Hello Cobra Law fans, race judicata here, formerly of the law firm Sui Sponte, now with the law firm Cobra Law. Do you love Cobra Law? Have you been victimized by GI Joe fans making fun of Cobra Law? Have you been hurt in the posterior regions every time someone says Cobra Law is stupid? Well Cobra Law is on the case. Cobra Law has decided to no longer attempt to take over the world using seed spores and instead attempt to conquer the world using lawsuits. We sued this hooded Cobra Commander 788, if that is his real name, for his unfair hatred of Cobra Law. We sued him so hard his head spun. I'm happy to announce Mr. Hoodie Coco will be opening up his forum to everyone who wants to talk about Cobra Law. He asked you to send in video clips about it. I'll bet there are a lot of people out there who love Cobra Law. In addition to that, Mr. Kevin from SEO Toy Review, a noted Cobra Law lover, will be handling the media segment of this review. If you love Cobra Law, there's no need to thank us, you're welcome. We at Cobra Law work every day for mutant world domination. Eventually you will be assimilated, but in the meantime enjoy the review. Cobra Lalalalala! Everybody hooded Cobra Commander 788 here. This is the show where we review every vintage GI Joe toy from 1982 to 1994. And this one is a redo. I did a review of Cobra Law before and I was not very nice. I was so harsh in fact that I took that video down. Fans of Cobra Law have for years been urging me to take another look at them. Well, you got your wish. And be careful what you wish for. For me, Cobra Law was the end of GI Joe. I was so disgusted by the 1987 movie, I lost interest in the toys. Cobra Law was so uncool and ridiculous that if that's what GI Joe had become, I couldn't see myself as a GI Joe fan anymore. Obviously I got over that because I'm a GI Joe fan now. But what it means is I can't be unbiased about Cobra Law any more than I can be unbiased about anything else I've already experienced. I don't think it's my job as a reviewer to be unbiased, but it is my job to be fair. And I think I can be fair even about things I don't like. Thanks to Brandon Knight for providing a good set of these figures and their accessories so I can do this review properly. I invited your Cobra Convergence 5 presenters to share their thoughts on Cobra Law, but I didn't think that was enough. I wanted to hear from everyone. I invited all viewers to send me clips sharing their thoughts on this controversial set. If you sent in a clip, you will see it in this video. Thank you for helping out. HCC 788 and you present Cobra Law. This is the Cobra Law team. Come on, Brian. You can do this. Deep breaths. It's like Lamaze. Alright, let's give it another try. Here we go. This is the Cobra Law team. They were introduced in 1987 and were also available in 1988. They were discontinued for 1989. There were no other versions of these figures in the vintage era. After they ran their course, they were forgotten. After all, according to the movie in which they appeared, all of these characters are dead. This Cobra Law three-pack included Galobulus, the Royal Guard, and Nemesis Enforcer. All three figures were sold in a single pack. They were not available separately. This isn't the only time a three-pack was available related to that 1987 animated movie. Sergeant Slaughter's Renegades were also released in a three-pack. They had the virtue of still being alive at the end of the movie. I'll have to mention the 1987 animated movie a lot in this review. I won't go into detail. I've already done a full review on it. Instead, I asked Kevin from SEO Toy Review to talk about the movie in the media segment of this review. He actually likes the movie, so he's more qualified than I am. Some collectors have speculated that the 1988 Iron Grenadiers nullifier may have originally been intended as a Cobra Law figure, but was repurposed as the AGP driver. The seed for the creation of Cobra Law came from the advertising agency Griffin Bacall. Joe Bacall wanted to go in a sci-fi direction for the 1987 animated movie, and Cobra Law was the result. The backstory and specifics were hammered out by animated series writer and story director Buzz Dixon. He was tasked with creating a Cobra Emperor to replace Cobra Commander. He came up with two ideas. One, Serpentor would come from a shadowy organization somewhere called Cobra Law. He would be sent to replace Cobra Commander because of the Commander's consistent failure to take over the world. Or two, Serpentor would be created from scratch by Destro and Dr. Mindbender. Unfortunately, Sunbow Productions liked both ideas, and Buzz had to figure out a way to make them both work. The suits made these decisions, and the creatives had to work it out. The name Cobra Law was supposed to be a placeholder name until something better could be chosen. The name is an allusion to Shangri-La from the 1933 James Hilton novel Lost Horizon. Unfortunately, that name stuck and was used in the final draft. There are a lot of fans of Cobra Law. Some people became G.I. Joe fans because of the animated movie and love Cobra Law. There are a lot of folks who don't like Cobra Law though, including the people behind the creation and development of G.I. Joe. Buzz Dixon has talked about his shock at the directive to create this thing, and the disappointment that it derailed some plans for the animated series. He tried to convince Hasbro not to do it. Larry Hama, the writer of the comic book series, flatly refused to include Cobra Law in the comic book. Kirk Bozegian, a Hasbro executive at the time, said the creative team disliked the idea. That doesn't mean you have to dislike the idea. It just means the people who were forced to work on it didn't like it. It was not a labor of love. In the movie, Cobra Law had a battle cry. It went something like this. Cobra, lalalalalalalalalala Let's take a look at the card back, and I have the full card back, thanks to Brandon Knight. And it is huge. It held three packaged figures. There's a G.I. Joe logo on the top, and a Cobra the enemy logo here, which is sort of true based on the movie. It says Cobra Law team. Here it says fully poseable, modern, army figures, and that it definitely is not. Artwork is okay without being exceptional. There are some mountains in the background, which I guess is supposed to represent the Himalayas. You can see where the figures are packaged. Nemesis Enforcer was here, Royal Guard was here, and Galabuelus took up all this space. There is a list of contents, and I will talk about this when I discuss some of the accessories. Flipping the card around to the back, we have some more artwork, and this artwork is way worse than the front of the card. They are out of proportion. The heads are too big for the bodies. There's this blurb that explains what Cobra Law is. I won't read the whole thing, but I'll give you some highlights. First, Galabuelus is a biomechanical creature, and Cobra Law is a colony based solely on living organisms and hypergenetic manipulation. Cobra Law lives in an ice dome deep in the Himalayas, and they believe that the human technology based on inorganic lifeless substances is a travesty to their culture. So that's the premise of Cobra Law. Cobra Law is a culture based on organic technology, and they consider technology based on inorganic matter to be a travesty. But that's shown to be BS right away because even these figures come with some inorganic technology, and in the movie in which they appear, they use a piece of inorganic technology to carry out their nefarious scheme. There are three file cards on here. We will take a closer look at all of those later in this video. This set was worth three flag points as it should be since it was a three-figure set. There's a cross-sell for Sergeant Slaughter's renegades, and this example still has some birthday wrapping papers still stuck to it. Let's look at these figures individually, and I'm going to start at the bottom of the totem pole with royal guard and work my way up. This is the royal guard. This was an army builder. In the movie, there were many royal guards, so you would want to buy multiples of this figure in order to build an army, but it was only available in the three-pack. The only way to build an army of royal guards was to also build an army of Galobulus' and Nemesis' enforcers. Nemesis is, this is, I, Nemesis. What's the plural on that? Let's take a look at royal guard's accessories, starting with his battle axe. The battle axe is a wicked shape. It looks really cool. It's in silver plastic. It has lots of nicks and scrapes on it. Looks like it's been used many times. This kind of looks like a Klingon weapon. It is silver to look metallic, and this kind of looks like inorganic technology to me. This does not look like biotech. His next accessory is his pistol. The pistol is in gray plastic. It is pretty plain and unexceptional. This definitely does not look like biotechnology. This definitely is inorganic technology, which again is contradictory to the premise of Cobra Law. The final accessory is the antenna. The antenna is detachable. It is removable. It connects to the side of the head. There's a hole on the antenna that connects to a peg on the side of the head. The antenna itself is small. It is red. It is made of flexible plastic, so it does bend very well, but it does not stay on the figure very well at all. You can peg it on, but it will fall off very easily, and this is a frequently missing part. Let's take a look at the sculpt design and color of Royal Guard starting with his head, and on his head he has a bug-like helmet or face. I don't know if this is his real face or if it's a helmet. He's got big blue bug eyes and a gray snout.  His chest features a dark gray base uniform with a tall collar that goes all the way around. He also has some red shoulder pads that reach up pretty high. That kind of makes his shoulders look a bit low. He has a red chest plate with organic shapes and texture on it. On the back, he also has a back plate with similar organic texture. On his arms, he has red upper arms and tan rings around his biceps and gray elbows. The gray is a different color than the gray on the chest. In fact, all of the gray on the lower half of the figure is a lighter gray than the gray on the head and the chest, and I think that's an unfortunate choice. It would have helped the figure to look more consistent if they had kept the same gray throughout. He has red forearms with elbow guards, and those elbow guards are really wide. To me, they look like the arms of a chair, and then he has gray gloves. On his waist, he has a gray belt. That's the lighter gray color, and there's no way this is organic technology. That looks like a belt he could have picked up at JC Penney. He has a bit of that red armor directly under the belt, and on the hips, he has some ridge details that continue down to the legs. The legs feature gray trousers in that lighter gray color. According to the premise of Cobra Law, these pants must be alive in some way. The ridge detail continues on the outside of the legs, and then on the front of the thigh, there are these organic tan shapes with some texture on them. He has some red boots with some additional texture on them. On this particular example, there's a hole in the leg. On the lower leg, on the right side, there's a hole in the molding, and this does not appear to be damage that happened after the figure was manufactured. That is not something that is on every Royal Guard figure. This appears to be a factory error. I believe this is what's called a short pour. That's when not enough plastic gets into the mold, and you're left with an unfinished piece. The overall look at this figure is insectoid. This is fine for an army builder. The forearm guards are my least favorite parts. It looks like he sat on a chair, and there was super glue on the arms of the chair, and when he stood up, the arms of the chair went with him. It doesn't look like armor to me. It looks like furniture. This is Nemesis Enforcer. In the movie, this character was big and menacing. The figure is of average height, though, so he is much less intimidating. Let's look at Nemesis Enforcer's accessories. He came with bat wings that attach to the figure with a peg, like a backpack. They are in gray plastic. It's a soft, rubbery plastic, so you can flap the wings like a bat. It has finger and vein and hair detail. It's well sculpted, but they are very undersized, way smaller than depicted in the animation, and even smaller than depicted on the artwork on the card, just much too small for this figure. I'd say these wings are comically small. They are totally inadequate. These wings should be at least twice the size, if not larger. His final accessory is this back attachment with tentacles. It has eight tentacles for on each side. It has molded-in details, like sucker details, similar to an octopus. It also fits on a figure with a peg, like a backpack. In the movie, Nemesis Enforcer did not have tentacles, but he did have a tentacle weapon. In the movie, the tentacle weapon was used to attack Sergeant Slaughter, and you can kind of do that with the toy by putting the peg in Sergeant Slaughter's back and then just kind of wrapping him up in the tentacles. But unfortunately with the toy, when you let go, the tentacle sort of spring back out. Besides which, that's not how the tentacle weapon worked in the movie. It was more of a face hugger that attached itself to Sergeant Slaughter's head. But the toy doesn't work that way at all. Let's take a look at the sculpted design and color of Nemesis Enforcer, starting with his head. On his head, he has a purple helmet with a texture pattern. That helmet has a nose guard that runs right between his eyes. It also has his ears exposed. He has white eyes, which is kind of creepy. Not exactly scary though. On his chest, he has a purple uniform with a texture pattern. Now this uniform I could believe is alive. It has like an animal skin texture on it. It has texture, but not a lot of detail. He has a red harness that goes around his back and over and under his arms. And it clasps in the front with this silver emblem in the center. On his arms, he has unpainted shoulder guards with that texture pattern that look like they should be painted purple, but they are not. They are just flesh tone. And this is bad. This is a glaring unpainted detail. And in my opinion, this is not an unpainted detail that can be overlooked. He has bare arms down to his gloves. He has silver spikes on his elbows, and these spikes should be much larger, according to the animation. These spikes are small and disappointing. He has purple gloves with some devices molded on them. These arms are incredibly disappointing. On his waist, he has a red belt, more of that purple textured plastic. And on the front, he has a red crotch guard under a big tan W. Under this big W, you can't miss it. A big, a big W. On his legs, he has that purple textured plastic. There are 10 straps around his thighs and 10 holsters on the outside legs on both sides. At least they look like holsters. They don't hold anything. He has red patches on his upper and lower legs that meet at his knees. Those are not knee pads. The lower legs are otherwise in that purple textured plastic. He doesn't have defined boots, more like his purple uniform just covers his feet. This figure has a lot of wasted potential. It's missing paint applications. It's too short. The arm blades are too small. The wings are way too small. This figure needed to rival Sergeant Slaughter, but it doesn't even come close. Nemesis Enforcer was revisited in the modern era. He got a modern action figure. It was in a comic two pack that also included Lieutenant Falcon, which is a pretty good figure. The modern Nemesis Enforcer figure was renamed Nemesis Immortal. And it's a decided improvement on the first version. This Nemesis Immortal figure is taller than even the average four inch modern action figure. So he has the size to be intimidating. Those wings are much larger than the version one figure. Perhaps not quite as large as in the animation, but still much, much better huge improvement and those spikes on the arms. Again, much larger, much more intimidating. One downside of this figure, the wings are so large it makes him top heavy and he wants to fall backwards. So in order for him to stand, he has to be hunched over a bit. The figure was in a comic two pack as I mentioned and it came with this comic book. So he did make it into the comic after all, just not the regular series. This is a story with Lieutenant Falcon, Lieutenant Falcon versus Nemesis Immortal showdown at the top of the world. And this is reasonably well written and drawn. This is Galambulus and this one is a doozy. This is the figure that always gets a big reaction. Whenever I show it to non GI Joe fans, they always think of something obscene. In the movie Galambulus was voiced by legendary actor Burgess Meredith. I covered that at length in my review of the movie. There's no way to avoid looking at this. He has a big long snake tail. So let's do it. Galambulus came with only one accessory. What the card contents call his laser gun. It is in red plastic. It's intended to be slung under the forearm like this. That's not the best way to shoot a gun because you can't look down the barrel to aim. You have to shoot from the hip, which is not very accurate. The accessory itself is well sculpted with lots of organic looking details. It looks like it has a video game joystick on the top and a magazine on the bottom. That magazine looks like it could come from Colt firearms or Smith and Wesson. Maybe they have a retail presence at Cobra Law. You never know. Let's take a look at the sculpt design and color on Galambulus, starting with his head.  But that's okay. It's supposed to be mission accomplished. He has a bald head with veins. He has a device that goes around his head and covers his right eye. He has a big black, gross left eye. And the rest of his head looks pretty human. Perhaps he was once a man. On his chest, he has red crustacean-like body armor that covers his chest and back, but leaves his left shoulder and his midsection exposed. That red crustacean armor even has crab legs sculpted onto the chest. This armor, not only is it indestructible, also tastes great with lemon and butter. On his right arm, he has a couple red armor plates on his upper arm, but it has his bicep exposed and the red paint does not go all the way up the shoulder. So it looks like he has armor pieces just stuck onto his arm. His right arm is mostly bare, but it has some extra veins sculpting on it that looks grotesque. His hands are bare and he has a red armor on his forearm with some kind of device molded on. His left arm is totally bare, but the arm is green with red veins all the way down the arm and all around. You gross. According to the artwork, there's supposed to be claws on that left hand, but it's just a regular C-shaped hand on the figure. I guess they hadn't quite gotten away from that standard buck for the hands. Finally, we can get to the snake tail. The lower half of his body is a snake tail. It is in green. It's a lighter shade of green than the left arm. The front has a texture on it that looks like snake skin. The back has a ridge pattern. It is segmented apparently to make it easier to bend, but it doesn't help that much. This is a bendy tail. It has a wire that runs down the inside and you're supposed to be able to bend this into any shape you want. The problem is it isn't bendy enough for you to form it into a coil for him to stand up or to coil it around his enemies because it just doesn't bend enough. It doesn't stay. What that means for Galobulus is he can't stand up on his own. To keep him upright, you have to lean him against something or he has to just lie down. The catalog photo had a different tail. I don't know if it's an improvement. I don't think it's possible to make half snake guy here look good. This, in my opinion, is a terrible action figure because the tail won't bend in a way that will allow Galobulus to stand. There's no way to keep him upright. He must either lie on the ground or lean against a wall and neither option is very fun. He can't effectively use it against his enemies either so the tail is just a nuisance. I've always been curious about the construction of this figure given the very non-standard lower half.  He has a screw in the back like a standard action figure so I'm assuming we can take him apart just by unscrewing that. He feels like he has an O-ring but what exactly is that O-ring attached to? All right, looks like he is splitting apart. There we go. There we go. Oh man, this one's all cracked and broken. Oh, all right, check this out. He doesn't have an O-ring at all. Well, all right, I'm not gonna be able to get this one back together. He's all busted but look, there's no O-ring. There's just a post, a rubbery post that simulates the movement of an O-ring figure but there's no O-ring on this guy. So his torso just wraps around that post and the post will bend a bit. So that's fine. Interesting way to construct that without any extra parts and without the standard J-hook and without an O-ring. It may seem strange to say that a pack of three figures did not have enough figures but there's an omission here. There's a missing figure for Cobra Law. That is of course, Pythona, a female Cobra Law character that was prominent in the movie and important to the story. There was no vintage Pythona figure. There was a modern figure from the G.I. Joe Collectors Club figure subscription service. That figure was reviewed by Timmer on his YouTube show, Half the Battle. I didn't review that. That was reviewed by the ghost of a future version of myself that I killed in 2012 and you know what? Doesn't matter. Pythona, I really, really like this figure. It looks absolutely fantastic and it's a damn shame that it took decades for this character to get an action figure. And of course, you could then only get it through the Collectors Club so it's rare, expensive and kinda worth it. The only thing I don't like is that the hair on top of the figure is just plugged in, not glued in so it comes off really easy. Yeah, cause that's what G.I. Joe Collectors really need. More small stuff you can lose. Especially when it comes to rare figures. Still, it's a pretty awesome figure. I'm just sad that not a lot of people get to enjoy it. Thank you Timmer. Please make sure you check out Timmer's YouTube channel and subscribe as he's trying to reach 2,020 subscribers in 2020. Let's take a look at the file cards that are printed on the back of this giant card back. There are three file cards. Let's start with the bottom and work our way up. This file card for the Royal Guard has their faction as Cobra which is not exactly true but close enough as a portrait of the Royal Guard here. Code name Royal Guard. He's on the Cobra law team. This top paragraph says, bread and surgically enhanced for size, strength and endurance. The Royal Guards of Cobra law are responsible for the personal protection of Galobulus, Supreme Leader of the Hidden Valley and last descendant of the Serpent Kings. Encased from head to foot in organic insectoid armor, Cobra law are impervious to any ordinance up to high explosive anti-tank round. Although formidable in battle, the guards tend to be tactically unimaginative and are relatively useless without close supervision. Bread and surgically enhanced for size, strength and endurance. And yet the figure is average size. This is a problem I have with Nemesis enforcer as well. These guys are supposed to be big and intimidating and they are not. This bottom paragraph says there was an attempted coup in Cobra law about the time when Emperor Hadrian was building his wall. 500 irate noblemen stormed the inner sanctum of Galobulus' summer palace and were confronted by just 20 guards. Galobulus slept through the entire incident. One guard was slightly wounded. Of the 500 noblemen, there were no survivors. This bottom paragraph does a great job of describing the royal guard as bad asses. But the figure just doesn't live up to it. Next up is Nemesis enforcer. Once again, Cobra is the faction. Portrait of Nemesis enforcer here. Codename is Nemesis enforcer. He is on the Cobra law team. This paragraph says they say in Cobra law that Galobulus raised the Nemesis enforcer from a pile of dead things and that where his soul should be there is nothing but emptiness. His leather wings have beat across the night sky since before the Ice Age, as he tirelessly carried out the dark will of his master and creator. Fleeting glimpses of his sinister form gave rise to legends of vampires, harpies and countless other things that go bump in the night. He is the reason we have vampire legends, not with those little wings. His bottom paragraph says he can glide silently and land without a sound. He is the other presence in the pitch black room. He is the lurker in the dark just outside your bedroom window.  He is the dread that stands behind you in the dark and dares you to turn and face him.  Stop rattling those garbage cans as to the middle of the night I'm trying to sleep. Finally, we get to the file card for the head man himself. The faction is Cobra. Again, not really true. According to the movie, Cobra is more of a faction of Cobra law than the other way around. Portrait of Galobulus here. Codename Galobulus. He is the Cobra law ruler. This top paragraph says descended from the serpent kings of prehistory, Galobulus rules over Cobra law, a hidden secret valley in the Himalayas where the high priests of the biomechanical cult have created a technology based solely on living organisms. The buildings of Cobra law are really colonies of crustaceans and the clothes of inhabitants are as alive as the people who wear them. Galobulus has achieved immortality through symbiosis at the cost of his humanity. But he never was human, according to the storyline, unless he was once a man. This bottom paragraph says the plates of Galobulus' body armor are living mutations of lobsters and crabs, each genetically altered to perform a specific function and bread for the tensile strength of their chitana's shells. Over the centuries, so much of Galobulus' body parts have been replaced or biomechanically altered. That very little of the original is left except for his brain and his central nervous system. If these guys are so great, why did they need Cobra commander?  On the one hand, the 1987 Cobra law team is a really well done three pack of action figures. But on the other hand, I'm just glad that Hasbro didn't stick with this monster theme and returned to traditional Cobra bad guys for the following year. We're rather unfortunate because these guys would have blended right in with the visionaries or have been a perfect foil for the humanoids. As far as I can recall, the humanoids actually do have a sort of HP Lovecraft sort of elder horror kind of backstory. And that goes really well with the origins printed for the Cobra law team. Thank you, FormBX257. It's always great to have you in my videos. Now I turn it over to the other Kevin from SEO Toy Review to cover the media section of this review, which consists of one thing, the 1987 G.I. Joe animated movie. Hey hoodie, thanks for having me. Kevin from SEO Toy Review here. In the mid-80s, after Kenner's success with Star Wars and Mattel's hit with Masters of the Universe, Hasbro's Transformers and G.I. Joe boy action lines were at the peak of their popularity. Hasbro had great success marketing some of their lines to kids with syndicated cartoon shows and they decided to release theatrical movies of G.I. Joe, Transformers, and My Little Pony. These movies would usher in new toys as important characters in the cartoon show and therefore promote sales of the new action figure lineup. Hasbro worked with Sunbow Productions, Marvel Productions and Toei Animation for these animated movies just like they did with the syndicated cartoons. The quality of the animation on the movies was much higher. Because these companies were still working on the syndicated shows at the same time as the movies, there was a lot of complications and crunches that resulted in a delay in G.I. Joe the movie. G.I. Joe the movie was meant to be the first of the toy related movies to be released and unfortunately became the last. Due to Hasbro losing about $10 million because of low box office numbers on Transformers and My Little Pony and backlash from parents after the death of Optimus Prime, G.I. Joe the movie was released on home video. Plus with a little bit of additional dialogue Duke managed to survive taking a stake through the heart. Go figure. During the 80s, Griffin Bacall Advertising was a huge partner with Hasbro in making the G.I. Joe and Transformers a huge success. The ad agency was responsible for the G.I. Joe comic book commercials which allowed Hasbro to use more animation and advertising than they were allowed if directly advertising the toy line. It was Joe Bacall who insisted on the G.I. Joe movie taking a more sci-fi tone. He insisted that you can't market an hour and a half long war movie to kids and teens. While the movie was meant to promote new toys Hasbro had designed some additional characters were created to fit the direction and tone of the movie. Two multi-packs were released as a direct tie-in to the film. The Sergeant Slaughter's Renegades and Cobra Laugh 3-Pack were based on the film but don't make any mention of checking out the G.I. Joe movie and theaters or on home video on the package. The Cobra Laugh 3-Pack included Galobulus a half snake man in Crab Shell Armor who wanted to use G.I. Joe tech to incubate spores in space to mutate mankind. His bat-winged thug Nemesis Enforcer and one of his elite troopers from the film, The Royal Guard. While the art design and animation work on these characters is pretty impressive in the film the action figures fall a little short. In the film Galobulus floats around in a giant tentacle sphere for most of the film. I think the reveal of his giant snake tail might have been really neat but this was spoiled for me by seeing the action figure. Nemesis Enforcer was a hulking brute with massive wings in the film. He lifts a running vehicle, cuts open the bottom with his elbow spikes and rips out a terrified snow job in his first fight. Later on he takes down three of the best Joe's Alpine Gung Ho and Bazooka and the only Joe who can physically go toe-to-toe with this guy was Sergeant Slaughterer. The Royal Guards are numerous, unstoppable, insect warriors who attack from below the ice with quick reflexes, flashy weapons, cool capes and a whirling dervish battle cry. As a kid I loved G.I. Joe the movie. The animation looked phenomenal. The scope of the battles incorporated nearly every character. The voice acting from the original cast as well as the new celebrity voice actors was wonderful and the stakes for the Joe's had never been higher. This G.I. Joe adventure wasn't the first to involve sci-fi elements or even monsters but it did recon the origin of Cobra Commander and I think that's the movie's greatest crime. For many years after the G.I. Joe cartoon show was off the air the only way I could really the excitement of the G.I. Joe cartoon series was to re-watch a copy of the movie I had taped off TV. For me it never gets old. I know the plot's pretty absurd but I never cared. The opening battle around the Statue of Liberty is my favorite piece of animation ever created. Pythona infiltrating the pterodrome is amazing. The scene of my favorite G.I. Joe beach head breaking in the new recruits is classic and who would have thought a roadblock Cobra Commander team up travel movie would have worked but it does. And anytime I look at the clock at work during my middle school class and see there's only five more minutes to lunch I think of Falcon being interrogated by Serpentor. All I gotta do is hold out for five more minutes. I don't know what else to say it's nostalgia but I love this movie. Looking at Cobra Law overall I don't like these figures. I don't like them at all. From start to finish I dislike them. Do they have some good qualities? Sure, Royal Guard has lots of paint applications. It looks like a lot of effort went into that figure but the bug eyes and the snout look kind of silly. Those guys are supposed to be big and intimidating but the figure just isn't. Also they're supposed to be troop builders but you couldn't build an army of Royal Guards without building an army of Galobuluses. Nemesis Enforcer should be a big menacing figure but it isn't. He should be at least as big as Sergeant Slaughter yet he's smaller. The light purple is a weak color and the texture pattern is used as a substitute for detail. It's nice but it's not detail and it's a poor substitute for it as well. The Royal Guard must have got most of the paint budget because Nemesis Enforcer has some glaring paint omissions. The wings are way too small and the tentacles are just there. This is the figure that needed to sell the set. Nemesis Enforcer in the movie was a badass. He went up against Sergeant Slaughter. The figure needed to measure up but it doesn't. Corners were cut and it shows. Galobulus has a big snake tail. It bends but not enough to be useful. It looks silly at best and obscene at worst. The sculpting on the upper half of the figure is actually fine. It matches the description on the file card.  There is no getting past the tail. Cobra Law was the end of GI Joe for me as a child. Despite this I'm trying to be fair. My old review was criticized as being unfair. Well here you go. I've looked at all the details, all the accessories, all the merits and flaws. I still think they're terrible. They are a festering boil on a baboon's backside.  They are the action figure equivalent of vomiting on an empty stomach.  They are not very good. My opinion has not changed. I don't like them anymore now than I did the first time around. But my opinion is not the only one out there. That's why I invited everyone to share their views on Cobra Law. I wanted to hear from you, especially if you liked the toys. If you don't like my opinion, perhaps you will prefer the opinions of your fellow GI Joe fans. I'm Dave, and this is Shane from Ontario, Canada. And HCC has asked everybody if we like Cobra Law. They turned Cobra Commander into a snake. Yeah, and before that, GI Joe was all this awesome stuff. And... This has been C. D. J. A. A. C. D. J. A. C. D. J. A. C. D. J. A. C. D. J. A. C. D. J. A. C. D. J. A. C. D. J. A. Hey, it's Greg from Anything Joe's. The thing that I like most about Cobra Law is that it took the notion of what a GI Joe universe was supposed to look like and threw it out the window. So while you may not like this bizarre fantasy universe, it spoke to the imagination of young children and said, hey, you know that crazy idea that you've got running around in your imagination?  Embrace that idea, nourish it, and run with it. Hey, everybody. What's profit here? A. K. A. Joe 173. I'm going to let my fingers do the talking on what I think about Cobra Law. I'm a deep inside target haunting. So Joe 173 wants us to express our opinion on the Cobra Law three-figure pack. I despise of them. Destro, your thoughts.  For once I agree with you, Cobra Commander. And I have a solution to exterminate them once and for all. Ah, do tell, Destro.  This shall do the job like the little grubs they are, Cobra Commander.  Splendid, Destro. Splendid. We shall pollinate the world now and get rid of Cobra Law once and for all. Cobra! Happy Cobra Convergence from Joe 173. Get ready for pull from GI Joe bugs. 30 seconds of Cobra. La la la la la la la. And let's go. Love the royal guard. Love the detail. Love the sculpt. Check that weapon. So cool. Love his head sculpt. Dig that green arm. Such awesome detail. Snake tail. Nemesis enforcer. Cool detail. Hate this gun. Hate that green thing.  You're going to need one of these. This is GI Gary from Pina Comics. And my opinion of the Cobra Law set is that this globulous's tail ruins an otherwise decent subset and even the renegade subset because of the total tie into the movie that I personally enjoy and have fond memories of. This belongs as a pen, not as an action figure. Give this guy a wheelchair or legs. I first saw GI Joe the movie in 1988 or was it 1989? I saw it on TV and I wasn't able to start the show. The first scene I saw was Lady J being pulled up by that weird, weird, weird plant. And then it kind of creeped me out. It even creeped me out more when I saw those giant insects. Yeah. But I like Cobra Law. Cobra Law. I get up this morning and what is it? Cobra Law. Cobra Law. Hoodie. You know that's a sore topic for me. I mean, I was once alone. Cobra HR is going to hear about this. But growing up there actually is pretty silly because I outdoor grounded reality in the comic books. But that was just important so it's pretty cool. And now you know. And knowing half the battle. Hello viewers of HTC 788. I from I Want to Talk About Cobra Law. Cobra Law is weird. Just the old-world concept that Cobra Law is weird. Buzz Dickson and Hasbro of 1987. I think you guys made a big mistake. And you thought Sir Pentaurus ridicule, Cobra Law is the defining factor of ridicule. Why? As a kid, I didn't hate Cobra Law, but I wasn't really impressed with them either. I just saw them as a new villain for the Joes to fight. Really didn't blow my skirt up but didn't ruffle my panties either. But looking back as an adult, it really don't fit with G.I. Joes mythology and the toys themselves don't fit with the toy line. Now, I think the toys themselves are fine. They're just not G.I. Joes. I didn't have them growing up, but I think if I did, I would have been more inclined to put the lobby list in the back of my KO cruiser than in the back of my his tank. Greetings fellow Cobra's to the final episode of Cobra's Convergence Five. Today we are honoring the great toy line, Cobra Law. These are my favorite figures growing up because I'm a huge fan of science fiction and fantasy and with G.I. Joes, that's an automatic win for me. So let's shout out for Cobra Law. Cobra, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la. Cobra Law is definitely part of my collection for G.I. Joes. I don't have a problem with them. I get why other people do. If you're super into the comics and you were, that was your first introduction to them. I totally get why you don't like them. I was born in E3 and the cartoon was all I knew about really. And I like the idea of Cobra Commander coming from a secret underground serpent society instead of being a used car salesman. So they work for me. I like Cobra Law because they're cool, love, crafty and style monsters. And you know, the lobby list is voiced by Burgess Meredith, the best penguin. And that's really it. I mean, I know they're not really military but they're still kind of cool. Cobra Law is actually kind of terrible. Pretty easy to bookmark that as the place where G.I. Jo took a little too hard of a dive into science fiction fantasy, just as a concept. And the toys were just awful. I mean, the lobby list couldn't even stand. Nemesis said the little baby tiny wings. It just wasn't very good. Hey guys, Brad from Cast Eyes here. And I have to say that sadly I am not a fan of Cobra Law. The giant bat wings, the super bright colors, the insectoid helmets, the serpentine tails were a massive departure from the near future modern 80s aesthetic that had been part and parcel of the G.I. Jo brand from the early comics. They just never appealed to me. Sadly, this feels more like Masters of the Universe to me than G.I. Jo. And for me, it has just never felt right. That's right. Always wear the safety equipment. All of you safety ferrets, cerns. I like to see those out. Good, good. Hoodie! Yes! Cobra Convergence Five! And you want my opinion of Cobra Law. How could I say this? It sucked! It was the worst thing ever! You're gonna reduce me down to think, oh, I was once a man. I mean, come on! I'm going to be bossed around by this. This? This isn't even a proper action figure! Look! It looks like a damn 80B or something! Hello Hooded Cobra Commander. This is Esteban from Costa Rica. And yeah, I always thought it was very cool. This three pack, the Cobra Law. I saw it when I was a child on stores and never got the chance to own it back then. But I thought it was very interesting like how they looked like a very alien-like, especially the one with the long tail. I don't memorize the names of them. But I always thought they were pretty cool. So, cool man. What's up guys? It's Jonathan from Glitch Matrix and I love Cobra Law. I don't know what it was, but from the very beginning in the 80s, the whole idea of this secret civilization hidden somewhere in the Himalayas just tickled my imagination. And then the first time I saw the three-pack at James Way with Galabuelus, the Royal Guard and Nemesis Enforcer, I was hooked. I mean, just look at this thing.  They made a snake man. Galabuelus, I can't quit you. That was our review of Cobra Law. I hope you enjoyed it. Thanks to the Cobra Convergence Five presenters you saw in this video. And thanks to everyone who sent in a clip. Today for Cobra Convergence Five, you will get content from Joe Colton Cosplay and that will conclude Cobra Convergence for this year. There will be a wrap-up video tomorrow as well as the final fan participation video. It's been a lot of fun this year. I hope you enjoyed watching. We will be back next year and I promise it will be even bigger. As for me, you can find me on social media, on Facebook and Twitter, and I have a website, hcc788.com. I also have Patreon if you'd like to support the channel in that way. You can get some perks such as a code book to decode the secret messages in these videos. Patreon really does help keep this channel going, especially now. So if you'd like to support the channel in that way, I would greatly appreciate it. I'll be taking next week off, as I always do after Cobra Convergence. After that, it'll be time to get back to G.I. Joe. For the time being though, remember, only Cobra is Cobra. M.S.C.'s.


Hello people of the internet, my name is Johnny and welcome back to another Five Nights at Freddy's news video. Now you may have seen recently some information going around about Sanchi getting their FNAF license renewed and it's true, their license has been renewed. But I did want to wait until today to post this video, not only because I just posted a video at the time that we got this information, but I also wanted to wait for hopefully a bit more information about this discussion because we don't know anything about this besides the fact that yes their license has been renewed to this year. So I originally saw this information on the FNAF subreddit, it was posted by EthanGeorgia underscore CG. The post says not to get hopes up, but Sanchi's FNAF plushes have all had their copyright dates updated to 2020. And then they provide a screenshot of the website and it says copyrights got caught in 2020 and if you go to the website that is what it says. So it's way too hot to put up the green screen, but as you can see I am on Sanchi's website, this is the, oh jesus, that's the catalog, this is the Freddy plushie and right down here you can see copyrights got caught in 2020. And in fact it says this for basically every single FNAF product on the website. As you can see they all basically have copyrights got caught in 2020 on them. Really enough the only one that I can find that doesn't have a copyright of 2020 is the FNAF celebrate scarf and I don't know why, but it still has a copyright of 2015. Maybe they just don't want to bring it back, but I think it looks pretty good. And we know that the license got renewed recently because on October 23rd, 2019 as you can see the Foxy plush had a copyright of 2015. So now comes the big question, why in the world has it been updated? Has Scott officially cut ties with Funko? Is he bringing back Sanchi for 2020? It's interesting to discuss because again we don't know a whole lot. This is literally all we know. Personally, I would really hate to see Funko go. I know that is a very unpopular opinion, I know I'm going to get a lot of hate in the comments because it's the cool thing to do to hate on Funko because they leaked the designs of the characters. But I definitely think Funko has a very significant role in the history of FNAF merchandise products. And it would be weird to see them go. And they have so many products for FNAF. The plushies, action figures, mystery minis, Funko pops, they have a lot of stuff. And to cut all of those away just to sign deals with Sanchi again would probably not be the best idea. Financially, of course. But we all know Scott usually does what he sees fit for the community and for the games. Plus, Sanchi is a lot more expensive than Funko so again that's another thing that doesn't work out financially but they are a lot more higher quality. Just comparing the plushies alone, actually that's all we can compare because that's really all Sanchi does. Yeah, I mean all they do is plushies, t-shirts, they've got like one poster, one scarf and that is literally it. That's all their products, that is legit their entire lineup.  You can tell that Sanchi does a much better job at getting them game accurate than Funko. It's also interesting to speculate what Scott is going to do with this renewed license with Sanchi. It is a bit odd, the timing however, because Funko is actually making plushies for Security Breach. I'm here on GameStop and I can see 5NZ40 Security Breach Vanny plushie. However, unlike the action figures, I cannot actually buy this product. I can't pre-order it, in fact I honestly don't remember the release date if you guys do tell me in the comments. There's no picture, it's just kinda here but we know nothing about it. So does this mean after Funko leaked the action figures and the mystery minis, Scott told them to stop making the plushies and now he's going to Sanchi? I don't know, honestly I don't think he would do something like this, I don't think he would just stop production on a product that hasn't even come out yet. To be honest, it is a very Scott thing to do, I can see him doing that but I feel like that, I don't know, that's a real stretch, you know. It is again interesting to theorize what characters can Sanchi make with their new license. Will they go back and make characters that don't have plushies yet? Or will they be more focused on the new characters that have come into play recently with Help Wanted, Special Delivery, maybe even Security Breach but we really have no clue. Because again, we know like nothing about this situation. Going back to Sanchi's lineup however, they don't do plastic products. I don't have a lot of knowledge on Sanchi but from what I've seen they don't do a whole lot of plastic products which is why there's no action figures and stuff like that. So again, if Scott cuts ties with Funko we're missing out on so many pieces of merchandise including action figures and I love having FNAF action figures. As well, I got loads of Funko pops, they're all gonna be gone. Mystery Minis, I just ordered a lot of them for the Security Breach merchandise and they're all gonna be gone. I think the plushies we can go without, I think, I think if Scott truly is making deals with Sanchi again I think we can, you know, let Funko's plushies go but I don't know how I feel about letting everything else go. Do I think Funko would be okay with cutting ties with Scott? I think everyone can agree that their FNAF merchandise has been very, very slacking recently. They haven't been making a lot of good FNAF products as of recently.  They just, they reuse a lot of stuff which it's kind of okay but at the same time it's when you realize that's basically what they're doing a lot. It's like, come on man, don't do that. Yeah, it is interesting to find out if Scott will cut ties with Funko. I personally hope he doesn't. I know a lot of people want him to but guys, you really gotta think about it. Do you really want Funko to stop making FNAF products? I know I don't. Again, I do think Funko fricked up. They funked up real bad earlier this year by leaking all of the merchandise for the upcoming game and I know Scott said that things would be happening very, very differently going forward but I wouldn't want to see Funko go away. Now you can hate on me all you want in the comments down below. I honestly don't care, right? If you guys want Funko to go away, that's great, that's your opinion. I personally don't and that's my opinion and guess what? That's okay. Going back to what I said earlier about the production cost of Sanchi, it is significantly higher than Funko and because of that, their merchandise is also a lot more expensive than Funko's. So that is another thing to take into consideration. You get less products and they also cost more. But yeah, that is basically all the info we have on this discussion as of right now. Scott has not said anything as far as I've seen Sanchi and Funko have also not said anything. So I guess we just gotta wait and see what's gonna happen. That is it for this topic in this video. Stay tuned if you guys are interested in FNAF merchandise because tomorrow we're going to be looking at the brand new wave of FNAF merchandise being released by Cloak. They've been teasing it over the past week or two and I am very excited to see what they're gonna have in store. Anyways, yeah, that's it for me. Thanks for watching and I'll see you all on the flip side. Goodbye.


Thanks for coming. My name is Charles and I work at automatic which is kind of the parent company if you will of wordpress, but I wanted to make mention of both my telephone number four four four two one nine three one six and Twitter handle I was just going to ask a couple of questions during the presentation if anyone's more comfortable with just doing text or Twitter then feel free to chime in that way and I'll also kind of leave that up there for any subsequent discussions Okay, so with Out further do I'm going to put this up here just kind of to give you a sense of the company behind wordpress. We usually have a Collective gathering Every year where everybody gets together and just talks about what's going on and Good time for face-to-face but before I go into a deeper discussion of distributed diversity and life at automatic Just wanted to give kind of an acknowledgement that we're in Atlanta, Georgia, we're kind of kind of inhabiting the space building upon the work that the Muscogee and the work that the Cherokee did to make this a habitable space and Also, if you've gone back 50 years ago last Monday Just down the street that way we were all You know kind of commemorating dr. King's Passing his funeral took place a couple of blocks that way so I Say that to just kind of give my context I grew up in Atlanta And I'm kind of one of the older people Now in the community was old enough to have witnessed the events around his passing So I want to jump into automatic now I've been there for about two years and one of the great things about it is that you get to Hang out and work at a very welcoming Company as you can kind of see from the photo here. There's a lot of work that I think has been done at least on gender Inclusion in the company. So I think that's a thing that's to be praised and The company is also Distributed in the sense that we work all over the globe So I'm a data scientist there and a lot of my colleagues work in In Europe There's a colleague that I work with quite closely space in Israel There's another colleague who's based in Australia so distributed Companies can work they can be effective at doing important things in the world And that gets to one of the things that is most important for me about Being an automatic and I'll come back to it later Which is being able to have kind of the world as your office place So this is a photograph. I recently took of my office for the day, which is at a coffee shop here in Atlanta I dropped my kids off to school and I find a place to work and I can look you know listen to stories going on in the background I can listen to the birds chirping. I get to kind of create my own space to do Work in and I'm communicating with people all over the world literally I Think that's very empowering and I'll get back to that also, but I think that empathy For this company plays a large role in making it work in the sense That when we first start at automatic everyone does what's called a support or happiness rotation as in the first three work three weeks of work are Listening to or taking live chats about how the products are doing The first three weeks are actually understanding how people are experiencing the various word press calm Products and answering questions about them So this is a screenshot. I took of an internal Memo, it says if you can read it February empathy challenge It was put out by the lead of our mobile group Kate Houston Basically the sense of getting into the design of the word press application and Understanding how the people that are using it are experiencing it in order to really build some empathy With the users with the designers that are making this thing happen here's another screenshot of Alan who is a engineer associated with the the Gutenberg project and He is kind of looking at how the user flow and in Gutenberg looks as a real user of it and I think the Gutenberg workshop is the competing one to this So I have a lot of I'm showing empathy for Gutenberg, okay, so all the sense that Everything aside, I think that Automatic really puts a lot of effort into Developing kind of external and internal empathy trying to put yourself in the person the other person's footsteps and This is another kind of empathy that I really like about automatic which is This is a photograph taken from a designer Hang out in Detroit in which they actually kind of went into communities In Detroit and said, okay, can we put up a web page for a given small business and I think the woman and the lower Left hand at the screen owns a business in Detroit and Some you my recognize Ola here who's co-staffing the booth with me And they kind of came in and said How can we make a WordPress site work for you? We spent the whole week Just going around in the community in the hood just saying how can we get a site going for your business? And I think this to me shows a lot of empathy for you know, how people are experiencing the product and how we can make it work So this is another thing I wanted to highlight which is that our head of design John Mada is here with a High school principal in Paintsville, Kentucky and John had the idea well Okay, maybe we can have a design class for high schoolers there so that they come out knowing skills and Just wanted to take a second here let that Gestate but wanted to get a sense of why people are here or let me ask Just ask three questions Are any people who here who work at a room work remotely? Okay, so maybe Fridt Lanser cool. Yeah Any people here that are really actively thinking about well, how can I make my Wherever I work more inclusive more diverse Okay, so it's it's it's in there and so hopefully I can touch on some of these issues and At least got a discussion going Okay, but the thing I wanted to bring up with both You know the experiences kind of in the community in Detroit and in my kind of Acknowledgement of dr. King's work is that opportunity is still kind of in the exclusive Mindset if we look around at what's come going on in our world in our country Just some graphs here. I'm a data scientist at WordPress So I'm always being called on to put together charts graphs analyses for the stuff that's happening internally So a graph just to illustrate that economic opportunity in terms of just salary is still kind of racialized in our country Black Latino People just making a fraction of the pay of others in our society if we look at kind of a measure of Economic inequality The definitely seems to be some patterns here in Atlanta unfortunately scores kind of high in the Genie index which is kind of a measure of how You know the economic divide of an area it's a kind of a You know kind of a dark patch there and the Atlanta and the You know southeast and it's kind of spread throughout the country And just to kind of apply one racial lens to it the areas at least in the southeast of this high inequality also kind of overlap with the proportion of African-American the African-American population Let's see so All that to say that there, you know exist some disparities both along racial and geographic lines They kind of intersect right so one way to think about what distributed work as in the the companies that are like automatic could bring to the world is a A more acute equitable distribution of Resources wealth however you want to put it right if your Opportunities are not necessarily linked to and limited by your place Then maybe that opens the world up to a lot of other possibilities So again, I think back to the work that John Mada was doing You're actually saying that you could go out into a place and introduce a Technology as kind of an equalizer and this when people go out and do surveys of Women underrepresented minorities One factor that keeps coming up, especially when you ask well What's what's the most important thing about working in a place for you? Is that this this notion of flexibility and work? Comes up as a key factor. In fact among 83 percent of Underrepresented women in the sciences and engineering the ability to do Flex to have flexibility and work to be able to work from wherever you want it to be able to kind of chart the schedule That you want comes up as the most important factor So another factor kind of looking at and trying to tease out where to Look for people and what to think about in terms of how Distributed work could have a real impact You're just just thinking about where Skilled people are so as just one data point The black colleges the historically black institutions, especially in the southeast pay Play a large role in producing graduates in the sciences and engineering so again It's kind of a way of looking at you have a large population in a given era you have You know skills concentrate it there so Kind of bringing the work to the people so to say it's a very powerful way of thinking about things and You know If you're skeptical about saying well you know what is the value of Equality or Distributed work for You know what is the value of being more inclusive Then this report done by McKinsey 2015 Kind of hits home a point which is our latest research finds that companies on the top Quartile for gender racial and ethnic diversity are more likely to have Financial returns above their national industry medians Which is to say that Making an effort on for inclusion making an effort for Constructing a diverse workforce You know has a benefit for everyone and you know most recently I think this is kind of the You know the movie child the poster child for what? diversity means an inclusion means in terms of profitability in The movie Black Panther, you know kind of internationally kind of across all demographics it's one of the most profitable movies that has been made and Again, it speaks to inclusive and diverse themes So, you know we kind of broaden what our Reach is if we broaden inclusivity then you know everyone wins So, where are we so one of the discussions that I was having earlier with my colleague? especially about the Detroit hangout they did was that Well, it's okay to go to some place and try to make a you know Teach them development skills or teach them about putting up a wordpress site But what happens if they don't have reliable access to the internet? What if the people they're trying to reach don't have that kind of Access and that's a good question. So I was trust trying to think about this question in terms of the training how much do you need to to be able to construct a Distributed workforce that impacts people that have been underrepresented and How much burden are you placing on them in terms of training and in terms of the resources they need to enter? into you know distributed company so one Piece of this spectrum. We have companies that we think about in terms of their distributed workforce WordPress or automatic as I mentioned everybody works remotely Companies that you may be aware of Mozilla the the browser There's this search engine called duck duck go And there's this company called github that hosts a lot of open source Projects well these companies all have a significant number of distributed employees people that work all over the globe But in some sense even for roles like product development engineering software development Marketing you need some skills. Maybe they can be acquired formally and formally You know, maybe you need a college education. Maybe you need You know some some kind of technical training. It could be formal or not But still there's a lot of investment you need to be making in training On one end of the resource spectrum. There's companies like Lyft. I mean you can be a driver Anyplace, but you need to own a car, right? Leasing a car Yeah, there's some kind of Yeah, I mean and and increasingly, you know places like Walmart or Amazon of course are talking about Creating You kind of I would say hybrid workforces that you know some portion robots some portion You know people doing the restocking people Handling customer support, so there's a lot of You know stuff going on in this space But I think that the kind of barrier to entry, you know getting the job is less burdensome than You know having to you know necessarily have the the car or have the You know be highly credentialed, okay But the questions you could ask in the space are you know kind of stability of the job You know what are the the benefits you're receiving? Are you having to make lots of compromises in your? You know other aspects of life in order to juggle You know getting it. So what's the is the work life? Equation really working out And you know you so you could go in this other portion of the spectrum You know telemedicine where you know you're a highly trained Physician here, and she's making a you know essentially a telecall So you know just really a lot of things to think about And I think remote work is increasingly becoming the Thing on the horizon, but how what questions should we be asking about it? And here I really have more questions than answers So I just want to this is not exactly as Visible and legible as I would hope but I just wanted to throw up some Indicators and some data that we have from distributed companies about how Inclusive they're making their workforce So this may be a little hard to Parse but on the left-hand side. I have some data from github another You know technology company, I think It's around five percent or so participation of black and Hispanic Engineers About 22 percent. I think women in technical roles. It's larger for the company as a whole Get lab is another Distributed company that makes basically software a software hosting platform and The thing you'll notice here, although it's It you know does have in the teens representation of Black Hispanic employees, but you know again, it's a smaller company and the numbers are low you can have one black technical employee and still have 12 percent, which is interesting but So in other words, there's still You know, there's still this gap in between the promise of the work and kind of the representation there again, this is Not that legible looking at it, but The summary here is that for black Latino College graduates in the in the sciences engineering The rates are something like eight to ten percent So it's coming towards what you expect from the overall population, but the kind of labor force participation Still is going toward the five percent level in these kind of STEM fields, so there's still some drop-off is in You know the graduates are being produced, but are they finding work in this area and You know, it's also so there's also kind of a really credentialized Look at the the data because you know, I'm looking at college graduates people that could You know afford the tuition have the resources to make it through college What about the people that need work? that are perfectly capable of doing things but You know, how do they get into the pipeline for work that? Gets out of this huge Barriers in terms of inequality So, you know, here's another graph kind of illustrating the same point So I made a quick survey. I was just trying to send this out to people at the various Distributed companies to ask well, you know, what are you doing? What are your thoughts on going forward? Strange well the interesting thing about it haven't had much feedback But I would just kind of welcome people to just dive into it took a site here distributed inclusion org and You know feel free to go to it or just dabble around in it and how much? How's my time? Okay So I'm gonna try to experiment actually we're going to the survey and while I doing that are there any questions or You know kind of yeah, I do have a question about the definition of diversity Because here I did I went to a non-profit Diversity summit there were three white guys and two black guys at the panel everybody over 50 non-profits probably mostly female employees there younger so the audience was mostly female younger black white Hispanic Asian and then we had these five guys older guys up on stage talking about the importance of Inclusion and it was ironic So from your point of view I wonder how maybe or maybe from automatics point of view or How do you actually because sitting in your session? That's diversity You're looking around this Conference we see a lot of people It's not just black and white in Atlanta. It is in Seattle. They think about American Indian population So it's Well, I had a nice quote there, but it's a complicated You know, I meant in light you bring up the complexities of the issue when I think of I mean, I've been thinking about three things lately There's the word diversity. There's the word inclusion. There's the word equity and What I'm really trying to think about is You know really the thing I was getting to in the beginning of the the talk which is that You know King was assassinated trying to get some work done for the striking garbage workers but striking sanitation workers in Memphis You know at the end of it all We're all trying to participate. We're all trying to put food on the table educate our children what are the barriers to getting there and I think of Inclusion and equity particular as saying that you know a as a you know as a native person in Seattle as a Young black man in Atlanta You know, you're trying to You know really exist you're trying to fulfill your human capacity and it's a society We benefit from those human capacities being fulfilled As a company we benefit from having You know multiple eyes on things when I do when I write code I Submit it to a platform like github and three other developers look at it and a developer who's You know 20 years younger than I in base in Australia May have different perspective than I would on the code When I'm trying to present a You know just a plan for three years going forward For my work and I make a comment The woman who's my manager may have a different Thought about the structuring of those goals than I would so I I mean I think that the a the perspectives Play out in a real way. I think the opportunities for a company play out In a real way, and I think that when you And I also think that when we let artificial barriers that we've inherited. I mean we were born into society. We can't control the fact that You know Georgia is what it is The the world we are born into we have no control over but we have some control over just saying You know you have a valid idea. You have a valid idea. Why you know, why aren't you being heard and I think That I kind of view the inclusion as that being invited to the table Making decisions about how a company reaches out to the the people that it wants to support and I view the inclusion and equity as What are our customers need? Maybe there's a huge market that we haven't identified So that's Kind of how I view it You know, I think automatic is still like many companies making it shift So I've been going giving you a long-winded answer to your question, but I'll just Mean as a human being we all want to be a contributing member to the society, right? if a company Company with benefit is that have a lot of different I put a lot of time Okay, particularly in a place that they would get from having those diverse People the best way that we would look at it the college Inclusive college equality college diversity and those three companies that way Right. Hmm. So we need to Have that communication has a dialogue and have that happening And that's why we have to start talking about it and that's why I talk about accessibility When it comes to people But that's about a lot of people apply to everybody Do you find In the same way that companies release Diversity data race that they're releasing salary data according to Diversity because I think that's the other part of the equity scale. Yeah, it's nice to know that we have a diverse Workforce, but what are we paying them because that is like the onus of salaries on that? Yes, I feel like the minority group may have less Affordability, you know in that negotiation factor for time and to hold out for the salary Yeah, I Yeah, I did I've seen Two that come to mind. I can't really place where but One was saying that you know the In essence it seemed to be saying that They were particular underrepresented groups that were more prone to take, you know, kind of their reasoning was take a lower sell The explanation was take a lower salary get the job, you know, just nail just something down kind of thing And so not having Right and I don't think this particular survey teased apart, you know With their skills and negotiating with their I think If I'm not mistaken Maybe Facebook Google have Released some data about, you know, pay equity for women. I Don't know if it's been done along racial ethnic lines But yeah Intentional And then As crazy as it may seem Everyone's not pretty into it Always have a way to find them So if you're just figuring out ways to get to those disadvantaged people Or people who have the skills that they don't know how Is it going to be taught how to figure out where to find those jobs that would help too And I would also add to that one of my friends and my cousin works in IT and They intentionally didn't put their Ethnicity on their application Because they don't know if they're going to be looked at and not given the given the opportunity because they're qualified or not qualified And so if you went to the university of wisconsin, which is, you know, big cheese state But he got a job. He loves it. He's in san diego But the company that he works at believes in diversity and that's part of their culture And I think it really comes down to what the company's culture and their values are and then that's reflected in how they execute things and then Like you said you surround yourself with diverse people it's kind of like a It's accurate kind of thing like if that's what you're fostering Other people are going to foster that as well. And then it's not just all on like the head of the company I say like wipe that question off Yeah I really hate that question But then, you know, like I have the opportunity to do that and by the end of the story it's the same thing That's a probably good place to start And another example is my friend. Um, he's the owner of an educational Platform, I don't know what it's called. It's called bridge prep solutions and what he's done All of his employees work remote. They're international and he's taken off ethnicity Gender and something else on there And he's just he has like key questions that he wants to have for example, like a person at polytech That didn't all get the degree but has the skills He has certain questions that meet the criteria for what he's hiring for and he goes to different pockets So like for example, he has an ad on career contessa, which is a female Oriented website for women to get jobs. He has a job posting on I think it's nezvi or national association of black engineers And then he has a posting on another website that's for all minorities and disadvantaged for People that need accessibility and that's how he's like picking out employees based on those skills rather than trying to like fit them In those holes Yeah And that might be something you can try and do and it'd be less work on your part because a lot of people They might know one website Or something like that. I don't know Well, I I'm getting the signal to Oh Okay, um, I was I think in in building a team and hiring a team, um I was fortunate enough to learn in a corporate environment from A wonderful manager and I've had a wide I had a wide variety of managers, but one in particular was Very good at Talking to us as junior people who would eventually move up the lab Talking to us about diversity about the importance of I think it's important to not like we've been talking about What you're hiring but also the people you're already working with talk to them about being inclusive Being empathetic being Opening to new ideas because when you have a lot of different ideas, there's a lot more conflict, but it usually results in more interesting ideas And a really good product and like I said, I learned that from that manager really early in my career and It made a big impact and I mean other managers have Closed off points of view. Yeah, and so I think that's in addition to hiring You know looking out to to new people when you talk to your existing Yeah, yeah Yeah, I mean, I just feel that um whatever however, you want to phrase it but the quality of being empathetic of listening of trying to build that Um, I think that it's an important and maybe a skill that you should That I would say people should hire upon because a lot of times Um, you know, I can't tell you how many times that You know, you'll get into a technical discussion And it's really the person who kind of builds the bridge It says, well, okay, I see your point, but we need whatever it is And that's really the thing that gets a product out the door And I think that if you're you know, I really think that the contribution one Contribution that will be talked about maybe 50 100 years hence In terms of automatic is the ability and maybe other companies too just to create a wide-ranging distributed You know workforce in a way that's And hopefully at the end of it That's equitable and I think that Those kinds of things don't happen by accident and you like you said you have to You have to go out and find the The manager that you mentioned, you know And you know as people Right Stating that your diversity minded so that I know in applying for jobs No one's going to say we don't like this group of people, but if you you may be Lost to words like overwhelmed at the idea or Feeling like you may not belong there if you're looking at the present team or something like that and If you go we're diversity minded. These are the things that we're looking for and we're open to All these types of people and the person won't feel as though they don't belong and they'll they'll be It won't be a scary to apply to whatever position it is. That makes sense. Yeah Yeah, applying for a job is scary enough You know, why are you gonna? You know, it shouldn't be an open question about whether I'll be included there or not Yeah, intimidating exactly Oh marvelous Well, uh Well, yeah, I think if I leave you with anything It's that first line up there that It's not as visible as I want it to be but it's cultivate empathy and I think of the You know the story of your manager and the story of you know coming to apply for A job and am I going to be accepted as I am? Um, you know all of those things the degree to which we can just remove those barriers and You know and make it as Open and you know open to the challenge of You know pulling through more applicants You know, that's a good problem, right? I mean You know if everybody's there then you can say, oh You know, this is a skill I value and you can you can make better choices. You can make you have larger options Um, so that's the thing I would encourage cultivate empathy Thank you. Thank you


Hi, everyone. I'm Koh from Koningi Mellon University. I'll present our work, A Complete Capturization of Game Theoretically Fair Multi-Party Point Us. This is a joint work with Gail Asherov from Bartelon University and Elaine Shih from CMU. My advisor Elaine and I are two co-organizers of the CMU Crypto Seminar, and we need to decide the food for the seminar. I prefer sushi while Elaine prefer cake. We cannot persuade each other so we decide to toss a random coin. If the output is zero, then I win and we will order sushi, otherwise Elaine win and we will order cake. Since we're in different city this week, we decide to do Blom's Coin toss protocol on blockchain. We each choose a random bit and post the commitment of the random bit on the blockchain. If you're not familiar with blockchain, you can think of it as a public bulletin board. So after we post the commitments, everyone can see them on the blockchain. After we post the commitments, we each open our random bit and post the opening on blockchain. Let's say Elaine's random bit is zero and my random bit is one. The output will be the XOR of these two random bits, which is one. So Elaine wins and we will order cake. However, I really want a sushi. After Elaine post her bit on blockchain, I know that I'm going to lose the game if I open my bit. So what if I refuse to open my commitments? In this case, Elaine just automatically wins and the outcome would be one. So still we will order cake. This is the famous Blom's coin toss protocol back to 1983. It guarantees that a strategic player like me cannot bias the output towards my preference. Formerly in the coin toss protocol, the goal is to output a random coin that is publicly verifiable. The correctness requires that if everyone is honest, then the output should be uniformly random. The fairness notion considered in traditional literature is called strong fairness or unbiased ability, which requires that a strategic player cannot bias the outputs towards either direction. Unfortunately, this is shown to be impossible by cleave in 1986. Indeed, even in blom's coin toss protocol we just saw, I can always bias the output towards one by refusing to open the commitment. The fairness notion achieved by blom's coin toss protocol is actually more of a game theory favor. For game theoretic fairness, it requires that a strategic player cannot benefit herself by deviating from the protocol. Now that we've seen blom's coin toss protocol which achieves game theoretic fairness for two party coin toss. A natural question to ask is that can we achieve game theoretic fairness for multi-party coin toss? In multi-party coin toss, several players get together to toss a binary coin. Each player has a preference that is publicly available. Let's say, for example, kittens and I prefer sushi and we call them sushi people, while puppies in a lane prefer cake, so we call them cake people. Some of these players will get together to form a coalition that will coordinate with each other and try to bias the output to increase their utility. The utility we consider is quite natural. If I like the output, I gain utility one. And the utility of a coalition is just the sum of the utility of the players in this coalition. For example, if the output is cake, then this coalition in the figure gains utility three, and if the output is sushi, then this coalition gain utility two. Therefore, the preference of a coalition is actually the preference of majority players in this coalition. Now, for multi-party coin toss, the game theoretic fairness notion we consider is slightly different. Now we care more about the behavior of a coalition rather than a strategic player. For multi-party coin toss, game theoretic fairness requires that a coalition cannot increase its expected utility by deviating from the protocol. So if a coalition holds protocol is game theoretic fair against coalition of size T, then the honest protocol is actually a T-sized coalition-resistant Nash equilibrium because this best strategy for the coalition is just to follow the protocol honestly. So why do we care about this game theoretic fairness? Because we know that strong fairness is impossible against half-sized coalition. However, in many decentralized applications, for example, voting on a blockchain, many pseudonyms may be controlled by the same entity. And these pseudonyms, they will coordinate together and they may deviate from the protocol to gain benefit. It is very likely that these pseudonyms form a majority-sized coalition. So we do need some meaningful fairness notion that is achievable against a majority-sized coalition. Game theoretic fairness is exactly such a notion that is slightly weaker than strong fairness yet still meaningful and suitable for decentralized applications. Unfortunately, game theoretic fairness for multi-party coin toss protocol is shown to be impossible against a minus one-sized coalition due to Chen's result back to 1918. So a natural question to ask is that can we achieve game theoretic fairness for multi-party coin toss against small-sized coalition? Let's say majority-sized but not necessarily a minus one. And the answer is yes. To convince you, I'll first show you a very simple strawman solution for four players. Let's say we have two sushi people and two cake people. In the strawman solution, each group first arbitrarily choose a representative. Let's say it's the kitten and the puppy. Then these two representatives draw with each other using Blum's coin toss protocol. The output of this Blum's protocol will be the coin for four-party coin toss. So this very simple protocol is game theoretically fair against coalition of size two. Note that if the coalition contains one sushi person and one cake person, then this coalition actually has no preference and they can never increase their expected utility. So we don't care what they do to the coin. If the coalition contains two sushi people, then by Blum's coin toss protocol, the sushi representative cannot bias the output with sushi. And so this coalition cannot benefit by deviating from the protocol. The same argument works for the case if the coalition contains two cake people. So we can achieve game theoretic fairness for four-party coin toss against coalition of size two. This is an evidence that it is true that we can achieve game theoretic fairness for some meaningful primary region. Actually, this very simple strawman idea generalizes to any number of players as long as the coalition is of size at most two. So on the achievability side for a coalition of size less than half, we can achieve strong fairness and of course game theoretic fairness through multi-party computation. If the coalition is of size smaller than two, then we can use this strawman solution. On the impossibility side, Chen Edou showed that it is impossible to achieve game theoretic fairness against a minus one-sized coalition. So we ask the question, under what size of coalition is it possible to achieve game theoretic fairness? Exactly where should we draw the line, the boundary between visibility and invisibility? This work answers this question. We explored the broad range of parameters of coalition size between half and minus one.  We give a construction of a game theoretic fair coin toss protocol against team-sized coalition. And we show that game theoretic fairness is impossible against two plus one-sized coalition. We will give the expression of T2U later. So in the rest of the talk, we will mainly focus on the construction of the protocol. Still to convey the main idea, we will use a simple example of six players, three sushi people and three cake people. The structure is quite simple. We let the sushi people choose a random coin S0. And then we let the cake people choose a random coin S1. The output will just be the XOR of these two random bits. But where do the random coin S0 and S1 come from? So for easier understanding, we assume a secret sharing trusted authority parameterized with K that choose a random coin S for us and satisfy the following properties. First, only K or more players can ask the authority to reveal the value of S. And second, any K or more players can choose to rewrite the value of S before any reveal request. As a heads up, this trusted authority can be implemented by standard crypto, and we do not need to assume trusted authority in our final protocol. So this trusted authority is just for a better understanding during the talk. With this trusted authority, our protocol works as follows. First, each group has a trusted authority with parameter K set to be two. The sushi authority first choose a random coin S0. And then if the collision wants to rewrite the value of coin S0, it has to be now. And then the K authority choose a random coin S1. Still, if the collision wants to rewrite the value of S1, it has to be at this point. No rewrite is allowed after. Then sushi people sends reveal request to the trusted authority to reveal the value of S0 on blockchain. Then the K people send reveal request to K authority to reveal the value of S1 on blockchain. If both coin revealed successfully, the output is the XOR of these two random coins. However, if S0 is not revealed because two or more sushi people refuse to reveal, but coin S1 is successfully revealed on the blockchain, then in this case, the output of the protocol is just the coin S1. On the other hand, if the coin S0 is revealed, but S1 is not revealed, what should we output? Should we output S0? So definitely not. We should output 0 instead of S0. This is because by the time when the sushi people decides whether they want to reveal S1, they already see the value of S0 on the blockchain. So even if a collision of only two K people, they can bias the output by deciding whether they want to reveal the coin S1 after they saw the value of S0 on the blockchain. This means that if we choose to output S0, if S1 fails to be revealed, then we will only be able to tolerate collision of size one. So instead, we will output 0 as a heavier punishment for the cake people if they refuse to reveal the value of S1. So this six player coin toss protocol actually achieves game theoretic fairness against collision of size up to four. To see this, if this coalition contains two sushi people and two cake people, they actually have no preference, and they can never, because they can never increase their utility, so we don't care what they do to the coin. If the coalition contains three sushi people and a single cake person, then this coalition can decide the value of S0 because they can rewrite the coin. However, as we mentioned, when they rewrite the coin S0, they know nothing about S1. So the coin S1 is still an independent uniformly random coin chosen by the cake authority that is guaranteed to be revealed due to the two honest cake people. So if the coalition choose to reveal coin S0, then the output should be S0 XOR with S1. If they choose not to reveal S0 at the time when they decide whether they want to choose reveal S0, they know nothing about coin S1. So the output is an independent uniformly random coin S1 chosen by the cake authority. On the other hand, if the coalition contains three cake people and a single sushi person by a similar argument, they can control the value of coin S1 at the time when they know nothing about S0. So if they choose to reveal S1, the output would be S0 XOR with S1, which is uniformly random. If they choose not to reveal S1, then the output will directly be zero. I believe smart as they are, they will never do this because this brings them no benefit. So this protocol is game theoretically fair against coalition of size four. Can we generalize it? And the answer is positive. This idea actually generalizes to arbitrary number of players. And this table gives the maximum size of the coalition we can tolerate with this protocol. In this table, N1 is the number of cake people and N0 is the number of sushi people. For simplicity, I ignore the running here and we've got loss of generality. We assume N1 is at least N0. And this is the landscape of the achievability and inch of ability of game theoretic fairness. It turns out that the landscape of game theoretic fairness is darkly different from the de facto strong fairness. In this plot, the X axis denotes the number of sushi people and the Y axis denotes the number of cake people. The Z axis here is the size of the coalition. This red plane is the boundary between visibility and invisibility of game theoretic fairness. For any region below this red plane, we can achieve game theoretic fairness. And for any region above, we cannot. As a comparison, this blue plane is the boundary of invisibility and visibility for strong fairness, which is exactly half of the number of players. From this figure, we can see that there is indeed a meaningful region for which we can achieve game theoretic fairness, but not strong fairness. And moreover, we can see that the achievability of game theoretic fairness is not only related to the size of the coalition, but also the relationship between the number of sushi people and the number of cake people. To wrap up in this work, we give a game theoretically fair coin toss protocol against T sized coalition, and we show that game theoretic fairness is impossible against any T plus one sized coalition. And T is summarizing the table below. Here in one is the number of cake people in and zero is the number of sushi people. When in one is much larger than N zero, then we can tolerate coalition of size up to in one minus half and zero. Moreover, if one equal to n zero and they're equal to odd, then we can tolerate and zero plus one sized coalition, as in the six clear example we just saw. Otherwise, we can tolerate a coalition of size up to two thirds and one plus one third and zero. In the work, we also give other results, we give a complete characterization of another fairness notion, which requires that no coalition can harm any honest individual. We also give complete characterization of these two fairness notion on their other natural utility functions. And this is the reference for the paper mentioning the talk. And thank you. If you're interested in more details of the paper, you can read our paper, which is posted on it brain or write me email. That's my talk. Thank you so much.