Hey beautiful, you look stunning. Look at you, looking at me, us looking at each other, falling in love with one another. You look beautiful, thank you for being here. Today, obviously we're watching people remove their locks and it's gonna be such a big change. I love watching people untangle their hair. It's so satisfying and the results are always so good. Let's watch some videos. Up first we have a video by Lauren Fleck. I didn't actually film a before video of my hair on my camera because at this point I didn't think I was gonna actually take them all out. This is the length of my dreads. As you can see they up very long. Only half of them were extensions. So the plan was by this point was to take a few dreads out of the front, create a fringe and cut the extensions off to change them to lighter extensions, but obviously things changed. Holy fuck! Shit! The fuck!  I can only imagine how long this is gonna take her. Ooh, baby! Oh, we said chop. We said we're going with the chop method and I agree with her. That was gonna take way too long to do it any other way. It's actually unbelievable that it's even possible to remove locks just little by little, not by not. It's pretty incredible to me how you can do that. Whilst I was taking my dreads out I noticed how short my hair was and it was literally creeping me out because my hair was so long prior to that. Oh my God! She all of a sudden has a chin-linked bob. How did that happen? This is the hair that has came out of seven dreadlocks. Some of this is also extension hair as well from brushing out the ends of my hair. So all together I had 52 dreads. At the moment I've got 45. Since taking my extensions out and the whole point I started this video was to take my extensions out, have just my natural hair and then put my new extensions in but a lighter color. These are all my old extensions.  That's just the stuff that she cut. Now she has to remove all the rest of it. I think I've came to a decision today that I'm gonna take them out. It's time. I literally hide behind my hair all the time. She didn't even go into this thinking she was gonna remove all of her locks. She was just going to put new extensions in. I don't really know how that works. But no, now she's going into the full thing and removing all of them. Okay, all right, all right. Ready for a change, even if it is gonna take me about a month. I'm ready for a change for you too. And yeah, it's probably gonna take a month. I've heard that wetting them is not the best idea because when you wet your hair, your hair goes a little bit elasticated so it can bend loads and then pull back. Exactly, I would not advise you to wet your hair to do this thing with stretch out and it wouldn't be cute. And you've experienced a lot of breakage that way. What you wanna do is you wanna get the dread. I would open it up. Get your crochet needle. What I've done, got a little bit of coconut oil on the end of the needle and just put it in there and melt it in. So this crochet needle, you can see there's a hook end and a bit that's flat like so. Look at how tiny that needle is. This is the most meticulous thing you can possibly do in the realm of hair. Oh my gosh. I'll go into the center of the dread at the bottom and I'll just catch onto something and then feel the knot. If you feel the knot and you feel it's like really caught in there, don't pull it down because you will break the hair.  So you're not actually fully ripping the hair. I just know if I tried to do this, I would go actually mentally insane because I would feel like I'm doing nothing. You move like one knot at a time. Ugh. I'm gonna take a dread out and plait it so that it stays in its place and then eventually once I'm done all over, I will take all the plaits out. We're going for it and she is deciding to braid her hair after she removes the locks so nothing gets retangled because when your hair is in the state of kind of like this crimped frizzy moment going on, it can easily get tangled again. Back's always hard because when I'm picking out this but I have to sit like this, my elbow starts hurting because it's bent and my shoulder hurts and my other shoulder here hurts as well and my body aches and I do wake up in the mornings with a headache because my neck is just strained like this. I've just got to that point now where I just want them out. Once you start taking one out, you'll understand that. When you start seeing what comes out of the dread as well and how much lighter you feel on the top part of the head, like I cannot wait to brush my hair and wash my hair. That sounds so stressful. I don't even think about the pain on the neck. The feeling of like relief you get when you remove the locks. This is probably just such an experience. We're on like probably week two at this point. We're still working our way around the head millimeter by millimeter, releasing those knots. It is intense. So I've been doing this for nearly a month tomorrow, which is Monday. I'm going to be doing last four. And then there were four. Four left until we get the moment we've all been waiting for with all the hair down and the whole new look. I can feel the difference in having these four in my hair, how it feels at the root compared to like how this all feels up here. The difference between this and that, there's no wonder it was aching my head quite often. That doesn't sound worth it. Your head was aching often. I don't know. A high pony is one thing, but a constant pull on your hair with these locks. I don't know. I feel so much lighter, but now I have to take out all these braids and I'm going to brush my hair. All right. Time to remove the braids and time to see a fresh new look. Varying in my hair was down to here, like down here before. And now it's really, really, really short. Do you guys remember where we came from and now we're at? Like her hair was down to here and now it's like up to here and then she's going to cut it shorter. Like this is a big change. I can only imagine the sense of like, oh my God, like what happened to it all? Like that's a shocking experience. Oh my God. I look like Medusa. This looks so crazy right now. Like I don't even know what this is. It's definitely a look. I don't think it's your look, but it is a look. Oh yeah, we really need to cut. There's like one strand at the end. And she needs to do a little choppy. Oh my God. It's so satisfying watching that dead. Lifeless hair drops to the floor. I'm so happy she's cutting it. I'm so happy with my hair. My hair is in what feels like the best condition has ever been in. This is proof that you can have dreads for two and a half years and have the healthiest hair afterwards. This is the finals all. This is my hair. Oh my God. It looks so different. This is all just getting out the shower and crunching it. I used the curly girl method on my hair just to kind of see how it would go. And it's actually gone earlier than I would have even thought. Oh my God, her curls. I was not expecting the curls. Her hair looks fantastic. She looks healthy and vibrant and gorgeous. This is my extensions. So that already, I don't know how much that weighs, but that already is a little bit heavy. But this bag, it's full up to here, but this is actually heavy. I cannot believe how much came out of my hair. So you lose about 100 hairs a day on your head, but obviously with dreadlocks, you don't lose them because they stay in there. This is 52 dreads worth of hair. And apologies about the dry skin, but. All of those bits there, fluff, dry skin, all of the hair, all of this was in there. And that was all my dreads to my shoulders, all of that. Can you even believe that? It's literally like a animal's nest. I don't know what I was expecting, but it definitely wasn't that. That looks like a scary monster made of hair. That is spooky. So you know when they say dreads are a journey and when you let go of the dreads, it's kind of like releasing a lot of weight that's on your shoulders and it's not just a figure of speech, it's genuinely. All of that holds a lot of energy.  Bad Alicia. There's no idea for me to grow my hair really long like I did before. I just wanna keep it really healthy and I quite like the short. I'm just wanting to change. I just want a bit of freedom and I really like this. I think I'm gonna keep it up. So yeah. Oh my God. You can tell she just felt like relieved and felt like a new person and felt really good about herself once she removed them and I am so happy for you, Lauren. That was major. Wow, I can't get over how much hair that was. Up next video by casually Christina.  Five and a half years. I have never kept anything that long except for hopefully my dog will live that long. Okay, anyways. Five and a half years with the same hair, the same look, the same locks and she is about to take them all out for the first time. I have a feeling it's gonna be a very emotional experience because that's a long time to have the same hair and not change it at all. And so like this is gonna be a big change for her, a big difference and hopefully she likes it. So this is what her locks looked like. She had this hair on top that was not locked up and then she had all the locks at the bottom. It's so pretty. I love it. It's such a fun, different look but I'm also excited to see what she looks like without any locks and you know, like a fresh blood, a fresh hair color. I think it'll be an interesting change. Ah, okay. So first thing that happens is she says she found mold in the middle of her dreadlocks. That is scary. I actually don't know what the proper way of cleaning locks is but somebody can inform us all below about that. That'd be great because I don't want anybody with mold in their locks because that is a safety hazard. And obviously it's not as easy to clean locks as it is with just regular hair. So you know, it's understandable but also I don't like that for her. I don't like it at all. To me, I don't know if that looks like mold or it just looks like dust and dirt and debris. You've had your hair in sort of knots if you will for lack of a better term. You know, you're sleeping, you're doing all these activities day by day. You're not necessarily washing the locks a lot.  So I'm not surprised that's in our hair but it doesn't look like mold to me. Ah! Like on one hand these videos are so satisfying and the other side of things, it's like so difficult to watch because I'm like, I wanna help. I wanna jump through the screen. I wanna unknot that hair with you. And it's like so stressful because it looks so difficult to undo that. And it's so tedious and it takes such a long time. At this point, I was losing so much hair while I was brushing out my locks. It was just breaking apart and just coming out in clumps. That makes so much sense though because you lose many, many of strands of hair a day. When your hair is knotted into locks, you're not losing a hair, it's just staying there.  And it's natural and it's completely normal. You know, you should expect that when you're taking your locks out. Very thin, ain't it? Yeah, but a hair feels thicker. It feels thinner down here, but that's normal. We just brush our hair out.  They are making progress. She has enlisted the help of her friends and they are taking these metal combs and just millimeter by millimeter, we are going up the hair strand and releasing all of that hair. Oh my God. I would need like 45 people working on at once because I have zero patients. I would not be able to sit there. I would not be able to do this. And that as well probably never have locks. It's so much work. I'd also probably get canceled for having locks because you know. So here we are. Those are some real a** friends because if my friend called me up and said remove my locks for me, I'd probably be like, how would I just pay somebody to do it? Or I'd be like, that's so nice for you to ask that. Actually, I'm totally busy the next six months. Does that make me a bad friend or does that make me a real big a**? Probably a bad friend, but that's okay. Look at this. Wow. Here's one that's half done. Wow. Look at all of that hair. Your hair's long girl. Yay. Yay. It's like double hair. She has so much hair. And it looks so healthy. She probably hasn't cut it in five and a half years. So it's looking pretty good. And I love this like textured crimp that's going on from releasing the locks. It's very pretty and it's making her hair like so fluffy and full. And I just can't wait to see all the rest of the hair released. Let it out of its cage. We got another girl. By the end of the day, we have 10 people around her and everybody's like going ham on our hair. I love it. I would do one lock. I would sit there and do one full one because I know at the end, when you spend an hour or two just releasing that hair and then you have one section that is completely unlocked, the feeling that would come over me. The sense of happiness and relief and just like, oh, accomplishment. It would be everything I ever wanted. If you guys' friend had locks, would you help them take it out? Be honest. I wanna know. I would do one who like just wouldn't. I do a lot of other nice things for my friends but not that. They're going on an hour like 20 right now. Like they have been doing this for days. I can only imagine how painful this is. Like she's just getting her hair pulled from every different angle with four people doing it at the same time. I would be so uncomfortable and I would wanna run away. I would also just shave my head. What is the craziest thing you've ever found in one? A tick. Oh my, oh my God. I just got shivers. She found a tick in somebody's locks.  Uh, uh, uh, uh, uh. They are no for me. The way they latch onto the skin. Mm, mm, mm, mm, mm. I would freak out. I would also immediately shave my hair off because I would not be able to handle that. They're nearing completion. However, there's probably still another like 10 hours to go on this.   Get me out of this chair. I would not have the same attitude.   Have people do it while I'm asleep. That is the trick. Don't do that. What do you think, guys? It feels like a contest.  She has some thick, gorgeous hair. Oh, we're getting there. So at this point, it was about six o'clock in the evening. My head was hurting. I was hungry and I needed a shower and we decided to go back to the Airbnb. And me and Jodi and Alex started working on the dreads again.  I would have passed away. So I had my first hair wash. I still have a couple dreads that we're gonna get out tomorrow. They were really tough, so I wanted to just condition them. But I'm super happy to see my curls because before it looked like I had lost my curls. Kinda seeing them coming back. My hair is very, very thin. Still a lot of matty. No, it's, look at that. All it needs to be brushed out. It's still more to go. There's one, two, three, four, five. Ooh, the matted one's six, seven, eight, nine. Why does it look like nine dreads left to brush out? There's still nine more to go. Oh! It's to your butt. It's time for the cut.  I wonder if they're gonna go short. Like what's the vibe gonna be? I kinda do. Wow! Oh my gosh, I recognize myself though. What are you looking for for today?  What? Let me show y'all how much hair came out my head y'all. Oh my goodness. It is like a small animal. Can you see this? Like you can't even see it with the lighting. Look at this. And it's thick. This ain't no little thin bundle honey. This is a lot of hair. Do you see this? Look at this you guys. That is how much hair came out of her head. That is insane. But it makes sense because her hair is so naturally thick and that hair just accumulated for five and a half years. But I bet her head is 10 times lighter than what she started with.  There's nothing better than running your hands through your hair. I'm sorry guys. Locks look great. I'm not discounting them.  We all love running our hands through our hair. It's just fun, come on. Christina, that was major and you guys actually did that in very little time compared to other people. You got lucky. Up next we have a video by Abby Laura. I have had my locks for a little over five years and I am going back to my loose natural hair. Five years, another five years. That is a long time. It's gonna be a transformation. I can't say this is how my hair looks just before I cut it because I've already started cutting it and pulling out. I just need to do an intro for this. I love her locks. I love the color of them.  Like this is fierce. This is good. Little sad to see them go but I'm also excited to see the transformation happen. I've already pulled out some on the back. The thing is my aim was, I was supposed to be pulling it out day by day because it's a lot and I have things every day that I was just too busy. So I locked in myself two days.  Oh, this is gonna be, oh, it says it took two weeks. I was gonna say this is gonna take like a month to do but apparently two weeks. That's honestly record timing as well. Let's see. This is the robe that I'm on right now. Things I'm using to pull it out is this. So I wrap it to a comb. As you can see, I've been pulling out the stuff so the conditioners are on my shirt. So she's soaking her locks in water and conditioner which is kind of a different method than I've seen other people do. Usually people just go in there raw.  I don't know which one is better. Adding water to your hair is going to make your hair more elastic which is not good when you're pulling on it. You're gonna see a lot more breakage that way. So for me, I feel like I would not want to wet the hair before removing locks. Just seems dangerous and like you're gonna have a lot more breakage than you would have had if you were moved on dry hair. It might be a little bit easier to remove the locks when they're in conditioner and wet but it's gonna overall probably not be as good for your hair doing it that way but any lock specialist let me know down below. And here we go with this tedious, tedious process. One by one, not by not. She is just taking that tail comb and going in there. God, it's a lot of work. Have I said that yet today? Like she's probably been doing this for hours already and she's only done one lock. Like I can't. But I will say that the hair you released already looks nice and healthy and I honestly thought you added some kind of extension into the locks to make them blonde but no, that is your real hair. What are we gonna do with that color when it's all released because it's gonna be all weird and patchy. I'm curious, are we going back dark? Are we keeping the light parts? I don't know how that's gonna look. It's not even that much done up somewhere but I need to go on the road now so I'm gonna have to find a way to put this together so I can, you know, look presentable still. As you all can see, shrinkage is real but this is so cute. Her hair looks so, so healthy and beautiful and long. Like I know that hair is gonna be twice the length when it straightens. Are we gonna get a straight look today? I just wanna see a whole transformation. We're on to day two or three or four or five. I don't even know anymore but she is going at it. This is the other lock I was put on. I think I cut it around the same length and this is so much longer, this is. So I finished pulling out another one. This is how it looks with two strands as I just pulled out. I'm going to just condition all of it, put it in a shower cap and then just let it sit and then just take it out from the back and go one by one by one. She's honestly making this look pretty easy. She has like really perfect locks. Like I would think that there'd be tighter than this and harder to get out. It seems like they're being released very easily and I love it. Oh God. It's so nice to fit in this cap, bro. Oh, I could only imagine that feeling. She probably hasn't been able to do that good of a job rubbing her scalp in five years and oh, I could only imagine the chills that would run down my spine. I love getting my head rubbed and touched. It's my like love language. Even though I've been pulling this up for a while, it still hits me that I'm really doing this. Oh, we're cutting. Bro, there's no going back, you know?  But this is goodbye. We've lived along a good life. All that growth. No. Hey friends, so today is day seven and this is how far I reached. Oh, her hair is thick, thick. That part I literally just finished so I'll show you guys the difference and the parts at the back I had already finished. Pulling out those. Yeah, this is day seven. So in my head, I thought I was going to spend two days. So the fact that we was on day seven, I was just, oh my God. Day seven. Yo, she's got a dad in there helping her out. She's got mom. She's got everybody enlisted. I have two more left and I decided to pull out the last one camera so you guys can see. My hair is wet and there is conditioner all over it because after this I have to do a whole treatment. I just came on here to do the last two locks.  That is so cute. Wait, leave it like that. No? Just me? I love it. I just finished pulling out this one. This one's still 30 minutes. Each lock probably takes like 30 to 40 minutes. No, let's get to the other side. The last one. We got this. I'm talking about part of this video at this point. Okay, we are done with the last one. Now we're going to have to go through hell to comb out and everything. But this is the final look of it being pulled out. I'll see you guys in the final clip where I just close up everything and actually style my hair. Hi, guys. Here we have it, the final look after and doing a style, washing and getting everything done. You know, I honestly, I'm so excited. This is something that was on my mind to do for a long time. Do I regret pulling it out? Definitely not. I'm just ready for new things. Lots of definitely a growth journey for me and a personal journey. Doing this really is just me growing, changing, evolving like as a person. Oh my God, it looks spectacular. Oh my God, you have gorgeous hair. It is so thick. I love both looks. You look great. Congratulations. And good for you for having the patience to do that. Ooh, two weeks. Cool, imagine how many hours that was. Okay, those were so fun to watch. That was really cool. And like just major transformations. Congrats to all of you. This seems like you're very happy with your decisions and your locks. And that was awesome. If you want to get my haircare brand or my hair color line, you can do so with the links right down below or go to xmodohair.com. That is all for today, guys. Thank you for watching.  And I'll see you next time. Bye.


You know, I made a video, um, I think it was a couple of years ago about how the SAV foundation isn't real. Going over the basics of why that's a silly idea.  Which was, it's like a compounding collection of stupids all together. What do you call a group of stupids? An idiot? Yeah, we'll go with that. Anyway, point is I did that video knowing, even I remember doing it and I actually looked it up not too long ago and it actually says in the description, until I have to make another video, we're there now. So last two weeks ago I did the infographics show was wrong and then uh, infographics like a couple of days later, maybe even before I got the video out had already done another video, which weirdly enough wasn't up to a certain point. There were things in it that got wrong, but it was nothing in it that was particularly like super wrong until the ending where it tried to hint that the SAV foundation might really be real, which is a fun thing to do, but it feels so irresponsible. And if they want to have fun with it I'm not going to bother with that. Like there's no second year, well until they make, and if they make something else that's really far off base then maybe we will do it, but there's no second version yet of the you're wrong about the infographics show, but there is going to be a discussion of why this whole the SAV foundation is real thing is stupid. Let's just get that out of the way right now.  The SCP wiki, if I'm trying, okay conspiratorial fiction or just general conspiracy theories have this idea in them that the person who has discovered the thing is particularly clever. Like they've done a lot of work or they they've got these they've got all they've they've done the research and they figured it out that this doesn't make sense and this doesn't make sense and so if we uh we throw those things together we can figure something out, but they're never right obviously. Well that's not true, but then you can be a crazy conspiracy theorist and be right about the thing that you have a conspiracy theory about by the way, because you had no proof that the thing was correct and it just happened to be correct. Anyway, in order for the SAV foundation to be real you would have to accept that the SAV foundation thought the best idea for keeping itself secret was to release a public database on wikidot making it seem like it's fiction and that not only on wikidot is a bunch of you know is the listing of the SCPs which would make sense and they're formatted in such a way as to be realistic but also a bunch of flash fiction and short stories and a couple of novels worth of other fiction that that an international almost unlimited resources organization probably more powerful than most but maybe three governments would think that secrecy is best preserved by creating a collaborative fiction writing website and I'm going to say this again and put emphasis on it again because it's the stupidest part of this on wikidot not any kind of they didn't create their own no they put it on wikidot i mean okay so it's fine that kids of course kids are going to think that it's real it presents itself as real in a certain way of course now the website even has like the social medias at the top left of the screen like any level of investigation beyond surface level would determine very quickly that the wiki is a collaborative writing site and not a real secret organization and if it was a secret organization there wouldn't be youtube videos about it they would get taken down there wouldn't be several very successful and more successful than me even youtube channels devoted to scp content there wouldn't be an infographic video about it two three four i don't know any they've done now market player wouldn't be playing containment breach i mean there wouldn't be games available on steam based around it yeah it's real it's totally real it's fine to think it for a moment it's not fine to continue to think it and i know that most people don't all right let me be totally fair here i don't think most people believe the scp foundation is real right and the ones that do are probably below the age of 13 the kids the super like young kids who don't know any better and that's fine that's fine but if you're a an adult or even a any kind of teenager and you have gotten come to the conclusion that maybe the scp foundation is real you're an idiot all right and before you reach for the subscribe button to unsubscribe for my channel i just want to say wait i don't have anything to say i guess that's that's fine i guess look it's very important that this kind of thing doesn't get spread around to the younger fan base that we don't propagate the idea that it's real there what's the best way to explain this it's a fictional world which is enhanced by the you know realism of it and it's fine to create fiction under the auspices that it is real however it's also doubly important to make sure that people understand afterwards that it isn't because it because people will get caught up in any sort of conspiracy theory that they can get their heads around because it makes them feel special that they know something that nobody else does you know the people that think that the moonlandings were faked because uh look this uh this flag is waving in the wind even though it looks exactly the same in most pictures or this is a this is a this is a sound this is a sound stage in arizona or out in california desert in the mojave or the flat or flat earth or people who are like yeah the earth is flat why is the earth flat because you know this that and the other thing and conspiracy theories look and the people whose minds go in that direction it's a it's a tricky thing because you can start like going down a hill and never stopping with that kind of stuff believe it's real for one moment and suddenly uh you know and especially with a super like uh a cons and an extra governmental organization that's trying to keep it's actively trying to keep itself secret then you're like oh yeah uh dr samarion's youtube channel is just made up specifically for me to try and convince me and people like me that the scp foundation isn't real and then you could present like obvious like it that it's a collaborative writing site on wikidot and people will go oh yeah that's just proof that i'm right that's just broken logic so stopping it before it begins super important now is this a huge problem in the community no i don't really think it is i said this before most people don't think this and most people who do think it are either young and haven't really given it too much thought you know you'll get this from a lot of people i thought the scp foundation was real when i first started which is fine that's fine that's fun have a little bit of enjoyment in the in the wonder or whatever but let it go it's not real it never was real and if the world or anyone that you know tries to convince you else wise just chuckle and move on if you can't if you can correct them correct them because if you can get to that early sometimes you can prevent it from spiraling out of control people get excited about things you know and i don't want to tell people that their fun is wrong if it's fun and that's all it is but you get very serious very quickly the scp foundation isn't real it doesn't matter what the infographics show says at the end of its video it doesn't matter what you read on some scp article somewhere it's just for entertainment it's a collaborative writing website for fiction writers that's it science there's science fiction on there there's horror on there there's contemporary fantasy and that's about it you can find all sorts of fiction on the scp wiki it's lots of fun for everybody but no matter what it's not real if you give it any real thought any like concrete logical reasoning you'll realize that the idea that it could be real is so stupid anyway that's it i guess that was a little bit of a rant but uh i remember watching the i was watching the infographic show and i was like you know what this is the the second video they did or at least the one about the scp foundation in general i was like you know this is this is a lot of stuff in this i wouldn't have put in it the there's a lot of stuff in this that i i think makes this a bad video but it's not particularly wrong they go into a lot of detail and then they got to the end where they're like and maybe it's real and i was like anyway as i said that's it thank you very much for watching if you like this kind of content and don't feel too insulted scroll down and hit the subscribe button that's sort of important hit the subscribe button it's how i know to continue to make content like this it's how uh you know the channel grows and views grow and it's very important then head on over to patreon.com forward slash d samarian like everybody here on the screen already has including vb and dr j redacted who have all pledged at 100 dollars it's nice to know that i'm not alone out here and i'll see you all again on thursday


My name is Anna van Alve. I'm a student here at Tilburg University. I study economic psychology. Economic psychology is a study of economic behavior. How people make decisions, how people cope with scarcity, how do people respond to advertising. Why don't we prepare well enough for our pension? Questions like that. Economic psychology mainly focuses on choice behavior. How do we make certain choices? For example, there's a choice paradox. People would like to have more choice, but in the end the more choice they have, the less satisfied they are with the actual choice they made. Economic psychology is basically a Tilburg Convention. Already in the early 70s we founded the International Association for Research in Economic Psychology as well as the Journal of Economic Psychology. We also have one of the few programs in economic psychology in Europe and we have by far the longest track record in this field. It's a really small university and it feels like a bit of a family actually. The program economic psychology is not a very heavy program in the sense that you are required to study all the time and have to be reading all the time. There's always time for leisure activities, different societies, so you actually really get to experience and enjoy student life. We use research-based education and that means that our students typically read empirical articles from academic journals and that we discuss them in depth in our classes and where possible we try to get our students actually actively involved in doing research as well. That's what we're actually doing during class, mainly during the workgroup or the small seminars, that we work in small groups and actually perform these studies, perform experiments. After the bachelor students typically enter the master. We offer a master's in economic psychology here at Tilby University as well and our experience is that our students easily find a job afterwards. Often in profit organizations in companies such as market research companies or advertising agencies but also sometimes in non-confermental organizations such as the NEBIT, the Dance Institute for Vegetarian Advice or the Authority of Financial Markets. I think it's fair to say that our graduates are behavioral scientists with a strong feel for how to apply behavioral insights into professional environments. What I would really like to do in my future job is to change behavior in people for the better, so not specifically for economic wins but more in social desirable ways. So people adhere more in traffic rules for example or are less inclined to throw their trash just away on the street but put it in the bin for example. So those are examples that I would like to change behavior for the better.


Hi guys, welcome back to my YouTube channel. This is Daniel Rosala here. So for today's video I want to do a little bit of testing with different render profiles on Kaden live and seeing how quickly each of those render profiles renders out a small amount of footage and accompanying music or sound and I'm also just going to note how long it took and what the result in file size was so I did this Benchmarking process if you will recently and I posted it on reddit But I'm just going to actually show you guys the methodology. So there's no no secrets here So what I'm going to do is I'm just going to get a bit of stock video footage I'm going to just take a free bit of stock video from Pexels and then I'm going to go Free background Music I'm just gonna get some music as well because usually the stock video doesn't include footage I'm just going to grab some from Pixabay my internet's a little bit slow because I'm currently uploading a video to YouTube So let's just check out this bit of footage here I'm just going to use 15 seconds of footage just so the renders are going to be quick for me So that's 14 second clip of a time-lapse of clouds moving over city. That's absolutely perfect So I'm just going to download this clip Now it doesn't have any sound as I mentioned, so I'm just going to download a bit of royalty-free music to Done so I've got those two things and finally I'm just going to Create a little overlay here using gimp Just so I'm adding a few elements into the rendering job I'm just going to create a layer here and just have it like this kind of like a bit of a lower third Situation and I'm going to just say this is a test render project Just put that in white. So it's going to be visible over the lower third And I'm just going to go now and save those Three files into a folder on my desktop, and I'm just going to add these into Caden life. Okay, so I've just gone into Caden life here and I brought in my stock footage from pexels as you can see there's no audio tracks. I'm just going to actually Ungroup them and get rid of that non-existent audio and I've got this audio that I grabbed from some other website So in total this is going to be about a 10 second track So I'm just going to bring this guy all the way back here, and I just got that lower third as well so I'm just going to also add a Little in phase I'm going to add a little bit of out phase and now just going to see that So that's it, you know to speed it up even more. I'm just going to take out a little bit here I'm just going to actually group these guys all together And I'm going to whoops I'm going to cuss here to here Probably smarter way to do that. So let me just see the project. I'm about to export Okay, so it's a 10-second clip now I'm just going to add that fade back to the end and I'm just going to save this project so I can make sure that I can Quickly edit it and then run this through various Render profiles. Okay, so I'm just going to head and point to this to the directory I want this to render in the first one I'm going to try is just a standard mp4 using the h264 and AAC Codex and I'm going to just click on to more options here I'm just going to put the encoder speed up to the maximum it'll go and use all four threads on my CPU and That looks like it's pretty much good to go So here we go render to file and I'm just going to time this and then see how large you can see it's going to be Pretty quick. So it's a 10-second clip and the rendering time looks like it's going to be in the region are probably about 15 seconds So I'm just going to see how long this takes to run and then measure the resulting output Okay So that's just finished rendering as you can see it took 25 seconds to run and the resulting and the resulting file came out to be 6.8 Megabits in size. So that was just using the default mp4 Profile with the encoding speed set up to maximum. Okay, so now I'm going to go for one of the I'm going to try out the two GPU testing render profiles firstly h264 Constant bit rate or CBR rendering then I'm going to do the variable bit rate rendering Then I'm going to do the h265 Rendering so something like a little bit over 20 seconds on the first job to compare apples with apples I'm going to well, okay the encoding speed is set as far as it can go and I'm going to just call this actually test render underscore H264 underscore CBR and now rendering Okay, so we're already off to a Quick restart 25 seconds on the first render this looks like it's going to beat it by at least a few seconds The next question is going to be how big the file is going to be you can see it inflating over here. It's already at 15.5 23 now and two seconds left on the render so That render profile ran in 23 seconds, so it actually only saved two seconds in the end, but you can see the file is a lot bigger It's 30 almost 36 megabytes versus almost seven megabytes using the mp4 CPU rendering profile Okay, so let's try the variable bit rate this time. So h264 VBR I'm just going to call this H264 underscore VBR same thing threads are on for encoder speed maximum for the project rendering And you can see in the left window that the file is building five megabytes past. Well almost past 25 seconds, so that was actually the same as the first render It was actually listed as a custom profile, but it's basically the same as the default one that one the variable bit rate came in at 23 megabytes versus 36 using the constant bit rate profile. So I'm just going to have a quick look at these clips That's the first clip looks fine to me. Let's let's take a look at this one and finally this All right, so that's it so far. Let me just try this time h265 now I don't have access to either of these these H265 and I don't need this because there's only one profile and let us render So this looks like it's going to be the quickest is my prediction zapping along here five megabytes past And you can see all the times I've had so far on the tests Okay, that finished rendering in 22 seconds. So so far the h265 is our winner in terms of file size 22.3 megabytes, so that's actually pretty decent, but obviously it's Almost four times the size of the first one So when you're getting into much bigger projects, you're talking about a large disk space overhead of about 400 percent Which is actually very very significant to state the obvious and in terms of time saving. I wasn't really that significant here Okay, let's just try the MPG to This time and I'm going to put the encoding speed again up to up to the maximum and this is going to render me out a mpg.mpg Format file and it's typically going to be a bit larger than the mp4. So you can see it's inflating here Towards the bottom somewhere trotting along I think this is probably going to be about 25 seconds and it's actually fairly So 6.8 was on the first CPU rendering profile the mp4 and this one's going to be let's just see in a second Finish running in 39 seconds. So that's actually been the longest rendered so far and that came out to be five megabytes All right, final one. I'm going to go for a Um, and I don't think I can use so this is intel h24 I'm pretty sure I'm not able to use the vaapi But let me just check just in case Yeah, it's giving me an error log there.  There's no compression here And let's see how big or small that file is and how quickly it runs So this is actually overriding the vaapi files. This is the bottom file. You can see in my window That's currently inflating relatively slow, but it's going to be the biggest of these files for obvious reasons I'm just going to pause the video while this continues to render Okay, we're getting towards the end of the rendering job here last three seconds ready s 82 megs 92.5 probably just going to be barely under 100 Uh ye 104.3 So that's basically the differences you can see are quite significant in terms of how long Each render job takes i'm just going to show you that screen. So 57 seconds for lossless 39 seconds for variable bitrate h264 constant bitrate was a 23 second render and that gave us a 35.9 megabyte file and just the default mp4 profile resulted in a 6.8 megabyte file that rendered out in 25 seconds. That's my day for today. Hope this you got hope this video was useful and subscribe for more videos on this youtube channel


How to use the law to make more money. That's going to be today's episode. So, you know, we have a very, very special guest in the studio with us today. Coming all the way from the beautiful city and state of Utah. You know, I'm in Denver, Colorado. And of course we are here live in Howlulu, Hawaii. So hopefully you guys and girls are having a great afternoon there in Hawaii. And for all the people that are catching the playback, don't forget to hit that like subscribe, comment and share button. I'm Prince Dykes. This is the Prince of Investment coming to you guys and girls live in a beautiful state of Denver, Colorado. Now, how to make more money with using the law? We know that in business and investing, you got the law, you got politics, so many other ways. Very interesting thing that came across my desk today. So, I brought in a very special guest, maybe a little soft introduction. He's an attorney, Lee R. Phillips. He's a counselor of the United States Supreme Court, which is very interesting. I thought when I saw that, you know, he has his degrees. He has his licenses, real estate, mortgage backing, security, life insurance, registered and investment advisor, RA's, all these type of things nationally recognized in the field of business structure, asset protection, financial planning, estate planning. And he is the founder of Legal Leagues Corporation, a company that specializes in solving asset protection and tax problems for high net worth individuals. So, without further ado, ladies and gentlemen, today, let's go ahead and bring in our special guest, Mr. Phillips. How are you doing today, sir? I'm great. How are you, Prince? I'm doing good. Definitely like to have you on. Did I botch your introduction by any way? Nope. I think it was more than, more than reasonable. Now I got to ask this question. One thing while I was looking at your bio, what have you written a book? I didn't see a book on you. I've written about 19 books. I haven't, I haven't, I didn't see the 19 books that didn't come across my desk. So you've written 19 books, right? Yes, sir. Nice. Nice. Okay. So since I missed that in your bio, can you tell us a little bit about yourself and, you know, so people who may not be familiar with you? Well, I have a really sorted background. I have a bachelor's in geology and physics and a master's in nuclear chemistry. And then a lot of agree. The short story is when I was 27, I got cancer, spent five months in intensive care and didn't work for three years and we lost everything. So asset protection kind of became a focus of mine. And then as I matured along, I figured out your biggest asset protection threat is actually the IRS, the government. They're taking a third of whatever you're making. That's an asset problem for me. And so I went pretty deep into taxes. I'm a US federal tax court attorney and, and do a fair amount in taxes. So if you're going to use the law, what we need to do is set up the structures so that you get the maximum tax benefit. You can't turn the crank any faster. You're, you're working as hard as you can. Everybody's working as hard as they can. But if we play the game a little smarter and we can maybe shave five or 10% off the taxes, that's a big deal. In fact, it's a bigger deal than most people think it is. You ever seen the dollar double 20 times trick, Prince? No, I haven't seen that one. Let's take a dollar and double it 20 times. One dollar, two dollars, four dollars, eight dollars, 16, 32, 64. I got it. Mm hmm. You end up with a million 48,000 in tax. But wait, wait, wait, there's no, no, uh, tax on that, is there? Excuse me. You end up with a million 48 and cash. Okay. Yes. Mm hmm. But there's no tax on that. Everything you do is taxed.  You pay tax on it every year, right? Unless it's in an IRA or something. Mm hmm. So let's tax it. Let's tax it at 40%. Between federal and state, a lot of people, 40% tax. Okay. Uh, so I've got $1 and I double it to two. But I have to, uh, have to tax the extra dollar. So I don't end up with two dollars. I end up with a buck 60 because I taxed the extra dollar 40%. Right? Mm hmm. Double the buck 60, that's three 20, but I've got to tax the extra buck 60. So I don't end up with three 20. I end up with 256. So over here, I doubled it 20 times. I have a million and $48,000 plus. So a million bucks over here. I've taxed it at 40%. That means I've lost 40% of a million dollars. That's a big deal to me. So I'm going to ask everybody, do I have 600? Let's see if I tax 40% off a million. I got 600,000 left, right? Mm hmm. Do I really? Thanks. No way. Uh, do I have, okay, uh, do I have $400,000 left? Do I have 200,000 left? Do I have 100,000 left? Do I have 50,000 left? Do I have 25,000 left? How much do I have over here? Over here without the tax, I've got a million 48,000. Over here with the tax, I have a grand total of $12,089. That's all of the taxes. That's all the result of taxes. We went from a million 48,000 down to $12,000. What, the eighth wonder of the world is what? Compound interest. Mm hmm. Remember that one? Yeah. What people don't understand is taxes are compound interest in reverse. Uh, so if I say we can save you 10, 15, 20% on your taxes, that's a big deal. That's not $200 out of a thousand. That's millions of dollars over your lifetime. It's huge. So let's use the legal structures. We'll use them for asset protection. And we're going to use them for tax structuring. And a lot of people set up their LLC and I meet people all the time in live events. I do lots of live events. And the people come up to me and say, oh, I've got an LLC. And I say, okay, good. How is it taxed? And they look at me and they go, well, I don't know. Well, if they're taking 30% of your money, don't you think you maybe ought to understand how they're getting it? Because if I could save you 10 or 20 or 50% of that, that's a big deal. So let's tax it properly. Let's set it up properly. And that's how you use the law to make more money. Does it sound reasonable, Prince? Definitely sounds reasonable to, uh, like I would say tax avoidance. It's a big difference between tax evasion and tax avoidance. Huge, huge, huge difference there, you're right. So, you know, ways to limit your tax liability, right? It's always, you know, like you're saying, hey, you do the same thing you're doing, but I'm going to show you how to increase it by 15%.  Myself, I have an LLC and I'm a registered investment advisor here in Colorado too. So when you say, hey, you got your LLC, how are you being taxed? What is your answer to that? What is a better tax effective way? Should I put you on the spot? Do you know how it's being taxed?  Yes. Okay. You are selling goods and services, aren't you? Mm-hmm. Income that you're getting is, we're going to call it non-passive or ordinary income, whatever you want to call it. Mm-hmm. Brants and royalties and stuff, they're passive income. You're doing earned income. So you need to have your LLC taxed under sub chapter S of the IRS code.  So you save 15.3% immediately on distributed amount. I have to, according to the law, I have to take my reasonable salary, but then I can come in and I can distribute the rest of and save immediately 15.3%. Now, do I need to turn it to an S corporate in order to make this happen? Yes, you do. That's the only way you can make this one happen. So, and you would say that is the lick of prints right here is getting taxed.  You need to understand how you're getting taxed, because that's how they're getting your money. Yeah. And if you've got earned income, the best way to have it taxed is a sub chapter S entity. I can have a corporation or I can have a an LLC taxed under sub chapter S of the IRS code. Now, if your rents are coming from real estate, passive income, we call it. Then you want your LLC taxed as a partnership. That means you need more than one person as a partner, right? You got to have at least two owners. And in Colorado, and now in many states, Colorado was actually the first problem state. Well, welcome to the problem state of Colorado, Prince. There was a case early on and the judge set aside what we call charging order protection in an LLC. Just said, nah, we're not going to ignore it. So Colorado was the first to say that single member LLCs don't get charging order protection. You have to have at least two members. So you need two, two guys, two girls. I guess you could have a guy and a girl. I don't know. I guess we shouldn't even do pronouns anymore, right? Yeah, yeah. But, uh, but you need two people, okay. In order to get what we call the charging order protection. Do you know the charging order protection? No, I'm not familiar with the charging order protection. Okay. In legal entities, you've got the corporate shield, which protects me from what happens out in the company. Gotcha. Gotcha. All right. That's the corporate shield. Gotcha. There's a reverse of that. We need to protect the assets of the company, the piece of real estate, the apartment building, whatever it is that's held in the LLC from the personal problems of the owners. Uh, I can declare personal bankruptcy. If I declare personal bankruptcy or I get divorced or I hit a kid in the crosswalk on the way to church, those aren't business things. Those are personal. They come after me. Hmm. If they come after me, the question is, can they get the assets of my company? If it's a corporation, the answer is absolutely yes. If it's an LLC, the answer is no. Because the LLC has what we call charging order protection, which protects the assets of the company from what happens to the owners of the company.  Mm-hmm. But if it's your little company, there's you and maybe one other guy. If you lose all your shares of your stock, that's a big deal. The company's gone. Mm-hmm. So the LLC protects the company from what happens to you. And that's a big deal. That's why you're always today, today, you're always going to use an LLC. Now, we just spoke about this, right? You were saying, hey, you got what you're saying for tax purposes, the S corpus better, but for protection, you got the LLC. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, I didn't say that, Prince. Okay. I'm, I said that you needed to have your LLC taxed under subchapter S. Got it. Gotcha. The IRS doesn't know whether you have a corporation or an LLC. They don't care. The only thing they know is you have a company that's taxed according to the rules of subchapter S. You could have a company, an LLC or a corporation taxed. Using the rules of chapter C. We call that the C corporation, but it's actually an LLC taxed under chapter C of the IRS code. So I can have an LLC taxed under the partnership rules of an IRS code. I can have an LLC taxed under the subchapter S rules of an IRS code. I can have an LLC taxed under chapter C of the IRS code. The IRS doesn't care how you tax an LLC. That's pretty cool. What if you're someone that has, hey, I have book royalties, I own properties. I have blah, blah, blah. It's like a conglomerate and it's an LLC. How would you, I guess, structure that tax tax wise? Well, two issues here. One is you're getting passive income from the royalties and the rents and stuff. You may be getting earned income or non passive income from your day job, so to speak, your financial planning, right? I would separate those into two separate LLCs. One taxed as a partnership and one taxed under subchapter S. Because I don't want to bring in the rents and stuff into this LLC because then I have to pay a reasonable salary based upon the addition of the rents into this LLC that's taxed under subchapter S. So I want the rents, the passive income separate. Also, the second issue is you've got a liability as a financial planner. You've got a liability as a business owner. That's different than the liability associated with your rental unit or your royalties from your book.  Helpfully. Let's keep those assets separate from the business because if the business has a problem, any of the assets in the LLC could be used to satisfy that problem. The corporate shield protects me, the owner, but the assets in the company are available to handle that problem. But if I have the book royalties and my rents over in this company, they're not available if there's a problem in the business. They're outside. They can't get those. Because of the charging order protection. They can sue me personally, but they still can't get these assets, the rents, the piece of property in this LLC. Even though there's a problem in the company, I have to declare bankruptcy in the company. They're still not going to get these assets in the LLC that holds my real estate properties. Okay. Now, as an attorney, right, some people say, well, you know, I get this question all the time. You know, hey, I got a nine to five. I have a W-2. My wife has a W-2. What are some ways I can, you know, limit my income, you know, my taxes? What are some ways you would say to that?  Locked in. Your taxes are there.   We really need to teach you how to use your real estate as a tax shelter. They don't do that.  And if you learn to use the company, if you learn to use the real estate as a tax shelter, you can make a lot of money.  Because even the people who think that they know about real estate as a tax shelter, if they actually understood what could be done with real estate as a tax shelter, it'd blow their mind. It's mind blowing. I want to walk down that path. How is real estate a good tax shelter? How does that really work? We always hear about it. How does that work? Well, real estate gives you the ability, they say, to get an economic gain at a tax loss. Can I run some rough numbers by you? And you kind of think along with me. Let's say I buy a $400,000 piece of property. And I understand that that's the mud shack in the middle of Honolulu, $400,000. But I pay $400,000 for a piece of property. I have to put 20% down. That's $80,000, right? So what's my total investment in this piece of property? $80,000. Okay. I rent it. Let's say I get $3,000 a month in rent. And my mortgage payment is $2,500 a month. That means I get $500 in cash flow, right? So that means I get $6,000 over the year in cash flow, right? So on this piece of property, I can deduct the amount of interest that I pay on my mortgage, can't I? Yes. I can deduct the insurance and the property taxes and everything else. So in reality, and the other thing I can do is I can depreciate this piece of property, can't I? So depreciate or appreciate? Depreciate. So it's a $400,000 piece of property. I can't depreciate the land. So let's say the land is $100,000 just for round numbers. That means I'm depreciating $300,000 and that has to be done. I'm basically deducting it. I can deduct $300,000. But the law says I can't deduct it all at once. If this is a residential piece of property, I have to deduct a little piece of that, one 27th and a half over 27 and a half years. So at the end of the 27 and a half years, I've basically written off, I've deducted the full $300,000. So what is that? $4,000, $5,000, $6,000 in depreciation. So by the time I pay the property taxes, I get the depreciation and everything else. I've made $6,000. I actually put $6,000 into my pocket. I had the expenses of the mortgage and I had the property taxes. Let's say I actually put out of this $6,000 into my pocket. So I've made $1,000 free and clear, right? But over here, I've got like $12,000, $6,000 in my depreciation, $6,000 in the mortgages and everything else, the interest. So I've got $12,000 in deduction over here. So I get $1,000, but I don't pay any tax on it because I can offset it with all of this depreciation, these deductions. Got it. So in reality, over here, I've got $2,000 or $3,000 in tax loss that I didn't even use. That can carry forward every year until I sell the property if it needs me. But I've got a couple of thousand dollars over here on losses and I've put $1,000 into my pocket. Tax-free. That's a pretty cool tax shelter. Now, let me run one more thing. So if I've got $1,000, I've made $1,000 on an $80,000 investment. What's that return? 3% or 4%? Not a lot. And so I've got a small percentage return, but I didn't take into account the little piece of appreciation that I've paid every year and the appreciation, the little piece on the mortgage I've paid each year, and the appreciation of the property.  Very big. Okay.  You can deduct a lot of things and you can't do any of this with your W-2 job. So in the future, you're going to have to get a little company, invest in real estate, do something to control your taxes, and you are going to use an LLC for the asset protection. And by the way, if your folks want, I've got an e-book called 10 Tax Tips. I go through this sort of stuff. They're welcome to have that. It's free. You can just go to my website legallease.com forward slash think. We'll put that in and we'll email that out to them. Now, people that listen to this and they're saying, wow, I want to get in contact with him. I want to talk to him. What are the ways that people can get in contact with you? The bad news is, or the good news is, I don't take clients. I just educate and help people. Definitely one thing is, can I have you back on? I've definitely got to have you back on. You can have me back on. I'd be happy to come back, Prince, no problem. I do have an entire staff of tax attorneys and stuff, accountants, enrolled agents. They do the tax stuff. They do take clients. If you've got a huge tax problem, they can help you. Particularly if you owe the IRS money and you're arguing with them, they can do the resolution stuff really good. I did want to ask this question. What was your pathway into the Supreme Court, the consulting, stuff like that? What's your tie-in to that? After I got sick, I started to practice law in the areas of wills and trusts and stuff. Then I started to write about it. I wrote the books and became, I'm going to say, kind of famous for teaching people what they can do. In the meantime, I got good enough at lawyering that I could go to the Supreme Court and argue cases. You have to apply to be admitted there and that sort of stuff. The same with the federal tax courts. I've done the legal side of it, but I've enjoyed and now I'm kind of three-quarters retired. I've enjoyed the educational part of it too.  I think they're definitely going to have to have me over with Think Tech Hawaii and have to speak to one of their groups. Nice. That's Think Tech Hawaii and especially if you're here in Denver, Colorado, I'd love to get you in the studio too. Okay. Definitely. For people out there, what do you want to leave the audience with before we get out of here? Just pay attention to your taxes, the two ways that you can work with it or either a small business or your real estate investing. You need to do one of those two. Otherwise, you're just going to work a day job and that's going to be the end of it. And now, people out there, they want to, you know, I kind of touched on this earlier. You do social media, how people get in contact with you. I want more from Mr. Phillips. They can just go to legalese.com and there's phone numbers and stuff there. Okay. I'm old enough that I'm not too social, for instance. I got the LinkedIn accounts and all that crap, but I check them once every four years whether I need to or not. Okay. Well, definitely it was great having you on. We got to get running and I would definitely reach out because I definitely want to get some more from you and definitely have you back on the show as well. But, you know, fortunately, we got to deal with time and time crunches, but we'll make it happen. I understand. All right. Thank you for coming on, Mr. Phillips. Ladies and gentlemen, as you guys and girls already know, my name is Prince Dix. This is The Prince of Investment. Until the next video podcast, Cartoon or whatever else crazy you see me doing around the globe. Peace, be safe, I'm out and thank you. YouTube, you can also follow us on Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn. Check out our website, thinktecawaii.com. Mahalo.


dir vielleicht auch so ein Smartphone. Und ich habe da so eine App drauf.  Die haben gesagt, ja, das funktioniert jetzt nicht, weil habe ich nicht verstanden. Aber was da immer drin vorkam, das waren drei Buchstaben und eine Zahl und das ist PSD2.   Für diejenigen, die, es ist hier einer der ersten Vorträge, für diejenigen, die hereingesteuert sind, ohne zu wissen, worum es geht, es geht um die Richtlinie der EU 2015, 2066 des Europäischen Parlaments und des Rates vom 25. November 2015 über Zahlungsdienste im Binnenmarkt zur Änderung der Richtlinie und so weiter und so fort und so fort.  November für die technischen Regulierungsstandards für eine starke Kundenautentifizierung und für sichere offene Standards zur Kommunikation. Das ist was in der App die ganzen Pop-ups verursacht hat. Warum bin ich hier und warum erzähle ich euch was zu diesem Thema? Ich bin Informatiker und Sicherheitsforscher, ich glaube neudeutsch sagt man Hacker dazu, habe meinen, einen meiner ersten Vorträge auf dem Kongress vor zehn Jahren zu Meiver Classic gehalten, seitdem einiges gemacht zu Zutrittskontrollsystemen, RYD, Spezialgebiet sind halt solche Arten von Kommunikationsprotokollen. Ich bin auch Open Source Entwickler, also wenn irgendein Kommunikationsprotokoll rumliegt, dann implementiere ich das manchmal. Unter anderem HBCI, dazu erzähle ich euch noch ein bisschen was.   Ich sage euch gleich noch was das ist. Dazu habe ich größere Dinge beigetragen und dann die Kombination dabei ist das Plug-in Biro Fintes. Also eine Perspektive, aus der ich das betrachte, ist halt als Open Source Entwickler. Ich bin auch Gründer und Geschäftsführer.   Wir machen halt Beratung, aber entwickeln halt auch Software.  Wir sind jetzt Zahlungsdienstleister. Zum Glück hat es nichts damit zu tun. Ich bin, ich freue mich sehr, dass alles was wir tun an der PSD2 vorbeigeschrammt ist, außer halt als Privatkund. Ich bin nämlich auch noch neugieriger Nutzer. Wir haben gerade in der Einführung gehört, dass jemand durchaus eine App in mehreren Konten haben könnte. Ich habe mal kurz durchgezählt. Bei mir sind es neun verschiedene Kunden, weil ich auch noch mehrere Hüte auf habe. Also sowohl Geschäftskonten, nein, neun verschiedene Banken. Konten sind es ein paar mehr. Als sowohl geschäftliche Konten als auch Privatkonten beziehungsweise Familienkonto als auch, ich bin in einem Verein Vorstand, Vereinskonten. Ich glaube sieben oder so davon benutze ich auch regelmäßig. Der Rest war halt so kostenloses Girokonto.  Das hilft dann auch wieder beim entwickeln von Open Source Software, wenn man Testkonten hat und mal gucken kann, was die Banken so anstellen. Agenda. Also wir haben gerade gehört, worum es gehen soll. Ich werde euch gleich den wunderschönen Vorherzustand darstellen. Situation beforehand. I will give you a reason from the European Commission why this directive was published. Then I will answer the question, what has the PST to ever done for us in the nice form in the intended form and then in what actually happened. I will talk about the chronology of the whole thing and the several problems and nuisance that came with it. I greatly appreciate it two minutes before this talk I saw an advertising slide for BTX. There are BTX terminals here at Congress. Not everything was bad in the 80s. There was online banking for private customers. In Germany this started sometime in the early 80s. I think the CCC has some history with BTX, people might remember. In 2007 this was finally turned off, but worked pretty well. From this Sprang to Life HPCI, the Home Banking Computer Interface, which is a communication protocol used to exchange banking data for end users. It's basically comma separated values on steroids, but sometimes other signs like a plus character can be separators. I did implement it. It's actually parsable. There are protocols that are not parsable. This is not one of them. I was surprised. I thought it's mainly a coincidence, but it works. It's mainly a hierarchical data structure, but there's only three layers of separators. At some point the separators are at the end of the separators, but that's also the end of the layers. This was later, this was implemented in 1998, Version 2.1, I believe was the first usable version. It was then improved further and further up to the point where 3.0 is known by many people and was then renamed to FintiS, Financial Transaction Services. It's a purely German thing. With FintiS there was an attempt to make this internationally usable. For example, by pouring this into XML. Even the XML is parsable, but I would say it's one of the ugliest implementations that you can imagine. There's also no one who uses it. Well, that's not correct. There's a central list of all the banks that support and the FintiS and HPCI versions they support. In Germany you can basically reach every bank, for example the Deutsche Bank with Version 2. Most support Version 3. I think there's exactly one bank that supports Version 4. As I said, basically no one uses it. FintiS 3.0 basically everywhere, because that's how it was available to the general public. HPCI was a purely German thing and very secure.  You needed a pin. You needed a separate contract to get this running. There was even an alternative version where you would send floppy disks in letters and RSI keys in letters. But starting from FintiS 3.0, there's an alternative Login pattern called Pintan. You log in using your Pintan and whenever you wish to affect a transaction, you need to use a transaction authorization number. It's very nice. It works, but it will soon die, unfortunately. The French have something similar. It was called Minitel, but it was turned off a couple of years ago. Roughly, that's it. There is in well-structured formats. I also added a screenshot from Wells Fargo, sometime in the 90s. That was before HTPS. This spawned a wild growth of web banking systems, where banking would run through a web interface, always in different protocols, always with slight differences, so no structured format. For corporate customers, this looks a bit different. All of what I talked about was private. For business customers, it looks a bit different. It started with sending floppy disks in the mail back and forth, later on things like BCS and eBix, which I will talk about in a minute, when I talk about the situation in my company, because this is a shame with FintiS. Back in the day, this allowed for interoperable eBanking. There's a set of business cases defined in the FintiS specification. You can access your account statements. You can access lists of transactions. You can send transfers. There's a bunch more. A lot of banks have other systems, but most of this works kind of everywhere, whether it's an app on a smartphone or a software on a computer. The cool thing was, this was more or less universally accessible. It used to be released by the ZKA, which was later renamed to DKA, die Deutsche Kreditwirtschaft, the German credit economy. You can download the spec from DKA. It's generally parsable. I did it. All you need afterwards is a username, a PIN, and the same credentials that you use for eBanking. I think the most important thing, you don't have to ask anyone before you write an implementation. You don't have to ask anyone in order to use an implementation. I did this for an association management system, making sure that payments in that association were automatically parsed and transmitted. The nice thing about FintiS is that it's forward compatible. It has singular records, which are equipped with a version. You can add new versions of a given record. The bank can support a given version. A thing is, this may change whenever there's new regulation, so there might be a new version of a credit statement or for any given record with a new version. For example, at the point where there wasn't a e-directive stating that customers had to provide the account number where the cost of a TAN code was to be charged to, you can tell from the version increments of the specification when such directives went into effect. As I said, the most important feature was multibanking. You could have an application on your computer or your smartphone and access all of your accounts in that. In addition to that, what other kind of systems were out there were related to online shopping, I want to pay for an online transaction. So there's still things like PayPal, wallet services, which you charge with a given amount of money that are disconnected from your account. There's also a group of services that connect directly to your account. The easiest of those systems is payment in advance. So you pay ahead of receiving whatever you ordered. There is collect on delivery. Sorry, that was wrong. There is a direct debit or direct withdrawal services. There are some connected systems like Ideal in the Netherlands, which is where the merchant talks to an interface at the system, asks for a given amount of euros from a given user and doing that on the website of the bank. The user authorizes the transaction. The merchant immediately receives the authorization for that transaction and can immediately send the goods. We have something similar in Germany. It's called JiroPay and no one knows it, because I think it's only the Sparkase, who uses it, and no one else apparently. In parallel, starting around 2006 or so, a company sprung into life called Sofortüberweisung and sometimes we kind of wonder how something like that could come to be. I've always found the business model a bit odd. This is Sofortüberweisung in the middle. The user gives their credentials that he received from the bank. He enters those in the website of Sofortüberweisung. Sofortüberweisung logs into the banking website. Sofortüberweisung then tells and affects the transaction on the banking website. Then it gives the transaction authorization to the merchant. Sofortüberweisung promises the user not to do anything else than to actually send this specific one transaction and not to snoop around in the account or do anything else. But there is no technical guarantee. They did receive a quality check from TÜV and at some point they also added the point where they had insurance. So in case something went wrong, they seemed to have insurance. Around 2012, the conditions of participation of many banks started including a clause where they asked the user to sign that they only give their credentials directly to the bank over a secure connection. So what I did to illustrate the whole problem was I searched for a picture from Wikipedia. So kind of what you're doing is you're violating your bank's conditions. The bank doesn't guarantee that this is going to work and the bank will not cover any damages that you may incur. There were a bunch of banks that tried to take technical measures to stop this from happening. I haven't don't have any evidence, but I think I heard something about the Sparkhazis stopping accesses by blocking a bunch of IP addresses, resulting in Sephardipa Waisung connecting from different IP addresses shortly thereafter. This might also have been a business decision because the Sparkhazen did have their own competing system. So as a result, they were forbidden from interfering with Sephardipa Waisung's services. So I tried to check the conditions of participation for my account and what happened is they changed the details in the conditions of access and they added a sub clause with a comma saying, you can only enter your credentials on the secure side of DKB or on the list of other authorized providers, including only Sephardipa Waisung. To have a look at this, I had to log in to the DKB account at some point to receive my account messages. In order to do that, I had to generate a tan, which is generated in an app that receives a password to do that. In order to reset the password, which I had forgot, I had to send myself a text message, which was easily done. So I don't think I really have to remember the password because it's the same flow as a normal login. So this is the state until mid this year or so. 2015 PSD2 was published and these are the the rationales for why it was published. The antecent before it was in 2007 the old payment services directive using mostly the services that trigger payments as a rationale for why the original PSD was published, as well as account information services. The idea was to make sure that the market should remain in continuity, so it should provide some security against market disruption. This is a side-by-side view of these two directives. They have some incredibly complex wording that takes you several minutes to figure out that oh, this does not apply to payments in supermarkets. There's an appendix that explains what it relates to and in version two they've added payment services and account information services. So what did PSD2 give us? These new categories of a payment service and account information service. New security measures, which is the part that most people know about. The so-called strong customer authentication. And this is combined with a very strange 19-day rule that nobody really explains. A 90-day rule that nobody really understands or explains. And the time out in online banking was lower to five minutes. So if you fail to click something within five minutes, for example, because you're looking for a 10-Generator, you're logged out and you have to log in again. There is a new transparency requirement for banks. Most people don't notice this because they take the box. But it means that banks need to inform customers about their fees. The fee structure has to be understandable. You have to receive it on a permanent data carrier. And the PSD2 also requires banks to report certain things to the Federal Bank and to register before they start offering their services. Most people seem to think that's pretty good. We had a meeting with the Federal Bank and they thought they should help them. Among other things understand market stability because these services have to, they know which kind of risk assessments they have to have to conduct and in which way they have to report these to the authorities. And there are new interfaces. The payment service directive speaks about dedicated interfaces that these services have to offer. These are called APIs. And this is what PSD2 API is all about. But it doesn't tell, it doesn't say how they're supposed to look, only what they have to do. These new categories, a payment provider is somebody who has services like Zufordüberweisung, that third parties that start, that send payments on behalf of others. And account information services, which is what used to be known as multi-banking. I'm not sure what the people who wrote this thought of, but they certainly didn't have a telephone that offered all this. They had websites in mind. Because these days you're supposed to be able to have a portal that collects all the information about your bank account and lists them on one single page. Let's have a look, let's look at history. I found a screenshot. Oops, this is wrong. It was probably 2016. It's a screenshot from 2016 where they imagined what the future with the Brave New World of PSD2 might look like. Because these days you have to go through a payment provider who then contacts a credit card provider that contacts a bank. And these days the online shops can directly access your customer's bank account. Well, no.  This is what it looked like in our company. We had staff software, accounting software, wage apps. These spoke to my bank via Fintes. It's a computer that sits in my office. I own it. And it connected my bank, which I trust. And I give them my account details. And it works very well. This stopped working on the 14th of September 2019. Dathef told us that they have a new cooperation partner, which is called the Fint API, GmbH. So my account details go to Dathef's computers. They send them on to Fint API. And they then contact my bank. I like the Fint API logo because it says a Schufa company. It's now it was bought by the Schufa Holding, which is a German credit scoring company. So in this Brave New World all my data goes through Schufa. And of course they say they don't use it for anything evil. But at the same time I never entered into a contract with Schufa. My contract is through somebody else. So it's not very nice. But everybody speaks about these third parties implementing these APIs. It's always four parties though. It's me. It's always me and my bank. Of course, that's two parties. Then there's one something that I really want to do. For example, payments would be a third party. But in fact, there's always a fourth party, a gatekeeper implementing the API. I'll tell you why, but it's essentially because these get preferred access to all the banks, which isn't easy to implement on the other two layers. There's always a fourth party. There's no use case that I can imagine where it's only three parties, except perhaps for the Account Information Service that operates these portals where I can get an overview of several accounts. The PSD2 API calls for an Open Access, where Open is meant in the way that bureaucrats understand it. There are no contracts required between the banks and the people who use these APIs. They're required to offer an API. But it only says that it needs to be available and what it needs to do. And it needs to be as good as the other interfaces that the bank offers to the customer. It doesn't actually prescribe which specification it needs to fulfill, which means that, well, not all banks develop their own APIs. They don't fancy doing that. They buy them from external providers. But there's a large handful of different APIs used by different banks. So when I want to implement functionality that accesses accounts, I need to either implement all of these specifications or I use a third party or fourth party that implements all of these for me. There were attempts to specify a PSD2 API that everybody might or banks could implement. The website is a bit awful. It's the quasi standard, but there is no de facto standard yet. To use this API, I have to be a licensed or registered provider. The good news is that there is no requirement to own capital. I can't do it as a private person, but I can do it as a legal person by registering a legal person and buying insurance. But as soon as I want to offer payment services, I need to have several tens of thousands of euros in capital. And most functionality that I can imagine don't really make sense with just account information. So, for example, if I have, if I organize payments for a club, I want to be able to both register that people have paid me, but also pay others. And the access is open as long as I have an electronic certificate that proves my identity. The concept of software that you run on your own computer and not in the cloud doesn't exist in this legal document. It's completely useless for people who want to run software on their own computer. The new thing is strong customer authentication, which is the blood pressure thing. This strong customer authentication can be required. And it means that you can require two elements of the Categories, Knowledge, Ownership, and Biometrics. After five failed attempts, the access has to be blocked. The inactivity rule also exists here. There has to be a dynamic link between customer identification and the transaction. So we can't use these transaction number lists. And there have to be mechanisms that ensure that the software or the device has not been tampered with by the person paying or third party. And that's where my blood pressure went up, because of course my devices are rooted so I can do backups. And then the app says, no, you're not allowed, it's rooted. And then when you think about what rooted means, it means that the device can lie about its state. And the app doesn't want that unless the device is so good at lying that the app works after all. So I tried to run this on device that has ways of blocking these attempts of detecting whether or not phones are rooted, but this leads to this arms race. So it means I have a second device where I run the TAN apps that are currently not wanting to be tricked. And then there's another so-called feature surprise SKA. Things were simple this far. I would log in with my pin and that would give me read only access. And as soon as I wanted to write anything, I would have to enter a transaction number. Now I need transaction numbers for a lot more. I sometimes needed to log in. The precise wording is to access sensitive information, except for sometimes. There are four or five pages in the technical directive that explain these exceptions. I'm allowed to not require the SKA when I access transactions that are less than 90 days ago, unless it's the first time or the last time was more than 90 days ago. For contactless payments, payments up to 50 euros that are possible without the pin or the strong customer authentication, unless it was more than 150 euros since last time. Parking fees are always without SKA. Trustworthy payees are allowable without SKA. Recurring payments starting from the second time can be without SKA. Transfers to a different account of the same person can be done without SKA. Small amounts up to 30 euros can be done without SKA, except for sometimes. Some methods used by corporate accounts are included. And transaction risk analysis modifies all this, which means that they can require SKA in places where it was previously accepted or go the other way of requiring it, but not requiring it where it was previously required, unless it determines that there's a high risk of fraud, which means that I'll always be required. This means essentially that I can never know if a ton is going to be required, which means that using interface design is really difficult, because you don't know if a ton is going to be required when you hit submit. It's very confusing for users, because they can't rely on anything. They don't know what's going to happen when they press a button. For authorized services using FinTS, it's completely impossible, because even transactions that I thought were read-only and wouldn't require a ton. For example, Cron jobs that fetch my account, transaction history periodically, these two may require a ton because of some edge case. And when you use a push service, it's great, because the person receiving this ton doesn't know if that was their Cron job, or if it was an attack. These ton mechanisms work in different ways too. So some banks require you to log in. Other banks like the Spark asset don't require you to log in. But for example, Spark asset requires you to enter your password when you want to search for things that go back more than 90 days. There is no consistency between banks here. And you will notice this only ever happens with EU-Directives or regulations. I don't know if you have a PayPal account. PayPal still doesn't have two-factor authentication. They simply do transaction risk analysis, but they know that the tons only lead to the user cancelling the transaction, which is bad for payments, because it means people don't pay. And that's one of the reasons why PayPal don't have, don't use two-factor authentication, and despite criticism, they're still running their services. These are the ton generation apps that I have on my phone. I have recently, after the 14th of September, looked in my press and actualizing all bank accounts. I had to enter nine different tans in four different ways. I had ton generators with chips. I needed to search for those, but that wasn't that difficult, because I only needed it for transactions. The DKB has disconnected the credit cards from this old payment, old system. So, there's a separate ton required. I didn't press and refresh at this one. So, timeline. The directive was introduced in 2015. In 2018, it was put international guidelines. Basically says copy and paste from the guidelines. The directive was called upon the technical regulations in 2017, because there was a deadline on the 14th of September. This was the delegated guideline. Six months prior, banks should have introduced a test API for software developers, so that they could test their products. There was a fallback solution, if you were outside of the PSD2 guidelines. If you had for 30 seconds of long latency, you needed payment service providers to use a fallback that was the interface that the normal customer used. If banks didn't want to do that, they needed to use the PSD2 API 3 months prior. In June, they should have used the PSD2 already, in order to not fall into the fallback. On the 14th of September, everything exploded. The directive came into effect, which led to only certain things to explode. Certain banks only used the 90-day limit. If you were signed in, on the 13th of December, you needed to have those problems. Sign-in flows for two-factor authentication apps were complicated for the post bank. You needed to sign new things for club accounts. It wasn't that bad, because you could share the pin, because only one received the pin for the 10th generation. Everyone needed a single one for access. Post bank needed a signature, and they didn't want to accept emails. They didn't want to accept emails because of fraud, so that made it very difficult. After asking support by phone, they said they were going to ask, I proposed the fax in, but that made it even more complicated. I showed this on the screenshot before. If I have eight different apps, I have to re-sign in eight times. If I wanted to sign in on the Apple Town App, it didn't work to create a new letter. No one knew where to enter the code, and I needed to search for that code on the web page, and it also didn't specify. For credit cards, this also should apply, but no one has implemented it yet. This is why the EBA said that they have an additional timeline until 2020. APIs don't work, then that's because they didn't have enough time to test, they say. There was already a talk about this top pick. There was Mastercard, SecureCode, and Visa card, verified by Visa, and this was basically not that great. 3USCure is Acquiresure and Interoperability. The customer is missing in this list. The whole thing is there to add new terms of participation to customers and basically make the customer liable for whatever damages are there. One group of banks, the VR Banks, part of Viducha, ask you to register on a website on onleinsichereinkaufen.de. Sorry, it was, I'm not quite sure which one it was, but I know, because one of the pages exists, the others don't currently. Currently only this one exists, and has a valid certificate from Let's Encrypt. And then there was the thing about blood pressure, so this said, you can sign up here and turn on Pushtan, but that doesn't work on your phone because it's rooted, it's insecure. You can also use the alternative process though. We'll just send you an SMS, a text message to that phone. Okay, I don't understand this, but fine. So this form here is currently online. It still has the same problems that Mordekan Anderson reported previously. If you scroll down, you'll find this sign up system. It's an iframe, it's from some other domain that has an extended validation certificate, but yeah, no one sees that because it's in an iframe. So what else? Club and family accounts now require one sign up per person. People are having fun with it. The banks are moving to turn off Fintiesk, because they have PSD2 now. Regulated services can no longer use Fintiesk, well, except sometimes in fallback mode. Surprise SCA is tripping up users everywhere and causing high blood pressure. There's one thing that's not too bad. There's no registration requirement for applications, even for Fintiesk, with a goal of transparency. And now in online banking, you actually see which application was used for access to your bank account. But development is still possible for open source developers. But almost every transaction can sometimes require a tan. So, we just saw this, but let's move to the end. Transparenz and regulation were improved. Consumers are kind of annoyed. It's a perfect basis for phishing. I don't know if you received an email saying PSD2 is not in effect, please log in here. Perfect phishing case. Commercial users now have to move elsewhere. The good thing is, there's now new business opportunities for startups that can circumvent that. Finally, open source software and non-cloud applications are mostly excluded. And that's it. Thank you. We have 12 minutes for Q&A. There's three microphones in the room. If you have any questions, please line up. I'll try and distribute fairly. But I have one question.  Didn't you hear? Sofort-Überweisung ist now legal. Ah, let's start with you. The question is, you said that Finties is being faced out by banks. I know that some banks have directly turned off Finties. Do you know how this looks like for other banks? Are there any signs from the big providers for banks? In large part, they kept back about this. They don't want to extend this because they have other things to do. I think they turned back. So yes, there's no reason to do that. They got back because lots of people complained.  It mentions in the directive that European banks have to give out information to customers about new regulations and about requirements and rights to customers. The other way around. The sheet is for you as a customer and you can show it to the bank and pressure them about what isn't included. You said it's not that complicated to start a company with a legal entity. Would that help me to create a company so I can get an API and then access my account? You need a new app. The answer is yes, you need a new app, which runs ebix, but that should work. You listed that there are three ways to, three authentication specifications. You talked about TANs. If I correctly understand the directive, is knowledge and ownership about the chip card. A chip card is still a good auto-finance recognition method. Yeah, that's correct. So from these three factors an authentication needs to be derived. This can be any sort of signature. I have never seen an implementation except for a bunch of apps, though. For example, DKB has its own app and everything stays within that app, including the iPhone, face recognition, and so on. The thing is, if you use a different app, that's not this one. It's difficult to type a signature. So, yeah, you use the TAN. I'm only asking, because Spark has said that HabitCE with chip card is not fulfilling these requirements. Yeah, the statement is incorrect. The card is pin plus card, knowledge and ownership. So, no, this is fine. Only a small annotation. You mentioned that PayPal doesn't support two-factor, but I used two-factor. I think there was, five years ago, there was a short time for where they allowed two factors. I think they stopped there. I could click on this half a year ago. Cool, then they allow it again. Nice. I'm asking for a friend. He develops an online shop and he confuses with this 3D secure thing. Payment service provider says that it's fine to enter the credit card with this 3D secure method. And after that, the shop can withdraw from that credit card as much as they like after that. I'm not quite sure about that. For the first payment for repeating payments, yes, but I think this needs to be confirmed for every payment. I'm not exactly sure, but sometimes simple authentication should be enough. Okay, two factors should be enough. Would you be okay with PSD2 if it was open source? Or are you saying that this is bad? It's relatively difficult to implement these requirements, because most open source users tend to download and compile around their software themselves. I didn't see how it's possible to really support open source. And basically you would have to stop the requirement to have a qualified electronic signature at the endpoints. And then the only problem would be you'd still have to have the TANs at the endpoints. Yeah, it would be feasible. I just wanted to mention that most here will have two bank accounts. But all this two-factor thing is just going crazy. If I have my online banking and the two-factor on the same device and the integration that some banks offer, that was shown in Congress before, this can be hacked very easily. How can we ensure that this has been done securely as a customer and that as a customer you can make sure that this is done well? So it says that there should be two separate devices or if it's on the device, there needs to be a separation. It's somewhere in this routing clause. It needs to be separated by the features of the operating system or something. So I think this moves into the direction of something like Samsung Knox and not default Android. I think also when I accessed that in detail I was on a router device or something. I'm using an open source software to track my finances and I have that on my server. And I am now with that I am a payment service provider. And the developer said he wanted to include PSD2 and he said, and I don't think that's possible, the developer said he registered himself somewhere and I'm not sure if that would work and I'm not sure if I can use that. I'm not sure if you can use that. I have to look it up. I'm not able to answer that. Is he able to include PSD2 in his software? No, he's not able to put that into his software. He needs to use FinTS. You can change the evics. Do you have a suspicion who is behind this? Why did they do that? Soforthe Beweisung? Alone against a bank lobby? Who did propose that? I really don't know. We talked briefly before this. Digital first and second. It sounds like progress, so probably it's better. They thought it sounds better. I just wanted to ask, do you know political organizations or actors who try to summarize, to do lobbying in the name of the users and the clients? I think there's a club of IT users as a register club. So I would just say this is more of a self-help group. No, I just know this one, but nothing else. Last question. You mentioned registration for third-party services. Isn't that kind of an approval for the bar thing? So, in the last few months, the guidelines were published. How can these allowances be withdrawn? I think there are some additional conditions for information providers. This is a bit simpler. Only certain paragraphs apply to them. In other words, it wants to actually trigger transactions. The full security package applies to them. Are you happy? Singularanger has another question. Can I prevent my employer from receiving my bank data? Funny question. Second question. Can you give us a preview whether there's going to be any improvements? So, it says that every X-Years or so this directive is supposed to be updated. I think it's 2022 or something. I'm not very hopeful though, because from the perspective of the central government, non-Cloud services seem to be kind of weird and a niche product. So, it's kind of a question. I'd like to introduce a previous question. There's an institution that tries to improve the situation. I'm working for this in the name of sub-photobereism. We are actively working on this to discuss with European banks and regulators to improve this in the very near future. There are a few people who try to improve the situation. Very good. So, you may be able to answer the question I asked before. Henry Platz, thank you.


I was very excited about reading this book when I first got it. It's from the classic golden age of early science fiction. Unfortunately, it's not good. I didn't think it was very creative or imaginative or really very interesting at all. The Medusins are a race of aggressive aliens that look like floating green jellyfish the size of elephants with hundreds of black tentacles and they've kidnapped some princess or something and the space legion has to fly to the Medusin homeworld to rescue her and blah blah blah. It's all very basic.