that I do as I've gotten older, one of the problems is that that our hearing starts to degrade and you start to lose high frequency sounds. It makes it harder to understand what people are saying. So whenever I do a mix or whenever I do a live show, it's running through a mixer. And that mixer is doing two things. It's boosting the base two or three dB around 200 cycles per second to warm the voice, give it a little bit more base, a little bit more bottom, a little bit more sexiness. And that's true for both men and women. Then I also add about five, seven dB around 3500 cycles to make the consonants crisper, to make it easier, especially for people that don't have perfect hearing, to be able to hear what I'm saying more clearly. This is called shaping the sound or sweetening the sound is that we want to take the dialogue, make the voices warm and friendly, sexy, happy, cheerful, not happy, cheerful, but to make them worth listening to. And the high frequency we boost because I don't want to have people have to rely on captions all the time. I want them to be able to hear clearly what's being said. And by boosting the highs a little bit, just makes it that easier for people to perceive. And you do this with an equalizer? I do it with what's called a graphic equalizer. Now here, I'm running through my end here. I'm running through an Apex system called the master voice controller. It acts as the preempt of my microphone, it's boosting the base a little bit, sharpening the highs. That's running into a Scarlett 2i2, which is an ADD converter which takes the analog out of the Apex, converts it into a USB. It then streams out to Zoom so you can hear it. And I'm using an AKG C202 microphone as a headset, so I've got really nice tight sound. That's what I use for the live show. For anything that's being recorded like my weekly webinars, then I'm running those through a mix on Adobe Audition, and I'm dialing in with a graphic equalizer to paint in exactly the frequency shaping that I want. So one is live. Remember, we talked about the technology for live is different than the technology for recorded. I have the same results, but I use different here to achieve it. So you like audition then? Is that because I know that I do all of I do almost all of my editing in Final Cut because it's just the fastest thing out there. There's nothing quicker. I do all of my audio mixing in Adobe Audition. Interesting, crossing over, yeah. Larry, we got to do this again. I will be back to you. Don't leave town. I will always say yes when you ask. It's fun. Okay, there's so many questions, so many things. Not only for what we do, you know, for the problems we have, and we're all amateurs around here. Amateurs studying hard, learning hard every day. But, you know, for people in general, because this is something that the world has to know about going forward, you know, going back to your comment about the business model, I think one of the things that's going to happen in the future is that more and more people, this is good for you and it's good for me, are going to get involved in this kind of communication. And they have to know these things if they want to do it right. That's right. So what is, how do I study about you? It's Larryjordan.com. Is that what it is? Larryjordan.com is my website, and there's a couple of buttons across the top to pay attention to. One, if you go to Free Resources, you'll find free step-by-step tutorials. I've got over 2,300 written tutorials to teach you everything you want to know about Apple and Adobe products. Second, if you go to my store, I have online video training, which covers Premiere and covers Final Cut. So if you really want to learn how I've got training that's used by tens of thousands of editors all over the world, it will get you started right. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Larryjordan. We'll be back and we'll take a look at that site. I know there's a conicopia of things there, because every time I talk to you, it's a conicopia the same way. Thank you, thank you for inviting me. Aloha. Talk soon.


Hello, I'd just like to ask, like recently overwhelmed with all the ideas what would be possible with blockchain and cryptocurrency and stuff. Do you see anything which, from your point of view, is not a good idea to be implemented on blockchain? Oh, fantastic question. 80% of what people are saying is a good idea to be implemented on blockchain, added to that list of things that should not be implemented on a blockchain. Right now, blockchain is the hammer, and everything looks like an ale, and people are going around and hitting things, mostly breaking things, and not really producing anything useful. The problem is nobody really knows what a blockchain is, and it's defined in such a ridiculously broad way. I'm going to be publishing an article about that, so I'm going to talk about that. Blockchain is the ultimate meaningless word, and the bottom line is that we try to apply it anywhere we think we can add the words database plus trust plus transparency plus immutability. The problem is that trust, transparency, and immutability are not properties of the blockchain. They're properties of a system that combines a blockchain, an open consensus mechanism with a proof-of-work investment, extrinsic energy, and a native asset that creates a game theoretical reward system all working in conjunction to massively increase the decentralization of the system until its decentralization range is so high that suddenly immutability, security, transparency, openness emerge as characteristics. So let's do all of that without the decentralization. I have some really simple advice for you. If you like this advice and it helps you revolutionize your business, please send me a Bitcoin donation. If you are currently involved in a large corporate proof-of-concept research project where some consultant is selling you blockchain, not proper noun, abstract noun, blockchain, just generally, let's do blockchain, not a blockchain, not the blockchain, not one blockchain, just blockchain as a general concept if they're using words like that. They're telling you that the system that you have now can be replaced with a blockchain, and suddenly all of these magical characteristics will evolve from it. This is the same business model that we saw in 2000 on the internet. One, existing business. Two, build a website. Three, question mark, question mark. Four, profit. And it fails at the three, placed, where you suddenly discover that, I don't know, creating an Uber of laundry to wash other people's clothes is not a winning business model. So here's my free advice. Take the word blockchain from the consulting research proposal. Don't fund it. And do a search and replace through the document. And replace it with Microsoft SQL Server data center edition. And if the proposal still works from an IT perspective, buy that instead. There. I just saved you a million dollars. I'll take a small commission, send it to my Bitcoin address. If you're using blockchain to mean a database and we added some hashes and signatures, you are missing the point. The magic of this technology is the decentralization. And to remove the decentralization is to remove what makes it magic. I have a simple analogy. This is as if a consultant comes to you and says, listen, you know this new amazing thing called aviation? Well, the technology behind aviation is wings. So we propose to add wings to cruise ships and by adding wings to cruise ships, given enough propulsion energy and time, we will soon achieve aviation. You're not going to lift 150,000 metric tons with the included buffet, cafeteria, Olympic-sized swimming pool, and amphitheater for musical productions into the air just because you added wings, because wings is not the technology behind aviation. You're not going to achieve aviation. And I'll go into that in more detail in a future talk, but the bottom line is that blockchain is one component of a whole set of technologies that work in conjunction to achieve one thing, and one thing that matters only decentralization. That is the measure of success. That is what all of the interesting characteristics emerge from. And you can't do without decentralization, right?


The essence of the situation is this would not have happened without the sanctions. You could have had the war, and it would have gone pretty much as it has gone. But the Russian government in 2022 was in no position to force the exit of Western firms. It didn't want to, wouldn't have done that. It was in no position to force its oligarchs to choose between Russia and the West. It didn't wish to do that. These choices were imposed by the West, and their results were actually, in many respects, favorable to the long-term independent development of the Russian Federation's economy. I'm James Galbraith, and I teach at the University of Texas at Austin. Well, there were numerous stated goals, and the most important ones were to, so to speak, defund the war to deprive Russia of export revenue, to prevent Russia from having access to critical technologies, to put pressure on the Russian regime, both through the civilian population and through this group of extremely wealthy people known as the oligarchs. So there were a range of things to degrade Russia's military capacity. The sanctions were imbued by the advocates of this policy with enormous supposed powers and a whole range of things. And you can go back and see the claims that were made in early 2022 and up into the first part of 2023 that the sanctions were, in fact, devastating the Russian economy or rendering it permanently irrelevant to the world. So this was an interesting problem that I thought I'd look into and see to what extent those claims had validity, to what extent they were backed up by evidence. If you take, in particular, the leading advocate of sanctions, which I would say was Professor Sonnenfeld at Yale and his team, they took the view that the sanctions were effectively destroying the Russian capacity to conduct the war. At the time I wrote this paper, which was in the early part of 2023, I was already fairly well persuaded that this was not working out as they expected. But the question was, were they wrong on the facts? Or was it something about the interpretation and the analysis that they brought to a body of facts? And that was the question that the paper really tries to address. While there was a reduction in the flow of Russian oil and gas, other materials, minerals in particular, to their Western markets. So the question was, how does that affect, let's say, Russia's access to international purchasing power? And the answer to that was, it didn't. Because although Russia sold a smaller volume of oil and gas, it sold it at a higher price. So its export revenues actually increased and didn't decrease. And secondly, the effect of the other sanctions and restricting Russian imports meant that Russia was spending less, less on, for example, imported consumer goods than it had been. And so Russia's current account surplus went up. So if you believe that foreign funding was somehow essential to the Russian war effort, actually the sanctions increased Russia's access to foreign funds. Now, I don't believe that this was material in all to the Russian war effort. Because in fact, the Russian war effort was entirely constructed, almost entirely constructed from within Russia. So their access to dollars or euro was essentially immaterial. But that was the argument that was being made. And on its own merits, it failed on the grounds I've just stated. Other things which were substantially more material, let's say, access to components, access to imports of equipment, machinery, that kind of thing, and semiconductors in particular were thought to be essential to Russia's ability to provide material support for the war. And the answer to that is, well, first of all, Russia had this war did not happen at the last minute. The Russians were aware of the risk of being at war for quite some time. So any prudent planning would lead to a stockpiling of anything that they actually needed. It is not even clear to me that there were important components that they needed to acquire in the West for military purposes. There were components, of course, that they needed to acquire for civilian industry, automobiles, aviation, and a lot of non-durable goods, and importing food and various kinds. The reality of that is that the sanctions did interrupt Russian production of many things, cars, appliances. The production indices fell very, very sharply in 2022. But then the question is what happens next? And the answer to that is capacity to produce these major products, for example, automobiles, didn't go away. The factories were there, the workers were there, the managers were there, the engineering was there. So what they needed to do was to replace some designs and some equipment, which they were able to do. In some cases, with the assistance of the Chinese, as the Chinese are now major exporters of automobiles, so they converted lines that had previously been, let's say Japanese or European, to Russian lines, Moskvich, Lada, using Chinese designs, and they've restarted those production lines. I don't know that they are back yet to the volumes that they were previously producing, but they'll get there. It is clearly the industry has been transformed from one which was oriented toward the West, to one which is no longer oriented toward the West, and that's really the effect that the sanctions have had on the Russian civilian economy. And that's true for both durables and non-durbals, the poultry and cheese and other grains and fruits and vegetables, lots of things that Russia imported from Europe or from Turkey. They have in the last eight years and especially in the last year, or so, basically reshorred or onshore to the Russian Federation itself. And so they are making, taking advantage of the opportunities that sanctions, if you go back to the period before introduction of sanctions in 2014 and even up until 2022, the Russian economy was very heavily colonized by Western firms, that was true. Again, automobiles is true in aircraft, it was true in everything from fast food restaurants, big box stores, Western firms were present all throughout the Russian economy. A great many of them, not all, but a great many of them either chose to exit Russia or were pressured to exit Russia after early 2022. So on what terms did they leave? Well, they were required, if they were leaving permanently, to sell their capital equipment, their factories and so forth to, let's say, a Russian business which would get a loan from the Russian banks or maybe have other sources of financing at a very favorable price for the Russians. So effectively a lot of capital wealth which was partly owned by the West has been transferred to Russian ownership and you now have an economy which is moving forward and has the advantage compared to Europe of relatively low resource costs because Russia is a great producer of resources, oil and gas and fertilizer and food stuffs and so forth. And so while the Europeans are paying maybe twice in Germany what they were paying for energy, the Russians are not, they're paying perhaps no more and perhaps less than they were paying before the war. So again, I characterize the effect of the sanctions in fact as being in certain respects a gift to the Russian economy. And this is, I think, quite different from what the authors of the sanctions expected. And the interesting thing here is that the assessment of the impact of the sanctions from the West and from the Russian side is not terribly different. Both sides see this as having a major impact initially on the Russian economy. The Russian Academy of Sciences issued a report in September of 23 that summarizes this as having a major crisis impact on all sectors of the Russian economy. But the difference is that rather than causing a collapse of the economy, the Russians see that what actually happened was an adjustment. And it's an adjustment that you might expect to happen when the conditions are favorable and what you've got is essentially a market economy with capable businesses that are able to move into market space, which has been created for them by the sanctions. And the essence of the situation is this would not have happened without the sanctions. You could have had the war and it would have gone pretty much as it has gone. But the Russian government in 2022 was in no position to force the exit of Western firms. It didn't want to, it wouldn't have done that. It was in no position to force its oligarchs to choose between Russia and the West. It didn't wish to do that. These choices were imposed by the West and their results were actually in many respects favorable to the long-term independent development of the Russian Federation's economy. I don't think that there was an option here that was going to achieve the goals that were set out for sanctions. It is one thing to sanction an island economy like Cuba, which has been under sanctions for many decades and has suffered enormously from the sanctions, or an economy which is essentially a pure resource economy like Venezuela. Again, very difficult for an economy in that position to meet all of its requirements under extensive sanctions from the United States and secondary sanctions and all of that. This is not Russia. Russia is not in this position. Russia has one-sixth of the landmass of the world. It has maybe 20 or 30% of the world's resources. It has 145 million people. It has extreme competence in science and technology and engineering. It has, after the chaos of the 1990s, it has developed a reasonably effective relationship between the state, the parastatal sector, major corporations like Gazprom and the private sector. It was in a position to adjust to the sanctions. Also, of course, it has trading partners. Many of them did not impose the sanctions, the most important of them being, of course, China, but that was also true. The sanctions have not been imposed by major Latin American countries, Brazil, Mexico. They've certainly not been imposed by African countries. They've not been imposed by the BRICS. So Russia is by no means, this is a situation in which the sanctions were imposed by one important sector of the world economy, which then cut itself off from resources that it needs, particularly true in Western Europe, in return for cutting Russia off from various things that Russia doesn't really need and could do without and could adjust to the absence of. And that process has been going on since 2014, but accelerated gravely in 2022, 23.