Tomas didn't want to use his head in Shed 17. Oh, well damn, that boy needs some milk. Hey everyone, Realistic Gaming here and today we're back with some more Thomas. As you can see we started off with some Shed 17, then we're going to move on to some creepy AI generated pictures that Mikey created for us, which are pretty awesome. And then we're going to finish off with some funny Thomas memes from TikTok. So with that being said, let's go ahead and begin and before we do so make sure to smash the like button where Thomas will convey you a visit to your house and it won't be pretty. Okay, so these are the images that Mikey created on an AI. Look at these. They look freaking creepy, but these look dope, like these Funko Pops, dude, if they existed in real life, I would totally buy them. Oh, look at that spider. Oh, okay, that one looks a little funny.  Oh, look at that. Oh, man, look at that thing. It looks like a hideous creature. It's almost as if the spider is trying to take over Thomas's locomotive and he's going to turn them into cursed Thomas. All right, and now we got the Thomas memes from TikTok. I want fish. I'm sorry, Thomas. Engines don't eat fish. So the fish control. The fish control? I want fish. No. Right. Bro, just give my man some fish. Oh, he's chowing down everything. Oh, there's a like wild Luigi fish. Hey, you know, Thomas is gobbling everything down. Got to chill, my boy. Oh, he got tased. Bro, they dragged him out of the market. Oh, they look pretty terrifying, whatever that was. Oh my God. What was that? Oh my God, I'm so sorry. What? Dude, why did he have to scream so violently loud? Like, I understand you had a nightmare of a chill, man. Oh, Percy? There it is again. Percy strikes once again with his nightmare scream. Again, take a right through the tree and you've arrived at your destination. Let's say you never followed GPS. I'm dead with my clothes. Oh my God, what happened to Toby? My clothes. Your stones? Wait, that's not Toby. Oh, what? Was he supposed to be like Uncle Scrooge or something? Hi, Percy. Oh, this looks cool. Why would I want to do that, Thomas? What are they going to do? Tell my parents? That was kind of creepy that Thomas just had like his eyes wide open. I was waiting for Thomas to attack engine one. Oh, that is pretty sick. The Transformer Thomas, like Optimus Thomas, Optimus Prime Thomas. I don't know where to call him. Oh, James? James has spun out of control and he created a nuclear explosion. What? Oh, Special Condor. I did not expect that at the end. Why was he going so crazy to begin with? Yeah, it's Thomas. Thomas. Bro, what? Okay. Oh, he's going to water the Thomas? Oh, okay. Now it's like a super bootleg Thomas we just seen there. Poopwood Doodle Train, okay. What? So the show is basically about Thomas, Poopwood Doodle Train. Understandable. Oh. Yo, Kong. Don't get gone. Gotta chill, bro. Dang, bro. Okay. I ain't going to lie. That was pretty majestic of Thomas to be singing like that. Oh, it definitely did all go wrong. I don't know, man. Some things just go wrong. Wait, Thomas has a foot now. That was strange. Oh. Bro, really? Come on now. Colleague on edge of fight. He'd be like... Oh. That's the first time I've ever seen a Thomas video in Spanish. It's pretty hilarious. Oh, it's gruffy. There you go.  It'd be like that sometime. Oh, not this again. James is about to spin out of control for a second time. Wait, what? Now everybody's spinning. I think that would lead to a catastrophic nuclear world explosion. Wait, what? Oh. I always wanted one of these, but I never got it. I shall get one. Man, that's pretty cool. Creepy at the same time. Okay, that close-up definitely made it creepier. It feels like it's haunting now. Bro, why is it squirting like that, bro? Make a stop. Somebody make a stop, please.  Come on now. Oh. What? Don't you remember the last time I did it? Hey, Gordon, there's something I need to tell you. What is it, Thomas? I lend your coaches to James and he crashed them. Oh. Dude. What? That's a cool little Easter egg, a SpongeBob Easter egg. Oh, there's a spinning love cat. Look at it. Percy is like, really, bro? I need somewhere to be, man. This is very wholesome. That was very wholesome right there. That was a wholesome moment in the Thomas and Friends universe.  My name is Thomas and I'm the number one tanker. No matter why, Thomas is annoying. Percy, I heard that you called me annoying behind my back. Dang. Yes, I did that because you are. How could you do this to me? No, Thomas, I'm sorry.  Oh, wait. Gordon? Bro, what just happened? Spin 2. Oh no, not another spin. Because these are actual locomotives.  I don't know, man. These vibes are just off right now. Oh my god, it's spinning faster, I think. At least that's what it feels like. Where will it stop? I don't think it's going to stop, is it? I don't think it's going to stop unless there's an explosion at the end. It can stop. I don't think it's going to stop, is it? I don't think it's going to stop unless there's an explosion at the end. It can stop right now. Please. Okay, I don't think it's going to stop, bro. Bro, it's just spinning for, like, an entire minute already. Dude, okay, this is getting out of the pocket, man. This is getting out of the pocket. Let's fast forward a little bit. Finally, Jesus. I am the fastest at Gordon. Oh. But he had, like, a rocket. Strap behind him. Gordon could not believe what he had seen. Was that Thomas flying by? I think it was. Thomas Roll Call Dance Party? Bro, what? They look like Slendy Tubbies. Hey, get it. Thomas, James, Percy, Gordon, Henry. The duck. Toby. I think I named them all. I don't know, man. I tried my best, okay? Oh my God, that looks creepy. Look at his eyes. Oh, who's that? Is that Percy? Bro, look at his eyes. He had, like, his eye was, like, off to the side. Okay, I think this is even longer than the spinning one. You know what? Let's just watch, man. This is content right here. Hey, hey.  They do be getting down. Oh my God, look at Toby.  All right. Well, oh, well, that is the end of Thomas the Train TikTok memes. All right, ladies and gentlemen, if you enjoyed the video, make sure to drop a like, comment, share the video, all that good stuff. Thank you guys for watching. You guys are awesome. And I'll see you guys in the next one. Peace.


As reactions continue to trail the emergence of Bola Amitinibo's president-elect, aggrieved candidates should congratulate and work with the president-elect, Bola Amitinibo for Roberta and United Nigeria. This was the position of philanthropist and businessman Emeka Akbar during his address on the state of the nation, where he talked about the just-concluded general elections, the central bank of Nigeria, narrow redesign policy, and his choice for senate presidency touching on the narrow redesign policy he said the CBN has made quite a mess of the banking institution in Nigeria. Even if you claim that the election was rigged, you will also still have to express some appreciation to the fact that at least you were given an opportunity and a platform to even participate in the process. And if you feel that the election was rigged, just try to take it as one of those things because your interests and your ambition are not bigger than the interests of the entire country. Scott Menefiele is a bad banker.  He shouldn't even allow people to call for his resignation. He should have resigned the moment he admitted that he had done so much wrong and where I was told that he apologized three days ago, Nigeria's must understand that apology is over in competency. It's not a problem that created a mess. This time around that they are about to organize the senate president's election. I think it will be very, very nice if no one else contest it against Agus O'Carno.


At Georgia Power, keeping your lights on is our top priority. When power outages happen, we want you to know we're working hard to restore your power as soon as possible. With Georgia Power's new outage notification alerts, you can sign up to be notified by email, text message, or phone with helpful outage information, including the estimated restoration time. Simply log into your account from the georgiapower.com homepage using your PC or tablet. On the left side of the screen under the outage category, click on set outage alerts and set your contact preference. Enter your specific information and choose if you would like to set a no contact time of day. You will receive a confirmation to verify your enrollment if you enroll in text or email. You can even register up to five devices to keep your whole family informed. You also have the option to enroll for text messages directly from your smartphone. Text REG to G-A-P-W-R to sign up using your phone number or Georgia Power account number and zip code. You will be asked to confirm your address and accept the terms and conditions, which will complete the registration process. It's a simple, easy, and fast way to get the latest status on your outage situation. In the event of an outage, Georgia Power will notify you with an estimated restoration time and let you know the reason for the outage once the power outage has been assessed by our crews. If an unexpected delay of more than 60 minutes takes place, you will receive a status update with an adjusted estimated restoration time. You can find additional outage details for your area on our outage map. Georgia Power is constantly updating and deploying the latest technology to make sure our customers receive clean, safe, reliable, and affordable energy.


Numbers from the Red Cross are 201 homes have been assessed, the residents have been assessed, 14 are declared destroyed, 103 are major, nine are minor, and 16 are affected. What is the community need and how can we help? That's in the bottom line. Then there's a process by which that gets communicated to the State Emergency Operations Center and then we put the right appropriate troops and package together essentially and then make sure that that package gets to the point of need, point of impact in a safe manner. The Bethel team is pulling folks back this morning from two places, Hooper Bay and Coplick. They are putting folks into Alekhna and Cheevac. They will be there overnight and then they're looking to go to four more places. I'm really proud to say that this has been an extremely coordinated response effort. Executed in support of our state partners with our federal and nonprofit partners. From the actions of our National Guard, from the Alaska State Defense Force as well as the Alaska Naval Militia, who have been on the ground in the hardest hit areas doing everything that they do so well. They want to help others and that's the way we do it as people in uniform who do have a servant's heart and say, yeah I'm good to go but I'll go help out and they do it a drop of a hat.


So, in this video, we're going to take some time to calculate the area of a somewhat irregular shape. This irregular shape is the side of a Tian Deng flying lantern, and we're interested in finding the area of this shape because we're interested in figuring out how much weight there is per area of the paper casing that goes around the Tian Deng. However, this is not a standard shape. We can't use area equals length times width. We can't use area equals pi r squared or any of our standard formulas because we have a relatively irregular shape. So, we're going to use a method called numerical integration, particularly something called the trapezoidal rule, where we will approximate this shape by slicing it into each part and then do a pretty good approximate calculation for each of these slices. Now, you'll notice over here this sort of pedal shape that we had. This pedal shape, if we take it and we slice it, which is a measurement you've hopefully done earlier if you are doing this full analysis, if we slice it into slices here, each of these slices is spaced by roughly the same amount. In this case, these are all 20 units, and then this last increment is a little bit different. It's at ten and a half. But if we look at each of those pieces there and we kind of take a look at one of these, if I take that piece and I connect the points where those slices connect and I draw across the bottom here and I draw across the top and then even though these are curved, I'm going to draw a straight line from the two points on either side here and I'm going to notice that that shape is a trapezoid. Well, that trapezoidal shape isn't the perfect estimate of that shape there, but it's pretty good. It just misses a little bit of that curvature. If I wanted to get more accurate, I could divide that in half and then that little extra bump there would create slightly different trapezoids that would be better approximations. Then I could do that again, divide and divide, and I can make it as small as I wanted and each time I would get a little closer to the truth of that curve. But one of the tenets we use for numerical computation is more accuracy equals more work. Every time I divide those in half, that gives me a whole new set of data points and a whole new set of calculations that I'm doubling the number of calculations each time. So I have to decide some balance between the number of measurements and calculations I do and the level of accuracy I expect. I also have to realize that some of my measurements that I took here only have a certain level of precision, so getting too intense on how much calculation I do might just be wasted with the amount of precision that I'm taking here. In your examples, if you're following along with this set of lessons, you should probably have about twice as many here. I'm just keeping my numbers a little bit smaller for this demonstration. Also, we're going to do all of our calculations here by hand. However, doing those calculations by hand, we could actually probably simplify. We have columns and rows here. Generally when we see a process that's repeated over and over again and we are organizing our stuff in rows and columns, that would be a really good exercise for a spreadsheet. So let's talk about how we're going to go about doing this. Let's consider this, take this trapezoid and move it over here for a second. Here's a trapezoid and let's talk about what we know about finding the area of a trapezoid. Well, if you look at a trapezoid, any trapezoid like this, and if it's a regular trapezoid, which we're going to assume these are pretty close to being, you can usually take off this part, slice it over there and put it over to the other side, looking something like that. So we see that we have something that's somewhat like area equals base times height. Well, officially, the formula of area for a trapezoid, area for a trapezoid, is going to be equal to the height. We are going to have some perpendicular height here. There's a height there. And then we're going to have some combination of the two bases. Let's call this base one and call this base two. Well, in that particular case, if we take the average of the two bases, one half base one plus base two, notice I just put the one half underneath the height, there's our formula for the area of a trapezoid. We take these two and add them up, divide it by two, so we're averaging them. So it's basically the average width times the height, and that will give us the area of our trapezoid. Well, in order to do that with our data here, notice we're going to need a couple other columns that represent, well, first of all, this height from each of our trapezoids, which we said is pretty consistent, although it's a little different with the last one. So we're going to calculate it for each one. So we're going to need a value for our height, and we're going to call this the change in height because we've already called this h here, the height between each one. So our change in height between each of these is going to be important. And then we're also going to want something that we're going to call this one half base one plus base two, while our bases are just these widths we've measured. So I'm going to label that as w bar, meaning an average. It's a pretty standard notation for an average, so I'm going to go ahead and make a column for w bar, sort of this average width that's in between each of these. All right, so now that I'm going to do this, I'm going to need to have some extra columns to sort of put into place. So I'm going to go ahead and erase this picture here, and then we'll get back and put in the columns to calculate what do I need here? So we're looking for our delta h and then our w bar. Okay, so now I'm ready to put together my two columns here because I'll use those two things and multiply them together. Remember, my delta h times my w bar is what my area is going to be. So that's the final thing that I'm looking for is there's the one half base one plus base two and there's the height of each trapezoid. So I'm going to go ahead and calculate each of these. Now notice, and this is where it can become a little strange if you're using a spreadsheet, that the values we're calculating come from a connection between two subsequent rows. So as I write these columns, if I'm writing it on a piece of paper, I can kind of write it in between so that it represents a relationship between this piece and this piece or this piece and this piece. In a spreadsheet, you can't really do that. Everything stays lined up, so you have to kind of keep track of what you're doing. What I like to do when I'm doing that in a spreadsheet is even though it's on the same line, I will often use color in the column to indicate that this column is shifted a little bit, but here we can just write it up so it's shifted. So notice I go 20 minus zero. That's the change in height along this first stack. 20 minus zero, so that's 20.0. Similarly, 40 minus 20 is 20.0. And again, notice I'm writing it kind of in the middle of my rows here. Again, 20.0, 20.0, and then my last one is only 10.5. Now if we were doing a true trapezoidal rule in math, we would try to make sure that these were perfectly even, and then we could use sort of a longer formula that didn't take into account that one of these was different. But we're going to go ahead and just calculate each slice separately. All right, so now what I want to do is find the average between the two that are here. Each one of the ones that are here, so I'll have to add these two things together and then divide by two. So 70, that looks like 77.4, so that ends up being 37.5 plus two more, 37.7, I believe is the average of those two values there. And notice again, this is something that's calculated in between each of those parts. So I'm going to go ahead and sort of write it in a staggered row. So I'm going to go ahead and calculate the rest of these. This looks like somewhere between 51, this is 51.3, and this is going to be 56.3. This one's a little bit harder, 80, 90, 4, 95, I believe that's going to be 47.5, and last but not least, 19.3. Give me one second, I'm going to check and make sure my numbers are right. All right, and I was right, there is an error in here. Some of you following along may have found out that this is actually supposed to be 38.7, and there we go. So there's our value there, I did make a small error in that particular case. So now what do I do with each of these values? First of all, let's go ahead and recognize that these units are still in centimeters. We were adding and subtracting units in centimeters, so we get values in centimeters. And now I can simply take each of these values and multiply them. And what does each of those values represent? Well, it represents the area of one of my trapezoids. So in this case, let me do all the multiplications, and I'll go ahead and write them out here. Okay, so I've recorded all my area values here, 774, 1026, 1126, 950, 203. Notice I've also paid attention to how many significant digits I have. In each of these cases, I appear to have three significant digits. So as I move forward here, I keep three. Here it looks like I have four, but I like to follow a rule that if my first digits are one, if we just roll over and all my other multiplications that are similar are still in that, that I often treat that as a single digit. So we end up with a similar level of uncertain digit here. So there's three digits, three digits, three digits. And then this last one, because I was not multiplying by 20, but I was instead multiplying by 10.5, I got a value in my calculator of 202.65. Well, notice I could write that .65 down. Many high school students would, but then I would have this .65 added on when none of these actually have that level of precision. So I went ahead and used the appropriate number of significant figures here, which is still three. And we write round that up to 203. So now what do we have? We have one, two, three, four, five sections for which we've calculated the area of each. Notice this one is particularly small, not only because it goes to zero at that point, but it was only about half the height in the first place. Do you notice we do count that zero in there because that sort of accounts for a triangle. Remember the area of a triangle is one-half base times height. Well, remember that base, the second base is zero, so that's where that other base goes, and you still have the same formula for a triangle. It's just specialized to one of the sides being zero. Now, what do I do with these? Well, first of all, let's talk about the units. These are all in square centimeters because I did a centimeter times a centimeter. They're all units of area, which is what I would expect. And then finally, I total these to be 4,079 square centimeters. And that would be the area of one side of my lantern, noting that there are four of them. The surface area of the lantern, surface area of the entire lantern, would then be, let's see here, what we've got, 16,316 square centimeters for the surface area of the entire Tian Deng, using my numbers here. Notice then, with that surface area, if we were interested in sort of having a density value, not a true density because we're talking about density per unit area, not density per unit volume, but if we wanted a value like that, we could then take the mass of the paper and divide it by that surface area to get a density value for our paper that we could then use later on if we were building something to estimate the mass of the paper we would be using.


I should be able to... I feel like I'll have to do this out. It'll come from what I have in mind when this is... I feel like I'll have to do this out. I think that we have to really care. I feel like I'll have to do this out. Alright, thank you for being patient with us. We had to restart that so hopefully your parents got it but it'll be recorded. They can go back and watch it later if not. So we will start with our third place and I'm going to have the coach come up and then announce your students' names as they come up and move them down to their medals. So remember, Catholic is third place. Would you like to come up? I'm Josh, explainer. And then stay up here, guys. Congratulations coach and team. Thank you. Get closer to three and four and back, three in front. Kind of split. Split one there. Something of that kind. Alright, ready? I'll take another one. Great. There you go. There you go. That looks good. Let's see, I'm going to have Casey Peterson, Preston Walsh, Captain Vincent Bolland, Steve Dieter. We know the drill, huh? You've done this before. That's fine. That's fine. Vincent Bolland.


Zero Accounting Software 2023 Rental Income Setup Items Get ready to become an Accountant Hero with Zero 2023 Here we are in our Custom Zero homepage going into the company file we set up in a prior presentation. That being Get Great Guitars. Duplicating tabs to put reports in. We're going to right-click the tab up top so we can duplicate it. Right-click in the duplicated tab and duplicating again. Back to the tab to the middle. Accounting drop-down. We want to open the balance sheet. Then we'll tab to the right. We want to open the accounting drop-down. This time the income statement but the comparative income statement. The one we set up in a prior presentation comparing January and February. Currently working on the month of February. If you don't have that one you could just open the normal income statement. Tab into the left. We're going to change the date range.


Sayre coordinators. The topic for this session is sustainable sweet corn production and our speaker is Sayre farmer rancher grant recipient from a few years ago, and it's she's going to be talking about the people sweet corn production And I'm Larissa from Warren County in southwestern, Ohio All right welcome and like I said, I'll be talking about my research in sustainable sweet corn production Can you all hear me? Okay at this volume? No, this is my project number in case you all have any questions about it afterwards you can look it up on the Sayre website So it's just a reference thing So first I'll talk about my personal background I'm a student at the University of Kentucky. I graduated in May 2013 with a bachelor's of science and sustainable agriculture Then I started last fall to work on getting my master's of science and nutritional sciences I am the co-owner along with my younger brother of the community family farm CSA It's a vegetable CSA and we focus on mostly supporting our customers through fresh local produce and we also provide farm partnerships with people who raise eggs and Thieves and pork and also also honey and my mom and I made Jams and jellies with local fruit and all those things are extra for sale We started doing that a couple of years ago Because people said they wanted to have like a one-stop-shop sort of deal instead of just getting the vegetables from us So I'll talk a little bit about applying for a Ceregrant These are things that I thought would be useful and helpful for people who are thinking about maybe applying for a Ceregrant First you have to think of your idea. Once you think of your idea Make sure that that idea is meaningful to you It's interesting to you as well as to your community because part of Ceregrants is an outreach component So if it's interesting to you and meaningful to you also make sure it's meaningful to the communities So that outreach is a good part of the project Then you need to research the idea on the Cere database to make sure it hasn't already been done Especially in your region if it's been done maybe in New England or Florida Then it's a little bit different because the climate is so much different here But try to make sure it's unique Make sure what you're what you're gonna be doing is using the money in a resourceful way Also, I would suggest seeking help from someone who's already written a grant trying to find someone from a university And if you have a college bag nearby or an extension agent, maybe they've written a grant I worked with one of my professors Dr. Krista Jacobson She writes a lot of grants and I just felt that it was really helpful to go in with my idea and with the proposal and I said this is what I want to do But I've never written a grant before and I was a junior in college and I just said what how do I even start and she Helped me work through the process and I thought that was especially helpful Coming from someone who's successfully written several grants I also contacted my regional chair coordinator Alan Sundermeier and He was very helpful because he made some suggestions to the proposal and said these are things you might want to think about before you submit it to the committee to review it and Outreach is key They really like to see a lot of outreach to show that you're sharing your results from your research with the community with other Farmers so that this research can be applied to many other applications My project purpose the purpose was to see which method of Sweet corn production would be most sustainable Basically in my area The main problem I saw was that of the white corn that was chosen to grow was mostly silver queen and Silver Queen has a lot of issues with the fungal disease smut And so because of this people were losing a lot of Production and yields to this disease and I just felt that there had to be another white corn Sweet variety that people would enjoy eating as consumers the growers could also feel was a realistic choice So then I thought to have like a double randomized trial where I could do The heirloom varieties versus hybrid varieties and the hybrid varieties being my control because that's what most of people in my area grew Then I would also have the organic versus the conventional so that I can see Again the conventional being the control because that's what most people in my area do and then see if the organic was really a viable option for farmers in terms of money and output and based on soil results That I've done through soil tests So my hypothesis was that the heirloom corn would be better received by consumers and more resistant insects I also thought the conventional corn Practices would be more practical in terms of time and cost Farmers often times they're pushing their budget limits They're doing a lot of work themselves so they don't have a lot of time And so I thought that those would be things that would end up more in favor on the conventional production side So these are some of the project and I tried to put a lot of pictures throughout this so that you can sort of see how things were going And then if you think of any questions, you're welcome to ask throughout the Presentation or you can save them to the end just your all preference So these are some of the major tasks that I had to do during the course of the project So I started with ordering the seeds and then I didn't find which areas on the farm We wanted to plant the land that I use was my parents farm and I just wear this for a vegetable CSA So I just took part of that Um Then I had help with from my dad and my younger brother was preparing the ground I planted the corn and then when You know, I didn't feel that enough of the population came up for the amount of seeds that I planted that I would replant certain patches Just by ripping out a patch and then replanting it all together Then we fertilized harvested counted yo data insect data disease data And that was mostly just observational just like how often did this patch get the disease that it's spread to the other patches? We did put the organic section on a different area than the conventional section In hopes that it wouldn't affect one or the other These are tools that I used We did part of the Cerebrant budget I bought a backpack sprayer so that it when I was spraying the herbicide on the conventional corn Then I wouldn't have to use one of the little hand pump five gallon at a time deal This is a bigger container. It's easy to carry and it has a mechanized so you just turn it on in the sprays The earth way cedar down in the bottom right corner is how I planted the corn So it's not like a popper type thing in it and the different wheels for corn and that's I use that because that's what I like what our area use that's what we were using on our part of the time So something was going to work and needed to work with what we were already using This fertilizer in the bucket on the bottom left is the first the conventional fertilizer the triple 20 Nitrogen synthetic fertilizer And we just get that from the local ag supply store for the organic fertilizer We did use chicken manure that wasn't locally sourced, but it was organic So for planting you can see here on the bottom left This is my dad and I planting he was working out a kink with one of the belts And I was going back through and making sure the top covered up We found that when it's done with this planter that sometimes the seeds are always covered up And then if you don't go back and just like take a little dirt over them Then the birds come through and pick the seeds out even before they have a chance to sprout And then bottom right is when I was staking because we have a problem with crows Eating our little sprouts. So when the corn first comes out, but it's just doesn't even have roots in the ground very much It's just sprouting off the seeds still crows will come through and pull the corn right out of the ground But if you take like old popcans out of your cycle invent Tie them to like what's tomato twine to a wooden stake and stake them in the ground The noise rattling around generally keeps a lot away Fertilizing this is an example of a process of fertilizing First we started to use the fertilizer with like a grass seed spreader Thinking that it would broadcast over it But then I felt like after doing that for one row that it wasn't really getting on the row And it wasn't the most effective way to use the fertilizer So then we just took it in the hand and just like toss it down the row like you would synthetic fertilizer Budget components. I had some outside labor and I traveled to the over conference last year was an exhibitor in the exhibit hall and has some posters and So I needed some supplies for that to create my posters print the pictures out and to get the registration for the conference A really nice thing about the sear grants is that they really want you to include everything that you can in your budget So the farmer themselves is not in a pocket or anything So they include you they encourage you to include things like your gas up here and just making sure that it's the appropriate rate For when you get reimbursement for things. I Also had money for supplies such as seeds and fertilizers gas I had electric fencing materials because we have a deer problem and a raccoon problem getting into our corn We use the solar powered electric box and then strung two rows of Metal wire around one about hip height so that the deer would be blocked and one about angle height So the raccoons will be blocked I've also seen people do three rows of it, but I didn't particularly feel this was necessary So now I'm going to go through the different varieties of the corn that I chose and some pictures of the seed the plants and Your corn at the end. So this is stoles evergreen. It's an heirloom white variety and this was grown conventionally As you can see, that's me in the corn patch and that's a pretty tall variety of sweet corn In terms of yellow bodacious, which is a hybrid variety that's commonly grown It's usually about as tall as I am So that was particularly tall It was fairly easy to plant the kernels went nicely through the earth way sear And then I always have the planting dates here Golden bantam is the heirloom yellow corn So it was very hard to plant because of the way the seeds were shaped They would constantly get stuck in the planter and then you have to like pop them out and replant it and the population wasn't as good because Not as many came out when you were walking with the planter Blue jade is the um Basically, I had I had three hybrid varieties a white a yellow and a bicolor and so instead of a bicolor heirloom, which I don't really think As far as I can tell from my research there aren't bicolor heirlooms. So I chose a colored variety of heirloom coordinates blue jade Um, it was very easy to plant the kernels were very tiny and as you can see again the plant height I mean it was up to like mid five on me. So the plant height was very small um, we had some damage to it before the raccoon fencing was put up just because um Um It was so low to the ground that the raccoons could just run through and rip it off So we had some damage to that and that's the color of the corn up there. So it's a very beautiful color What do you mean by that like sweet corn too? Yeah, we ate it. Um, I mean we just like Boiled it for five minutes and put some butter and salt on it and ate it. Um, it's not quite as tender As some other varieties of corn. It's I think personally it would better if you were grinding a cornmeal Um, but it is still still still tasty This is the silver queen and it's um, it's our white hybrid variety And we planted it a little bit later and then we also had to replant it and that was by hand So we just I just went through and like replanted it because I saw when it was little enough That it wasn't going to be enough. So I just went through I also had to trouble with earthquake cedar in this one, which is kind of interesting because I had never had problems planting silver queens that planted before This is the bodacious which I was talking to you about earlier. It's our yellow hybrid. Um, and so The with the convention or with the hybrid varieties I had a lot of difficulties finding organic seed like organic certified seed and so because of that That's why I have on this one. Um, the organic planted So if it has them on the same slide, that probably means that I didn't wasn't able to find seed Puget and cream was the Bicolored variety that I chose and it's a beautiful variety and a lot of customers really like that variety We like it. It's easy to grow Um, we did have some problems with the population and I replanted it later on The silver queen, um, this is a really good example of what the issue is When I was doing proposing for this grant. This is the fungal disease smudge. It's an airborne disease those spores Infect the they can affect many parts of the corn most commonly affect the kernel of the corn so each of these Things here is a kernel of corn And now it's been infected and it's blown up and it's but it's moldy and it's To us in general it's inedible. Um, however, I have found that it is a delicacy in a lot of Mexican restaurants and If you were ever able to propagate it and grow it on purpose you would probably make a fortune Because it's very very expensive. It's sold at the pound and it weighs hardly nothing So, um, and that's an example of how much foliage is on a silver queen plate. That's why that picture is there No, it kind of grosses me out And it's something I try to prevent so I don't know. I've never had it but Yeah How many how large Do we hear plots as far as anchorage? Um, each so each section each variety And each treatment organic and conventional got four rows each 150 feet long I did four rows because a lot of times the outer two rows have different Effects for different populations of different yields than inner rows So that way I had inner and outer instead of just multiple rows To plant the silver silver queen organic? But all the varieties were planted organically and conventionally This is the golden bantam organic It had to be replanted This one was interesting because remember the conventional golden bantam was hard to plant with the earth plant planter This one wasn't as hard to plant but Still difficult Souls evergreen organic This was personally one of my favorites and seemed to grow very nicely and it did well and Um with the with the chicken manure fertilizer, it just really seemed to this combination seemed to work really well There's a solar drink that you have as much sugar content in that as you did in the others I did not evaluate sugar content. I found that that solar does not have as a good sugar Sugar taste as some of the other varieties and it has shorter shelf life 20 you know when you go to the farmers market itself. Yeah Um Was this the way I marketed my products is through a community supported agriculture. So Because we have so many customers We have about 175 customers and I don't want them all coming in on one day and picking up So we pick the day of so We have a cold room like a walk-in cooler where we can store things and things get ready before They need to be picked but in general if I'm picking corn I'm picking it The morning of they come pick it up that afternoon um part of the analysis I did Was I had a grower satisfaction from our end and I had a consumer satisfaction And I'll talk about that a little bit later, but it's basically like a blind Um survey where I gave some of my customers and said we Try this out Tell me how you liked it and I didn't tell them whether it was heirloom or hybrid or Organic or conventional, but I've marked down which ones they were trying and that was kind of interesting So results like I said, I'm a measured grower and consumer satisfaction I measured yield population planting Ear length and plant height So in general the hybrids were more uniform and stalk size and ear length And they were more uniform and and maturation So for instance with the golden bantam, um, it was hard to tell When it was ready because the cob itself was so small around That comparatively to any other variety I have ever grown that when I felt it it felt like it wasn't ready But then when I picked one It looked ready and I tasted it and it tasted ready So it was easy to get that to a point where it was almost too Ready and then it became a little bit tough um With the silver queen that was the exception because it did not mature Appropriately and I had to go through and pick that patch several times Which is not ideal for farmers because farmers would just like to pick the patch clean Maybe pick it a second time and be gone with it Um, that's how most of the hybrid varieties were most of the heirloom varieties. You kind of had to like spot pick Um comparing the organic and the conventional Honestly, the labor time wasn't that different. I expected it to be tremendously higher on the organic side because there was going to have to be weeding time and Um, but it it just wasn't that different the hours long and the conventional Plots and the hours long when the organic plots were higher in the organic plots but not Detrimental, so I don't think it's a hindrance to do it organically based on labor time alone Um, the conventional was less expensive in the seed It was easier to find in bulk a lot of times like with the blue jade seed I had to buy it smaller packages and when things are bought in smaller packages they cost more money So that was kind of a hindrance Oh, this was the herbicide that I sprayed the conventional with the bolly atz And I chose that because after consulting with the ag guy who we usually consult with at the supply store Because it has the atz which is the atrazine in it and it's got um A broadleaf as well. So it both this particular product kills broadleafs and grasses So that's why I chose that one So now I'm going to go through a couple of graphs um along the bottom it has The varieties that I've grown same means conventional and means organic I'll just pinpoint a few of the results The bodacious yellow, which is the yellow hybrid variety grown conventionally was personally My favorite to grow easiest to pick out the stalk matured most uniformly Um, I didn't have any problems with weed pressure disease pressure insect pressure hardly any earworms I just felt like it was really easy corn to grow didn't take that much maintenance Um, also the stoles evergreen conventionally was also one of my favorites to grow Didn't I mean that one had probably the least amount of earworms The reason it wasn't the highest on my list was because it doesn't Mature uniformly and so I had to spot pick it and I wasn't I didn't always have enough ready for everyone that day So I had to mix varieties and let people sort of pick and choose which is okay It's just not the way I usually try to run the csa The lowest one was a silver queen organic. There was so much smut issues with it, um They didn't see it didn't seem to respond as well to the chicken manure compared to the synthetic nitrogen fertilizer It just was not Not my favorite to grow Did you repeat it to top ones again? Yeah, the top ones are bodacious conventional and stoles evergreen conventional And this is the consumer satisfaction Again the top two the top one was the peaches and cream organic And the second was the bodacious conventional um What was interesting was that the conventional and the organic taste wise when people or the tenderness and all these things that they were Evaluating it didn't seem to be that much Different they didn't seem to have a preference one way or the other Especially because they weren't They didn't know like it's an organic as a conventional Not to say they didn't have preferences personally with their morals or their health beliefs about conventional versus organic But in terms of taste which is what some people say is their reasoning for buying organic They couldn't taste the difference And this is a listing just from like top to bottom So at the top is the highest ranked At the bottom is the lowest ranked Blue jade was the lowest on the consumers. They just said it was kind of mealy It was a little more tough the ear length isn't near as long as you'll see on one of the Future graphs I mean they're only like Four inches five inches long and the ear length instead of you know an eight or ten inch ear Which is what people like to have because if they're just going to buy a dozen You know a dozen as a dozen regardless of how long or how thick the kernels are Um and the growers the silver queens were my least favorite to grow just because of how many I had to throw out because of smut I mean smut like I said can be profitable in a situation, but for the vegetable csa They don't want it. I can't use it Followed by the golden bantam because it was hard to plant it matured Oddly it was hard to tell when it was ready How did you ask the consumers To evaluate what did you give them a tool? What would you I gave them a form an evaluation form explaining what my project was and I sort of You know randomly and thought about which customers to ask because I knew which ones would be like no I don't want to do this and I knew which ones would be okay with doing an answer honestly um, and so then I would just give them two varieties per week and so at the Who we have is like a regular share and a robust share and the robust share gets a dozen ears of corn per week when in season And the regular share gets six years So then I would just say I'm going to split your share of corn among two varieties and then I would tell them This is variety a this is variety would be if they looked too similar I would put them in like separate containers marked like ab And then in my book I would mark down which varieties I was giving out that day And I had them evaluate qualities like tenderness taste how easy was it to cook that you're going to like it Things like those These are the yields Um, so the varieties are on the bottom and the blue is conventional. The red is organic So you can see it's not always one or the other Um, what was interesting though was the heirloom varieties are These three are the heirloom varieties and you can see grown in the conventional manner Always had significantly higher yields Which I kind of thought would be the reverse just because heirloom was grown Traditionally organic not conventional um And and two of the hybrid varieties the organic Was more productive and again, I thought that was sort of reverse Because the hybrid varieties were Made to be grown conventionally, but that's not always the best way for the yields Especially the peaches and cream This is a table showing you air length So, um, the starts these top three are the hybrids these bottom three are the heirloom varieties Obviously the stoles evergreen And the peaches and cream bodacious Well, all of these are pretty much long and then the golden band two were short. You can see the blue j Um was very short comparatively stoles evergreen was obviously the highest. I mean 13 and a half inches Grown conventionally is I mean that's a long ear of corn. That's over a foot long And those are averages taken from a sampling of different years This is population per planting. So you can see, um, it wasn't always One way or the other But again, I mean, this is such a dramatic difference the heirloom The population the conventional plantings was so much higher than the population and the organic plantings I mean just so much higher and I Not exactly sure why that is but I was very surprised by that result to say the least Yeah, so the number of plants so I just went through like one two three and at the end of each row I marked my book how many and then I counted three to the four rows. So I just went through and counted them all This is plant height Um And now when I just went out there at the tape measure and I just my brother is six four. So I had him Ordered at the top and I measured it down at the bottom like that. What does this say? And then you tell me what it says and I record it in my notebook Um, and again, these are averages set multiple plants. So I went through and then just pick like tallest and the shortest But you can see it's Soles evergreen was obviously the tallest but you can see it on the picture as well when I'm standing there It was just it just towered over me Why did you include plant height as one of your parameters? Um, I thought that it might show a difference in conventional versus organic because I thought maybe one of the fertilizers the other would allow the plant growth to be taller I don't know necessarily a good thing because if you're still only getting in production two years of corn Per planting then I'm not sure maybe it's a waste of energy to grow that tall of a plant When you're only getting two years of corn because of the blue jade I mean you would get a 36 inch Plant that's three feet tall, but on that plant I got like six years of corn and so That's probably just thinking about it logically a more energy efficient plant Then say 117 inches or still is evergreen, but only only get two years for plant um I don't know that that's really important for producers because we're not trying to maximize energy use in terms of fertilizer, but If anyone was ever looking at like the biomechanics or biofuel sort of things That would be interesting This is part of my outreach Project. This is me last year at the OFA conference. I was an exhibitor at the booth um I also had a local newspaper article about the project And I talked to a local farmer to see what his thoughts were about the results and to help me with part of the discussion for the Report to talk about why things might have been different or what could have been and he's a local farmer He's been doing it for his whole life, and he's probably about 75 years old. So he's still in production So he must know a thing or two Um, I was also a keynote speaker at the Warren county soil and water conservation districts annual conference They had myself and a chief meteorologist in our area come and speak at their conference. So That was a really good outreach opportunity And then I was at a field day where people came to my farm and Saw the plots and asked questions about what was going on and why did I think do things differently? That sort of thing Um, this is the benefits and impacts and this Um square here shows what people were evaluating and the consumer evaluation um part of the benefits, um improved stream quality because we have a Um water conservation plan with NRCS for the waterways and the no till type feel and um where our conventional plots are are right next to and a little bit above on terms of height For we're spraying the atrazine. So when it rains too much, I'm sure that those soils are just going right into the water stream um So if that on the organic plot, it was certainly improved compared to the conventional because the previous year is if I hadn't been doing this trial all of it would have been conventional and Um, so it would have been twice as much runoff Um manure use increased herbicide decreased Um marketing the farm produce increased people were really interested in the fact that I had heirloom varieties They like having different varieties They really enjoy the experience of learning their other varieties out there than just You know what they see in kroger what they see in even whole foods Um things they just can't get and that goes beyond just sweet corn with eggplants or peppers or tomatoes And people really enjoyed the multiple varieties. In fact with the egg plant on our farm I found that the black beauty which is the typical eggplant is people's least favorite So what did we learn? Consumers can't taste the difference in sweet corn between organic and conventional Again, like I said, they may have reasons that they choose organic health reasons or environmental reasons But in terms of taste they cannot taste the difference This is a picture of the field day down here When we're showcasing the sweet corn What to do differently so if I could do it again, I would consider personal labor costs Uh, I considered in the budget outside labor costs because obviously I had to pay someone else to help me with this I did not consider my own personal time as a cost And I think that's something if you're all going to apply for a grant that you should definitely consider I mean, I enjoyed it anyway, but I mean realistically if I hadn't been doing the work I would have had to pay someone else to do it and that would have been a cost Um, I'd also have more specifically designated tasks. So it was easy for me to say This needs done whoever's available can do it, but it would be nice to say You know counting the population is my job and fertilizing is So it's their job and when it needs done that I could just be Aware that that person needs to spend time during their day to do that Um, I would also do more insect scouting. I didn't really do that in a scientific manner I did it more of an observational way where I could just say That variety didn't have any and that one had a lot but a lot I mean, it's subjective. So Um, I think that's one thing that it was part of a weakness in my grant And then I would also talk to more farmers in the area to show my results and to share them Yeah Oh gosh, um It had It probably was close to 200 Including like the researching the planting the fertilizing the harvesting without reach with preparation writing the grant Final report all those things probably close to 200 The serigran will pay you for your labor. Yeah That's one thing farmers that we work with on the grants They say, okay, I'll put in here a dollar an hour or it's like no We should be put in Donald's weight in there, right? I mean try to find it keep in mind even if it's time intensive It will pay you for your labor, which is a little different At some point. Yeah, and it's different and again like with the gas mileage I mean there's a set rate that you have for gas mileage and there's a good and make it comparable to what the pay is in your area So if for some reason it's way higher in your area than the state or national Average, you know, maybe put in your budget explanation like this is higher because And just list your reason So where do we go from here? This bottom right picture is just an aerial view from the top of our house of the vegetable csa plots But we have decided to keep stills evergreen to replace silver queen Customers like it better. It grows better. There's less disease on it It matures more uniformly And then we've also switched to using the chicken manure at least on their sweet corn production and occasionally on other vegetables when we have left over Just because it responds the plants respond really well and If you can get it from the right source, it can be less expensive better for the environment It's just a nice sort of circle of life concept And then I also have decided to let the customer be a variety or part of a variety experimentation Again with the eggplant with the tomatoes they can say I really like this one Or I didn't like this one at all. It's easy to tell at the end of the day Which varieties of tomatoes are left over and if they're consistently left over people don't like that variety and you change it And these are some of my acknowledgements. I moved to the Ohio Farm Bureau The conservation district my family all helped OPA helped with allowing me to be here as a presenter Um Clarksville ag I had sarah staff and regional coordinators and my professor at the University of Kentucky She was a big help in helping me write the proposal So If you all have any questions now, I will take those Um, no, I don't have a really good record of that Basically within the family farm system we each have our own Set up where we have traditional roles and responsibilities And my dad is responsible for Because he's done this his whole life. I mean, he's just decided like this is and he knows this is how much Fertilize of the core needs so I just use what we always used Just to one make it a more of a control standard So I wasn't changing so many different things in production And two because it always seems to work before so I just thought I would try Is it is it based on So many pounds per row or I mean is this something you can actively it out Yeah, I'm sure that it is something like pounds per row Um, we have got it down sort of to An art where I fill a bucket up Like if I've got a bucket and then I hold the bucket and reach my hand it and I get a handful And I walk about Like five feet And but so I Think that gets so yeah, yeah I mean, I can do like eight rows 200 feet Long each um with like two and a half gallons Because I have a five gallon bucket and I can't carry it I just wonder how would you compare your organic to your conventional? I mean the organic was a five four two or whatever the conventional was a 12 Is a triple 20 Yeah, and I think that was interesting to see in the production results and the yield results and the plant height results because Again, I kind of expected with a triple 20 nitrogen That you would have significantly higher because you're putting on so much more because I did the same thing I still just got a handful and walked like five feet with the chicken manure and it was only five four three and um Sometimes the plants grew taller had better yields with the chicken manure. So it makes me think that the triple 20 might be a waste Of energy a waste of nitrogen that you don't really need that much nitrogen on there um And like I said, we've sort of switched to using chicken manure just because plants respond just as well if not better They certainly are a much darker green color which indicates in general plant health And you only fertilize them at one time At the beginning when they were about Varying from like this tall to this tall is when I would fertilize them I didn't want to fertilize them They were too much taller than that because they would get too much foliage The fertilizer would stick down in there and it would burn it up, right? Well, if you all have any more questions Actually, um, I am curious. I'm a foreign language person So like working with the Hispanic community would be really neat for this month But I'm curious if you did did you have crossover between The the silver queen smut and your other varieties? Did they drop in? that um You know, there was a little bit of crossover with the fungal smut Especially the golden bantam seemed to have a little bit of problem with it, which is the yellow air room variety um, but I saw no smut in the bodacious blue jade The stole is evergreen Maybe a couple of it kernels got infected with the peaches and cream, but not enough that I would be concerned about Yeah, mostly just silver queen. So if you ever try to propagate it silver queen would be best Yeah Some of them we split By about a week just for many reasons But the main reason was because we were doing this project in conjunction with the vegetable csa Um, if I planted all of these at the same time I would have had a lot of corn ready all at one time Although some of the maturation dates were longer So the stole's evergreen had a longer maturation date as well as the silver queen So then I was able to plant them at the same time. It's like bodacious, which is a very short Maturation time and I would still get them ready at different times When I replanted them Uh, they were those were obviously planted at different times because I waited to see if they were going to do something It's a patch of corn and when they did it that I ripped it out and replanted it So they were around the time of like Mid to late may through mid to late june was when things were being planted The late the mid june is when they were being replanted And those varieties were not ready until about labor day Which is something to consider when you're thinking about um corn earworms or armyworms because the later in the season you get the more earworms you have But we um don't seem to have That was one of the reasons um one of the suggestions that the regional seric coordinator Alan Sundermeyer gave to me was to not apply any Insecticides of any kind on the conventional plot because he thought that that would mess up the insect population on the conventional side of it However On our farm. We really don't have a problem with insects I was just going to spray the insecticide on the conventional corn for the fact that a lot of people in our area do We've never sprayed it on our corn But I recently did some cultural research on that and found that when you have giant ragweed Also on your property that it cuts down. It that's another host for Army worms and corn earworms. So when you have ragweed then it's You know it takes away from the corn earworms on the corn If it's in the right area, I guess if you don't have allergies to it And use the chicken manure again for the yield Was there an overall number of the yield or was it just five? Um the way I determine yield by different varieties. So in general all of the varieties had better yields with the Chicken manure use but they were a few that did better with the triple 20 Um again, I think that would be interesting if I had done something with like scientific analysis or like, you know, crushed up the plants and gone into a lab and worked with What's the biochemical properties now at this plant between? um The chicken manure use or the triple 20 use I did do soil tests at the beginning and the end of each plot and um the The organic plots definitely had better soil organic matter and then at the end of it Some of your dad using chicken manure now or they're just huge My dad's not actually a full-time farmer. He is a microsoft engineer and he's self-employed But he has had a garden his whole life and he helped his parents So he helps us within the family farm so Sort of since he's at work all day and now I have this degree and I've expanded my part in it a lot I sort of make a managerial decision and then consult him on it because he has so much knowledge And then make sure no one else in the family has an objection And then say this is what we're gonna do


strategies. Is that Michael? There we go. How are you? Good. Welcome. I'm gonna let you do your thing, okay? Thank you so much.  I was in the chat box just excited. Thank you Michael. Thank you so much for this opportunity to share some ideas and thoughts with you all. I hope you're all having a great day. Hope you're making time for joy, awe, and wonder and some experiences for feeding your soul at this time in our country where there is so much tension and unrest. So my name is Michael O'Brien and I am elated to be here. I know they have my bio material up in some other places so I'm not going to go heavily into who I am. I want to share some ideas with you while I have your attention for a quick moment on this idea of folklore and this idea of future folklore and this unprecedented moment we have to sit at the intersection of a number of confluences or excuse me a confluence of factors that maybe we have not had the chance to sit in at one time with the kind of access to tools and technology that we have in this favorite moment. So I know someone is moving the slides for me so I'm going to ask that you move to the next slide please. So I love Brunet Brown. I think she is a fantastic researcher, thinker, human being and one of the things that struck me in her journey was that she really posited this question to herself and then shared it with the rest of the world. She asked what story was she telling herself about the experience she was having in a given moment with her husband. It's in a famous TED talk. And I took that same advice to my own life and found myself in situations where I would ask myself this question and immediately get to some core insights and some core tensions and some core conundrums that I had to sit in and reason with. Now my background is in music and theater and writing. I've had the privilege of having a career that has crossed multiple sectors. I'm heavily in the sciences now and human development but I still use creativity and art in my work. And the thing about all of my work is I center this idea of innovation and I know innovation is one of the most overused terms to the point where it almost doesn't mean anything. But in this context what I want to think about with innovation and I want to give you a definition that I hold true when I think about innovation. Innovation is about blurred lines and innovation is about taking things that exist in one space and moving them wholly over to another space to be used in ways that they might not have been intended to use to address problems and challenges that they might not have ever been intended to solve. And in this context I'm not saying that Brunei Brown didn't posit this question for us to take to like the largest concentric circle of the world but I am going to posit that like thinking in that way of moving the tool from one space to another I'm going to ask this question what story are we telling ourselves about the experiences the tension the unrest the rebellion I've heard all kinds of terms what story are we telling ourselves about the moment we're in right now locally globally nationally what story could we tell ourselves and how could that story that we begin to reimagine right now support the development of infrastructures of well-being for our children to rest in and settle in as they continue through development so that this idea of future folklore starts to sit in the myth deconstructing the myth of our humanity and the mythos of human development in a way that moves us forward and shifts infrastructure next slide please so what do we know about our story right now we know that the knowing human or homo sapien has gotten us here we're living out the impacts I'm not even going to go deeply into it because I think Nadia spoke about it so beautifully next slide please but in the space to be a bit provocative I want to put out some facts and some ideas that I think gets lost very easily calling your attention to that book on the left there is a legal scholar uh last name whitman first name james wrote this book hillar's american model through his work this is a gugenheim award-winning scholar through his work he was able to throw a gauntlet down and say historically that there is enough evidence to prove that a huge influencer on nazi race law and on hitler directly was american race law jim crow included we need to sit with that and in many places in that book he denotes the fact that there were times when nazi race law deviated from american race law because they felt that the practice was too inhumane we need to sit with that maybe it's because and the reason we need to sit with this is because we hold up world war two and this whole nazi endeavor as the most atrocious thing of the 20th century and I don't know that that is true and here is this legal scholar throwing it out on the right you have a picture of a lewis termin who was the president of the american psychological association in the early of 20th century he took the iq test the benet iq test from france and while he was tenured at stanford worked with the team there to translate it into what became the modern iq test the stanford benet iq test that then went on to undergird eugenics american eugenics this is our history and we have never wrestled with the mythos of humanity that comes from this space that is impacting currently what we see transpiring in the world but particularly in our country next slide please i'm gonna try to move fast and move faster so here's where i think we have this interesting opportunity again for innovation artists creatives we work with narrative 24 7 we work in the space of meaning making 24 7 it is wholly possible in fact i'm going to take a step beyond holy possible i believe it to be true that art and creativity and all the things connected to the creative endeavor and the creative nature of our humanity has been sequestered to utilitarian ideas and over capitalistic ideas around commerce and we have now relegated our best tools and reimagining the mythos and the mythology and the folklore around our humanity into spaces that are just about consumption mostly mostly i'm not going to say everyone but mostly and so what's it like in this space of true innovation to take these artists creatives process creative process and move it into holy separate sectors places to attach it to problems and challenges that need to be answered what's it like to set them free please hit the next slide for me and so to do that i think we've got to get into a little bit of nuance around the mechanics of our humanity and deconstructing the current myth we've got to get into the nuances and mechanics of our humanity to begin to think about how do we build this new narrative how do we build this future folklore our development is in four parts this is pretty much irrefuted developmental science biological psychological social dimensions which probably make the most sense i don't need to explain it but spiritual is not religious spiritual is about meaning making human beings make meaning our species homo sapiens sapiens make meaning out of everything even when there is no meaning inherent just go to an art gallery and walk around and you will start making up stories and making up meaning out of what you're seeing even when the artist intended no meaning what bigger meaning do we have to wrestle with in life or death who am i who can i be in the world who do i want to be in the world where do i come from what does it mean next slide please the other mechanics of our humanity is imagination one of the two nuances with imagination i want to put out the first one is that this is fascinating research that pretty much proves i won't say it's irrefutable right but there's a lot of there's a lot of research in this area where regardless of the type of distance whether it's physical psychological or social if something is distant from you in any of those categories you will imagine with words and relationship to that thing things that are closer to you much more proximal you will imagine with picture and by default metaphor like here's the fascinating part about picture and metaphor artists work in this space around picture and metaphor and one of the things that we've learned in terms of neuroscience in our brain and social cognition the parts of the brain that deal with cognition and the parts that deal with emotion are heavily subsumed within each other in fact the center for the developing child at harvard has a working paper on this that you actually can't fully pull them apart from one another and teleno demacio one of the greatest thinkers on the planet right now in my opinion has a brilliant article called we feel therefore we learn cognition emotions tied hand in hand aren't making us a process we know is heavily tied into the emotional parts of the brain this is really interesting because next slide please symbols the other part of imagination you have symbols for every complex word excuse me you have complex symbols a number of them for every word that you have but here's the flip side you have symbols for things that you don't have words for so it's possible to have symbols for emotional experiences and feelings and ideas without having words for them and i think we have to sit in that and again i go back to artists and art making the art making process regardless of its capitalistic you know end point the process of making the art is completely subsumed in the emotional parts of the brain as much as it's subsumed in the cognitive parts of the brain because they're shared and with imagination as a construct of our humanity what starts to matter is how distant or close are you to the person people things or story that you're trying to engage with next slide please so what are the stories and myths symbols and images that we engage with here's the thing about folklore or myth these are tools artistic tools from our history that are about frameworks for shared meaning if i had time i'd give you an entire anthropological dig on why art making it was a part of larger cultural process in our human history and was a part of indoctrinating the young into the social constructs of the group it was about teaching the history of the group ways of teaching you know ideas around healthy masculinity in the group we've lost that but we've not lost the use of myth things like welfare queens things like food stamp presidents things like anchor babies these are myths that are anchoring how we navigate and maneuver through the world and even think about who's deserving of citizenship who's deserving of humanity who's deserving of innocence who's deserving of support next slide please and so here's where we have this interesting opportunity empathy is an opportunity there are a number of definitions for empathy based on who's the researcher and what the constructs and constraints are but what i'm going to submit to you is that empathy works best empathy connected to activity not just resonant emotional feeling works best when it starts as a selfish endeavor first and what i mean by that is it you will never be able to understand the experience of someone who's had cancer unless you have cancer and to assume that you can know that experience actually minimizes that person's experience it minimizes their narrative it diminishes their personhood and robs them of their humanity you will never know what it's like to have cancer unless you have cancer i will never know what it's like to be a woman unless i was a woman you will never know what it's like to be black unless you're black and this is i will never know what it's like to be a migrant unless i'm a migrant these are just the truths of our experience but to the selfish point if we lose the attachment to the understanding the social factor race identity point of origin medical designation if you lose that and begin to sit in an understanding of emotional experience so for example i might not be a woman and know what it's like to walk in a world where it's culturally appropriate though it's completely inappropriate to talk about a woman's body just however you want right on the flip side i know what it's like to feel powerless i know what it's like to feel helpless next slide please and i know what it's like to feel a lack of control to feel disoriented or confused so i might not understand the social factor but as a starting place i can locate on the inside of myself any most using in my imagination of my own experiences and calling on my own memory recreate for myself those emotional experiences and then ask myself a key question i don't understand the social factor that might be producing this emotional experience in another person but i know what this emotional experience felt like for me and because i don't know that social factor i can't even imagine how this emotional experience might be magnified times 10 for that other person therefore how can i show up as a better listener how can i show up with resources before that person even has to ask me for resources build trust and then ask them for resources but not show up empty handed to the table how can i be a better ally accomplice comrade i do not need to get lost in trying to figure out what it's like to be something i will never know unless i have that direct point of experience but i can start first locating this emotion on the inside and using that as a bridge i call these empathic bridges through emotional experience to get to a place of truly inspired motivated empathic resonance and activity with another on behalf of our humankind next slide please i'm about done so getting to here we go getting to the end of this whole thing right these are my takeaways for you we've got to release artists to begin to help us do this work of reimagining our humanity starting with process that allows us to sit in our emotional experience to close the distance gaps that's the whole point here with the science around our imagination if i can get you to imagine with me about myself yourself others through pictures there's an emotionally visceral response there that words will not have people are not words people are not line items in a budget people are nuanced and complex and they have histories our nation has histories our nation has tension and chaos that we have got to make sense of and in the space of complexity theory it is narrative that does the sense making amongst all these varying factors and social influencers and things that you have to put into a pot and kind of figure out what is the meal here and what are we serving so the first thing i need you to do is find an emotion inside yourself as a touch point to understand another person's emotional experiences with the nuance of understanding that it's still falling short of what that person is really experiencing in that moment the second thing that we need we have to invest in our shared humanity and our shared future we have to invest time money and other precious resources in a reconciliation and healing process that ensures that all of us are on the path to manifesting our full human potential point blank we cannot afford not to any longer i am terrified that in philadelphia that we will find bullets in children i'm just going to be a hundred percent honest the military and national guard of patrolling neighborhoods we have tear gas children who are part of protest peaceful protest that is not the future folklore that i want my young people and my children to sit on 20 years from now we have an opportunity to do something different but we have to put the investments in have to put the investments in i'm going to end with this last a quick example shell as a company does projections for their financial health into the future sometimes 30 years out using this mix of narrative folks creatives economist etc and they do it through story-based work they build scenarios make sense of it then release the projections people have from that world gone over to south africa to help design the transition out of a part time the narrative folks the creatives went we have that opportunity here not without investment in time and resources thank you so much i appreciate you all thank you nadia thank you so much michael you have time for a few questions one thing oh that was wonderful and i think uh much more eloquently stated in many ways around narrative than what i shared before so i'm glad i was able to till the ground for you and you did a fantastic job thank you so much so i wonder if you could like you you started off the presentation saying like uh what asking us the question about what story we're telling ourselves but i wonder if you could answer that question what story are you telling yourself about this experience that we're having right now that well i also just want to say thank you everybody in the chat like i appreciate everything you're saying the story that i'm telling myself right now is it's multi-layered right like the first there are a couple of stories colliding the first is that we cannot rush to solutions before we have adequately framed the problem right as a consultant most of my work is incubating other people's problems to do this activity i call putting the corners on the puzzle so we can figure out what exactly we're looking at to then iterate solutions but we're running out solutions without investing in putting the corners on the puzzle that terrifies me it scares me but i know there are people that want to figure it out and that's the second part of the story i'm telling myself i might feel like there aren't people because we're kind of disconnected from one another who really want to do this type of investigation and uh in investment but they are there and it's my job to find them and connect and i'm yeah so you know i've been having this conversation about um this very conversation about people moving quickly to solutions and what i find is that it's wrapped particularly for those good intention white folks who are trying to be part of the solution and not part of the problem and want to be allies in this work it's to get rid of the guilt and the shame and i find that the guilt and shame is developmental right and that if you don't uh if you don't sit with it and work through it similar to the pain that we experience in death or or the loss of you know a transition in life um and and we don't like to sit through that but i actually think it's developmental and on the other side you have um this you know this way of being able to relate and i think it connects to what you were talking about in terms of starting with empathy so particularly you know if white folks turn too quickly to solutions they miss out on the bridge that you were speaking about and so i wonder um and not and i've been seeing that not able to i've been just thinking about like the the 20 children in Connecticut who lost their lives and how much i cried for them and the and and this opportunity where we have these tears related to you know all of these deaths in our community um and how we create the the bridge to be better listeners or how we enlist those folks to sit with that pain just so that they can empathize how do you and how do you see uh helping uh white white allies in particular being able to do that yeah so a couple of thoughts in this area i think that's a fantastic question and this goes back to that piece around the science of imagination right and i oh if i had time i would dig into all of nuance but when again when things are distant from you you can reason with them with words the word i abstract the linguistic parts of our brain in terms of like writing and literacy in this overly literate format as we know it it's a little that's a later construct for us than picture right we were graphic right and and doing demonstrative things with narrative and storytelling for meaning and building groups in fact there's a lot of research from the uh like evolutionary psych and and evolutionary biology and an anthro and anthropology and that talks about storytelling being the thing that helped us form groups and music making being the things that helped us form groups what i would position the white people the real serious question are we a part of your group if not then we're gonna have to do work to bridge right and to bond that's really technical language from social capital theory but it's real we have got to figure out how to get from being words on a page for you or symbols of destruction for you symbols of chaos for you symbols of antagonism for you to symbols of shared humanity for you and i do think artists artistic process there are ways to take those tools that we have and situate people in experiences with one another where again using the empathy bridge building framework if you can identify with me through an common experience around emotional experience around powerlessness this is me surmising and i wanted to research on this i think we might begin to shift the distance psychologically and socially because now you're not a other now we have some points of identity when we see this happen with policy the moment folks on the GOP side had their children come out and be like i am gay i am bi i am ex all of a sudden the political will started to shift because no longer was the lgbtq person somebody over there that you can reason with in terms of words and line items it was now your daughter it was now your uncle your nephew whatever and it shifted the whole way that empathy operationalized itself so again i have thoughts on designing those kinds of experiences and projects that are doing that around like employers and community members and funders etc but i think there's something there for us to explore and i appreciate that i want to so i'm glad you answered that question about connected to humanity because i don't i often don't feel like folks can actually see us as human human beings and that is what you're speaking of so i'm going to skip to this last question in the interest of time so i spend a lot of time making connections and michael i have got to spend more time with you fascinating conversation um i spent a lot of time making connections between the different components that spell out you know that that you spelled out across you know biology and sociology and that sort of thing and spirit but i don't want to take for granted as we're here talking about entrepreneurs of color and advancing impact and inclusion and access to them that they could actually make the connect that folks are making the connection between art and the importance of art and entrepreneurs and so i wonder if you could just spend just a moment helping folks make that bridge sure um you know not to be self aggrandizing but to uh uh really quickly anyone in the chat that wants to join that conversation you're welcome to join um i'm a creative right my undergrads in music i want to perform in our high school for theater i grew up really poor right i mean there's a there's a whole narrative there i'd be happy to share with folks that were interested in another time but what happened with me in relationship to arts and entrepreneurship and i've been i've done lit review work around this because i wanted to make sense of it for myself and for what i saw happen with other people there are skill sets right that are core to our humanity and what i found is that researchers that look at um the future of work resilience in the face of automation how are we upskilling and re-skilling with the way that automation is changing the world and in the context of COVID-19 that's also become like you know a huge conversation interesting list of skills there that we traditionally consider soft skills emotional intelligence social intelligence blah blah creativity all kinds of things right conflict resolution these are skills that the artist is developing over foot over and over and over again people ask me all the time where'd you learn your organizational psychology stuff i said theater first then i wouldn't got the book knowledge but theater is all about ensemble work it's about listening it's about problem solving it's about collaboration with your director right all that being said there's a second list of skills that i found that mirror that list of skills around resilience in the face of automation and that second list of skills came from organizational psychologists who study and folks from schools of management who were studying the what they call leadership domains and character traits of successful CEOs and entrepreneurs literally the same list right and i looked at them it's like well this is fascinating because this is about upskilling re-skilling upward mobility within the org right because the idea is you want to be a business owner or be in leadership but here and here are the skill sets that people say are worth it last list i found positive psychology and other folks in the space of mental health and well-being did 50 years of laundry excuse me of like lit reviews down research and found that there was a list of what they call character virtues and skill sets that buffered the deterioration of one's mental health or psychopathology right same list so whether we're talking about resilience in the face of automation as it relates to workforce development economic development inclusive economic development at that equitable economic development at that whether we're talking about upward mobility re-skilling upskilling entrepreneurship supports or someone buffering the impacts of trauma and their own mental health in the face of chronic stress and adversity talking about the same in that human skill that only i know art builds the way that it does and there is enough proof to say that arts support is a close second but there's something that art does that is verifiable right even down to medical cortisol levels and stress levels in the body people who hated making art still had the cortisol levels and there's been their bodies right so this is where i think we need to be investing interrogating and research pulling apart and looking at that nexus of stuff and going what can we learn about our humanity from a shared perspective and then how do we take what we're learning and apply it to the spots that are hurting the most to make sure that people have equitable access to skill development and again artists and creatives are one part of that process yes yes michael oh brian thank you so much for your time your energy your investment in this conversation i look forward to the next yeah and now let's welcome to the stage sythia mula


Let's meet Vera. She has a special hometown connection here. But even with that, she's always meeting someone new and making discoveries on campus and in Burlington. Her experience living on campus and involvement with club contribute to all that. Vera, we can't wait for you to guide us around and share your insider's view. Growing up in Vermont as a first generation American, I found a lot of love in my town, but I also felt closed in sometimes. I was literally born on campus at the UVM Medical Center and growing up, I would visit my mom who's a faculty member. This meant that after high school, I actually wanted to go elsewhere. But as I began to tour colleges, I started to see the incredible opportunities that were right here. As I became a student, I instantly started meeting people from around the world. It surprises some that more than 70% of UVM students come from outside of Vermont. This has to do with the state's small size and UVM's reputation around the country. All students live on campus their first two years. My first semester, I lived in the wellness environment, where I made friends who share my interests in the brain science behind health. Wellness is an important theme at UVM. We'd sometimes study and eat together, especially at one of my favorite campus spots. And there are many options, not to mention all of the places to eat in Burlington. I also got involved in Alianza Latinx, our annual event Comida para la Gente is an all-out celebration of food and culture. No matter how long I've lived here, I feel such gratitude every day for Vermont scenery. Watching sunsets over Lake Champlain or going on a hike up Camelshump never gets old. Festivals like Jazz Fest, Art Hop and the farmers market happen year round. As a local, I love to share Burlington, Vermont with others. And no matter where I end up, I'm sure I will come back and visit my incredible university and home base. That's my story. Back to you, Alex. Thanks Vera for a great introduction to Burlington. This is an incredible town and beloved community to families, businesses and a prime destination for visitors from around the world. Did you know this is where household names like Ben and Jerry's and Burton's snowboards got their start? Lucky you to have deep roots here. Take care.