40 Burst results for "New Zealand"
Leading Saints Podcast
"new zealand" Discussed on Leading Saints Podcast
"You know, sometimes, you know, to be a good leader, yeah, you have to follow the principles that our church leaders set out. And I guess there's another experience that I had was when I was the stake executive secretary for my stake president. And I love my stake president because his fury onto it, his fury, what's the word, straight to the point. Yeah, so he, you know, he's not afraid to just tell you straight up how it is and, you know, and he's not afraid to tell his ideas and feelings, which I really appreciate actually. But there was this one time in the meeting where we were actually discussing callings and, you know, I really like that principle that you shared, you know, that scripture in Doctrine and Covenants about like, you know, if it's done faithfully, if it's done, you know, if you record it faithfully, done in the name of Jesus Christ, then, you know, it's all good, you know. Doctrine and Covenants 128 verse 9. Yeah, yeah, that's the one. Yeah. And I really love that scripture. And, yeah, we were discussing callings and it came to a topic of what calling, well, which person should hold this calling. And I put maybe like a couple of names forward and everyone else put a couple of names forward. And, you know, and the stake president just, I think he felt like at that time, I mean, looking at hindsight, it's always 2020, right? At that time, he obviously felt like it wasn't correct, those names, you know, that we actually put forward. And, you know, he called someone else. And it was kind of weird because at that time, at that meeting, at that time, I thought, oh, why won't you call this person? Like, this person would be great and excellent at this job. And then it was only for a split second. And then the Spirit just reminded me, hey, he's the priesthood leader, sustain him. And so I had this, I guess, chastisement and a rebuke from the Spirit saying, hey, you need to sustain him. And so I did. So, you know, I was really happy with that experience because two weeks later, I think he actually proposed a name for this calling. And I was like, okay, sweet. I sustain. Let's do it. And, you know, one of the things as a stake executive secretary is that, you know, any callings from the stake, you put it out to the high council for approval and that's, you know, I was typing it in and I was pretty happy. And then, you know, I sent it off to the high council and just waiting for their responses to come in for approval. So, yeah, that was a really good experience, humbling experience, just to be reminded, hey, to be a good leader, you need to be a good follower. And sometimes that means following leaders that make decisions that you don't necessarily like. But afterwards, you might be able to understand or you might not understand those decisions. But, you know, our responsibility is to sustain those that hold the keys, those priesthood keys. And that concludes this How I Lead interview. I hope you enjoyed it. And I would ask you, could you take a minute and drop this link in an email, on social media, in a text, wherever it makes the most sense and share it with somebody who could relate to this experience. And this is how we develop as leaders, just hearing what the other guy is doing, trying some things out, testing, adjusting for your area. And that's where great leadership is discovered, right? So we would love to have you share this with somebody in this calling or a related calling. And that would be great. And also, if you know somebody, any type of leader who would be a fantastic guest on the How I Lead segment, reach out to us. Go to LeadingSaints.org slash contact. Maybe send this individual an email letting them know that you're going to be suggesting their name for this interview. We'll reach out to them and see if we can line them up. So again, go to LeadingSaints.org slash contact. And there you can submit all the information and let us know. And maybe they will be on a future How I Lead segment on the Leading Saints podcast. Remember to watch the interview about scrupulosity. Go to LeadingSaints.org slash 14 for free access to the Mentally Healthy Saints virtual library. It came as a result of the position of leadership, which was imposed upon us by the God of heaven, who brought forth a restoration of the gospel of Jesus Christ. And when the declaration was made concerning the only true and living church upon the face of the earth, we were immediately put in a position of loneliness. The loneliness of leadership from which we cannot shrink nor run away and to which we must face up with boldness and courage and ability.
The Charlie Kirk Show
Fresh update on "new zealand" discussed on The Charlie Kirk Show
"And I think it's the most rigorous data because although we've seen, right, so life insurance industry data, we didn't have vaccination status. All we could do is correlate with vaccines, unprecedented levels of mortality. We saw it in epidemiology, death rate statistics across countries, how you saw it totally go correlated with vaccination campaigns. But here's a robust data set where you can actually drill down and see a patient's vaccination status, their date and their death and their death rates. And you can compare it to regulars. And so it's just it's probably one of the more compelling and robust data sets. It's still limited because we want more data. But can I just finish with this, Charlie? The main point of this whole story of New Zealand is that this is an example of public health agencies not releasing data. Every public health agency around the world should be releasing that data, anonymized on vaccination status, mortality and outcomes. They're not doing it. It took this man to be so brave to do it. And now look at him. He's in jail. And this this shouldn't be a jailable offense. This should be routine public health practice. And they're not doing that anywhere. Strong cell is amazing. I got to tell you, the combination of NADH, CoQ10 and collagen is really something. You know, people ask me, they say, Charlie, how do you keep your energy up? How do you just keep on pushing? Look, part of it is diet, nutrition. But I'll be honest, I take supplements really seriously. Fact check me on this. You can say, oh, I'm going to fact check you. Type this into your search engine. N-A-D-H. Just type it in. What does it tell you? It might tell you that it is the secret to living long, anti-aging properties, more energy. All of that is being proven in more and more clinical trials. NADH is a precursor so that your mitochondria can remain healthy and vibrant. The elites, a lot of billionaires, people, a lot of money. They spend a ton of money on NAD. Such a fact. NAD just might be your secret weapon for more energy. I take NAD every single day. I could tell you that NADH compared with CoQ10, the trials show very, very good things. I don't take my word for it. I mean, honestly, my word should be good for something. But fact check me. Look at it. And if you do it over 30 days, you'll see an increase in energy. I wake up better than ever before. NAD can help you potentially, again, fact check me on this with depression, anxiety, other issues that you might be dealing with. It is nature's gift to you. So you might have extra energy and mental clarity. You guys can use promo code Charlie for 20% off. It's Strongcell.com slash Charlie. NAD might be nature's secret weapon for you. I love it. I take it every single day. Try to try it for at least 30 days to see the maximum benefit. And let me know, has NAD helped your life? Strongcell.com slash Charlie. Check it out. Strongcell.com slash Charlie.
Leading Saints Podcast
"new zealand" Discussed on Leading Saints Podcast
"And yeah, so that's what I did. I passed their name to Bishop and Bishop worked with them for a couple of months and now they've both got their temple recommends. So, you know, you definitely have to show love or just be willing to feel the love that the Savior has for them. And that will really transform how you actually minister to your family's minister, to the members of your ward, especially. That's something that I really learned as a Hillsborough President is that you really have to love these people and sacrifice as much as you can for them. Yeah, I love it. All right, this last principle is to be a great leader, you need to be a good follower. And so, but at the same time, it correlates really well with the closing question I always do. So the last question I have for you, Wilson, is as you reflect on your time as a leader, how has being a leader helped you become a better follower of Jesus Christ? Yeah, it's a really good question. And, you know, in my life, especially in these experiences with these leadership callings, you know, I learned theory early on that to be a good leader, you have to be a good follower. And sometimes that means that you have to follow leaders that maybe their decisions you disagree with sometimes and just accept and be humble to that because, you know, maybe they see things that you don't. And, you know, the people that you follow, they hold priesthood keys sometimes, you know. And so because they hold priesthood keys, they hold the right to receive that revelation and you need to accept that. And so I had this one experience with a leader in my church. He was actually a young men's leader at the time. He was my young men's president. And me and him, we just had like a PPI. I don't know if PPI is still a friend or we call them PPI's. A ministering interview, let's call it that. Yeah, yeah. And so he just sat me down. I was probably like 16 at that time and I just love him. And, you know, to me, he was more of like a father figure to me because I didn't grow up with a dad in the home. So he was more of a father figure to me. And, you know, we were just talking about like callings and just serving interest in general and just talking about like the future, like what I want to achieve and, you know, serving a mission and stuff like that because he knew that I wanted to serve a mission. Like, you know, I've always wanted to serve. And he just, I don't know how we got onto it, but we just got onto the topic of like serving in the church. And I don't know why. I just remember having this experience with him. I said like, oh, I don't have a calling. Like I just, you know, I just do my, you know, I just do my thing as a priest and I just, you know, and I, you know, come prepared sacrament and bless it and stuff like that. And, you know, he said to me, look, you don't need a calling in the church to actually serve. You're doing a lot in your, in your priesthood office. And, you know, that goes back to the, you know, the principle of serving in the invisible callings. You know, don't be afraid to just serve. You know, you don't need a calling to serve. You know, I think sometimes we get it fixated in our head that we need some sort of assignment to go out and serve. But nah, as long as it's under the direction of Heavenly Father and, you know, you're not, you know, I guess going against the keys that the bishop holds, then it's all good. Like, you know, you're doing what you're meant to do. You go out and serve. And he was, and then he just reminded me of like the example that I had among our young men. And I didn't think of it at the time because I was a recent convert. I would have been a convert for like, what, three or four years at that time. And he was just saying like, look, look at these young men that you've inspired to help go on missions, like to inspire them to go on missions because you've, you know, you're preparing so hard out right now to serve a mission. And that's rubbing off on the other young men. And I didn't think about that.
The Charlie Kirk Show
Fresh update on "new zealand" discussed on The Charlie Kirk Show
"And so Steve and I got to talk over the last few days. So, you know, Steve was given access to this leaked data from New Zealand. And what's so unique about this is that this is the first what you would call patient level record data you with you have the vaccination status. So we were, you know, what Steve was able to do with this data set is actually really track dates of vaccination, dates of death, rates of death, according to batches. And it's a complete data set. Now, there have been many people even sort of in our movement, you know, the medical distant movement who've questioned been skeptical on the data. I think there are limitations in the data. But the best analysis of this data is, number one, it fits completely with what we've seen from numerous other data sources in terms of the amount of mortality and deaths that it's causing. Number two, New Zealand has not denied that it was manipulated. They know it's leaked data. And their only concerns is that somehow we're going to betray, you know, that data is going to betray patient confidentiality. I will tell you, the whistleblower knew they were doing this sacrifice. They knew how much trouble they were going to get into. They did it anyway because they had a moral imperative to do it. And now they're in jail, they're in handcuffs, and they knew that was going to happen. They were willing to do it because they saw a really alarming signals from the data.
Leading Saints Podcast
"new zealand" Discussed on Leading Saints Podcast
"And, you know, another experience that I had was that I actually approached and this is something probably that I don't know if other bishopric members do, but I do it. But I approach members when their temple recommends are actually expiring. And I actually asked them, hey, do you want to renew your temple recommendation? Yeah, I love it. You know, just being proactive because, you know, I sincerely want them to go to the temple and be in the house of the Lord, you know. And so, you know, I approached these two members that I don't really know that well, but I knew that they need to go to the temple. I just felt like they needed to go to temple and they just need someone to say, hey, look, we will help you out. And anyway, I approached these two members and they both said yes to actually getting these temple recommend interviews. And what really impressed me is that when I did the temple recommend interviews with both of them, like I expressed love from our Savior to them, like at the start and at the end of the interview. And, you know, they both didn't actually pass their temple recommend interviews, both of them. And to me, that was really humbling to know or have the experience because when I asked them to have the temple recommend interview, they may have an inkling or they may have actually had a thought like, I'm not going to pass. But they were still humble enough to actually go through with the temple recommend interview anyway. And to me, that was like, wow, you know, the Savior really works in mysterious ways because, you know, I was expressing love to them saying like, the Savior loves you. You know, don't feel bad about not, you know, passing your temple recommend interview. I'll pass your name to Bishop and he'll work with you and we'll get you those temple recommend so that you can go to temple.
The Charlie Kirk Show
Fresh update on "new zealand" discussed on The Charlie Kirk Show
"And regardless of the, you know, let's say lack of information, I have lost complete trust of the CDC, the NIH. I know you have, too. And how you were covering ivermectin, I suppose the pharmaceutical companies look at people like, you know, just regular citizens as potential annuity lifetime type customers, that the more that they could suppress the immune system, the more money they can make from us. I am encouraged that there has been almost a revival in a health consciousness amongst the American citizenry. And I will say a lot of people aren't necessarily falling for this white lung syndrome thing. The China news had some people on edge, though, Dr. Corey, because obviously, you know what we saw from the last roundabout. What, if anything, should we be on the lookout for? They're still pushing the booster. Eighty six percent of people not taking the booster. What booster are we on by the way? Charlie, I have to admit, I don't even know. I think I've heard of people that are on their sixth shot, but I can't say that I'm going to be accurate. But I like everything you just said. You know, one of the things I realized every time I get too cynical, I actually find out in retrospect that I'm still being naive. I mean, the complete capture of our public health agency by industry completely explains all of their policies, right, which is just vaccinate, vaccinate, vaccinate. And I like that you mentioned that people were on edge with this news out of China. But let me just say that's the third facet that I didn't talk about, right? So it's the effect of prolonged lockdowns, mass vaccination. And then let's go back to, I guess, the term that we use is fear porn, right? That actually, to me, this is as cynical as I can get. It's literally marketing to by using fear to get people to show up for more vaccines. It's just vaccinate, vaccinate, vaccinate. And that's where that cynicism comes in because it's divorced from science. It's divorced from pragmatic sound medical advice. It's already failed. We have numerous sources of data to show that it's failed. And yet they keep doing it. But I like that you said it has been met with a rise in an emphasis on health consciousness. I mean, the way I would summarize this, Charlie, is the system is broken. It's been captured. We cannot trust our agencies anymore because they're literally working in the service of a pharmaceutical industry and we need to come up with different solutions. So I think what you're seeing, what I'm seeing is a lot of people now taking more individual responsibility for their health and now looking to unconflicted sources. For instance, like my organization, where we don't sell anything, we don't take money to everything, we live off of donations, and we're just trying to give out sound pragmatic objective advice. And I think people have an appetite for that now more than they ever have. Yeah, the game has totally changed post covid and the pharmaceutical companies are kind of freaking out because a lot of their stocks are down, a lot of their money grab is down. They're doing everything they can to continue their propaganda campaign. What is the latest news out of New Zealand, doctor? Yeah, that's that's an interesting one. So I'll give you my take because there's lots of different perspectives on what happened. But I've just spent the last couple of days. I'm actually in Europe right now is with Steve Kirsch. We testified in the UK parliament yesterday.
Leading Saints Podcast
"new zealand" Discussed on Leading Saints Podcast
"And it's really important because, you know, it's not about, you know, it's not about the glory, you know, for your own gain or personal glory. This is, you know, all glory to God because this is His church, this is His kingdom. And I love it when, you know, people would like the compliment here and, you know, they say, oh, you're awesome at this, you know, you don't need to deflect it, but just put it in the back of your mind and just accept it and to say thank you. But then when you're on your knees praying to your Father in heaven, you know, thank Him for the glory that you've received and give it back to your Father in heaven because it's His work, you know. And that, you know, just be grateful that you remain an instrument in His hands, that you can actually do this work, you know, and be a witness of it. Amen, brother. All right, next principle is love the people you serve. This is always an interesting principle because it can be so elusive or it can be kind of vague as far as how to love people. So how have you found it most effective to love those that you serve? Yeah, so one of the things that's really been on my mind around recently and lately is, you know, we're Jesus Christ. He said that, you know, the shepherd leaves the 99 and always goes to the one. He's always focusing on the one. And I really believe that all of us, like individually, we always have someone that we can go to and to minister. And in my mind, well, maybe it's just me or maybe others may think it, but I do really think that for us there is going to be that one person that only we can touch because we know them that well, like we're the only ones that would be able to reach out to them or get through to them. And I had this experience when I came back from the mission, I was serving as the young men's presidency counselor and I had this friend who had actually gone less active from the church, unfortunately. And due to some unfortunate decisions he made, he actually lived church. Well, he was actually excommunicated actually. And I just decided to reach out to him. I was actually studying one day and I was actually preparing for my exams for an accounting paper that I had at university. And I opened up my personal study, like, you know, I said a prayer and I was about to study the scriptures and I was actually reading. It's kind of funny how I'm talking a lot about him, but out of David A. Bennett's book, Acts and Doctrine. And it's awesome. And I really wanted to practice the principle of charity, having charity in me. And I just prayed and then I said, look, I'm just going to study my scriptures. I'm going to study my personal plan. If I want to experience charity taking over me. And I just had this spiritual prompting to just, OK, you're not going to study your scriptures. You're actually just going to go out and walk. And so I just got out of my house and I'm like, man, this is really random. This is like nine o'clock in the morning. And so I just walked like maybe like 10, 15 minutes just aimlessly, not knowing where I should be, you know, just like that scripture in the Book of Mormon with Nephi. And I went to my friend's house really randomly and I just knocked on his door and there was no response. And so I was like, oh, man, I don't want this walk to be a waste of my time. So I'm just going to knock around the house and just make sure that he's not actually there. So I was just looking through the windows, making sure that no one's home. And, you know, no one was home. And then I was like, oh, what should I do? And then the spirit came to my mind and said, I'll walk to his mother's house. And so I was like, OK. And so his mom's house is like another like five, 10 minutes. So I walked to his mom's house and just as I arrived at his mother's house, he comes in his car and arrives at the same time as I did when I arrived at his mom's house. And I was like, hey, you came for a catch up. He's like, yeah, yeah, I'll just talk to my mom for a bit and I'll come out. And so it was really interesting because what had happened is that me and him, we haven't actually caught up for a while because, you know, I served a mission. And this is the man that actually baptized me when I was a comfort to the church. So he baptized me. Yeah. And so so, yeah, I was talking to him and I actually spent like maybe like three hours with him. And he was actually telling me, you know, a lot of things had actually happened at that time. You know, he was going through marriage problems. You know, unfortunately, he separated. Well, he divorced his wife at that time and it was just going through all these difficulties. And it was really good to actually see him. And it was like, well, actually, I wonder if I actually had that experience if I wasn't able to actually love him or if I didn't have any love for him. And I think the reason why I had the experience and could be prompted by the Spirit to go where I needed to go was due to the fact that I actually loved him. He was like a brother to me. He's always like an older brother to me. And, yeah, eventually, I think it was like a year later, he actually got re-baptized in the church. I actually baptized him. Oh, wow, that's cool. Yeah, so it's not every day you get to say, you know, I re-baptized the person that baptized me. Well, I mean, Joseph Smith and Oliver Cowdery, you know, they sort of have that dynamic. That's cool. Yeah, yeah. So, yeah, it's definitely important to love the people that you serve and you talk to because it's not coming from you, if that makes sense. It's actually coming from the Savior Jesus Christ.
Bloomberg Daybreak Asia
Fresh update on "new zealand" discussed on Bloomberg Daybreak Asia
"Change things. Start exploring my coverage and more at Bloomberg .com Markets, headlines and breaking news 24 a day hours at Bloomberg .com on Bloomberg television and the Bloomberg Business app. This is a Bloomberg Business Flash. And it is 21 minutes past the hour. I'm Bonnie Quinn in the Bloomberg Interactive Brokers radio studio in New York City. Bloomberg Daybreak Asia is brought to you by IBKR Investment Advisors. Switch to Interactive Brokers for lowest cost global trading and turnkey custody solutions. No ticket charges and conflicts no of your interests at ibkr .com slash RIA continuing to gain steam in the Antipodes Australia's ASX down not at all in fact it's up nine tenths of a percent. New Zealand's is NZX up a tenth of a percent now it's reversed its declines. S &P future is also to pointing gains of about two tenths of one percent that's after a session which saw the S &P down nationally although we did see the Nasdaq 100 and the Nasdaq higher with the mega counts doing much better again today. Treasuries returning to their rally this after the jolts data and before Friday's November
Leading Saints Podcast
"new zealand" Discussed on Leading Saints Podcast
"So, yeah, so that's a really good example of, you know, just be where the spirit needs you to be, you know. Yeah, yeah, that's powerful. And I just love the framing that sometimes we want more detailed and specific guidance of like, okay, who do I talk to? What do I say? But just to be at peace that, well, at least I know I'm where I'm supposed to be, right? Like whether it's where you live or today as you serve, just be where you feel nudged by the spirit to be. And then it's amazing how things just work out that way. So, tell me about being willing to serve in the invisible callings. Yeah, so this is a really good principle, I guess I've learned over the years. And it's quite interesting because what, you know, this past General Conference with, you know, out of David A. Bednar, he actually touched a lot on a lot of the points that I actually want to talk about, which is like, oh, I must have been in tune with the spirit or someone, you know. Yeah, so I think, yeah, just, yeah, be willing to serve in the invisible callings. And what I mean by those callings is that you don't have to be upfront in the front line, I guess, battle. So, you don't have to serve, you know, as an analyst call in prison or a relief sign to your prison or special work members or even, you know, the ward council. The invisible callings that I would consider, well, the callings that I would consider invisible because you don't see them that often, you know, like the nursery leaders, the primary teachers, the young men advisors, the young woman advisors, the secretaries, especially the secretaries and the clerks. To me, those are the invisible callings because a lot of the work that happens in the ward is actually like a huge bulk of the membership are not in those, you know, the front line callings. Just like Aladeve Bennett said. And, you know, I learnt this when I was actually the ward executive secretary and the state executive secretary. It was just re-emphasised that, you know, you can actually do a lot behind the scenes. You know, people don't actually need to see what you do. And I was actually reminded of this great principle that I learnt in the Book of Mormon from a friend. And he was just, you know, in the Book of Mormon, we hear about Nephi. We hear about Laman and Lemuel, of course, and then we hear about Jacob. But there's only a few instances where Sam is actually mentioned. And, you know, Sam was a righteous brother of Nephi. He, you know, he was a good man, a righteous man. But it doesn't really say much, you know, in the Book of Mormon about him. And, you know, like even though it doesn't say much about him, we just know that he was a good righteous man. And I think with the invisible callings, our ward, our members, they do so much, you know, they do so much for the ward, they do so much for their callings, or even if they don't have callings, they do so much for their ministering families. And, you know, they don't need to be, I mean, you know, you don't need to be recognised to know that you are building up and serving God's kingdom and helping those members. And it just reminds me of that scripture in 1 Corinthians 12, 23, you know, those members of the body that we think are less honourable, you know, upon those we bestow more abundant honour, which is a really good scripture to describe this principle because I think, yeah, there are so many people in our ward that do so much, but, you know, but they don't serve in the front line callings, you know. Yeah, the last wagon, right? Yes, yeah, yeah. Yeah, that's a powerful principle. Anything else related to those invisible callings that needs to be said? Yeah, I think, yeah, those are the callings that, well, for me, anyway, it really helps me to understand, like, how the ward works. And I think if you get one of those invisible callings, you really can serve and give it all. And just like, you know, to serve quietly, faithfully.
Bloomberg Daybreak Asia
Fresh update on "new zealand" discussed on Bloomberg Daybreak Asia
"Private meant venture capital, hedge funds, private equity. Just means less liquid. Is that not inherently a risk in your mind? Liquidity? Liquidity is a risk to everyone but in differing degrees. So if you are a retirement plan or a retirement system, you know your liquidity requirements for the next 10 years. So if you can get paid for illiquidity, why not get paid for illiquidity? If you're a wealthy individual, how many of them need 100 % of their money on Tuesday? If they don't, they should get paid for illiquidity. And we're seeing that in the performance data. If you look at the active management, active management has failed to beat the index 85 % of the time for 20 years. And I think it's going to get harder, not easier, to beat the index. As more and more of the market is indexed, very little money is left to actually make what needs to be done in active management. Hear the full conversation on the latest edition of the Bloomberg Surveillance podcast. Subscribe on Apple, Spotify, and anywhere else you get your podcasts. Plus listen anytime on the Bloomberg Business App and Bloomberg .com. Markets, headlines, and breaking news 24 hours a day at Bloomberg on Bloomberg Television and the Bloomberg Business App. This is a Bloomberg Business Flash. Five minutes to the top of the hour. I'm Bonnie Quinn in the Bloomberg Interactive Brokers Radio Studio in New York City. Let's have a look at markets. We check them for you all day long here at Bloomberg. And of course they're open in Australia and New Zealand. The ASX picking up steam now up about seven tenths of 1%. New Zealand's NZX down a tenth of 1 % and we have the Aussie dollar trading at 65 .52. Nikkei futures indicating a gain at the open. Hong Kong futures to this after some pain. We had the NASDAQ Golden Dragon index down another one and a half percent in
Leading Saints Podcast
"new zealand" Discussed on Leading Saints Podcast
"You know, sometimes we seldom ask like, okay, where is it that you want me to be? Where is it that you want me to stay? And I think sometimes, you know, we can get in our head like, oh, you know, I want to be here, but is that necessarily where the Lord wants you to be? Well, that's something that I've, you know, come to figure out for myself because the opportunities to serve, you know, and I was having this conversation with my state president when I actually got called to be Bishop of Brick Council because I was his Executive Secretary at that time. Yeah, and that's funny because I was the State Executive Secretary of my state president and when he was Bishop, I was actually his Board Executive Secretary. So he just took me in when, you know. Yeah, so I was just talking to him and we were just talking about like callings and we were just having this long conversation about like, you know, how we served in the church and, you know, he's had a quite a big history of church leadership callings and, you know, one thing that we both noticed like, you know, if I did actually go to America or somewhere else, maybe, you know, I would have had these opportunities to serve, you know, different callings in the past 10 years is quite unheard of, you know. I think he can be thankful for a lot of those blessings, you know, to serve in those callings, you know, because it's taught me a lot. It's made me grow up a lot more. Yeah, so I mean, yeah, I think it's really important that we know where the Spirit wants us to be and the Spirit will actually guide you. I guess I'll have another experience with this principle was when I was the Elder's Quorum President and this was back in 2020, so this was COVID lockdown. In New Zealand, we had quite strict lockdown rules and so this was after that period. So I think we had locked down from March until maybe like August of 2020. So that was quite a long lockdown for us. And this member, he was actually my counselor in the Elder's Quorum presidency with me. He worked with the local Pacific Trust. So, you know, we got like a lot of Pacific Islanders and stuff like that and he was a part of that community and he got this big massive box of meat. I think it was like a pork meat and it was just tons of it. And he gave me this box and he just said, go and deliver this to some members that actually need it. And I was like, okay. And I thought of like one or two families that I thought of because they were my ministering family. So I was like, okay, I'll deliver some pork to them. And then the rest of it was quite strange because in my mind I had it that, okay, I'm going to go visit my friend who lives up the hill and then I'll come back down and I'll drop off some meats to other families that I think will love this. And, you know, I just had this prompting to like just, hey, actually don't go up the hill, just drive around your neighborhood and drop off those meat to this family. And it was really weird because I was driving and I was going to go up the hill and then I just turned and I drove into this really random neighborhood and I didn't really have any idea where I was going but the Lord pressed upon my heart that I was to deliver this meat to this new move-in from a family that came from Samoa. And it was quite random because just as I was driving around and I was about to reach the house, the wife or the mother of that family was walking on the street and I saw her and I stopped her and I said, hey, I've got some meat for you. And so she starts walking back to her house maybe like a minute away. And so I drove to the house and just as I get there, she's there and then I knock on the door and the husband comes out and then I give them this meat and they're really grateful for the meat because they actually needed it, you know, they were struggling at that time.
Leading Saints Podcast
"new zealand" Discussed on Leading Saints Podcast
"It's got some, a lot of personal experiences from my life where, you know, I came back from the mission in 2013 and, you know, my number one goal was to get out of New Zealand as soon as possible. And that's because, you know, I served in Hong Kong, I served with all these American elders, and I just thought, man, I want to go to America, I want to live there, you know, and I was quite stubborn. You know, I went to university and I got a degree in international business because I thought, just take me as far away as you possibly can from New Zealand. Man, there's no place I want to go right now than New Zealand. We should just, you know, exchange lives for a minute. Yeah. And so, you know, I really wanted to leave New Zealand and, you know, I got married in 2014 to my wife who I met on the mission. She was another sister missionary. Is she from New Zealand as well? No. So that's an interesting part of the story is that, no, she's not from New Zealand, she's from the US. Oh, okay. And so she's, yeah, so that's quite weird, eh? Yeah, we both met in Hong Kong as missionaries and, yeah, we just cut it off since then. Awesome. So keep going as far as this, you wanted to get out of New Zealand. Yeah, so I wanted to get out of New Zealand and I just talked to my wife and it wasn't until, so I got called as a world executive secretary, and then it wasn't until like the day, I just had a feeling and I just said to my wife, look, we got to save up for a house because at that time we were just living with my mum because she's actually got a pretty large house. It's two storied and so pretty much the whole second, well, the ground floor was ours. So it was kind of living in our own house but not. And so, you know, I just said to my wife, look, we need to start looking for a house and then she said, yeah, okay. And, you know, me and my wife, we were quite amateur at it because like, you know, people know how to get like a house broken and stuff like that. And, look, we didn't do any of that stuff. We just had no idea what we were doing. And we were just following the spirit and just trying to figure things out. And my wife just said, look, yeah, I think I agree with you. We need to start looking for a home and buy a house at that time. At that time, I was working a ferryman and wage job. I was actually working at McDonald's, which is quite funny. My wife has actually got, you know, she had a real job. She was actually a health caregiver at a restaurant. So she was making the money. And it wasn't until probably about July of 2017 that we actually started seriously to looking into getting a home for ourselves. And I remember we went to the temple and before we went to the temple in July, we actually put an offer for a home that we wanted, but we didn't actually get it. But I didn't actually feel bad about that. It was, you know, I felt confirmation in the temple that like, you know, our desire to stay in Dunedin in New Zealand for a while. I had finally accepted the Lord's will. That was it for us, for our family. And so when we got back, we actually found a house like a month after and we put an offer on it and it was really weird because the person, the real estate agent said, look, no one's actually put an offer on this house. You're the first one. And so we put an offer in and then the, you know, the homeowners at the time, they counted offered and then we counted offered and then we came to agreement. Then we finally got our home and yeah, and it was really crazy because at that time we didn't actually have that much saved for a home at all. We needed a 10% deposit. That's not, I don't know if that's the same in America, but yeah, in New Zealand we needed like a 10% deposit at that time. And yeah, it was just a huge miracle how the Lord actually guided our family into getting a home here in New Zealand. Because, you know, with our home, we've actually had a lot of young single adults that stay with us, like actually live with us. And we, we charged them barely any rent. You know, we just, you know, we, you know, we just, we believe that this home was given to us by the Lord and we use it to bless others. And yeah, that principle of being where the spirit needs you to be is really important because, you know, I think a lot of us, we have a lot of these desires to serve the Lord and we want to serve our Father in heaven.
Leading Saints Podcast
"new zealand" Discussed on Leading Saints Podcast
"Nice, awesome. Anything like in general your approach to, and we'll talk about some of the principles you have, and if you want to jump into one of these principles, feel free, but just that role as being a counsellor in a bishopric, like if you're giving someone else some advice of where to start in a bishopric, as a counsellor, what advice would you give? Yeah, so I think the best advice I would give is if you go into a new bishopric or being called as a counsellor for the first time, definitely you want to talk to the bishop first and just get on the same page as he is, because you really want to know what is his vision, what is his goals for the ward, what does he want to achieve under Heavenly Father's direction, because once you know that, then it will make it easier for you to know how you can assist bishop, because you're not trying to do the opposite things of bishop, you're trying to actually help him to move the ward along. And I guess the second best advice is read the handbook. The handbook's got some really good stuff there for you bishopric members, or just any calling really, if you want to know about, but you definitely talk to your bishop, understand what your portfolios are, once you know that, then you can get the assistance you need. You know, it's funny, you have to mention, to read the handbook, you think that would be assumed, and I think generally it is assumed, but you get into these roles, and they're very administration heavy, and so week to week, you just sort of get buried in, okay, who we got speaking for sacrament meeting, or I got to meet with the primary presidency, and you sort of lose yourself in these different demands, and so to just have a routine of saying, okay, I'm going to get through the full handbook in the next month or something, and just with the gospel library, just take a chunk of it every day and just read a few pages or paragraphs or whatever, and before you know it, you're through it, and then it's amazing you'll be sitting in a meeting and think, oh wait, they referenced this issue or this dynamic in the handbook, let's go and see what, review and see what it says. Yeah, yeah, exactly, yeah, like reading the handbook is just so useful and so helpful. To be honest, I haven't actually read the whole handbook, because it's quite a thick, you know, it's quite a thick book. There's a lot in there. Yeah, yeah, but yeah, definitely, I've read all the parts for my portfolio, so I know pretty well the things that I handle in the ward, yeah. That's cool. Very cool. Well, you have four great principles here that I think will give us a lot to talk about, and the first one being be where the Spirit guides you. Yeah. Unpack that. Yeah, so I think that's a really important principle. It's something that I learned when I actually became the ward executive secretary.
Leading Saints Podcast
"new zealand" Discussed on Leading Saints Podcast
"So the counsellor recommended Leading Saints to you? Yeah, yeah, she recommended it to me, and at first I wasn't going to listen to it, but then I was like, actually, I'll give it a listen, and I just could not stop listening to you. Wow. It was actually everything that I, you know, it answered a lot of the questions that I had personally, but yeah, I love how your podcast at the end ends with Gordon B. Hinckley's quote about leadership, and I was just thinking, man, like, why do I feel these feelings about loneliness and leadership, and you know, I've been thinking about that for a long time, you know, when I had this experience, and then when I was going to listen to your podcast, and I heard that quote, I'm like, oh my gosh, like, this is what I needed. Like Henry Farr was looking after me, you know? Yeah, it really pulled me out of a dark hole, and yeah, I'm just so grateful for this podcast. Wow, cool. Well, you'll have to connect me with that counsellor that recommended it. Yeah, yeah. Did she recommend a specific podcast episode, or? No, she just recommended just a general podcast, yeah. Oh, cool. Yeah. All right. Well, I definitely, I don't see Leading Saints as a general, you know, therapy tool or resource, but hey, if it helps. That's great, you know, so really cool. Now just tell me what the church is like in your ward, in your area, the makeup of your ward, demographics, anything that would help us better understand your religious community. Yeah, yeah, sure. So dead-end has actually had a huge history, I believe it's like over 160 years or something like that. It took us a long time to go from a district to a stake. We only just became a stake in 2016, and that was the time I became, you know, a ward executive secretary at that time of my ward, and so we got two wards in Dunedin. The unique thing about our stake is that to go from one inch to the other end of the stake is at least a five-hour drive. So it's actually quite large in geographic area, but the two wards that are near me, my local wards, the one that I'm in, the demographics is usually pretty old, like probably like maybe a third of them, like really old people, and by that I mean like widows or really quite elderly, and then we're starting to get really awesome is that we're starting to get young families actually getting baptised into our ward. So probably a huge chunk of that is young families, and then yeah, so that's pretty much the main demographics of our wards, we've just got really old people and really young families as well, and then the other ward here in Dunedin, that's mostly just young families, they've got some middle-aged people, and then they've got a whole bunch of students. A lot of people come down here to study, so we have a huge group of young single adults that come down here into that ward. Interesting, and you've had a variety of different leadership roles from being secretaries and clerks, and now you're currently serving in the bishopric. Yeah, that's correct.
Leading Saints Podcast
"new zealand" Discussed on Leading Saints Podcast
"All right, today we're headed to New Zealand. I love having some diverse accents here on the Leading Saints podcast, and today we're with Wilson Wu. How are you? I'm good, fine. Great. How are you? Very good. This is great. Now, are you born and raised in New Zealand? Yeah, I was born and raised in New Zealand. My parents actually immigrated back in the 1980s, and I've been here ever since. Yep, never moved. And where did they immigrate from? So they immigrated from mainland China, from a city called Taishan. Nice. Did they raise you speaking Mandarin or anything? Yeah, so that's a funny story. So I actually grew up speaking Taishanese, and I didn't actually learn it that well. But now I speak Cantonese because of my mission language, and I speak a little bit of Mandarin. Where did you go on your mission? So I served in the China-Hong Kong mission, and it was awesome. That's where I actually met my wife, actually. Oh, wow. Nice. That's fantastic. And you're a convert to the church. Maybe give us a brief summary of that story. Yep, sure. Yeah, so I'm a convert to the church. Me and my brother, we're the only members in our family. We were baptized when I was 13, and then he was 11. Our family has no religious background at all, so we didn't actually get taught anything about gold or anything like that in the home. It all started when I was about probably seven years old, when we had a person from a local church actually come to our school and actually teach us about Jesus Christ. And that's what they used to do in our public schools, but they don't do that anymore. Ever since he was talking about Jesus Christ, I just, I don't know, I just believed in Jesus Christ and started to believe in God. And I think I was about 10 years old, I made the decision to actually go to church. It wasn't our church, but it was just to go to church in general. And I remember I had a friend who actually gave me a copy of the Book of Mormon. He wasn't a member of the church. His parents actually gave it to me, and I started reading the Book of Mormon, like maybe like five pages of it. And I just remember reading the Book of Mormon, just reading about Nephi killing Laban, and how he made it a season for him to follow him. And oh man, it was such a cool story, and I thought, oh man, this book is awesome. But then I don't know what happened to that copy of Book of Mormon, but it just happened that when I was 10 at the same time, we had a family that moved in. And I became really good friends with this kid. And apparently the mom and the dad and the whole family, they were all members of the church. And it wasn't until maybe three years later, when I was 13, the mom actually invited me to meet with the missionaries, and they taught me the lessons, and they got me and my brother, and then they invited us to get baptized, and yeah, we've been members ever since. Wow. Fantastic. And then just going through the emails that we've corresponded, not just about this interview, but just in general, and I was reminded of an email you sent just about how Leading Saints has helped you, and maybe through a dark time in your life, what's the story behind that? Yeah, so yeah, it was probably in 2021, the start of that year, I just felt really just overwhelmed, and I don't know how to describe it, it was kind of like a depression that just came over me, and I was talking to my bishop at the time, I serve under a different bishop, we have the new bishop now since then, but I was talking to my bishop, and I was the alums quorum person at that time, and yeah, I was just going through a really dark time, and it was really hard, and he just counselled me to actually meet with a counsellor, and I just thought, oh man, I don't want to meet a counsellor, you know, there's all that stigma behind meeting with counsellors, and I just, you know, just swallowed my pride and just like, okay, I think I should probably see a counsellor, and I was just talking to the counsellor, just unloading my burdens, and yeah, and she just recommended me to listen to this podcast, and she thought that this would actually help me out, and so I'm really grateful for that counsellor to actually recommend this podcast to me.
Cloud Security Podcast by Google
A highlight from EP146 AI Security: Solving the Problems of the AI Era: A VC's Insights
"This is the Cloud Security Podcast by Google. Thanks for joining us today. Your hosts are myself, Timothy Peacock, the Senior PM for Threat Detection here at Google Cloud, and Anton Chuvakin, a reformed analyst and senior staff in Google Cloud's Office of the CISO. You can find and subscribe to this podcast wherever you get your podcasts, as well as at our website cloud .google .com slash podcasts. If you enjoy our content and want it delivered to you piping hot every Monday, please do hit that subscribe button. You can follow the show, argue with us and the rest of our Cloud Security Podcast listeners all on our LinkedIn page. Anton, this is a fun episode because we are going back to a long ago topic for us, which is VC and bringing in a very modern topic for us, which is AI and hitting on a constant theme on the show, which is that problems in cloud and problems in security tend to rhyme with things we've seen before. Correct. And I think that we are also one of the most fun elements of this episode would be kind of deriving lessons from the previous quote unquote transformations, namely arrival of cloud, arrival of containers. And now the arrival of AI in generative AI has been causing some of the upheaval, I guess, with this. And what we can do with lessons from recent past is kind of curious. And I think our guest today is so well suited to providing that perspective, given his experience first as a founder of a company that was acquired now as a VC observing the ecosystem. You said some ways into the episode that this is the most interesting part of the episode. I think looking back, I mostly agree with you, but I feel like it's interesting throughout. And today's guest. Today, we are joined by an old friend of mine. First time on the podcast, Wei Lian Dang, a general partner at Unusual Ventures. Wei, delighted to have you on the show today. Wei and I go way back. We have a mutual friend that I just adore. So shout out to Ryan for connecting us. Wei, I want to start off talking about AI for security versus security for AI. In my mind and in the mind of a lot of Googlers around me, those are pretty distinct things. When it comes to how you're seeing the market and how you're investing, do you agree? Are they different? Is it a useful distinction? Where are we at? Thanks, Tim. And really excited to chat about this subject. I would generally agree. I think these are separate and distinct in the sense that it's a different set of problems that you're solving for each or that you're trying to figure out. When it comes to securing AI, there's a whole new set of security challenges people are trying to navigate right now. When you're running these LLMs, when you're running these foundation models, you have to think about new ways to protect them. So whether it's the input and the prompts, whether it's how data is used, whether it's the robustness of the models themselves, that's a certain class of problems. I think that's distinct from how do you take LLMs and foundation models and apply them to different security use cases? How can vulnerability management or detection response or security operations at large benefit from AI? And so I do think they're different things, but they might be related in the context of how organizations are thinking about incorporating AI. For instance, if you're applying LLMs to security operations, you then have to think about how you're going to protect those models. What's your strategy around it? What's your approach? What's sort of tooling instead of solutions that you might suddenly need to think through? So I do think they're related in the context in which people are adopting AI, but they're a separate set of problems that people have to figure out. By the way, you made a subtle but interesting point. If you are using AI for security, you probably want to secure it really well, because admittedly, your AI for security would be the target for attackers. So in that sense, if you're doing AI for security, you have to do security for AI. Yes, that's what I'm saying, Anton. And I do agree with that. Now, I think what you need to sort of prioritize or think about first, I mean, I do think there is that sort of stack ranking that people have to think through in terms of what it means to secure AI. I also think it's in context in which how are, as a company or as a team, are you using AI in terms of your existing workflows? Or is it more you're augmenting what humans are already doing versus are you wholesale sort of relying significantly on the AI to actually go automate and take care of certain things and reason about certain things where you would normally have a security operator, analyst or someone else. So I do think it's relevant cases. use And then I think within protecting sort of model usage, you know, there is a set of different problems that people are thinking about and happy to kind of elaborate on that. No, I think there's just such an interesting and worthy point that Anton highlighted that you made their way about, as you're using AI for security, you really need to think about the security of that AI. That is, you know, a vendor made this point to me kind of a unintentionally couple weeks ago, he was explaining to me, and I'm not going to name the vendor, because that's not very nice. A vendor was explaining to me how they were using open AI in their product to help people understand what was being detected. And they helpfully pointed out, but by the way, we don't share the IP address of the vulnerable asset when we send this to the AI. And I'm like, Oh, I'm glad you sanitized it that much. But still, that kind of speaks to the unknown unknowns here and the danger that people are taking on. So that's very interesting. For sure. I mean, I think it's super early and nascent. I think you have a lot of organizations who simply think, you know, well, I can use open AI and they're well known reputable company. And for now, that's good enough. But you know, I think when it comes to actual implementation of tooling, and to your point, Anton, you know, how you actually build the right safeguards around usage of large language models and so on, it's much more complex and it's much more nuanced. So let's maybe focus on this kind of security for AI side. And I think being a VC, you invest in companies that are trying to capitalize on AI. And my fear sometimes is that with this technology wave, we're going to make the same mistakes as in like with mobile and to some extent with cloud when we build the technology first and then we bolt on security in three, five, whatever number of years. So what kind of security problems the AI innovators want to solve? Like, what are you hearing from AI companies? What sort of security challenges they have? Because if you say none, I'm going to go invest into the bunker somewhere in New Zealand where I can hide.
Dennis Prager Podcasts
A highlight from Diversity Disaster
"Welcome to the Dennis Prager Show. I'm your guest host, Karl Jackson, sitting in for Dennis Prager. The number to call into the program, one eight Prager seven seven six. That number again is one eight Prager seven seven six or one eight two four three seventy seven seventy six. All right, I want to thank first off Dennis Prager and Sue for allowing me to sit behind their microphone and then entrusting me behind their mouth. I've got my back right here at AM 950. The answer Orlando .com right here in Orlando, Florida. Sean McConnell is in my ear. I want to thank Alan Estrin as well for allowing me as well to sit in and contacting me. Who do we have watching the lines there, Mr. McConnell? Tony is on the line. Thank you, Tony. Good to see you. All right, the number to call in one eight Prager seven seven six, one eight Prager seven seven six. I'm going to do things a little differently today. Of course, we'll touch some of the hot topics and some of the leading headlines of today, but I'm going to go I'm going to go somewhere else today and and and we'll bob and weave throughout the throughout the program here. I think I want to start here. I want to make some emphatic comments, and I know a lot of people might not be comfortable with these comments, but by the end of the show, I hope and pray that you will be and you will understand just how important they are, because there's a war that is occurring not just against Israel and Hamas or, dare I say, Israel and Iran, a war, sadly, that the United States government, under the leadership of Joe Biden, has helped to cultivate. And I say that, sadly, but I believe it to be true with all of my heart. But there's a war that's taking place right here in the United States, and I believe that it's already begun. We're going to talk about several issues, and honestly, we'll go throughout the entire three hours. They're not necessarily going to be broken up, but we're going to talk about crime right here in the United States. We're going to talk about the border problem. We're going to talk about the problem that is Islamist, Islamicism or Islamism or Islamic Jihad. We're going to talk about all of these issues because I think they're very, very important. But first, let me say this. Let me start off with this. Many of you in the audience or many of you in the listening audience have been taught to believe that diversity is our strength when it comes to America. That is a damn lie. Diversity is not our strength. Diversity will be our downfall. Now, if you're talking about diversity as far as the brain is concerned, that would be one thing. But unfortunately, when it comes to DEI, that's not what we're experiencing today. DEI, diversity, equity, inclusion, CRT, all of that racist bullcrap, that is taking us down. That is identity politics. What that has caused us to do is to divide on issues that we shouldn't be divided against. Let me say this. Even if you are an anti -Semite, even if you are an anti -Semite, even if you're a bigot and you're a despicable person in that sense, in my opinion, we all should be able to agree that when it comes to, let's say, listen, I'm not going to hold any punches. So parents, for those of you parents that are listening in, I'm going to describe some of the things that we know took place in Israel at the hands of Hamas. And so I just want to brace you. And this might be a recurring theme throughout the show. So if you have little ears around, I want you to brace them. I am a Christian, so I will try to watch my mouth, but I'm going to shoot straight with you. I'm going to shoot straight with you. And I believe that you deserve nothing less than for me to shoot straight with you. But we used to believe at least that when it came to, let's say, rape, killing women and children, beheading people, that should be a line that I think we all can agree that we should not cross, right? I think we, at least in the United States of America, we used to believe that those things were evil, right? I mean, anti -Semitism is evil, but we understand that there's going to be bigots if you don't act on your beliefs when it comes to that. Okay, listen, it's a free country. I can't stand you, but it's a free country. But now we seem to have quote unquote Americans that are Hamas sympathizers, that are terrorist sympathizers, and they don't belong here. They don't belong here, in my opinion. They're anti -American. So I'm here to say diversity is not our strength. That's total BS. It's going to be our downfall. And the left is specifically and intentionally focusing on issues that will divide us. This is dangerous. Let me tell you some of the things that should happen. I'm going to talk about, man, I get so much, it's insane. But I'm going to talk about the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, how stupid that was and how that's coming to bite us in the butt. Another thing that the Democrats embraced because they were losing the vote, that's part of the reason and why they finally embraced or they tried to leave their racism in the past and tried to project it onto Republicans. So we'll talk about that a little bit. I want to talk about the warfare that is immigration. A lot of people are thinking of war in conventional ways, and we should be, right? We should be on our guard. But I'm going to talk to you about the warfare by immigration, the warfare that is our immigration system, the warfare that is our open borders. Also, I'm going to talk to you about popping caps. We're going to talk about the Second Amendment. We're going to talk about the lies that the Vice President Kamala Harris was spewing last week when she was in, whatever, the press conference that she gave with the Australian Prime Minister. I got some numbers for you, and the numbers and the things that she were saying were just a complete and utter lie. That lady, I hate to say it because I don't want to be mean, but the truth of the matter is that lady is dumber than a box of rocks, and she has no business being Vice President of the United States. Now, Joe Biden is almost equally as dumb, but I don't even think he's as dumb as her, despite the fact that, in my opinion, the man has dementia. This is one of these left -wing people and Vice President Kamala Harris that has literally, I believe, been trained up in some of her thinking without really thinking about it, if you will. Let me tell you where we should start when it comes to immigration, and we'll get into this, and we'll get into the war by immigration. We'll get into this nonsense about the Australian buyback program and how it allegedly saved lives and reduced the numbers of gun ownership. All of this is a complete and utter lie. That's all the left do. They lie, they lie, they lie, they lie while they destroy the country. And if you hate America and if you're pro -Palestinian, which means pro -Hamas, I can't stand you behind, and I hope you leave the country. Move to Gaza. I hear there's an excellent fireworks show happening there right now that you could be a part of. All right, so merit -based immigration. I want to talk about that. Merit -based immigration. We need to move back to a merit -based immigration, and this is very important. This is crucial for our survival. Sadly, I don't think any American president has done it effectively in quite some time. We had a moratorium, and then with the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, we destroyed that, and we began to destroy America. Democrats began to destroy America. Here's where we should be. Here's what we should be doing. All right, so currently, as it stands right now, we allow 1 .1, approximately 1 illegal, .1 I'm sorry, legal immigrants into the country annually. All right, we're going to have to change that makeup due to what Joe Biden has done, the open borders, because I'm telling you, guys, there's a war of immigration that is taking place. And while we sit here and we watch for, we wait for the beheadings and we wait for the mass shootings and all of this kind of stuff, I'm telling you, we are already at war. And China is at the helm. A lot of these countries in the Middle East, exception being Israel, are useful idiots for China. They don't realize that yet, but they will someday. They will someday. Russia also, they will someday. They'll realize it that they're useful idiots for China. But currently we allow in, again, approximately 1 .1 legal immigrants into the United States. The makeup of that is going to have to change. We'll talk about that. And I'm sorry, I think there's going to have to be a moratorium on that. At the very least, I believe we're going to have to cut those numbers in half until we can control the immigration process that doesn't seem to exist right now. I mean, these open borders are absolutely scary to me. This is the biggest threat. This is the biggest threat hitting the United States of these things. I've talked about how the left is trying to depopulate America. Perhaps I'll reintroduce you to that to some extent, but our open borders is a war that is being waged on us. And sadly, we have a United States government under the leadership of a Joe Biden that is participating. And it's sad. So that's going to have to be cut down. I want either that number cut in half, or I want a total moratorium for seven to 10 years. We'll be talking about that after the break. I got some other recommendations that need to happen right away when it comes to the border, if we're going to start saving this country. But we need some strong men and women that are willing to do it. Carl Jackson and for Dennis Prager, we'll be back in a few. Gold dealers are a dime a dozen. They're everywhere. What sets these companies apart and whom can you really trust? This is Dennis Prager for AmFed Coin and Bullion, my choice for buying precious metals. When you buy precious metals, it's imperative that you buy from a trustworthy and transparent dealer that protects your best interests. So many companies use gimmicks to take advantage of inexperienced gold and silver buyers. Be cautious of brokers offering free gold and silver or brokers that want to sell you overpriced collectible coins, claiming they appreciate more than gold and silver. What about hidden commissions and huge markups? Nick Grovitch and his team at AmFed always have your back. I trust this man. That's why I mentioned him by name. Nick's been in this industry over 42 years, and he's proud of providing transparency and fair pricing to build trusted relationships. If you're interested in buying or selling, call Nick Grovitch and his team at AmFed Coin and Bullion, 800 -221 -7694. Americanfederal .com, Americanfederal .com. All right, welcome back to The Dennis Prager Show. Such an honor to be sitting behind Dennis's microphone. I mean, I adore the man. He's absolutely brilliant, and we all should look up to him, frankly. Hat tip Breitbart, the Pentagon says the U .S. military launched airstrikes early Friday on two locations in eastern Syria linked to Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps. So the U .S. strikes Iran linked sites in Syria in retaliation for the attacks on U .S. troops earlier or last week. Isn't this amazing? Isn't this amazing? So the U .S. military launched airstrikes early Friday on two locations in eastern Syria linked to Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps, the Pentagon said, in retaliation for a slew of drone and missile attacks against U .S. bases and personnel in the region that began early last week. Man, I wonder if they could have afforded those drones had Biden not paid for them. Isn't it amazing how we've come full circle with the disaster that was the Afghanistan withdrawal, with the Taliban now running Afghanistan, $85 billion approximately in military equipment that we left behind that could be reverse engineered by China, were the Taliban to sell it to China, and let's assume that they did. I mean, it's phenomenal. It's amazing. We wouldn't be in the predicament that we are in were it not for Biden and the Democrats that voted for Joe Biden. And yes, I'm going to say that often. I'm going to say that loudly. If you're wondering what's happening around the world, if you're seeing what appears to be, I mean, the beginning steps, Lord willing, I hope that I'm wrong. I hope this does just end up being a move between Israel and Iran and their proxies in Hamas and Hezbollah. But let's not be naive. There's going to be a lot of leaders around the world that are looking at this decrepit dementia patient that are in the White House and they're saying, now is the time to make my move. And we have to wonder if those moves are not only going to reshift political allies and adversaries around the globe. It's insane. We simply don't know what's going to happen. But I can tell you what we need to do to start protecting our own border and to get ready for the fight. By the way, we'll be sharing as well, if I can get to ways that you need to prepare for a terrorist attack, because it's going to happen. And again, I think there's a war that is already being waged. I want to be clear, an unconventional war of sorts, where the ground troops are amassing their soldiers around us. And we have an administration in the White House that is fully complicit. Either they're stupid or they're complicit. Either way, we're very, very important. There's a piece, too, that I'm going to want to share by Ann Coulter. She wrote a fabulous piece last week. But I do want to get back to this immigration issue, because I believe it's important. Girl, are you a racist? Are you a bigot? No. No. I'm an American. I'm an American. Guys, we're not a nation of immigrants. This diversity, equity, inclusion, bullcrap. We're a nation of diversity. We're strengthened by diversity. That's all bullcrap that a lot of these college elites that have taught many of their students that have come through that don't have real world experience. That's just total bullcrap. All right. I'm sorry. Diversity does not make America stronger. Diversity makes America weaker. Diversity and thought and thinking, sure, where we can debate, go back and forth. That's not what the left is talking about. They love their people groups. They love the LGBTQ barbecue community. They love dividing men and women. You name it. They love dividing people because the left loves chaos. And what happens is, and sadly, we're starting to see this occur within the Republican Party, too. It's gotten so divisive within the Republican Party. I'm not even sure that we can win 2024. A lot of ignoramuses within the Republican Party. I'm so tempted to leave. You cannot believe it. But I'm not even convinced that we want to win 2024, to be frank with you. But said having that, we've gotten so divided, so divided that we're giving the elites exactly what they want. And so I'm like, can we at least unite here? We need to seal up these freaking borders. I'm sorry. I appreciate that there's a lot of people that want to come to America legally, but you're going to have to be punished because of the sins of the Biden administration letting people in illegally. So we've got 1 .1 approximately million people coming into this country. Every year, I want to ramp that back. I want that cut in half or I want a moratorium. And frankly, I would prefer a moratorium on illegal immigration, 7 or 10 years, whatever it takes us to make up this amount. And I want the people that have come in in the last couple of years deported. Full stop. Full stop. All right, for the Ilhan Omar's and all these people that think America is evil, why the hell would you want people to come to this country if it's so evil? Except that there's a plan. I want the visa overstays. They need to be deported. That's something that a lot of people don't consider. But even visa overstays, that's a way in which a lot of people come into this country. They stay in this country. We don't search for them in places like Australia, New Zealand. If you're there on a visa, a work visa of any sort, the day that your visa is up or perhaps the day before, they are knocking at your door, making sure that you're packing and ready to leave. We need to do the same thing. I really don't give a flip what your skills are at this point. I really don't. I really don't. Merit -based job -related reasons. When Trump was in office, this is one of the things that Trump said he wanted to do, unfortunately. And I got to find the quote. He literally said at the time, this is something we could work on after the 2020 election. Unfortunately, the left beat him to it. That is why when you have power, when you're in office, you better use it. You don't wait for jack crap. You use it. You use it. We can never make those mistakes again. The executive orders, great. We need legislation. And you use that power and you twist ankles, you twist knuckles, you twist elbows, you do whatever you got to do to use power. That is the difference between the right and the left. The right is willing to wait for elections, but the left, even when they lose elections, they seem to win because their agenda always moves forward. It's amazing to me. But at the time, Trump said, listen, this merit -based thing, when it comes to job -related reasons, let's grow that right now. 12 % of the people come into this country that's merit -based, job -related reasons. Let's jump that up to 57%. And I do appreciate that. We didn't get it done. We should have gotten it done. Family -based immigration currently makes up two -thirds of all immigration. That would need to decrease sadly, maybe to one -third. And again, I would prefer a moratorium, but at least we got to start somewhere. When it comes to asylum or diversity visas, they would have to be decreased by more than half. Right now, they stand at about 22 % of immigration. That's legal immigration, by the way. That needs to be cut down to 10%, again, with the caveat that I would prefer a full -out moratorium for the next seven to 10 years. It just has to stop. We've learned what diversity is. And unfortunately, what these elites have been telling our children that are going to these elite colleges and universities, and not even just the elites, I don't care if you go to community college nowadays, the stuff that they're teaching in these schools are just loony. And these people are graduating and running our country. This is Carl Jackson in for the great Dennis Prager. We'll be back in a few pretty soon. I got so much more to get to. It's insane. Stay tuned.
The Maverick Paradox Podcast
A highlight from 21st Century Icons in business
"In this episode I speak to Sally Percy about what it takes to become a business icon. We talk about her book 21st Century Business Icons and the importance of businesses working for the greater good and the challenges women face in being seen as extreme mavericks in leadership roles. This is a wide ranging conversation about the leaders who are changing our world. I create clear thinking and decisive leaders who can amplify their influence. Contact me to find out how I can help you or your organisation. And today our guest is Sally Percy. How are you doing Sally? I'm great thank you. How are you? I'm doing really well thanks. And I was wondering what types of things make you sing in the shower? Oh, sing in the shower. Do you know I don't know if I do a lot of singing in the shower. I do a lot of thinking in the shower. Like trying to solve creative problems. Like maybe think of a headline for an article in my tube or something like that. But I don't really do a lot of singing in the shower. Do you do a lot of singing in the shower then? I'm more kind of like humming in the bath. It's probably nearing me. What makes you hum in the bath then? You know what I think it's definitely mood driven. Do you know what I mean? So it's sometimes kind of something with a really kind of like heavy beat that I would be like kind of like dancing to myself. And other times it'd be more kind of contemplative, you know, when you just, as you said, you just like your brain is just open to input. You can tell you're a journo. Look how you turn that round on me, sneaky woman. You're going to have to watch me with this one. You know, you are going to have to watch me. I like that. No, I do like that. That's really cool. So I've called you a journo. Tell us more about you. So I am a now a business journalist, and I've been a journalist for about 20 years now. I did a few things before I became a journalist. And when I first became a journalist, I was actually living in New Zealand at the time. That's my boyfriend, now husband. He's from New Zealand. And I went out there and I got, he was from a rural area, he's from a farming family. And I got a job as a rural reporter on the local newspaper, which was quite funny because I was a vegetarian from London. I didn't know anything about farming, really. It's quite eye opening. I do now know a lot more about farming and I'm probably a bit rusty on it, so don't test me too much. And then I stayed out there for a couple of years and I found New Zealand a bit quiet. So we came back to the UK and that's when I really started to become a business journalist. And I originally joined Accountancy magazine and became editor of Accountancy magazine. And then after that, I decided I sort of wanted to broaden myself out of it and not be too focused on accounting and finance. And so over the years since then, I've worked freelance and I really moved myself much more into the general business space. And I particularly like doing leadership and management. I'm currently editor of Edge, the magazine of the Institute of Leadership. And recently I have and I've written two books. One was called Reach the Top in Finance. I wrote that in 2017. And then my most recent book is 21st Century Business Icons and that kind of profiles some of the world's best known business leaders. And I really enjoyed doing that because I learned a lot from them and found out a lot about them.
The Crypto Conversation
A highlight from Scaling Business with AI Superpowers
"Hi everyone, Andy Pickering here, I'm your host and welcome to the Crypto Conversation, a Brave New Coin podcast where we talk to the people building the future in the Bitcoin, blockchain, and cryptocurrency space. Five years ago, deep in a bear market, a group of traditional finance experts founded Bitget, and they've been building ever since. Now with 20 million users worldwide, Bitget is committed to helping users trade smarter by providing a secure one -stop crypto investment solution with copy trading, future trading, and spot trading. Your security is their priority and Bitget has one of the largest protection funds in the industry with US $300 million to cover potential trader losses from unforeseen events that are not due to misconduct from the user or platform. Bitget wants to inspire everyone to embrace Web3, so if you're new to crypto, learn more at the Bitget Academy with free blockchain courses, crypto guides, cryptocurrency trading strategies, and more. Or for the experienced investor, trade smarter with daily access to institutional -grade crypto market intelligence and trends analysis with Bitget research. I've put links to Bitget research and the Bitget Academy in the show notes, so get amongst it, or simply go to bitget .com. Thank you to Bitget, and now it is on with the show. My guest today is Justin Flitter. Justin is the founder of New Zealand AI, among other things. Welcome to the show, Justin. Cheers, Andy. It's nice to be here. Nice to have you here. Let's do what we do at the beginning of the show, Justin. I'll invite you to please introduce yourself. Love to just hear a little bit of your, I suppose, personal and professional backstory and what has led you to getting involved with AI. Yes, my name is Justin Flitter. I'm the founder of New Zealand .ai. We are the place where New Zealand businesses start their AI journey. And how have we got to be here? Well, I'm a marketer by trade, I guess, and along the last 20 -odd years have been curious and interested in emerging technology and how that plays out in marketing and business. I guess I can kind of share around the communities that we've created, whether that's the Young Professionals group in Wellington in 2006, we were getting 300 under -30s in monthly events coming and learning from each other through to founding the Auckland Social Media Club in 2009 and getting 300 people a month coming along to those events right at the kind of forefront of social media for business. And then in 2016, I was working for a company called Results .com and their board investors had come out of Diligent, which had a mega exit, and they'd invested in and created this company called Aria, which was a natural language processing organisation in the UK. And I started becoming curious around how natural language would impact the world of marketing, certainly as we were seeing devices like Amazon Alexa and Google Home and all sorts of things that we were starting to talk to these devices. And the way that we ask questions verbally is quite different from the way that we type things in a search bar. And so I started going to a whole lot of vendor events around Auckland and meant a whole lot of other people working in professional services like me trying to figure out what AI was, what the potential was, is it another fad, what's going on. And so I did a whole lot of research and eventually started a meetup called the AI Show. And the first event was at a dark and dingy bar in Britomart, but Shannon Thomas, who was then the external PR and comms lead for IBM New Zealand attended and she said, oh, we'll host the next one. And so then started quite a long partnership with AI Show and building an events programme, getting 200 -300 people a month along for several years, where we would showcase companies utilising artificial intelligence and share the expertise and the tools and the tech enabling the capability and discussing some of the pressing issues around how AI was changing people, society, the way we work. And yeah, and so that's kind of really been the journey. And I guess, you know, we ran AI Day, which was the two biggest AI conferences in New Zealand in 17 -18. And then COVID hurt and everything kind of went into hiatus, so we went back into some marketing contracting. And then in October last year, OpenAI launched ChatGBT and it completely changed the game for everybody. What's fascinating about this, Justin, is, I mean, the reason that you and I know each other, or at least are aware of each other, we're not sort of good friends or anything like that. But I've known who you are for more than a decade. And the reason for that is, you know, we've both been on Twitter, or what used to be called Twitter, for, well, let's just say for over 10 years, and certainly in, you know, smaller countries like New Zealand or tech communities, you know, it's easy to see, you know, those kind of identities such as yourself pop up. And it's incredible, though, if you kind of think back that, you know, AI, and I'll say blockchain as well, crypto, Bitcoin, have been reasonably, you know, from a mainstream perspective, reasonably esoteric, and very much niche topics for discussion on, on, let's say, Twitter, but, you know, suddenly, you know, the world is changing. And these things very much are going mainstream. And as you pointed out, you know, the world really literally did appear to change overnight at the end of last year, when, yeah, the first rollout of ChatGPT was unleashed into the wild, right? Absolutely. Yeah, it's doubled the website traffic. And all of a sudden, I was rebuilding the website and getting booked to speaker conferences and run workshops and things like that. And I think it's really, you know, I mean, AI has been around since the 50s, since that Dartmouth University, and the UK with Alan Turing and his cohorts. But, you know, for many decades, it's really been sitting in the research labs and, and, and for the, for the first time for the general public, I think ChatGPT makes AI interactive, we can use it, our mothers and fathers and our daughters can use the same tool that we might use for our research assignment or to understand complex charts, or to write a blog post or to research new markets. And, and that's just a staggering change in people's perception of what artificial intelligence could actually do for us. And, and so putting it front and centre and giving everyone a browser based, free, interactive experience where these machines are talking back to us in human language, is seismic. Indeed, and the Turing test has finally been passed and, you know, in spectacular fashion. So, you know, Justin, you work with an array of different businesses, I'm sure, smaller, smaller businesses, larger scale businesses. And, you know, you consult with them to help them identify, I suppose, the different ways that AI can perhaps improve their business processes. But I'm conscious also that, you know, a lot of businesses are a little bit conservative when it comes to the adoption of new technologies, they need to be risk averse. So it's often kind of tech savvy individuals are the ones that are first able to really leverage these new tools. But so curious, give us give us a sense of how you see and find to talk about New Zealand, you know, how you find the business community, what's their approach to the sudden availability of easy to access AI tooling? Yeah, on one hand, I think a lot of CEOs and C -suite leaders are asleep at the wheel here. And they're really, you know, they're a little bit, you know, they're not, I don't think they're paying enough attention to this at all. Yeah. On the other side, we are seeing a groundswell of change. And, you know, we've been running an AI for Business webinar series and workshop series through the Employers and Manufacturers Association. And, you know, one chat GPT webinar we did a month ago, we had 1200 people on the call. And so this is, you know, this is this is workers across all all levels who are starting to use personal chat GPT accounts to short shift their work. And so they're using it to augment some of the tasks that they have to do every day to increase productivity to help them do things faster, smarter. And a lot of senior leaders are seeing that activity. And they're concerned they don't have necessarily the same knowledge. They, you know, a lot of C -suite leaders I talked to have never even used chat GPT. I get asked questions around how do I install it? I'm like, you already have it installed. You simply have to open the browser. And so they're concerned around so what are they pasting? What are they sharing? You know, are they sharing our software code? Are they sharing, you know, customer information? What are they doing with us? And so they're putting the roadblocks on it. And we're seeing, you know, that's not the right way to be necessarily to be thinking about it. We need to be leaning in and we need to be providing the education and the resourcing and the guardrails around these tools the same as what we would do with any other new technology that's coming to the market and any new software tools that we have at our disposal to enable people to use them safely and responsibly. Yeah, absolutely. Well said. And, you know, one of the, I suppose, for the, you know, enterprise use cases, one of the faster growing sectors will be, I guess, the custom chat models that are native to a particular business. So that's important so that you can ensure, you know, whatever internal data that your business have that is obviously you want to keep that secure. But if you can have a chatbot that allows you to, you know, query your own data in any way possible, then that is an immediate benefit to your business and it alleviates some of those privacy concerns. Yeah, so I think, you know, certainly that's one of the most common use cases for businesses getting started on their AI journey and that's to unlock organizational data. And so we're seeing generative AI and conversational AI platforms now where you can integrate all your different company data sources, whether that's, you know, your finance with Xero or your Microsoft 365 and SharePoint or your file storage, your CRM, your ERP, all of these different types of data that you have, which are all traditionally siloed and specific job functions, can now be woven together into this mesh of data that generative AI can cross -reference to help you better understand the business, to generate new insights, to generate new content, to create new workflows, and ultimately to automate some of that repetitive processing that you have in your business, which sucks up employees' time and unproductive work. Yeah, and what's incredible about AI is the, you know, it is causing, let's just say, tensions, right, in almost every sector of society, if not now soon. So obviously in business we've talked about that a little bit, but like one other sector, of course, it's a simple one, but education, Justin, for example, you know, I have a 13 -year -old son, so he goes to what we call secondary school here in New Zealand. He'll start secondary school next year and I can see already that there's, I'm sure there's disagreement amongst, let's say, you know, school boards or amongst school teachers as to what is the best policy in terms of, you know, do you allow students access to AI tools? Do you try and, you know, run their essays through these clunky AI, you know, scanners? It doesn't work, it doesn't work. You can't detect AI writing. You can't, you can't. No matter what they say, you can't do it. That's right. So it's just like, this is a bit of a, yeah, a tricky one, Justin, but what do you think is the correct approach? And obviously it can evolve over time, but if you were heading up a school's education department at the moment, what would you say? When calculators came in, did schools ban calculators? Just, you know, like, you know, yes, but people can, they're still buying them at home, right? So, you know, banning something automatically creates demand for people to use it. Like you're saying, don't do this. So then everyone goes and does it. It's, you know, facts or well, whether you can call chat GPT fact -based chat GPT is a large language model that's designed to convince you that the next word in the sentence is correct, right? So it's, it's a production, a production model. So all it's, so, you know, you can't rely on, on the information that it's, it's given you all the time. There has to be a human in the look. It's there to augment our work. Now, if as a, and there are, there are schools and you know, obviously my opinion is that's just the completely wrong way to think about it. It's, it's it's naive. And, and we, and it comes because of a lack of education, a lack of awareness and lack of knowledge around how to use and leverage these. And you look to the, the US and, you know, when, when colleges are on holiday chat GPT usage goes down 30%. And so, you know, no matter what you, what you decide to do as an organization, students are going to be using this tool at every level of their education, because it can be that coach, mentor, support person, teacher, that's, that gives them that, that confidence that, that they need, right? It's there with them at every different stage of their learning journey so that they don't have to start from scratch. They're asking a question, they're getting a response, they're able to have a discussion about that particular topic. And so instead of the education system asking them, is the answer this or this? The answer, the question should be, how do you interpret that answer? Why do I think more deeply about that particular topic? Contextualize that response. Why is that meaningful? And so you, I guess it's, it's how we're thinking about critical thought. And, you know, we're, you know, you've got the entire world's knowledge base sitting in the DBT. You can literally ask it anything you want and, you know, generally get a reasonably good, reasonably good answer out of it. You do have to check it, but, you know, how we, how we, how we teach people, how we ask them, how we score knowledge and, and test knowledge and, and contextualize those insights for the world around us is something that, you know, we need to be getting students to do, to do more of. You know, I mean, I was at, I was at a University of Auckland, I was delivering a marketing lecture a few months ago, and a student asked me, he was like, if the lecturer gives us a book to read, why wouldn't I just go to chat GBT and ask it to give me a summary? And my answer was, because when you get into the next class and the teacher asks you what happened in chapter 13 to Mike, and how did that play out for the result of the story, you're not going to know the answer. So, you know, it's, it's only giving you a certain amount of, you know, knowledge. It's not giving you that contextualization in terms of what those ideas mean in the world that you live in. Yeah. Thank you, Justin. Very well said. You know, I mentioned the, you know, the tension across different parts of society. So another part of society, Justin, is, I suppose you'd say, broadly, the creative industries, but I'm more specifically thinking of, you know, tools like Mid -Journey and Dali, the incredible kind of, you know, on -demand instant photography, instant image generation. And it's incredible just in the last 12 months, much more sophisticated. Something like Mid -Journey has gotten, you know, a year ago, an AI couldn't really generate a realistic human hand. But now they can. And it's, if you extrapolate at forward five or 10 years, it's fairly easy to see that eventually you'd be able to generate, you know, short films or even like full length films from a detailed prompt, which is crazy to think about. But yeah, it'd be tough being a digital artist or graphic designer at the moment. I mean, you know, we're on the cusp, certainly in the next couple of years, of 80 -90 % of the content we use in marketing or, you know, many sectors being generated by AI. And that throws up a whole lot of unique challenges. But at the moment, like we're seeing short films being created, I mean, you know, two or three minutes. And at the moment, these are four to six second snippets stitched together with a soundtrack and a voice overlay, or voiced as well using AI. And so you've got Runway ML, you've got Pixel Labs, you've got a whole bunch of amazing tools. And I would say, given the pace of change, three to five years, I think we're seeing, you know, we're seeing, you know, full feature, full length movies being able to be generated. And you've got the ability where, and this is where that kind of writers and artists block and Hollywood is coming up because, you know, we can clone voices, we can clone actors. And so, you know, there's a, we can make people say and do anything we like once we've got some footage or some audio of them, which of course, makes that whole production of traditional films a whole lot easier. Because if you need, you know, it might take away the need to do a reshoot. If there's a slight tweak, then you could use some AI to do a slight tweak to something with editing and certainly in the post production. But none of this stuff is particularly easy just yet. And none of it's like particularly that good just yet. And certainly, you know, we've got a guy here, Steve Ballantyne, who runs an agency called Brand IQ. And they designed the cover for the New Zealand marketing magazine a couple of months ago. And, you know, that would have taken hundreds of hours to build the layers and the artistry around that. So, you know, while we're seeing some parts of production and execution being automated, the ideas and that creative freedom is just exploding. Yeah, it really is. And look, well, if that's the case, then, Justin, if AI is both a revolutionary tool and a weapon, what do we do now? That's the topic of the panel that I'm on at the Devonport Library tonight. It is indeed. Yeah, look, there's some immense global challenges around us. And, you know, we're seeing, you know, challenges around, you know, battle for Taiwan with between China and the US around semiconductors and the race for compute power and, you know, the computer parts that process the artificial intelligence. And, you know, along that we're seeing a race with Microsoft, AWS, Google, Facebook, and all of these that are, you know, they're all trying to vie for an advantage in the capability to generate, you know, to generate AI powered systems. So we're seeing, you know, drones now, you know, swarms of drones replacing firework shows. And so there's, you know, while there's always a super exciting, amazing, positive, humanity changing use case for almost all of those, there's also a potential for weaponization. And we're seeing the likes of the EU and debates around Capitol Hill discussing and regulations around privacy and copyright and those sorts of things. And, you know, certainly there are going to be some movements around that. The EU always takes a lead on these types of things. And generally, you know, New Zealand's a follower, not necessarily a fast follower, but a follower. And so we're kind of looking to the instruction and the guidance from the EU in terms of what that might look like. But, you know, it's a super complex environment. Some might argue the cat's out of the bag with lots of these things. You know, no one knows what's going on in the research labs necessarily. I mean, we've just seen, you know, we've got Neuralink, which is putting chips into brains to help people with different diseases and things like that to short circuit their processing. And now we've got a another startup and I'm just trying to find it actually. I posted it on LinkedIn this morning. And so they're actually building, they're actually putting growing brain cells around a chip. And so they're doing the complete opposite to Neuralink. And so that, yeah, so this guy was at, is at the brain conference in San Francisco today. He's Hon Wing. So Cordica is the name of it. And, you know, yeah, they're putting brain cells around chips instead of putting chips around brain cells. And I think there's, you know, a whole lot of, holy crap, what's coming next when we start thinking about the implications of that around GPU and computer processing and, you know, how we still haven't created AI or chips that are nearly as good as the human brain. So, you know, could this be a paradigm shift? Indeed, indeed. All right. Well, look, Justin, as we finish up this part of the podcast, just for anyone listening who's interested in learning more about what you and the team do at New Zealand .ai, I guess that's the best place for them to go. But yeah, where should people go? What should people do? Yeah, so we help businesses understand and learn where AI can thrive within their organization. We run a series of workshops, both kind of AI lunch and learn style, which is kind of AI for everyone. We do an executive leadership workshop where we deep dive into strategy and the potential use cases, how we're preparing the organization and building out that strategy and roadmap. And then once we kind of get to that point where an organization goes, yes, that's a really great solution, you know, the things that we can create using AI we couldn't imagine or do any other way, then we engage different partners from around New Zealand. So we don't produce any tech. We don't make any tech. We leverage the amazing technology businesses around New Zealand and in Australia to enable that. So we're bringing in partners to design, build and integrate those AI -powered systems into those businesses. So yeah, we're the place for businesses to start their AI journey and, you know, right through from curiosity to integration, we're helping to support that process. Awesome. And listeners, just go to New Zealand .ai link, of course, is in the show notes. Let's go do a very quick break and then we'll come back. We'll finish off. We'll have some fun. We'll run Justin through a slightly modified version of the very famous crypto conversation. Hot tech ground back in one second.
Milk Crates and Turntables. A Music Discussion Podcast
A highlight from Time Travel to 1994: A Journey into the Music and Movies of that year.
"Well, here we are, episode 119. And on this episode, myself in the wrecking tube, Mark Smith and Lou Colicchio from the Music Relish Show. We'll be talking about the year 1994, in music and movies I think, it's always interesting. So sit back, relax, break out your flannel shirt, your grungy jeans, and enjoy 1994 music. It was an interesting year, so I think you'll enjoy it. More interesting than what Todd Zauchman thinks it is. He thinks it's nothing, so we'll see. The KLFB studio presents Milk Crate and Turntables, a music discussion podcast hosted by Scott McLean. Now, let's talk music, enjoy the show. Thank you, Amanda, for that wonderful introduction, as usual. Welcome back, my friends, to the show that never ends, and welcome to the podcast. You know the name, I'm not gonna say it. We're streaming live right now over Facebook, YouTube, Dlive, Twitch, and X, formerly known as Twitter, and I don't know how many other live platforms. Well, it's gonna be a good show tonight. It's gonna be an interesting show tonight. Yeah, 1994. As I said in the intro, my friend Todd Zauchman just absolutely sent me a text destroying the year 1994. Oh, I just looked up 1994, I don't know what you're gonna talk about, there's a few things and I don't know how you're gonna make a whole show out of it, and good luck with that, because that's how he talks. That's exactly how he talks. I'm just gonna do this, and you know, it's not gonna be a good, blah, blah, blah, blah. That's how he talks. Now, he'll deny that, and you'll never know if that's the way he talks or not. He'll just have to take my word for it. I'm Todd Zauchman, and I don't know about 1994. Well, enough about him. He'll probably be piping in pretty soon, but yeah, 1994, it's a good year. It was a good year for Mark Smith from the Music Rellers Show and Luke Colicchio from the Music Rellers Show. That's for damn sure. It was. What's up, gentlemen? It was a really good year. How you doing? I was just guessing. I figured for 94, listen, we were all younger, so it was better. It was a big year. Hey. So I have to stop right here. Dave Phillips, who's been watching the podcast from pretty much day one, Patty Yossi. Hi, Patty. Good evening. I love you. Dave Phillips, for the last couple of weeks, he's piped in at the end, and he's like, I missed it. Like something's changed. Ah, Tiffany Van Hill. That's my buddy. That's my buddy, Tiffany. She's one of the people that teaches me how to work with horses. Oh. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So. And she knows what she's talking about. She's modest, but she's very good at what she does. As are all of my friends and teachers, trainers, mentors from The Herd Foundation in Delray Beach, Florida. It's a nonprofit if you're in the mood to donate today. Look them up. Herd Foundation. Give us some money. Nah, I'm not going like that. No. No, we do. We help veterans. We help veterans, and so it's a good cause. But back to Tiffany. Yep. That's my buddy. Good evening. The Herd Foundation teaches us so much. That's right. That's right. Maybe I'll do a Herd Foundation podcast. You should. Since I'm pretty good at it. You're going to have horses on? What's the horse named after the cookie? Huh? Isn't there a horse named after a cookie? What are some of the horses' names? Oh, Fig Newton. Fig Newton. Yeah. Fig Newton. That's my boy. That's my boy. Good looking horse. Yes. Yes, he is. And we have Stitch. Fig Newton is a retired dressage horse, dancing horse, right? Echoes of Echo and the Bunny Men bring on the dancing horses. We have Stitch. He's a retired racehorse. We have Miss America. She's a retired jumper. Then we have two mini horses. We have Cinnamon. She was a cot horse. You know, pulls the kids around. As would be Sammy. Sammy's the one that looks like Kaja Gugu for you people from the 80s. Looks like Lamal. It looks like Lamal from Kaja Gugu. Gotta do. And he was saved from a kill pen. Yeah. But he's a mini, but he thinks he's a Clydesdale. What do they do with horses after that? Is that the proverbial glue factory? All right. You know what? Right away. Penalty box. Oh. He's raining on my parade. I'm in a good mood. Now I'm all bummed out. Thanks. You feel sad for the drummer now. This is going to be a horrible show now. Leave it to the drummer. Right, Mark? Leave it to the drummer. Get out. It's always the drummer's fault. That's right. See, Tiffany says, that does not exist past our gates, Lou. Because nobody wants to talk. Back to the penalty box. Great start to the show. Lou is just in a mood tonight. I think he's been hitting the whistle. What's going to happen? You're going to come back and it's going to be an empty chair. He's very ornery tonight. Right away. He's very ornery. All right. He's filling his oats, as they would say. Yeah. All right. Lou's back. I'm all right. I'm all right. Okay. Enough about horses, although I could now, at this point, talk about horses for two hours. I love it. I love it. But instead, gentlemen, first of all, how's things on the music relish show? You. Take it away, Lou. Sure. It's fine. It was such an awful show. I thought I said the wrong show for a second there. It's been nothing short of amazing. Don't jump over each other to answer that question. It's always fun. Last week was fun. We got knocked down a bit by Warner Brothers because we played a clip of an America song featuring Dan Peake. Yeah. You're going to watch that. Yeah. We talked through the whole thing, but Spotify is much cooler than YouTube. YouTube sucks like that. YouTube, they have a very strong algorithm. They can kiss my rosy red ass over that. That's right. You tell them, Lou. Fuckers. That's right. Get me kicked off YouTube. That's right. Let me see. John Morris, he was our shift commander. When I met him, I was, I think, a two striper, and he was what they called a butterbot. He was a second lieutenant, I believe. He said, tell them stories from the Nipah Hut in the Philippines. That's a big no. That's a whole other podcast, but they would never make it on the air. Just leave it at that. It's like a chain of Nipah Huts? No. It was a bar slash club called the Nipah Hut. Tell one story. No. They had a giant spaceship that would come down from the top. It's kind of like George Clinton in parliament. At the end of the show, this big spaceship came down from the top. Smoke. Like you said, parliament fucking pelican. Then the thing went open, and everyone would walk up and get up on stage, all those drunk GIs. Like, yeah, I'm going in the spaceship, and you go down these stairs, and you're in a fucking basement. I don't think it was a basement. It's like something from a fucking horror movie. How do you get out? And then somebody goes, this way, this way, go, go, go, go. That's the cleanest story I can tell you. It's the cleanest story I can tell you. Sounds like fun. It was a lot of fun. It was a lot of fun. I got a story for you off the air one of these days. So okay, music relish show's going good. Excellent. I just wanted to say, Lou brought up, he made the show. His segment on bad love songs. That will go down in history as some of the best podcasting ever. Bad love songs? Really bad love songs. The worst love songs of all time, like in rock. It's a deep vein. Is that something, is that like content I could probably like borrow with Perry Mind? Because I'd love to hear that list someday. We voted him off the board. We're no longer a false triumvirate democracy. Wait a minute. We toppled the AI monarchy. There's three of us on this one. Are you two going to overthrow me too? Are you like rebels? None of those stories you're told, no. They're wrecking too. Instead I'll start calling you the Sandinistas. The hostile takeovers. You go on podcasts just to take them over? Like Amiens took over the White House. Really, yeah. Yeah, we could do that. I would love to. Maybe next week we'll do, we'll take a break from the years and we'll do like a, kind of a jambalaya, you know, of stuff. Like throw some music news in there. We'll do some trivia. Maybe I'll come up with some questions for you guys. You could give us that deep vein of worst love songs ever. And it's funny, we noticed that several of them made everyone's list of worst love songs. So it's got to be universally bad. Okay. If everyone said that, that fucking song. Then there were a couple where I said I liked the song, but Lou and Perry were like, what? I'm always, you know, on the one side. Yeah, the one. When it falls into like that kind of metal, metal category, you have a soft spot. Air metal. Metal ballads. Oh my God. How I grew up. Yeah, yeah. As young as Ron Mark, you didn't have to deal with those 70s ones. Yeah, that's true. I did. This fucking guy. Blah. See what I mean? He's setting the bar high. Remember, this is how he talks. I don't think there's anything good about 1994. Blah. So he talks like Arnold Schwarzenegger. Yeah, well, an American Arnold Schwarzenegger. He talks like Arnold Schwarzenegger without the accent. We're going to pass the bar on this one. I am here. Let me see if you can entertain me. 1994. Blah. All right. So let's actually get right into 1994. Yeah. So we'll start on January 19th, 1994. Bryan Adams becomes the first major Western music star to perform in Vietnam since the end of the Vietnam War. Oh, shit. Bryan Adams. Bryan Adams, yeah. Wow. On January 21st to February, as it's spelled, the Big Day Out Festival takes place, again, expanding from those previous years. Blah, blah, blah. Auckland, New Zealand. The festival is headlined by Soundgarden, Ramones, and Bjork. Nice. That's an interesting... Probably each night there were headlines. I would love to see Bjork. Me too. I would never want to see the Ramones. They'll never get back together again. Unless they perform in the Pet Sematary. Yeah. Hey, Lou, can you put him in the green room? No, I'd like that one. That's a good one. Come on, there's a little crossover. Put him in the green room. Put him in the green room. Okay, yeah, yeah. Oh, it's going to be a long show. It's going to be a long one tonight. I feel better about myself now. Got a little redemption? The redemption song? Yes. I got a Buffett story for you. Oh, yeah? His one song was The Pirate Looks at 40. He would segue into Bob Marley's redemption song. Oh, jeez. And it didn't quite... Wait a minute. Buddy, that is the quickest way to get to the penalty box. I'm not playing it, though. I know you're not. You're poking the rhino right now. I'm a guitarist. You're poking the rhino right now. You're not a rhino, you're a nice guy. Come on, we went through that last week. And so, as I've been saying each week, I'm just going to say right now, where's Jack? Okay, and we'll move on from that. Hey, Jack. Hey, Jack, please come back. He didn't listen before, so I don't think he's listening now. Let's see. January 25th, Alice in Chains released their Jar of Flies album, which makes its U .S. chart debut at number one on the Billboard 200, becoming the first ever EP to do that. Right? But they still are always talked about as like number three or number four out of the big four. Big four being? Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Soundgarden. And Alice in Chains. Alice in Chains is never getting that kind of... Whereas... That first album, the record company made them sound like another band. Yeah. And that's not their fault. They were produced that way. Dirt was a great album. Yes, yes. And Layne Staley was one of the greatest frontmen ever. Just as cool as the other side of the pillow, as they say. Yeah. voice Very unique also. Today we were talking about what we were going to talk about in the show. And he goes, when I saw the videos, he goes, I didn't match his face with the way he looked. Right? He said he was expecting like a grungy, more... No, he was slick. He was slick. In the Man in the Box video, he's got the kind of long... But then he changed it up. He slicked the hair back, he wore the shades, you know. Just turned into a... Suzanne McPhail. Another one of my horse people. She's the one that introduced me to that whole thing. And she said, who's Jack? That's right, I guess. At this point. On January 29th, The Supremes' Mary Wilson is injured when her Jeep hits a freeway median and flips over just outside of LA. Wilson's 14 -year -old son is killed in the accident. What a good day. Ah, this fucking... I saw this and I was like... Dead horses was a bummer. I know, I know. I saw this and I'm like, there's no way around this. February 1st, Green Day releases their breakthrough album, Dookie. Ushering in the mid -1990s punk revival. Dookie eventually achieves diamond certification. Now, I did like them back then. I actually did. I was stationed in Southern California in Riverside. And I decided to get like a side job. You know, I was in the Air Force. But I was like, I want to make a little more money. I want to do something. So I got a job at a record store. Cool. Was it Spencer's or something? Forget the name of it. Oh, Spencer's. They sold all the trinkets, too. No, no, it wasn't Spencer's then. It was something like that. It was a chain. Hot topic. They sold DVDs, too. FYE. No, it wasn't that. I'll remember it. I was working there when Dookie came out and the fucking whole wall was covered with Dookie CDs and they were flying off the shelves. It had a pretty fresh sound. It was fresh then. And coming off the 80s were kind of slick in a lot of ways, except for some of the real heavy alternative. But to hear a song like that on the radio, that was like hearing Smells Like Teen Spirit on mainstream rock radio. Good drummer, too. As a band, whether you like him or not, I think he's really good. Billy Joe Armstrong. Oh, Trey Cool. Trey Cool, yeah. February 7th, Blind Melons lead singer is Shannon Poon forced to leave the American Music Awards ceremony because he is loud and disruptive behavior. Poon is later charged with battery assault, resisting arrest, and destroying a police station telephone. Now, this is the dude that sang, you know, And I don't really care if I sleep all day And he's in the daisy field, so you think he's like this really, like, chill dude. And like, you know, me and the B -girl, man, you know. The B -girl, yes. And the tap -dancing B -girl, and like, I'm just this dude's a fucking lunatic. He was taking substances that made him. Oh, yeah. That was a short career. Was it him that did a duet with Guns N' Roses? What was the video, a song from Guns N' Roses with a video where they're up on like a water tower and they jump into the water or something. I forget what it was called. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe they did it with him.
What Bitcoin Did
A highlight from Making Bitcoin Carbon Negative with Daniel Batten
"We're in a position, because of that cheap price of electricity, where the people who are doing this form of Bitcoin mining, they'll be one of the most resilient on the network. Hello there. How are you all doing? Did you have a good weekend? Did you enjoy the sunshine if you're here in the UK, or the rain, or the snow, wherever you are? I hope you had a good weekend. There's a great one here, my football team. The men's team won their game in the FA Bath. We beat Blackwell Heath. We're through to the next round. And our ladies also won 4 -0 against an Auburn City women. We're now unbeaten. The ladies have won all six games at the top of the league. So great weekend for football. Very happy here. Anyway, welcome to the What Bitcoin Did podcast, which is brought to you by the legends at Iris Energy, the largest NASDAQ listed Bitcoin miner using 100 % renewable energy. I'm your host, Peter McCormack. And today we have Daniel Batten on the show. Now Daniel is someone we've been trying to get on the show for a long time, but living out in New Zealand, trying to do one in person became tricky. But when we announced that we were going to have our event in Australia, Daniel got in touch and said he wanted to come over. So while we're in Sydney, we made it happen. Now Daniel is one of the most vocal proponents of Bitcoin mining's positive impact on the environment. He launched his own fund, CH4 Capital, with the bold challenge of taking Bitcoin mining down to carbon neutral, and perhaps even carbon negative. Now, I know ESG -type topics can trigger some Bitcoiners, and I totally understand why. But Daniel was playing their game at them and pushing Bitcoin as a solution, not a problem. So I hope you enjoy this one. It's got a funny intro. We talked about his acting. It's kind of funny. I hope you enjoy that. But if you have any questions about this or any feedback, you know where you can get me. It's hello at whatbitcoindid .com.
Simply Bitcoin
A highlight from Europe's Anti-Bitcoin Bill Reveals Plan to Stop Adoption | EP 829
"It's all going to zero against bitcoin it's going up for ever more you're against bitcoin you're against freedom yo welcome to simp with bitcoin live we're the number one source for the peaceful bitcoin revolution we will be your guide through the separation of money and state speaking of the separation of money and state interesting news coming out of Europe kind of not as bad as the proposed bill by Elizabeth Warren that we covered on one of simply bitcoins simply bitcoin lives episode this week but it's something very similar right this idea that every single transaction needs to be KY seed right and then I think that will inevitably lead to the any host unhosted wallet needs to be KY seed all right the the wording specifically in the Elizabeth Warren bill included any minor any validator any software wallet so you know it's just of course the powers that be that tremendously benefit from having a monopoly on the creation of money having controls on money of course to benefit themselves of course they're not going to be okay with this and this was the theory that was originally you know put out back in the 90s in the book the sovereign individual I'm going to read you guys a passage from that book because I think it correctly predicted exactly the reactions from governments I don't think governments have been able to they're not used to this environment where they have competition and most importantly not only do they have competition but they can't shut down the competition right because we remember we saw Facebook try to launch their own you know digital currency and they got shut down real quick the thing with Bitcoin right and Bitcoin only right because aetherium is inherently centralized meaning it will inevitably be co -opted so they have no choice but to ally with the state and they were in order to survive but with Bitcoin can't be stopped and because it can't be stopped it creates a forcing function in the long term as more and more individuals choose to opt out of inflationary money into deflationary money so yes of course times are changing but it's not only on the money front right we're not only living through the disintermediation of money but we're also living through the disintermediation of information and yesterday was a historic day I've never seen this in my life the UK Parliament sent Russell Brand an extremely popular independent content creator a letter to rumble we love rumble by the way we're on there subscribe to us on there and shout out to our rumble audience as well it's been growing by the day so we appreciate you all they sent a letter to rumble asking rumble to demonetize Russell Brand like YouTube did so we have governments that are directly asking platforms to demonetize content creators of which they don't did they don't agree with that is absolutely absurd and these are the same governments that want you to trust them with central bank digital currencies if they had central bank digital currencies in place they wouldn't even have to ask the platforms they could just flick the switch themselves so when we say Bitcoin or slavery or how beauty on said it and I'm starting to lean this way to Bitcoin or death we are not exaggerating and you have to choose what world do you want to live in in the future and most importantly what world do you want the future generations your children your children's children to live in so it's gonna be a great episode I'm really looking forward to it you have to stay on top of what's going on anyways we also we also have a very special treat for you guys we have the head of customer experience from foundation devices the maker of the passport hardware wallet and he's gonna do a live demo for us during the culture cement segment so I'm really really pumped about that let me bring up let me bring him up on stage Bitcoin Q &A you're quite well known on Bitcoin Twitter as well how you doing buddy yeah doing very well thank you very much for having me I'm psyched to shoot the shit with you guys this evening well even in my time but yeah certainly some interesting goings on especially around the Russell brand thing so I'm sure we'll be able to share some insights on that one but not a good look yeah I completely agree man it's it's some some interesting times we are living through people some people call it the fourth turning I don't know man but the phrase that sticks with me the most is weak men create hard times hard times create strong men strong strong men create good times we're definitely going through this era and then I think it was actually Vladimir Lenin that said the very very famous quote right where there are decades that nothing happened and then there are weeks that decades happen I think we're definitely living through this moment of time anyways no more delay let's bring up my legendary co -host not optimistic today no smile oh there's this smile sorry I was caught reading the channels optimistic fields how you doing bro well I am doing wonderful and I'm actually really excited for this culture segment today guys I got a sneak peek of the demo that we're going to see and I think there's gonna be awesome this might be a simply Bitcoin first for the live show but to the news stories and stuff it really just goes to show that if you speak the truth you are the enemy of the state and I think more and more and more people are waking up to this because they either continue to de -platform you from your banks or de -platform you from social media for saying what they don't want to be said you know for saying the quiet part out loud and you know this is why we do our show in a very particular way so that we can survive on YouTube but man it really just goes to show that the powers that be are completely terrified of people talking about the truth hence why you guys need to talk about it more and continue to spread that signal but it just goes to show that this is the the last I don't know the last gasp of the great Leviathan you know what's them saying like darker before the dawn like this is their last grasping at straws to control the truth and and I mean I've been saying for a while I think the monopoly on truth is slowly and dwindling they're going to try to make examples of this so you know just be prepared we know what's coming so protect yourselves protect your family and continue to spread the Bitcoin truth the Bitcoin signal actually just truth with a capital T I suppose anyways Niko let's let's get into this one let's get into this one let's get into the show man I'm really really excited alright guys let's get to the numbers we have a lot to talk about today and I'm super is your Bitcoin in cold storage really secure is your seed phrase really secure stamp seeds do -it -yourself kit has everything you need to hammer your seed words into commercial grade titanium plates instead of just writing them on paper don't store your generational wealth on paper papers prone to water damage fire damage you want to put your generational wealth on one of the strongest metals on planet earth titanium your words are actually stamped into this metal plate with this hammer and these letter stamps and once your words are in they aren't going anywhere no risk of the plate breaking apart and pieces falling everywhere titanium stamped seeds will survive nearly triple the heat produced by a house fire they're also crush proof waterproof non -corrosive and time proof all things that paper is not allowing you to huddle your Bitcoin with peace of mind for the long haul stamp your seed on stamp seed alright guys I literally made it super easy for you guys you can scan the QR code on your screen it will take you directly to stamp seed website you can get you could store your generational wealth on titanium so you don't have to explain to your children why you lost your Bitcoin because you stored it on paper you can use promo code simply get 15 % off anything on the stamp seed website at the time of recording the Bitcoin price is twenty six thousand five hundred and seventy sats per dollar three thousand seven hundred sixty four block height eight hundred eight thousand seven hundred twenty nine blocks to having thirty one thousand two hundred seventy one having estimate April 21st 2024 total lightning network capacity four thousand eight hundred fifty five Bitcoin capacity value one hundred twenty nine million US dollars realized monetary inflation one point seven five percent the market capitalization of Bitcoin currently sitting at five hundred and seventeen billion dollars Bitcoin versus gold market cap four point zero one percent in the grand scheme of things Bitcoin is still a baby if Bitcoin reaches not if when Bitcoin reaches the gold market cap that is five hundred thousand dollars per coin and I think that's just getting started anyways we played you guys a video yesterday of a member of the United Nations talking about how we are in an information war we played you guys the video and she was basically recommending that that that they no longer have people to call on on Twitter to censor information she was also saying how there's an army of people that are propagating United Nations approved information well you know she's she's talking about as if the information that's coming out of the United Nations is a matter of fact right she's talking about the problem of disinformation disinformation well my question to you guys is who gets to decide what is disinformation and what is information right well we advocate for on simply Bitcoin is individuals not central planners not governments using their own critical thinking abilities right to dictate okay this is a good idea this is a bad idea right this is how the American this how the American Constitution it's literally written like that that there's a reason that the First Amendment is the way it is right the government or Congress should make no law you know basically censoring or stopping the freedom of the speech of people right and they made it that way for a reason because if there is a central authority if there's a government that gets to dictate what information is true what information is not true history has shown that they'll use that power to protect their own political mode right so thank God for the internet thank God for technologies like Bitcoin thank God for technologies like Noster for example they can't do this anymore and because they're not able to do that they're freaking out number one and number two and number two it becomes a forcing function over a long period of time but that doesn't stop them from trying here is the former New Zealand Prime Minister at the United Nations saying that that words are weapons of war right weapons of war if so if you say something against the government that all of a sudden becomes a weapon of war and again this has escalated it is escalated to the point where the UK Parliament has asked rumble to demonetize Russell Brand who's a very popular content creator who goes against the legacy corporate media's narratives right and it kind of embarrasses them so what are they doing they're attacking his money they're saying rumble okay they can't they've tried to deplatform people before they've gotten a lot of pushback so what they do instead is that they attack his pocketbook obviously YouTube complied they demonetize Russell Brand's content but rumble said no we're not doing that so love that of rumble we're on rumble we support rumble that's awesome but another thing that I want to say is that the allegations against rubble Russell Brand are just that they are allegations they have not been proven so something that has not been proven is a justification to shut off someone's living that is insane anyways let's check out this letter and this is a letter by part by the UK Parliament the specifically the cultural culture media and sport committee to the CEO of rumble Chris Palavoski who says dear Chris I'm writing concerning the serious allegations regarding Russell Brand in the context of of his being a content provider on rumble for more than 1 .4 million followers the cultural the culture media and sports committee is raising questions with the broadcasters and production companies who previously employed mr. brand to examine both the culture of the industry in the past and whether that culture still prevails today however we are also looking at his use of social media including on rumble where he issued his preemptive response to the accusations made against him by the Sunday Times and Channel 4 his dispatches while we recognize that rumble is not the creator of the content published published by mr. brand we are concerned that he may be able to profit from his content on the platform did you hear what they said the government is concerned that Russell Brand might be able to profit from his content because there was some allegations made against him conveniently a lot of Russell Brand's content is criticisms of the government so I mean big coincidence I guess you would you could say we would be grateful if you could confirm whether mr. brand is able to monetize his content including his videos relating to the serious accusations against him is so we would like to know whether rumble intends to join ryu tube in suspending mr. brand's ability to earn money on the platform we would also like to know what rumble is doing to ensure that creators are not able to use the platform to undermine to undermine the welfare of victims of inappropriate and potential potentially illegal behavior so they asked rumble to demonetize a content creator an independent content creator that's the key word when we had Parker Lewis on the show and I was talking about the legacy corporate media he didn't say no Nico it's not the legacy corporate media it's the legacy government media so anyways why is this happening I think Jeff Booth said this perfectly we read this to you guys the other day and this all boils down to the money this is why we say as Bitcoiners fix the money fix the world here's Jeff Booth he says because broken money Elon Musk said how did most of the legacy media go from superheroes of free speech to supervillains of speech suppression and Jeff Booth says because broken money ensures the centralization of power by stealing the productivity through inflation that should flow to society in the form of lower prices then those enriched by that theft and subsequent power must control the messaging to keep it but it all it wasn't only Jeff Booth that said this here's an article from our friends over at Bitcoin magazine of nine Bukele the president of the country shining on the hill the Savior El Salvador the first country that made Bitcoin legal tender the beachhead for the Bitcoin movement around the world he goes on to say the most vocal detractors the ones who are afraid and pressuring us to reverse our decision are the world's most powerful elites and the people who work or benefit from them they used to own everything and in a way they still do the media the banks the NGOs international organizations and almost all the governments and corporations in the world and with that of course they own the armies the loans the money supply the credit ratings the narrative the propaganda the factories of food supply they control international trade and international law but their most powerful weapon is their control of the truth and they're willing to fight lie smear destroy confiscate print and do whatever it takes to maintain and increase their control over the truth and everything and everyone I think come from Nico or simply Bitcoin that came from the president of El Salvador name Bukele so what is happening here two things are happening here thing number one the internet has empowered individuals and those individuals can now use the internet to uh to grow these massive platforms themselves and because they're individuals they're a lot harder to co -opt and at the same time we are witnessing the distance remediation of money that internet has allowed Bitcoin and Bitcoin has empowered individuals to choose their own money too so government states NGOs international institutions right that have had this privilege of having not only having the monopoly in the control over money but also the monopoly in the control over information it's quickly diminishing in front of their eyes and of course that system is fighting back they can't take that they've been used to operating in a system where they've been able to control the narrative they've been able to control the truth and that is slipping through their fingers and they don't know what to do and that's why they're short -circuiting the way they are that's why we've gotten to a point where the UK Parliament is literally asking a platform to D monetize an independent content creator not to mention all the stuff that was revealed during the Twitter files where it was exposed that the US government even though that is explicitly against the US Constitution the government should not be censoring speech was asking Twitter to D platform D boost and censor certain speech and these are the same governments that also want you to trust them with central bank digital currencies and they expect you to believe that they're not going to use central bank digital currencies as a weapon as a forcing function in order to control your actions as a individual and this was all predicted I might add in the book the sovereign individual which we'll get to during the new segment but this is some crazy times now what can you do to protect yourself in this particular situation do your own research pick what information sources you choose you you want to choose I love Twitter because it's like a news aggregator and the the news that you know pops up pops up Noster is a great platform rumbles a great platform YouTube is is good to do your own research don't rely on a single information source and then most importantly the most empowering thing you could do is to opt out of state money opt into Bitcoin I think that's the most powerful thing you could do look the most important the most important vote you can make that voting for a Democrat or Republican it's not to say that it's not important to vote but the most powerful vote that you can do that will actually change things is voting with your wallet opt out and the way that you do that is you buy Bitcoin earn Bitcoin mine Bitcoin and take that said Bitcoin into self custody the moment you do that you're part of the peaceful Bitcoin revolution whether you are aware of it or not and that is how we win if enough people take self custody we win and there's nothing they could do about it speaking of self custody we have the head of customer experience with us today Bitcoin QA and you guys make it super fucking easy to take self custody with the hardware wallet that you guys make and not to mention the awesome application that you guys make so Bitcoin QA what's your take on this whole Russell brand stuff I can't believe we've reached this point if I would have been told this five five six years ago I would have said that's impossible there's no way that's that that's so ridiculous what's your take on all this yeah before I enter you I've just got to say that was one hell of a fucking monologue I take my half to you that was fantastic yeah kudos and yeah the whole Russell brand thing man just completely shocking another example yet another example of government overreach Russell brands been a thorn in the side of the UK government if you can't tell by the action by the way to anybody's listening that I'm from the UK and he's been a thorn in their side for years and he's a very well educated man he's very well spoken and he has drawn a lot of following by speaking out against money printing against government policy he was rabid about the whole covert thing pharmaceuticals getting rich because of you know yeah you know all of the corruption that went on over those couple of years and I see this recent letter as that them seeing the opportunity as they're into trying you know get one back on him you've touched on earlier that the fact that all of these are just allegations at the moment and the fact that they're going around trying to take money off him from you know he's not been convicted of anything at all that's not see won't be but right now they're just allegations and they're trying to take his money off him it's just completely shocking and they're just trying to lash out because he's been a pain in their ass royally for years so yeah I mean they're just they're just overreaching and leveraging their powers wherever they can just to kind of deep platform and then hurt his wallet as well unfortunately yeah 100 % they attack his money they attack and again like they attack his money and they're also like hey guys these CBDCs like we'll respect your privacy you could trust us what are you talking about anyways Opti what's your take well I actually I kind of want to ask Q &A question because there is some talk about this in the chat what's your thoughts on Russell Brand being like controlled demolition Q &A whoo how do you mean like basically that this is like an orchestrated attack you know once everyone's talking about this maybe Russell Brand isn't necessarily as much of a truth speaker as people are making him out to be like does he actually believe what he's saying or is this just kind of one of those things where you know you create a figure and then you kind of tear him down to discredit the whole movement in general the whole truth movement yeah possibly I think I think most of what he says is genuine he before he started doing all of the YouTube stuff like he was he was a you know some form of a celebrity he had a big following and could have monetized himself as a product in many many other ways by coming out and being as outspoken as he has against the the prickly topics of like money printing and you know COVID etc he must have known you know he's smart enough to know that would have been incredibly divisive to people that followed him so I lean towards the fact that he's genuine and the fact that they're probably gonna try and use him as a scapegoat to warn ward off other people that kind of speak out against any government policy etc etc yeah I'd agree I mean like especially considering what his status was it's hard to follow the incentives and be like yeah he's got a lot to gain from this when in reality he's on the verge of losing everything so I'd agree with you and then just kind of going back to the beginning of this rant and and people are saying epic daily Nico Jones rant today so good job Nico I like when Nico gets get animated remember growing up guys when I grew up I had a saying and I'm sure your mother told it to you as well and we all probably said it in kindergarten you know sticks and stones but words may never hurt me and now we grow up in a world where words are violence like what is going on guys and that's a convenient it's a convenient way I know Nico I was getting there I'm asking rhetorical questions on the show now okay I'm learning some Nico Jones tactics but as we know guys as we know guys you know if you can stop words from being said then you can stop thought and if you can stop thought then you can ultimately stop behavior and this is where they're going they want to ensure that you guys sell censors so that you guys don't lose everything and this is where we are guys that they are absolutely afraid of people speaking the truth they're absolutely afraid of the average person waking up and exposing all of their lives because that's all they have they have lies and favors and they have the monopoly on truth as we think now is more important than ever to speak your minds to make sure you're having these conversations to as the saying goes you know speak truth to power and all that good stuff because there's been a constant theme throughout 2023 or actually rather since 2020 basically is that if your voice is too big and you talk against the establishment then the powers that be will do anything they can to put you back in line and whether that means you know breaking your reputation taking all your money dragging you through the court of public opinion we know what their tactics are and if you're following along closely then you know what the playbook is and it's almost like they're doing the same thing over and over and over again but I think the silver lining of this is that it seems like their playbook isn't working as well as it used to which in some sense should be absolutely terrifying because then they're going to go to even more extremes and you know I'm not gonna say what everyone's thinking but it's gonna get crazy guys and so I think it's just becoming very very clear that as an individual just even a normal person that doesn't have a platform like you want to do whatever you can in your power to protect yourself and hence why we always say that it always boils down to the money guys so protect your money protect your livelihood by taking your Bitcoin into self -custody by saving in Bitcoin and because remember guys this is always about theft they want to take your wealth and put you back in your place and then distribute it and make everyone feel good and we're seeing this happen in real time and it isn't lost on me that this is done via a letter you know it's just like hey how nefarious can a letter be but if you're reading in between the lines then you know how nefarious this letter actually is and that this is a coordinated attack on someone that's talking against the establishment and if people like Russell Brand you know say what you want about him but if people like him can't speak about the truth and they also get run through the grinder like imagine what would happen to an average individual like there's no hope for us if people of that stature can't talk about what's actually going on in the world and hence why it's so important to continue to double down on independent content creation spreading the truth talking about all this stuff because this is all we have we have the truth on our side and as the saying goes you know the truth will set us free so just just don't be afraid you know be brave but also be smart out there and the best thing you can do is just protect yourself and protect your money protect your family and I think as more people do this then the world will slowly but surely start to fix itself anyways you know amen we'll see what happens amen preach brother all right everybody let's get to the news we got a lot to talk about today let's check it out no no no no no no before we do that before we do that I have to give a shout out to our awesome sponsor Bitcoin 2024 it's gonna be the largest Bitcoin conference on planet earth it's gonna be in Nashville Tennessee it's not gonna be in Miami this year July 25th through the 27th 2024 you definitely want to get your tickets quickly before the prices go up for a GA it's 349 for an industry pass it's 849 for a whale pass it's four thousand seven hundred forty nine Opti and I are gonna be there it's gonna be awesome check out Bitcoin 2024 in Nashville Tennessee the year of the having Opti and I are gonna be there some other simply Bitcoin members are gonna be there it's gonna be awesome use promo code simply to get a 10 % discount on the already discounted tickets to Bitcoin 2024 all right now let's hit the news the daily news I want to give a shout out to our sponsor foundation devices it's self -custody done right they built a premium grade hardware wallet called passport right here in the u .s.
Cinemavino
A highlight from Legend
"And welcome back to cinema vino. We've got a two man game going. It's me and Sean Jordan. Just one little handshake over here. Coming at you. We're like a garage band, two members just coming at you with some hard rock. Tenacious D. Yeah, exactly. Or the black keys, the white stripes. Yeah. Yeah. Both of those. Yeah. Yeah. There you go. Summer Chaos is now, this is the home stretch. Mine Meg. If this is the white stripes. Yeah. I think you're going to have to be. All right. Yeah. You're holding down, you're playing. Lying down the ones and the twos. Yeah. You're playing the quarter notes. That's about it. Yup. No fills. Which is how I like my drums anyway. She made the notes in the vamp up to the chorus. A little bit. That was one of the first songs I learned. There was a little bit of flavor. It was like a rice cake with a little bit of salt on it. Not a lot of salt, but a little bit of salt. Yup. So, this is a penultimate episode of Summer of Chaos. We're going to talk about legend. No, it's not penultimate. We've got this and then we've got Battle Royale. Oh, and then Dread. You're right. Dread. So, this is. And Robocop. This is penultimate to the penultimate. Yeah. Penultimate recording. And then I think Robocop's a gap. It's just kind of in between. Right. We just toss it in just because it sounds. Gap here. Yeah. Just a little bit of something to fill in. It's like a caulk that we used in between some tiles. Don't like that. But that's the metaphor I went for and there you go. It's a grout, ladies and gentlemen. Yeah. Drinking that imagery, won't you? So, we're going to talk about legend with Tom Cruise and we're drinking some white board dough. For those of you who are coming in late to this series, basically, we do a random wheel. We spin a wheel. We put a bunch of varietals on the wheel and also like beer and cocktails. Whatever the wheel picks, that's what we do for the Summer of Chaos. These movies were all picked out at random. We put random movies in the hat, drew them out. So, pretty much anything goes for this entire summer. And so, same thing with wine. Anything goes. So, for this one, we got white Bordeaux. This is Chateau La Fresnel. This is a 2022 white Bordeaux. Little bit of background for those who may not know. We were actually talking about this before the podcast that Bordeaux is now known as a red wine region. But up until about 50, 60 years ago, it was a white wine region. It was known for its white grapes. Bordeaux are going to be... White Bordeaux are primarily Sauvignon Blanc with some Simeon and some Muscadel. There's a few other grapes they mix in there, but those are the main three that you're going to see. Then they're mainly Sauvignon Blancs. Is this kind of like how like the Republican Party and the Democratic Party kind of switched identities somewhere in the like 40s, 50s? Around the New Deal? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Basically. Now, it's like five, six to one red wines to white. It used to be the opposite. You'll also see a type of wine made from these same grapes called a Sauternes, which is going to be... It's made completely differently. It's going to be a lot sweeter, a lot more sugary. Those are very fancy, high -end, expensive white wines. So, basically, just from the price tag alone, you'll never confuse a Sauternes with a white Bordeaux. These are going to be more affordable, you know, $15, $20 range. Not super sweet. It's a little more tart, a little peachy? Dry. And the first thing I think of is Sauvignon Blanc. And these will have some characteristics of the same characteristics of other Sauvignon Blancs in the world. They're going to be a little bit grassy, a little bit citrusy, grapefruity. They're going to have some of those same kind of flavors to them. The main thing that's going to distinguish these wines is going to be... I've heard it referred to as minerality. I've heard it referred to as wet concrete. I've heard it referred to as chalk. Tasty. Yeah, limestone. But kind of that dry, refreshing edge that you don't necessarily find in other parts of the world. Kind of like what brings the harshness of mineral water versus the softness of tap. Yeah, exactly. That's a good way to put that. Yeah. It's got like a bite to it. It's got kind of like a... Little edge. Yeah. And you don't find that... Like for example, New Zealand's often been known as grapefruit bombs. Big fruit bombs. And you don't see that as much. This is my favorite region for Sauvignon Blanc. They're balanced. That's why I love French wines in general. They don't go out of the way in any one direction. They're nice and balanced. And so it's great for that. This one has that nice... It's got some grassiness to it. It's got some fruit. But it's dry. And so this would be great. I mean, people say seafood. I'm not a big seafood fan, but kind of a lighter seafood meal is perfect for that. You're not a big seafood fan? Not a big seafood fan. Period? Not really. Shrimp? I mean, I don't mind shrimp. It's not my first thing I go to. Lobster. Yeah, same. Bass. Catfish. I don't mind catfish. I've had some catfish. That's garbage. Catfish is garbage. But I remember when we went to Barcelona, we took a cooking class. It was on our honeymoon. My wife and I, we did a... It was all seafood. We had some paella. We made some paella. We did octopus. We did squid. I mean, we tried the gamut of seafood stuff that they had in the Mediterranean. It was like... That was a good indication. It's like, I don't like this. This is not for me. Yeah, not my taste. It's fair. It's fair. But I will say that we did a wine kind of similar to this, a Spanish white. And yeah, this would be perfect with a wide variety of seafood. Some of the stuff that's bigger and more buttery, you might want to go for a white burgundy, like a chard. But this is a good hot weather, outdoor type of wine. It's nice and refreshing. I like it a lot. Yeah, 25 bucks, not a whole lot of money. But yeah, any good wine store, you should be able to find a nice white Bordeaux section. So look for those while the weather's still warm. But now, legend. Talk about this movie a bit. This was released in the United States April 18th, 1986. So... You say in the United States. Where did it come out before? It was released in Europe the year before. This had a very difficult production. This was a difficult movie to realize. It has a lot going on. So this grossed worldwide $23 million against a $25 million budget. In 86? That's a big budget. Huge. And for several reasons. A big reason for that is that when they started filming, a fire broke out and burned down the 007 studios where they were filming at Leaves in England. So pretty much had to build new sets. That's probably all the magic. Exactly. Yeah, some of the Sprite costumes caught fire. Or the unicorn hair. I can imagine, yeah. It's one wrong look, that unicorn horn. Yeah, it's gone. But they had to build new sets. And Ridley Scott's original cut of the movie ran for between two and a half, three hours. So... Jeez. And the final cut was like, what, hour and a half? Yeah. The version that I watched, I don't know if you saw the original 89 -minute version or if you watched the director's cut. I think I watched the 89 version. Okay, I looked around. I had trouble finding it. That's the version I know the best, so I went back to that one. The director's cut? No, the original. Oh, the original. Yeah. There's a director's cut out there. Is it like two to three hours? No. So basically, when the final cut of this print was released, Ridley Scott watched this cut and freaked out and thought that basically American audience couldn't grasp this much plot. And so he cut the film basically in half, down to 89 minutes. And when it came out, it got mediocre reviews. Obviously, he didn't do well at the box office. He just watered it down too much? Yeah. Gene Siskel put this as one of his worst movies of that year. And the international cut that came out the year before was 93 minutes. And it got a little bit better reviews, but still not great. And then in 2002, somebody found a full work print of the movie in a can somewhere. And so they took that out and restored it, remastered it, and really Scott added about 25 minutes to the cut that the director's cut. So it comes in at like 115 minutes, give or take. And he and Tom Cruise have gone on the record saying that's the version to see. I was going to say, I was reading that Tom Cruise saw the movie in theaters and was like, that's not the movie we filmed. Yeah. That's not it. I mean, you could imagine with that much cut out, it's going to be almost incoherent. It's like a whole other act. Yeah. Yeah. And so basically, the director's cut, yeah, it's a whole other fleshed out thing. And I have seen that once. I saw it when it came out. I think I've got that on DVD somewhere. And the one thing I would say is it does, it adds a few scenes. It makes the motivations a little bit deeper, especially for the character of the darkness and his relationship with the princess, Lily, and the stuff there. It's kind of just, not to cut to the chase, but it just kind of comes out of nowhere. He's just like obsessed with her. He's just like, oh, I must have her. It feels very rushed. It feels like a plot of necessity, not like a plot of, you know, any reason. They're just like, we need to stall him. How do we do it? Love interest. Yeah. And it's like, it's like I'm telling a story to my three -year -old and it's like, I got to kind of get something else in here. You got to kind of yada, yada, yada over motivations. We're coming in for a landing too quick. We got to just shoot. Pull up. Yeah. But so basically, this is a fairly straightforward fantasy story. Tom Cruise plays Jack, who is a protector of the forest. I was a little vague on what exactly he is. Is he a bard? Is he a ranger? I mean, he'd be more druid than anything. Is he a druid? Yeah, I couldn't place what he was supposed to be. It's like, this is where we need Travis. Yeah, he would be. And if Travis had an answer to that, I would be impressed. Because to me, they don't spell that out at all. I guess he would be more of a ranger. Yeah. Because he didn't really have any sort of like shape -shifting ability or had any ability to talk with trees. Really, his only thing was he had like one -on -one connection with the sprites, right? That's about it. Yeah, he had good buddies. A working relationship. And he wore a loincloth. Yes. So there was that. Dude, he was showing that thing off. He was. And that's what I, you know, in that situation, it's like, check out my hairless legs. My supine body. Yeah, check out these smooth legs. But, so Mia Sarah plays Lily. Now, this is her starring debut. Next year, she would go on to play in Ferris Bueller, amongst other things. Her hair when she transforms into a dark version. Awesome. Now, this great production value is great. Everything, costumes, hair. For 25 million, it better be. Yeah. Yeah. And those are real unicorns. Yeah, they better be. Yeah, I mean, now it's like, that'd be 100 million plus to make this thing. Easy. Easy. Easy. So yeah, Lord of Darkness, played by Tim Curry, who is unrecognizable in the mountain of makeup. Honestly, but might be one of my favorite representations of the devil. Yeah. Like, this makeup job is incredible. And in theory, we'll get to this later, that should be great casting to have Tim Curry. Yeah. I almost want to see more of Tim Curry in the face. Like, see more of him, you know. Almost, you know, Faustian devil and Daniel Webster kind of thing, where it's like, you can see like him being rascally or whatever. But yeah, so Lord of Darkness seeks to cover the world in darkness. Plot out the sun. Conveniently, yeah. Typical plot device. For that, he needs the horn of a unicorn, which is the most sacred and majestic of all fantastic creatures. Basically, he wants to take the unicorns out of the world, take the horns out of the world, and the world. The representation of purity. The horn of the unicorn. Yes. The world goes dark. Everything turns into kind of a barren, frigid tundra of darkness. He just has goblins that work for him inexplicably? Yeah, incompetent goblins. Yeah. It's nice. But they rhyme. They talk in riddles. They do. They do rhyme. But you know, he kind of has the James Bond villain of incompetent people working under him, you know. If anything, that's the thing that slows him down as much as, you know, these James Bond villains. Like, you hired a bunch of idiots. He also has, like, the Bond villain thing of, like, doing a lot of monologuing? Yes. Let me vamp for five minutes while you prepare your thing to destroy me. Yeah, let's me blather.
The Crypto Conversation
A highlight from Everlasting - Securing Timeless Value On-chain
"Hi everyone, Andy Pickering here, I'm your host and welcome to the Crypto Conversation, a Brave New Coin podcast where we talk to the people building the future in the Bitcoin, Blockchain and Cryptocurrency space. Hey team, we have a new sponsor here at the Crypto Conversation, BitGet, one of the world's leading copy trading cryptocurrency exchanges, yes indeed. What happens if you've got the funds to invest but you don't have the time to keep track of the market? You still want to make smart money moves? What do you do? Well, copy trading is a popular choice for beginner traders. You can shorten your learning curve by uncovering tips and strategies from more experienced traders. BitGet's copy trading platform has over 80 ,000 elite traders to choose from and 380 ,000 followers just like yourself who are already using the BitGet copy trading platform as a potential passive income stream. All it takes is one click, you can subscribe to an elite profitable strategist, set your limits, automate your orders and monitor their trades. I've got some links in the show notes below, one link will take you through to the BitGet sign up page, give you a VIP discount. So learn all about it for yourself, thanks to BitGet and now it is on with the show. My guest today is Paul Salisbury, Paul is the co -founder of Everlasting, a digital currency hybrid custody initiative founded here in New Zealand but making its way all around the world going global, welcome to the show Paul. Thanks Andy, it's great to be on the show again. Great to have you here Paul, look we'll do what we do at the beginning of the show, it would be nice if you could reintroduce yourself for the benefit of those listeners or watchers who are unfamiliar with you, with who you are, just love to hear a little bit about yeah I guess your personal and professional story, crypto journey if you like and what has led you to where we are today with Everlasting. It all started right back at 2012, I was over in Switzerland and yeah did you know kind of come across Bitcoin, thought it was really interesting but it wasn't until I actually moved back to New Zealand at the end of that year that I was like I should go a bit deeper and maybe there's some more use cases here that aren't explored and you know looking at payments and international transfers that side of things personally was quite exciting but then professionally things ramped up pretty quickly so by 2014 helping one of Australasia's first Bitcoin funds based over in Sydney to actually structure their controls and security using multisig for all the you know the Bitcoin that they were amassing at that time on behalf of their investors so that started me down the security side of things actually looking yeah okay and since then I've also founded Blockchain Labs which was doing smart contract auditing and you know professionally I've worked with everything from individuals, fund managers, lawyers, companies, DAOs, protocols and you know treasuries on chain to make sure nobody loses money right that's always the goal at the end of the day. Yeah I like it and look listeners just you know for some additional context here I should point out I guess that I have known Paul professionally and I suppose the New Zealand blockchain circles for a number of years and as as much as sometimes you can think in crypto man it is it gets really depressing when you see all the different exploits, hacks, scams and just the the general nefarious activities that that do go on and crypto sometimes you think man there's just so many bad actors I can you know a heart hand on heart say that Paul is a good actor he I think you'd describe yourself as a white hat Paul in terms of the security professional space. Very much part of that doing responsible disclosures on ongoing you know vulnerabilities all of those kinds of things and that's also to your point there something we don't hear as much about we hear about when there are losses and we don't actually celebrate when hey we got out in front we actually prevented a massive loss of funds and sometimes the confidentiality around that is warranted so people aren't panicking or losing faith in that particular protocol but yeah this means that we only hear when things go wrong but there are actually a lot of professionals like myself that are very tightly coordinated around the world to try to be in front of as many of those vulnerabilities as possible. Yeah so well a shout out to the the white hat community if you like all around the world doing their best to advance the technology forward on behalf of the good guys so I guess that's it's kind of nice context then Paul to learn a little bit more about Everlasting and I can see that there are you know different branches if you like to what you guys are trying to do but I think that the core of it is you want to help different segments of the crypto user community keep their assets safe so perhaps we can begin there however you like just tell us a little bit about what Everlasting is.
Telecom Reseller
A highlight from Unified Communication for a Diverse World: Unraveling the Magic!, HoduSoft Podcast
"This is Doug Green and I'm the publisher of Telecom Reseller, and today I'm very pleased to have with us for the first time on the podcast series, Karthik Kampati, who is the co -founder and chief business development officer at HodooSoft. Welcome to our podcast. Thank you, Doug. It's absolutely a pleasure. Thank you so much. Well, we're introducing to many of our readers and listeners for the very first time, HodooSoft. They are a company that just recently joined the Cloud Communications Alliance, so we're very pleased to do this podcast on behalf of the CCA and the TR publications. We're going to be talking about unified communications for a diverse world unraveling the magic. And it's not often that we get to use the word magic in our podcast. So we're going to be diving right into that. But first, what is HodooSoft? Yeah, so let me just give you an overview. We started our journey in 2015, and it has been a very good journey thanks to all our customers and partners. We are into unified communications. We have two of the flagship products. One is HodooPBX, which is a multi -tenant IPPBX software. It is used by MSPs, ISPs, ITSPs, hosted service providers to offer a business telephone system. That is one part of it. The second product that we have again is HodooCC, which is an only channel contact center software. And also it is part of a unified unified communications umbrella where we have two variants. One is, of course, the single tenant, which is used by the consumers or the I would say the enterprise customers, including banks, insurance, finance, e -commerce, call centers, contact centers, BPOs. And we also have a multi -tenant version, which is again used by ISPs, ITSPs, MSPs, managed service providers. So majorly, specifically like we now have almost 330 customers spread across 51 countries and in six continents. And especially in North America, we have almost 45 customers. Majorly are MSPs again. So yeah, this is what we are and this is just the beginning. We have a lot of things to do and we are very, very young. And our mission for next five years is to have 2 ,000 plus customers in 100 plus countries. And our vision is to build a brand, HodooSoft, which is purely based on our values. We are very honest. We are transparent. We are committed to our thoughts and through this, we build trust with all our customers and partners globally. Thank you. So for a diverse world, you guys have a very diverse portfolio. It sounds like you have something for everyone. You're able to accommodate enterprises, but you're also able to offer MSPs, ISPs and carriers a solution that they can then in turn offer their customers. And you even have contact center solution. Yeah, that's correct, Pat. We have brands like UNICEF, which is the world's largest NGO, especially for the childcare. Afghanistan Bing of UNICEF uses HodooCC, the call center software for a very noble cause. And they eradicate polio using one of our products, which is HodooCC, which is a great, great, I would say, effort towards a better human, towards a better future where the child are being given the vaccination and everything is track, recorded and monitored using HodooCC. Especially, they use the survey module to take the surveys, post the vaccination of their kids, which is really noble cause. Then the other brand that we have is AvistaPrint, which is a Nasdaq listed company. They use HodooPBX, which is the business phone system. We have Brother Printers, which is a Japanese printing brand. Similarly, we have many customers, both in enterprise as well as who are MSPs in US and other countries as well. So, Karthik, where's the magic? What's the magic? Yeah, so the magic always is something which we believe is into, you know, people tell to me about B2B, business to business, B2C, business to consumer. I believe the magic is in S2H. It's about being human to human, where we connect with people, where the product, the unified communications helps to connect between different stakeholders of any business. Let me give you a simple example. Say, UNICEF, right here, the stakeholders are basically the parents who are basically giving the vaccine to their kids or their infants. The other stakeholders are the UNICEF representatives who go to house to house and they give this vaccination of polio to them. Then the other stakeholders in this complete process are the agents who take their feedbacks and service. So, how we can use this unified communications to engage all the stakeholders, which is very important because, you know, it's always said and which is a thumb rule, 80 % of the work is done through transparent communication and 80 % of the problems also occur because of the communication gaps. So, how with this unified communications we can collaborate, communicate and reduce these gaps to engage with the stakeholders to make it very uniform through the technology and how we can help to achieve the goal. In this case, supposed to vaccinate and take feedback from the parents. Say, in other case, which I was just discussing, say MSP. So, how they can offer this hosted telephony as a service or hosted contact center as a service to their customers and make sure that all the customers are happy because their customers then again engage to their customers, right? So, it's a complete change. So, basically, the objective is that if the customer is happy, then the MSP is happy. If the MSP is happy, we as the technology partner grow together and create this magic at all the levels of the stakeholders, including the customers, including their agents, including their consumers, right? For a bank, the consumer is an individual, right? For any service provider, the customer is the person who awaits the service. Similarly, in every segment, you have a customer or a consumer who wants to be continuously engaging with their service providers. And I always believe this, rather than being reactive, let's make it more proactive, right? That's where the unified communications plays a very vital role. So, it's very interesting what you said during this, that in addition to working to offer outstanding technology and software, you are focused on the human aspect of communication and you have in your assembly of clients, you know, household names in the work of doing good things, such as UNICEF. Yeah, no, I think, see, at the end of the day, we both are speaking, right? And today we are more connected to become more better as human beings. Now, when you connect human to human, technology helps us to do that. It is just the bridge between connecting the people. But more important, the biggest stakeholder in any business is a person, a human being. So, when you are honest and transparent and when you connect with people, then, you know, your trust with your customers, slowly, I'll be connecting that part into my ecosystem and then you trust me and then your customers start trusting me. That is nothing but basically edge to edge, which I always believe it's the human to human and then the business grows automatically, right? The revenues, the profits, the technology are all the byproducts of it. But the code is how honestly, transparently and how you are committed towards the work to create a value for the customers. Now, looking at the technology, I understand there's two areas that you have worked on that make your technology very accessible. That part of your MSP and carrier story is enabling the use of Teams. Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, the HODO PBX, which is a multi -tuned IP PBX software, which, as I said, majorly used by the MSPs, ISPs, ITSPs, they do come up saying that how we can integrate with Teams. It's a very, very fast moving thing from Microsoft and it's really nice. So, we have through our partner where we integrate HODO PBX with Microsoft Teams and the customers offer them as a service with the strengths of Microsoft Teams and HODO PBX coming together. It makes the MSP more stronger and then they can offer the truly unified communications to their customers as well. It's, again, basically connecting people to people. That's for unified communications. And I also understand that your new version is very up to date with regard to Steershaken. Yeah, yeah. So, that was something which was being asked by our customers. So, we were really focused on it. So, we have the Steershaken compliant, which is especially useful for our customers in the US. As I said, we almost have 45 MSPs who are working with us. And, of course, we will grow with more and more people and connecting with them. So, Steershaken is one of the technologies which is very, very important and especially on the compliance side. So, yes, HODO PBX is now compliant with Steershaken and we already have started deploying the new versions with our current MSPs and we'll be looking forward to have more for the new MSPs as well. So, how do you do business with HODOsoft? Do you go through a dealer or a channel or can you deal with you directly? Yeah, so currently we are working directly, but we are also working and discussing with the channel partners in America and in other regions as well. Currently, the majority of the business in North America comes directly because we work with MSPs. But in other regions, like we have customers in Africa, we have very good customers in APIC India, we have good customers in Brazil, we have a customer in Chile, and also we have customers in Australia and New Zealand. So, there we have more channel -driven, which is growing very nicely. U .S., we are still working directly, but yes, we would like to grow the channel as well. You know, in addition to being a software company and to engineering great solutions and so on, I take it with our discussions before we started our podcast that you're a value -driven company, that at the end of the day, the real objective is to help people. Yeah, I always say this. See, the human is the biggest stakeholder of any business, right? Now, when you connect with human technology like Unified Communications, it's helping us to connect with people, right? But the biggest asset in any business is the human being. That's why I said it's not about B2C or B2B, it's always about edge to edge. It's about human to human. You like me, I like you, build relationship. And this relationship is going on with respect to my actions, right? So, how is my action? Am I honest when I'm speaking, when I'm executing something? Am I transparent in my work when I'm discussing with my customers, when I'm discussing with my partners? And am I committed to deliver what I have committed to my customers and my MSPs, right? And through this journey of being honest, staying transparent and delivering as per the commitment is a journey towards building trust with humans. When you build trust, then your trust with your customers is already there. And when I build trust with you as a human, that's where we create a bigger ecosystem where humans connect through the technology, which is the unraveling of the magic. The magic is not in the technology, the magic is always in the people. And the people are the true force of any technology, and it's not vice versa. Thank you. Well, you know what, it's very refreshing to start my day here in Portland with that very interesting idea. I've got some podcasts ahead of me, but I'm enjoying the fact that I just heard what it's all about. So, and that's the magic. So, where can we learn more about Hodosoft? Yeah, you can have more details on Hodosoft .com. And again, it's just a website, it's about engaging with the people, engaging with my team and feel the difference, feel the change. And that's what I am, right? Let's connect, let's build relationships, let's build trust, business will follow. Well, I know we're going to have you on this podcast series again. I've really enjoyed having you here. I'm looking forward to hearing the news about Hodosoft. But Karthik, thank you very much indeed for joining me today. Thank you, Doug. Thank you so much and thank you so much for all the discussions and all the comfort that you have given to me. I look forward to have the next discussion with you. Have a great day and God bless you, my friend. Thank you.
Evangelism on SermonAudio
A highlight from The Necessity of God's Word (Part 2)
"Do you understand the magnitude and significance of the effort that we are part of when we engage in taking the Gospel to unbelievers? Find out much more on today's edition of Encounter God's Truth. We go back to Appalachian Bible College in Mount Hope, West Virginia to hear the closing portion of a lesson on The Necessity of God's Word and our series on biblical apologetics. I'm Wayne Shepard and our Bible teacher is Dr. John Whitcomb. We've been learning together from this classic series on apologetics and today's program brings us to the finish. As fall approaches and so many head back to school, how appropriate it is that we focus on the energy that scripture has to impact our hearts and minds with God's eternal truth. As Dr. Whitcomb demonstrates, it's more formidable than the greatest human intellect and even more powerful than seeing a miracle. Let's go back to Appalachian Bible College now and hear the conclusion of this message, The Necessity of God's Word. We begin by reviewing 2 Corinthians chapter 2. Who is sufficient for these things? My friends, we're in an infinite operation here that determines the eternal destiny of human beings in heaven or hell. Who's sufficient for these things? For we are not as many which corrupt the Word of God of sincerity, but as of God, in the sight of God speak we in Christ. Now friends, we can just begin to realize the magnitude of God's plan here in form of a little chart. I hope this will be of some help to you as it has to me from time to time. Over here we have symbolized the unbeliever with a darkened heart that doesn't have cleansing and purifying and forgiveness and regeneration by the Holy Spirit, the unbeliever. And notice that he is surrounded by an impenetrable barrier to any outside finite pressure. It's called his sinful nature. And over here we've tried to depict the believer whose heart has been cleansed by the Holy Spirit based on the merits of Jesus Christ. And the believer may fall into the serious temptation of trying to win the unbeliever on a horizontal basis, namely just provide Christian evidences to penetrate that heart through logic and philosophy and history and science. And by the way, all these arguments that we've talked about through archaeology and history and logic, I mean there are hundreds and hundreds of evidences that show that the Bible has got to be supernatural in origin. But the amazing thing we discover is that no matter how powerful the arguments are in the realm of creation and prophecy and so forth, they cannot penetrate that heart. They cannot get through to that heart. Well then what's the answer? What's the approach? God says you have... Now this is very illogical from a human standpoint. God says you have to approach the unbeliever through the third heaven. You have to go this way, through prayer, faith and obedience in relation to God on the basis of Hebrews 4 -12, the word of God, not my word or your word. The word of God is living, powerful, sharper than a two -edged sword, piercing even to the dividing center of soul and spirit and of the joints and marrow and is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart and neither is any creature that is not naked and open before the eyes of him with whom he have to... God knows that person infinitely. He knows what can reach that person, namely his precious word alone. That's one of the hardest lessons I've ever had to learn. Well all the things, Lord, that I've learned about how we know the Bible is true, why can't I use those arguments, those evidences? Well friends, let's stop and think for a moment. As the word of God penetrates into that unbeliever, something of infinite power has reached his heart. Now just think of the evidences Jesus If provided. you think our evidences can be effective, and they can be, and that's a whole subject of its own, think of the evidences Jesus himself gave. Stupendous sign miracles, hundreds of them. In fact, someone has suggested that every sick, crippled, leprous person in Israel, by the time Jesus' ministry was finished, was healed. Thousands of people, it says that over and over, year after year, thousands of people can heal them all, heal them all. And I say, well Lord, I should think that the whole nation then would have turned to him. Why, on one occasion, friends with a boy's lunch, he fed 5 ,000 men plus their families with food left over. And they said, they all agreed, this is John 6, let's make him king. I mean, anyone who can feed everybody for nothing supernaturally is our candidate for king. Then he began telling them about himself and who he was and that they had to believe in him on the basis of his substitutionary atoning death. And guess what happened at the end of chapter 6? They all left him. You say, that's absurd. Haven't they seen sign miracles? Yes. Miracles like the like of which had never been seen before in the history of the world? Yes. And Jesus turned to the twelve and said, are you going to believe me too? And one of them finally spoke up, of course, Peter, Lord, to whom shall we go? Thou hast the words of eternal life. Right. That's the difference. But even one of them was a doubter, Thomas, and another one was demon possessed, namely Judas. That helps me to understand what the miracles were for. Why Jesus, friends, said, an evil, adulterous nation demands signs and no sign will be given except the sign of the prophet Jonah, namely, as he was three days and nights in the belly of the great fish, so the son of man will be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth. In other words, his bodily resurrection is his final proof to the whole human race of who he is. The sign miracles, may I say it this way, were almost totally ineffective and worthless to convert anybody ever in Israel. That wasn't their function. It was simply to do what? To attract attention to himself as the God appointed Messiah and King of Israel so that they could then hear his message and then their response to the message would determine their eternal destiny. This is an awesome thing to think about. Now, I almost hate to read this chapter. With fear and trembling, I ask you to turn to Luke 16. This is absolutely awesome. The rich man in Hades. Luke 16, beginning with verse 19. There was a certain rich man which was clothed in purple and fine linen and fared sumptuously every day. And there was a certain beggar named Lazarus which was laid at his gate full of sores and desiring to be fed with the crumbs which fell from the rich man's table moreover the dogs came and licked his sores. Would you kindly agree with me he was in desperate condition. He had nothing of this world's goods. And it came to pass that the beggar died and was carried by the angels into Abraham's bosom. That means the place of blessing, the place of the faithful in what at that time was called paradise, the upper Sheol Hades where believers went when they died. And the rich man also died and was buried and in hell or Hades, the lower Sheol Hades, he lifted up his eyes being in torment and seeth Abraham afar off and Lazarus in his bosom in close fellowship with him. And he cried and said, Father Abraham, have mercy on me and send Lazarus that he may dip the tip of his finger in water and cool my tongue for I am tormented in this flame. That is the situation now of every unbeliever who's ever died. I just, I'm staggered by this. And Abraham said, Son, remember that thou in thy lifetime receiveth thy good things and likewise Lazarus evil things but now he is comforted and thou art tormented and besides all this between us and you there's a great gulf fixed so that they which would pass from hence to you cannot, Lazarus can't get to you, sorry, neither can they pass to us that would come from thence and other you can't come here either. And then he said, I pray thee therefore, Father, that rich man in Hades and torment said to Abraham, Father, that thou would ascend into my brother's house. I have a plan. I want you to reach my living brothers by sign miracles. Now this would impress some people today because we are harassed in every direction by people who are committed to sign miracle ministries to change the hearts of people by spectacular things that they can see. Now watch the response of God through Abraham. I have five brethren that he may testify to them lest they also come into this place of torment. In other words, would you please send Lazarus, the beggar, back to the realm of the living because my five brothers often came to my mansion and saw this beggar by the door and they'd recognize him when they see him. Please send him back to the realm of the living. And I mean, think of this as an evangelistic program. He could go from house to house, knock on the doors of my brothers and say, I am back from the dead. I saw your dead brother in Hades in torment. Do you think that would get their attention? How do you like that for a sign miracle Look ministry? at God's response through Abraham. Abraham saith unto him, they have Moses and the prophets. Let them hear them. They have the Bible. They have the Old Testament scripture. They have the infallible and errant self -authenticating word of God. In other words, that's what they need is Now, this is why he was where he was. Listen to how he despises God's word. Do you catch this? He said, nay, Father Abraham. In other words, who cares about the Bible? Old wives fabled stories for children maybe, but not for my brothers. You don't understand, sir, they're intellectuals. They're scientists. They don't accept stories supposedly from God. They want to see something that's empirical, tangible, self -evident and thus convincing. Nay, Father Abraham, but if one went unto them from the dead, they will repent. That's what they need, a sign miracle. Hmm. And here's how it ends, folks. And he said unto him, Abraham said to the rich man, if they hear not Moses and the prophets, neither will they be persuaded though one rose from the dead. Really? Well, that's what happened when Jesus arose from the dead. The whole story of the book of Acts is that in spite of the fact that Jesus Christ fulfilled his promise, he said, you destroy this temple and in three days I'll raise it again. And he did and rose from the dead. And the apostles preached the resurrection of Jesus and the scribes and the Pharisees hated the message and threatened and tormented God's servants for mentioning resurrection, even of Jesus. Oh yes, friends, even if one rises from the dead, they will not repent. You know what Jesus did for his friend Lazarus one day in Bethany? He raised him from the dead. Lazarus, come forth. I'm very impressed by what happened, aren't you? Immediately, the corpse stood at the entrance of the tomb and he said, loose him and let him go. He's fine. He's alive. Probably felt better than he had in his previous life. He didn't have to be dragged out half dead for recuperation. Don't you think all the scribes and Pharisees and Sadducees would have just swamped the whole, I mean, that settles it. We believe. Read what happened next. The enemies of Jesus got together and made a decision. Just for that, we're going to kill Lazarus and Jesus. Hmm, that doesn't sound intelligent. Well, that's the problem because the mind of man, which is an aspect of the soul, heart, spirit of man in his sinfulness, his darkness cannot function intelligently. Only the spirit of God can bring us reason to see God's realities as they really are. And I say, well, Lord, I just didn't know it was this bad. I just desperately need your help then to accomplish what is otherwise impossible. Help me to preach the word faithfully, clearly, completely, without compromise, graciously, patiently, in season, out of season, love people, whether they receive me, accept me, appreciate me or not, because the word of God has infinite power. I don't. He has it. He alone has it. Now, friends, there is a way in which Christian evidences can be used. I just want to be very careful here not to disparage the things that God has given us in the way of evidences. Let's take a look. The low value of Christian evidences, among other methods, shall by this all men, unsaved men who lack spiritual discernment to understand scripture, by this, Jesus said, shall all men know that you are my disciples if you have love one for another, John 13, 35. So the ultimate models for mutual Christian love in a godless world must be the Christian home and the local church. Now, think carefully of that statement, Jesus, that's the greatest of Christian evidences. When you go forth to a mission field, whether it's New Zealand or wherever, something you can do under God is undeniable and irresistible. And here it is. Demonstrate to the people to whom God sends you that you know what Christian love is in your relationship, husband and wife and parents and children and children to parents and hopefully other Christians and a little tiny microcosm of the Holy Spirit called a local church that God will plant there and the godless surrounding population sooner or later will have to see something they have never seen before and can't explain and can't duplicate. Christian love. Why, there are all kinds of evidences, friends, that are helpful, like maybe, you know, medical missions, helping people physically, that'll get their attention. Maybe hospitality, maybe English language courses in China or wherever, people almost do anything to learn English and you get them there and you demonstrate, you know, the things that they're interested in and show friendship. But you see, Jesus said, the greatest evidence we have that will really get people's attention is Christian love, one for another in the home and in a local church that God will plant here and there around the world. You see, friends, Jesus never said miracles will do the trick. He said to the apostles, you remember in John 14, the miracles that I've done you'll do also. And they did, they raised the dead, I mean Peter and Paul, I mean amazing sign miracles they did in the early church, book of Acts. But do you know what else he said, friends? Greater works than these shall you do because I go to my Father. And what are the greater works? Preaching the gospel, which when believed brings eternal life instantly. But the sign miracles Jesus performed never saved anybody. Did you know that? They were spectacular, they were undeniable. But every person Jesus healed got sick again anyway and died, every one of them. He didn't permanently solve anybody's problem physically. He fed 5 ,000 the next day they were all hungry again. Didn't solve their hunger problem. But Jesus said, because I'm going to my Father in heaven and send the Holy Spirit and create the church and grant unto you the scriptures, you will have the capacity under God to mastermind this book and make it known to people and you'll see greater works. I mean Peter the apostle, folks, preached one sermon and 3 ,000 men were saved in one day and saved forever. Vastly greater miracle than healing the sick and walking on water, which Peter also did. Don't try that, by the way, unless Jesus does to you what he did to him, namely says come. Don't try that. I have been fascinated, obsessed I guess is the word, with the mentality today that you have to have intellectual brilliance and you have to have spectacular miracles to attract anybody and to have any credibility as a member, as a representative of God. I've done a little booklet in fact that's out there and maybe have helped you. Does God want Christians to perform miracles today? No. In fact, you know what would happen? It'd be a regression. It'd be a step, giant step backwards because we'd be going back to the lower foundation of the church in the apostolic era before the superstructure was built on a completed scripture. In those days it was a unique way for God to give the apostles opportunity to attract attention, but now friends we have something they didn't have, the completed Bible. God says you master this book and sooner or later one way or another you follow my guidelines and instruction and you mastermind the basics of evangelism and church planning and missions and witness and you will have infinite power from above through this book that pierces even to the dividing asunder of soul and spirit. And I say Lord, I desperately need your help. This book friend is so powerful that even when you preach it without love it'll change people forever. Did you know that? Paul tells us in Philippians 1 there are other people here in Rome that are offended by my being here and they don't like me and they don't appreciate me but they are preaching the truth and I will rejoice in it and I will continue to rejoice because even without love which is often the way we preach like on a radio station you never even see the people or hand out a tract and you see the people disappear you never see them again. Even under those situations the word of God has infinite power. Let me tell you a man who preached the word without love, Jonah. He hated every minute of his ministry. He said God why didn't you destroy these people? That wasn't a loving approach to missions. But you know what he did? He preached the word and the whole city repented and Jesus said it wasn't fakie either. He said Nineveh repented at the preaching of Jonah and will rise up in the last generation and condemn this generation. I mean he must have preached more than just judgment. He must have said something about God. It's my opinion. The whole city repented even though he hated every one of them in Nineveh. But that's why God says preach the truth as we were reminded this morning. Preach the truth in love and you'll have even more effect. Yes, but whatever you do folks, hold on, preach the truth. That's the point. That's the power, the truth and hopefully it's done in love and graciously and prayerfully and patiently but whatever you do and whatever your motive and whatever the circumstances, preach the word. And I say thank you Lord, that settles it. I think I'll be a Bible believing Christian and a Bible believing teacher and I want to honor Jesus Christ and the blessed Holy Spirit who presented this book to us because that's an irresistible force. Even in a world dominated by what? Satan, millions of demons, billions of depraved people and even mice in nature. God says watch me. I have a special weapon, an instrument I'm putting into your hand and your mind and heart. Watch what I can do almost in spite of you for my glory through my word. Father in heaven, I just stand amazed at how you operate. Everything sooner or later will be for your glory or it will disappear. Help me to examine there for my own ministry. The church could be raptured to heaven and I and all of us will be confronted by the Lord Jesus with eyes like a flame of fire searching us, examining us to see whether we really have done the work of God in a godly way, in obedience, in faithfulness for his glory. Help me to be ready at any moment to give an account to you dear Father because that's why you sent me not to gain glory for myself or any of us as teachers and proclaimers of the truth but to glorify the Savior apart from whom we're lost forever and the blessed Holy Spirit who gave us this precious book. May ABC father stand brightly in a darkening world as a true reflector of the light of Jesus Christ until he comes I pray in his glorious name for his sake. Amen. If God's word has made an impact on you today we'd love to hear about it. Just leave us a comment at facebook .com slash Whitcomb Ministries where there's always something to encourage you. You can also find lots more on the subject of apologetics at sermonaudio .com slash Whitcomb. Find that page from our website WhitcombMinistries .org. You're listening to Encounter God's Truth from Whitcomb Ministries and we're grateful for the opportunity to emphasize week after week that God's word is true from the beginning to the end offering timeless truths for changing times. I'd like to close with a reading from Psalm 103. Bless the Lord oh my soul and all that is within me bless his holy name. Bless the Lord oh my soul and forget not all his benefits who forgives all your iniquity who heals all your diseases who redeems your life from the pit who satisfies you with good so that your youth is renewed like the eagles. The Lord works righteousness and justice for all who are oppressed. For everyone here at Encounter God's Truth I'm Wayne Shepherd praying for the Lord to fill this week ahead with much meaning and many blessings. Thanks for listening.
Bloomberg Radio New York - Recording Feed
Monitor Show 19:00 09-03-2023 19:00
"Campaign also on October 14 and that's going to be a tight race as Dan Schwartzman was suggesting earlier and it's between two white guys called Chris Chris Hopkins the Prime Minister and Chris Luxon of the opposition National Party he's a former Air New Zealand CEO it's gonna be an interesting race. And the RBN hold tomorrow? Yeah it looks like that yeah yeah all right thanks very much Paul we'll see Paul Allen a little bit later in the show the next hour of the show. Softbank lines up some of ARM's biggest customers as strategic investors to support the ARM IPO and Country Garden in China wires a ringgit coupon payment in its latest effort to avoid default. Volodymyr Zelensky will be replacing Ukraine's defense minister. China and Australia are set to resume high -level talks this week. President Biden touring areas hit hard by Hurricane Adali in Florida while in sports Arsenal scores twice in stoppage time to beat Manchester United. I'm Dan Schwartzman and I'll have news and sports coming up.
Dennis Prager Podcasts
Yale Students Welcomed by Ominous Grim Reaper Flyer
"Students got a terrifying message from the campus police is the New York Times There was anger after the campus police union Which is negotiating a contract shared a safety flyer with a picture of the grim reaper on it But the gem on this article are comments from New York Times Readers the only people who were allowed to comment are New York Times subscribers, but I'll get to that Andre fara also, that's FA apostrophe a OSO an incoming first -year student at Yale Has been had been in the United States for 12 days. He arrived from New Zealand on his own three suitcases in tow As he pulled his luggage through downtown New Haven Connecticut a woman handed him a flyer describing his new city as crime -ridden and dangerous so the beauty of what you're about to hear is The denial of reality that is like the denial of two sexes the denial of reality that is central to left -wing Thinking Why would anybody hand anyone a flyer saying that New Haven was dangerous oh my god silly It listed alarming local crime statistics and instructed students to quote remain on campus Avoid public transportation and stay off the streets after 8 p .m How many editors of the New York Times would walk around New Haven alone after 8 p .m. So is that a legitimate question Particularly women Illustrated with a picture of the grid grim reaper the flyer with students in ominous. Good luck But perhaps most jarring was the source of the flyer Listed plainly in its text the union that represents Yale's own campus police In the day since the union distributed the survival guide quote -unquote leaflets Yale administrators and police officials have been scrambling to calm first -year students and their parents
The Crypto Overnighter
A highlight from 646:SEC, Terraform Labs, and Huobis TradingView Tie-Up
"Rockstar Energy punched, bringing a bold and unapologetic flavor packed with energy through a blend of B vitamins, guarana extract, and 240 milligrams of caffeine to fuel what's next. Rockstar Energy drink. Good evening and welcome to the Crypto Overnight. I'm Nickademus and I will be your host as we take a look at the latest cryptocurrency news and analysis. So sit back, relax, and let's get started. And remember, none of this is financial advice. And it's 10 p .m. Pacific on Sunday, August 20th, 2023. Welcome back to the Crypto Overnight, where we have no sponsors, no hidden agendas, and no BS. But we do have the news, and we're going to talk about that. First, however, I need to remind you that this is the last show for a couple of days. My wife and I are going out of town for our anniversary, so I'll be off the air until Thursday. But that's for later. For tonight, the SEC turns up the heat on Terraform Labs, unveiling undisclosed wallets and a deeper probe. Sam Beckman Fried faces a challenging legal environment and is asking for weekend jail. Uzbekistan bridges the gap between traditional and decentralized finance with a new crypto card. Finance's internal bridge hacked from last year resurfaces as the exploited funds face liquidation. New Zealand offers a cautious approach to crypto, emphasizing observation and patience. And finally, Huobi pairs up with TradingView, aiming to provide a seamless trading experience. The U .S. Securities Exchange Commission is intensifying its probe into Terraform Labs, the company behind the Terra blockchain and TerraUSD stablecoin. The SEC's investigation has revealed allegations of crypto market manipulation and fraudulent transactions linked to Terraform Labs. The regulatory body has now gained approval from U .S. District Judge Jed Rakoff to collaborate with the South Korean government. This collaboration aims to delve deeper into Terraform Labs' operations and interrogate Daniel Shin, co -founder of Terraform Labs. The SEC's interest in this case has grown due to the discovery of undisclosed wallets tied to Terraform Labs and its founder, Dou Kwan. These wallets, holding over $160 million in digital assets, contradict the Loma Foundation Guard's previous claims. The LFG had stated they held only 313 Bitcoin in reserve, a crucial asset used to maintain the dollar peg of TerraUSD. The collapse of USD and Luna in May 2022 resulted in a staggering loss of approximately $40 billion in value. In addition to all this, Kwan faced detention in Montenegro for four months. This arrest was due to charges related to the use of forged documents. Prior to this, the SEC had accused Kwan and Terraform Labs of orchestrating a multi -billion dollar fraud in February. The SEC's allegations against Terraform Labs and its founders have raised eyebrows in the crypto community. The discovery of undisclosed wallets and the subsequent revelations have cast a shadow over Terraform Labs' operations. The regulatory body's collaboration with the South Korean government further emphasizes the gravity of the situation. Another story that has left the crypto world abuzz, the founder of FTX is facing a trying time with the law. Let's dive into Sam Bankman Fried's current predicament.
The Crypto Conversation
A highlight from Zeebu - Disrupting the Telecom Carrier Space
"Hi everyone, Andy Pickering here, I'm your host and welcome to the Crypto Conversation, a Brave New Coin podcast where we talk to the people building the future in the Bitcoin, blockchain and cryptocurrency space. Hey folks, we have a new sponsor here at the Crypto Conversation. Today's episode is brought to you by coinsbe .com, the go -to platform for spending your crypto. With the biggest selection of brands across all gift card platforms and live in over 185 countries, Coinsbe supports the most relevant local brands for your everyday needs. They support more than 200 cryptocurrencies and offer a vast product range from gift cards, game points to mobile phone top -ups. Can't find what you're looking for? No worries, Coinsbe also offers Visa and Mastercard prepaid cards. So just go to coinsbe .com and turn your digital assets into real -world possibilities. And now it is on with the show. My guest today is Raj Mahambar. Raj is the co -founder and CEO at Zebu, a new product that brings a blockchain -based settlement platform to the telecom carrier space. Very interesting. Welcome to the show, Raj. Hey Andy, thanks for having me and thank you to everyone that's listening. Yeah, it's a pleasure to have you here, Raj. Let's do what we do at the beginning of the show. I will invite you to please introduce yourself. I'd like to hear a little bit about your background and your story and what you've been doing in the lead up to co -founding Zebu. Yeah, sure. Absolutely, Andy. So the beginning of my career really started more finance -focused, right? I worked as a principal at a venture fund where they also had a telco arm. And while I was doing my work, I all delved into blockchain quite a bit. And I also delved into the telco operations where I noticed that one of the biggest problems the telco industry had was settlements, right? Hence, I formulated the plan for Zebu and tried to streamline those as much as possible. Awesome. So tell us a little bit more about the background here then. So you mentioned that the settlement is a problem in the telecom space. So forgive me, Raj, I'm not super familiar with the telecom space. I hope to learn a little bit today. I'm sure the listeners can learn something as well. So yeah, I mean, just explain, I guess, the problem that you're trying to solve. Let me start by differentiating between retail operators and wholesale voice and SMS carriers. So where are you based, Andy? I'm in Auckland, New Zealand. Okay. And who's your cell phone provider? I believe it is, I think it's SPARC New Zealand. Okay, so they would be your retail operator, right? Yeah. That's the customer facing bit in the telco space. So let's say you make an international call or send a text from Auckland. Your provider, you make that call or SMS over to the US, let's say. Your provider wouldn't be directly interconnected with Verizon. They will need to be interconnected with a wholesale voice or SMS carrier. And then that carrier will route that voice or SMS, that call or SMS through one or two more carriers over to Verizon that are directly interconnected with Verizon. So essentially, the point is, there's two types of companies, there's tier one retail facing operators, and then there's tier two and tier three wholesale voice and carriers, right? So the product we've created at Zebu is more focused towards the tier two and tier three companies. And similar the arms that tier one companies have, right? Because these carriers, as I mentioned, they route these calls and messages through multiple other carriers to terminate those at the end destination. So these are global transactions, right? And the global wires take anywhere up to 96 hours in immersed markets, and even 16 days to a month in unimmersed markets. Now, that is because number one, the industry primarily runs on the dollar and the euro. And many of these companies, they need to take central bank authorization to do the forks conversions, right? And that's only if they even have it available. If you think about some of the African regions, they don't have access to the US dollar, right? So at Zebu, we've taken this 96 hours to 16 day period and minimized it down to 30 seconds to 10 minutes max on the platform for value transfer. Well, yeah, look, I'm actually just looking through your white paper now, Raj. And so in the white paper, you guys say that the telecom wholesale voice industry is obviously critical for global telecommunications, acting as a backbone that facilitates the exchange of voice data and messaging services between carriers and operators. However, the industry is plagued by several challenges, including inefficient processes, long remittance delays, lack of transparency, revenue loss due to currency exchange and high costs. And all of these challenges lead to revenue loss for industry players. And I think you've just kind of explained that. But yeah, good to see it explained nicely in your white paper as well. So this is I mean, yeah, it's a big, big task to take on the global telecom industry there, Raj. Yeah, yeah, absolutely right. I mean, so as you mentioned, the forex costs, the wire transfer costs, these are also recurring charges that these carriers face. And on top of that, this is a low margin business. So being able to roll volume of transactions is how they can generate proper beta, right? So the idea behind Zebu is that, first of all, they don't have the liquidity crunch anymore. And also by limiting on -ramp and off -ramp and being able to keep their running balance and stablecoin on the platform, the carriers will be able to do trends as needed basis without having to worry about constant charges, such as making charges and forex conversions. Right. So the idea is that Zebu will provide a kind of like a transparent, decentralized ecosystem for voice traffic exchange and an ecosystem for buyers and sellers to exchange voice traffic directly, right? Essentially, right. So let's say I am a carrier and you are as well. I am rendering my services over to you. We can have our own commercial arrangement that is off of the platform, which is already set. And now let's say we both go to the Zebu platform. Each one of us do the KYB, get onboarded, everything. And it's really as simple as, let's say, if I rendered you $100 ,000 worth of services, I generate an invoice, upload it onto the Zebu platform. I input your customer ID. It shows up on your interface. And with a one -click interaction, you can pull down $100 ,000 from your bank account, crypto wallet, credit card, debit card, comes to the platform. And as you initiate the transaction to send over to me, it instantaneously gets swapped for the Zebu token. And that value is transferred over to me. Now it's up to me if I keep my funds in the Zebu token, if I ask for an instant swap to Stablecoin, or if I want to move the value directly over to my bank account in fiat, which as of now still takes one to two days, but we are actively pursuing a digital banking license, so we can actually streamline fiat on -ramp and off -ramp for all of our customers as well. Okay, got it, got it. So explain then, I guess I'm looking at the Zebu technology stack, all seems to make sense. And there's a token, of course. So just explain to me, Raj, who is the target audience for Zebu? Let's start there. The target audience as of now is telecom carriers, right? They are going to be our primary users for Zebu token's utility. But in our phase three planning, we are actually currently working out a product that's going to be B2C. So those retail operators I mentioned will be able to do settlements with their end customers, which is people such as me and you for their phone bills using Zebu token. Right, right. So tell us about the Zebu token then. Has that been launched or is that yet to launch? It has been launched, actually. We got listed on Lbank about a week and a half ago. I saw that on your Twitter earlier today, actually. So nice, congrats for that. Thank you, thank you. And so the token itself, that will drive the ecosystem forward. I can see on your website, it says there's seven businesses have been onboarded. Soft cap and 5 million USD. Is that just because very early days and just at the beginning of the Zebu journey? Yeah, so we've actually achieved the soft cap and the hard cap. So we've raised $25 million so far, right? And going back to our customers, we are right now partnered with Bankai Group. And Bankai Group is one of the largest telecom carriers there is, right? Probably top five in the world. They do about $2 .1 billion in revenue, those are just rough numbers, but about $2 .1 billion in annual revenue, right? And they are one of our customers and through them, they're also helping us expand our user base. So as of now, we have a total waitlist of 89 customers getting ready and comfortable with the platform, finishing their KYBs. Our business partner team is actually training their treasury and accounts teams as well. And as soon as they get the go -ahead, their names will start popping up on the website as well. Fantastic. And so are you looking to work with other telecom networks around the world? And I can see you do have a list of some of those partners that you're working with already on your website. Bridgevoice, Novatel, Broadband Telecom, MGW, to name a few. Yes, correct. So those are the ones that are already doing transactions, test transactions on our platform. And along with them, like I said, there's a list of 89 more companies whose names are going to start popping up on the website soon. So how quickly do you think this will start to take off as all these other businesses come online? To be entirely honest, Andy, look, I mean, so far, we on our end, we have stayed very careful. We've gone slowly as far as the platform goes, right? Because as soon as we want everything to be as streamlined as possible, as soon as transactions start, right? So the platform is very, very robust. Technologically, we are set, but kind of these are all legacy -based players, right? They haven't tried new systems. So we want to make sure that they are comfortable and ready to go. But of speaking how fast we might be going is, we assume that by two to three weeks from now, the platform is going to start full volume at its capacity. And we are actually projecting to do about $1 .5 billion in transactions on the platform over the next 8 to 12 months. Yeah, fascinating. So yeah, lots going on then. I mean, do you think the telecoms industry is ready for this kind of technology and this kind of marketplace and a token? Yeah, absolutely. Look, I mean, so when I've walked you through that flow of transaction, right? We are actually also providing, as a customer acquisition cost, we are also providing 3 .5 % of each settlement value back to the users of the platform. So we have a criteria for that on what percentage you would get. But let's say you sent me $100 ,000 on the platform. Each one of us gets 3 ,500 equivalent of Zebu tokens on each transaction. Now, not every one of them will get 3 .5%, but we have specific criteria on that. But since we are increasing their margins by almost 50 % through our loyalty program, and on top of that, an additional 75 % by cutting their forex and wire costs, the carriers are incredibly intrigued to get started on the platform. Our flow of user base has been the easiest part of the whole process. Wow. Yeah, that is interesting. And so what sounds like, I guess, the telecom industry is always evolving, but certainly ready for some disruption as well, right, Raj? Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
Dennis Prager Podcasts
A highlight from No Love of Country
"Dennis Prager here. Thanks for listening to the daily Dennis Prager podcast to hear the entire three hours of my radio show Commercial free every single day become a member of Prager topia You'll also get access to 15 years worth of archives as well as the daily show prep subscribe at Prager topia Hey everybody Dennis Prager here. Hope you're well And say I hope you had a good weekend I've got a good Wednesday It's very hard for me not to root for American teams in world competitions it never even occurred to me that I would not a Who will I root for if not be how could that be I love my country But I I hope the women's soccer team loses I'm not only not rooting for them. I hope they lose They have contempt for me and my country so in turn I have contempt for them It's not a complex issue. I Don't root for you just because you are American and Stand for the opposite of everything that I treasure about being an American So this though the story is worldwide, but here it is from the Daily Mail the British website US women spark fury with another listless rendition of the star -spangled banner at the World Cup as Holland's players proudly sing their anthem with arms wrapped around each other so when I was in Europe last month, I wrote like a column my weekly column about how much better I felt in Europe now to be honest that was Eastern Europe But this would be an example We Were talking about the Netherlands which is a pretty woke country I might add But apparently it's women's soccer team Loves their country more than our soccer team Women's soccer team loves their country The Dutch were involved in colonialism and imperialism and all that stuff But apparently the women of the Dutch Soccer team do love their country Gleefully singing Their national anthem with their arms wrapped around one another our team looked For the most part there were exceptions like they were About to undergo Life -threatening surgery What am I doing here with this crappy piece of Lyric and music being played for a place for which I have contempt Well, how many are on the team 15, I don't know how many are on the team Of the luckiest human beings on the face of the earth Only Six players held their heads to their chest when the star -spangled banner was playing and Not all of them were singing most were not Those who did such as Alex Morgan Julie Eretz and Lindsey Horan Appeared to mumble the words rather than sing loudly along they wouldn't sing loudly along because The truth is it took some courage just not to be silent With the ugly human being talking about ugly in a moral sense Megan Rapinoe in the lead with her contempt for the United States of America By comparison the Dutch team that's a team against which the US women played and they I think they tied the Dutch team sang proudly to their anthem Wilhelm Wilhelm us With the players wrapping their arms around each other before the game began in Wellington New Zealand all 11 Dutch women sang their anthem Too bad.
The Eric Metaxas Show
A highlight from Ch Ahn (Encore Continued)
"Welcome to The Eric Mataxas Show. Would you consider yourself smart, insightful, precocious, astute, clever, wise, beyond your years, and good at checking a thesaurus for synonyms? Well, then you've come to the right place. Here now is the handsome, attractive, striking, gorgeous, and quite frankly, breathtaking, Eric Mataxas. Continuing my Miracle Monday conversation with Chae Ahn, that's A -H -N. That's a Korean name, isn't it, Chae? Yeah, you're one of the first to really pronounce it correctly, by the way. What do people say? They call me Chae, they call me Ahn. You know, yeah, whatever, yeah, which is fine, whatever. Now, Chae, by the way, doesn't strike me as particularly Korean. Is that Korean? It is Korean, but my whole name is Chae Ho. Aha. But when I came to this country, they thought it was my middle name, and so it was just dropped, and so all my papers, my citizenship is just primarily Chae Ahn, and so. Chae Ho, does anybody call you Chae Ho? My mom did. She did? Yeah, especially when she was mad at me. That's the classic thing, right? All right, so we were talking about this moment in your life that God has supernaturally called you to go all the way across the country with your wife. You have three kids, then you get four kids, and you're telling me that even though you knew God spoke to you to do this miraculously, it was a struggle. So you're saying from 1982 to 1992, you were struggling. Well, we didn't move out until 84 because it just took time to make the transition. And by the way, it wasn't just me. I invited Luengo, his wife, and a few singles and others to come, and so we had around 15, 18 people that were part of the church planting team. And yeah, it was a struggle. 84, I remember after one year not seeing anything happen, I'll be on the floor just prostrated, weeping before God. And I would say, where's the God of revival? You said, come to LA for a great harvest. We're not seeing a harvest. But you see, I believe those 10 years, and I would joke the 80s were from Hades for the 10 worst years, but they were the best years because God was developing character. He was breaking me. You gotta realize I was 28 years old. I was so cocky, and I thought, because everything came easy before, ministry -wise. And just like Joseph, even though he got this incredible vision dream that his family's gonna honor him as a ruler, yet he had to go through the whole Potiphar situation, the prison experience. And so I went through my wilderness experience, but they were great years because I had the privilege to go to Fuller, and because I had nothing else to do. So four years at Fuller, getting my master's and my doctorate, another four years. And I had the privilege to meet Peter Wagner and get mentored by him. And so it was all part of the preparation. So I really believe when it comes to making of a leader, there's that preparation time before you come into convergence. And it's the character development time to be like Jesus. And so that's why Paul says, I exalted my tribulation, knowing that tribulation brings about perseverance, perseverance character, and character hope. And hope doesn't disappoint because the love of God has been shed abroad in our hearts through the Holy Spirit. Well, you talk about that. I can relate to that because I had many years of character building and I always joke around, I say, don't you hate that? But it's true. I mean, I don't wanna talk about me right now, but just to say that I know that this happens and it was years of humbling, real humbling, brokenness, difficulty, struggle, never doubted God, but often was thinking, wow, this is not fun. This is not fun. Yeah, and it's just something that I think every believer has to go through. And of course, we never graduate. And so we're being constantly conformed into the image of his own. Hallelujah, that's the name of the game. Okay, so at what point did things begin to turn around for you? Well, really it began in 92 when I quit, I resigned from the church, not because I didn't love the church, but because unfortunately the movement was part of, the church planning movement got caught up in what I would call the discipleship shepherding movement. Oh, I think I know about that. Was that like Derek Prince? Well, I don't wanna mention names, but yeah, there are. Well, let's just give the initials, Derek Prince. Okay. Yes, but they were called the teachers and they were like these amazing teachers. They were great. And by the way, many of them did repent for the wrong teaching because they were talking about authority and we needed spiritual authority because we're all hippies, rebellious and all that. But they took it to an extreme. And so - It became almost cult -like. It almost did. Right. And so, yeah, just controlling. And so here I'm observing this in California as I'm going to Fuller and I'm seeing my whole movement get into this whole other movement. And so I wanted to leave. And so Sue, my wife gets the word, we're to resign and give the church back because they really planted the church. And so we did in 92. I didn't know the backlash I was going to get from our pastors, our leaders. They thought I was betraying them even though I wasn't taking the church. I was not splitting the church. I wasn't trying to, you know, move the church out of the movement. I just basically was going to itinerate as an evangelist. I've never heard that verb. I was going to itinerate. You were going to go out on your own, I think, is what you mean. Yeah, exactly. Do your own thing, man. Do my own thing and not very successfully. And so 93 was the worst year because economically, you know, I have four kids now in Southern California, a mortgage and no salary. And so we had to refinance our house just to survive. But then in 1994, something happened extraordinarily in Toronto. So Toronto outpouring of January 20th, 1994. And at the same time, a lot of people don't know this, but the Holy Spirit fell in Los Angeles with John Wimber. The same spirit of revival that was in Toronto manifested in the Anaheim Vineyard. And we got hit by the power of the Holy Spirit. I felt, Eric, I was born again again. I mean, people, I know there are many people listening. They have no idea what we're talking about. This is hard to explain. I had Randy Clark on this program a few weeks ago. Yeah, I saw it. And he was talking about this. And I didn't even know that he'd been affiliated with the Toronto Blessing as it's called. He was a starter. Why no, I didn't know that. And it's hard. A lot of people get really freaked out by this. They say, this cannot be God. I don't trust it. And a lot of people that I respect a lot, I disagree with them, but they would say that, I just don't believe the Holy Spirit would have people acting out in this way and that way. And they make a lot of sense. I just think ultimately they're missing something. So you, where were you physically? Were you still in the LA area? Sure, yeah, I was in LA and where I got touched was the annual Anaheim Vineyard Healing Conference they have every January. So this is Wimber. John Wimber, he was hosting it. And Francis McNutt was one of the speakers, just great, great speakers. And he begins the conference on a Wednesday night by making the announcement. This is around January 25th. He said, we just got word that one of our churches in Toronto, there's been an unusual visitation of the Holy Spirit. And so he said, the same thing happened to our people this past Sunday. We were sending out all these young people to New Zealand on a short term winter trip. And as we prayed for them, they fell down laughing and they could not stop for over an hour. He said, this is not normal people. This is not normal for our church. So we know something is up. And so what basically what he was saying was fasten your seatbelt because God's on the move. There's another visitation. And of course, John Wimber was the one who brought the third wave that was come Holy Spirit with him and he was one of my professors at Fuller because I took his course, Signs and Wonders in Church Growth. Amazing miracles were being done through the vineyard movement. And of course, Jesus is a healer, but they were being used powerfully in Southern California. And so here I get powerfully touched. I mean, I have never shook, even though I've been born again since 1973, but I got prayed over by Mahesh Shavu who's a dear friend now. And I shook violently for like 20 minutes. You see, this is the kind of thing that I think freaks out some people. And when I was at the Global Awakening here in New York, I saw some people, quote, unquote, manifesting in this way. One thing you can say for sure, it's not the person, it's something going on. So then the question, the logical question becomes, is this demonic or is this God? And that's the only question to try to figure out because anybody who says like, oh, it's made up, whatever, it is not made up, it's something spiritual. Now convinced I'm that it is God. So it could be demonic. But it could be demonic. And this is where you need wisdom. You need people that are really steeped in the scriptures and have walked with God and have discernment. We're gonna go to a break, but I'm just so glad we came to this spot. We're gonna continue the conversation as long as you can hang out. Che Ho An is with us. Che An is with us in the city. I'm so excited. This is a Miracle Monday. I'm just so thrilled to have you. We'll continue the conversation. Folks, you do not wanna go away.
AP News Radio
New Zealand airline is asking passengers to weigh in before their flights
"A New Zealand airline is weighing passengers before they board. As part of a monthlong survey, air New Zealand is planning to wait 10,000 passengers, so pilots can estimate weight and balance before takeoff. It is voluntary, but the airlines insisting that travelers shouldn't fear stepping on the scale. There is no visible display involved, and the way in data remains anonymous. The surveys designed to calculate average weight that goes on a plane. Numbers required by the domestic civil aviation authority, and the timing of it may be necessary, as recent health stats show New Zealanders are getting heavier in light of increasing adult and childhood obesity rates. I'm Mimi Montgomery.
Bloomberg Radio New York
"new zealand" Discussed on Bloomberg Radio New York
"Having said that, man, this story has been on all of our radars, radar, no pun intended, because we're going to talk about airlines and one specific flight. Aaron New Zealand, I'm sure you've heard about it. You've seen it, passengers were in the air for 16 hours, okay? One of the longest commercial flights in the world already had to do a U turn over the Pacific, leaving Auckland, New Zealand, at 8 p.m., trying to arrive in JFK, JFK was having issues yesterday. Right, power outages, right? They had to turn right back around. 16 hours. That is remarkable. So making a U turn about halfway into its nearly 9000 mile journey over the Pacific. It was just south of Hawaii. The turnaround made the jet, the top tracked flight on the site, which monitors aircraft all over the world in real time. So we're talking about Charlie Helen always talks about this because he loves to track flights. Oh, cool. But kind of amazing and it makes me wonder, you know, did the passengers know, right? We were kind of trying to find some information. I'm trying to find if anyone can figure this out and tweet it at Carol and I am trying to find a passenger who's tweeted about this. What are you doing in that situation, Carol? What do you mean? What would you do if you knew? Okay, this flight's gonna be an additional 8 hours. And would you want to know? Would you want to know the timeline? I think I probably would want to know, you know, and I would just order up another drink and let my world know that things are going to be changed. You know, I was part of me was like, well, why did they turn around? Why didn't they just find another airport in the United States, but they say that what would have happened is that diverting to another U.S. port would have meant and I'm reading from what the carrier said would mean that their aircraft would have been on the ground for several days impacting a number of other scheduled services and customers, so it would have impacted a lot of other flights and customers. It's reminding me of the Southwest Airlines debacle that we had over Christmas, some of these airlines, but it's very challenging. If they're all, if one flight gets missed, messed up of the system, then it messes up all these other ones. So bad news for these passengers, but maybe their issue saved some other passengers. That's a really good point. And it's the whole idea, right? The play gets somewhere, it's going to pick up another flight, but if things get off track, I mean, the whole system gets messed up. And a real Domino's effect when it comes to flights. Anyway
Bloomberg Radio New York
"new zealand" Discussed on Bloomberg Radio New York
"New Zealand Central Bank had already adopted 2%. And everybody kind of coalesced around 2%. There's no magic to 2%, but the feeling was that was just enough inflation to keep us out of deflation without being too much to affect the decisions that you make when you're buying. Michael, did you notice how we look as white in winter pasty? Is anyone we know? And Sweeney is just cut and chiseled and rested. Yeah. So something wrong with the Colorado sonic 10,000. What was the economy like? The anecdotes of Sweeney has on his you didn't take but you didn't take the surveillance Gulf Stream, right? No, we did not. We went commercial and the flight's out. We're pretty good directed to eagle from Newark and lots of people in the hotels and the condos, lots of people on the slopes. The cost of a ticket is ski ticket, $240 a day. A day? How do you do that with a family? I'm trying to think back to my dad taking four kids. What a weird inflation indicator. There's a small ski area near Flagstaff. Arizona called Arizona snowball. Weekends. $300. Oh, a ticket. Weekdays, $38. So I guess that's what we call in the economics business dynamic program. Pandemic pricing, the same thing. But all that being said, though, people are out and about and it was the activity level was just fantastic. It is an issue for scary, though, because they're getting into this situation where only boomers and rich millennials can afford. It totally ski tickets. And so the vast majority of middle and lower classes aren't going to be taking up speed. Like you and I have lived this. I mean, the great Allen Meltzer dearly missed from Carnegie Mellon used to, you know, you wouldn't take your head off because you know what you're talking about. You take my head off and say time you have to aggregate. I don't know how you aggregate your world in this American economy. There's the haves and the have nots, like there's never been before to me. She seems. Well, I mean, it depends on how you define never been before. I mean, there were kings and serfs. But the ski industry ski industry has changed tremendously. It's become a sport of the rich, or at least the better off. And ski companies have been merging to try to spread losses from climate change, and become much more real estate companies than anything else. They're selling the properties that Paul was touring this week. And rusted. Are we going to have a Bloomberg radio studio and veil? Yeah, sure. We can do that. I know a guy. Stay with us. We're drawing
Bloomberg Radio New York
"new zealand" Discussed on Bloomberg Radio New York
"You're Unilever, which did the results there, they did it in New Zealand, and they're actually extending it to Australia now, or you're just a fish and chip shop in the UK that was also doing this, but trying to figure out, okay, how do we do a four day work week, but account for the fact that at certain times of the week, there's a huge demand for fish and chips, of course, so we want to have workers there. We don't want everybody to be on their day off on that. Every business is certainly different here, but I think the key really is the amount of planning that this takes is substantial. And so not just going into this thinking, okay, this will be wonderful. We'll just flip a switch. Matt, one of the aspects of the planning was starting by having people look at what tasks they can eliminate. For example, is there something that you're doing that you really don't need to be doing and I think that's part of the appeal here because if any of us look at our schedules, I mean, I can think of probably three things that I do because they're just part of the process that I've been doing for quite a long time. That really is not adding that much value. Yeah, like meetings, for example. I mean, even if you don't choose to do a four day work week, even if you just reduce the number of recurring meetings, let's say, or useless meetings, that's probably a good thing as well in a benefit to all. Map, you mentioned how a lot of people think that cutting back on meetings would make our work lives better at the beginning of the year, at least one well-known company actually announced they were killing most meetings. Do you think that's gonna work or meetings just gonna keep creeping back? Well, yeah, I mean, that's the thing. I mean, Shopify is sort of become a poster child for this. They announced a new policy at the beginning of this year where they were going to get rid of every recurring meeting with more than two people and limit big meetings to just one 6 hour window on Thursday. So if you wanted to have an all hands engineering meeting, you could only do it in that window. And they also, which was also intriguing to me, it were encouraging people or telling managers to
Bloomberg Radio New York
"new zealand" Discussed on Bloomberg Radio New York
"Central Bank starts raising rates. So be okay this week, we also have the RB and Z, the reserve bank of New Zealand right now, I think that the consensus is that we're going to see a much weaker economy in New Zealand in 2023. It's really been struggling as many economies across the world have been to come back to some degree of normalcy after the pandemic. What do we know about the outlook for rate policy in New Zealand? Well, we know that their inflation rate is very high. It's continued to rise. It's up to 7.2% year over year. We know that Adrian orr, the governor of the reserve bank of New Zealand is not afraid to do aggressive bold moves because remember, at the very beginning of the downturn globally, when the pandemic started, they suddenly went from 1% on their key rate, 75 basis points down to 0.25, who else was they were out front, and they were out front on the way back up. But I think now they're rate hikes. They're aggressive tightening have been very effective in hitting the housing market. There are high prices. The market was overheated. And that hasn't stopped them yet. And there are other parallels too when you look at the tightness of the labor market in the face of higher interest rates in the states, the labor market is pretty tight. Same is true in Australia, even though the RBA has been tightening the labor market when he just had in the last week a shockingly strong employment number double what the market was forecasting and in New Zealand. Labor market conditions are very tight, although I think the expectation now is that things will begin to loosen in the new year. Yes, but is loosening enough. That's the thing. I think it's all relative, isn't it? And that's another reason why some of these is particularly, I think, developed nation central banks or in this position where they can maybe slow down the pace of rate hikes, the size of rate hikes for various reasons, be okay, their corporate bond markets still being in turmoil still being tight. The rbn Z maybe figuring that the impact that they had on housing is pretty what I want to say significant. But at the same time, the economies are holding up and their inflation rates are still higher well above target. So the door is open to more hikes, but this point, just like the fed, the question isn't do they stop yet or anything like that. It's just how big the magnitude. Bloomberg's global economics and policy editor Kathleen Hayes. I'm Doug prisoner. You can join us for Bloomberg daybreak, Asia, beginning
Bloomberg Radio New York
"new zealand" Discussed on Bloomberg Radio New York
"That you might have to look in the other direction saying well we do want to have an aggressive rate hike path but maybe we have to just slow it down a bit Cool it off a bit for now Well one of the ups and downs I think the most important thing first is a relative price shock is exactly that It's the price for a good relative to other goods and services And that is reflected relative scarcity when it comes to the oil side with all of the supply constraints that are artificially put on They're sector The level of prices have obviously been forward looking the actual activities that we're seeing in Europe today were being very proud to market So whilst the oil price labels may remain high that's not a prediction It's analyzing they're going to keep rising or forever So eventually they fall out of the consumer price inflation measure And it's of nothing We have no influence with monetary policy around impacting that relative price So on one part you had the inflation expectation components of the near term price But also real income is for households Negatively impacted It's costing you more to go about your business Your skills and cameras being used on higher oil prices So there's a balancing effect over the medium term for us The reserve bank of New Zealand governor Indian ore is speaking earlier to Bloomberg I want to get to a story that caught my eye It's going to be critical at the open as well for investors And that is around one of Saudi Arabia's largest banks a Bloomberg scoop it appears that they're working on an ambitious plan to give this lender a global footprint through a major overseas acquisition spree This is according to people familiar with the matter Basically what we understand is that Wall Street advisory firms have already started pitching opportunities ranging from a takeover to credit of Credit Suisse to approaches of some of the emerging markets focused standard chartered DBS holdings the pony has been suggested in the Swiss wealth manager Julius ber as well It's basically what the goal of forming a national champion with a global footprint 40 $82 billion lender We'll see how stocks both in Switzerland and its Saudi Arabia digest this news I want to flip the board and get to some of the equity action in the futures market specifically We've seen an enormous amount of volatility coming through from overnight but also in the last hour.
We Travel There with Lee Huffman
"new zealand" Discussed on We Travel There with Lee Huffman
"It's where the original settlers came into New Zealand and first met the Maori people. So it's a very historic location. And the stone store is one of the most important structures there as is the camp house, which I think is the oldest building in all of New Zealand. And there's an inlet there, and it's just your minutes from that when you stay at for a pouquet. Oh, wow, that sounds amazing. Yeah, it's like that awesome mixture of like that local flavor and then also the historic aspect of it. And then obviously the nature too. So it's like hitting on all three cylinders. Yes. All right, so now again, obviously you're traveling probably a solo female traveler. I would assume when you're traveling, did you feel safe the entire time? Or is there any parts of town like, hey, maybe I should stay away from that part? You know, New Zealand's funny, especially in these little towns that most people don't lock their doors. So that was culture shock. I actually stayed in an air-b-n-b, my first week there with a lovely woman from South Africa. And she's an artist, and she has a dog and a bunch of chucks or chickens. It was just that she has cat. And it was just such an adventure with this beautiful view. And she didn't lock the front door and I didn't quite know what to make of it. I just. You know, so at first, I felt unsafe in that, you know, what? They're leaving their door unlocked. I'm from New York City. How is this possible? And then I got used to it. And I've spent a lot of my time in Carrie Carrie with the door unlocked and he felt very safe. Well, that's awesome. Same thing with obviously more like that kind of digital nomad type of scenario, right? Probably didn't anticipate that, but you looked into that lifestyle, whether you wanted to or not for the last 18 months, do they have like strong Internet and everything else there? Well, it's really funny when I was living there last year they did not. They had actually quite bad. At farra poke, the I was such a struggle I had to go into town like my video if I uploaded a two minute video and I believe my computer on overnight it might make it whereas in talent ship like 5 seconds. And then literally the day that I checked out, they got their fiber installed. And I did go back there recently. And it's lovely now. They have fiber. So in the town of Carrie Carrie now, I think they've installed more fiber access. So you'll find really good Internet access and there are two coworking spaces. And both of them not only is one of them, but they have great Internet as well. Oh, fantastic. Same thing. You mentioned that there's the Maori people and the language there. But most everybody you interacted with, they all spoke English. I would assume? Everybody speaks English. There's a movement underway in New Zealand that everyone should learn Mallory, which is lovely. So you'll hear a lot of words and you'll see like the tamako, which is the full body, sorry, the full face tattoo is called a tamako and people were refer to it and there are general words in daily language. So in New York, we have like spanglish where people speak English, but throw in Spanish and like in that same kind of way, you'll hear people here speaking English, but also there might be a Maori word that's just part of inherent in the language and culture that will just come out. Okay, same thing with say obviously you said it's a little bit of a small town. Do we need to have exchange into the local currency or is our credit cards accepted or American dollars accepted? You're going to need a New Zealand dollars and bring your credit cards for sure, but there are a number of places especially at the markets. There's a Sunday market every week, especially which has local produce. And many of them only take what's called F posts, which means you need a local bank account, or you can transfer. I mean, people will be like, just transfer the money into my bank account and they'll give you so different they'll give you the number to their bank account. And just expect that when you get around to it, you'll transfer the funds. Of course, if you do that from an American bank account, I mean, my bank anyway would charge me like $15 per transaction. So you need to have a decent amount of cash on you if you don't have a local bank account and want to shop at some of the more local places. Okay. But again, I kind of speak to that local small town feel where they just try to trust you that way, right? I've seen so many times, you know, somebody's like, oh shoot, I forgot my wallet. And they're like, just come back tomorrow or the next time you come in the store past then. That's wonderful. It's like such a bygone era that we have there versus in the U.S.. So let's talk about some of the things to do there. And some of the notes that I saw seems like there's a lot of hiking and beautiful waterfalls that are nearby. There are there are 5 main waterfalls, all of which are beautiful and worth going to. If you stayed at for a puke, you're actually down the road, so I mentioned the stone store. And there's a place called the honey house cafe, which I strongly recommend going for a cup of coffee or a little sandwich or a lovely afternoon cake or something. There's a bridge there that's where there's a beautiful view over the inlet of Carrie Carrie. If you cross the bridge and go there's a field and to your left, you pick up the trail to Farah poke waterfall, which is the first one, which is maybe a 15 or 20 minute walk. And if you continue on that trail, you'll end up maybe 45 ish minutes later at rainbow falls, which is one of the I think it's probably the biggest waterfall there, which has I missed it my first time. You come in on the bottom if you do this walk and you're looking out into the fall, but you can walk up and around it and then actually there's viewpoints up top and there is a tea house. That's also wonderful. And if you have the time to go, it just has lovely like teas and food and stuff, so I would also recommend making the time to do that. You can also drive there and park in the parking lot, which is also very accessible to the tea house and then start at the top of the waterfall walk down. So that's those two. And then what's neat is that most of these walks all start from around the stone store because the other two water if there's two other waterfalls that are right near the stone store that the path and one is called wide variant two wild area waterfall, and the other one is the secret waterfall. And it's about around an hour walk to each and that's just all in you can there's a point during that walk where it will tell you if it's bad weather, don't take this path. There's like a shortcut, but it's quite steep and in nature. And if it's raining, it's really muddy, take it really seriously. Don't take that path. And if it's sunny, then it is a great shortcut. But that will take you just through the Woods over these bridges and you end up at this lovely peaceful, small, little waterfall. And then the secret waterfall is a little easy to miss. You do need to be looking for it. And there is a sign for it. And then the secret waterfall, when we first started walking up to it, it reminded me of like a scene out of an Indiana Jones movie,.
AFF on AIR Podcast
"new zealand" Discussed on AFF on AIR Podcast
"It's probably not something that many of us have thought about. Oh really want to think about but what happens to have frequent flyer points after we die assets like money in physical property. Can of course be bequeathed but it doesn't quite work like that with frequent flyer points. That's because as the terms and conditions of pretty much every low t. program made clear points are the property of the airline not the account holder and have no monetary value of course points can be redeemed for things of value. When you're live but after off the account holder dies points would be forfeited depending on the policy of the airline..