Wir werden live das Gespräch von German Inter-Englisch transmutieren. Hallo, ich freue mich, dass ihr es geschafft habt und euch eine halbe Stunde in diese berühmte Hitze setzen wollt. Ich würde mich freuen, wenn ihr auch noch für den Talk danach bleibt. Aber ich hoffe, dass ihr das auch dann überleben könnt, weil es ist, ich finde es fürchterlich heiß hier. Ich bin froh, dass ihr es geschafft habt, dank der Hitze. Ich hoffe auch, dass ihr für den nächsten Talk bleiben könnt. Aber ich bin sehr glücklich, dass so viele Leute dazu haben, die Hitze zu bravieren und in diesem Talk sitzen. Also, Politische Lösungen für technische Probleme, das Titel der Talk heute.   Und das ist über die IT-Sekurität und was ihr damit tun könnt. Und der zweite war für die in den Ausschers basically telling, dass das, was ihr versucht, zu tun, ist nicht der Fall. So, zu Beginn. Wenn ich sage, ich möchte Politische Lösungen für technische Probleme geben. Zuerst müssen wir darüber reden, was technische Probleme sind. Also, was wollen wir uns hier in dem ersten Platz lösen? Wir alle wissen das Cyber. Das ist eines der ersten Google Image Resultate. Ich denke, dass alle das gesehen haben. Das Cyber ist groß und das Cyber hat uns auch sehr unhappig gemacht. Das ist etwas, was wir gegenwenden müssen. Oder was wir gegenwenden wollen. Weil es für unsere Gesellschaft ein Vorteil wäre, wenn wir uns die Probleme erzielen.  Und sie repart approximately 6.500 Vulnerabilities in IT-Systems every year. Und approximately 2 Zero-Days per month on average. Zero-Day means that this vulnerability exists in production systems. And it's only become known by attackers exploiting them. So, that is something nobody knew about before the attackers exploited this weakness. And only after there was damage humanity was informed about the vulnerability in this software system. Best candidate is the Adobe Flash Player, where I really ask myself how they can go away with this low number of vulnerabilities per day. And finally, I think the most disconcerting part according to the Symantec study is that the top 5 Zero-Days in 2015 usually took 59 days until before they were fixed. So, users are vulnerable for about 295 days in the year 2015. And I think you can say with good reason it would be nice to lower these numbers. So, obviously you want to increase the first number because you want to discover all the vulnerabilities. Zero-Days, that are being exploited in the wild, should be lowered. And of course, the time to first fix should be reduced massively. 2014 was also the year of politically and technologically very painful security bugs. So, we had to go to fail from Apple. It was one and a half years old before it was found a vulnerability in the TLS library of iOS and Mac OS. So, one and a half years the people were vulnerable, was fixed on the same day for iOS and five days later for the Mac. And that deserves the award for second most fastest-pushed updated Apple ever released. Only the U2 album that people got for free a few days, a few years ago, reached people faster than that. We had Heartbleed, everybody knows about it. It was two years old when it was discovered. So, theoretically we were vulnerable for two years. Had no or very few chances to see if any of these attacks have been happening before. Fix was released on the same day. The fix was published with knowledge of the exploit. Special feature, the first bug that had a logo before became cool. I think that's worth a round of applause. And Shellshock vulnerability in Bash. 25 years old before it was discovered. As far as I know, that is the oldest CVSS10 that exists. It's older than the IP stack that Windows uses. So, yeah, it's probably the oldest bugs, because Windows IP stack is also in the CVSS10 area. So, we have problems. And it turns out that the off-proclaimed self-feeling parts of open source are not working as much as we wish for. All of these symbols, open SSL, as well as Apple's TLS Implementation S, Bash, are all open source programs. And everybody sees the open source much, much more secure, because everybody can look at it. And many bugs, many eyeballs, make bugs, shallows. But reality is different. We can see that the open source quality assurance, I think we just have to admit it to ourselves. There are still deficits there. And the economic incentives that make software more secure have also failed us, because some people decided to exploit some of the victims of heartbleed and correlated with their yearly revenue. All of these would totally have had the money and power to audit open SSL or to pay someone to make the library more secure. In the meantime, Facebook created their own TLS library. But we can see we have yearly revenues that are definitely relevant here. And all of these are being protected, or amongst others, protected by open SSL, by open source products. But none of them audited them. And I think that's very sad. There's a social dilemma at play here, because if I invest in an open source software, I have to spend money. At the same time, everybody profits from that. Also those who don't invest. And of course, that leads to an incentive where open SSL is the industry standard, everyone's in the same boat. That means nobody can blame me if I get a security issue there. And of course, why should I invest? Because my incentive is to just wait for everyone else to do it. And I could just profit from their effort. So, let's go to the political solutions. So, what I was talking about at the beginning of last year about the digital agenda, agenda of the German government. I think the following political solutions would be appropriate to ensure that we all have safer computer systems. Not as citizens only, but also companies whose rights the German government is also trying to protect in this context. But where are the political possibilities at all for these kind of technical problems? So, we have real bugs, programming mistakes, buffer where just code quality is lacking, something you can exploit on that level. And we also have the concept of a backdoor. Maybe not quite an intentional mistake. But the remote access possibility, which might or might not have been built in by design. So, that's a systemic kind of a flank, which you can target. Take the German secure mail program, DEMail. This was an example. But these aren't really political errors per se. But I'd like to say, that's why I'd introduce another idea to... Well, an expanded model. This is the different layer. So, after this layer seven, the layer eight problem, we have the organizational level, and the top level is the kind of politics. So, this is a problem of competence, really, at this level. So, at the same time, they're under pressure to do something at last. And there's a lot of action going on, saying we have to do something now, finally. But it's a kind of security drama because the efficiency of the approach isn't really apparent. So, maybe we know airport security when we all have to leave our toothpaste there. We think, oh yeah, they're taking care of security, but it's another approach or workaround that should be addressed as itself. And so, on the layer below, at the organizational level, we have another focus as regards company interests. So, what is the need to do IT security? The users themselves are usually not decisive there in this kind of process or decision. So, we have a dysfunctional KPI. What's a KPI, three-letter acronym? This is Key Progress Indicator. It's a, he's not sure himself, a Key Performance Indicator. So, this is what we arrange with your consultant with your McKinsey advisors and to be able to measure your own progress in the last year, for instance. So, what they're saying is, of course, find more errors in shorter time. But these kind of personal advancement reports will make you ensure that people spend the least possible money in the shortest time. So, basically it's a certification just to make sure that you keep on going and can't be sued for negligence or something.  So, if you take companies like Microsoft, that gives us all another level, to do something interesting within this organization is quite difficult. And so, that's my conclusion. The social dilemma that arises out of this is that no one is as good as maybe they could be or some, because it's not worth investing in this mutual gain. And so, the vulnerability level might be at the application level or at the presentation level or, you know. So, these are indirect ways of targeting exactly the level where the weakness is, where the vulnerability is. And these are kind of, well, open question. Will these signs make sure that the German certificate for security, will these make coders write better code or will they prevent hackers from hacking? This is something a friend of mine who is an auditor of one of these. Well, he said, if I sell bad meat because I'm a vegetarian, I didn't catch that. Then I can be certified for, well, have his fish and chip shop certified by some strange rule breaking or bending. I didn't quite get the anecdote. But regarding software quality, we have the infrastructure level. The question is how does the infrastructure need to be built up, that we can enforce these standards and the decentralization. These are all points that are only necessary. As soon as the first level, the software quality has already failed you. So, that can be advanced from before just to make independent audits to make bounty prizes and to also have a liability for bad code. But if you have fraudulent systems, well, you could talk about liability issues and just see with what kind of bugs this is already delivered out. So, these political ideas that might be realized, they have some kind of accountability to ensure how these standards are enforced at all. And again in Germany we have a situation that the data retention is being reintroduced. In this situation I would have liked to see that after a year we can say, well, have we profited, have we benefited from data retention? No, there's no indicator for that. And we have to leave it be and carry on another way. So, instead of that you see, I'm a consultant, I have these three boxes and now I'm going to dive into the deep. Proactivity means you want to be faster than the attackers. And the entire security industry annoys me in, especially with the products, the entire prevention thing is always trailing behind. Audits, new vulnerability now, we have to create a new patch. Oh, a new virus, we have to update our signatures. The entire area of prevention only thinks about known vulnerabilities and not about how to reduce the number of, increase the number of known vulnerabilities and how to be faster than the attacker. Right, there's a slide missing here, maybe not. Then I wonder how can we increase software quality today, especially the open source software. And one thing I think will be cool is that we will be able to do something called backbounties. Backbounties from an economic perspective are very sensible because you just put out one high award and you just say, okay, remote code execution in OpenSSL, if you find such a bug, we give you $250,000 or something. And then you just slowly increase the awards. And then you hope that sometime several scientists are working on this, several researchers are working on this and you don't actually have to pay them. So, for security researchers, maybe not the best, but economically speaking, for security they're very interesting. The problem is that today's backbounty programs just don't award high enough amounts. So we have this company called Vupen and they just buy exploits. And so with Google's backbounty program people go there, they can show them vulnerabilities, but they don't actually collect the prize because that would force them to reveal their technique. And instead of cashing in the award, they just say, yeah, now we're going to show you how we did it. We just want to show you how we can do it. We actually have another buyer who will pay more. And of course that's the worst thing that can happen in these kinds of competitions. I think the only thing that we can do as a society is to take care that as a civil body and as a state body we are in the position to pay them the prizes that they want to get for their work to dry out the black market that is also being peppered by the state security agencies. And of course it's a question of liability. Security promises are not being kept. And I always forget who said it, there's this beautiful quote saying, there's only two suppliers in our society that can work without any liability. That's drug dealers and software manufacturers. And both of them call their users users. So if they don't keep their promises or patches that are coming too late, like these 59 days, sorry, 95 days, I think at least in proprietary products and obvious carelessness you could try to create a political pressure for liability which would actually incentivize people and companies especially to make the software more secure. So 20 years of IT products or more than one decade of security problems we find several thousand vulnerabilities per year. Why? Manufacturers say we want to reduce costs so you want to maximize a profit. Users cannot see security features. They don't understand or check. That's why they go for the nice certificates. And in the end, security is often an afterthought. So people often ask you, ask us, well, is this secure? Then you say, well, what's the attack you want to defend against? And that's something we need to educate people about. I think the only way to actually tackle this problem is to create more legislation and actually create stronger marketplace rules. So, for example, standards should be here that we demand decentral infrastructure, we demand strong standards, we demand end-to-end encryption. And of course you can just codify these demands but you can only force people to follow these if you're competent enough and if you don't make the mistake in order to give suppliers the choice to just create their own enforcement rules. So, the next step, we should take a look at the Ministry of the Interior. Thomas de Mesier, the German Minister of the Interior, probably the last thing he wants in his life is that our IT systems become more secure. If you look at what he's in control of, he's in control of police, who basically want to push forward data retention. There's the Federal Office for the Constitution of Protection, so the Internal Secret Service, who are mostly busy with spying on journalists and shredding old files and supporting Nazi structures. So the last thing they want is for our IT to become more secure. Then there's the BND, the German External Secret Service, who recently offered four and a half million Euros to buy zero days. So, they definitely don't want us to know what they have so we can patch against what they paid so much money for. And then finally there's the Federal Office for the Security of IT, who participate in development Trojans for the government. And they should now be responsible to eliminate the zero days that the colleagues from the BND bought earlier. I don't buy that and neither should you. So, what our demands as a CCC is to take the BSI out of that mantle and then subsume all the other agencies under the Ministry of the Interior so they can finally do what the job actually is to protect the some people who attack us or want to attack us. So, that's about our suggestions so far. And now, well, what we were confronted with in as a result. And I had a letter in my letterbox. What was, what happened there? Well, that was exactly how I felt, sort of blackout moment. Well, laws in a way, published as a sort of a div file. So, you can amend one paragraph here and there. So, maybe they have learnt something there in those terms from our community. But we have five areas here that are sort of the minimum standards that are from legal side the least common denominator. And so we have the points if the BSE, the security office of the government is involved with working with government, with non-government companies then there have to be certain regulations held and, well, a lot lower threshold to actually access data. There are kind of deals to watch information about standards and these are enforced in these one-on-one contracts.  And there was the discussion about IT products, software basically being traded as arms regulations to international trade. Well, this is the thing about registry, the need to register your product is interesting here. So basically it's this ministry defining what's critical infrastructure and just keeping a list of the lower standards. But of course the providers or enterprises have the right to make suggestions. So how on earth should the German office for IT security know what kind of demands security standards companies might need? Well, so what these companies need to do that want to have this certification, they have to do a sort of two-year audit cycle and have to give an alert if they have security issues. But that can be done anonymously and if the product is entirely deprecated then they have to have certain contact persons for, well it's like once the first nuclear reactor is hacked, well we might find out through this alarm obligation form a bit later on. So that's the most immediate way. And so we get every two years we get a sort of delayed image of what's going on. And so you can imagine in this kind of well how fast a yearly cycle is in this context. So let's have a look at the security standards that are to become obligatory. Well basically the companies have to write these security concepts themselves. Take as an example energy, they have unions or representatives and lobby groups and they have a sort of suggestion right in the legal, in legislation and an expert reads the evaluation and says well that sounds like you could do it in this manner. And I think in the BSE Security Office, IT Security Office, I don't think there's so much known about the proceedings of legislation so everyone is just convening and taking their own stack of IT concepts, security concepts with them and these have a very different standard not only formatting but writing and it's literally a matter of finding the least common denominator. And so that's the box at the back here, the combination of both, they have two possibilities really. And so what I said to them is just, one option is you read all of them and take the best suggestion and all adapt to that which means you won't have to actively change your already existing procedures. And the other option is that we take not the smallest common denominator but to make it a broader concept and make sure that it's just something that everyone can achieve in within the next two years. So if you see what it might be a simple process it's quite clear what people will choose or which would be the box on the right but also just the least effort, the way of the least resistance. Then we have the telemedia services, they have to be secure now. Telemedia services are content and hosting suppliers and they are now forced to take organized storage and technical precautions to protect the systems components and processes or supposedly to create appropriate authentication methods but that was removed from the changed law. They may now save user data to try debug and solve issues which takes paragraph 15 of the telemedia law and makes it analog to the paragraph 100 of the Telecommunications Act which allows them to save user data and there isn't even a set of limitations on this. That's the kind of data that's being used when you get subpoena for downloading files because obviously if these data exist then you can use a civil law process to just subpoena them and use them for your purposes. So obviously this is kind of productive because the best way to get data security is to not store data that you don't want to risk getting hacked. And that's the point, we know the problem as soon as you have the data everybody comes and wants to access it. I've compared it to the European Union guideline 2006, 24 EG and basically this is a data retention law that is not limited to criminal law. And then there is this beautiful part where the Federal Criminal Police gets the jurisdiction of a cyberspace where you can see how many and which laws are there that involve computer crime that includes the unauthorized access of data and preparation of such computer frauds and manipulation of data and computer sabotage. And of course you could say if you're writing pentesting tools or proof of concept for vulnerabilities then you have other people committed crime and thus you're also liable. That's the kind of grey area that we operate in here in Germany and that's what we're trying to get rid of as a CCC because the IT security can only be achieved by reducing IT insecurity and for that we need research. So with all of these cases first you go to your local police especially while far reaching cases then you get passed on to the state level and if they are of a countrywide or larger impact then they get passed on to the Federal Criminal Office so you can't, it's hard to imagine a way any further away from democratic structures. So, to summarize our first criticism was the protection of the end user. The protection of end users is something that's not even in this entire new law. Companies know how to protect their own interests very well. They know exactly which data are important and which aren't in regards to their yearly revenue and user data, especially telemedia suppliers or telecommunication suppliers data stay there that they don't really care about because last years have shown that if there is a breach there maybe a larger problem where user data are stolen there's zero consequences. Customers don't leave Customers can't demand any punitive damages. So there's just a few days of media coverage half a year later you create some security transparency offensive sell people your new messenger saying it's not secure and there's no damage to your image at all. So I think that's a joke and we absolutely need concrete ways to tackle end user protection. Secondly bureaucracy in IT security instead of bureaucracy I wish for a proactive approach I want IT security to be created a competition of corporations with each other and against bureaucracy. One way to not get that is the right of giving the corporations the right to suggest their own procedures because obviously corporations will never out of their own volition suggest anything so they would have trouble fulfilling. So you would always end up with absolutely smallest thing they can get away with that is not obviously ridiculous. So I'm looking forward to the corporations claiming to exceed the standard of security that's demanded by law. And then of course we have privacy the fewer data is collected the fewer data will be hacked and here we can see that the collection of data happens for completely different reasons. And lastly we demand the independence of the federal security office federal IT security office which needs to become its own agency because now they are the only ones who know anything about security and currently the secret services German agencies are their colleagues and of course they will share that stuff. So that's why I don't think it's a good idea to supply the BSI with information about security vulnerabilities because they will just leak it to the secret services who are potentially attackers. So in theory a good idea but they should not be under the influence of the Ministry of the Interior. So that's it, thank you.


Mr. Stink Tech Hawaii, the community matters here. Aloha y bienvenido to Hispanic Hawaii. I'm Richard Concepcion, your host. Today's guest is Ana Jimenez-Madamele. She is the executive producer at the Atres at Work on the film Natural Reaction and World Buffet. It was created and filmed here in Hawaii. Ana, welcome to the show. Muchas gracias. Buenas tardes. Let's start by asking you to tell me just a little bit about yourself and what motivated you to become an actress. Such a difficult film to do. Thank you. Yes, so I wanted to do something more creative. My area is in public health. Healthcare has kind of been my passion all my life. But there were little inklings when I was younger. I was in this little film in grade school that the teacher, she filmed it and I was all intrigued how she set up everything. And then I wrote to Lizzie Wagner back in the day and she was a very strong character. So I felt like, well, I want to be like her, you know. But then I got more into health in seventh grade and my path kind of led me there. But more recently, I just felt like I wanted to do something different than public health. So that's kind of how I got involved. And so I initially hired a team and the first team I didn't go with. So I went with the second team and I felt like I made the best choice to work with natural reaction. So you become the executive producer and the actress for natural reaction. So you do hot. Is there any conflict between being the executive producer and the actress in the film? Well, I think when you're trying to do two roles, yeah, it's challenging, but, you know, you just take it by the way you can handle it. And so by hiring the team, they said, Anna, just focus on your acting. Let us do the rest because I was trying to go, oh, what about the food and what about this? And it was just too much. So by hiring the team, I let them take care of that. And then I could focus on my lines and my character and doing my part as far as being the actress. And then the executive producer role was just basically doing the funding. Wow, that's great. Let me ask you about casting. And also I want to talk about the budget to create in the movie. So how difficult was for you to be able to find actors and actress to perform in the natural reaction? And how was the budget looked like? Well, that's what made it interesting. By hiring a team, I didn't have to worry about that. And they hired the best actors. Some of them was Jim Ina, who's an established theater actor. He's won some awards. And we have some Gen Z group actors, Landon Richards and Brandy Taylor. So their experience helped me get to my next level. So I didn't have to really worry about casting. It was another thing that took the stress off of me because we wanted good actors to make a really good movie. So talk to me about pre-production and post-production. How does it work as a executive producer? So pre-production, that's where you know you're doing your casting and you're finding the locations and actually the SAG office recommended that we do it at the Botanical Gardens in Kaneohe. So it really made a great fit. And post-production, of course, that's the editing. Then that's the marketing. That's really where the rubber meets the road, so to speak. So people think, oh, I'm going to make a movie and everything's going to be great. But if you want to sell it, now you're talking another realm. And it just, you know, that's a whole other chapter. Well, I want to ask you, what was the main natural reaction? What was the reason for that name? Well, that came out through the dialogue and just reading the dialogue. It actually weren't, they weren't my lines, but when I read it, I was like, hmm. Oh, and the original name was In the Loop. In the Loop. Yeah, but there was a movie that had a similar title. And so I felt like it was too close to that title. But in the dialogue, there was just something that came to mind and I was saying, how about natural reaction in what happens in the movie, how she reacts to what happens. It just all worked out. So natural reaction was a better title. So do you have a process like when you want to find a specific name for the movie, so make sure there is no copyright for another movie? Yes, you have to go through that process, but it's pretty easy because most movies now, and anything on TV is an IMDb9. So you can just go on there. But I've seen things with the same name, that's a movie and then a television show. So I think, yeah, you do have to talk to some legal, but we have legal representation or access to producers. I know it takes a lot of work to be the second to producer and also be part of the movie as an actress. So I want to take this opportunity to show the real, all natural reaction. Oh, and I wanted to quickly say too, I want to thank my husband, Eric, for his support because this wouldn't have happened without his love and support. Okay, let's watch the movie then. It was my sister who got me into painting. Always did things together, her and I. The cops don't know injustice, they know incompetence. What I did to your sister wasn't personal. It's just what I do.  I think she might have gone looking for two. Call back up and leave me there. Like that she died. That is natural reaction. Ana Jimenez-Mamelen, that was great. I watched the movie, wonderful movie. It kept me a lot suspended. What is going to happen? What is the name? What is she going to do? That's great, that's wonderful. So let me ask you where this movie was created? Where in Hawaii was that? Most of it was filmed in the Potamacal Garden in Kaneohe. And I wanted to mention too that my husband did the artwork. He did the artwork in this movie and the second movie that I did. So it's a family business to the film industry. So tell me where the movie was filmed. Okay, so it was filmed in the Potamacal Garden. And so we used a house that was there for the scenes. And then we used different areas in the Potamacal Garden to film the different scenes. So they weren't just all kind of in one location. But you know the magic of cameras and everything. You think there's somewhere else and it's like close to the house and other scenes were further from the house. But yeah, it made for a perfect location. And my car was actually in it too. By accident kind of. And then we did have other scenes that were up in Halapa Valley and at another house for one of the background crew gave us a family member's house. So there were a few other locations. And oh yeah, there was a location in Kailua at the bookstore. So that was kind of nice to have that. Well, that is great that we created film by filmmakers and actors and actresses here locally. And that's great for the business, for the community and for the future talents and future filmmakers. But if you have any tips to give to any executive producer or producer, what will you tell them? Well, stay within your budget. And everyone knows now you can make a movie with your phone. But if you want to have more polished look and you want to not worry about every little thing, yeah, you can hire a small crew to help you. Like I did the first movie. I ended up having a lot more crew. And I even had a stunt person, which is very unusual for an indie movie. And we had the drone at the end. And that time the guy was making his own drones. He said, oh yeah, they're going to be mass produced. And sure enough, everybody has a drone now, too. I wanted to mention, too, Theo Comis was another actor who's very established. He also does coaching. He was excellent. So I was very privileged to have gotten him on my movie. And stay within your budget. And it's just like any budget. Like I took some savings working capital, which means capital I'm making now between the husband and I. And just stuck with the budget, basically. Quickly to what you can afford. All right. So what was the best or the worst part of working in the movie as an actress? No, I said second to producer as an actress. The best part in working as an actress is, you know, you get treated like a queen for the day as far as hair and makeup. All girls love that. And, you know, dressing up and being somebody else, you know. And the worst part was, I mean, for this film, because this film is thriller horror drama, was there was a lot of emotion. And that's actually hard to play without, you know, not getting into it and how to get out of it and, you know, it weighs on you. But, you know, it comes with experience. I'm still a new actress. So I think seasoned actors, if they can get in and out of their emotions quickly. That's true, you know. So as an actress, you know, how do you prepare for that kind of, you know, talent to go into feel sad, to become happy, to laugh? How do you prepare for that? Well, the best way is to, you know, be yourself and let the character come into you. And you might have to think of a strong emotion if that's what it requires. But, yeah, you know, feeling the emotion as the best way and let the character come into you. Is there any benefit of creating your own movie? Is there a benefit behind that? Yes, you get to star in it, for one. Okay. And it gives you more footage for your real and more experience. As casting directors that came here from LA recently, they said, get into everything, you know, make your own movies, make movies with people who do play, keep going to class. That's how you get better.  I mean, it didn't happen overnight.    So it's just, that's what, you know, that's your passion. And some people are naturals, you know. My one acting coach said that the person, they're natural, you know. But that's just how it goes with a lot of things, right? That's true. You're meant to be something and you're more better at it because you're more better because you're natural. Also, you got to continue practicing your skill, right? Exactly. So let me ask you, when the pre-production and you go through all the different phases and then you go to post-production and the film is complete. What do you do from there? Where do you go to play the movie? You just take it home and watch it and give it to your friends? What is the next step? Okay, like I mentioned before, the rubber meets the road. So my producers worked really hard on the editing and so now what we want to sell it, we want to make movies, money. So in addition to me, increasing my acting skills. So my one producer worked hard to get it on Amazon. It's in the second year now and it's on Prime, so if you got Prime, it's free. We also got it on Roku. We had it on two channels, but we took it off one channel because Roku, actually, a lot of people don't know about Roku, but it's another TV. It's like Hulu. But anyways, it was on two channels on Roku and we had to take it off a one, I think, because now we're going to be on Artemis streaming live channel and they require that if we have it on any platforms, it needs to be for sale, which is a good thing, right?  I mean, if you keep persisting. But anyways, so we're excited about that because Artemis is actually a film festival, which I mentioned to you. Okay. And so now they're doing a live streaming channel and so whoever got into their film festival gets to be on this channel and it's international. All right. So we're helping for the best. All right, that's perfect. We're going to take a quick break. We're going to come by and we're going to continue talking story with Ana Jimenez, my member. My friend, mother, what big eyes you have. She said, all the better to see you with my dear. What are you doing? Okay. Research says reading from birth accelerates the baby's brain development. And you're doing that now? Oh, yeah. This is the starting line. Posh. This is over. You're dead. Read aloud 15 minutes. Every child, every parent, every day. I just walked by and I said, what's happening, guys? They told me they were making music. We're here with Ana Jimenez, my manager. She is the executive producer and actress that work on natural reaction and World Buffet. Welcome back. We're going to continue talking stories. All right. So let me ask you, tell me a little bit about the casting, the actress and actress that came and performed for you and they sat and after union or they are no union? Well, we had union and non-union but we only had three union because you have to pay them. So they get residuals from when we sell the movie but they did get money up front but it was like the minimum because we're, you know, ultra low budget. So 20,000, that's not a lot of money. So they've gotten some residuals because we've gotten some checks from Amazon and Roku actually. So you was telling me about the procedure getting the movie to be playing in different locations in order for you to sell it. Tell me a little bit more about that. That was no very clear. Is it going straight to Amazon? You have a middleman who will set it up for you? How does it work? Yes, you have a middle person. And there's many platforms you can use. We went with one particular because that's the one we knew about. So yeah, there are different venues that you have to go through them and then they set you up on Amazon and it's a process. So you have to pay to be on there for the initial and then closed captioning and then the yearly is much lower and it still was a couple thousand, I think for 1500 or something like that between initial and then the closed captioning and then the yearly is really low. And then of course there's a quarterly or whatever, but yeah. And then Roku, I think there's like a monthly or something be I'm not really sure and then they pay you through the advertisement. I think that's how that works and Amazon, they take their percentage and I think with the new streaming, the Artemis streaming channel, that's going to be a little bit better deal because it's going to be 50-50 I believe. And actually I wanted to mention that Artemis, that's A-R-T-E-M-I-S film festival, there are women in action that kick butt and I know Raquel Welts one of her movies is on there. So that's that genre. If you have a movie that's like that, that's why we got onto that one. But we actually got picked up by a distributor, but we thought it was in our best controlling interest monetarily to go with these three platforms for now. Oh wow. So you've done natural reaction which is done well and still going. A lot of people are still watching it. So you are creating a new movie. Tell me a little bit about the new movie. Okay, so World of Fae is different from natural reaction as far as genre off because natural reaction again is thriller drama horror where World of Fae is comedy, a little spoofy and has heavy dialogue, has these like monologues that go on and on and it also has a little bit of a political backdrop. But nothing like too, you know, too controversial. Yeah, nothing too controversial, nothing too heavy. It's just light, but it's nice. And that's another thing about making your own movies is doing different genres so they can show your range and you can see what you're better at. But it's good to play whatever you can to get better. So as an actress you continue taking classes, you continue to prepare for different roles, right? Exactly. And so how do you prepare from being, you know, thriller to now comedy? Is there any major preparation or did you just like you say before just go with the flow? Well, yeah, I had, there was a lot of heavy dialogue in the first movie they're like, you know, it's your first movie, maybe not so much dialogue. So this one was a lot of dialogue. So yeah, I prepared for like over a half a year for it. So learning my lines, that's the most important thing then, you can get into your character. So yeah, it was a little bit different. And it was nice to be, you know, like quirky and funny and not have to have the all like bad and upset and all that. So it's more relaxing when you're doing something funny that doing something they had to do with the thriller. Yes. I mean, I had to still, there's parts of the movie where I do get upset, but I don't want to give it all away. Okay, great. So let's, let's watch. Let's watch this movie real quick. Okay, let's watch it. How do you choose from between Maine Lobster? Lausta. Shhh. Focus. How do you choose from between Maine Lobster or Georgia Peaches? Or whether your pizza is deep to Chicago or New York original? There's Cajun Shrimp from Louisiana or Kahlua Pig from Hawaii. Do we take the fish from Seattle or Clouster Bay? They're all... Can we just... Clouster Bay. All right. That is the world buffet. So tell me a little bit what was happening the other day and what you get was laughing, you know. Okay. So that's, it's actually world buffet bloopers, you know, takeouts that the things that didn't quite work out in the movie filming. So that's what was going on. But it was just trying to say the words right and I couldn't say it right and took forever and so that was one of the part of the bloopers because it's online right now. So it's like almost five minutes but we just took that part. So that's what was going on. That's what was going on. The mistakes of filming which is funny too, you know. So I don't want to say how many mistakes you guys made but it seems like it's fun what you're doing is something they had to do with comedy. How many hours does it take to just create let's say five minutes? Does it take a lot or do you spend two hours a day, five hours?  Well it depends on the director. So a very famous director Clint Eastwood he only wants to do a couple of takes and he's done and so my director was the same way. We didn't want to do a bunch of takes unless we had to because you know we're on a two string budget so to speak. My second movie was only $18,000. So yeah you don't want to have to take a lot of time so it's important that you have people that know their lines and are ready to go because you know and the facility you have too so it might depend on that too you only have so many days or half a day to use you know your location. So what is your recommendation for the future actress and actress or filmmakers here in Hawaii that they want to create their own film what is your recommendation for them? Well I say go for it I mean there's a lot of people that want to make their own movie and that's all they want to do that's great there's some people that want to make their own movie and make money out of it that's where I'm at and increase my skills that's another level because like I said it's you know it's apples and oranges just to make the movie to sell it is another full enchilon because you know these big budget movies they have you know multi-million dollar budgets just to make the movie so that's where they get you know So talk to me about the marketing I want to know a little bit more about marketing how do you market your movies? Oh and I wanted to mention some of the actors in World Buffet so we have Wendy Pearson who's also an established theater actor actress and Starla Marie who happens to also be a singer-songwriter so I just wanted to mention a couple of actors in World Buffet so getting to making a movie here what was Oh talk about the you know the marketing part of the movie you created the movie you finished it how do we market this movie? Okay so I learned a lot in natural reactions Talk to me about that If you can have the budget like I said multi-million or even like maybe ten thousand twenty thousand because some people will do it for cheap maybe five you've got to do the social media that's worth that right now too right but then there's other people they like do you know LA Times they do all this other stuff that they can keep rotating it or on TV which is very expensive so if you don't have that kind of budget you can't advertise on TV right so they're paying a lot of money to do that so I did do the LA Times digital for us I didn't think it was all that successful because we didn't have the TV to match it so to speak so you got to kind of pick and choose like what will work for you but if you're doing media yourself you know you're talking you know Instagram Facebook Twitter but now there's ways one of my similar photographers said that you know just do through Instagram and it does both but so yeah you just have to decide it's really about your budget and time so the first movie I was doing it all myself that it was like I did for the it was like the first month or two when we got on Amazon yeah I was just like but you know now I've figured out some of the tricks oh I don't know about that but I mean it's just you know overwhelming that happened when you create a movie when you perform and you start using all the different platform to promote and then you get all these emails and you got to manage all these emails coming in and trying to respond to each and every one of them so it's become very very difficult let me ask you what is the future for Anna Heeman I said actress or producer is it good to produce her yeah so I actually hooked up my producers with another person that's up and coming actress she's actually better than me and she wanted to do her own movie she already had an idea of you know some storylines for what she wants to do and so she was actually going to go with somebody else and I talked her into going with my producers and so yeah and I thought she was just going to do it for really small people and so yeah so I'm going to be in her movie it's a small role and then I just got asked right now to do another movie by the way when we were out in the lobby somebody else asked me to do a movie that's great they wrote a novel and so I said oh okay but yeah so I'm going to concentrate though I really want to concentrate on improving my acting big time and I do want to make another movie so I have some it may not be an indie though and then the one that I just got asked about so actually I have two now on the burner turns out that's great just keep going don't stop one more question final questions you know students you know maybe they in high school or they're going to college and they want to continue I say producer and filmmakers what would you tell them from your personal experience? I would tell them that it is work it's the job take it seriously if this is what you want to do and more power to you youth is on your side and listen to those around you you know and even with me you know I got to listen to other people because you the more advice you can get the better you know I mean of course you got to pick and choose but yeah go for it guys a limit I say the worlds are oyster anyway you are right the sky is the limit and we want to say thank you so much for watching Spaniard Hawaii we had a great time here talking about natural reaction and World Buffet we Ana Jimenez Matt Miller and we want to say if you want to continue watching the show be back next Tuesday or you can go to thinktakehawaii.com to re-watch this program and Aloha gracias thank you


This is Mises Weekends with your host Jeff Deist. Hey ladies and gentlemen, welcome back once again to Mises Weekends. I'm joined in studio by our friend Alan Mendenhall. I'm sure many of you know him. He's an attorney and dean of a law school here in the state of Alabama. And he's also our residential legal expert when it comes to the Mises Institute analyzing court cases and in this instance Supreme Court justice. So we're talking about newly appointed Brett Kavanaugh as our subject this week. You know Alan I'm looking at this guy and first and foremost it's so untrump-like because I read somewhere some commenter said this is a guy that a president, Rubio, or a president Ted Cruz easily could have appointed. This is a swamp guy. He was probably the swampiest of the swamp critters of the possible nominees. He was my least favorite of the four that they were down to. We were down to Barrett and Kethledge and Hardiman and Kavanaugh was probably my least favorite. And so I sort of agree with Judge Napolitano. He came out with an op-ed yesterday saying he was disappointed in the pick and I have my reasons for that too. I do think that had Roy Moore not lost the election to Doug Jones and the Republicans hadn't lost that seat and John McCain if he didn't have cancer and you had those two sentencing it probably would have been a different choice. You probably would have seen Trump pick someone with a little bit stronger conservative bona fides for lack of a better word. But I think concerns about Susan Collins from Maine and Lisa Markowski and how they might split might defect, made this choice more moderate, more palatable to people on the left. So he's definitely the safest pick of those four. Well, the other thing about the swamp is this guy literally grew up in D.C. and that seems to me a very bad omen for people who think like we do. You know, I'm thinking out loud of other people who have grown up in D.C. Al Gore, Pat Buchanan actually grew up in D.C. The sports writer John Feinstein grew up in D.C. and I think it's a very odd place to grow up.  I think it gives you a hometown sense of a place that isn't really a hometown. It's not a real place. It's a false place. Yeah, it's a transient community. And so, yeah, you're right. And in his career was basically in D.C. from the time that he was, you know, before he was associate counsel and senior associate counsel in the White House and he was very resistant to W. Bush and all that kind of stuff. You know, he had clerked for Kennedy. He clerked for Kaczynski, which I see as being interesting. I don't see Kaczynski as being your sort of standard cookie cutter establishment type. But, you know, working in the office of independent counsel Ken Starr doing, working on the Starr report, working on the Vince Foster investigation. There's a reason why it looked as though this guy is everywhere. You know, he's in the Bush administration when Katrina happens. You know, when Rehnquist dies, he's there at the Starr report, all this Clinton stuff. And that's why he had such a tough time getting confirmed when he was first nominated back in 2003. It took him three years to get confirmed to the D.C. circuit. Why is Trump of all people nominating a bushy? It's a surprise. Unbelievable. It's a surprise. I think that he had a lot of people advising him about confirmability. And I think that's really what this choice came down to. And there's a little lore circulating that having a former Kennedy clerk replace Kennedy with something Kennedy wanted. And that Kennedy had privately told Trump, I'll step down. I'll retire if you replace it with ex-people. And, you know, who knows if that's true or not. But that's, you know, that's out there in the rumor mill. Yeah. Well, I bet Ruth Pader Ginsburg thought Hillary Clinton was going to be the next president. Well, she's 85. So you would expect her to...  If she were to retire during Trump's term, which is unlikely that she will, you know, that would be momentous to say the least. Breyer, 79, he turns 80 next month. So he's not a spring chicken either. I think if you still have those two on the court going into the next presidential election, it will be another one of those elections where you say, oh, this election is really about the Supreme Court. Right. Which raises all kinds of questions like, why does the Supreme Court have this much power? Why are we voting for a president based on what nine lawyers, a composition of nine lawyers is? That seems to be odd. Well, if Trump manages to win re-election in 2020, Ruth Pader Ginsburg is 86 at that point. Yeah.  She could. Yeah. She could. There's actually no mechanism if a justice were to become incapacitated in office or to be in some sort of vegetative state or something. There's no mechanism for removing that justice short of impeachment. You would have to actually go and impeach that person who's in ill health, and that would not be seemingly, but it might be necessary. But she wouldn't step down. She'd just be sick and missing votes and missing arguments and not step down. It's possible. There's no way she'd step down with Trump. I don't think she'll step down during Trump. No, I really don't think she'll step down during Trump's tenure. I would be shocked if she did. Well, Kavanaugh spent at least a few days, a few years out of D.C. because he went to Yale. So he spent three years and presumably in New Ham, Connecticut.  This Harvard Yale chokehold on the Supreme Court, I think it's exceedingly anti-diverse. I think it gives a northeastern establishment a hold on all kinds of policies and imagine them talking to us about diversity. You know, it's interesting because the correlation between these Ivy League schools and the politicization of the court have sort of worked in concert. I think presidents are trying to pick people that they can't be accused of being unqualified. I think after Harriet Meyers at least. After Harriet Meyers, people are saying, well, we need to make sure we pick somebody that is not susceptible to accusations of being unqualified. And I personally, like you, would like to see a lot more diversity. I think there are plenty of really excellent law schools out there and many, many excellent attorneys who went to law schools that were not Ivy League. And that's why I think Barrett was a Notre Dame law person and I liked that about her. I thought that was a unique quality. And then Catholic and Hardiman as well were sort of outside that typical cookie cutter resume, put it that way. Right. I guess Hardiman went to Georgetown, I think. Yeah. So by Ivy League standards, that's almost the South or whatever. That's a Southern law school, I guess. But it is interesting also that, you know, so much has been said about his Catholicism. And he appears to be a pretty serious Catholic. I think that's right. And you and I talked about this off air, how the Supreme Court was always viewed as this waspy institution. In fact, there were no wasps whatsoever on it for many, many years up until Gorsuch, who is, I guess, raised Catholic but is now Anglican. Yeah, that's correct. So it's not a wasp court, but it's a very Catholic court or it will be if Kavanaugh wins this nomination. Yeah, that's true. And one of the things that's kind of interesting about that is that, you know, Catholicism has a pretty deep and rich legal theory, tradition of legal theory. I mean, I'm thinking of Gorsuch in particular being schooled and natural law and studying with John Finnis and lecturing at Notre Dame. And that was one thing that made me actually more comfortable with Gorsuch was that I felt that his understanding of natural law theory and his commitment to the idea that there is a higher law that is antecedent to government promulgation made him more trustworthy as a jurist. Of course, the difference is you are replacing Scalia with Gorsuch. So that's almost a conservative for conservative. The difference here is that Kennedy is that fulcrum justice. He's the one that, you know, could go either way. So replacing him with somebody can change the dynamics of the court altogether. You know, you've got Ginsburg, Breyer and Sotomayor and Kagan on one side and Roberts, Alito, Thomas and Gorsuch on the other. And if Kavanaugh fits in on that right side, then you've got a pretty reliable 5-4 majority for most votes. And I think that's what makes the left hysterical about this. But isn't there an inherent conflict here? The left is never going to accept the idea of a higher authority or law. Civic nationalists even on the right don't really accept that. So, I mean, there's baked in conflict here. The secular left simply doesn't think a Supreme Court justice should be influenced by his or her religious views. That's true. Yes. And I think that's another reason why sort of originalism and textualism is a safe methodology for these justices. Because then what they're doing in their confirmation hearings is they're discussing their judicial methodology. They're not results oriented. They deal with the questions as framed when they get them. And they are analyzing statutes as written according to what a reasonable mind would have believed the terms to mean at the time the text was adopted. And so that prevents justices from inserting their ideological views into the interpretive process. And I think that maybe isolates some of these conservative nominees from criticism. And you would think actually, but the left doesn't see it that way. And it's interesting though if you recall that now we have many people on the left that are saying we're all textualists now. I think Scalia sort of changed the way judging was done in a lot of ways as far as influence goes. I mean, everybody has to at least account for a textualist or originalist approach. Whether they're taking it or not, they have to at least account for it in their appellate decisions. At least federal appellate judges have to do so. So in a sense, there's been a bit of a victory on the right because 30 or 40 years ago you probably wouldn't have said that. Whereas in other words, the Federalist Society types have won that point somewhat because the left now feels like they have to apply textualism at least as an argument. I think that's right because I think that textualism and originalism, I mean, there are many, many schools of these things and they're pretty rigorous. And there's a deep philosophical debate going on among originalists. But one thing you're not going to see now is Eisenhower nominated Earl Warren and William Brennan. You've got Nixon doing Justice Blackman who authored the Roe v. Wade opinion. You've got Ford doing John Paul Stevens and H.W. Bush doing Souter. And you're just not going to see that anymore. I mean, this process of creating a list from which the nominee will be chosen is a new thing. I mean, that's sort of a new phenomenon, at least a public list that's available to everyone for scrutiny. And this allows the general public, in addition to just senators, to give feedback on each person. And there are lawyers all through the country that can scrutinize opinions or, you know, we're sitting here in the 11th Circuit right now as we speak and say, I practice in the 11th Circuit. Well, I may have some opinion about some judge on the 11th Circuit and my dealings with them. And I'm able to tell my senator about those sorts of things. And so that sort of transparency, I think, is a good thing. And, you know, it's interesting that we talk about all this from a libertarian standpoint because I do think, and this is common for everybody, that there's a tendency to look at results as libertarians. And we say, OK, you know, is this person pro-Obamacare or are they pro-police? But a lot of the analysis that goes on in a courtroom isn't that. I mean, you're getting a statue and you're having to determine whether the law that's already been enacted through a legislative process comports with the Constitution. And so we as libertarians sometimes think, oh, this is bad, but we forget that there is a methodology that the judge is applying. And so the question is, given the system we have, would you rather have a judge that has adopted this methodology or, you know, my fear would be that you would have a judge that would adopt some methodology that then someone on the left could use against you? Like say you just want to start talking about rights that are unenumerated and then you were to institute those rights in an opinion, for example. Well, what happens when the left sees that methodology and says, OK, now we're going to have a right to basic subsistence. Now we're going to have to write to a minimum income for people. We're going to have a right to this and that. And now you've, because you were trying to be results oriented, you've now opened the door to results oriented approach on the other side. So that's something I'm always would be cautious about. But I'm not sure the American public buys it. I think most Americans view the Supreme Court as a wholly political super legislature and that it is completely results oriented. And judges have viewpoints and decisions in mind and then they reverse engineer some legal argument to make the desired result happen. I mean, that is the perspective I personally think as a libertarian that's healthy. Yeah, we view the court as a political thing just like I think we should view the Fed as a political thing. But it's it's the the rhetoric is that, well, we're bound by precedent and that we have a we have a methodology. Well, and it's always, of course, it's always skeptical. It's always good to be skeptical of all government institutions. One thing I would say to that is that the process and I there is an element of the Supreme Court becoming a super legislature. I mean, when Marbury v. Madison was handed down, it was one thing to say that, oh, it's it's the province of the judiciary to say what the law is under the constitutional scheme. And and to tell Congress if Congress has done something unconstitutional, then somebody has to be able to tell Congress that they've done something unconstitutional. And that that duty impliedly falls to the judiciary. That's one thing. But what Marbury Madison Marbury v. Madison did not contemplate was this idea that Supreme Court become this massive super legislature. It was, you know, it was still understood that Supreme Court wasn't making law. It wasn't legislating. And that's what's happened with the Supreme Court over over the years. And I do think from request on the court has scaled back on that. And some of the movement toward originalism and textualism that we talked about that even judges on the left have to account for has has sort of scaled that back. But but now we have an out of control administrative state that the justices have to deal with. I mean, you've got executive agencies that are created by the legislature, but they exercise these quasi legislative functions. And then Congress, you know, delegates the powers to these agencies. And then that that gets rid of their accountability.  I hate that. But they're the ones that delegated the powers to them and they can take them away. But but then if it becomes their responsibility, then they're the ones to blame and they have to go tell their constituents. So for in some ways it's convenient for the politicians to be able to blame agencies. So there's an incentive structure in there for politicians not to go after agencies because, you know, they don't want the they don't want to take the responsibilities that, you know, they want Congress to have these responsibilities that they've delegated to agencies. So that's a that's a dynamic that's got to get worked out. And if it's not too late. But you know, one thing that's telling about Marbury versus Madison judicial review is you'll hear the public and even journalists say such in such case is the law of the land. That's right. Yeah, you hear that all the time.  So, you know, if you created some some federal law that that was just obviously unconstitutional. Well, the court can strike that down and it's it's not going to be the law of the land. So, you know, there there are a lot of you're right there. There's a lot of issues with with starved decisis with precedent. I think part of the problem is the incorporation of, you know, the ancient. English common law into an American system of federalism with 50 states and trying to figure out what it means to have this sort of horizontal. Binding starved decisis versus, you know, what what does it mean to have federalism and what what role the state's going to play versus the federal government. You've got these these federal courts and these state courts, these federal courts all created by statute with the exception of the Supreme Court, which is which is constitutional. And then you've got all these state courts and what what is the inner place supposed to look like how are these circuits supposed to deal with state Supreme Court decisions and the Constitution doesn't give you clear answers to that. So we've been trying to work that out ever since the founding and it's been messy. And that's not a system that lends itself to sort of the traditional ancient understanding of the common law as customary and bottom up. I mean, in a system where you've got a top down Constitution that establishes the framework in which all law has to operate. That's very different from a system of custom that comes from time immemorial time out of mind that just exists and that judges locally have to respond to and that you can't really understand. I mean, the common law is you're going to different areas of the realm and determining what laws do these different regions have in common and how are judges getting that from jury decisions. The root is the same as commoners. Yeah, well, that's a good point. Imitating from the people rather than from from the top down. You know, I just want to get back to this originalism and textualism. Let's make an important point here is that a huge percent of the country is just not buying this because the whole idea that we should look at the original intent of either the founders or whoever drafted a federal piece of legislation who is in Congress at the time. A lot of people say, why should we be bound by these old dead white guy founders, property owners, slave holders, etc.  In other words, I'll just say generically, the left doesn't buy it and the right uses it, I think, in hypocritical ways. In other words, they use textualism when it serves their purposes. So yeah, to give an example, maybe you would look at like a fourth amendment case and you would say, okay, the framers clearly could not have contemplated. We'll use the claiming case that I thought Kavanaugh had a very bad line on, which is where he said in my view, I think that this government's metadata collection program is entirely consistent with the Fourth Amendment. Well, you pick up the Fourth Amendment, you read the Fourth Amendment, you're like, well, how is this consistent with the Fourth Amendment? I mean, on its face, the framers never would have contemplated an iPhone. How do you deal with that? Well, people like Rehnquist would say, okay, the principles are what are perennial. They're what sort of get repurposed over time in light of change circumstances and new technologies and these kinds of things. But the principles are the same and you just apply them to new facts so that you're not doing the living constitution thing. That's sort of maybe the Rehnquist response to that. But I think with Kavanaugh in that particular case, I just want to throw this out there, I think he's wrong in that case because he's assuming that you would have no reasonable expectation of privacy in the metadata in your cell phone, which no one new government was collecting at the time anyway. And then you would think that if the government were to say, oh, this is reasonable for us, they'd at least be able to show that the collection stopped some kind of imminent attack. And if they can't show that, then it seems especially unreasonable. So that was the case that I think people were worried maybe Rand Paul wouldn't vote yay. And that's a valid concern and it's one that I have with Kavanaugh myself. Congressman Justin Amash has actually been tweeting about Kavanaugh's bad Fourth Amendment decisions. Obviously, Amash won't vote on the nomination, but you know, and there's kind of two questions with respect to the cell phone metadata issue you raise and that apparently Kavanaugh is bad on. One is whether metadata vacuuming after the fact is okay and comports with the Fourth Amendment or a different analysis is whether the Fourth Amendment even applies to this NSA activity. So there are two separate questions. Yeah. And I mean, the Fourth Amendment was designed to prevent arbitrary government interference into the private affairs of individuals. And the government would have to show that this is not an arbitrary thing. And to do that, they'd have to say, well, it's not arbitrary because we're trying to prevent terrorist attacks or whatever. But if they can't even show that, then it sure seems arbitrary. They can't show that there's actually any kind of causality. Oh, yes, doing this in fact has stopped X, Y, and Z and they can't do that. Then it's arbitrary. It's arbitrary collection. Have you seen much to form an opinion about Kavanaugh on what we would call economic liberty? I think he's okay with the Obamacare mandate, for example. Well, the Obamacare mandate is, that's a different issue. So that's the Seven Sky case. And there's some debate over whether he created a framework under the individual mandate's penalty to treat it as a tax that would have enabled someone like John Roberts in 2012 to bar from that scheme. So what he did in that case is he actually said, I don't think this court should have jurisdiction here because of the Anti-Enjunction Act, which barred courts from ruling on tax issues before they took effect. And he's saying, well, this penalty hasn't taken effect yet. So we don't have jurisdiction to rule on it. But in writing about this issue, he said basically that the scheme of the penalty, because it requires the assessment and collection, as a tax would be assessed and collected, then it is in effect a tax if it is like a tax. And that did create something for John Roberts to work with. So it is entirely reasonable to conclude that Kavanaugh created a framework that Roberts could have borrowed from or at least considered in upholding the individual mandate as a tax and not a penalty. So yeah, that's another glaring case that bothers me about Kavanaugh. There's the Clayman, there's Seven Sky. Now, there is some evidence that he's good on administrative agencies. The White House is touting him as having overturned like 75 regulations from administrative agencies. He's attacked the EPA on cases and in particular in areas regarding admissions regulation, state air pollution rules, greenhouse gas regulations. So he is doing stuff to push back against the growth of administrative agencies. He's got a case in Heller where he's appeared to be productive of Second Amendment rights. But as far as economic liberty as a concept, you don't really see much overarching philosophical discussion by Kavanaugh. So unlike Gorsuch, you might get some philosophical discussion. So Gorsuch may have some kind of conversation about natural law or whatever. Well, Kavanaugh is going to have some kind of conversation about a procedural technicality or an issue of statutory interpretation. That's his world. He's sort of a scholar of procedure and forms versus Gorsuch who's much more of a philosophical deeper thinker. Someone that's going to look at a tradition. I mean, Gorsuch is going to go look and see what Locke and Montesquieu and Cook and Blackstone and all these people thought about things. And Kavanaugh is much more likely to look and see what did the last judge say in the last case and the last opinion and what's precedent and what's going to bind me. So he's sort of a real nuts and bolts federal appellate lawyer. But I think he probably speaks to his competence and his importance that some of his theories and ideas have gone upstream and been considered by a renquist or somebody at the Supreme Court. Excuse me, by a Roberts or somebody at the Supreme Court. So he's usually the other way around. Yeah, there have been the Supreme Court has adopted some of his opinions and sort of validated his legal reasoning. And he's on the DC circuit, which is considered sort of the stepping stone, the Supreme Court and cases from the DC circuit often end up at the Supreme Court. So his analysis is is more likely than most judges to be considered by Supreme Court justices. And I think people generally agree that he is a very smart person. He's a very intelligent person. So it's worth going and look looking at what he said and how he analyzed it just to see whether you disagree or not. If Kavanaugh has written on the issue, you you're going to want to see what he said. So he said some mealy mouth things about Roe v. Wade as a libertarian Roe v. Wade doesn't excite me one way the other. I think it's wrongly decided. I think there's nothing about abortion in the Constitution ought to be up to the states. And we were discussing this earlier. There's no reason why certain states couldn't be more liberal with abortion under under a pre-Roe framework. But but nonetheless, he said some mealy mouth things. What does he do as a Catholic who presumably thinks abortion is wrong? What does he do? He mumbles about precedent. Yeah, I think that's what he does. And that's respecting president. And that's what he did in his 2006 confirmation hearing. He said, basically, I think Roe v. Wade is the law of the land. We don't upset precedent. But again, he was a lower appellate culture. He wasn't going up for confirmation on the high court. I don't know that it matters exactly how he treats this. I mean, he's just going to say probably I can't discuss it because this matter might come before me on the court. And that's basically a punt. And that's probably what he's going to have to do is just not going to come before and miss it. They're not going to do anything to Roe v. Wade. Well, and it's actually interesting because everyone talks about like overturning Roe v. Wade. Well, that's almost not the way case presidents typically change. I mean, if you look at Casey and Carhart, I mean, these are adaptations to Roe v. Wade. I mean, when Roe's going to look at this balancing test where you're going to balance the state interests and health and the woman's health and all the stuff. And they versus versus the the interest in a woman's privacy. And then you're going to establish this balancing test that incorporates this third trimester framework. Well, then later on, you know, the court gets rid of that third trimester framework. And it's just a gradual process. So the likelihood that the court is going to take up a case and just say we hereby over Roe v. Wade is really unlikely. I mean, litigants have to frame the question the right way, bring it up through the appellate process and the right process and get the constitutional question exactly right. And it's just unlikely for fact patterns out there in the real world to actually fit that. So if Roe v. Wade goes away, it'll probably eventually eventual process by a series of decisions rather than one case that just says we hereby over Roe v. Wade. So I, you know, the left probably is right to be concerned that there that the Roe v. Wade is jeopardized. And the right is probably right to be thrilled that that Roe v. Wade might eventually be jeopardized. But for Kavanaugh's confirmation hearings, I don't see it making a difference because, you know, I have a feeling that Republicans are going to be able to get them through in light of the nuclear option. They're going to be able to get him through. I don't think you're going to see many senators. I don't think you'll see really probably any defecting and you're going to have people like Joe Manchin who's running against Patrick Morrissey, the popular AG that's a big Republican.  And Kavanaugh is not seen as some rabid pro-lifer that Murkowski or Susan Collins have to defend against with their own voters. No, I think he totally satisfies Collins Murkowski. He's not Robert Bork. No, that's right. He pulled votes from Joe Donnelly. I don't know what Doug Jones and here in Alabama, what he's going to do. I mean, if he wants to have any shot whatsoever in keeping his office, he's got to vote yes. Well, he's been on, I think, Fox intimating that he would consider voting yes. I think he's saying I'll keep him open mind and all that, which, what else would you expect him to say? He's got to say that. But, you know, there's some question marks out there. Claire McCaskill, Missouri, John Tester, Montana. I think they both voted against Gorsuch, but primarily because I think they realized, okay, Republicans are going to get a nuclear option. We'll vote this way just to appeal to our party base. And that's also a couple years before their election. Right. An election year is different. An election year is different, which is why people like Joe Manson are sort of on the hot seat. Well, the thing about abortion is I think it's a great litmus test for libertarians. This is an aside, not, not on the issue itself, whether you're pro or against abortion, but rather how it's handled. In other words, from my perspective, we can't have one abortion rule for top down for 320 million people in a country as diverse as ours. And I think it ought to be localized as much as possible. I would like to see common law, as you discussed earlier, common custom and practice and locality governed. But a lot of libertarians who are very strongly pro-choice say, you know, are pro-federalization, pro-nationalization, and say, no, we did an overarching federal law that says abortion's legal. And that that is the libertarian take on this, because if not, you'd have these regressive states like Alabama trying to radically restrict abortion. I think that's the wrong libertarian answer. I think the right libertarian answer is that, and again, I'm not personally animated by the pro-life pro-choice side. But I think the right libertarian answer is that it should be decentralized and you should live with the fact that other people see these intractable social issues differently than you do. Well, there are competing schools, in my view, among libertarian jurisprudence. I don't like when, and I said jurisprudence, not jurisprudence, but I don't like people trying to come forth and say, this is what a libertarian jurisprudence is. This is it. We figured it out because, in my view, there is a difference. And conceptually, there's one concept that says, okay, we ought to have a centralized, robust federal judiciary to ensure that all the states come into compliance and protect individual liberty. And then there's another methodology that says, look, we need to have decentralization, diffusion of power, dispersal of power. We need to have diversity of jurisdictions. And that's more along the lines of where I fall. So I'm more of a thinker that is, you know, I'm Hayekian in that sense. I'm sort of with like, I'm sort of conservative in that sense. I can see myself coming out of a Michael Oak shot tradition. And I like to see some competition between jurisdictions and letting people decide in their own personal communities what works and operates. I like the bottom-up process. I like, you know, I like the messiness and the checks and the balances and the separation of powers. I don't think it's a good thing to centralize and nationalize power and then dictate to faraway places what ought to be the libertarian viewpoint. And the flip side of that is if you demand an overarching federal law, what if the right comes in and makes an overarching federal law banning abortion? In other words, you're opening yourself up to executive, or in this case, judicial power. I want to finish up with a little bit more about Kavanaugh, the guy. Ryan McMacon wrote a great article about a week or so ago on Mises.org about how the Supreme Court is way, way, way too powerful. And one thing he mentions, he mentions this about Hillary Clinton in other contexts, but that so many of these old Supreme Court justices are completely removed from ordinary life. They don't really, they haven't had a real job for decades. They don't really do normal things. They don't mow lawns. They don't go to normal places that they're really in a bubble because they've been appellate judges at the federal level for so long. Now they're a Supreme Court justice and that it's dangerous to have these people so detached. Nine people, I might add, so detached from the 320 million people over whom they hold this great power. And Kavanaugh seems to be bucking that a little bit with his image. He's got the beer drinking allegations. He has Nats tickets that he apparently bought with credit cards. He seems like kind of a normal guy. Wonderful play to that. That's a good question. I think Gorsuch tried to play as the normal guy, too. He tried to say, look, I'm a hunter, a fisher, outdoorsman, that kind of thing. But also a PhD academic. Exactly. Brilliant guy. Is Kavanaugh brilliant? Because I think Gorsuch, love him or hate him, is legit brilliant. I think, I agree with you on Gorsuch. I think Kavanaugh is a very smart guy, but he is less of a historian and a philosopher and more of just a great lawyer. So he is brilliant too, but he put his brilliant mind into being a lawyer and poured it into that whereas Gorsuch was more exploratory and tried to think outside the box and as an academic would follow questions where they might lead and be more of an open-minded person and be interested in the big questions and sort of the perennial themes that pop up in all generations, whereas Kavanaugh is much more narrow, lawyerly type. But not to put too finely into distinction. I mean, he seems kind of normal in the sense he doesn't look, his physical appearance, what he sort of does in a spare time. You know, Souter had that really intellectual kind of almost a daininess to him that is very off-putting, I think, to a lot of people. Not to denigrate Souter. I'm sure he's a brilliant guy. Yeah. But Kavanaugh has got kind of, not a blue collar vibe to him, but an ordinary vibe. He's your guy next door. He's got two young kids. He's 53. He likes sports. He's 53. 53, runs up credit card debt anywhere between $60,000 and $120,000 depending on what you read. That's increasingly normal in America. Yeah. Well, I was shocked when I saw that, but I didn't realize that that was normal.   Over three cards, I think. Three cards. Well, we're out of time, but it's always great talking to you. It's always great being here. If there's another Supreme Court vacancy, I know Amy Barrett didn't make the cut, but there's another Notre Dame grad named Andrew Napolitano. Judge Napolitano. I think would be an absolute great fit. And of course, his Freedom Watch show is rumored to be returning to, I believe, Fox Business. I'm not sure if it's Fox, regular or Fox Business. We'll look forward to that. And we'll look forward to having Alan Mendenhall back very soon. Thanks so much for your time, ladies and gentlemen. Have an excellent weekend.