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If any of you folks are wearing hats or glasses, best remove them, because this here's a wildest ride in the wilderness! If any of you folks are wearing hats or glasses, best remove them, because this here's a wildest ride in the wilderness! I just want to point out how skinny I look. I think I'm the one that looks skinnier. Since you guys last saw me, I'm down 10 pounds. Isn't that awesome? Tell us a bit about your diet. What have you been eating? Nothing! He's literally, he literally before we started, he took something out of the fridge. It was this box of like, what is that? It was like yellow stuff. And what was it? It was couscous. Apparently, people are having trouble hearing us on our mic.  Okay, I'm going to test this on YouTube guys. If not, I can quickly fix this. It sounds okay to me. Someone said audio is fine. Audio is fine for me guys. Someone said quality is not the best. Your mic is bad. Your mic is bad. That's impossible. It's literally the same mic, just the more professional version. You are not quiet. Cadence says you're okay. You're good. Okay, alright. I don't know. I think even on my end it's playing good. It's at 1080 for me. Maybe it's pretty good, isn't it? Yeah. The camera is better too guys. I don't know if you could end the camera quality. I was able to fix that. So we went from 1080p to 3K or 4K. No, no, we're at 3K. 3 or 2K. 2 or 3, whatever. But... We have had a pretty eventful week, haven't we? We have. Well, the Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, there was a big snowstorm the other day. That was eventful. But what did we do on Sunday? We went to Outback Steakhouse. Oh yeah, it was so good. That was the highlight of the trip, guys. Totally. 100%. No, it wasn't. We went to Winter Chill Out. Okay. Did we not talk about this on the stream? No, because we had the stream and then we went to Winter Chill Out. Okay, I was just making sure we weren't repeating ourselves. No, so yeah. Last time we streamed, guys, was the Grace stream and then right after that we went to bed. I didn't go to sleep. I went to bed and then we drove six hours to Ohio and we did Winter Chill Out. We did. How did you honestly think about it? I know you loved it. Don't take me out of the equation. I loved it. I honestly loved it. There were parts that were obviously could have been different. The organization could have been better. There was a few areas where we were just kind of standing around for extended periods of time. That seemed kind of pointless and poor planning. But you know what? They showed us the maintenance shop. That was honestly my dream come true. I got to hold a wheel. We saw how the brakes worked. They had an actual setup, guys, of friction brakes and they were working. That was one of the coolest things I've ever seen. We got an awesome tour of Millennium Force. We went into the tunnels. We saw how the cable tensioners worked. It was absolutely fantastic. From that perspective, I thought it was extremely, extremely cool. What about you? It was good. There were good things about it. I'm definitely being a little too hard on them. I didn't like the amount of standing around. There was a lot of standing around. There was a lot of gray area, which is what I'm going to call it. She went and walked us over to Steel Vengeance. I heard other groups were allowed to go up to the sign though. Our tour guide was one of those sticklers. We weren't allowed to go near Steel Vengeance's sign. We had to just stand back right up against the railroad tracks almost. I was like, so why are we over here? We've all seen Steel Vengeance. Why did we really have to come over here and stand here for 20 minutes? Outside of that, it was good. Honestly, I've been told to go to Mack Bull. I was always told to go to Mack Shack at Cedar Point. We actually got to taste it because they're discontinuing it.   We did discover, do you remember, that Americans like Velveeta cheese and that's what they use. Velveeta is like craft singles, but in a huge brick. It's like oil and processed, like hydrogenated, margarine. It's disgusting. It was horrible.  I've always hated Velveeta. He ate mine. Thank you. You're not supposed to tell them that. Oh, but they had this great crumble. Oh my God, they had a crumble and I ate so much. Oh, the crumble is good, which I'm assuming is a part of their new bakery for next year. This camera is so good. This camera is good. This is just me. How do I get rid of that box? Okay. What else? We wanted to... Oh, where are we going in two weeks? So, okay. I'm super excited to be taking, for all of us to be going there, the people who are going, Brendan's coming. We are going to Busch Gardens, Williamsburg and King's Dominion. Both of those parks are very... I find them awesome. They're very special to me. I am so excited for Brendan to try out Busch Gardens, Williamsburg. Just experienced that park. I know he's going to love it. I have to... Sorry, we're trying something else new. Yeah, so, okay. Just before we talk about this, I'm testing out widgets because for Patreon users, we are going to implement a special chat for Patreon users to chat in the stream. I'm not liking it in the actual camera setup right now. In the other ones, I'll like, but right now, I'm like, where do I put this? You know what I mean? Yeah. But we'll put it up here because it was blocking your face. So, keep going. Where are we going? So, we are going to Busch Gardens, Williamsburg and King's Dominion in two weeks from now. Not even two weeks from now. Yeah, two weeks. Yeah, literally. Less than 13 days from now, we are going to be at Busch Gardens, Williamsburg, guys. Both of those parks are incredible. I think I might overhype King's Dominion a little too much. I really like that park, but I know for a fact, Brendan is going to love Williamsburg. It is such a beautiful park. They have great rides, great food, great atmosphere, everything. It's really an elevated experience. I'm excited for him to try the rides there. The rides are great, but guys, what I am the most excited for is to see everyone's reaction on Intimidator 305. I know. This ride, guys, like, if you've ridden it, you know what I mean. Whether or not you like it, you cannot deny it is the most intense roller coaster ever built. Yeah. How much are you paying that person? I can double it. I'm trying to reach out to King's Dominion. I'm going to reach out on Monday, and I'm going to beg for permission to film my reaction on I-305 because even a lot of Americans, when I used to be more Americanized as a channel, literally always said, like, I need to see a reaction on your first ride on I-305. So I'm going to film my death. I told him. I told him I once brought someone there a couple of years ago, and this person actually did eventually, like, black out for, like, not that long, but she did black out, and Brendan's like, are you trying to kill me? I'm going to come back on the station, like... It is actually that first curve, and guys, if you don't believe us, just look at the reviews on that ride. The number one review is it's too intense. It's too intense. It's going to be me. I'm going to be on the Google, like, should have got a BNM. So that is going to be fantastic. I-305 is such an incredible ride. I think King's Dominion is a nice park. There's twisted timbers, flight of fear, dominator. I just can't wait for Brendan to experience these two parks. And what do you think my favorite ride of the trip is going to be? I already know. I honestly think it's going to be I-305. I think Pantheon is going to be up there. It might actually. To be honest, I was thinking a different ride, but it might. So I think I-305, Pantheon, Alpingeist, or... He's missing the real one. Or Twisted Timbers. Verbalton. I've been looking forward to that ride for so many years. It's a good, it's a fun ride. Thank you. Look, even my viewers know me better than you. Verbalton, Verbalton. So he may be looking forward to that ride the most, but I know what his actual favorite is going to be. It's probably going to be the food. You guys have no idea I'm eating nothing right now. Oh, and another ride. I actually can show you what I'm eating. This is my dinner. It's couscous and chickpeas and spinach. Another ride I know that he's going to be looking forward to because he just discovered it was there as an invader. Yeah, actually, I'll probably like that a lot. I guess you guys want to go right into Sirius Trigger. It's a, it's a reoccurring trigger, but it's going to, this trigger is going to segue into the title of this video, the title of this podcast. So let's go right into it. Look at this. Look how shiny that, you know what? No, no, no, and this is what the problem is. This is the problem. Look at parks like Kingsdale, literally any park but Wonderland. Any park but Wonderland, literally, like I'm not even exaggerating. I'm going, this park that only gets like 20 people a day come and they can retract their wooden coasters. But Wonderland, when they retract, they don't even retract the entire wood guys. They retract, they retract the top two layers. They probably reuse the running rail. But look at King's Dominion. They are getting the grizzly treatment. They are redoing everything. Reprofiling it. They're modernizing it. They're going to make it last another 20 years. Why can't we do that with Wild Beast? If they're not going to get rid of it, if they're not going to RMC it, they cannot continue to just keep retracting like 80 foot sections because the ride is rough. It's rough and Mindbusters is rough too. They need to do like a thousand feet of it at once. They can't keep just putting band-aids on it. And they don't understand maybe they're trying to save money, but the more and more, you know, they have to put band-aids on the rougher it gets. It's just not worth it. Just spend the money, you know, spend the however much it's going to cost. One, two, three million and retract the entire thing properly. There's a perfectly good company here. Gravity Group. Is that who's doing that? That's who's doing this. Gravity Group literally has worked with King's Dominion, as you can see here. Gravity Group did the retracking on Beast. They did retracking on Racer at King's Island. They are known for making some of the best wooden coasters in the world. They have some of the best carpenters in the world. Why can't we use them? Or why can't we just at least properly retract something? Well, Surya, I'm glad you asked. Our next topic is Wild Beast at Canada's Wonderland, the next coaster to be getting this treatment in 2024. I don't think it will be, but it better be. I honestly think it is. I was thinking about this last night. I was about to make this an actual YouTube video, and I was like, no, we can talk about it on the podcast, and then I'll make it an actual YouTube video. If you've noticed, there's zero work going on Wild Beast right now. There's no retracking work going on Wild Beast, which is the first. This is the first season where nothing is taking place. Still, oh, actually, no, it's not early anymore. We should start seeing it. No, they can't do anything now. They can do like a little 100-foot section like they do to my buster. They can do that in two days. But to be honest, I think Wild Beast is going to be 2024. I think in the 2023 offseason, we're going to get a Gravity Group refurbishment. Is it the whole coaster getting this? Everything, the whole ride. I think we're next. The whole ride. They have to. It's so uncomfortable. It's getting almost to the point where it's beyond uncomfortable. I'm going to say that, but not only Gravity, not only Wild Beast, but even Mind Buster, like they need to start actually seriously investing in those rides if they want to keep them around any longer. I would love to see this. I think this would be the perfect solution if they don't want to go the RMC route. I don't think they're going to go the RMC route anymore. I don't know. I don't know if I could see Wonderland doing this though. I would love it and it makes sense, but I don't know. I really hope so. Because when was the last time they actually did work on Wild Beast and what was it? It was that turn. No, no, you know what it was? Every season. No, what was the last thing they did though? Was it that curve? The curve. The fan curve. And then a little bit, they added some supports that no one believed me about. Do you remember that? Coming into the break run? Yeah. Yeah. So that was a while ago though. So you are right. They haven't done really anything. And you know what? I also just want to point out. Whenever they would retract a section on Wild Beast and even Mindbuster, it didn't make it smoother. No, it really didn't. And I don't want to say this because I know Wonderland's maintenance and everything. They are so capable and they do an amazing job. But I think with something like this, they need to hire a third party company like Gravity Group who only specializes in this because they have the expertise. They have the equipment. They have the knowledge to do something like this properly. I honestly think that Wonderland is left with no option and it looks exceeder fair. This isn't the first one to get this treatment, is it? This is the second one to get this treatment. Not full, but Gravity Group is also doing another one coaster in the chain, aren't they? Yeah, Kings Island. Yeah. So I think Wonderland is due for one as well. I would agree. Gravity Group in 2021 did the left side eraser. They did about 1,500 feet. They're doing 1,000 feet to the right side. In 2022, they did over 2,000 feet on the beast. So we need 2,000 feet done. We need like the whole ride done. That is the whole. How long the ride? We need that. And then some. They need to retract the goddamn station, too. You need to retract the park. Because soon there might be a little accident. Someone's going to drop their vape and it's going to pop. And I'm going to be filming with the drone. I'm kidding. Calm down. We don't need lawyers. However, if you do load too many people in most stations, it does get a little bit wobbly. It does. Seria jumps and the whole thing's like, ooh. He's not going to jump. He's tested it. You can do it, too. But I don't do it, do I? I don't really have anything else to say other than I think it's very plausible we could see. Again, I do want to stress though I have no solid information about this. So this is 100% opinion based that we're talking about right now. Do you think Wild Beast or Mind Buster? Wild Beast. I think Mind Buster is... Mind Buster is something they can do themselves. Whereas Wild Beast is so rough. Like if I was given an option, okay? If I was given an option to ride Mind Buster or Wild Beast all day, I would choose Mind Buster all day.  Yeah, Wild Beast is pretty brutal. All right. Just look how nice that craftsmanship is. What craftsmanship? All right, all there. Look at that. You don't know where I'm pointing. But look at that track. The tracks? Yeah, you can see your reflection off a bit. Mirror, mirror on the wall. When's the last time you could see that one? Who's the fastest one of them all? I'm going to get one of those signs. But yeah, anything else to say about a possible re-tracking? I don't think... I was just going to say, It really is. It really is. You know what, though? I think we've talked about this before. But this is a good reason why we might not be getting another one coaster. I don't think we're getting another one coaster. We have three. We have three guys. Like ever until one of these goes. Because how can we struggle to maintain two? People are literally predicting one-and-coasters out there are wanting a one-and-coaster. Wonderland has three wooden coasters. So until you see one removed or an announcement of one being removed, we can't even discuss a fourth wooden coaster coming to Wonderland. That's not the kind of park that's going to... And the winter, spring, summer, fall, it's hard on wooden coasters, is it not? Maybe that's another reason. And the only reason a park like Kings Island can get away with it is because they built their park around those wooden coasters. So they knew ahead of time what they were going to have. So they had to hire a maintenance team based off the wooden coasters, right? Whereas Wonderland, you know, we don't have as many wooden coasters as other parks. So it's like, why would we need to hire a team of 20-plus carpenters all year round? That's unnecessary. Yeah. So there's definitely no new wooden coaster coming to Wonderland until you see signs of it. That's why I don't talk about it. I'm not ruling it out of the picture. Again, 2025 could end up being a GCI, meaning plausible signs to it being a GCI, and that price tag. Unless Wonderland starts hiring like 50 carpenters. Oh, man. Oh, this is my topic. This is my topic. This is my jam.  You ain't wanted. You can't defend your parks anymore. Okay, let's have it, Brendan. Let's have it. What are we looking at here? We are looking at an amazing company up top. Thank you, Farrah. Thank you very much. An amazing great year. Thank you. Awesome. So attendance at Cedar Farrah totaled 26.9 million guests in increase of 38% or 7.4 million guests compared with 2021. Six Flags. Yet. Where am I starting here? Could not make up the massive drop in attendance from 27.7 million visitors to 20.4 million. Leading to drops in revenue net income earnings per share and adjusted EBITDA in 2022. Can you just explain what EBITDA means? EBITDA is like your total package. It's really complicated. There's more to it. Honestly, I have to explain it in detail because I always forget it. You know what? I'm going to give you a... I've heard Brendan use that word several times now and I have no idea. When you first said it I thought it was some made-up generation. Excuse me. It's basically your earnings before you subtract everything. This is why I had to look it up. Some companies measure this a little differently. The average company measures this before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization. Some companies actually include a lot more. Some companies include a lot less. But basically it's excluding it's before all your expenses. Essentially. Got it. For example, it's earnings before Leviathan's lift motor blew up. So it's like total earnings? Yeah. That was a little unnecessary shade, by the way. Where? I thought it was very necessary. But to be honest I didn't even know what that word was until I became a stockholder in Cedar Fair. I didn't know what that word was. I didn't know what that meant until right now. Because other companies actually use a different word. And when I worked at Starbucks, we used that word. And that's why that word was ingrained in me. And now I forget the Starbucks word for it. But anyways. So it's almost interesting. Because Six Flags is down 7 million visitors and Cedar Fair is up 7 million visitors. I was just going to ask you. So from a business perspective what does that say when a park loses 7 and a half million visitors almost overnight? Like over one operating season? Yeah, so basically what I did is the math. So I took an average price of $40. This is lower than what that 7 million would have equated to. So I took 7 million visitors times $40. That's bare minimum. It's probably more than this. They lost over a quarter of a billion dollars from just those visitors crashing. Now it's more than that. Again these guests would have spent more than just the ticket to get in. There's the parking, the food and all that. So that's bare minimum a quarter of a billion dollars that Six Flags lost in 2022 versus 2021. Which is insane. That's unacceptable. It's unacceptable. And people... There's half and half. A lot of people hate Salem. Salem is the guy above us right now. A lot of people hate him. I hate him. I think he's horrible. I think he's making the wrong decisions. He's trying to take what was the cheap theme park company and turn it into something it can't be. And his goals are too ambitious with hardly anything lined up. Even the additions they announced for 2023 are not additions that would fix what's going on here. So I actually think it's a waste of money. I think they're blowing money that they already don't have. I could rant about this all day. And then there's people that actually like Salem. But I've noticed that people that like Salem are people that are slightly racist. And I'm going to explain why in a second. Because Salem said something interesting on the stockholders' call that I personally my personal opinion view as racist undertones. And I personally think that people that like Salem like this decision because basically Salem basically Salem viewed it will use Von teenagers as an example to avoid the topic in depth. Basically what he said is he wants his parks to be less Walmart and Kmart and be more target. That's literally what he said on a stockholders' call essentially. He wanted to remove the rowdy teenagers and bring in a class year like family into the park. So what they did is they raised the prices. They jacked the prices up on a lot of their products and in turn what that has done is made 7 million people not be able to afford to go or choose not to go because they didn't see the value in the product. Whereas Cedar Fair has kept their prices relatively medium in the market like it's been very affordable in my opinion and on top of that what I like about Cedar Fair is they're raising their prices a lot slower. So Cedar Fair is raising their prices but it raises at a slower rate and while they're doing that, they're investing in the pyramid. So let's view the investments at a Cedar Fair park and let's use Canada's Wonderland. You see it right now especially. So infrastructure I think is the bottom of investments. It's the most important part of an investment and I'll explain it more in detail in a second. Cedar Fair is investing in that and the best way to look at that is let's say Canada's Wonderland is building a 2025 addition. So that addition has the potential to draw in a 20% increase in attendance. You have a park that's seeing a roughly 4.2 million guests a year now and they have record season pass sales in 2023 with hardly any new additions that would create a big draw. So let's say Wonderland is about to build something pretty epic and they're expecting a 20% increase in attendance with that investment. Their infrastructure needs to be able to handle that. So right now infrastructure would be like toll booths front gate, restaurants warm water in the restrooms for Winterfest it's everything that's like that. So you're going to see parks like Wonderland Kings Island, Carowinds, and some Six Flags parks should be doing this but they're not investing in their infrastructure to prepare for those big years and that's the difference between Cedar Fair and Six Flags in my opinion. Cedar Fair invests smartly. They're aggressive with their investments like Dornie Park, Worlds of Fun Even Cedar Point they're kind of switching it up with that new restaurant they're building in more infrastructure there. I'm impressed like Cedar Fair gets hated on a lot. And sometimes we hate on Canada's Wonderland more than we should too like all of us do in the chat. I've seen us all comment on Wonderland. They get hated on but Wonderland's prices compared to other attractions in the GTA Fair they offer a season pass that now gets you in to so many different seasons for like $99 if you bought it smartly when they first announced it. $125.99 right now $125.99 now but that's $125.99 guys that's the price to get into like a park in Florida for the day for a whole four seasons? Four seasons at Wonderland. And if you can't pay it up front you can still do a payment plan which is more than affordable. Yeah, oh my god. Yeah, Wonderland we'll take our check. Thank you. Thank you. No it's just for itself. Where's Marley?  And it's just like when I'm hearing about the plans for Wonderland it makes me appreciate Cedar Fair so much more because they're trying to become place a place not an amusement park we're trying to become this place making experience entertainment wise food wise venue wise event wise and then roller coaster wise and it's funny because roller coasters moved down on Cedar Fair's investment model and then in the fourth quarter roller coasters actually moved up on the investment model and you're seeing it for the first time ever you're seeing these medium small parts getting really cool actually really cool investments that aren't like 40 free spins I love 40 free spins that's not me hating but like they're getting dive coasters possibly and they're getting Zambini how do you pronounce it? Zambizi Zinger? Yes, which actually looks so much cooler than the animation those cur... oh my god the profiling on that so like honestly guys not to over height but be excited about Wonderland's future because Cedar Fair has aggressive plans for all their parks now if I could add something onto that with the Six Flags Cedar Fair thing so what Brandon just said he hit the nail on the head so good where even their smaller mid tier parks are now getting these unique and that's the keyword unique attractions whereas you look at the Six Flags they still do the same cookie cutter stuff you know same generic name Superman Batman Wonder Woman same generic ride you know the single rail skyline or giant discoveries which aren't bad rides but every park just gets the same thing there's no uniqueness there's really no planning it's like we're gonna take one of those and we're gonna put it in each park and then they wonder okay how come people aren't really visiting that park well if you have a family you know who went to one park or whatever you're not gonna need to go check it out so there's no there's no thought process in how they add attractions they just they just like you know vomited out they're like that's what we have that's what I want yes and to even just elaborate or expand on that any further this is why I love Cedar Fair Six Flags is literally buying cookie cutters and the not even good cookie cutters anymore I watch Coaster Dash I think I watched this video on Six Flags and Salem this morning and honestly great video check it out honestly I think it's Coaster Dash I hope I'm not wrong I think Coaster Dash made a video about Six Flags if I'm wrong I'm so sorry but someone did and it was really good and the best way to describe it is now when you look at Salem's investments when enthusiasts were complaining about the 40 freestands being copy and pasted at all the Six Flags parks we were groaning and moaning now look what's being placed at all the Six Flags parks that was like Christmas back then great investments by the way it's pronounced Salem okay Salem sorry but I just don't I honestly don't see Six Flags surviving like and when I say surviving they will survive I just see them going down the bankruptcy route again in the next two years I really hope that's not the case but if these numbers if these numbers keep trending 20 million 20 so guys I know a lot of my viewers are a little more GP and so am I but business wise Six Flags has almost double the amount of parks Cedar Fair has it's not double but they have more parks than Cedar Fair does yet they're achieving less attendance a lot of Six Flags parks are also in metropolitan areas like Chicago the in warmer climates too yeah so you had Chicago, Georgia, Los Angeles there's the one the two in Texas metropolitan areas you know even great adventure you're an hour away from Philadelphia an hour and a half from New York City but great adventure is historic for never having lines even Magic Mountain do you remember a Magic Mountain announced they were going year round 365 a few years ago and specifically I think it was last season they had the lowest numbers like people were going there what's the single rail that just opened there oh great adventures yeah no no not great adventures Magic Mountain they had a single rail oh Wonder Woman for the media day there was a five minute wait for that ride because no one went for a media day no one went you look at a Cedar Fair media day you have an hour and a half two hours for Banshee two hours for Mystic Timbers Yukon Striker had a lot of people there Fury had like five hours worth of people there and then you look at a Six Flags event when they unveil a new ride there's no one there why because nobody cares because it's the same thing over and over again again like I really want people to appreciate Cedar Fair because like I could talk about Cedar Fair all day like I'm literally like call me their biggest fan because I honestly think I am I would like people would faint meeting like Shane or um like one of those famous people any famous person I don't even know a famous person's name on my head Lady Gaga people think if I met like the CEO of Cedar Fair I would literally faint he is so smart the whole team is so smart I love it I love it I love the direction the company's heading I could rent a day someone it's his rent now they're such a good company and they're they're a goal like I would have said this four years ago and they've gotten even smarter even smarter I do want to quickly just say because someone said Cedar Fair needs to diversify something in their investments I assume you mean that's with like the constant B&M's but they are still picking an elite manufacturer they are still getting that 20 plus million dollar ride and yeah B&M's run similarly but you put give a dive coaster a giga coaster a wing coaster there there are different models where six flags will take the cheapest of the cheap and they won't even try and change the layout they'll have it the exact same layout yeah and give it time guys give it time because I think some of you might need to go back and rewatch Grace's interview on our channel last week there is a lot of hidden information I don't know if it was accidental or on purpose so you're going to see we're actually going to talk about something she said in the stream that kind of leads me to believe that something's canceled and then yours that also leads you to believe that we are going to see coasters outside of B&M hopefully I mean it's already happening look at GCI they've been working with Cedar Fair now for some time even like Gritslour Mach so it's happening it is happening now Zamperla yeah wondering why I needed B&M's it really did I understand that decision I need those capacity machines like a reliable capacity machine yeah now we need an Intamin Hi Wonderland Intamin that's for me you would literally be the only one riding it I know it would be awesome okay do you have anything else to say anything else to say to Lord Voldemort on the screen right now just stay in your park can you imagine it like remember when there was the rumors of Cedar Fair I would have cut our attendance down well no I'm kidding you know what though one more thing because I remember like the Six Flags did the whole membership thing because prior to all that membership they had like the best season pass base you know a regular season pass no matter what park you bought it at got you into all the Six Flags parks that was fantastic and then they did the membership thing which was you know okay whatever and then they got rid of that and then they got rid of the dining plan and now they're like reinstating it when you change every six months you don't know what you want how are your customers going to know what to purchase and how are they going to feel safe purchasing something like let's say they want to purchase a membership or a pass they're always going to be thinking well is this going to be useful in six months from now 100% like there's no guarantee yeah and that's the other thing we'll talk about Cedar Fair is making risks like we'll talk about one of the attractions they're removing from Cedar Point all of you probably already know now it's not news from us yeah um there is something really cool happening to a really cool ish ride at Wonderland right now and I thought what who better than to describe what's going on with Leviathan my baby oh guys this is actually very exciting this is an awesome video by the way uh so basically in a steel roller coasters lifespan it requires a lot less maintenance than wooden coasters but when they do need to be maintained they need to be maintained in terms of after an X amount of years it's called metal fatigue it's where so the track the structure it will start to warp a little bit it will start to crack it's nothing dangerous and it's actually not cracks they're called fractures but it's going to start to deform and you need to come touch that up you need to flex it you need to weld it you need to maybe replay it you might need to retorque some bolts so that's what's going on here the most common type of fracture that happens it's called a transversal fracture or a longitudinal fracture so let's say my finger here is the track the crack will long will run longitudinally along the track so it's not even that dangerous when it's caught right away it's not dangerous at all actually because it's not it doesn't compel against the forces so if the force comes down here it's not interacting with that immediate force but what's happening is the veins of the steel start to delaminate and it makes those fractures so they just come in they weld it closed and then it's good for another 8-9 years but it's a very routine thing all steel structures not only roller coasters you see sometimes like hydro towers cell towers even buildings they'll have to go in there they might have to re-weld steel beams stuff like that it's a very common thing in the industry it happens all the time and it's just pretty cool to actually get to see it done is it dangerous? you could actually probably leave those fractures for like 4-5 years and nothing will happen eventually yes you know if left untreated anything will become dangerous that won't become dangerous for a long time the biggest risk is you know how much will it delaminate will it turn into an actual crack how big will that crack become will rust be able to penetrate the inside of the track because if rust goes on the inside of the box spine it can eat the track from the inside out it'll become more fatigued over time but if you let it go even for like 3-4 years no it's not dangerous but if the park has some free time it's good to address sooner rather than later you know what's funny though I have to give wonderland credit they take really good care of their steel coasters compared to their wooden coasters look at their ride like vortex yeah 100% I was going to say vortex is probably a lot more popular than the wooden coasters but minebuster is fairly popular too I think wonderland's maintenance team is really more geared towards catering towards the B&M's and the steel roller coasters like the steel fabrication I'm sure they have a really good welding team I'm sure they're in contact with really professional welders and iron workers and stuff like that and it really goes to show when they do stuff like this so that's awesome I mean like this was so cool they do a lot more than just wonderland and it's a very normal job too by the way this isn't anything wrong you're going to see this company I believe working on the ride for a little but it's the same last season I believe it's the same company that worked on it last season I don't know too much we don't talk to them if you drive by the park for whatever reason at like 2pm you know on a Tuesday or Wednesday you can probably see them up there in the little box doing their welds but they're not even always welding sometimes they're just inspecting right like they're making sure the bolts are still torqued everything like that is still good now I will say while they're up there they could maybe put a little paint on I think behemoth was due for a paint job before did y'all see my tiktok I don't know if they could even hear me the mic was so far away did y'all see my tiktok on behemoth hello did you see my tiktok on behemoth it needs a paint job real bad did you see the catwalk oh my goodness I'm like I normally make fun of it but now I'm like okay this is getting 6 flags level at least take a power washer or just do something yeah so guys when we end this stream I'm gonna look at the mic settings I just plug this in I have a feeling I have to go into my mic settings and boost something it's a better mic than my previous one but for some reason it is picking up a little quieter but yeah I'll figure it out in between the hangout session we have a fun little activity yeah we have a fun activity so join us there I also just want to quickly point out just in case anyone is wondering all those little black marks there that's not rust or anything that's just chain grease so it will drip out from the top sprocket it's all open maybe even you know if you've ever been under Leviathan or any ride you might have seen it fall on you like black oil and that's all it is it's just chain grease oh okay I thought it was Satan coming to claim my soul oh yeah you would like that though would you prefer I say Jesus we don't talk about that here oh it's cherry coke zero I told you that on the phone that's what you got it oh my god you just exposed yourself this man called me before our little trip last weekend and he's like I accidentally got coke zero cherry flavor is that okay? lo and behold it's your favorite flavor no matter what you say to me right now I don't believe you what's an accident I swear to god it was an accident last time but it's a good accident I'm just playing oh really good topic two canceled attractions for Canada's wonderland how do you feel about this I have a lot to say so one of them I know was for sure the flying theater I knew that we were supposed to be getting a dark ride in action theater and it was supposed to happen a couple years ago and I was sitting here wondering okay I know I've been told or heard from a very reputable source that action theater was supposed to be turned into a flying theater why isn't it happening I'm like it's gonna happen next year then it didn't happen and I'm like okay it's gonna happen next year and it hasn't happened I'm like it's gonna happen in 2024 no matter what until Grace came on our live podcast and gave a little juicy tidbit about decisions that wonderland are making now what did she say she said that they they saw what people wanted and stuff for winterfest and they wanted more cater towards the rides and things like that okay that's great am I wrong I thought you remembered it Grace said that wonderland is going to be building attractions that you can't find elsewhere in Canada she said that on the podcast she literally said that on the podcast she didn't say that in our meeting so with that being said there was a flying theater announced for Toronto by the CN tower by the CN tower so my assumption I can't confirm it's cancelled but it's definitely it's been delayed significantly and it's a winterfest ride so I would have thought they would have built this ASAP because they need more winterfest rides and the fact that it's not being built leads me to believe that what Grace told us about they wouldn't build attractions that already exist in Canada that they have cancelled this project it's been taken off the bye so another attraction is Forbidden Frontier why don't you explain what Tony and the Cedar Fair Cedar Point said so this is actually probably the only bit of actual cool information we got during that Q&A so at the Q&A for Winter Chill Out they were talking about things that were closing like the Mack Shack they said was Forbidden Frontier at Cedar Point was going to be closed for the 2023 season and basically what they said what it boils down to was attendance nobody went to it people didn't even know it was there people had no interest in going there they went in there once they said and they did not have a good time it did not it did not meet the expectation that Cedar Fair, that Cedar Point thought it would be yeah they even said the amount of work that went into staffing this attraction too it was just costly for hardly any interaction that was going on so they didn't see the return on investment thus it is closing there is no planned attraction at the moment whenever Park says that I don't actually believe them so yeah I've heard other rumblings as to why it closed all of it being under cost but I won't go into that now I want to ask you because when we heard they were closing you almost looked relieved why were you relieved this is T great question so we've been talking about Whitewater Canyon and Whitewater Canyon has a lot of distance markers in there right now and Whitewater Canyon is possibly the only land location in Wonderland that would make sense for a forbidden frontier style attraction Canada's Wonderlands also one of those family parks where Cedar Fair would unfortunately be seeing an attraction like this to come it was inevitable that we were on the list for one of these so I was worried that these 2025 plans that we've been hearing about and the really high price tag I don't know what forbidden frontier cost but the price tag that we're hearing for 2025 I was a little bit nervous about 20% nervous that it was forbidden frontier it was so I'm like I was betting on a coaster and I actually have a video for you guys it's so exciting I have a really cool video I might even tease it in our hangout session that proves when Wonderland's going to get a coaster and how many coasters they're going to get over the next six years I haven't working on that video I have everything but I'll show you guys so I'm pretty confident that we're getting a coaster in 2025 but there was a little because of the location of where the construction markings are showing up and the distance markings there was a little bit of nervousness now the only thing is I don't see why they would use distance markers for an attraction like forbidden frontier yeah it's just more like just static structures like play structures or like maybe a restaurant or just some theming or atmosphere stuff yeah so I honestly was relieved because it was something that I was afraid of like deeply afraid of that we were going to be the next park and that would have killed a lot of space it would have killed a lot of space but yeah do you have any other thoughts? so the other thing is when it comes to the flying theater being canceled it doesn't mean that they won't put a dark ride in action theater they're probably eyeing another one there are many options they could put in there they could put a more a trackless shooting ride in there for more of an adult audience maybe one that works on like guardian like something from Niagara Falls yeah but that exists too now right with the hands but that's made by Triotech too but on top of that I've been hearing rumblings that action theater actually isn't in the best health anymore it's infested from what I've been hearing and these are just rumors and speculation this is nothing confirmed and the building actually isn't in a stable condition to build an attraction and I don't know how truthful that is so I can't 100% say that's 100% true but we have heard that so maybe that's part of it too and maybe that's why the mountain is becoming a conversation do you think there's any value in that building for being a haunt just haunt do you think they're going to keep that maze in there? no I mean for now yes but Wonderland can easily build tents in the outskirts so there are parks and even Universal Studios they build these tents outside and then you just have the queue lines I think that makes sense for Wonderland to do in the future I could see them removing things especially from the basement of the mountain and just building tents on the outskirts Kingswood stuff like that they even have the theater they could use beside the mountain they could put a haunt maze in there do you have anything else to say about these two most likely cancelled attractions? I'm pretty happy not the flying theater the flying theater would be cool and I still think that would be unique for Wonderland's audience but for being in front of you that looked like I went there once I think in 2019 it was terrible okay guys this is a slight tease to a video that I'm paying to have made about Canada's Wonderland but yeah a front gate reno so you've been with me when I fly the drone and you've seen what we're starting to see and again you're going to hear the constant word bottom of the pyramid infrastructure so just to start off the conversation what you're seeing on the drone that I post the other day isn't a front gate reno occurring right now it's infrastructure upgrading electrical upgrading the system again, when we heard Wonderland and Cedar Fair are upgrading the infrastructure of the parks to be able to handle the growing attendance Wonderland is a park that desperately needs that infrastructure upgrade from plumbing, electrical, everything so that area of the park is getting some plumbing electrical upgrades in preparation for what I would assume is a front gate reno probably hopefully coming in 2024 it could be coming in 2025 but I would assume they would fit it in to our off year I would hope they would fit it into our off year what I can't see them starting World Expo yet there's a chance, there's a chance but I see them finishing Frontier Canada I can't and the distance mark rings unless we really are getting a GC I don't but regardless we need a new front gate if you guys have ever gone there on a Saturday or just any summer day, you get there at 10 o'clock, 10 am which is a terrible time guys, don't go with 10 am go either earlier or later but you get there at 10 am that front gate is absolutely packed there is no room to walk and things are just moving slow as molasses again, that's not necessarily Wonderland's fault because Wonderland's population has increased exponentially over the last 5-6 years to the point where maybe they aren't able to keep up all the way now they have to start prioritizing like they prioritize with Lady Bear we need a new, better restaurant now we need a new front gate how do we get people into the park we need front gate and parking lot upgrades so that might be something they're trying to work into you can't do it all at once but you have to prioritize thank you for saying that it pisses me off sometimes this is why I can't drink pop on the stream there are enthusiasts that are like, why can't Wonderland do this this, this, this and that slow down, they are they cannot fix front gate toll booths build a new coaster fix the washrooms, upgrade all the restaurants and even a 1-2 year period try explaining that to their stockholders that's very expensive no, it doesn't work that way and to be honest, Wonderland's one of those parks really doesn't need the investments at the end of the day they're going to do the same numbers essentially for the next little bit we're really lucky to be seeing these investments we really are, because at the end of the day a stockholder could approach Cedar Fair and be like why aren't you investing in a park at Canada's Wonderland that's going to see 4 million attendance for the next 5 years no matter what you do and Cedar Fair could be like you know what, yeah, we'll use Wonderland as a cash cow and we'll start investing back in Cedar Point because their attendance is starting to flatline and go down a little bit we're really lucky that Cedar Fair is eyeing Canada's Wonderland and seeing some sort of future goal there has to be something that they see in the park that we don't necessarily see ourselves yet because the investments are coming and we're really fortunate that the company is doing that because for a publicly traded company it's really difficult to argue investments for a pretty like stagnant attendance park it doesn't really have much more room to grow like we're not going to be able to hit 5 million unless they expand their season the park already hits near capacity for a lot of haunt and for a lot of the July-August months it's pretty much like you know, how do you even expand it like when you said hit 5 million just think about that, 5 million people in a year, that means on average a summer day you're looking at over 45-50 thousand people, did you say? where are all those people going to go so you need the restaurants you need the parking upgrades you need the washroom upgrades you need even just the walkways guys think about how congested some of those paths are you need new paths, you need wider paths you need properly laid paths where there's no tripping hazards it takes time and we're never going to see a parking garage everyone's always like, oh build a parking garage so you can develop half of the parking lot parking garage is outside of the budget for any Cedar Fair park most amusement parks outside of Universal cost 300 million dollars in itself whether it be slightly less, slightly more maintenance on top of that in a winter climate it literally won't make sense for Wonderland so you're never going to see a parking garage at Wonderland I do want to say though what Wonderland does have going for them is the public transit a lot of people do transit to the park hopefully the local municipalities they reinstate some certain bus routes like the GO bus and stuff but hopefully things like that they make it more accessible because if you increase transit then you don't really need people to drive to the park if you live 20 minutes away and you're you know you're a 20 minute bus ride just bus over and if that keeps going on they won't need to expand the parking lot and I do want to touch on something imagine ingredients said Mr. Sandwich the stockholders would love a big reduction in labor hours that an automated parking entry would give them though 100% the fair raised the cost of labor at Wonderland significantly and in turn what we're going to have to do is automate some things you can't automate the rides that's already been vocalized many times by a lot of companies so the places you can automate are admissions shopping again we already know in 2024 there's a new app coming and the app is going to have mobile payment which is mobile ordering being able to scan and pay services so they are automating it's coming but yeah I think I think there's still a few years before we see everything really not wrap up because it's going to be ever expanding but Wonderland needs to play catch up right now with a lot of things so we have to be patient we have to give it I think 3 to 5 years for them to fully catch up with everything yeah they would probably make it mandatory to scan into the park it wouldn't make sense not to and it's time that Canadians start when you go to an American Cedar Fair park a lot of the booths are automated you self scan now and it makes sense when you go to a toll booth on a highway in the states a lot of them are automated now too so it literally is old technology that a lot of Canadians just aren't used to yet and they need to get used to it I know our generation and younger are used to it so Carowinds does it really well Kins Island do it really well they usually have per 3 lanes they usually have one attendant per 3 lanes and their job is just to make sure everything is going okay because you're always going to get that one person who can't maybe figure it out why or you know they want to pay or there's something wrong so it's not like you're eliminating jobs completely but you know when you have 10 parking booths if you can go from 10 people staffing them to 3 people stopping them that's still good savings especially when you can compound other places too how oh oh wow what I think it was actually 2018 with steel vengeance cedar point also got those self-compacting trash cans which requires to be emptied a lot less so right there you cut down on park services labour so you don't need someone to come every day to empty those garbages because that's a lot of time right so now they need to be emptied I believe it's like once every 2 or 3 days because they self-compact right there so it's like little things like that especially since that is a hard department to hire for um guys that's it for topics we hit that in an hour oh my god should we just end the podcast now and go over to our hangout session guys the hangout session is going to be pretty fun he what did you forget I forgot the part I forgot the part of the day guys I am so sorry we've had a quite the yesterday and quite the today guys so I am sorry I forgot the part I forgot the part I had to my car my battery died I was on top of the hill at the coast in neutral and go down the hill don't worry the car is fine for the trip oh hi um all in them they're shoveling I'm at war with the snow plows nope everyone's so disappointed in you apologize I'm really sorry guys I'm really sorry this here's the part of the day it's the e-stop button it's actually just uh it's a log flume e-stop button it's a log flume I don't even think it's an e-stop I think it's just an actuator it's basically when an actuator button looks like you push it it sends a command that's where all the inlets go for the for the um the PLC pretty cool nice part of the day Brendan the box behind you has cool stuff well this is Yukon Stryker from when I went on media day pretty cool yeah I also have a millennium force bolt over there but that's okay I don't know how we got those this is my favorite Disney character Maleficent this is a polar bear that's sorry yeah oh my god is that a bottomist um yeah I think that's it for news oh my god I thought I thought for sure I was telling him like this is so stacked so stacked I feel like we gave a lot of information though we did like honestly we just kind of spit a lot of information at you guys yeah okay so guys are you okay if we end this stream quickly take a five minute break and then we'll start up the the little game we have like we'll end this stream and start the hangout session alright okay so we're gonna end the stream five minutes we'll start a new one come join us there um yeah and ask us any questions about anything we like we talked about in this stream as well so if there's a topic you have a question ask us there so yeah thanks for being a part of today's podcast thank you guys this this was fun today yeah a lot of information


I come from Lyon. This is Lyon. This is a view from my kitchen window. So, yes, in the introduction you mentioned our work on tracing connections in the macaque. We've been doing this for a number of years using techniques which were put together in the 70s. So, talking about modernity, the problem that we confronted was that it was claimed that we had a very good understanding of the connectivity of the macaque brain because numerous groups across the world have been doing this for many years and publishing their results in excellent journals. But they had been looking at the connectivity of areas which they believed to be interacting together in a specific fashion. So, auditory areas were connecting to auditory areas, visual areas to visual areas, and there was a very poor understanding of the global connectivity. Our approach was very different because we discovered auditory projections into the visual cortex, into the primary visual cortex, back in 2005 or something like that. And this meant that the cardinal rule of what we believed to be a primary area was actually not holding because a primary area was considered to be an area which did not receive input from other primary areas. Of course, that's absolutely not true in rodents, as we all know. But it was thought to be true in the macaque. So we re-approached the problem and discovered that something like over a third of the connections which actually exist have been ignored. That's a conservative estimate, actually. Any given study was underestimating by a lot more. And a lot of the work that had been done had been done on a collated database looking at connections over many different publications. And the problem was that people were using different sorts of traces. They were using different sorts of definitions of what an area is. And so they were grossly underestimating the density, that is to say the percentage of connections that exist of the possible connections. It turns out that the macaque cortex has a density of 70%. Over two thirds of the possible connections actually exist. So most areas connect to most other areas. So if you want to understand the connectivity in terms of functional terms, if you want to cover an insight into function, actually knowing what area is connected to what area is trivial, what you need to know is the strength of that connection. And of course a lot more about the integration of the connection into the complexity of the area. So I think that these results in themselves lead to a reapprisal of the organizational principles of the cortex because the fashionable idea had been for many years that the cortex, the aerial interactions of cortical areas were organized according to a small world organization. In other words, you had an economy of connections, you had very few connections leading to a high degree of integration. With a high density, that becomes a trivial observation because you have no economy of connections, but you have a high degree of connectivity. So the title I gave to my talk here is specifics of the primate connectome because more recently we began to look at the connectome of the mouse. When we started this, the Anand Brain Institute had not yet published their publication in Nature in 2014. And so we used similar types of techniques in conjunction and collaboration with Andres Burkhauter and we're able to make a comparison between mouse and macaque cortex. What this shows you is that the mouse cortex has a density of 100%. All cortical areas project to all cortical areas. And the Anand Brain Institute's publication in 2014 made a number of mistakes. They were using computational methods to infer the connectivity, using very large injections which involve multiple areas. And their claim was that this was leading to a density of about 30%. Well, we published this, this is published, I don't want to go into the details of that here today because it would require a lot of neuroanatomy and I don't think that would be appropriate for this venue. But the point I'd like to make here is that if you're working on cortical processing in 2020, you're not going to work on the macaque monkey. It's not an ideal model by a long shot. You can't use genetic dissection of the processes that you're interested in. You can't use optogenetics in an easy fashion. So you're going to work on the mouse. In that case, the presumption is going to be that the mouse is an adequate model for what society wants to understand. Society is actually not very interested in the mouse cortex as such. The human society is very interested in the problems that confront a species which relies increasingly on its brain. Given that the brain falls apart and disintegrates with age. And so the challenge is to understand the basics of the primate cortex. Now, if you look globally at the neurobiology of the cortex, and I'm interested in the development of cortex for example, as well as its connectivity, the differences between mouse, rodent in general and primate are enormous. And my claim is that it's not possible to make a smooth transition in our understanding based on investigation uniquely of the mouse cortex. So the situation 20 years ago would have been that if you were interested in cortical processing, you worked on the macaque because it was, in those days, an ideal model. You had behaving macaque monkeys. You could record from single neurons while monkeys were doing complex cognitive tasks. And you could record the activity of individual neurons and correlate it to the task in question. That has now been, that is now no longer the case. And I think that the urgency now is to bring our understanding that we can gain from the reductionist model in the rodent and bring to bear that onto questions which need to be posed and to develop the techniques which will make it possible to investigate those questions in the macaque cortex. So that's the major frust of what I'm going to be talking about. I think the other problem that confronts a student of neurobiology of cortex is your, you read in the textbook that the cortex is responsible for higher cognitive functions and it sounds extremely noble. And then you have this increasing pace of artificial intelligence. And so what your iPhone can do, what your mobile telephone can do is enormous. And you get confronted by the fact that the brain maybe is not as special as you might presume. And the frontier between artificial intelligence, if you look at television programs about real humans, for example, you have this idea that actually robotics and artificial humans are going to be perhaps more real than real humans. It's not trivial. It's actually not trivial.  It's so compelling in many ways. So this is a photograph which I got from Rodney Douglas and it shows you a main frame IBM computer of some years ago. And if I had a pointer, the trick is to say, well, what's really interesting in this room here? Does this work? Yes, it does. This produces an enormous amount of heat. This whole IBM machine is producing a lot of heat because it's doing the same thing over and over and over again. That's how it works. This man who's cleaning the machine has a brain that works on a couple of bananas and it produces practically no heat. It's a completely different phenomena. There's no comparison. It's worthwhile remembering that. And the mystery about how this works is, I believe, total. We don't really know how it works and that's what we're challenging. This is what these are the questions that we want to answer. These are the questions that have to be answered if we're going to bring society the solutions. So let's not get confused about artificial intelligence. It's useful, it's important, it's a tool.  And we have to be very firm about that because society who's funding us isn't. So we have two dilemmas here. The ideal model is the rodent brain. You can do many, many things in that and it's going to be an important frontier for how biological systems actually can achieve extraordinary performance. But I believe it's going to tell us very little about the mechanism's underlining human consciousness. It requires a transition via a model which resembles, to some extent, the human brain. I say to some extent because let's not forget that the McCack model is never going to be an absolute model of the human brain. This is making reference to the work of Frank Puller who with his student Charié, Cicille Charié, back in 2012 was working at RSA Gap II in Abition. So this is a gene which undergoes a specific inhibition in humans and it changes the nature of the spines in the human brain. And it doesn't exist in chimpanzees. And it actually renders those spines neotinic. So the spines in the adult human have characteristics which are usually found in immature animals. This is one example, this is not saying that the human brain is at the top of some extraordinary pyramid. It's just saying that, hey, hang on, you get very, very specific gene expressions in different species which might make it very difficult to transit from one to the other. So there's going to be a triangulation. If we're going to understand the human brain, we're not going to have a perfect model that we can simply transcribe into understanding the human brain. We're going to have to understand different species, different comparisons. So the work I'm going to be talking about today is very much to do with the connectivity of the brain and I will talk about the consequences of this very high density of the inter aerial connectivity. And I will argue that this has important consequences, for example, on the existence of small worlds. This has been published. But more recently, there's been a lot of interest in the notion that you have hubs in the brain. You have areas in the brain which have very high in and out degrees which are more interconnected to other cortical areas. The claim is that these so-called hubs will play an important role in routing information through the brain. This gives a vision of information being channeled from one place to another via different routes and the hubs would play an important role in that. Now there's another layer to this because if the hubs are more interconnected than statistically probable, you have a phenomenon called a rich club. And the rich club is by reference to human society, a lot of these network investigations are based on social networks. The rich club in a social network is a group of individuals that have a high degree of control across the society because they're involved in very, very different entities.  I find this extraordinary. The idea that information is routed through the cortex, through the brain, for anything, I think completely ignores what we understand about how nervous systems work. There aren't any messages going from one place to another. That does not exist. This analog, this metaphor for the brain, like the worldwide web, I've heard people stand up and say, well, you know, the brain's like a worldwide web. There you do have a piece of packets of information that go from one place to another and indeed you have hubs which will route this information from one place to another. But brains don't work like that. Nervous systems don't work like that. Axons, cells and these cells integrate the activity coming along the axon and they fire. And so the horizon for any cell is the cell that came into it and the cell it's projecting to. You integrate across maybe 5,000 inputs coming into a large pyramidal cell. And what is then signaled by that cell is a completely different entity than what came in on any of those synapses. So I don't believe that routing of information is going to be a useful concept. And if routing information is not a useful concept, I don't believe it makes much sense to think about hubs and rich clubs. But let's come back to the density of the cortex. I told you that the density of the mechat cortex using track tracing, and I'm going to claim that that is the ground truth, is 70%. So they can't be a very large range of inputs and outputs. No cortical area is going to be hugely more connected than any other. And in fact, that's what we show. There is, we have some information, we have some data and I will just refer to it very briefly concerning the claustrum which suggests that the claustrum may be fulfilling a role that people have been trying to ascribe to hubs because the claustrum projects to every single cortical area that we've looked at. And the input to every cortical area is the strongest sub-cortical input that you can find. I say sub-cortical with some embarrassment because actually the claustrum is not sub-cortical. It's a layer of cells which is wedged underneath the insular cortex, which is trapped in the white matter and is generated by a germinal zone which actually generates the insular cortex. So the best way to think about the claustrum is the lost layer of the insular cortex. So it's actually not sub-cortical, it's cortical. And you can best think of it as a satellite. So what's extraordinary about the claustrum is it projects equally to every single cortical area of the brain. And people when they talk about the claustrum often refer back to the publication of Koch, Christoph Koch and Francis Crick where they suggested it had an important role in consciousness. So this is the sort of image that people like to show when they want to refer to modernity to show that modern techniques are allowing us to make enormous progress in understanding the structure of the brain. It's a tractography based on diffusion MRI of the human brain. And it's been believed for many years that this will enable you to understand, to put into evidence the full connectivity of the human brain, of an individual brain. The sort of work I've been talking about looking at the macaque cortex using tract races and I'll come back to a little bit more detail in that uses many, many individuals because you only have three, four, five, maybe six tracers in any case. And so you have to do six or seven injections of tracers and look at the distribution of retrogradedly labeled neurons and you end up with a kind of composite. Now if this was to do what it's claimed to be doing you would have in one instance the full connectivity of any given individual.  The problem is that we have a very poor understanding of exactly what the technique is telling us. So a few years ago we collaborated with a number of teams, Tim Barons in Oxford and David Van Essen in St. Louis. And what we were basically doing is comparing across individuals the connectivity that you can obtain using tract tracing with the connectivity that you can obtain using tractography from the best sort of diffusion that we could get back in those days. This was about five years ago. And the long shot is it's very, very, very poor. It's extremely poor. Basically you can reveal very short distance connections and it's not clear whether the phenomenon that you're recording looks similar to the connectivity whether it has anything to do with transport or whether it has anything to do with the diffusion of water molecules because the water molecules are diffusing in and around the axons. So we're not doing tractography. We are further investigating tractography and it turns out that it's highly variable across cortical areas in an individual brain. So if you compare the tract tracing and the tractography some areas give you quite a reasonable estimation with tractography of what the tract tracing shows you and other areas don't. And I believe that this is very, very much to do with the configuration of the cortex. So in my book, tract tracing is not really very useful, not very convincing, not very powerful. But just in case you don't want to believe me, this is an early result that we find it's no longer in preparation. If you put, this is a summary diagram of what could be a way of thinking about things. If you do an injection of tracer in area V1 in the central representation, generations of anatomists would tell you that in V2 you will expect to find dense connections in the central representation of V2. In fact, tract tracing was basically used for many years to explore the topological relationships between sensory areas. If you do in the same experiment, if you put a tractographic seed in area, in the central representation of V1, you do find dense streamlines coming into the central representation of V2, but you also find dense seedlines coming into the far periphery, upper field and lower field. If you had a result like this with tract tracing and you sent it into the journal of comparative neurology, you wouldn't be able to publish it. That would be the end of it. You wouldn't want to publish it. It wouldn't be considered to be at all useful. So, I'm not quite sure what time did I start? I have 15 minutes to go. Right. Okay, that's gonna be a difficult one. So, basically, I mentioned that back in 2012 we made a series of publications where we looked at the tract tracing using tracers where we inject a tracer. It's retro-gagely transport. It's an active process. It's got nothing to do. It's not a passive diffusion. And we were able to show a large percentage of connections which had previously not been discovered. So, this is an illustration of those findings. This is a log scale. These are the newfound projections, projections which had not been reported in any journal that we could lay our hands on. And these are the so-called known connections. So, the very strongest connections, going over the very shortest distances, were largely known. But very, very quickly, you get a large increase in unknown connections even over very moderate distances over connections which have been well and truly studied. And there's a relationship between distance and strength. So, our claim is that this relationship between strength for connection and distance is actually a key to understanding global organization of the cortex. And basically what we've been able to show, I'm going to jump over the issue of the small world networks not being explained in a high density graph because I think it's relatively trivial and it's well and truly published. And come instead to the distance-weight relationships that we can observe. So, the distance relationships gives you the fact that over short distance connections are very strong and over long distances, they're very much weaker. And that in itself gives you a very obvious explanation of why wire minimization is such a key feature in the organization of the cortex. It also tells you something that you know. We know that the different cortical areas which are heavily integrated like the visual areas, auditory areas, the motor areas are grouped together so that you have a group of areas. And the strength of the connection between those areas is going to be much stronger because the distances are much shorter. When we look at the distance relationships, they're very consistent and they allowed us to develop a model where we were able to build artificial networks using the same characteristics that we observe in the cortical network and ask ourselves, does this generate features in the large-scale networks that we can form in this session which are reminiscent of what we've observed in the macaque cortex? And the answer is that we do. The answer is what we do. And one way of doing this is to look at these free motifs. So you take all groups of free in the global network and you look at the frequency of the difference of the different motifs that you get here. So you go from a motif, for example, the zero motif where you have no connections between set of free nodes to the fully connected triangles. And then the frequency of this is going to give you a characteristic distribution. And the claim has been made and I think there's many ways to understand that that this frequency of the motifs is going to be an important feature in understanding the function of the organizational principles that we're describing. And if you look at this motif here, for example, the motif number eight, where A goes to B and B goes to C and C goes to A, you find abnormally unrepresented in the cortical network. And then we look, we can compare this to the observed frequency and we show that there's a very, very high frequency of the motifs that we've observed in the cortex that you generate in this fashion. So we believe that the strength distance relationship is a cardinal feature and that it's determining many of the other features that we can observe, like the core periphery distribution, which we think could have something to do with the global workspace, which has been highly studied by Stan Hasdahan. So exit small worlds, I didn't go through the details of that, but I think it's easy for you to understand that in a fully connected graph, there is no explanation of clustering as being a generative feature of the distance between networks, between areas. And this is to pay reference to the notion of hubs. And what I want to show you is this, this is not published, we're submitting it this month. This is the different cortical areas with tracer injections in these areas. This is a log range here. So you go from, this is a range of strengths of inputs and the red dots are the strength of the clouser. So you can see from this that the clouser is consistently across all the cortical areas, a very, very, very strong input. And there's no influence of distance. What I've been telling you is that in the cortex, cortical areas projecting to each other, as the distance increases, there's a decrease in the strength of connection. There isn't in the clouser. The clouser does not obey the rule of the decline of strength of connection that I was talking to that we refer to as the exponential distance rule. This means that the clouser enjoys a very specific privilege in that it has this very strong connectivity across the cortex. One consequence of this distance rule is going to be that if you look at the cortex in terms of weights and strengths of connections, you would make a very simple prediction which would be that there should be a spatial organization which will be determined by proximity and that this will in turn be supported by the folding of the brain. So if you look at a flat map of the cortex that David Vanessa has been working on for many years, you can see that if you look at the foveal representation, you have a location of the foveal in terms of other cortical areas, which is quite specific. The foveal finds itself sitting in front of the ventral stream, which is the pathways which lead down into hypercampus and we believe is important for object recognition. If you look at the far periphery representation, the far periphery representation of area V1 and V2 is in front of the parietal stream and so the strength of connections would be expected to be much greater between these parietal dorsal stream areas and the far peripheral representation. And so this illustrates the fact that the exponential distance rule, the weight distance relationship of areas is going to, in addition to determining the motifs distributions, is going to be characteristic, characterizing the spatial layout of the cortex. I'm not really gonna have time to talk about hierarchy, I suppose I've got about five minutes. Seven. The key feature for understanding the role of connections and the way areas integrate is to understand that what we call cortical hierarchy is the integration of long distance connections into the local circuit. The distance, the integration of long distance connections into the local circuit is a key feature. Now, what you need to remember is that the local circuit, the local circuit constitutes something like 80% of connections in the cortex. The remaining 20% mostly come from the adjacent cortical area. So the long distance connections that we favor represent individually one or two percent. And the mystery of how this whole thing works is how those connections are integrated functionally into the local network. This is what we mean when we call cortical hierarchy because there's a basic pattern in that integration and we know this from the work of David, Vanessa and others whereby we see that super granular layer connections are projecting in a feed forward direction and I haven't got the time to go into explaining exactly what I mean by that. And infra granular layer neurons are projecting in a feed back direction and it turns out that this feed forward direction pathway targets preferentially layer four and the feedback pathway avoids integration into layer four. So the origin and the destination of the connections the long distance connections is extremely specific and I believe that that is going to have a huge impact on how the signals are integrated over these long distances. So the whole mystery about what the cortex is is to grapple with the integration of long distance connections into the local circuit. And of course the local circuit is composed of excitatory cells and inhibitory cells with very, very few, very few inhibitory cells projecting over any distance at all. The inhibitory cell is a local cell and of course the canonical circuit says that this, the interactions between the different cortical layers is highly specific. Now for those of you who might believe that my ranting and raving about the tractography was over the top, remember tractography will not ever at least in the way we understand it at the moment give any indication of the origin and termination of the long distance pathways. And that is the information which is key to understanding the integration of those pathways and I believe is of huge importance. So this is another diagram which is highly used. It's used often to say that we know a lot about the brain. I think it's actually, it tells us how much, how little we know about the brain but this is the notion of feed forward goes this way, the projections which go in a feedback come this way, this is area V1 down here, this is area 46 up here and so we know what the feed forward sweep does. It determines the receptive field properties. The mystery is what the back projection does and this is I think where we need to exploit what we can with the mouse and try and see how we can answer those questions in the macaque. I think that understanding the feedback pathway is going to be the challenge. I think that there's, I think the work of Karl Frisven and others is extremely, is very provocative but what I think that they're ignoring is that the feedback pathway is multiple and I think we're going to find that these different feedback pathways are going to play very important roles in understanding the range of activities, the range of roles of the feedback pathway. So I think before I forget I'd like to mention the work of people who've actually contributed to all of this. So a lot of my work at the moment is being done in China where I find that I can get the sort of support that we need to be able to do this track tracing. This is greatly enhanced by my collaboration with Sean here and his collaborators. Mooming Poo who heads the ION Institute in Shanghai where a lot of my work is increasingly taking place is not in this. My work with Zoltan Torakai has been a huge importance. Zoltan has been, has led me to understand many things about graph theory that we're finding to be very important. David Van Essen has played an important role. All our work in the mouse would not have been possible to even begin without Andres Berghouter. And I collaborate very closely with Ken Knoblock who's a great guy to work with and has a lot of insight. And these are students which are heading different projects which I've only very briefly mentioned so I won't go into further detail. I'd be very happy to take questions. Can I extend what the cortex is doing in terms of some kind of information processing? Or you've mentioned, okay, there is just 2% of this long distance connections but yet you are questioning the small world and the rich club which seems to be connected very densely still and have just a few connections outside so those two things are kind of... Well, we published in Science in 2013 an explanation why the small world is inadequate. We have also publications on the rich club so I haven't had time to go to this in detail. I've been able to mention that the small world is based on the idea that you have very sparse connectivity. It comes from understanding of the social network where the density, that is to say the percentage of connections that exist between individuals is 0.00 something. In the brain, the connectivity between causal areas is in the range of 70% end of story. I don't have anything to say beyond what we did in Science. It's published, it's there. Does that mean there is not a small world principle for interconnections between single units? There could well be. You could test that probability using viruses. I would love to do it. I'm not excluding that. It's very probable and I think recent results in the mouse say it's almost certainly the case because there's instances of high clustering which is a key feature which are very, very, very high in mouse. So for the rich, for the small world, I think the story is done. The same argument. If you have a very high density, you're not going to have any hubs. A hub is an area which has a high indegree, has a high degree of connections to other areas. And that means it's higher than some areas and some areas will have very few connections. This is indeed the situation in the worldwide web. It's absolutely not the situation in the cortex. We've published 70% density. We've doubled, in Shanghai, we've been able to double our number of areas that we've investigated and we find exactly the same statistics. So there are no hubs in terms of ranges of inputs and outputs. There's no area, there's no single area with very, very high degrees of connectivity, except the classroom. And interestingly, the classroom is a satellite of the cortex. So there is a massive hub in the brains of mice and men and monkeys. The classroom is highly conserved across species. You're perfectly right. I didn't have time to go into the really interesting thing of what we call hierarchy. Cortical hierarchy is this laminar constraint on the nature of long distance connections. It's been well shown across species that feed-forward connections target the middle layer and the feedback connections avoid the middle layer. I think that the mystery, the intact mystery, is how that integration occurs over the longer connections because the power, the strength of those connections are vanishingly weak. My detractors say, Henry, why don't you just threshold all this? Get rid of the weak connections because, hey, you know, you don't know how they work. Well, I think that that would be a mistake and I think, yes, I'm sorry for being confusing, but I think that the challenge is to come back to these weak connections and to try and imagine experiments and species other than mouse, which will tell us what they're doing. Thank you very much, Henry, for your very revealing talk. I'm here. You talked about mouse and the fact that you can obtain a lot of different types of information from the mouse and recently there have been a lot of reconstructed neurons being released in the mouse-light project and some smaller labs also are doing that. And what they show, these fully reconstructed axons, is that more often than not, long-range projecting neurons connect not one region to another region but to multiple other regions. So I was wondering if there is any way to assess this type of information in macaques. Absolutely. But you're referring to the work of Fogel in London who's been using barcoding to do that. We did these experiments back in the 70s and showed that the high degrees of bifurcation is a characteristic feature of the macaque. Yes, I think it's a hugely interesting idea. The point is that a single area projects with one neuron to three, four, five different areas. This is by a bifurcation. It doesn't mean it's identical information, by the way. Georgie and Achenty and others have shown that. It's not necessarily identical information going across those collaterals. But yes, that's very interesting. We have a lot of data on that, which is published. Using, so we use pairwise injections of different types of traces and look at double labeling. And that enables us to map out these incidents of bifurcation and it's as much a characteristic of the macaque, I believe, as it is as a mouse. And it's beautiful work that they've been doing recently. Yeah, that's an important additional mystery. Thank you, Henry. That was a very interesting presentation.


Hi everyone, Joe for jaskiescasebrakes.com coming at you with 2022 Panini legacy football 4 box pick your team number 11. Now if you follow the instructions here I'm gonna have a chance at some break credit as well. No vet commons ship Big thanks to everybody here for making the pick your team 11 happen Chris Maxwell, I think with quadruple last spot mojo. He bought the final four teams all at once So thanks to him. Thanks everybody for making this happen. Chad, what's up? Uh, I don't know if we're gonna be re-listing that Maybe that might end up in or that might end up in a basketball mixer or something like that No, sorry Chad I think we just got all of our the remainder of that product back from the national. I think we're kind of still Came on a huge pallet. I think we're still kind of unboxing or unpacking everything So once we kind of make sure that we got everything squared away then We'll see if we're going to repost any of that that sort of stuff. We've been breaking up the national What do we got here? Good luck everybody. Got a Desmond Ritter. We'll set some of those aside I think Aiden Hutchinson, I think is celebrating a birthday today at least according to nfl network Is there Sam Howell 299 for Washington? Kenny Pickett for Pittsburgh And a Malik Willis Orange to 149. I wonder if he'll get a shot. That's here EA and the Titans It'll be weird seeing Matt Ryan in a Colts uniform 50 50 David Bell For the Brown that's going to go to Adam in the Browns Like these little mini cards here too. There's Nick Bosa for the Niners, Nestor And Isaiah Spiller is your rookie autograph For the Bolts that's going to be for Oliver and the Chargers 95 out of 99 under the lights and we've got 106 out of 150 David Ojabo that's going to be for Adam and the Ravens And here's Isaiah Spiller again 83 out of 249 dual relic And autograph this one doesn't have a team logo on here But as we just saw he's going to go to the Chargers And that's for Oliver and the Chargers almost like a personal box for you. Oliver got both autos 83 out of 249 Yeah, I guess you're starting a Isaiah Spiller PC whether you Intend to two or not. We've got Damien Harris to 299 for the Patriots. That's for Karen And we've got a mini trade lance to 125 For Nestor. All right, it's box 104 NFL owners expect you to prove sale of Broncos during a meeting in Minneapolis It's a pretty uh Pretty rich group there Walton family. Waltons are involved of four. Let's see what we got here. Good luck everybody It's Jerry Judy 299 We've got got a mini Terry McLauren another picket rookie card. We got a Bailey Zapp That's for Karen and the Patriots Randall Cunningham 35 out of 100 for Adam and the Eagles Got a Jameson Williams to 149. This might be someone to watch on the Lions And from Alabama, there's Jameson Williams dual relic and autographs speaking of 198 out of 199 So both of those those Jameson Williams will go to Adam in the Lions There you go, AK J-Doc, what's up? Do I do I think KD's ultimatum to the Nets helps out the Lakers for a Kyrie trade I I mean, I don't think directly Indirectly maybe there's Michael Vick to 299 because I think everyone's just waiting to see What KD does or what happens with Kevin Durant before any other deals Happened so I think he's just kind of backing up the whole The whole process was five out of 20 That's Aidan Hutchinson for the Lions So I think everyone's just kind of waiting. Hey, what's going to happen to KD? And then I think whatever dominos are left in the free agent market. I think those will start to fall But I think a lot of teams involved are just kind of Kind of waiting It's not as you Harris to 150 And which is why I hope that KD situation gets resolved sooner rather than later Yeah, in my opinion, that's what I think that yeah, KD is that first domino I think there are enough teams that are that are at least trying for Kevin Durant So hopefully they figure it out But if if you're the Brooklyn Nets, I mean you're asking for You're asking for the moon, right for Kevin Durant suppose that they would try to You know and then all the other teams that are trying to get Kevin Durant, they don't want to spend they don't want to you know Pay full price for Kevin Durant. So maybe they think oh, maybe we can wait out the Brooklyn Nets. So now it's just kind of a Now it's kind of a A sort of A game of chicken who blinks first who's going to make the move first? I'm going to overpay or someone to get The best deal possible If he gets traded, where do you think you have who knows? um, I've heard some people say um, I've heard some people say the The miami heat maybe might have assets and maybe future picks to be able to to move Ironically the gold state warriors actually have a good pack probably a good package of youngsters And future picks that they could get Katie back Yeah, and he's also got what four years left on his deal. So It's like if you're Almost I would imagine almost every single GM is at least putting a phone call Whether it's realistic or not putting in a phone call to the Brooklyn Nets You know and and and kick the tires you have to at least try there's seven single terry to 2.99. So I mean, this is kind of like almost like Juan Soto situation, right? Here's a dare to tear drew breeze One out of 65 for the saints adam cuppermint with the saints I mean everyone most teams want Juan Soto, you know, can can you deliver the the the package of assets to get that player? Everyone's gonna at least try though Everyone's gonna kick the tires Desmond Ritter to 50 There's uh, romeo doves to 100 For green bay. That will be for Sean Healy. You might you might get some opportunities I think it's gonna get a Nice set of targets this year and we got a kenny picket mini nine out of 10 Gold cracked ice Mini rookie car pretty cute. It's gonna go to michael galucci and the stealers That looks pretty cool. I got nick mangle to 299 the jets It's for adam and his jets And we have alec pierce dual relic and autograph like pierce is a When turned in went from a bear cat to a colt and that'll be for jack and indianapolis Yeah, I like those little mini cards at jerry judy 150 for denver got new owners arthur hackett I think nfl network just mentioned uh, not too long ago that that would that they are the richest owners In the league. Here's a kiran williams to 125 So we'll see what they do with all that all that money Oh points Be randomized to one person in the break that usually that does take the place of an auto Everyone will have a shot at that. I think they do they already exist j-dug They do make those mini top loads for those mini cards. We don't really stock those because It's I mean, I think it's it's so rare that products have top loaders at that size You may have A pack or two of those laying around somewhere Yeah, I mean, I'm pretty they have they have a top loader for pretty much Pretty much everything I wonder if uh If someday it might get Inexpensive enough for us to just have a 3d printer And make the perfect size top loader for for everything I thought and that technology might might present itself In future years Maybe sooner than we think there's Elijah Moore to 199 for the jets got a Bailey zap 11 out of 20 another low numbered mini card here for Karen and her patriots And we've got a Evan Neal rookie autograph for the G That it's going to be for Matthew and the Giants final stack here Ms. Heinz Ward or to 125 From Michael and the Steelers We have a Jalen Tolberg futures jersey and autograph. I believe he is a uh Dallas cowboy Show me Cowboys Survey says He's a cowboy wide receiver for the boys. That's going to go to Nestor Dallas 127 out of 249 and I want to say that That apparently he's been looking pretty good in camp To be a big part of the Cowboys team this year buttersbow Jackson to 299 We've got a mini Desmond Ritter to 75 We've got a blue Desmond Ritter to 50 49 out of 50 That'll be all those will be for jack and the atl And another dare to tear card LT Lawrence Taylor at 24 out of 65 And I'll go to Matthew Good luck. If you dare if you dare to tear good luck Last one here is a Kenny Pickett 56 out of 100 that's going to go to Michael And his dealers and there you go gang Got another four box legacy break in the books appreciate everybody getting into it Now let's give away some money and the points So let's flip back to the list here now everyone's got a shot at the point So let's gather everyone's names one through 32 And we'll use one dice roll for both lists And now let's alphabetize by your first name If you bought an even number of teams half of those become entries so Adam bought six teams that's going to be three entries Arthur bought three teams two count for the promo. That's still an entry Chris got four. That's two entries EA got two. That's an entry Jack got four teams. That's two entries Matthew got two teams. That's an entry Michael got two teams. That's an entry Nestor got two teams. That's an entry Oliver two teams entry Patrick two teams and an entry and Sean two teams and an entry I got Adam, Arthur, Chris Eric, Jack Matthew, Michael, Nestor, Oliver and Pat. Great All right, so let's roll it randomize both lists four to two six time. Let's do the points first 250 points one two three four five And sixth and final time 250 points going to jack. There you go jack Four or two six times for the money top two after six One two three four five And fingers crossed. Good luck sixth and final time. It is Sean and Jack. Congrats to the both of you 125 dollars of break credits to jazzy's casebreaks.com going your way I'm Joe Thanks for watching everybody. That was picker team 11. I'll see you next time for the next football break. Bye. Bye