So I just got this pair of shoes the other day and I was so excited and I started to think about it. These literally have zero value, but I also started to think about it.  So in today's video, I'm gonna be explaining to you guys why sometimes it's okay to buy a pair of shoes that has zero resale value. And if you didn't know by now, my name is DJ and this is the DNA show. On this channel, I love talking about sneakers and especially giving you guys my insight on shoes over all the things I've learned over the past 15 plus years. So if you haven't already, consider subscribing and joining the fam. We're on the road to a million subscribers and you could be the next one to get us there. So first things first, you have to have an understanding when you're purchasing a pair of shoes. What is the goal when you're buying the shoes? Are you buying the pair of shoes to flex? Are you buying the pair of shoes to add another addition to your collection that's gonna complete a set of different things? Are you buying it for everyday use? Are you buying it because you're trying to flip it and make some extra money? There's so many different reasons why people buy sneaker. And I know in current time, as a lot of sneaker heads like to do, they like to talk about the resale value and what the shoes are worth and if they're able to buy it for retail or below retail and then reseller it for more money and what the value is, all the things, make the flip and do all the yada yada. But there's a lot of collectors out there that literally just wanna have their pair of shoes for their collections. And they may have a lot of memories behind that shoe that drives them to wanna go after that shoe again when it may retro or something like that. And for those that don't know, when a shoe retros basically in that sense, it just means the shoe came out in the past, they decided to re-release it again years later and then they give the opportunity for people to buy that shoe again. And for us as sneaker heads, we might have some type of childhood memory or something like that with the original version. And now we see the retro version coming out, you know, 10 year anniversary, whatever it may be.  I wanna add these to my collection. I have so many memories from the past. This just made so much sense. I have to cop the shoe. And I think this is exactly where this pair falls into play right here. I used to have these back in high school and I used to wear these as my foot was transitioning. Oh, my bad, you guys. I haven't shown the shoe yet. Maybe we should do that first.  Very simple, white and black colorway. But why is this shoe so important to me? And why was I willing to take that L or whatever you may wanna call it to have this shoe and be able to add it into my collection? Because I know there's no resell value when it comes to this shoe, but there's so much sentimental value when it comes to this shoe for somebody like me. So for those that don't know, I've been in the shoe game for many a years and I remember vividly back in high school, my foot was changing size oh so rapidly. I came into high school wearing a size 10 and a half and by the time I was a sophomore in high school, I was wearing a size 13. I was struggling trying to understand what my size shoe was and I still wanted to have shoes in my collection. I was rocking J's and forces and different stuff and trying to find affordable options and even buying you know, shell toes and different things because I knew my foot was changing so much. It was hard to be like oh, I'm gonna put all this money into a pair of shoes and then I can't fit it a couple months later. So it was definitely kind of that struggle just growing up, trying to find ways to hustle and make money so I can afford my sneakers and all the different things. But I remember vividly I had a size 13 of this shoe right here. They were sitting at like champs or footlocker or something like that. They're available on the shelves. I was like these are gonna be great because I can wear these with all my outfits. It's gonna make so much sense, very neutral. I can rock these throughout the entire year. You can't go wrong with some all white Air Force ones but it's got a black bottom so it's gonna make the shoe even better because if it gets dirty, I don't really have to worry about it as much. You know just all those little things that made me justify like why I needed this pair of shoes in my collection. So as me a young 15, 16 year old kid back in high school, this shoe right here was just a perfect everyday sneaker for me and I loved them. But you know how it goes. You're young in high school. You're still riding bikes, having fun, kicking in what your homies going to the little house parties doing all the things. Next thing you know, over time, you wear the shoe so much it started to get beaten up and they started to get broken down. You still clean them up but they just don't look the same as they did back when you first got them fresh out the box. So eventually I ended up retiring this pair from my collection and honestly, I don't know what I did with the pair of shoes. I might have took them to like Buffalo Exchange or something and tried to get, you know how they give you the little credit at Buffalo and next thing you know, they give you like $17 or something and they use that towards something else and they're like damn well it wasn't even really worth it but it was like, I'll take what I can get cause I'm young and broken, I'm 15 years old. Like you guys all remember those times, right? So I think, I'm assuming that's probably what I did cause I definitely used to sell a lot of things at Buffalo Exchange when it came to clothing and sneakers and different stuff like down on Facebook. But I don't know either way, I remember I got rid of them somehow. I don't know how I got rid of them but I don't have them anymore to say the least. All this time goes by and I just remember having all these memories and just so much nostalgia for me having that shoe in my collection and wearing it and just feeling fresh and all this stuff and I remember there's actually a picture of me wearing them on photo day for football pictures back sophomore year of high school. I remember that, hopefully I have it here somewhere on the screen for you guys to see. That's me, young DJ way back in the day. But yeah, anyways, just all that time goes by and I am literally at the employee store. I see the shoe and I'm like, bro, I have to get these, no doubt about it. Like all you guys know that shop at the ES like you get the discount too, so it makes so much sense. I ended up seeing them there and I was like, bruh at this price, you can't go wrong with this price at all, it's an all-white Air Force one. But for me, so much memory and nostalgia and everything like that for myself, you can look at this shoe and be like, oh, this is just an everyday Air Force one. I got shoes in my collection back here that are worth way more than these, but these mean way more to me. So to be able to find these, get them at a discounted price, add them into the collection, definitely gonna add these into my rotation this fall. Excited about that. It was just an exciting moment and I think this is a great opportunity for me to share with you guys, hopefully you guys were able to pick some of those dimes that I was dropping throughout the video, just saying like, buy what you like, understand that you don't need to always buy with the intent of the resale and the long haul. Create those memories with the sneakers and then when they retro again, continue to live that life of that sneaker and then, you know, get that new pair and freshen up and get right and stay icy and stay fresh. You don't always have to worry about the resale value is what I'm saying. Now again, there is gonna be a fine line between that because some people are like, oh, I just buy bricks only, dead of that with two. Great, that's not a problem. Again, buy whatever you wanna buy and buy what you like because it's your money. I'm not exactly telling you what to do with your money. I'm just suggesting, based off of what I've learned over the years, you have to have that fine balance of shoes that you're willing to pay, you know, retail price or whatever, they're sitting on shelves at the local Foot Locker, but you have so many memories with that shoe and you wanna get them back in your collection or you might be willing to pay the extra $30 over retail and it's not really reselling for nothing but nobody really cares about the shoe at the same time so you can get it for just a little bit slightly over that retail value, but it means so much to you when you finally add it to your collection. There's a lot of shoes that are like that and trust me, if you guys wanna hear more stories, I have a lot of shoes that I've gotten for really good deals that I've been able to bring back memories and different stuff like that, but either way, just understand that when you're buying shoes, you definitely wanna have that intent like, okay, am I making a wise investment on the sneakers that I'm purchasing? Do these have the chance to rise in value and do they have the chance to be able to be an opportunity for me to trade that sneaker for another sneaker or is somebody else gonna covet that sneaker the way I covet the sneaker? There's a lot of different things that come to that.    But I think at the end of the day, again, you have to have a healthy balance because if you don't, all you're gonna be doing is chasing the hype, trying to get the ladies in greatest shoe that everybody else wants, paying the resell value, all the different stuff, like following the trends and doing the thing. That's cool and all. That's great. That's a part of the game. I understand it. And sometimes again, you may like a shoe that you're like, this shoe is actually dope. And unfortunately, everybody else likes it too. It happens often. So it doesn't make you a hype beast for liking a shoe that's dope. If the shoe is dope, the shoe is dope. And trust me, there's a lot of shoes that are worth a lot of money that aren't that dope. And that's also perfectly fine because it may be a shoe that I don't like, but somebody else may like. And that's the best part about the shoe game, right? We get to buy what we like. Having that understanding and knowing the balance of like, okay, yes, I'm going after all the bangers. I want the Travis Scott's. I don't want the Fragments and all the different things and the retro's and the new Yeezy drops and all the things, everybody wants all that stuff. But you gotta get the shoes that's like, these are great everyday shoes. I can make cool memories in these. These got nostalgic vibes to me, especially if you're an older collector or older head. You know exactly what I mean. You start to see shoes retro again. And it could even be a Jordan retro model. You know, we see the Cardinal 7s are supposed to be coming out again. A lot of people have different memories, not only from the last retro, but the retro before that one. And some people, even with the OG, there's a lot of things like that that it's like, it's so much nostalgia behind it. And that's the part of the game that I think a lot of people don't talk about as much, right? We want to talk about still grabbing those pairs of sneakers for our collection and enjoying our collection and enjoying the stories and the memories, even if the shoe isn't worth a lot of money, still able to add those to the collection.  I don't care at all. Boom, I'm grabbing it. Now, obviously I'm gonna make smart decisions on the other pairs because that's gonna play the vast majority of the value of the collection. What I can use that as an asset later making wiser decisions with putting that into properties, different things like that. And trust me, I don't just buy any shoe to say I have it and all the other stuff. Like I buy all the shoes that I like, I like the complete sets that I like. And as you guys know, I'm not really a huge fan of the Adidas Yeezys and all that stuff. And I don't like every single Jordan model and I want to have them all. Like again, you guys know, I don't like the Shatter Backbore ones. Like that's the number one thing that people, oh, you don't like that. Like it's fine. I don't like the shoe. I've had it before. I tried it, just didn't like it. So I sold them, I got rid of them. I traded them. It's just what it is. Like, so if you understand your identity and understand who you are as a collector and the stuff that you like to collect and the items that you like to have and knowing that, but at the same time, still saying, all right, words back to my humble days when I was first getting started and those sneakers that got me into it and everything. Like, still have respect for those type of shoes because trust me, a lot of people that's watching these videos and a lot of people that are making these videos had to start somewhere, right? So don't forget that and don't forget those days because we always are going after those grills and we see the crazy expensive sneakers and all the lifetime achievement awards when it comes to collecting shoes and all this random stuff that we're seeing online when it's just hype, hype, hype, hype, hype. So hopefully this video can just kind of bring us back down for a second and understand like a simple pair of white and black Air Force ones went so far for me back when I was a young kid in high school and it's crazy to reflect and see this pair of shoes right here now in my current time, in my current state of life and getting a fresh pair and what the memories I can make in this pair of shoes all these years later, right? So I think to me it's super dope how sneakers can tell stories and you can tell your stories through your sneakers as well. And we might both have the same exact pair of shoes and have two completely different life stories from this sneaker. And that's the thing I love about shoes and all this stuff. So hopefully you guys enjoyed this video. I'm sorry if you didn't, but either way I'm just telling my story about sneakers and why I think it's very important to steal, you know, go after those coveted shoes that you may like that everybody else doesn't like or it doesn't have the resale value and different stuff like that because that also is a part of the shoe game that makes things fun. So I appreciate you guys as always. If you guys want to see any other stories or me just talking about recent pickups that may be like this that may not get a lot of views on YouTube and stuff which is fine with me because I think things like this definitely need to be shared on YouTube a little bit more often. Yo, if you enjoyed this video and want to grow your collection or make extra money on the side, I built a VIP mastermind that will teach you everything that I've learned about growing my sneaker collection over the past 15 years. This will also give you access to the DNA fam in my VIP community where we talk about investing outside of sneakers. And don't worry, if you don't plan on joining the VIP community, it's okay. I'll also set up a private DNA fam community that gives you access to all the behind the scenes looks from the studio and multiple chances to win free sneakers and gear from weekly and monthly challenges. So all you need to do is click on the link down below in the description or the first link pinned in the comment section. That will get you set up and into the community. I'm excited to see you guys on the inside.


Good morning, everybody. Thanks for your time. Thanks for the invitation. I'm sorry that I couldn't be there. I'm isolating at home with my no longer six children, but we're still home for a while. I'm going to talk a little bit about an application of my mobility and migration model to the coastal Bangladesh. I had thought I'd have a quiet four-hour plane ride and a quiet hotel room to get these together, and I didn't. So I'll do the best that I can. And I also will stress that I can in no way read the room. So in any case, if I'm going too long on any one topic or just need to keep going, feel free to shout out. So what I wanted to do for this talk in this group, given the sort of focus about extremes, was to tell a little bit about the modeling work we did in the paper and try and convey this one message on the people side, which is that for things that haven't happened yet, it's a real challenge to model what people might do because we don't have historical analogs. And we can address some of that problem by being good modelers and doing the best we can with data. And we can address other parts that just by being careful and smart about how we apply the model and how we talk about the model. So that's a key message that I'm hoping some of what I show will get to. And we just had a wonderful presentation that involved a coupled agent-based model. And so I'm going to guess, again, not reading the room, that many of you are familiar with bits of agent-based modeling. And in particular, the thing that you probably know is that they are models in which we have individual decision-making agents, whether they're people or firms or whichever, in which the properties that we're interested in at the system level emerge out of interactions among those agents and from those agents to their environments. And so they're really great tools for problems where we believe that that heterogeneity really, really matters and is driving our system's results. So the things that if you haven't done a lot of agent-based modeling you may not know are that we're still kind of figuring things out a little bit. We haven't converged in some of the ways that other modeling fields have on sort of universal ways of going about things, universal theories, universal algorithms for representing particular decisions. And to my knowledge, although I've been a part of a few attempts, there's no ab myth so far, no really good intercomparison that helps us understand what are the right ABMs for the right purposes. Another thing that's important to note is that because we're modeling individuals making decisions, doing a lot of different things, it's really rare that we have all the data that we might want to calibrate and validate the things that are happening in our models. And we make it work. We apply a range of techniques. We match patterns at different scales in order to try and reduce the issue of the equifinality problem where lots and lots of different models, different primer sets can give us the same outcome that we're looking at. And one of the last things that can be a bit of a challenge is just that as much as there's some intuition to what agent-based models are and we have individuals following rules that we can usually describe in a sentence, there's a lot of those assumptions to describe. The models get really big and it can be challenging to communicate everything that's going on at the model. And that is part of what really limits their utility. Because I think we all kind of know models aren't answers, they're outputs. And if you aren't able to think through what the set of assumptions underlying that model is, it's not easy to then make use of those outputs responsibly. So that's the sort of other side. And now that I've set things up like this, let me tell you a little bit about my model that, again, too complicated to explain appropriately and doesn't have all the data that I'd like. So the model Midas is a reasonably recent model in a long, long string of migration models that go all the way back to the 19th century. And the laws of migration and the gravity models are appropriated from physical principles to look at big cities as centers of attraction. Now, the thing about those is that they are using the city or the place as the unit of analysis and not the person. But we have now about a half a century or so of demographic theories that help us think about migration as an individual decision. And in the last 20 or 30 years, we've got the computer power to really explore those. So among the big theories that we apply to think about mobility now, particularly in the case of understanding migration decisions as a livelihood outcome, are the sort of push, pull and mooring theory. I've been around for 20, 30 years. And so Midas is an implementation of that. What it looks like is this, we have agents who are located in places. They are embedded in social networks with agents in the same places they are in other places. They're deriving utility from some set of options that are in their place, and we can interpret those as jobs or access to family and nature and use value. And yes, and they're sharing resources that they derive across their social networks. They're sharing information about the places that they are across their social networks. And periodically, they're making decisions about, am I making use of the best portfolio of opportunities for me? And if it's the case that the best portfolio for them that they know of, maybe it's in another place, if it's somewhere else, then they'll move. And so what makes this or what sets Midas apart from other models, at least at the time that I wrote it, are that it's a simultaneous consideration of pushes, pulls, and moorings. And by moorings, I sort of mean these sort of kinetic barriers to doing things. I can't leave because I can't sell my house. I need to stay here because I'm taking care of family. You can't beat these kinds of things. And what I like about it as well is that migration is a, it's an emergent strategy, among others. So it's not baked in that agents are deciding to migrate or not. They're making decisions about what's best for them. Migration is an emergent outcome from that. So the question that we wanted to address in our Bangladesh case was looking at enhanced sea level rise due to climate change and wondering how is that going to reshape migration flows towards the Bangladesh coastline. And here's what we had to work with. We had a few waves of the Bangladesh household income and expenditure survey, which is representative at the district level. There are 64 districts in Bangladesh. We had about 10 years partially overlapping of internal migration data in Bangladesh among those 64 districts.  Different pieces of a puzzle we wanted to tie together. And this is what we did. We built a minus application based on that household income expenditure data as kind of like a jobs and income access model. And we calibrated it as best as we could to internal migration data that we had. We then took those flood depth projections to get an idea of how would the worst case flood be changing over the coming century. And then this is the next piece we had to do. We had to translate those flood projections into some kind of a damage function. We had to try and find some idea of how is it that floods affect people, particularly in a space where floods are the norm. Floods happen every year. So we drew upon, there happened to be in 1998, whether the worst the worst cyclone driven flood in like the modern record in Bangladesh happened to sit between two waves of a panel study where the researchers were able to estimate the sort of wage damage effect of that shock. We're able to use that data as our best case estimate of what do we think future floods might do to wages both inside and outside of agriculture. The other thing is we have no idea what amazing things are going to happen in the economy over the next century how things are going to change. I will go downstairs with you soon but we're talking right now. Okay give us a few minutes. We don't know what's going to happen so we make the assumption that the economy doesn't change and there's really no better way to get around that for now other than to embrace that assumption and be aware of it. So what do we do? We scale our sort of simulated economy by the expected flood damage functions and then we look at what do we think might be happening to migration flows motivated by the decision model that I introduced earlier under different representative concentration pathways out to 2100. We look and see what the differences are and the the keys that we the key findings that we have are this. So we as you might expect the flood impacts on wages reduce migration towards the growth the coast but not enough to that it doesn't persist. So we observe under all rcps that we have persistent migration towards the economic opportunities that even with the damages that we can account for would persist in the coast of course thing other things may change but we don't have data on that. So what I like about this result it's a very agent-based model result which says look we're not telling you that migration is going to continue but here's this plausible story where it could continue which kind of cuts against this narrative that where there's a new and unexpected flooding people are going to leave. So let's be a little bit more careful as we think about things. Now within this set of results there are a couple of key things that matter there are lots and lots of different sensitivity analyses. One thing that matters is how much credit we make available to agents to make decisions and one of the interesting things is that more credit doesn't always lead people to move more in some cases it leads them to invest in place build themselves up and sort of become if not trapped certainly more moored than they might have been before. And then the other thing that really matters is how much this thing that we experience now is a shock then becomes a norm and this is a real challenge and it requires us to parse out you know what do people experience this uncertainty what are they experiences expected variation and how do those matter differently to the decision and we don't have a lot of good data on that we've all now just gone through over the last two years like the biggest shock that we'll probably experience in our lifetimes a lot of things have become normal like your kids joining you in presentations and it it's not obvious how universal this experience is and generalizable across different climate hazards different different things that are going to matter in climate adaptation research so this is sort of like a big unknown to try and address like I got to this one already so access to credit doesn't necessarily move people more. So again the things that are missing in all of this have no idea how we would expect coastal economies to change in the next century. We also don't have any real idea well on the physical side I think we might we don't have good data on how the experience of enhanced sea level rise and damages ensuing from that are going to match the things that we have historical analogs for so the sort of spatial and temporal correlation across Bangladesh for example of sea level rise is going to lead people to you know try and succeed through different strategies than you might see through a cyclone people you know you can you can move or you can rely on on insurance and other things to smooth damages in one way when the threat's in one place but if it's everywhere it's a very different experience so this is a thing again we don't really have great analogs we don't know as I said something that's a shock at first becomes really normal and so like across this as well as other sort of climate adaptation challenges like they're sort of out of bag problems that are going to be expensive for us to try and reduce which isn't me saying let's stop and not do anything we're going to get better at doing this we're going to be better at converging upon you know more universal modeling techniques and we're already getting better at you know not just generating data but making better use of the data that we have and I like this spectrum from like remote sensing on the one end through reliance on experts in the middle out to like the sort of like new exciting world of like high frequency mobile phone based data collection of like different ways to engage with with people and learn things we can learn a lot from being able to connect with a hard to reach populations the mobile phone it's expensive it's not necessarily easy to scale yet but it allows us to get to that point where we have like a true socioeconomic baseline that we don't have now we can talk about things in terms of anomalies in the same way that we can talk about sea surface temperature rainfall as anomalies at the other end we're getting so much better at picking up not just you know lights on lights off in cities from space but learning about whether not just that people have planted but maybe the people have switched crops or switched varieties we're starting to be able to pick up these things in smallholder plots from space which tells us a lot of behavior and thinking learning a lot about how to look at or pick out patterns of groundwater sharing and use from space and learning a bit about institutions so finding ways to be smarter about getting the data in the background that can support your models is going to be a thing that will lead us forward but we're not going to resolve everything and the implication of that is that when we think about the kinds of predictions we ought to be making from coupled models stepping out you know way into the future for things that haven't happened yet we've got to do lots and lots of big sensitivity suites sweeps we've got to end up relying on really large ensembles of potentially different valid calibrations and thinking about you know what's held in common what's you know seems to be universally true across all of these big ensembles are universally untrue and really you know I think this is always true for models of complex adaptive systems but it's particularly true with the climate adaptation challenge of like looking for qualitative insights that we think are likely to hold up and so this is a really important point I think to take forward when we make use of models in decision contexts for future projections so trying to sum that up the the application that I share was the best foot forward that we had with secondary data and the group of experts that we were able to work with and my group moving forward now is we have a similar application looking at climate mobility in Senegal we have another application looking at forest sorry at fire as a as related to deforestation in Brazil and we're hoping to do other applications stepping forward what I wanted to do in our time here was just characterize what is hard on the people side when it comes to climate adaptation problems and hopefully have a useful message about like what are the kinds of inferences that are appropriate when these kinds of models so I'll stop there I really appreciate you making time for us today and in case you have any interest in talking further you can reach me here and if I can hear them I'll take any questions Andrew I hope you're here to allow the plows there are there any questions for Andrew Jonathan thanks this very very exciting work you're doing there I'm curious as you're doing your modeling of the decision-making and the agents are kind of deciding what to do based on finding their best choice economically are you looking just at the kind of cash economy side or are you having something in there for like the hedonic utility that people like to stay in their village with the people they know yeah these are really great questions and I guess to some extent you know we can do anything we want if we're good coders right but the limitation is is at the data side and so to the extent that you have any kind of support for how one thing is valued against another we can put it in there and Midas is set up nicely to sort of plug and play like I want to consider this you know this form of utility and this form of utility and this form of utility whether you know whether it's like use value access to nature hedonic values cash incomes the trick is getting that data and where we run into so many problems is like imagining you're really wanting to engage with trade offs people make and you want to say well I think I know people care a little bit about money but they also care about time with their family and they care about not commuting and they care about their health but labor people collect labor data health people collect health data environment people collect environment data and finding ways to get you know perspectives on all of those different things from one person is the sort of critical task to better do the thing I think you're you're describing here thank you are there any other questions for Andrew if not I want to thank Andrew for giving a presentation as well as juggling with child care there and COVID so thank you thank you


Thanks for checking out this video. So do you know about the Fangoria Chainsaw Awards coming to shutter on Sunday April 18th at 8 p.m. Eastern Standard Time? Are you also a person who's thought man? I don't want to watch that alone. I'd like to watch it with other like-minded horror fans Well, this is your opportunity because I'm gonna be doing a watch party for it So at 8 p.m. Eastern Standard Time on Sunday April 18th Sign into Scenar if you don't know what Scenar is it is a Google Chrome extension. So you have to have the Google Chrome Web browser you then you have to get Scenar then create a free account It doesn't cost anything then just make sure you have a shutter account and that way you can watch this with us now Go to Scenar.com backslash Carlton Malibu and Carlton Malibu spelled out C-A-R-L-T-O-N-M-A-L-I-B-U And that is my specific page and that way you can see my scheduled watch parties. So Please join us for this. We're just planning on hanging out talking about cool horror stuff and watching the awards as they happen So it's pretty simple come join us. It's open to everyone. It's public and if you get there early enough The first 10 people can use I can give the ability to use their camera and or microphone So you can talk and or be seen if you're into that otherwise everyone else will just have to stay in the chat but it's gonna be a fun time come join us and Yeah, that's basically it. The other thing is if you want to within Scenar if you follow my profile Then that way you'll know what I'm doing with other watch parties because we do watch parties every other weekend This is kind of an off one that we're doing in addition to our every other weekends where we watch other movies So yeah, so just know that And also Subscribe to my channel because that's a great way to keep your eye on what's going on here And also hit the notification bell because then you'll know when I'm putting up videos like this Letting you know that we're doing another watch party because I'm assuming we'll do other one-off ones We'll find out. But anyway, thanks for checking this out until next time. Keep it brutal


My heart has been defective since birth and unfortunately, I didn't know right away But thankful that having an amazing doctor Figured it all out. I have cardiomyopathy in hypertension. I tell my kids that only at one point Only 10% of my heart worked and that was because parts of my heart had unfortunately died and Now They're coming back to life and it's moving and it beats and it beats hard and it's awesome with this stage of heart failure that I've Experienced with the issues that I've had with my heart if it wasn't for University of Maryland, there would be no me The advances in technology and how the doctors stay upon new medicines and new trends and making sure that You have the best of both worlds that's something that I don't feel that every hospital is able to deliver and University hits it every single time over the last nine years. I have Encountered numerous amounts of heart failure some have been more serious than others but one thing that never changed was their effectiveness of making sure that I came home to my babies and I know that a lot of people can identify with me that that's the main thing that we want to get home to and when you're scared and Things are just going crazy and the machines are going off and you don't really understand having someone is telling you Exactly what you need giving you your meds treating you like a human being It's no other words that you can say. Thank you. It's not even enough My time at University of Maryland each and every single time whether it's been by ambulance or ER or just on the cardiac floor from the time that I walked in I felt safe and There's no amount of words that can compare to Knowing that this is not home, but this is like my second home and I know that this is going to get me home to my babies


Thank you guys for supporting the previous video, I suggest you to subscribe to the channel to stay updated about the Objects Link project. Also on www.thin.com you can buy an Objects Link kit. You can find all links below this video. This video is sponsored by GLCPCB.


This is the Winter Meetings trade show. A lot of people in there are the people that set up at minor league parks, colleges to entertain the fans that come to watch the games. Jake and I are going to go see what they got.   Unfortunately, the company has a new name. We're officially Somboy Media. We got some beers. We're here. Winter meetings. They give you beers. First time I felt comfortable. Whoa! Oh wow! That is not what I expected. I mean, we swear there were games. These dugout mugs are delicious. This isn't a real one, right? I guess real is what you wanted to be. Oh no.   My head is really small.  Your buddies think you look better that way. Playing tic-tac-toe. Basketball, Nerf style, I guess. Tic-tac-toe? Yeah. No? Give me one. 0 for 3.  That was a warm-up. Good at tic-tac-toe. Softball, basketball. Bad at everything in life. That was a warm-up game. I'll get your balls.  I just won. I'll get your balls. Let's play the real game. I'm from.  Where are you shooting from? What was that? Oh my God. You were shooting from over here. You shot that last one from here. That's full of excuses. Full of excuses. Watch this. Jimmy loses that game.  That was cool. Island. You're probably not going to do good. Kevin? Not going to see the first one. You're taking it? No. That's weird. The pitcher is winding up for his first anniversary. It's way slower than you think and kind of like dies. It's a weird pitch, but I was also terrified. I'm not as bad as that one. Oh, look at that. Looking good. I don't want to show you guys the gift. Now, see, you're with the Rosenthal. You got to get a shot from the short. Odd. Oh, yeah. Here we go, Jake. I kind of broke the machine. No, it ran out of balls. Made it bad. Kind of messed up, but now I'm about to go yard. You should be good to go. We're good? Yeah. My one, buddy. Yup. Way to make contact, man.  Are they forced? I mean, it's rude. Alright, I'm claiming normal level. You're good. Here we go, Jermboy. That shirt, hold up. I think so. Roosevelt's. Promo code, Jombino. 20% off. You can't bring any beverages out. We're sorry. We're all good. Well, y'all make it really good. Just go this way. I'll just guard it right now. Huge band, man. Thank you. Well, hey. Was that fun or what? Minus us missing the pitches, because the machine was on random? If I knew it was on random, I would have prepped for it. I would have changed my approach. I would have changed my approach. I thought they were all fastballs. I was sitting heater and they were just diving. What happened? As soon as we graduated, like 14 years old, and pitchers started throwing random pitches. Roosevelt's. That's when I stopped. Go to Roosevelt's RSVLTS.com slash Jomboy. Jombino. Buy a shirt. Buy a sweatshirt. $200 a free gear. No, 20% off, but check it out. If you use Jomboy, yeah, we got a piece.


What's going on guys? It's your boy DPJ here today with another Destiny video now that Iron Banner dropped yesterday and before it dropped there's a few things we saw. Hunter Cloak Wolf absolutely incredible. You know you guys know I'm trying to get back into that PvP.  I mean I ain't that great. Most of the time I do get owned but seeing that Hunter Cloak with that motherfucking wolf on his head I just I had to play Iron Banner. I just had to play it before it come.  No arms, no weapons, nothing. I didn't care about none of that. As soon as I got this wolf's cloak I would have been happy and I wouldn't have played it no more. Luckily yesterday.  Wolf's wood cloak. Look at that thing. Amazing. Absolutely amazing. One bad thing about it. Thing don't change colour with your your shaders but still it looks amazing. I mean it's not bad colours to be honest. I mean it will go with certain arm, certain shaders sorry. It just looks so good. It looks so good. I mean love of it. I mean love of it. Now like I said I've grinded Iron Banner now. I've got the cloak. Well this was planned prior. As soon as I got the cloak I wasn't gonna play no more but he's got a weapon. He has a weapon here. I am super curious about and it's that right there. New Wins Mercy. This to me looks like an amazing an amazing pulse rifle. I mean I don't know if you guys have saw the future war cock pulse rifle. I think it's called the villainy.  It's basically another messenger. I mean it two burst head shots. I mean if you are high enough light leveling that Iron Banner it will two burst head shot. It's an amazing weapon. It's got basically the same standard stats as this. Same rate of fire, same impact. I'm not sure about range but it's got a higher stability. This New Wins Mercy even. It's got a higher stability than the one saw the future war cock. This one also has perfect balance. It has brace flame where you can max the stability out. That's only going to take the magazine size down to about 29 lowest. It's got outlaw. It's got third eye. This is a monster of a PvP weapon and I'm going to grind until I get it. I'm going to grind until I get it. What rank do you need to be? Is it a rank 4? Oh you don't need to be a rank? Oh you should do. You need to be a rank 5. I didn't see that there. You need to be a rank 5 to get this but you can still get it dropped in Iron Banner. So if you grind Iron Banner there's a chance you will get this bad boy drop. So yeah I've got my cloak.  Now it's all about this New Wins Mercy. Absolutely incredible. It looks so good. I mean I've played with this Iron Wraith as well. I played with it at the taking King of Launch event and it's not a bad weapon whatsoever. I mean rate a fire. If you've got a trigger finger this thing absolutely murders it really does. But yeah I mean if I get it I get it. I still haven't even got a sidearm. I might have a jogging. Every sidearm I get I just dismantle. But yeah I'll give this one a chance I really will. But that's the main. My main focus now is this Porsche rifle it really is. Now I'll show you guys my classic stuff I was using for that Iron Banner. Now I do switch up depending on the map. But my main setup is bad use. I mean I'm going into the Iron Banner. I mean I'm going into the Iron Banner. 298 light. Between 298 and 302. 303. And it's still red. I mean they said that the damage curve your light will be. You'll see a bigger difference this time around. I don't believe that is the case to be honest. I mean I tested it out and I went in with the fan verdict and it was just as good. My light level was 200. I think it was 295 when I tried it. But the fan verdict year one 150 attack weapon was just as good as it is in normal PVP. I mean yes there's a slight slight you can see a slight slight difference. But I mean it's it's a matter of it's a matter of single digit numbers. It really is when it comes to damage was what you're dealing. I mean there's a massive massive difference to be honest but yeah. Bad juju for the win. Absolutely beast of a weapon. Bad juju, red death. You can't go wrong with these bad boys. And like I said look at mine. Mine are both 280 attack. And I mean and I'm not doing too bad. I'm not even joking guys. I'm not doing too bad. I mean 99% of the games I'm going at least positive finishing top three in my team. A lot of my team are really good players so what can I say. Bad juju for the win. Red death for the win. If you've got long range maps. My suos, DIT 43. Absolutely murders. I've got this one here which I'm going to level up and then try out. Tuanele SR4. I'm one and scout. I'm not too bad whatsoever. This is the sniper. The steel piercer. Hunter exclusive. You guys know you hunters know. This thing absolutely works. I mean it's mine. It's it's perks ain't that great. But it absolutely works. If I need a shotgun I switch to this one right here. I can spruce you three with D. I mean it's got a range. I mean dead nerf shot package. This thing don't need shot package.  I'm not even joking guys. It can spruce you three with D. If you haven't got one and you play PvP quite often you've probably been under-received entity so you know what I'm talking about. This thing is incredible. I mean I've got accurate ballistics. I've got I mean I've got aggressive ballistics as well. I can switch that out but no shotguns. I've been nerfed that little bit when it comes to range. I'll just go with that a little bit extra range. So yeah I got range finder also.  This is more so a trials or elimination sort of perk skirmish maybe or whichever skirmish yourself which I can't remember which one you can revive in. Maybe both. Who cares. But yeah. Cause spruce you three with D is a beast of a weapon. This is one you can actually buy from the Vanguard water master as well. I'm not sure if this is the one I brought. This could have dropped. I'm not sure to be honest but you guys can go and see that for yourselves. Heavy. I'm just using the hothead. My basically re-skin of the dragon's breath and I mean my mind's ain't even that great to be honest. They ain't that great. Nothing great here. I mean I just up out from field to go. Excuse me one extra rocket and yeah it's just it just wrecks it wrecks. But other than that my actual armor set up wise I haven't actually looked too far into it. I mean it's all about light. I mean if I select other armors my light level drops so I have to use the arms I've got to keep my light level up there so it can be basically compete. So yeah nothing else can really do that. I mean I switched my helmets back and forth. Sometimes use my knocker head raider.  But yeah other than that I just go into it go for the grind and hopefully get some decent loose attitude but guys let me know down below in that comment section what loot of you had dropped. Have you had that pull trifle? Let me know if you have. If you've tried it out let me know how it handles. I'm super curious to find out. But guys hope you enjoyed the video. Look at that motherfucker. Wolf looks so sick. You know it also looks sick as well though. Just about to end the video there but the warlock buns looks absolutely incredible. I mean I have got a couple of pals who've had it drop. I don't believe any of them are online. No they're not so I can't show you. But yeah guys look it up. It looks amazing. You'll probably see unease now's channel in the next few days because he was one of the people who got it dropped but it looks incredible. But guys hope you enjoyed the video.  Nothing better than that.  Thanks for stopping by as always and peace out on next time. Peace.


When I was 16 I had to read this book for those of you who are listening and they're not seeing this is a book They're called Department of Licensing Washington driver guide This was my Bible at the age of 16. I Read it maybe five or six times I thought I knew how to drive because I already had experience and I read this book to just solidify my knowledge We were about three months three years into United States. So English was a little bit tough for me I remember going to the Columbia Clearwater office over there to take the test I went took the first test in English and I failed. I Remember being disappointed. I was convinced all the questions on the test were not in the book I'm like I read the book. I know what the book says and whatever questions they have They probably have gotten from another book that I they never gave me But you know what they told me surprisingly is that they're not allowed to put things on the test They are not in this book But they are allowed to put things on a test. There are not in my mind God is not obligated to give you challenges The challenges that you will face in your life are Proportional to this book But not to you in this book Just like I went to take a test and I had a certain amount of this book in my head and I Failed you know, I wish I would say I took a second a second test and succeeded, but I didn't I took a second test in Russian And I failed again It doesn't matter which book I've read Russian or English I just needed to get more of this book inside of me for me to chair to face face and to overcome the test and I remember reading a third time and now I memorized it. I Read it. I Tested it. I did everything and I got so much of this book inside of me that it was coming out of me I knew every single thing in this book and now when I went again to take exactly same test I found out that actually Everything I needed to have to answer that test was in this book. The problem is this book was not inside of me That's exactly what happens with life Every challenge you're facing this book has answers to help you conquer it every demon that comes your way this book can crush it God people say always God will never let anything happen to you that you cannot handle That's like saying a teacher will never give you a test that you don't know answers for it's a joke Teacher will never give you a test of Things that are not in the book But it is your task how much of the things in the book go into your head Not the teachers and Therefore sometimes we face challenges that are bigger than us and we say where is God in this the same God Who allows these challenges? Gives us victory over these challenges in this book in his name in the community of Believers and when we allow these things to penetrate us on a deeper level We will overcome them if we allow them to come into Superficial level and just and we just do it just enough to get by you will hit a test and realize Oh my goodness This is bigger than me and this is not a point to throw away the Bible when I failed the first time My point was not to set this on fire My point was to come back home and realize I just got a little bit more studying to do not less When you got hit and you cannot overcome something it doesn't mean you need to pray less actually Jesus says you need to pray a little bit more Because this kind means this challenge you are facing has a little bit bigger than your faith And so you gotta get your faith worked up to the level of the challenge so the challenge can be overcome Nothing in your life will ever be allowed in your life without you having what it takes to overcome nothing Every curse that has come may be against your way every demonic activity Everything in the family the mess and the chaos Nothing will ever be permitted to come that you already don't have a victory for But this victory has to leave from the pages of this book into the lips of the believer This victory has to leave from here into here and from here into here and from here into here It has to come inside of us and it has to take control of us and it has to possess us like the same way this book Started to possess a 16 year old teenager


Alright guys, we are here in Tampa 2014 for the 21 convention and we have an amazing speaker for you. This guy is somebody who is a veteran of the 21 convention, but also a part of the 21 convention documentary series. He's an architect, a philosopher, somebody who is really a foundation of masculinity and the philosophy of masculinity. Let's welcome on stage, Socrates. Call me Socrates. I'm partial to that opening. It reminds me of one of my favorite American novels from Herman Milville, Moby Dick. And it relates to me in a number of ways in my own personal progression throughout life is that I have a sincere connection towards both central characters of that novel. Two individuals that are highly damaged and highly flawed, terribly passionate about what they do and they believe thrown amongst nature and the universe. It also studies their individual obsessions and reflecting upon that and projecting into that novel and seeing myself reflected back in that. I reflect on a regular basis my own obsessions. One of which is my historical past, my involvement in my life and my place in life in the universe. And it has been a slow one. That being said, it has taken me 28 years of an adult life to get to this spot today. That is a very slow progression. One of the things that hinders that progression was my early education. I was taught to believe certain things. I developed limiting beliefs.   It has taken me 28 years to go through that process to realize that that's not necessarily a bad thing to be a dreamer. But if you're going to dream, you need to execute. And the reality is this, in the absence of strenuous change, nothing occurs. People don't change. You're going to need to act. And the Irish have a great proverb that is, again, another one that I found inspirational and guiding when I faced moments of fear, anxiety, uncertainty. And the proverb goes like this, you'll never be able to plow a field by turning it over in your mind. And there's two points to this. One, the obvious. You need to act. The second one's embedded in like a Trojan horse. And that is the reality of this. If you want the benefits of the plowed field, what comes from that, you have to be willing to put in hard work to achieve it. And you have to act on that. And that is something that we all have to face when we look to capitalize on our dreams. I have a friend that actually said something in passing. And I thought it was rather remarkable. He said, it would be interesting if we treated average like a terminal disease. Average is at risk with everything we do, all right? As soon as you exceed average in thinking, in your research, in your study, in your approach to life, in the decisions you make, in the thoughts you have, and in particular, the people you surround yourself with, the qualitative nature of your life will dramatically change. You have that opportunity right now.  That is an amazing resource to have to be able to capitalize on. It has been particularly true of my experience with the 21 convention. I actually predate the 21 convention with Anthony. I'm one of the few people that can actually stand here and bear witness to what's occurred. And so my history with this goes back to when I actually realized I wasn't failing, I was failing, I wasn't happy with the nature of my life, and I wanted it to affect a change. How best to do that? I could have capitalized on certain ideas, I could have focused on certain things. Instead, I decided to make room for something, to release myself to the currents of what would become my life. I actually sat down and said, I'm going to make room for something rather than trying to force an issue. And what I realized is going back in my life, looking at the moments of my success, I tried to recreate those environments. Not the people, but the environments, or the situation, but the environment. And part of that was surrounding myself with like-minded people committed to a like-minded cause. Having done that, I joined a number of communities and found a group of men that were willing to work on themselves. As we progressed, we started making more and more relationships. There were a slew of us from a variety of different backgrounds, cultural backgrounds, age backgrounds and maturity levels. It was rather dramatic. One of them was a young punk, a young 17-year-old punk. I'm in my late 30s. Try to relate to that as a peer group. I found it rather difficult. That was something I had as a limiting belief. He progressed, I did too, and what we found as we progressed together independently, that there was a lot of commonalities. We had similar interests. Part of that was we actually read similar type books, relayed that information and shared things that I didn't necessarily have time to do myself. One of which was a 1930s book written by Napoleon Hill called Think and Grow Rich. Here we are in 2000 reading a book written and published in 1930s. It was old, antiquated. The language was antiquated.  But there were truths to be found in that. And part of it was this element of a mastermind of the concept of three people coming together with a like purpose that we're going to hold each other accountable. And part of that process is that you come up with more ideas, more insights than if you had them on yourself or with just one other person. And so we started formulating small groups, tried testing this stuff out. And that was one of the things I really liked about this organization was we tested things out. We documented these things. We wrote journals and then we put them online. And we put them online for others to read and to comment. Many instances it was a very brutal process. It was a very humbling process. If you put yourself out there, you're exposing yourself.  But what we developed was a culture of men. We developed a culture of sharing and supporting each other. And that I found immense richness to this. As this progressed, we started doing it more and more. More and more people became interested. Eventually we ended up having it at somebody's house. And at one point my house held 25 people for three and a half hours sitting down and talking with one or two keynote speakers giving a presentation and then everybody discussing it. It felt like an oversized Oprah book club. It was rather remarkable. Somewhere along the line, we just knew we couldn't do this. We wanted to be a little more professional about it. We couldn't find people that had a facility to do it. So we used the library. We actually went to the conference rooms and actually utilized a conference room. In some cases there are rooms as large as this. The problem was the library didn't decide to charge us for it. I figured at that point it wasn't gonna happen. It was, I thought it was a challenge getting guys to show up at the library to actually commit to doing this stuff on a regular basis. But I was kind of surprised, they did.  And interestingly enough, we did. There were three of them. And remember that young punk I told you about earlier? He came up with this great idea. Sounds wonderful. You know what I'm gonna do? I'm gonna do this, but we're gonna do it in even a better facility. We're gonna rent a hotel room. We're gonna have a conference. And instead of relying on the people that are in our community, we're actually gonna open this up to actually have people fly in because I know there are more people outside of Orlando, our area where we live, that wants this information would like to be part of it and could join us rather than relying on the small geographical location of a catchment pool of what we had available. I had other things going on in my life. I wasn't thinking that clearly. I also wasn't that committed to it. I had my own things to do.  Are you shitting me? You're gonna spend how much money of your personal savings to be able to put this sort of show on. And with the expectation, our people are actually gonna deliver. He didn't know what he was doing. He didn't know how he was gonna do it. These are gonna be two key things. Everyone looks at it. I miss the most important thing on the wall. Here you have a 17-year-old teaching a 30-plus-year-old professional something about life and getting something done. He had purpose. And when you know your purpose, you'll figure out what and how. And what and how is less important than your purpose, your why of what you are doing. He had that. I didn't. In 2007, he puts on his first dog and pony show, the first 21 convention. And it was a success. It was an obvious success. We're here today. I was amazed. He continued it the next year. And we're like, rock on. He does it again this time in 2010. Now most people try to travel the world. I know I would have liked to travel more than I have. Okay, and that's just me buying an airline ticket and going someplace I wanna see. What does he do? He decides to take this road show overseas. He goes to Europe and puts on two conferences in countries he's never been in, has limited connections, but he does something else. He just doesn't have a purpose. He utilizes global connections. It's gonna be something I'll talk about in a bit, but he leverages those connections. Okay, the what and how. He figures that out. And I can imagine the fear that's going through him. I know what I faced, when I faced any of a number of my projects, but we've talked at length on some of these others and he shared that. But he took those fears and he ignored them. He paid attention, but he figured out a what and how tax will respond to his fears and he figured it out. Not only did he figure it out, he actually acted on it. I'm amazed. Thoroughly perplexed. Just stunned.  They were profound. Anthony being Anthony, he was already kind of known being stubborn, bullheaded.  I've talked about that, I think in the documentary. 2012, he takes it global. Not just overseas, global. Three separate continents, one year, 17 freaking time zones.  Who does that? That still boggles my mind that he was able to achieve that. He has a purpose and the purpose wasn't just putting on the conventions or the presentations or the million plus hours of video content he's uploaded for free on YouTube. His purpose is self-education. His purpose is to develop a culture of men to help support him to better himself and better each and every one of us in a process. That is stunning. That is something our cultures collectively have let go of and we've lost. And here you have a very young man achieving that. Not old men. Not old men that are afraid.  Take that lesson today into your hearts. You are in a special place. Capitalize on it. Find your purpose. Look then to solve the what and the how. As we go forward, I want to recognize that the 21 convention has done a number of things and the next six points are going to kind of keynote on some of these elements that the 21 conventions does either explicitly or inexplicitly. And the first and primary one and something Anthony's leveraged very successfully is we've won the history's lottery ticket. There is no better time to live than right freaking now. We have access to information, research, dialogue, communities, other people globally at our fingertips. The internet is an amazing device and tool to learn, to harvest information, to share, to put information out, and to get feedback and responses. The Gutenberg Press was one of the most famous human inventions around. It is a device made for printing that had the all the power of a tweet and it launched a human revolution in thought and ideas. It changed nations. It changed societies and it changed our world view. What we have before us is vastly more powerful and you're leveraging it. All right. You need to be able to have a direction in your life. You need to know which way you're going and you need to pursue that. That's gonna be part of the connection. You have to have a degree of knowledge, self-awareness, and be willing to share that. And then you need to actually leverage your global connections. Right now, I don't think half of you know each other. It would be a shame if you lost out on that opportunity not to make the connection, especially in this economic era of service industries. All right. It's not enough just to get an education. You have to then have practical experience to compound that. That's gonna take time. The other element which education systems to do a pretty poor job at is developing transferable skills, okay? The last thing that they absolutely don't do is actually make a global network of connections. If you're gonna be successful in a global environment, you're gonna need to be able to leverage the education, experience, and then you're gonna have to leverage the ability to make the connections to make something function. Anthony did all those things when he went international and went global. The other element is education is a terribly personal responsibility. Our education systems are horrible. And if there's no greater testament to it than after 12 years of an American education, you're not worth anything more than minimum wage. As a matter of fact, we have to have a minimum wage to force employers to pay you that little. The reality is if your education was better than it was and it was as good as they say it is, your employers would be competing to outbid you for you. They're not, they're not going to. Employers have no problem throwing money at resources they value. The average high school graduate isn't worth any more than what they get with minimum wage. And there's a reason for it, all right? The skills you're being taught are not leverageable in the societies in which we live in. You need to have transferable skills and one of the most primary will be social skills, your social interaction and connections with people. How to be able to team build, how to be able to manage those relationships and how to be able to maintain those relationships.  We know what they are. Don't make the known mistakes. Avoid those things. Be smart. And it's not just a ladder of success. It's a ladder for your success. Know your passion. Find out what industry or what area it lies. And then find out what are the common mistakes people have made? Make a map. Make notes to yourself. Edit it and make sure you don't replicate those mistakes. Removing the negatives are gonna be improve the quality of your life faster than any skills you add to them. And that is the first lesson of management. Remove the negative. Avoid the known pitfalls.  It helps for a rung or two, but you're not gonna climb the ladder of success by being carried to the top.  You're gonna have to self-educate as part of that process. And that is an essential component of it. Learn what you can learn. Research the material. Avoid the known mistakes. And then dedicate yourself for self-education. You guys are all doing that right now. This is for the TV audience, the people that are not here. They're missing out on this connection as well. Capitalize on that. Use a personal accountability for your life. You have to be personally accountable. Another major component of the 21 convention is this, is that most men live lives of quiet desperation. We're desperately fearful of the things we want, of stepping outside of conformity. And there is a tyranny of conformity. It will hold you down. People who don't want to be bothered. People who don't want to see you try and succeed because it'll show in their face what they weren't capable of. It will hold you back. If you allow that to happen, you're submitting yourself to that tyranny. And for men to be free, you have to free yourself from those shackles and those restraints. You need to attend the personal details to fulfill your personal objectives. No one's gonna take care of your business quite the way you'll take care of it. You have to be accountable. You have to be willing to do that. You have to be willing to reach for your dreams. Find out what those are and pursue them. I can guarantee you, Anthony is scared shitless every time coming up to one of these conventions. I know I'm worried about these presentations, but you have to turn into your fears.  You work towards it. You dedicate yourself to it. You get excited about it. You're living a life in combination of fear and excitement all at the same time. And you know what? You never feel more alive. And that is remarkable. Embrace the fear. Couple it with work. Couple it with dedication. Couple it with your purpose. And then you'll kinda enjoy it. It's kinda weird, but you'll enjoy it. The other is the ease of which people can complain. There's one thing to complain to release steam, to release tension. That's a human nature. But it becomes another issue when people use it as a crutch. And that crutch is called mediocracy, okay? It's comfortable. And the weak use mediocracy as a handrail to support themselves. They have to have it, right? Be very careful in letting yourself go too long in the nature of complaining between releasing tension and it being a narrative in which you are propagating. When it transcends into a narrative, you're gonna be holding yourself back.  If we are gonna have passions and we're gonna execute on those passions, you're gonna need to get up and rise and grind. You're gonna have to find your motivation. You're gonna have to find your purpose. You're gonna have to build a degree of momentum and a head of steam through action, through course of work to get it accomplished. You're gonna have to understand how that progresses forward. What's the nature of these things? How is that achieved? Those are the what's in the house. You'll need to also research. You can figure that out as you go along. But you need to get up and you need to go after your dreams.  That's an admirable thing. It is an absolutely admirable thing. He's not willing to stay with average. He's not willing to set the status quo. He's not willing to let other people say, like I did, you can't do this. He's not willing to listen to his fears in his head saying don't do this. That's unreasonable. We should all strive for that. It is a remarkable, remarkable situation when you can let go of that. And move forward. I wanna talk about the mediocrity as the default state of life. That's where we normally are. That's natural.  But don't tolerate it for long. If you feel lazy, that's okay. Move on from that. Allow yourself to have that time off because without it that, you're probably gonna need it from time to time. Degree of ego depletion, just the degree of emotional drain, everything else. You need to take a break. But then pick it up and move on. The other is surround yourself on a regular basis with like people. There's a phrase about steel sharpening steel. And it is true. The quality of the people you surround yourself with will reflect highly in the quality of your life. And unreasonable people don't accept low quality individuals in their lives. They know it'll hold them down. Overall, take these things forward. I'm surrounded in a room with people who are unreasonable, who are acting on their dreams. I see a room full of dreamers. I see people who have already committed heavily to pursuing the life that they want. And you're surrounded with like-minded individuals. Capitalize that on the next three days. And welcome to the 21 convention. All right, give it up for Socrates, man. Awesome stuff.


Hey everybody, this is Christian Buckley doing another MVP buzz chat and I'm talking today with Gregor. Hello. Hi Christian, how are you doing? So for folks that don't know you, who are you, where are you and what do you do? Yes, so my name is Gregor Sutty. I, you might be able to guess from my accent. I am from Scotland, so I live near Glasgow in Scotland. I am an Azure architect. I'm obviously an MVP, an IMCT and I'm an Azure architect for a company called Intercept in the Netherlands. I'd like to say that, so first off, so more than 50% of my line is, comes from the Glasgow, Scotland area. So it was actually supposed to be there and doing some research with my in-law and some of my family members were going to go do some family research in the area and things kind of changed and wasn't able to make it out there, but I love the area, been many times, but. Cool, the next thing you know, give me a shirt. Yeah, we'll do. Yeah, so it's funny, it's like my maternal grandfather Richardson, it was like we can trace back, I think 17 generations. Oh wow, that's impressive. Yeah, so pretty impressive. Then just stop. So that's my task is to go and find beyond that. So for folks that are unfamiliar and not that I know everything about in the Azure space, but what areas of Azure is your specialty? Because that's such a broad area and I'm sure Microsoft will get creative and break it apart and recreate other MVP sub areas within Azure. So what do you focus on? So my background is mainly development. That's not really my focus area, but my background is .NET, well actually VBSyc development, then .NET development, then I became a dev manager and then I got into Azure. So I'm coming to Azure from a development background. It's a little bit different to most architects. So I'm not very good at networking. I'm more web apps, app services, function apps, all that kind of good stuff. I've also got a data background as well, so SQL Server back in the day. I've got data, AI, everything apart from really AKS, which I haven't really got into networking. These are the two areas that I don't do. So anything else that comes up at work, they can sometimes give me a shout and I'll jump on a call and help. But that networking is not my strong point. So my main background is development. It's interesting. A lot of the people that I know that are kind of in that space kind of came up through the networking desktop support, like that side of things. I worked in, so my prior life before Microsoft Ecosystem, so back when I would work with IBM and other technology, it was in software configuration management. It was actually those tools I worked with, Rational Software, if you remember that. Yeah, yeah. In fact, we were the largest, my company, we sold the Rational back in 2001. We had the largest collection of free rows and clear case add-ons. Those take me back. I remember using them. Yeah. No, it's kind of funny too.  They didn't stay for very long, but there were a bunch of big names, famous authors in that space that all joined to kind of help build kind of like the beginnings of Microsoft's DevOps journey, which honestly, I don't know where it kind of is or, you know, I don't keep up on that space at all. I keep up on that space. That's my space as well, DevOps as well. Yeah, very cool. So the team that built Azure DevOps kind of moved over to GitHub, and they're all building GitHub actions at the moment. Which has taken off, which is great, and it's pretty broadly supported. Yeah, yeah. But I don't pay much attention to what's happening outside of the Microsoft ecosystem. No, I mean, to be honest with you, yeah, I've been a Microsoft fan by all my days, so I couldn't really tell you much about anything else. Yeah. No clue. Yeah. Well, so what's kind of your passion topics right now? What do you do out in the community? What do you write about, speak about those kinds of things? Well, I just like helping people. So my big thing is helping people. So my big, the kicks that I get at the moment are helping customers. So I, my number one thing is probably a customer phoning me with something I've never seen before. Like a rational rose problem that we need sorted, then I'll come and fix it. So I get a kick out of fixing things that I don't really know anything about. Do a wee bit of reading into it, do a wee bit of playing about it. Try and learn it and then figure it out. So that's my big thing at the moment. Doing a lot of bicep at the moment. So doing a lot of infrastructure as code for customers. Doing a lot of that. My main job is basically helping customers who are either getting on board and into Azure, or customers who are already in Azure and want to do something better. Like maybe, maybe sort of their environment or move from maybe modernize their apps. That kind of thing. That's my big thing. Modernize apps is quite good fun. Well, that there's an endless job right there. Yeah. Often, often a thankless job. It's just because they pile more on. So what was, what was your path to becoming an MVP? Like how did you get discovered? That's a good question. I didn't actually, to be honest, I've been in IT for like 25 years until about six years ago. I didn't really, I heard the MVP, but I didn't really know what it was all about. And then I spoke to a bunch of a good friend of mine called Kenny Lowe who works for Dell. And he was telling me all about it. And I was like, that's quite interesting. I need to look into that a bit more. And he kind of lit the touch paper. They kind of got me interested on it. And then I just decided a lot of people say that MVP shouldn't be a goal. And I probably do tell people that, but I wrote up on a lot of paper about my screen MVP. And that was my goal. So that was my one and only goal when I got to Azure. I was going to like, I want to become an Azure MVP. So I decided to, how am I going to go about that? So my path was, I had to learn Azure as I was doing this. So as I was learning Azure, I decided I would blog the learning resources and the study material that I was using. And that became very popular. So I started off with doing the developer exams from having zero Azure knowledge and failing them and kind of blogging my journey of how we'd go about learning all again and kind of the study methods and what not to do, basically, because I was doing this in not a very clever fashion. So I then belonged about how to do that. And then I think now I've got like 26 exams or something like that. So I've kind of did quite a lot. That's kind of how I started. Not really sure how I got found out about an MVP. I kind of self-nominated just before that part changed. Oh, yeah. For folks who don't know, there was a window, a short window where they allowed self-nominations rather than a Microsoft person or existing MVP, which is now what it's back to. Yeah. So I self-nominated, waited about six months and then they said they're getting rid of that. So I had to start the whole process again, which was fine. You got on the radar. Yeah, exactly. They knew how I was at that point, which was good. And I was helping with the Glasgow Azure User Group. I was doing lots of community stuff anyway. Yeah. So the one thing I would say is people shouldn't, like, I know I'm kind of contradicting myself here, but you shouldn't really try to become an MVP. You should just earn the MVP as part of what you're doing. That's my opinion. Yeah, that's the great guidance. That's that balance. You have to surface the things that you're doing. You've got to make people aware of it, but you've got to do it in a humble way. Yes, exactly. Yes. Being humble is one of the key things, I think. I always put it down to, like, I was thinking about this this morning because I thought you might ask this. Like, if you're one to win an Oscar, you don't think about one to win an Oscar. You probably just want to be a leading film star and then an Oscar becomes part of the world of just being a good actor and being good films. So if you're a good community person, the MVP thing will come along, but you shouldn't really just go all out for MVP. Yeah, except, except that there are so many people like I had this before I've got nominated where people just assumed I was. Yeah. And guess who said like, wait, you're not an MVP. Yeah. There's a few people I've nominated that I was like, before that I was like, you're not an MVP.  Right. Yeah. I've also been quite lucky. I've nominated 20 people for MVP and 18 of them have become MVP. So that's quite good. That's good. Yeah, quite good. Yeah. Yeah. Hopefully one of the other people is going to become an MVP soon. That's one of those things where I've had people that have come up and said, you know, hey, could you nominate me or could you recommend me? And I've had some with a couple of them, some frank conversations, like, like I don't, I don't see, I don't know enough about the stuff that you're doing. Like, here's what I'd have to go and see. And some of those people like never came back. I've had some others that have come back and been persistent. I think that's great. Like doing that thing. And I actually had one, a good friend of mine who's now actually an MVP and an RD. So a regional director who he said, you know, it's been my goal. So I've been trying for like three years. He says, I've just decided I'm going to stop trying. It's like, I don't, I don't care. Like I'm, I'm loving like work is great. I'm doing the community stuff. I'm passionate about this. If I get it great, but I'm not going to try to get it. And I kid you not a month later, he. That's the mantra. I think you need to try not try. You just do what you're doing and it will come along. Yeah. Yeah. There's loads of people. I've had loads of people like yourself reach out and you don't know them. And you're like, no, I'm not, I'm not going to entertain people. You don't know. Yeah. There was a lot of people like you, like what you were saying that. I couldn't believe where I'm the MVP. I just assumed that they were MVPs and they're like, no, I'm not an MVP. And I'm like, okay, let's do something about that. Yeah. That's why you've got to be, I don't know, be subtle about it. I mean, talk to friends of yours, like get to know MVPs, get to know Microsoft people. But, but it, I do agree with you that if you're involved in like wherever you live in the world, if you know your local Microsoft sales people, though, if there's an office nearby, if there's user groups get involved with that stuff. If you become visible and are just out there doing stuff and speaking at and creating content and answering questions, because you don't have to speak at conferences and blog every day and create videos.  And there's a huge community out there and people that just answer questions and discord. Yeah. There's many ways to do it. Yeah. I think some, I think a lot of people get intimidated and think that they need to public speaking. And I think that's a big, not really true. I think a lot of people have been like, I'm not going to talk about MVP to blog and do you say help out and hit the forums and that's, that's perfectly legit. You don't need to be in a public speaker. I don't really do public speaking. So yeah, I think that's about my mistake. Some people make. Well, that was like my main thing. I was because I was blogging occasionally, but a lot of my content was for the company that I worked for 10 years ago. And so for me it was thankfully I had a company that would do all of these events. And I was going to be there in the booth regardless. I just then submitted to every one of them and just slowly started getting picked up and people would see me and I'd speak more. But now, you know, in post COVID, like, I'm fine with letting others, the younger generation go and do that and be the, be the travel jockeys and do all that where I'm just doing stuff like blogging and content creation and, and interviews and, and promoting the community, that kind of stuff. And, you know, it's, I love doing this, this stuff. I'm still giving back to the community, but I'm not standing up in front of as many crowds as you know, that's, that's kind of where I'm doing the same. Yeah. I've kind of, yeah, speaking as really my thing. So yeah, there's plenty of opportunities. Yep. Yeah. Well, that's great. Well, so for folks that, you know, want to get in touch with you find out more, like what are the best ways to reach you? Where are you most active in the social realm? Most active as a 12. So it's just Gregor underscore city. I'm on Twitter quite a lot. Or LinkedIn. And actually, I don't really use Facebook or anything like that. So yeah, definitely. Well, if you're not a grandparent, that's, I keep getting hearing that. So I do use Facebook a lot because I am a grandparent. So I've got three littles, but yeah, but it's a, no, but what's kind of your other, other places your blog or other sites. Yeah. You got the content to point people at. Yeah. YouTube as well. Just Gregor city and my blog is Gregor city.com. I don't blog as often as I used to. I used to blog quite regularly, but more into YouTube videos and content creation that way. Now kind of not really got started on YouTube channel. Done one or two courses. We've just finished on these 900 course, which was good. So I need to do, I want to do more of that. My main thing. I had a previous boss who would always say that when you learn something, you should try and teach it to other people because you learn more and you're also giving back. So that's my, my main thing. I feel very lucky that I've been working for people. The company I'm at in my previous job where I was kind of mentored into teaching people and giving back. And I always want to do that. I think that's really quite important. So that's a big thing for me at the moment is doing courses to give back to people. Well, I realize that everybody has different learning styles and different skills. But I'm with you. Like I, I learned the most by, by going through walking through organizing it, teaching it, you know, speaking about talking about it, sharing that, and then getting that real world feedback.  You're building your confidence in that.  But if you're writing about it, sharing about what you're learning about, then you'll get more of that input that feed others. And we've even learned to do something blog about it. And somebody said, there's a better way.  Then the AZ 900 was really good because even just realizing that some people don't even know what a virtual machine is. And you have to start from the very basics because we're kind of like going into a too high level, even though it was the AZ 900. You need to remember that some people are like marketing people who want to do this for their job, but don't really know anything about Azure. You have to make sure that your content is at the right level. So that was a learning curve, but it was a great learning curve. Yeah. Well, there's another opportunity right there because what I find is usually there's like the one-on-one content. And then it jumps right up into advance. And there's often the greatest opportunity or the people like, I understand the core concepts, but ease me into the more complex things. And that's where the greatest opportunities. That's where most people are as well. Definitely. Even for the, when you go to conferences, that's kind of where most of the content is. It's not really a beginner. It's just above beginner, but it's not quite at the expert level. So yeah, I'd agree with that. Yeah. So I just need to think about what course to do next. But I think the fundamentals is popular because there's a lot of people just trying to get into cloud and kind of, you know, data fundamentals is quite popular. Yeah. All the, all the containers and AKS fundamentals, all these fundamentals courses seem to be the most popular. Do you worry about, do you ever go out and look and say, Hey, I really want to write about this.  Do you? No, I can't say that. I probably should do that. No, I can't say that. I do. I just know that the fundamentals, when I, when I did a LinkedIn learning course, I asked what's the most popular ones and they're saying the fundamentals, the fundamentals ones are the most popular. Yeah. Which I can understand, especially AZ 900, just getting into Azure in general, that's where people start. So that's going to be big. Data fundamentals is quite big. AI fundamentals now obviously is going to be huge. Yeah. I mean, build's coming up tomorrow and it'll be AI every second word. You know, it's going to be massive. Of course. Yeah, yeah. I just got, I just got an abstracts accepted for a conference in August on AI that I'll be doing. So yeah. Yeah. I think if you're not doing anything, you might not get accepted anyway. He's taking over the world. Yeah. I was at night in November, and I was talking to this girl Veronica, who's an AI MVP. And I said, there's nothing about AI. And she's like, no, no. And then all of a sudden, I said, you must be the busiest person in the world. She's like, yeah, that was really funny. Did I make a mistake that I actually wrote the title of my and my abstract. I didn't have AI created.    And I'm thinking, yeah, maybe, maybe somewhere else might be the way to go. Well, my, my approach is that like, I'm just looking around at what sessions are out there. I know what I'm interested in. And so I found a title is like, I don't see a couple of people writing around the broader topic around it. I'm just like, Hey, this is a niche. And it's something that I'm actually doing and using. And, and so I'm looking at, it's a brand new topic. I'll be doing it for the first time at a conference in Australia in August. But it's stuff that I'm going to, I'm looking forward to hearing people's feedback on my approach on the different things and, and strengthening that and changing that and come up with some other topics. So again, I'm looking at it as a learning tool as much as that is sharing what I've already learned. That's interesting. I've got a topic in mind. This is very similar. We've been doing some stuff at work and a lot of customers are like not doing this thing. And I'm like, yeah, but there's not a lot of content out there on it. So definitely going to try and do some talks around that stuff and some, some courses. Yep. That's a, well, the reason I was like, I don't do the SEO thing either around the topics. I write about what I want to write about. I go look at, after the fact, like I look at, I do, I do a series of, of AMAs, ask me anything videos and blog posts around that. And some of them get like, hey, 20 people looked at it in six months. Another one gets thousands of views. You know, and, and so it's like, okay, well, why did one hit and you know, and so it's interesting to look at that just from the data standpoint. We do a thing every December where we run a whole month of contributions from the community. That's the one thing that I do look at. So I kind of do look at that and see what sport we learn. It's the same. It's very similar. It's the same sort of topics that I see year on year. It's the same sort of interest. It's quite interesting. I think AI will definitely be massive going forward. Obviously it is already. So, of course, build. Yeah. Having seen the kind of pre-built stuff when we were at MVP summer. Yeah. It's going to even worse now. It's going to be. Yeah. Everyone's going to be AI. Yeah. There's, well, hey, it all demos really well. That's very exciting. Yeah. It just, I think there's a lot of opportunity around the practical application of all those things. What does it actually look like? Out in the wild. Instead of in that clean demo. Yeah. I always do have a little bit of, yeah. Okay. That's like a nice flashy demo, but how does that actually work in the real world? Right. We need both know that it's not. It's simple as what the demo doesn't always work like that. No. Yeah. The funny thing is when you're talking about massive amounts of data is like, what does that data look like? How much massaging happened in that data to get it to the point where you could show that slick demo. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And customers don't normally supply your data like no nice to clean them. And yeah, normally you get raw data that you have to kind of do the massaging yourself and then make it look pretty. Yep. Yeah. So that'd be interesting. It's an exciting space. It certainly is. Yeah. Change each of those areas. It's going to, it's going to change, you know, the Azure space is going to, I'm in the M365 apps and services. It's changing that world. It's going to be, I think in two years. You know, the MVP segments will look very different. Absolutely. Yep. Yep. Yeah. Cause Mark Brasovic at the MVP summit got asked what's, what's his 10 year thoughts like? And he's like, I don't know this moment in time because it's so up in the air. I thought that was really interesting. Yeah. Yeah. Even he wasn't really sure what the one landscape is going to look like. So that's quite exciting. I'm interested. Sorry. Lots of new opportunities. Oh yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So I do a monthly tweet jam. So we're actually doing one this week on, on SharePoint. But I, my end of year, the December topic is always like, what was the biggest news from the year behind us and what are your predictions for the year ahead? And it'll be, there's so much that came out so much that changed with this year. Where we actually saw the demos of all the co-pilot stuff. For example, it, it's going to be an interesting end of year. Yeah. Look at that. Our CTO, I intercept kind of challenges recently to start doing some calls every couple of weeks about innovation. And I was like, you wait till the MVP summits finished and I'll come back and speak to you again. Obviously I can't, I need to wait to build out. Right. So I'm like, there's lots of stuff that we can't really talk about right now, but everything's going to change. So I wouldn't tell them to too much innovation just yet, wait to build. And then we'll, we can have a chat because then we can talk about it. And almost like, there's, there's going to be announcements and inspire. There's going to be announcements at Ignite. It's going to be, there's just a lot happening. So yeah, you need to, you know, folks, I know this, a question I get all the time is an MVP, like how do you keep up and it's almost a full-time job just keeping up with all this stuff going on. It's impossible. I think, yeah. I mean, lots of people read the emails. I tend to just like put them in a folder and I'll look at them every now and again, but I don't, I don't have the time to go through all these emails. I imagine it must be like that when you work at Microsoft, you must have like an inbox of thousands of emails. You just don't have time to read. Yep. Yeah. I think you just need to learn to, to not try and be that person who reads every single email and every single thing. Too much, not enough time in the world. Yep. Great. To do that. Well, Gregor, really appreciate your time and, and thanks for connecting. And I'll, you know, hopefully see you now that we're back to in-person MVP summits. Hopefully see you next year. If I don't see you somewhere in between. Yeah. Thanks for having me on. All right. Talk to you soon. Cheers.