Now, he's kind of an odd fellow. He requests that I prove myself by doing a spin jump minigame. Really, who am I to disagree? So, here we go. But as I jump in here, I just want to explain a little bit of the story without giving away spoilers for anybody who hasn't played the game. Basically, Princess Peach, his voice, has been stolen, and Mario and Luigi, gentlemen that they are, are going to travel to the Beanbean Kingdom to try and get it back for her. Nice. Expertly handled, by the way, on the spin jumps here. Thank you. It was actually kind of a tricky challenge the first time through. It is a tricky challenge, but you know what? I'm not going to let this guy intimidate me. That's what he's trying to do. So, if you didn't play the original Mario and Luigi games, this might be new to you that there's the... Mario and Luigi have these very cooperative moves they do by hitting each other with hammers and standing each other's shoulders and all sorts of cool stuff like that. Yes, and you actually control Mario and Luigi with different buttons, so they can actually move around and jump around separately. And that plays into the battle. Let us begin. I'm really excited that people get to experience this game again. It's been a long time since it originally came out. It really has, and I want to point out the graphics here. It's the same pixel artwork from the original game, but it's been updated. Talking and fighting is never a good idea. But 3D lighting has been added to the pixel art to really bring it alive. And just the little animations that they do are so beautiful in this version. And those animations are crucial to the gameplay itself.  So it's really nice to be able to see them in great detail. Absolutely. It's really important to keep an eye on the enemies. And for anybody who is not familiar, this is a turn-based RBG battle system, but what's really interesting about it is that you're actively engaged the whole time, whether you're doing a move, trying to nail an action command, doing a bro attack, which I'll do in just a bit, keeping an eye out for the enemy queues. There's constantly something to do. You're never kind of just sitting back and waiting. So these jump attacks that you're doing, you're increasing the damage by hitting the appropriate button, A for Mario, B for Luigi, right when you land that attack, and you can build sort of extensive combos off of those. Absolutely. And as you can also see, I've been doing an okay job of dodging this guy's attacks, but you can tell where he's going to attack by his queues, and all enemies have different queues that you have to kind of learn and keep an eye out for. Because if you don't, you will have much pain. Much pain. D. Like that. 11 points of pain. See, perfectly timed pain. Excellently demonstrated. Perfectly timed demonstration of that very point. Yes, so what I'm trying to do with Kuhuro's here is that I'm actually taking out the pillars that he likes to hide under, like one pillar, if I leave one pillar, he's going to hide under it, and I won't be able to attack him. And now what I'm also going to show off here is the emergency guard. I still took damage here, but I took way less damage than I otherwise would have. And if you actually get really good at it, you can do a whole battle without taking any damage at all. Nice. So actually, what I'm going to go back here into, should I heal? No, I'm going to live on the edge. What I'm going to do is do a bro attack here. And this is where our brothers actually team up to do an attack. And I have to keep an eye on the action commands here. Yes, nails it. Oh, so cute. I love Luigi so much. Luigi is very brave. I love their little dancing. And I love when they feed each other items. It looks so cute. Yes. Luigi just tries harder too. Yes. And we got him. Kuhuro's down. Nice. Nicely done. Well done. Left you a present. He left you a present. That's really sweet of him. Kuhuro's slacks. Left you his pants. Everyone needs a pair in their closet. I'm wearing the mine right now. Yes. But so now we're going to jump out of here real quick. We beat Kuhuro, so we're going to jump out of here and jump to a different save file. Constantly testing you. Yep. We're just going to switch to a different save file here. Oh, OK. In just a second. It's happening. We can see it happening. It's transpiring. Yes. OK. Yes, happenings are occurring. I also wanted to point out while we're switching that in case you didn't notice, humor is a huge part of the game. Yeah. Even the location names, Hohu Mountain, are all named after different styles of laughter. So if you want to chuckle, you should head on over to this game. This is the place to go. That's the place to go. Yeah. It was really well regarded, not just for the comedy of the, like the scenarios and the situations, but the writing as well, the animations, the characters. All of it really came together in a really beautiful package. And I think that's why this is so highly regarded still after all this time. Well, and the trailer reminds us of the immortal line, I have fury, which I think we all fondly remember. Fawful still has fury for the record. Fawful still has fury after 14 years? Yes. And we didn't get to see much of it, but there's actually been an updated user interface and map system too. You can actually place pins on the map, which is really helpful because there are all kinds of abilities that you get that help you unlock different areas. Yeah. There's a bit of re-traversal involved once you develop all of your different bro moves. Yeah. But we're about to jump into Minion Quest here. This is a brand new mode added to this game. And as you mentioned, there are all kinds of memorable characters and locations in this game. And Minion Quest really expands on all of them because we get a whole additional story that takes place alongside the story of Superstar Saga. So if you loved that story, there's way more of it now, which is really nice. And this is like a parallel story just happening alongside the events of Mario and Luigi doing their thing. Yes. This tells the story of what happened after the Koopa Cruiser crashes and what happened to all of the Minions that scattered across the Beanbean Kingdom. But this has entirely different mechanics. This is an entirely different game. It has a completely different battle system. So this is definitely not a throwaway mode. And it's by no means small. It's huge. There's a whole story. And we're going to jump right in. I'll explain a bit of the mechanics later. But I just want to kind of give you an idea of what one of these battles looks like and introduce you to Captain Goomba. Captain Goomba. The brave Captain Goomba, the hero of our story. Yes. He's got the guy with the flag on his head on the left. And as you can see, it's a brand new battle system. So it looks like chaos. But it's Captain. It's your job to make sense of the chaos. So a lot's going on right now. But before you even go into battle, how you choose your units, how you place them, how you deploy them in battle, and then how you use each of their special skills is paramount to winning. Now I'm going to say this is a special save dedicated for Treehouse Live. I'm pretty buffed up here. I'm pretty powerful. So I'm making mitts made of these guys. And it looks like it's just a storm of activity on the screen right now. But when you're actually playing it, you know what everybody's doing. And you've set it up so that this chaos actually does make sense to you, as you were saying. Absolutely. And the more you play, the more units you acquire, and the more you realize how to use them and everything that's going on, you realize how deep the strategy of this game actually is. And when you can see, oh, he just used his Captain command. So Captain commands are a huge part of the experience. And I just used one myself. But basically, you only get so many Captain points, which allow you to use Captain commands. And you have to be really smart about how you use them. But they give you a variety of abilities. You can actually stop the other team from using their special skills, or you can increase the stats of your team, or do any number of things that will help you on your way to victory. So we crushed those guys. Kind of handily, yeah. And I love that this is taking place apparently in a movie theater. There's like a Koopa's watching from seats. This is Yoshi Theater, and the Yoshis are watching the carnage. It's what they like to do. We're not going to judge. It feels like a nice homage to some of the other Mario franchise titles where you've had audiences watching things unfolding in front of them. Paper Mario did that, yeah. Absolutely. And before we jump back into another battle, I want to point about a few things on the screen. On the top screen on the left there, there's a triangle, and that's another layer to the strategy is that different types of units have different strengths and weaknesses. Melee units are stronger against ranged, ranged or stronger against flying, and so on. And if we jump into the formation menu here, we can see some of our units that we can employ, and all of these have different strengths and weaknesses as well, like Shy Guys are strong against Lakitu, so there are all kinds of things that you really have to keep in mind if you're going to be a good captain. And you can actually look at the bottom screen here and see what kind of enemies you're going to face at different levels, and that'll give you an idea of what the makeup of your troop should be. So for instance, I've been fighting with Captain Goomba. He's kind of my go-to. I'm a fan of his, big fan. We also have other captains that you can unlock as you play the game. Other than Lesser Captain. Yes, Lesser Captain. Captain Shy Guy is Lesser to no Shy Guy. That's fair, that's fair. So we have Captain Shy Guy here and Captain Boo, and you can do whatever you want with your troops, but I think it's nice to have a good, well-rounded melee squad, a ranged squad and a flying squad. And then for your fourth one, you can just go nuts. So you've built all of your squads to specific functions in this demo. Absolutely. And then even as you encounter different enemies and different troops, you're still going to have to change it up a bit. So it's not like you build these four troops and then you're set.  But let's go with Captain Shy Guy, and he's going to take down his own. Oh, no. Which is only fitting, I think. Shy no longer. And so I'm going to actually speed through this cutscene, not because the dialogue isn't delightful, because it is, but we don't really want to spoil anything. But I do want to note that you can actually, once you've played through a level... I'm sorry. It's so distractible. So distracting. But once you've played through a level, you can actually turn off cutscenes so that when you return to it, you don't have to play through them again. So if you want to go back to, you know, grind to get more units or get more experience points, get more beans to fortify with, which I'll touch on in a second, then you totally can. And you don't have to relive those scenes if you don't want to. Oh, you're absolutely free to. So you mentioned the Captain points, and those are on the touch screen, on the lower screen of the 3DS. You can see those basically like coins almost. Yes, and how you choose to use them is really important, because if you use them all up in the first couple of battles, some scenarios have like up to five battles before you get to the boss. And if you use them all up, you can be in big trouble. They regenerate slowly after a battle, but you really want to save them until you really need them. So we're doing okay. So I'm actually going to use Rally. Ooh, nice. And this is Shy Guy. He's going to kind of be the cheerleader for the team. Shyly Rally them. He's going to increase, yes. He's going to increase their minion spirit so that they're actually able to pull off their special skills faster. And that's a really expensive skill. It used up four of your six points. It really is. And it's only because I know that I'm a bit overpowered here that I can kind of afford to do this. But see, as my minions do their special skills, I'm going to have to help them pull it off if I want to get the good ratings. I love the giant veggies. Yes. That mega turnip was amazing. Turnip power. Well, that poor Goomba's all bandaged up. Yeah, they get beat up throughout the fight. But they'll be okay. It's all in the name of Lord Bowser. And speaking of, that's actually what our brave Captain Goomba is after. If you've played Superstar Saga, you know that Bowser has... He's going through some stuff, okay? He's been separated from the minions. And Captain Goomba is actually trying to reunite all of the minions and get them back together so that they can rescue Lord Bowser. And it's no small feat. They're going to have to go up against all kinds of familiar enemies, including the Koopalings and even Fawful. So he's got a lot in his way. But I believe in him. He's got Goomba gumption. Yes. Goomba gumption? Yes, goomba gumption. I love the idea that Bowser is just going through some stuff. It's a bit of a rough spell, you know?  We all have these time at Bowser. He will bounce back. He will bounce back. Absolutely. Special skill go. Now he's calling for backup. That's not nice. That is, you know, it's a sign of weakness. It really is. That's why they're shy, because they're weak. Yeah, look at that. Oh, more backup. See, he saved. If I press pause, I can see how many battles I have left. I'm the last battle here. So I'm going to go all out with my captain commands. Cool, totally. He clearly is doing the same. So I'm not going to hold back here. Yeah, blow it out. I'm going to rally the troops again. I'm not going to call for backup, because I just said that's cowardly. You don't have that option anymore. It's cowardly when the other guy does it. It's cool when you do it. See, I just used deny, and this is a really useful skill, because it only takes one CP, but you can actually stop anyone, even the captain, from doing one of their special skills. So that comes in handy. And as you can see, it just secured my victory. Nice. Nice. With no losses. No losses. No losses at all. Yes. Couple bandages. That's okay. He bruises. Yeah, battle scars. Every goomba's life is precious. Except the enemy goombas. Except those troops. It's got to draw a distinction here. Very important distinction. All right, again, super delightful humor and dialogue and everything, but I'm going to speed past it so that you can enjoy it during the course of the game. The point I'm kind of obsessing on is, would those flags stop Mario from stomping on them? Ooh. Yeah, one of those in the boot. That's interesting. Well, you never see him go up against Captain Goomba. Yeah. I don't think we'll ever know the answer to this. I believe that Captain Goomba could overcome even Mario. That's my current theory, and I'm sticking to it. All right. All right, so before we go into another battle, we're actually going to turn off cut scenes, because it's really handy. And we're going to jump into the four to five menu. As you can see, kind of a whole lot of beans here, a whole hill of beans even. Got that. And you earn these throughout battle, and you can actually use them to increase your units of stats and abilities. So here I have a medium melee experience bill. So I'm going to give that to this brave Goomba here. He's spot nobly in my name, so I'm going to give him a bean and help his experience. But you earn these throughout battle, so you don't have to be cheap with them. But at the same time, you don't want to give them to a unit that you're not going to use. So reward the strong, punish the weak. Reward the strong. Absolutely. That is the moral of the story. Like you do. Yes. So we're going to keep on keeping on here. Ooh, and we're going up against a boo here. So I'm going to pull out Captain Boo. Give him a chance to shine. Boovy boo. Yes. But one of the things I love about Minion Quest is that not only is it an additional layer to the Superstar saga story, but you really get to see from the Minion's perspective, which is not something you normally get to. No. And I got to admit by the end of it, I was like, I was not too happy with Mario, let's say. I am not really a big fan of his anymore. Oh, no. Taking a little bit of the glow off him. I'm just kidding, Mario. You're great. Start to see the way he affects the people around him. Yeah. Well, and in Super Mario, honestly, he's going to be walking a mile in their shoes as well. That's true. He'll learn a thing or two, I think. He'll grow. It's going to be a humbling experience for all involved. Yes. And again, I want to reiterate that we have special save daddy here, so our troops are powered up. When you're going through here, you're going to really have to keep an eye on what level the enemies are at, because if you're outpowered, it's going to be a massacre.  He did.  So I'm going to... How many battles do I have left? Okay, I'm going to use Chance here. And I don't know what this is going to do. Yes, it dropped enemy accuracy, so that was good. But this really is a chance, because sometimes if you use that at the beginning of battle, it will refill your HP when you were already full. Right, yeah, right. That's not very helpful, so you really have to be smart about when you use all of these Captain commands. Come on, Captain. Let's do this. Couple points back. Yes. Ready to go. Now we're in the final battle. We can do this. No, he's doing it again. No.  And how is that boo surprised? Like, he looks around confused, like he didn't know... He's a boo. He knows what they do. Yeah. And it happened like 20 seconds ago. Yeah. Please don't be mean. Oh, gosh. He's so mean. Wow, he's done a lot of damage with that filthy behavior. He's done that like three times and used to deny, so somebody was hoarding their Captain points. Yeah, and here we were. I would never do that. Oh, I just did it. Okay, good. I would normally never do that. You were talking about being overpowered, but even this is proving to be a bit on the tight side. Yeah. There we go. Sergeant Guy, thank you for your service. But as we just saw there, there are actually a whole variety of characters, not just from Superstar Saga, but from other of the Mario RPGs that'll make an appearance in this game. So keep an eye out for them. Yoshi's are very excited. Yoshi's are super excited, yeah. Yes. This is their favorite movie. They really love watching this gladiatorial fight take place. You described it like they're all hanging out watching an old war movie or something. That's what it feels like to me. We didn't know they were so bloodthirsty, but there it is. So let's go. We'll do a couple more battles here. Oh, I meant to switch back to Captain Goomba. That's my mistake. It's fine. I'm sorry to everybody. I think Captain Boo has his fans. It's true. Or he will after this stream. He will. We will see to it.  As you can see in the bottom screen, Captain Boo only has a few Captain Commands unlocked because he was actually recruited pretty recently. But the more you play, the more Captain Commands you unlock for all of them. So he's running on fumes here, but I still think that he can pull it off. No, deny. Denied. Not happening. Oh, this is why I wanted Captain Goomba because this is actually pretty close. Nice. And I didn't use deny in time. I'm sorry. I do like that he only has these two. They feel like very boo abilities right now, you know. Denying chance. Yeah. You got this. You got some of this. You'll have a bit of this. This is a nice chance to go back to that thing you were talking about with the sort of weapon interactions and the character interactions about melee ranged and flying. Am I right in assuming perhaps that ranged is strong against... As you can see, ranged is just a little bit strong. Oh, I'm at the bottom of my Captain Points too. Oh, you're fine. But as you can see, the power triangle and the advantages have a huge impact on gameplay here. I was actually more powerful than these guys. My troop was at a higher level than theirs, but since they had the advantage, they almost handed it to me. Yeah. Another excellent decision on your part to demonstrate some more of the complexity and nuance of this game system. Yeah, yeah. Absolutely intentional. Like everything on Treehouse Life. Yes. I'm going to be a better Captain now. I'm sorry, guys. This one's going to be fine. Yes. A lot of range they've got. A lot of flying, a lot of range. No one is afraid. Come on, Hammerball. You got it. Come on. I'm going to use chance. Come on, give us something good. What's it going to be? What's it going to be? My CP was restored. That's actually really helpful. That's super. So yeah, you get more chances at chance. So I'm going to deny. I'm going to do another chance. Nice. Just keep rolling the dice. No, that doesn't help with the immediate problem. Oh, man. I should have saved it for deny, but I have to live with my decisions, as we all do. You can deny one more time. You've got one last. Deny. I maybe should have saved that for the Captain, actually. Maybe. But, um... We've seen how this battle turns out. You'll get two of them now. Oh, gosh. That seems bad. It'll be okay, right? Oh, it won't be okay. It's not going to be okay. It's not going to be okay. It's not going to be okay. It's not going to be okay. It's not going to be okay. It gives us a wonderful opportunity to demonstrate what this battle looks like when you've planned the strategy according to, you know, the actual enemies you're facing. But, I mean, this just goes to show you how important it is your role as Captain, because, as I said, I was actually pretty well outpowering these guys. I was two levels above them, but since I didn't take in the Crept Troop, I lost. So, I'm sorry, guys. That's my bad. Captain Goomba's coming in to say everything. Captain Goomba. He'll sweep up. Don't worry about it. Captain Goomba's going to close the deal. Yes. So, now we're actually going to jump into the last battle that we're going to show here. And at the end, we're going to fight Iggy, because he's kind of a jerk in this game, and we really want to fight him. So, we'll be able to get through this. You're much better prepared for these enemies now. Yes. Absolutely. Up to Nye. Aw. I don't have to say to Nye when every time I use it, but I'm going to. It feels good, though. Yes. If we could convince everybody to use voice recognition. There's a microphone on there. For that, and that alone. Not true. Not any of it. Nope. Nope. It's just a button. It's a touchscreen touch away. Yes. But you can say to Nye, and it does feel good. So, please do so. So, I'm doing pretty well here. So, I'm going to save my captain points. We've seen the other side of this battle just a few minutes ago. We have. It doesn't feel good to be on the other side. Victory. Yay. We've had our confidence. You restored two confidence points. Yay. All right. We've got this. Aw, he used Nye on me. That's just low. That's not appropriate. Yeah. Now, you get some of your own medicine. Oh, now this voiceless captain here is powering up his guys. Not very nice of him. Does he say to Nye, do you think? I bet he does, in his head and in his heart. Elliptically. Yeah. Oh, didn't I? Again, eventually, I will stop saying it every time I use it. There's no reason to. Do whatever comes naturally. That's true. But here's another thing, as we can see, is that I'm actually able to get at the captain even though he still has units left. And that's because he chose his units wrong. I'm just going to go ahead and go there and say it.  Because it's not only the units you choose, but it's the way you place them that decides how they're going to interact in battle. Since he didn't do it so well, that allowed me to get straight to him before his units were even done, and that's kind of the nail in the coffin there. Yeah. He was already pretty chewed away. Yeah. He's pretty beat up about it. All right. Two battles left. I think we can get through this. You can do it. I think we have time. Let's do this. I really want to be mean to Iggy. We'll get there. Do it, Babam. Go. What power. I want to captain Babam. Denied. That's what I want. Yeah. Oh, no. Babam is gone. There was an admiral Babam. There was an admiral Babam. One of those people. That is hard to say, by the way. Yeah. Babam. No, not going to. There we go. Not going to. Okay. Look, you're outnumbered, guys. It's not happening. It's not, yeah. Guy. Ah, guy. He shyly charged forward with his spear over and over again. Oh, with his last little captain point, he tried to get something together himself, but it didn't work. From Hell's Heart, I stab at B. Bunk. All right. Now we're finally facing off against Iggy. Oh, there he is. Oh, yeah, yeah. Already trying to take the attention. What a showboat. Oh, and great. He increased his attack power right from the start. Oh, yeah. That is going to make things rough. That's going to hurt. That looks bad. I could use rally, but that's going to eat up a whole lot of my CP. Yeah. But you know what? I think I better, actually, because this could turn into a slaughter. And you'll have a couple of denies left after that. Yeah. But that's all you're going to have points for. I am going to hold on to those denies in case it does come down to captain versus captain because I don't really want what Iggy's serving up. No. No. I'm hitting a block on his watch. Oh, gosh. He really is a showboat. Damage to all allies. Oh, gosh. That's not nice, and I don't like it. Please stop, sir. This is bad. No, it's fine. Everything's fine. It's okay. It's not fine. Three on three now. It feels okay. You know what? Three on two. We chose our units well, and captain Goomba is a good captain. Okay. So he's going to do this. I'm going to trust him. There it is. Three on one. Two on one. Told you. It was a good thing I saved to that. And he's at less than half. You're fine. It's okay. You're hammer bro might be. Yeah. Oh, now he's denying on me, which is just uncalled for. That's not cool, buddy. Okay. I think, yes, we finished it with a special attack. That feels pretty good. There's the drama. All right. So that is all you're going to get to see of Captain Goomba for now. But we have something pretty special to show. Are you ready? Is it time? Let's do it. It's time. The reveal happens over here. We have brand new amiibo that are releasing. We have Goomba, who you can call Captain Goomba if you like. It's allowed. As well as Koopa Troopa. You can call him Captain Koopa Troopa too if you want. I will be customizing. Put little flags on them. But yes, so we're not going to give any details. But these amiibo, as well as the Boo amiibo, will be compatible with Mari and Luigi Superstar Saga plus Bowser's Minions. So.


And thankfully it ended with Chris figuring out his problem, cause I don't know that I would have ever thought of this. I have a weird safari issue. It is sinking, mimicking, mirroring between my Mac Studio and my M2 MacBook Air. This morning I decided to update my Mac Book Air and play with it and instantly when opening safari I noticed that whatever was opened on my Mac Book Air was mirroring on my Mac Studio and vice versa. I got caught with tab groups. Turns out that using tab groups in Ventura, the changes, assuming you're connected to the internet and everything, all else is equal, the changes are near instantaneous. So being inside the same tab group on all three devices caused that tab group then to update in real, near real time and have a somewhat mirrored experience.


Welcome everybody. My name is Bob DeRosa and I'm going to talk to you about Broadridge's journey from on prem to the cloud with Kubernetes. So just to give you an idea of what we're going to go through today. I'm just posting an agenda. And basically, you know, I'll start out I'll tell you a little bit about Broadridge. I'll tell you about the project that we completed. We'll go through why we made the switch, how we prepared the process we went through from moving from on prem to the cloud. We'll take a look at what we should have done differently. The results of the project. I'll talk a little bit about what's next and I'll provide you with some references from some of the material I talked about. So first, a little bit about Broadridge. Broadridge is the leading provider of investor communications. We're a global fintech company. We've got over four and a half billion dollars in revenue. We handle millions of trades a day involving trillions of dollars. And when I talk about investor communications, we support communications that reach approximately 75% of the North American households. And investor communications includes things like proxy statements, mailings, if you've got any stocks that you own. A lot of times the material that comes from us, whether it's mail to you or electronic is attributed to Broadridge. You know, we work with a lot of different banks and brokerages, and we're their back end. We also have something where we manage shareholder voting so a proxy vote. If you use that app at all that's again powered by Broadridge. Last year we hosted nearly 2000 virtual shareholder meetings and shareholder meetings are something that's required by the SEC. A lot of times they used to be done in person, you know, whether it's at a small venue for smaller companies or even at larger venues and even hotels, things like that for a larger company. It's where the board will go through their annual meeting, they'll present any information that needs to be presented, and then they'll hold their voting. Well, because of the pandemic obviously this was still a requirement, but people were able to take advantage of a Broadridge service that we've had for years. And like I said, there was over 2000 meetings that were held last year. Now we have over 10,000 employees worldwide. And out of that we've got thousands of technical associates. And if you want more info about Broadridge, you know here's the URL. As far as my background, I started as a software developer, and then I moved on to starting my own company with a couple friends, and I was the CTO of the company. We did educational software and security. We also, that's my first trial where I use the Amazon cloud, and we put some of the products into the cloud. I moved on to Broadridge, and I worked in a role called service delivery. My responsibility there was managing the products that were running in the cloud, we had a couple products that we put into the cloud. So I managed the infrastructure side of things. And then I moved on to the DevOps COE. So we started up a DevOps center of excellence. And I was involved in choosing the tools, putting processes in place, and just kind of getting the word out to the company about DevOps, how it worked. And as part of that COE, we looked at moving our tools from on-prem into the cloud. And so I was responsible for the technical lead on the team that took those tools and moved them from on-prem into AWS. So the project we're going to be talking about today, like I said, we migrated our DevOps tools from on-prem into AWS. We have a couple of different tools. We've got Nexus, we've got GitLab, and we have Jenkins, which is known as Cloud BCI. So today I'm specifically going to talk about Cloud BCI because that we moved into Kubernetes. Now our on-prem CI implementation had around 10 masters and around a thousand agents. Those agents were running on VMs. One of the problems is that because a lot of the masters were shared by different development teams, if one team had a runaway job, it could affect other teams. Another problem was since it was on-prem, if we needed to add resources, it sometimes could take weeks to do that if we needed more disk space or more CPU and stuff like that. Because they were all VMs, they required a lot of time for maintenance and patching. Some of that was done by the DevOps teams, but some of that was done by the development teams, but still everything interacted. And like I said, mostly VMs, but there were some agents that were running in AWS.  And these agents were located all around the world. So the next question is why we made the switch. So first of all, why the cloud? We've got a corporate direction that we're moving our applications from on-prem to the cloud. And obvious reasons that you always hear about the cloud, better scalability, better reliability, and the fact that you can use infrastructure as a service. The other question is why Kubernetes? Well, the main reason we moved CloudBCI to Kubernetes is because it was optimized for Kubernetes. The build agents, which I talked about before, they work very well as pods. So, you know, a lot of times when you're building an application, you'll run your build job, it'll do what it needs to do, and then it's going to be quiet for a while. Well, with pods, you can scale them up when you need them, you can run your build, and then when you're done, they can go away. Also, the fact that you can customize images for development teams. When you have these VMs, these physical machines, you've got to install the software that you need beforehand. So if you use pods instead, you can put in different containers that are required within the pod. So if I have one team that's building with certain software and then does testing with other software, I can easily swap in and out different containers in the pods to accomplish that. So I don't have to worry about having everything installed beforehand. Pods are easier to patch and to roll back. You know, if something goes wrong, I can just use a previous version of the pod. And the fact that these things are shared and they scaled up and down, that's going to reduce our infrastructure cost. So in preparing for the project, if you're doing your own project, the first thing I would say is, if you're going to move to Kubernetes, you want to take advantage of that move and rearchitect what you're doing. Now, in our case, since we were using a third party application, you know, we were limited, we were following their architecture. But if you're going to build your own application that's currently on-prem and you're going to move that to the cloud or to Kubernetes, you definitely want to look at that architecture and see where you can make changes. The first piece of advice I would give you, if you don't need to use Kubernetes, then don't use Kubernetes. You know, Kubernetes is a complicated environment. There's a lot to it. And if you have a simple application that maybe just needs to use a few containers or could even go serverless, then you probably should consider that. In my opinion, Kubernetes is not the right environment for doing a lift and shift. And I know there will be vendors that will tell you, you know, we can lift and shift and it's very easy with Kubernetes. But again, it all goes back to if you're going to make this move, then you really want to look at your architecture and you want to see how you can improve it. You want to take the lessons learned in the past and you want to apply them in your new design. There's an expression that a friend of mine always used to say, and it goes something like fast, cheap and good. Pick two, right? But the idea is that you can't do a project fast, cheap and good at the same time. It's just not possible. But you can choose fast and cheap. You can choose fast and good, or you can choose good and cheap. Now, if you're going to be going to Kubernetes, what I would say is pick good. Whether you pick good and fast. And it's going to be a little bit more expensive to get it done. Or you choose good and cheap. And it's going to be a little bit slower. Again, Kubernetes is pretty complex. So if you're going to go that route, choose good. And then one of the other two. All right. When it comes to preparation, there's an expression. Rockets are hard. And if you're following all the commercial space travel that's going on, I think Thursday, there's actually another SpaceX launch. Along the way, there's a lot of mishaps, a lot of testing, a lot of explosions. And a lot of times when that happens, you'll see tweets that'll say, rockets are hard. So what I would add to that is, so is Kubernetes. If you're going to be doing this project, you really need to make sure you have the expertise to do it. And, you know, as a global fintech, we've got, we're fortunate that we've got resources. But, you know, you need to hire the folks with Kubernetes experience. You need to set the proper expectations that it's going to take some time because, again, you want to go back, you want to look at your architecture, you want to do it right. And the best way to go about it, in my opinion, is do build a minimal viable product and test out some of your ideas. And then start small with that, work with a few trusted customers, whether they're internal or external, and then start iterating based on that work. This way you'll get it right. And as part of the process, you want to document what you're doing, you want to review it, and then you want to test it. So, like I said with the MVP, you want to do a quick POC and test your assumptions. And we actually did that early on, we were thinking of using one type of file system. And then after doing some testing and running through it, we realized it wasn't going to work. And so we switched that up and we ended up using something different. So it was good that we did this POC up front before we got too far down the line, and then it would be harder to make changes. What I would say is use the native services whenever possible. So a lot of these cloud providers have native services like storage, like databases. Figure out what cloud provider you're going to use, and then embrace those native services and use them. It's going to help you tremendously when it comes to being able to manage and scale and even do things like DR. You want to plan upfront for disaster recovery. So you don't want to leave that as an afterthought, especially when it comes to your own architecture. On the one hand, it may be interesting to use a database for some of the storage and then maybe use a network file system for other stuff and then maybe SSDs for a third part of your storage. But then when it comes time to do disaster recovery, when it comes time to do backing up, you have to figure out, how am I going to do all that? How am I going to keep it in sync? How long is it going to take to do that? How long is it going to take to restore that? So if you look at disaster recovery upfront, when you make some of your choices, you may choose different things to make sure that it's easier to recover. And again, it all plays into the type of product, the amount of the RTO, the recovery time objective, and the RPO, the recovery point objective. So if you've got a product that you need to have an RPO of five minutes, meaning you can only lose five minutes of data, you may make different choices in your architecture than if you have a product that you just have to back it up once a day and that's fine. Now, keep in mind as part of the cloud, you're following a shared responsibility model, the code and data, the operating system. A lot of times is your responsibility. You know, some of the serverless functions, you don't have to worry about the OS, but still have to worry about the code and the data. And that the cloud is not magic. So because of the shared responsibility model, you still have to make sure that you're doing proper security, you're doing proper monitoring, and you're doing proper backups. You know, no matter what cloud provider you're using, they've got great uptime, but there is definitely times when they're going to have problems. And you're going to want to make sure you plan for that. Now in our case, a couple of products we're using, we're using Aqua for our container security. We're using Datadog when it comes to monitoring our clusters and our containers. And then we're using Castin K10 for backing up our applications. Now, as part of the DevOps team, we obviously follow infrastructure and configuration as code. And what that means is that we're storing our code in version control. And when I say code in this case, it's not the application, but it's the infrastructure. It's the code to build the infrastructure. All that code become part of a CI CD pipeline. So everything is auditable and everything is repeatable. Right. If you're checking in your code, if you then push it to the pipeline, the pipeline will build the code. It'll push it out to your dev environment. You'll do some testing. And if everything works, you can then deploy it on up to your QA environment. And again, since it's all the same code, just different data, you know, if it works in dev, it's going to have a good chance that things will work in QA. If you have to make any adjustments, you do that and then eventually you'll push it up to prod. Now the idea behind this is you want to push your problems to the left. Again, another common thing in DevOps.  Once that's done, you check it in, you capture it.  The idea is that by finding your problems early in dev, it's going to be quicker to fix them and it's going to be a lot cheaper to fix them. You know, if you have a problem and it makes its way all the way to production, generally what happens is, you know, you've got a fire drill, right? You've got customers that are now impacted. You've got to get all these teams together. You got to figure out a fix. You've got to push the fix quickly, try to test it quickly where if that same problem is found in dev, the developer can pretty much fix it by themselves. They'll just check it in. It'll run some tests again. And, you know, it's a lot easier to handle. Another piece of advice I give is don't reinvent the wheel. Just improve it. Again, because we're a large global fintech, we've got resources where we work with a lot of vendors. And we're able to take advantage of that. You know, where we don't necessarily have certain types of resources, we're able to bring them in as consultants, or even some of the people that we buy products from. They've got a lot of knowledge. For example, working with Cast and they've got a lot of really good Kubernetes people. They understand storage and backup. So some of the issues we were having, we were able to work with them to solve them. And it helped both sides, right? It helped us to get a solution, but then it helped the vendor because they were able to now understand from their customer's perspective what needed to be done. Again, as I said before, you want to capture the best practices as code, right? And not just for your product. So what came out of this is that as we were new to Kubernetes and EKS at Broadridge, we were one of the first projects. We worked with our cloud team, and we ended up building out Terraform modules for EKS. So we basically took best practices. Things like non-routable sitters for the cluster. Things like proper segmentation of the VPC, tagging the right subnets. All those problems that we encountered, we ended up putting all that in a Terraform module. So teams later on were able to not have those problems. They were able to build off of our knowledge and be able to get up more quickly when it came to EKS. Helm charts. Helm charts is a, Helm is a CNCF graduated project. It's at the same level of Kubernetes at this point, and it's considered a package manager for Kubernetes. So if you're not familiar with Helm and you're deploying to Kubernetes, you really want to become familiar with Helm. It'll become your new best friend when it comes to Kubernetes. Now as a package manager, what happens is, you know, you might think of installing software. You know, if you're into Linux, RPMs, or packages with Windows, there's a Windows installer, the MSI file. Well, with Kubernetes, it's very similar. Normally, when you're deploying to Kubernetes, you've got this whole collection of YAML files, and they describe the services, the pods, the ingress, you know, pretty much everything for your infrastructure. And what Helm does is it takes all those different YAML files, it packages them all together. It takes them out where you've got your logic in templates, and you've got your values, your data in YAML files. And so again, it lets you deploy across different SDLCs using the same code. So the logic remains the same, and then you can customize the values depending on the environment you're deploying in. The other great thing about Helm is a lot of third parties publish Helm charts. So, for example, CloudBees published a Helm chart for their CI product. So we were able to use their installer without having to figure out how to install it in Kubernetes ourselves. There's a lot of good open source charts available, things like Nginx ingress. There were different secret managers, DNS, all that good stuff. Even Kasten had a Helm chart, Datadog had a Helm chart, so we were able to take advantage of all that. You know, we didn't reinvent the wheel, we didn't write those ourselves. We just used the third party charts. We obviously reviewed them, made sure that they did what we needed to, but then we were able to take advantage of that more quickly. So a couple of things, if we look at what we should have done more differently, or what we should have done differently, I should say. One thing I would say is we should have hired talent faster. So when we initially started with Kubernetes, you know, we did some training.  But if we were to do it again, I would say we should have brought the people in with the knowledge sooner. And that would have helped the project along faster. The other thing I would say is our MVP, we should have defined less features upfront, you know, created a smaller MVP and got people using it sooner. So, you know, one of the things we wrestled with was, okay, if we give this to people now and they start using it, but we don't have everything in place, are we going to get caught, you know, with a problem, and then not be able to service them properly? And so we put in more features and try to do more things where if I were to do this again, what I would say is, you know, we'll put the basic features in upfront. We'll work with some of those customers and basically tell them, look, it's not ready for production, we really need to do some basic stuff with it. You know, some stuff that maybe isn't as time sensitive or critical to you, because we really need the feedback. And, you know, that ties into failing faster sooner. So by getting that feedback sooner in the cycle, by making the mistakes and making changes sooner, you're not as far down the path with some of those decisions. I look at some of the results of this project and the project is still ongoing as far as Cloud BCI is concerned. We've got to the point where it's deployed and since we had such a large implementation, on-prem implementation, you know, we're looking at the best way to bring people over. But if I look at some of the current results, you know, first of all, like I said, we were able to build that reusable EKS Terraform module, and that's really increased productivity for a lot of the other teams. You know, we were the pioneers, we mapped out the course, and then other people are able to benefit from that. We also built a bunch of reusable Helm charts. And, you know, we needed monitoring, we needed backup, we needed DNS. We built out those charts and as we were building them, we built them in such a way that they were reusable, so other teams are now pretty much, they can drop them right in and get going. We wrapped third-party Helm charts. So, my background, I was working on Chef before working on this project. And so there's an idea in Chef about wrapping third-party cookbooks. And basically, what that means is that you're going to take a cookbook somebody else wrote, you're going to not change it, but you're going to write your code around it and include it in your code. And it makes it easy to maintain. So, I have my logic and my data to my cookbook. I include the other cookbook. And then if an update comes out for the other cookbook, I can just move that in and replace the old one. And then, you know, I might have to update some of my code, but for the most part, it's good to go. If you don't wrap something, if you try to modify somebody else's code, and then there's an update, then now you've got to port all your changes that you made to the new cookbook. So, we took that same technique and we wrapped third-party Helm charts. So, again, when Nginx Ingress comes out with a new chart, we can just drop their new chart, their new version into our chart. And, you know, maybe we have to update some values or things like that, but we don't have to port any patches or anything like that. That's a good technique to use. Along those same lines, we developed some Jenkins code that will monitor all those third-party Helm charts. And whenever there's an update, it'll pull those updates down and put them on our internal Helm repository. And so the goal here is that, you know, we will know, hey, if there's a security fix or new features, we'll know sooner on that it's available and we'll be able to use it.  And that was a new project. We hadn't used that tool before. So, because of the fact that we already had this Kubernetes cluster up and running, because of the fact that CloudBee uses Helm, even for CloudBee CD, we were able to deploy that product very quickly, really in a matter of days. And so, again, you know, that was a big win, you know, that really showed that, yeah, once this environment is all set up, you can move other stuff into it quickly. So I might ask, what's next? Well, like I said before, you know, we're migrating our internal customers to the new platform, and that's ongoing. And that's going to take a while. Scaling, you know, scaling is still something we're going to have to work out as we move more and more of these customers onto this platform. There's different ways to scale things. So we're still working on the best approach to that. Building out third party images. So again, like I said before, when you've got these build agents, you can build images that are used in your pods.  And just build them and have them available to the customers. Automating the testing, you know, CI CD pipeline, it's great if you can build stuff automatically. But the goal is not only building it, but being able to automatically test it, and then automatically deploy it. So, you know, we've gotten good at the build part. Now we're working on the automated testing part. And then we can get to automatically deploying things. We've got other groups adopting our code. So as I said before, because of the way we built some of this, we kept that in mind. And it's making other people's lives easier. There were people who were part of my team, the team itself. We moved over three other applications, there was, you know, at times the team was anywhere from around three to eight people. But what would happen as we completed a project, some of the people may have stayed and worked on the next tool, and then some of the people may have gone and worked on other projects. But the great thing is all the skills that they learned throughout this process. The ones who moved on to different teams were able to take these techniques, take the skills they learn, and they were able to start to seed some of these other teams and teach them the proper techniques. So that's something to keep in mind right as you're building your team as you bring in new technologies. When you start out with that small group, you want to bring people on who can then help spread the word, right? You want to be able to take your techniques, take the right way of doing things, and push that out company-wide. And then finally, because of this new approach with containers, we're really using this as a catalyst to rethink how our DevOps pipelines work. So again, instead of having these monolithic agents, we're able to string together different containers, we're able to swap in and swap out different types of testing techniques, different type of build techniques. So it's really helping us rethink how all these pipelines are going to work. So that's really it as far as my presentation. I've talked about some different technologies, and so here's just a reference. Again, Helm is really the package manager for Kubernetes that we're using. Terraform, if you're familiar, if you're not familiar with Terraform, Terraform allows you to deploy infrastructure to develop infrastructure as code. And it's used, you know, in our case, we use it with AWS, but they've got different modules for other cloud providers. They even have some Helm and Kubernetes modules. So it gives you a lot of flexibility. EKS, Amazon EKS, that's Amazon's managed Kubernetes service. CloudBees is what I talked about as far as CloudBees CI and CD, the two products that we're using for continuous delivery, continuous integration. Kastim was the backup project that I talked about. Aqua Security is what we use for container security, and Datadog is used for monitoring. So that's really the end of my presentation. Thank you all for listening and I appreciate your time. Take care.


Continuing with the components of quality education, we see that the third component listed over there is the quality content. So quality content refers to the intended and taught curriculum of schools. Now in this curriculum, we might see the national goals for education and then the outcome statements in which these goals are achieved or not achieved, how will they be measured with measurable objectives and this is our starting point with respect to the implementation of the curriculum. Now if we look at it from many angles, is this curriculum-student-centered, is it not discriminatory? Does it have standards? This is what this curriculum standard meets. So curriculum should emphasize deep rather than broad coverage of important areas of knowledge. In depth, it should not be superficial. Similarly, authentic and contextualized problems of study. Our idea is to develop the skills for the solution of the problem rather than the road learning. It's more like stressing the skills development as well as knowledge acquisition. So problem solving issue here is very important. Curriculum should provide for individual differences. These differences can be based on gender, localities, ethnicities. These should be taken care of. Focus on results or standards and targets for student learning. Curriculum structure should be gender-sensitive and inclusive of children with diverse abilities and backgrounds. If this is not possible, some students will lag behind and will not be able to talk to them. Curriculum should be responsive to the emerging challenges and issues in society. Then, uniqueness of local and national content. Next is literacy. Literacy or ability to read and write is often considered one of the primary goals of formal education. Literacy includes reading, writing, and arithmetic. Numeracy is also a part of it. It should also be a part of counting, addition, subtraction. Numeracy skills can be helpful in understanding. That might help in the management of household, small enterprises. We can also understand issues with respect to different communities. Unicef defined as psychosocial and interpersonal skills used in everyday interactions, not specific to getting a job or earning an income. It is focusing on the development of certain kinds of attitudes, certain kinds of values, certain kinds of behaviors amongst the people. These could be part of the personality development which can be helpful in the relations in the community. If we look at it further, then they talk about peace education. It seeks to help students gain the ability to prevent conflict and to resolve conflict peacefully when it does arise. Whether this conflict is between two individuals, between two groups or maybe at the national level or the international level. Then challenges in reaching large numbers of children with quality content. These are the challenges for the teachers particularly. Teachers often find curricular integration and interdisciplinarity difficult, especially when the teacher does not have any role in curriculum design. So in corporation of different, let's say, disciplines it becomes difficult. Then they say that subjects that do not appear on important examinations are not always taken seriously. Social attitude towards the subjects may not be favorable and cultural patterns are difficult to change. So ideas conceived in other regions of the world may not be adequately adapted in the local context. Political and economic instability can also affect on the delivery of these things. These are the challenges for the educational institutions particularly for the teachers and well, challenges are there but these are not something which cannot be overcome. So that is how we see that these are important components of the curriculum.


This rapid review aims to identify risk factors for adverse mental health outcomes among healthcare workers during the COVID-19 pandemic. The study found that nurses may be at higher risk, but no studies compared this group with primary care workers. Other risk factors include underlying organic illness, gender, female, concern about family, fear of infection, lack of personal protective equipment, PPE, and close contact with COVID-19. Systemic support, adequate knowledge, and resilience were identified as factors protecting against adverse mental health outcomes. The evidence suggests that psychological interventions aimed at enhancing resilience in individuals may be beneficial, but to build a resilient workforce, occupational and environmental factors must be addressed. Further research including social care workers and analysis of wider societal structural factors is recommended. This article was authored by Johannes H. Dacock, Helen and Latham, Stephen J. Leslie, and others. We are article.tv, links in the description below.


In another development, violent clashes erupted on Wednesday in the Nabooja market after a truck carrying domestic gas crossed a woman passenger on a Komasha motorcycle to death. The incidents which happened at the building materials market in the Ede area of the Federal Capital Territory degenerated into a bloody clash between motorcyclists and Ebo traders. Now the FCT police command in the statement said it has managed the incident to forestall further breakdown of law and order.


Are you there? Where are you? I'm looking for intelligent viewers. Intelligent commenters. Where are you? Ok, bonbonime. My name is Sam Vaknin. I'm the author of Malignan Self-Love. I'm a professor of psychology in several universities on several continents. Today I'm going to release three videos run for shelter, run for cover. The first one is going to be very brief, relatively speaking, and I'm going to respond to a few of your questions. The second one is going to discuss the forthcoming changes in the international classification of disorders and the next version of the DSM, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual. So the changes to the very concept of personality disorders, its revolutionary stuff. And the third video is going to discuss the Myers-Briggs inventory, the MBTI, and how valid is this very, very widespread test also known as the 16 personality types test. So how valid is it? Is it for real or is it a scam? So three videos, one after the other, rapid fire shooting. And we start with the first one where I essentially cater to your unending litany of questions, queries and quizzes. Let's start with the first question.  You remember the famous coping strategy, grey rock, where you render yourself uninteresting to the narcissist. You don't react, you don't adulate, you're not alive.  So that the narcissist finally gives up and walks away. The narcissist does the same to potential sexual partners.  The narcissist grey rocks sexually throughout his other life. Some narcissists are paranoid, so they grey rock women because they are afraid of, I don't know, blackmail or compromising information or compromising situations or finding themselves trapped somehow. Other narcissists grey rock women because they are sadistic and they want to frustrate women and to hurt them by ostentatiously rejecting them. Other narcissists are simply terrified, terrified of women. They are misogynists or they have performance anxiety or something and so they grey rock women. Some narcissists are autistic. They simply sincerely and honestly don't notice when you come onto them. They are oblivious to sexual and social cues and cannot read behaviors such as flirting or courting. And so sexual grey rocking is very common among narcissists. Believe it or not, even somatic narcissists grey rock sexually. They grey rock sexually, everyone except the target. They home in, they zero in on a particular target, a victim, a prey and then they sort of ignore everyone else around the target unless they try to triangulate. So grey rocking is an essential narcissistic technique. Your second question was, what's this thing with the schizoid cerebral narcissists?  So usually the schizoid cerebral narcissists had experienced a kind of rejection or abandonment or humiliation early on in one of his very, very early relationships, usually the first or second relationships. And he came up, he had learned a lesson from it. Having been cheated upon, having been betrayed, having been abandoned, he came very close to modification. And he realized that modification could be life-threatening. So he spends the rest of his adult life trying to avoid the same early experience. And he tries to do this, he tries to accomplish this by squaring the circle in subsequent relationships. Essentially, this is the deal he offers his intimate partner. This is the pact, this is the compact and the agreement that he suggests that he puts on the table. And now we are talking about a heterosexual narcissistic male and his female partner. But of course it applies to all kinds of relationships and it applies with gender reversal where the woman is the narcissist and the man is the intimate partner. So here is the deal.  You will be my mother. You will not abandon me. You will provide me with services.   You will do all this for me. In return, I accept that you must find love, intimacy and sex with men because I am not a man and I cannot provide you with these needs. Of course this is a very self-defeating strategy because the elements in this strategy are unsustainable. The adulation ceases because who can adulate a woman, who can adulate a wimp, who can adulate a wuss, a non-man. So gradually the adulation ceases and then most intimate partners react, as I have explained yesterday, with frustration, with anger, with disappointment. They feel deceived. They feel they had been exposed to false advertising. They feel they had been subjected to broken, fallacious promises.  She spends most of the time outside home, outside the shared fantasy.  The shared fantasy does not provide intimacy, does not provide emotions, does not provide passion and desire and many other things that the intimate partner requires.  Actually, over time she spends less and less time in the shared fantasy and more and more time outside the confines of the shared fantasy, which creates, of course, abandonment anxiety.  So after some time it could be a year, it could be two, it could be a decade, it could be two decades. At some point there is actual abandonment. So it's a self-defeating strategy. The three elements of the strategy, the three pillars are unsustainable and definitely not long term. And they force the narcissist, the cerebral schizoid narcissist, to recommence the cycle over and again, time after time. And it's an inefficacious solution. Many cerebral schizoid narcissists end up life all alone because they give up on the possibility of a functional shared fantasy and they don't have at their disposal any other efficacious solution because of how they're constructed mentally. Okay, I want to read to you, as had become our habit, I want to read to you a comment. Yes, yes, my intelligent commenter for a change. The name is Kate Papa, apologies for that. And this is what she had written. She, I assume, had written, the cerebral narcissist and his significant other are both dead inside. Neither are capable of healthy adult relationships. It's not that they cannot let each other go. They simply, simply refuse to. Both parties are getting the needs met. The narcissist can feel satisfied with his sense of moral and intellectual superiority. She's referring to cerebral narcissists, yes. And his ultimate, so the narcissist, the cerebral narcissist can feel satisfied with his sense of moral and intellectual superiority and his ultimate control over a partner that he knows will never abandon him. The narcissist's broken, probably mentally ill partner can feel sexually satisfied by any man, but refuses any real intimacy.  And then go running back to daddy for confirmation that she's blameless, justified by her bad treatment of not only the narcissist, but the triangulated third party. Well said, well said, Kate Papa. It's exactly the way it is. Okay, your next question. Are you sure that narcissists cannot be cured, cannot be healed, cannot be recovered? Because doctor so and so says otherwise. And doctor so and so claims to have a great experience healing and curing and recovering narcissists. So are you sure because they're doctors, they're professors, you know, well, I don't care much about academic degrees in this context. Anyone with or without academic degree, who claims to cure narcissists, to heal narcissists, or to recover narcissists, whatever the heck it means. I have no idea what is a recovered narcissist.  Someone who fakes expertise and doesn't have it, or a con artist.  And to substantiate this very harsh statement I've just made, I'm going to quote three seminal texts. I'm going to start with a quote from the book, Psychopathology Foundations for a Contemporary Understanding, fifth edition, published by Rutledge, 2020. This last year. It's pretty recent, wouldn't you agree? Here's what they say. Personality disorders are among the most difficult of disorders to treat, because they involve well-established behaviors that can be integral to a client's self-image. And they quote Theodore Millen, 2011. Nevertheless, much has been written on the treatment of personality disorders. And here they quote Beck, Freeman, in 1990, Clarkin, Phonogy, Gabbard in 2010, Creechfield and Benjamin in 2006, Gunderson and Gabbard in 2000, Lipsley in 2003, Magnavita in 2010, Young, Kolsko, Weisschar in 2003. So they quote all these studies, and they say, well, many people have written about the treatment of personality disorders. And they continue. I'm continuing to quote from the book. It's The Book about Psychopathology. And they say, there is empirical support for clinically and socially meaningful changes in response to psychosocial and pharmacologic treatment. Magnavita, 2010. But the development of an ideal or fully healthy personality structure is unlikely to occur through the course of treatment. But given the considerable social, public health and personal costs associated with some of the personality disorders, such as the antisocial and borderline, even moderate adjustments to personality functioning can represent substantial social and clinical benefits. I'm going to repeat this. I'm going to repeat this because this is what you should listen to, not to doctor this and doctor that online. Because let alone people with no academic degree and self-styled experts and coaches and I don't know what else, listen to this well. The development of an ideal or fully healthy personality structure is unlikely to occur through the course of treatment. Even but what can occur are moderate adjustments to personality function. That's what they say. And that's what I had said in yesterday's video. And that's what I've been saying since 1995. Here is a text I had written in 1995. Can narcissism be cured? It's part of the book Malignant Self-Love, Narcissism Revisited, whose first edition was published in 1999, when most of these self-styled experts and coaches were teenagers and couldn't spell the word narcissism if their lives depended on it. So here's what I had written. Can narcissism be cured? Adult narcissists can rarely be cured, though some scholars think that behavior can be modified. Still, the earlier the therapeutic intervention, the better the prognosis. A correct diagnosis and a proper mix of treatment modalities in early adolescence guarantees some success without relapse in anywhere between one third and one half of cases. Additionally, aging moderates or even vanquishes some antisocial behaviors and traits. And now I want to read to you someone who is a much bigger authority than me. And that's of course the one and only Theodor Millen. Theodor Millen had written in his book Personality Disorders in Modern Life, third edition, 2004. Morse narcissists strongly resist psychotherapy. That's Theodor Millen, not Sambhagni. Morse narcissists strongly resist psychotherapy. For those who choose to remain in therapy, there are several pitfalls that are difficult to avoid. Interpretation and even general assessment are often difficult to accomplish. I want to quote, provide you with another quote from the third edition of the Oxford textbook of psychiatry published by Oxford University Press. People cannot change their natures. People cannot change their natures, but can only change their situations. There has been some progress in finding ways of affecting smaller changes in disorders of personality. But management still consists largely of helping the person to find a way of life that conflicts less with his character. Whatever treatment is used, aims should be modest. And considerable time should be allowed to achieve these modest aims. Not very encouraging, is it? And finally, the fourth edition of the authoritative Review on General Psychiatry published by Prentice Hall International. It says, people with personality disorders cause resentment and possibly even alienation and burnout in the healthcare professionals who treat them. Long-term psychoanalytic psychotherapy and psychoanalysis have been attempted with narcissists, although their use has been controversial. The picture is bleak. We can modify certain abrasive and antisocial behaviors, very frequently not for long.  We can control modulability, psychotropically, with medication usually, pharmacologically. And we can control obsessive-compulsive aspects of behavior. End of story, nothing else. Core therapy, which is the treatment modality that I'd invented, essentially dismantles the false self, reduces the need or eliminates the need for narcissistic supply and tackles grandiosity as a cognitive deficit. End of story, it does nothing else. The narcissist remains the same, same a-hole, disempathic, exploitative, entitled, none of these changes. Narcissism is not tuberculosis. Narcissism is the personality. Narcissism is the person, borderline is the character. Personality disorders, as the DSM says, are pervasive. They are in every cell of the person. They are in every interaction, they are in every setting. You can no longer, no more cure or heal the narcissist of his narcissism than you can change your own personality. Can I make you another person? No. Can you make the narcissist another person? No.  And above all, ignorant of the very basics of personality disorders. And I'm saying this with full responsibility, judiciously, based, as you've just heard, on the latest cutting-edge knowledge in psychology and psychiatry. So, caveatemptor, beware, ask questions. Don't trust authority and don't be impressed by the title doctor before the name. Psychology is a huge field that someone is a doctor of psychology, doesn't make him or her an expert on narcissism or on personality disorders. Did they publish anything? Are they teaching the topic? What makes them experts? What qualifies them as scholars in the field? Or did they just wake up in the morning, found out how much money there is in the field, and declared themselves experts? In one of these cases, and I will not go into names, I have this in writing from the person who is now one of the leading self-styled experts on narcissism. Be very careful. Thank you for listening.


Welcome back to Mises Weekends. I'm your host Jeff Deist and our guest this weekend is Bill Bonner who's perhaps best known for founding way back in the 1970s Agora Financial which in the intervening decades has turned into a publishing juggernaut. Now Bill has spent his career living and traveling around the world to understand global markets and he's an absolute expert on central banking and debt. As a matter of fact he wrote the book on it called Empire of Debt way back in 2005 which later became a documentary movie. So Bill and I have a great conversation about this sort of bizarro world of debt and fed machinations that we find ourselves living in today. Now one quick caveat, we caught Bill on a cell phone from one of his second homes in Paris, France and so the sound quality is not optimal but we think you'll enjoy this interview anyway so stay tuned for a great conversation with Bill Bonner from Agora Financial. Hard to believe but it's been 10 years roughly since Empire of Debt was written and I remember Addison Wiggin coming down to Washington DC meeting with Ron Paul and talking about the book and Ron ultimately ended up I believe in the documentary movie about the book. Could you have imagined at that time when you wrote it everything that would have happened since you know the layman brothers crash of 2008 and the feds reaction and quantitative easing it's it almost sounds quaint now but at about that time when the book came out total federal debt was 8 trillion. Of course now it's about 18 trillion so it's really it's been an amazing ride. It has been an amazing ride. No I have been I have been wrong consistently wrong. I'd like to say that I'm consistent. I'm consistently wrong for the last 40 years because I remember talking to Murray Rothbard back in like 1973 and we were sitting around you know at the time I didn't really know what was going on but he said well this can't last you know this can't last because they had just set up this new currency system that eliminated the international the international exchangeability you know the ballot from previous to 1971 you could change your money into the foreigners could take their money to the US and change the goal so when when we had a pure paper money system nobody you know I didn't think it would last for more than a few years and here we are 40 years later and still still going I wouldn't say it's going strong but it's still going. No it is amazing and and when you think about it there's there are millions of people working in in financial markets and financial industries and Wall Street private equity funds etc who don't even remember the Greenspan era much less Paul Volcker right I mean 1973 might as well be 1873. No exactly right I mean it's amazing what's happened and it's happened over such a long period of time that most people most people alive today or at least most people who are making important decisions in the financial world have no experience of anything other than a bull market because we had a bull market since 1982 and no experience of real money because we haven't had that since 1971 and 1968 domestically so this has been a very very strange period in history one that that shouldn't exist the way it does it's theoretically mathematically can't go on for much longer but it's gone on it's improved remarkably robust and remarkably durable and part of the reason for this is that so many people can't imagine anything else and they can't imagine anything could go very wrong with it yes they now they've lived through the crisis of 2008-200 so they know there are there are setbacks and now they're puzzled about why the economy hasn't rebounded but they assume that it's just a matter of time until the authorities get their ducks lined up and everything will work well Jim. Well you wrote in an article a week or two back that Yellen's announcement last week which turned out to be an announcement that the Fed was not going to do anything was the most anticipated central bank action in history I mean isn't this kind of bizarre can you ever recall the I won't say the general public but certainly the financial press being this fixated on a central bank action it's it almost seems bizarre to me. Well it's totally bizarre and it's bizarre because it never before made so much difference that they the Fed I mean central banks up until recently up until recently until Greenspan and Greenspan was the the decisive pivot in the whole central banking world often tell him nobody knew the names of the central bankers and you know that you can take that all the way back to the head of the mint in England in the 11th century nobody knew who these people were because they were supposed to not do anything their role was just to not do anything to not not to use any innovative techniques not to use imagination not to come up with new plans not to pull on levers not to turn knobs their job was simply to make sure they didn't do anything that would ruin the the the monetary stability of the country now we have all these innovators these activists these people with ideas and it's amazing every the paper every day and you're a new economist coming up with new ideas to how we can put the new new thing there but it's amazing now we're just everything we're improvising we're making it up as we go along that's not something you're supposed to do in central banking but now that we are everybody dies a turn to the central bank if they're going to do something nobody knows what they're going to do they don't know what they're going to do but they're making it up as they go along and it's sure to be a disaster that's not the way central banking is supposed to work well when you're talking about making it up as they go along everybody who thinks like we do surmises that there's going to be some kind of end game to all this debt there's going to be some sort of global currency reset so Jim Rickards in his newsletter recently said something I thought was so interesting he's talking about decisions that are being made by elites that are going to impact global capital markets and he says this I'm quoting him he says they do not announce radical changes overnight they prefer to make small moves year after year through boring technical changes that few notice or understand I'd like to get your thought on this because we tend to think that there's going to be some big calamity or there's going to be another Bretton Woods type summit or the IMF is going to do something very publicly and SDRs are going to come to the fore but in fact maybe this is just happening and we're not aware of it because it's it's happening through through as Rickard says sort of small technical changes well yes I think they're making small changes all the time because they dare not make big ones they don't know that really I think they're given far too much credit when I read what they have done but what they say you know you hope they're like politicians and you hope that behind that stuff that they say publicly they have some private talks it makes some sense but I doubt it's true you know they have done a lot of work that their whole lives doing mostly academic kind of work in in economics but that academic school that they're in is just doesn't make any sense in the end of the day so they don't really have a firm idea of what they're doing or how they're going to do it they really are improvising and improvising now is taking place by middle increments because they don't really trust what they're doing they don't know what they're doing they kind of wait to see what happens but when the whole thing falls apart which it will then they will improvise on a much much grander scale and then we'll get some I think what we'll get is the first they'll make cash which probably at the depths of the next crisis and then we'll see some much more heavy handed innovation well the idea that they don't know what they're doing surely that uncertainty is not priced into markets today would you agree that that markets today reflect at least a subconscious belief that somewhere someone has their hand on the wheel and they know what the hell they're doing well yeah I think so it may not be that they know what they're doing but maybe a lot of people think they don't need to know what they're doing that that the system works well and just a lot of them look it up too badly it'll be fine but but what's happened is that they have their misactivism with the Fed requires them to know what they're doing and at least in the theoretical way it requires them to know things they couldn't possibly know anyway so it's really hopeless and eventually it'll become clear just about everybody that it doesn't work you know when we get a few days of stock market sell-off it won't take very much get a few days a thousand points down day after day for a few days and everybody is going to look at Janet Yellen in the Fed say what are you doing one is going wrong why didn't we stop this and then of course they'll come out with some new program but what's different here as opposed to let's say Argentina in 99-2000 I know you've spent a lot of time down there is that we're talking about people tinkering with the world's reserve currency we've never had a collapse of a worldwide reserve currency I mean this is uncharted territory no it's totally uncharted no Argentina with small potatoes small potatoes and Argentina also is full of Argentine the Argentines are very different from American in that they already suspected that the system didn't work nobody in Argentina trusted the Central Bank it was only the foreign the foreign lenders who thought that they were telling the truth but the Argentines themselves you know they have big wads of cash in their pockets they have they don't they don't save money in banks they typically if they're going to try to preserve some wealth in Argentina they buy an apartment or buy a farm or something I mean they are used to this kind of stuff so they knew what they were doing but on the world stage as a whole the US the reserve currency the United States dollar that nothing like this has ever happened and it is you know many many times the scale not to mention the fact that in in America today there are a few people who are prepared for any kind of monetary disaster I mean there are people walk around with no money in their pockets they have a credit card or a line of credit and they go to an ATM machine get some cash that they need to spend but they're not at all prepared for the kind of disaster that's headed their way well if you had to tell the average guy or gal one thing they should do today you know a person of of ordinary means an American let's say what what would you say what would you say that an average person could do to protect themselves even if what we're talking about is a remote or outside possibility a lot it's very easy and doesn't look off they think just make sure you have some cash cash is going to be you know where the rubber meets the road and then next crisis the ATM machine they're not gonna work so you got to make sure you have some cash on hand just to pay for ordinary living expenses during this crisis period of course nobody knows how to work or how long it'll take but the other thing you should have is some gold coins just simple simple bullion coins you should have some of your savings in bullion coins because they tend to resist the crisis and all sorts and the crisis could come in many different forms and nobody knows there's a lot of argument about whether it'll be just a pure classic deflation or a hyperinflation or just high levels of inflation sustained over many years nobody knows and you can't know those things but we do know that over time gold coins just simple bullion coins tend to hold their value and so when you you go through a crisis and the crisis could take a year could take five years could take 10 years but you come out of it and you still got the gold coins you know and they're still like something whereas your bun stocks and everything else in brackets they may or may not be worth something well what about the idea that a little bit of something can be good and a lot of something can be bad like alcohol for instance you know marks i'm sure this is misquoting it but it's paraphrasing marks that somehow as we get too rich and too prosperous we're going to hang ourselves on our own luxury vices is this something is a person who's traveled a lot who's studied a lot of other economies are americans just really dumb and really clueless about what makes us rich and and what it's going to take to sustain this well you know this idea of warm basis is this phenomenon that people have observed in in medicine where you give a little dose of something somebody makes it better and you give a big dose and they die but that's the fundamental idea of the of that book which is that public policy works the same way that a public policy and not just public policy but something like government you can argue that a little bit of government it really is a good thing because it kind of stabilizes things and it makes it easier for people to make long-term plans and so on but a lot of government and you reach that point very fast by the way a lot of government is obviously not a good thing because then the instability increases and more government you have or more people you have making decisions and more people who have making decisions that affect your life and so now you can't make a decision because somebody else is making a decision that runs right into it but that phenomenon is a phenomenon that we see in almost everything where a little bit of something can be good a lot of it tends to be disastrous and in the financial world that's the idea of that book really is that in the financial world we have a policy a public policy and the public policy is kind of changing the manipulation of the economy in order to provide more what they call aggregate demand the aggregate demand means just printing money basically just printing money so the person go takes the money goes into the store he has demand you buy something and there's a whole generation maybe two generations of economists who believe that this is the way to improve an economy where in fact there's no evidence whatever that any economist has ever improved any economy I mean it's just not it's not true and while a little bit of aggregate demand or a little bit of credit little bit of even money printing might stimulate the economy in some way it is certainly true that you put a lot of this stuff to work and then you get a lot of people who depend on it and those people then insist on more of it because they need it in order to sustain the kind of advantages and benefits and property that they've come to to require so when you get more and more people in support of a policy like that you necessarily get more and more of that policy and then you get so many people in favor of the policy that it's unstoppable and then it has to run its course to the inevitable destruction to form again to the point where it all blows up and just can't go on anymore and that's where I think our public financial policies are headed Bill Bonner thanks so much for your time today and a really fascinating interview ladies and gentlemen have a great weekend