Good afternoon, everybody, and welcome. It's wonderful to have all of you here with us this afternoon. I'm Susan Collins, the Joan and Sanford Wildein of the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy, and simply honored to be hosting a very, very special event today that is in honor of J. Ira Harris, the J. Ira Harris Lecture, featuring the 38th United States Secretary of Commerce, the Honorable Penny Pritzker. So I'd like to begin by first recognizing some very special people here with us today. Of course, our featured speaker, Secretary Pritzker. Thank you so much for being here. We're delighted to welcome you. Our guest of honor, Mr. J. Ira Harris, who is here as well. We're delighted to have a number of members of the Harris family who are here with us. Mrs. Nikki Harris is here, and their son, John Harris, and his wife, Jennifer, as well as their daughter, Jackie. And so we are delighted to have all of you with us. Michigan's Vice President for Development is here this evening as well. Jerry May, thank you for joining us. Well, today's gathering was made possible by Ira's good friends with a special thanks to Bonnie Tish. Their names are all in your program, and many of them are here with us this evening. They gave a generous gift to Michigan and asked us to host a major event in honor of a special milestone birthday for Ira. The public intellectual nature of their gift really recognizes Ira's curiosity and his passion for education, policy, and leadership. And their gift honors Ira's abiding love for his alma mater. The incredible generosity of Ira and Nikki Harris has really transformed the University of Michigan from the hospital and the medical school to the north of the campus, to the athletic campus in the south, from the College of Engineering to the literature, science, and the arts, the Ross School of Business, the library, the Museum of Art, the Office of Financial Aid, and at the Ford School, Ira, Nikki, and their family created the J. Ira and Nikki Harris family professorship of public policy, which is held by my colleague, Barry Ray, who is also here with us today. They've been incredibly generous with their time and their expertise as well. And for more than 20 years, Ira has been an active member of the University's Investment Advisory Committee, contributing his world-class financial acumen to helping the University maximize the growth of its endowment. And he served for many years on the President's Advisory Group. President Mark Schlissel, who was not able to join us today, has instead sent a formal letter of both gratitude and congratulations. And we look forward to presenting that to Ira during the reception. So on behalf of the University of Michigan, thank you, Ira and Nikki, for your inspiring commitment and your dedication. We really, really appreciate it. Ira, I'd also like to thank you personally for providing me with this opportunity to tell such a distinguished group just a bit about the school that it is my honor to lead. And so before I turn things over to Mr. Harris to introduce our keynote speaker more fully, I'd like to take just a moment or two to tell you about the Ford School. Founded in 1914 as the nation's first program of its kind, we were named in 1999 for the University of Michigan's pride, President Gerald R. Ford. The president's legacy is alive and well at the Ford School, where our students learn about and are inspired by his exemplary career in public service and his lifelong commitment to bridging ideological divides. At its core, the Ford School's mission is improving lives, advancing the human condition. We provide our students with a skill set that's increasingly in demand in a world that, as we all know, is getting smaller and more interconnected, that's changing at breakneck speed and becoming ever more complex. We provide our students with the analytic and creative skills to harness the complexity of the 21st century. Our students learn to analyze complex data sets, to evaluate benefits and costs, to speak and write clearly and persuasively, to think critically and compassionately, recognizing the multiple perspectives, to craft and enact solutions where others may only see dead ends. Well, that's our curriculum. That's the professional toolkit that our students take out into the world. And they find that those tools are as valuable in business and finance and the nonprofit enterprise as they are for the public sector. Our faculty aren't just outstanding teachers. They're also vitally engaged in the real world policy issues at the highest levels. Emeritus Professor Sheldon Danziger, who is also here with us this evening, is one of the nation's foremost experts on poverty and inequality, and he now leads the Russell Sage Foundation, America's principal foundation dedicated to social science research. The expertise of Harris family professor Barry Raib is widely sought by top journalists from around the world. His research and his outrage shape public understanding of climate change and energy, both the politics and the policy. Professor Robert Axelrod's seminal work on game theory made him one of the most cited political scientists ever and the first to be awarded a national medal of science in over 25 years. He now advises the State Department on the threat of cyberterrorism. And Ford School Professor Susan Donarski saw years of research and persuasion come to fruition last year when the Department of Education dramatically shortened the FAFSA form to make it easier for disadvantaged kids to go to college. A first generation college student herself Sue's work also led the University of Michigan to launch the HAIL program, which will enable scores of talented low income students to attend and to succeed at the University of Michigan. Our alumni, they're helping rebuild Detroit. They're leaders in major public school systems, the Department of Defense, Homeland Security, international aid agencies, National Science Foundation, Accenture, and so many more. Those are the stories that's the work of the Ford School. And so on behalf of our faculty, our students, and our staff, and of course of the broader University of Michigan community, I welcome all of you here for this really, truly happy occasion. So in a moment, I will invite Ira to introduce our speaker. After her remarks, there'll be some time for your questions. Please write them on the question cards that you received. And if you will pass them to your right, then staff will be there to gather them for the question and answer session. Now you'll find an overview in your program of the incredibly distinguished, successful career forged by Ira Harris. After decades of prominence in business and finance with leadership roles at Salomon Brothers and Lazard Frayers and Company, he is now the chairman of the financial consulting firm, J. Ira Harris and Associates. In addition to their generosity to the University of Michigan, Ira and Nikki have been active in a wide variety of charitable organizations, including the Chicago Public Library, Northwestern University, the National Center for Learning Disabilities, and many, many more. So please join me now in another round of applause as we welcome our dear friend, J. Ira Harris, to the podium. First, I want to pick on my friend, Bonnie Tish, for doing this, because the truth was the generosity of all my friends to this wonderful cause. I didn't get ties. I didn't get sweaters for my birthday. But I've got to tell you, it couldn't have been anything better than this. And I will tell you, if any of you sat with us back with the students with Penny, the total reward has already been there. She is so phenomenal in talking with our next generation. And they should all know that there is a summer intern program at the Commerce Department. And if you apply, you should write a letter and say, I met you at the Michigan lecture. I just want to take a minute and introduce Bill Daley, my good friend from Chicago, who had been Secretary of Commerce and who has given so much in his life and has just been a really good friend. Eric Canner, our former Majority Leader of Congress, who is now, thank God, in the real world and puts so much back into it. And I've really been very fortunate of having so many friends that have put so much of their time and effort back into the public sector. I do got to tell you all a very funny story about how to do with the creation of the Ford School. I got to know President Ford after he had been president of everything else. And Nicky and I really hit it off when he and his wife and Betty was one of the great women of our time. And when this whole thing started to create the school, I obviously was asked to get involved, which I did. Now, a very major donated to the school whose name is on the building is Sandy Weil, unfortunately, is out in California. So we're now talking about, I'm trying to give you an example of the public private sector, of going to approach Sandy, do a donate. Sandy loved the president. The president had been involved with Sandy for many, many years. So I called Ford on a Saturday and I said, look, we're going to meet. I'm taking Mary Sue in on Tuesday. We're going to meet with Sandy to talk about the school. But I said, you got to call him today to tell him how important this project is to him. So the president says to me, I heard you know, I hate to call people to talk to him, to ask him for anything. So I said to him, look, I want you to turn the clock back about 30 years. Make believe you're in Grand Rapids, running for Congress on a Saturday afternoon, dialing for dollars. This is what you got to do because if you don't call Sandy and tell him it's important, we're not going to get anywhere. Half-hour lady calls me back. He says, I did it. I did it. I think we got him. I said, OK, we'll work on it. So now we meet with Sandy and Sandy had this great love for President Ford, as Jeff Lane here who served on boards with both of them know. And Sandy made a gift of $5 million, which was a terrific gift towards the naming of the building and everything else. So the next thing that happens is about three months later, I get this urgent phone call from Mary Sue Coleman, who is the president of Michigan. She says to me, Ira, I got problems. I said, what's your problem? She says, we got a regents meeting this afternoon. And on the agenda, there was to approve the naming of the school and everything else. And I said, you know, what's the problem? She says, well, Sandy's gift is only 36% of the value of the building because it's run a little bit extra. And some of the regents are very upset that we have this rule in Michigan that the naming gift should be 40%. And they're concerned that we're creating a precedent. So I said to Mary Sue, good. Tell the regents we're creating a precedent. Any building named after an ex-president who's an alumnus of the school, you only got to put up 36% to do it. And I said, see what they do. There wasn't one region, after she said that, that had the guts to say a word. They decided they'd create a new precedent. But Sandy has been really terrific towards this and has named the dean and other things and been great supporters. And I'll tell you, the president was really interested in going on and see this school. And it was one of his accomplishments that he loved very much. About today, I can't tell you how happy I am. I can't tell you how lucky Nikki and I are to have such wonderful friends that we got. I've got two of my three kids here today, which have always made us very proud. And when we got the idea of calling Penny, I called her up on the phone. And I mean, I couldn't even finish the sentence of asking her, would she do this? She said, absolutely. Nikki and I have known Penny since she was a young girl. We have been so proud of watching her emerge all over all these years and to being just one of the most outstanding people that we know. We had the great pleasure of being very close with her mother and father and also after they had both passed away to watch Penny become a mother of bringing up her younger brothers. And this is someone that has constantly done it. Let me just say a few things. She's been 38 Secretary of Commerce since June 2013. She's done an unbelievable job focusing on business. She has very much made her position that she's Switzerland. And her job is just to develop business for the United States and do the best job. The things that she had done have been creative, taking all the experience of the different businesses she's been in and doing this. She's probably met with over 2,000 CEOs. And when she meets with them, she wants to listen. She created this open for business agenda which she talked to our students about today, which has been unbelievable, of really going out and trying to encourage investment back in the United States. She earned her bachelor's degree in economics from Harvard University and a JD and MBA from Stanford University, which you know are both the Michigan's of the east and the west coast. So she didn't want to come to the real Michigan, but she went to the Michigan's of both coaches. All I can tell you is I love her. She's fantastic. I'm so proud of her and I can't thank her enough. Not only did she come and greeted her speech, but when the school called her and asked her would she meet with the students, as you see, we've got 15 students that came in from the school. She said, absolutely. That's who I really want to talk to with the students. So Penny, I love you. I'll always love you. I won her security that I know her for a long time so they didn't get upset when I went to kiss her. I should sit down now. That was the best part of the day. Ira, thank you very much. Dean Collins, thank you as well. And I am really honored to be here tonight. I'm really honored to deliver the first J.I. Ira Harris lecture. It's really extraordinary. Ira, you know this. You are loved.  You're appreciated by this community for all that you have done on behalf of this great university. Thank you for all the scholarships you and Nicky have created and the professorships that you've endowed. Thank you for the seemingly endless amount of support that you've given to the College of Literature, Science, and Arts, the Stephen Ross School of Business, the Ford School of Public Policy, and of course, the University Athletics Program. There's no question. The two of you mean a great deal to the students, the faculty, and the supporters of the University of Michigan. I'm here today because you mean so much to me. Ladies and gentlemen, Ira Harris has been part of my life since I was born. He was, as he said, close to my mom and dad. Nicky and Ira were very close friends with my mother and father. And you can ask him about the time he put nail polish on my father's feet. And he used to call our house every morning at 6.30 in the morning, waking my mother up, which was never really a good thing to do. We've been close for a very, very long time. So much so that when my husband, Brian, and I decided that we were going to renew our wedding vows for our 25th wedding anniversary, there was only one person we wanted to officiate, and that was Ira. He agreed in a heartbeat. In fact, I think he had to stand up somebody in this room, and I'm not sure who. But thank you for your patience with that. There's one little detail about that day that I'm sure you will appreciate, which is Ira showed up for the occasion, dressed in his full University of Michigan robes with his academic tam on. It was the perfect outfit for officiating at our wedding celebration. I've always relied on Ira for his advice and counsel. His nature is to be, and you all know him as well as I do, is both cautious and analytical without being cynical. When I asked Ira whether I should step out of my business world and accept the honor of being Secretary of Commerce, his natural instincts were on full display. A lot of people were counseling me against it. They worried that after 27 years in the private sector, the bureaucracy and the politics would frustrate me. Ira encouraged me to think it through and asked me a couple of key questions. How would a CEO secretary be uniquely different in the role? How would business experience and skill translate in the public policy arena? How do you lead an agency five years into an administration when you only have three and a half years left? How do you become an integral part of the process, which is well underway, while also putting your own stamp on the place and its priorities? How could we gain bipartisan support for that agenda? Ira asked those questions, and then he encouraged me to take the job.  I had to resign from everything, every board, every business, and even our own family foundation. It's like going into the witness protection program. So on my first day of work, I sat in the conference room with about 50 people, and they're all staring at me. And these are now my closest colleagues, and I had neither hired them nor had I ever seen them before. And they began rattling off these acronyms, like NTIA, and BIS, and PTO, and ESA, and ITA, and EDA, and NOAA, and NIST, and oh my god. And less than an hour on the job, and I'm a drowning in the proverbial Washington DC alphabet soup. But attached to all those acronyms were some very serious economic policy issues and considerations that I would quickly need to master. And it was really somewhat terrifying. I thought I knew what the Commerce Department did, but I really had no idea of its true depth and breadth. Commerce had 12 different bureaus under its umbrella. And when I say different, I mean really different. It's responsible for everything from the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration to the International Trade Administration to the Patent and Trade Administration to the Census Bureau. So think of it this way. We count both fish and people. We issue both patents and weather warnings. We negotiate trade deals and make sense of big data. In fact, every day, we generate enough data in terabytes to fill two libraries of Congress every single day. So it became clear that the first to be successful in my new role, I had to be all in. So I moved my life to our nation's capital. And it also became clear that I needed to time to develop my priorities and a vision for the department. So I announced that I would take 100 days to accomplish three things. First, we would put the right people in the right jobs. So when I took over as secretary, about 80% of the leadership positions in the office of the secretary, which is about 100 people, were vacant. And 80% of our Senate confirmed positions were also vacant. Second objective in the first 100 days was hearing from our stakeholders. So I went on this listening tour, both within the department, across Capitol Hill and across our country. And third, we had to develop a strategy with a set of priorities. And so during those 100 days, we developed what we call our open for business agenda that continues to drive our work each and every day. The phrase really has two meanings. America's open for business, but also that commerce would be opening new markets and opportunities for American businesses around the world. The agenda has four pillars that encompass every task the Department of Commerce is responsible for, trade and investment, innovation, environment, and data. So this framework gave every bureau in the Department of Commerce the opportunity and the permission to identify where they fit in within the overall plan. It clarified the direction we were headed together and it enabled each bureau to develop individual strategies to meet their specific goals. I also made the decision to position the office, the executive office of the secretary, my senior team and me as the tip of the inverted triangle. I can't do a triangle very well, but think of an inverted triangle. Yes, an inverted pyramid. The way I saw it, we were there to serve the department, not the other way around. And so over the past three years, not quite three years, a couple months short, our open for business agenda has unleashed the creativity, the capacity and the power of the 45,000 people within the 12 bureaus that comprise our department. And together we've begun to transform the Department of Commerce into a true department of business that works with the private sector on policy development, helps firms of all sizes enter new markets and supports the development and expansion of the digital economy. Tonight I'd like to focus for a few minutes on one of the most exciting innovations, commercial diplomacy. Commercial diplomacy uses the power of American business to influence policy in markets around the world. Our world is too complex, our challenges are too deep, and the players too diverse for us to depend solely on traditional military and diplomatic tools. In the modern world, commerce must be part of our foreign policy toolkit. It's the third leg of the national security stool. So for decades, the United States has played a unique leadership role in the world. At the end of World War II, America and its allies built a rules-based international system that promoted openness, creativity, as well as political and economic freedom. From the Marshall Plan to the Berlin Airlift to our intervention in the Balkans, we relied on the unquestioned military, financial, and diplomatic power of our government to strengthen our post-war system. But over the decades, the world has changed and the tools we use to address our foreign policy challenges must change as well. For the first time in history, we are truly a global economy. The size of the global middle class has doubled over the past decade and will double again by 2030. Global networks connect business to business and business to consumers in ways that have never before been possible. It means that every U.S. business has access to literally a world of new customers. So like all great innovations, our vision for commercial diplomacy was sparked by a light bulb moment. It came at a large multilateral meeting three years ago in Asia when a senior Indonesian official approached me with a special request on behalf of his government. The Indonesian government wanted Apple to open a store in Jakarta. And the official asked me to reach out to Tim Cook, the CEO. This was a curious request because the Indonesian government was among the countries trying to implement a data localization policy. So data localization requires the store of user data on server to keep that data on servers physically situated in a country where the data originates. So this Indonesian policy was in direct conflict with the goal of generating a new high-profile investment given Apple's commitment to the cloud. So right then it occurred to us that the voices of American commerce with long-term capital and world-class products and services behind them carry immense weight around the world. So America's top executives could be deployed to make persuasive business cases to foreign officials about how certain public policies might be counterproductive. So we realized that we could make the Tim Cooks of the world great partners in effecting economic policy change around the world. And this is the beginning of commercial diplomacy. Fundamentally, commercial diplomacy brings business leaders to the table as advocates and emissaries in concert with government officials when and where our interests align. Now we at the Department of Commerce are consistently engaging American executives in ways that have never been done before. We ask them to join meetings and policy dialogues and in turn executives with the authority to make multimillion, and in some cases, billion-dollar decisions, detail why certain policies inhibit their investments. Rather than simply telling a foreign leader that a particular policy is bad, we're trying to show them what benefits will flow from pursuing a different policy. This is far more persuasive. And our vision has matured, and we have observed with overlapping interests that they extend beyond US government and the American business community. And often we find that our foreign business community has the same interests that we do. Irrespective of the country, people want economic freedom and the chance to earn a good living, start a business and support a family. Irrespective of the country, foreign governments want American companies to invest in their communities because American firms create jobs, bring leading technologies, respect the rule of law and tend to invest for the long term. Irrespective of the country, foreign citizens want access to American products and services. So interestingly enough, our government and our business community share these objectives. We've come to appreciate that this overlap creates tremendous, but underappreciated opportunity for our private sector and our government to work together as partners in an effort to support and shape a well-functioning rules-based international economic order. So let me spend just a very short moment discussing how commercial diplomacy efforts are playing out in a particularly pivotal place, Ukraine. As we know, Russian aggression in Ukraine has had a significant impact on the Ukrainian economy and its people, with GDP declining 10% over the past two years. International financial institutions, the United States and our European allies have provided important financial support, but the key to a sustainable economic success in Ukraine will be the market's ability to draw private investment. An independent prosperous, democratic and corruption-free Ukraine would be a global triple win. It's good for European stability, it's good for our own national security interests, and it's good for American business. So in September of 2014, President Obama asked me to go to Kyiv. My mission was to meet with President Poroshenko and Prime Minister Yatsenyuk and urge them to focus on critical business climate reforms, like addressing corruption, even while they were fighting a war in the East. I decided to enlist the American business community as partners. My message to the Ukrainian leadership was clear. Without real reform, American businesses would never fully commit to the Ukrainian market. The President and Prime Minister agreed and began to press ahead with an ambitious economic reform agenda. And in fact, within two weeks of our visit, their legislature passed a law establishing the National Anti-Corruption Bureau. The next step in our commercial diplomacy engagement was to convene the first ever U.S.-Ukraine Business Forum during the summer of 2015 in Washington. And Vice President Biden and Prime Minister Yatsenyuk were both in attendance. Before more than 150 Ukrainian and American business executives and government officials, the Prime Minister and Ukraine's economic ministers provided updates on Ukraine's path to economic reform. American business leaders offered concrete recommendations on how to further improve Ukraine's investment climate. They outlined the constructive role they could play in supporting Ukraine's integration into the global economy, a critical step if the country is going to enjoy long-term political stability. In October last year, I returned to Ukraine with a distinguished group of senior U.S. business leaders, whose mission was to make the business case for why Ukraine should adopt a number of particular policies that would draw more trade and generate more investment. Ultimately, the Ukrainian government committed to a roadmap that consists of seven critical microeconomic reforms that were requested by the business leaders. And in the months since, the government has made progress on this roadmap. They've begun developing a plan to address the significant value-added tax refunds they owe companies. They've begun developing an electronic and transparent system for making large government procurements. They've begun to cut back their overly burdensome regulatory regime, and they've implemented a new law that lowers their gas royalty rates to a level that's in line with international practices and encourages investment in natural gas production, which the country desperately needs. So Ukraine continues to face serious economic and political challenges, and their work is far from complete. But I mention this particular engagement as an example of how commercial diplomacy can work. As with traditional diplomacy, success is defined by incremental but meaningful steps along those lines. As I said at the outset, commercial diplomacy is not a traditional tool in our toolkit. But the government and the private sector are literally building new muscles. American executives are not accustomed to framing the cost of often complex economic policy decisions to foreign leaders. They're not trained as ambassadors, but many American executives are patriots and want to help affect policy change that will open more markets to America's businesses and products. But two and a half years of this effort is not enough. We need to push future presidents and their secretaries of commerce to invest in and cultivate this tool. If commercial diplomacy is truly going to become the third leg of the foreign policy stool, and I believe it should, our government needs to develop mechanisms to systematically deploy American executives as emissaries and advocates with foreign governments. And I have no doubt that some may be cynical about this approach, but I don't think Ira would be. So Ira once again, happy birthday, and to the students and community of the University of Michigan, let me close by saying go blue. Well, thank you so much, Secretary Pritzker, for a window into your evolving vision of commercial diplomacy and some of the really exciting work that is underway in the Department of Commerce. I know that a number of you have written questions and in a moment, we will ask some of the questions from the audience, but perhaps I could start our conversation by asking a question or two of my own. And maybe I would start by following up on one of the things that you alluded to at the end of your remarks. And that is that we're in a very difficult, complicated time at the moment. We are in the middle of an election season. There are so many important, complex, and often controversial issues that are still on the table. I wonder if you would highlight for us what you would see as your key priorities for 2016 in your role as the Secretary of Commerce. Well, this year is obviously, it's a year we have an election, but we at the Department are very focused on a few things. First of all, getting the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which is our trade agreement with 11 other countries in the Asia-Pacific region, getting that pass through Congress, and we're working very hard on that, and you'll see a lot more activity as we rev up as Congress is sort of back in session now. The second area that we're focused on is data. As I alluded to or mentioned, we produce an enormous amount of data, some of which is easily usable by the private sector and much of which is not as available as it ought to be. And so we have a huge effort going on within the Department of Commerce to make more and more of our data available. And today, if you think about it, I went down and did this fintech event. And if you think about the financial services industry, whether it's the insurance companies that use our weather data to make risk-based decisioning, or it's financial services companies that use our housing data from census, or our wage data to make decisions about either credit cards or lending, or whether it's just the average business leader who looks at our GDP data to help inform their decision-making. We just have a lot of data that we produce and as the world has become sort of where the value of big data is being appreciated and the ability to use it is much greater given our computing capacity, we need to be in the business of making that much more available as a public good. The third area that we're focused on is the digital economy. There are so many issues that are arising in the digital economy. And I would say the digital economy is the economy if you think about it. We all, in one form or fashion, our businesses rest on a digital base or a digital foundation in one form or fashion, regardless of whether you're in manufacturing, you're in financial services, or you're in even an artistic business. So we're very focused on policy around keeping a free and open internet globally and that is not something that to be taken for granted. There are enormous forces around the world trying to limit that. The second is we're trying to deal with the intersection of privacy and security. So for example, we just have finished negotiating the new EU-US privacy shield, which is the update to what used to be the US-EU safe harbor, where about $260 billion of trade every year depends upon having that mechanism in place. We're focused on access, but still 25% of households in America do not have access to high speed broadband and access becomes critical not only for those families to have access to information and education and the ability to explore the world from your laptop or desktop, but also for companies that wanna be selling their products. And then finally, we work with new technologies to help them and to better understand what's necessary at the intersection of innovation of new technologies, whether it's autonomous vehicles, whether it's fintech, regardless of the area. So those are the areas where we're focused. And finally, we've made for the Department of Commerce a skilled workforce of priority and really institutionalizing that as something that we're focused on. So lots to do this year. That's a quite important agenda. Absolutely. Excuse me for one sec. Thank you. I have to say as the Dean of the School of Public Policy, your focus on data and helping members of the community, business, and others, and I hear some of our alums and our students enjoy the comment. I mean, it's so important. And so we very much appreciate that. So now let me go to questions from the audience. The first one is after speaking about using U.S. commerce to support friendly countries, how do you see this strategy being used in the Middle East, specifically Egypt and Saudi Arabia? Well, if you think about one of the biggest problems that most economies face is creating jobs. And so take Egypt or Saudi Arabia. They have both countries have significant youth populations that are not employed or are underemployed. And part of what we can do is work with those countries to help bring new businesses, innovation, entrepreneurship to those countries. In fact, I did a round table in Saudi Arabia of entrepreneurs, half of which were women.  It was really, it was pretty amazing what they're doing in their country, even though there are obviously limitations on what women can do. So it's a huge opportunity for us to work with those countries. Obviously you need to have security first in order to be able to have greater engagement. Well, actually this next question is a nice follow up to that. How is the Department of Commerce promoting and encouraging equal pay for women and minorities in the private sector? Should government action on this policy issue be more forceful? Or does the private sector need support and more time? Probably all of the above. I think that the government needs to continue to put pressure on the private sector to have greater diversity in our workforce and in our leadership. And if you look at the demographics of our country and who's the deciders, I think that the number, 72% of purchasing decisions in the United States are made by women and around the world of the $18 trillion that's spent a year, $12 trillion of those decisions are made by women. Why wouldn't you want women in your leadership knowing that? So, and the same is true for diversity among your leadership team. The United States demographics are changing and why wouldn't you want your leadership team to have much greater diversity so that you have greater insights into all markets? And, but the job is bigger than just the Department of Commerce. This really goes, frankly, I would throw it back at you and say this takes leadership also in the academic institutions to make sure that we're training our entire population. I mean, just to think of what would happen if we actually as a country had trained all our talent but we don't do that. And I don't mean everyone needs, forgive me, a college degree. There's enormous opportunity in technical training and frankly in some respects we need to make sure that we invest more in technical training in this country so that a young person has the capacity to go maybe from high school into a career as opposed to needing a college degree. Now maybe it means you go high school into community college training into a career but there's enormous opportunity for young people there and it's a lot less expensive and you can build into the middle class that way. So there's just a lot that we need to be doing in terms of training. But for sure, the government needs to lead and one of the things I've found in this job is there's a lot more diversity. There are a lot more women in leadership in government than there are in the private sector and it's been quite a pleasure to actually work in that environment. And so again, another area where there are many roles for partnerships across the different sectors. Here in New York, one of the great centers of commerce in the world, great prosperity has also come with great inequality. Access to ideas, resources and opportunities for upward mobility is increasingly out of reach for a growing percentage of the population. How do you see the Department of Commerce playing a role in addressing these challenges and how can the department create the conditions to allow more people to succeed? And again, I think that you have already started to address this one in your previous remarks. Yeah, I think that, you know, let me tell you a little bit just about, we promote this and this is not a direct answer to the question, but I'll give you just an example of one of the things we're doing. Manufacturing, there is a growing need for people to go into manufacturing in the United States. Manufacturing, I mean, it's going through a bit of a dip now but not pretty modest relative to what it went through in 2009, but we've grown about 900,000 manufacturing jobs in the United States over the last five years. And we have a scarcity of a skilled workforce for those jobs. Those are technical jobs. It's not your father's manufacturing. Most of this is digital work. And we need to, so we do, and the problem is the reputation of manufacturing really took a dive over the last 30 years. So families are not encouraging their young people to go into manufacturing, even though there are great middle class careers in that field and in that sector. And so what we did is create this thing called Manufacturing Day. And now we had last October, I think, over 2,500 companies opened their doors to the local community, to young people, school age children, but more importantly to their counselors and to their parents so that you could see what is manufacturing look like. And the point is that there's got to be more paths to the middle class and that comes with training and it means we also have to change our conception that every high school has to be only training you to go to college. There are great, there are other paths that can lead you ultimately to a BA or ultimate, if that's what you need to do your career. But when you meet the young people who have gone through technical schools and then gone through to get certificates either at their local community college or through other training organizations, ending up in manufacturing and then progressing themselves through their careers, they're finding themselves in their early 30s, they own a home, they own a car, they don't have any debt, school debt and their careers are blossoming. We need to be doing more of that. This question has more of a global focus and I actually believe it's true that you are the Commerce Secretary who has visited the most countries internationally. Behind Bill Daley. What challenges have you faced at the Commerce Department as the global middle class grows exponentially and you mentioned that in your remarks, how does that translate into challenges after the Commerce Department? So one of the biggest challenges that countries face is they're trying to encourage innovation, they're trying to encourage growth of industry within their own countries. So what they do then is their reaction is okay, I'm either gonna put up walls so that nobody else can come into our country or through creating market barriers or what they're gonna do is they're gonna require data localization or localization, that significant portion of a product be made within their country. That can work in some instances but from the most part it doesn't work globally as a way to grow and so we spend a lot of time working with countries to explain to them that a supply chain is not something you can just instantly put up within a country and also that all technologies cannot be realized in all countries that needs a certain kind of workforce. So we spend a lot of time advocating for policies that make markets more open and more accessible and the Trans-Pacific Partnership is really evidence of that. I mean if you take a country like Vietnam, Vietnam and Malaysia, Malaysia not only has signed the Trans-Pacific Partnership, they have ratified it. They ratified it before they signed it, that's pretty amazing. Wish our Congress would do that. Anyway, but these are countries that recognize that in order to be part of the 21st century trading ecosystem they're going to have to improve their labor standards, their environmental standards. They need to make their markets more open for digital products. They need to create digital backbone that makes their countries attractive for investors to invest in their countries and so that's the kind of places where we're working. That's why this agreement is absolutely critical to get passed. Another reason for it is if we don't set the standards for trade in the Asia-Pacific region, China will and then we're going to have a race to the bottom in terms of the conditions for trade. If you think about Trans-Pacific Partnership, it will lower 18,000 tariffs, it will eliminate actually 18,000 tariffs on for American goods and services sold to be sold around the Asia-Pacific region through the TPP, just the 11 TPP countries. And it will also make goods more affordable here in the United States because it lowers tariffs here in the United States. So it's a big benefit and those are the kinds of places where we're trying to make a difference and create more access, both through agreements as well as working one-on-one with countries. Thank you. Unfortunately, this will be our last question and I think it will be of great interest to at least 15 members of our audience and perhaps others who are watching as well. The question is, so you mentioned summer internship opportunities and the real question though is what recommendations do you have for students, students of public policy or others who are excited about the kinds of opportunities that you're talking about? We have incredible internship opportunities at the Department of Commerce so I would encourage you, you can go online, you could talk to my staff who's here, I don't know where's Marni's here, Lauren's here, right here, just go talk to them, get their cards and send them your resume and apply for an internship. And we need talent and what I would say is and the thing about government is as a young, my observation is a young person, you get to do, you get more responsibility as a young person in government than you do in a lot of other organizations so it's a great experience and I highly encourage you to do that. I would also encourage if you're thinking of a career in government, also get some private sector experience and bring that to the table in your career path. And one of the amazing things about careers today is careers are no longer you go to work for one company and stay there for your entire life. And so I would both, if you're thinking of, if you're in the school of public policy and you're thinking you want a long-term career in government, I'd make sure I had some private sector exposure so that you have credibility so that your judgment about policy is better informed. Wonderful, well thank you so much. Thank you Secretary Pritzker, that was fabulous. We also really appreciated the time that you spent earlier with our students. Please join me in a final round of applause for Secretary Pritzker. I'd also like to thank the generous donors to the J. Ira Harris Lecture Fund. Thank you so much, many of you are here and we very much appreciate that as well. And last but absolutely not least, a huge maze and blue thank you to Ira Harris. Ira, thank you for all that you do for us. Thank you all for joining us as well. I'd like to invite you to join us just through those doors in the kitchen and gallery for a reception. So again, thank you and please join us through those doors.


Hi guys this is Jason Zach from Nathaniel School of Music. In this lesson we are going to learn five Christmas songs and all of them in the blues or in the rock and roll style depending on how you play it. So each of these songs are pretty much blues songs in the sense that they come from that genre but they may be a bit more bordering towards jazz or pop or some other primary genres but we are going to convert all of them into blues no matter what and I've chosen some songs which hopefully won't annoy you. I'm not going to convert Silent Night or Okamali Faithful into blues or rock and roll. No we'll do songs which perhaps at least have the word rock in them for example rocking around the Christmas tree which might be a bit more doable. Okay so I'm going to give you two patterns and let's learn those patterns first. We're going to do this all on the key of G major G A B C D E F sharp G and for most of blues and rock and roll in general we just need to deal with three primary chords that would be the tonic namely G major then the dominant chord namely C major in this case and the dominant chord namely D major okay if you calculate the tonic would be the one G the predominant or the subdominant would be four which is C the dominant chord will be five which is D okay G C D G C D fair enough. So you're going to play these chords but not the traditional way we play them like rocking around or root off the red nose or we're not going to do those sort of patterns we're going to do some very idiomatic blues rhythms okay and I'm going to teach you two in this lesson but to learn a lot more on the blues there is a blues piano playlist we've attached in the description do check that out that'll help you learn blues from a very ground level taking you all the way to some very interesting rhythms and very iconic rhythms which you'll never forget you'll you know that it's there you know that it's part of the blues culture and blues is a very inspiring genre I think without it we would not really have any contemporary genre today so it's good to learn blues if you haven't already so stick around and I hope that you can perform at least one or perhaps even all five of the songs that I'm going to teach you in this lesson so before we get started it'll be awesome if you could consider getting yourselves a copy of my notation it's available on our patreon page and you can also consider hitting that subscribe button and hit the bell icon for regular notifications let's get cracking first of all the two blues patterns so if you take the g major chord we don't play it as a block gbd instead we play the one five that's gd and then the one six that's one six that's g e so gd g e and there are two patterns around this one is quarter notes or crotchets one two three four usually aligned with your head movement or the pulse of the song as you move with the music the pulse follows so one five one six and keep it nice and choppy so we are going to play some very jumpy songs so just to get acquainted with the pattern try to sing a few of the songs that we have presented for you in this lesson so you can do maybe root of the red nose reindeer or rocking around the christmas tree or jingle bells jingle bells you know i'll have a blue christmas and so on and so forth right we have or even go tell it on the mountain oh go tell it on the mountain so maybe the first line of each of these songs you could sing and keep this pattern pumping so this is pattern number one and what's going on g major chord is still in the chord chart of our song we are not playing it as like that we are not playing it as a full chord but instead of that we are playing this very iconic blues phrase which is great for the bass register one five one six one five creates a lot of movement and a lot of harmonic color okay now if you ever have to go to c which you'll have to do as well because it's all blues g c and d are going to be the primary chords move your left hand either down to c but generally i would prefer to go up to c because it's a bit higher in this case and sounds a bit less muddier so that would be c g c a that's your one five one six of c major right then you come back to maybe g one five one six when you do one five one six of the dominant chord which is d d a d b if i just 12 bar this if i do this over the traditional 12 bar blues progression let's see how that works the one chord the one the one the one and then the four chord which is the c and back to one and one this is the structure arguably the most influential popular chord progression of all time the 12 bar blues so you can modify this slightly by doubling you can perhaps play every hit twice you can establish those eighth notes now so to do this one and two and a good technique for your wrist and your your arm in general would be try to move your arm forward and backward as you're playing and also try to bounce your wrist this way you're kind of distributing the energy to the entire arm your arm your hand won't feel the strain only in the wrist or only in the fingers or only in the forearm and if it starts hurting in the fingers and the forearm the pain becomes quite excruciating you'll have to stop playing for at least half an hour you know you don't want that so a good way is just push your push the piano as you play push in and out so and bounce your wrist especially when you're doubling and you automatically get a lot more dynamics you're getting natural human dynamics which can't really write down on paper so there's a little bit of staccato and it's almost like you're jumping on a trampoline you know so that's the feeling you need when you're playing this pattern so go tell it on the mountain rocking around the criss so you can either choose to do the the usual bouncy quarter note pulse or double that this is used for almost all the popular blues songs so that is pattern number one in the left hand then it's just going to be about the melody which is notated for you so do see the melody you can watch me playing it and we'll break down all these five songs now the next blues pattern is is inspired from the bass guitar or the the best bass line you can think of to start off at least with the blues would be one three five six five one three five six five yes we have modifications all that is available on our blues playlist so do check that out after this lesson boom boom boom boom boom so i like i would like you to sing it actually so and then that's the second pattern in intervallically one three major third perfect fifth major sixth pump okay so now that we have our two patterns in place now that we have all our available chords which is pretty much the one four five let's start with the music let's let's bring in the first song rocking around the christmas tree so i'll show you the melody in the right hand you can play along keep your keyboards along as you play around and i'll just support it with maybe a g or the chord root so let's do that again and i'm also doing the chord roots in the bass as a pulse g g d so two g's and two d's rocking around the christmas tree you can do christmas tree if you want i've heard some versions like that christmas tree at the christmas party hop rocking around the christmas tree at the christmas party hop now next part let's do the third line now okay so that would be mistletoe hung where you can see every couple tries to stop a lot of this chromatic there's a lot of fun playing these chromatics so whole story again rocking around the christmas tree and it kind of repeats rocking around the christmas tree let the christmas spirit ring next the ending is do some caroling do some caroling so and now what pattern shall we play i'm going to nominate one of the two so in each of these songs so we'll do the i think this works the usual pulse one five one six so maybe start with rocking around just see if you get just to get yourself acquainted because the figures will be the same that's a d so around again and doing a few slides if you want so for c to d it's a quick chain so i'm doing c gca very quick there one more time shall we okay there is another part to this song but in this video i'm trying to sneak in five songs so let's learn the a sections and over to you to learn the b sections and to help you with the second part of the song as well do consider downloading my chord charts on patreon where we'll have the entire chords of all the songs i've covered not just for this christmas tutorial but pretty much all the lessons we've done on our youtube channel so that was about rocking around the christmas tree let's just do that once more as slow as possible c d second line second cycle you can learn the b section later we'll cover that in another video perhaps so that's about rocking around the christmas tree let's learn one more now rudolf the red nose reindeer let me get you the melody first with the chords g g g d still d g so good way to remember this structure would be three g's and then a d and then three d's and then a g it's pretty easy to remember so g of the red nose reindeer g had a very shiny nose d and if you ever saw it d you would even say it closed g and then all of the other reindeer to laugh and call him names they never let poor rudolf join in any reindeer games now let's bring in the tune which i sang and the left hand what shall we do let's bring in our bass pattern for this song and i think rudolf is pretty much swing in any case so we're not changing much we're not changing the vibe i think so you may want to break it down just keep doing that one more time maybe go to the lower d one more time then of course okay you can see the charts for the second part so rudolf the red nose reindeer seems to work i mean if you like that pattern it would also work fine but we've just notated this for you okay that's rudolf the red nose reindeer for you let's do one more let's do the most popular christmas song probably of all time even people who don't celebrate christmas will probably know this song jingle bells so you go melody i think is really easy jingle bells jingle all the way that all the way is a bit tricky jingle bells jingle bells jingle all the way all the way that's a dotted crotchet for you all the way hey and a form two three four oh what fun it is to write in a one horse soap and sleigh hey jingle bells again jingle jingle oh what fun it is to write in a one horse soap and sleigh sleigh okay the base pattern for this could be maybe a double double speed blues pulse so we'll have to swing it to enable it to work in this blue scenario moving to c have added a chord there because that's the chord in the song a major a domin you'll have to get that a because it's it's there in the song it's a secondary dominant which goes to d again jingle bells jingle bells jingle and then one horse soap and sleigh let's do that slowly a second half so we have a couple more christmas songs in this rock or rock and roll blues style let's do blue christmas so christmas without you same same story thinking about you pretty 12 bar blues like if you think about it tan tan tan g g major d seven g major he's still g major c christmas an experiment with the other patterns as well but i think this pattern will work well for blue christmas let's cap off the lesson with a popular carol go tell it on the mountain so again let's get the melody in the right hand everywhere go tell it on the mountain that jesus christ is born okay let's freeze on that for now so which pattern works i guess both patterns maybe we should do for the b can do the jumpy rhythm back to a lot of these songs are played or to be played in a swing i think naturally the comp the composition itself is swung but you can even straighten it if you want a rock and roll vibe for example becomes very rock and roll or you can swing it and play it fast that'll be a bit more boogie woogie if you think about it so we've learned five songs in this lesson and have fun maybe adding this blues or rock and roll feel with the two patterns i've taught you and the baseline to a bunch of songs don't destroy them too much or be a bit careful i guess because people may not like every single song played in the blues or rock and roll way because it's actually possible you can take every single song ever created on earth and it can sound like a blues song because blues is a very very influential genre in music it started it all contemporary music has to thank blues it all started with this genre so hope you found the lesson useful do check out our playlist for other christmas tutorials and many more to help improve your piano skills from whichever level you're currently at you can also consider doing a course at the school by going to nathanielschool.com and you can consider supporting us on our patreon page for just five dollars a month where you'll receive my handwritten notes staff notation midi files backing tracks and a lot more thanks a ton for watching the video cheers


Mr. Lewis, it's good to see you again, my friend. What can we do to make sure that low-income communities and underserved communities actually get the broadband services that they need? Thank you, Congressman, and it's good to see you as well. Number one, we need to have a long-term benefit for low-income consumers. Number two, we need to do everything we can to promote competition in the marketplace. And number three, we need to remember that the cost to consumers is not just the cost of the service. So consumers are also paying tremendous amounts of money in fees on their broadband lines right now, hidden fees, below-the-line fees. They're paying for rentals of modems and other devices. And then there's the cost of the actual device that they use, the computer or the laptop, that when you have a family of four these days, if everyone's online at the same time, requires multiple devices. Thank you for that. When it comes to those hidden fees and whatnot, do you have a suggestion on how we should deal with those? I think it starts with transparency. I think Ms. Eschew and others have worked for years to mandate a level of transparency around below-the-line fees and we support that. But we need to have truth in billing and accuracy in the fees that are charged and why they're being charged so that people get the actual prices, and not just an advertised price with fees added onto it later on. Thank you, sir.


Welcome, everyone, to this session. This is called Disrupting the Downtime Continuum. We'll go ahead and give ourselves a quick introduction here, so you know who we are. Yeah, so I'm Brooks Townsend, Lead Software Engineer at Cosmonic, and the open source project, Wasm Cloud. I'm a maintainer. I'm a serial open source contributor to all things, and I like to say my little trifecta of weird technologies is Elixir, Rust, and WebAssembly. And I'm Taylor Thomas. I'm the Director of Customer Engineering at Cosmonic. I'm a restation. So I've done a lot of rust for a long time now. And I'm also the co-creator of Cresslet and Bindle. If you've looked into the WebAssembly space at all, you've probably seen one of these two projects. I'm an open source maintainer in general. I'm an emeritus maintainer of Helm. I was one of the core maintainers there for a long time. And since we're at KubeCon, most of you at least probably know what Helm is. So there is some, at least, here's our background. We know a little bit about what we're talking about as we do this today. So let's go over what's the agenda going to look like? What are we going to talk about here? So first off, we're going to talk about what is WebAssembly? And I wanted to know, this is my favorite thing about being back in person. By raise of hand, how many people know what WebAssembly is? Okay, good. So that's a good chunk. That was more than I was expecting, which is great. So we're going to cover a little bit about what WebAssembly is. And then also explain what's this whole Wasm Cloud and Cosmonic? Like why are we wearing these Cosmonic shirts? Then we're going to do a bunch of demos. This is a very demo heavy session. And it's going to be live as long as we haven't angered the demo gods. We've done the proper sacrifices, cut our hand with a stick of RAM, dripped it on the altar of the computers. All that stuff. So it should all work. And then we'll also answer the question, what can we do right now and how do you get involved? So let's go straight into it. Well, what's WebAssembly? We like to say it's neither Web nor Assembly. Which is kind of funny given its name. Now it was primarily used first on the web. And if you look at it, these are the characteristics that make it very good for the web. It is an open W3C standard. It's very safe and secure. It's a completely default, like nothing's allowed. It's in a sandbox because you're in a browser, right? And the browser is the Wild West. So everything needs to be sandboxed. It has capability driven permissions. Capability driven permissions is like what you have on your phone when you go like, oh, would you allow this app to access your microphone and your notifications and all those things? It's very efficient and fast, which is important because the small sizes you are able to download it quickly over an internet connection and use it. It's also polyglot. So you're able to use multiple languages to compile to WebAssembly. It's just a compilation target. And it's very portable. It runs in all major browsers. Imagine if someone said, oh, sorry, this only runs on Linux. That wouldn't go over very well in a browser world. Now those things right there are actually the exact same kind of things we wanna see in the cloud. We like having open standards. Most of the world is transitioned to using open standards for these things. We want something that is completely secure and locked down. That's why we started using things in containers. It's very efficient and fast. That's also important. We wanna be able to pack these things tighter and have good utilization. Any language that can compile to WebAssembly, same thing, that's a benefit. And once again, portable. It truly runs everywhere, not just on Linux. So let's cover a little bit about the gaps here. There are some gaps to just be aware of. One of the things that language support for WebAssembly outside of the browser is still limited. It's quickly growing, but it's still limited. And so you have to know that that is one of the things that's happening right now in the industry. Networking is generally rudimentary. You're non-existent. They're just starting to add socket support. It's really great that it's there, but networking support is very limited. So you have to find ways around that. And you still have to compile a lot of your dependencies into a final binary, the final WebAssembly module. And ultimately everything is still numbers in, numbers out. You get a vector of bytes and you have to return a vector of bytes. There's no types. There's work being done on that, but right now you're pretty much just raw bytes when you work with it. So that's where we are with WebAssembly. Now let's talk about where we've been and where we're going with this. And now I promise, all this is important to understand why what we're gonna show you is important. So first off we started with what we jokingly called the PC time, right? Like everyone had their own towers or you had blades or one, two, three units that you had in a rack. And you owned that entire thing. You owned the operating system you installed on it, the libraries for that operating system, and then the libraries for your applications and an application that you'd run on top. Then we moved on to clouds. We're like, hey, can we like VM this? So we can put in a VM, everything's running. And we abstracted away the hardware, but we still were installing full stacks of libraries and applications on top. Then we came into containers and Kubernetes.  So we're talking like all these non-functional requirements that happen. The example I'm gonna point out here because it's the most recent and fresh is the log4j vulnerability that happened. We have all written vulnerabilities. I have written security vulnerabilities. We've all written bugs that turn into bad, like SEV1 incidents and other things that happen. So it's not a criticism of that, but like those happen in software. And when that happened, everyone we've talked to, there are people who had to rebuild and redeploy tens of thousands of containers because you're bringing along 95% of your code being just non-functional requirements, things you don't care about. And anytime an upgrade happens, that has to happen. So that's what happened with containers. Everything's still coupled. And even WebAssembly, to an extent, is still you have to couple in a library when you run your final artifact, even with some of the new proposals that are coming out around the components model. So all of those things, it's still better because now it's completely separate. It can run on different hosts, but you still have this non-functional requirements that are very important and still bound to that thing that you compile. The last one over here is WasmCloud. Where we've taken it, we've turned it into a platform and we've abstracted away the libraries that you need and are called capabilities. You now code against a contract and we'll talk a little bit more about that as we go into what WasmCloud is. Right, so you've started by hearing about WebAssembly about some of the huge advantages that it gives and then some of the limitations of where the ecosystem is now. And this is where at the WebAssembly host runtime layer of WasmCloud, we're taking advantage of all the portability, the security, how it can run anywhere and how adding additional language support is something that we can kind of build into the framework over time. We're not just locked into one single thing. But where the disadvantages is, where we're not fully there yet is where the WasmCloud application runtime comes in. This is where you get your removed boilerplate code, the access to capabilities outside of the WebAssembly sandbox and the WasmCloud runtime facilitates the passing of bytes back and forth. So when you're writing your app with WasmCloud, you get to write it against the contract. You say, hey, I wanna use the key value capability and from there you can write your full business application. And these capabilities, we keep talking about them. We keep talking about non-functional requirements. This is the part that you need to make your app run but that you don't write. Either you copy and paste it from a previous project so you're setting up the HTTP server in the right way or you're bringing in open source libraries which is great but you're not reading all of the code from your open source libraries. You're not making sure that everything is fine and this makes up up to 95% of the application code that you end up deploying. With this capabilities model, you choose it at runtime, you can hot upgrade to a new version, you can patch vulnerabilities and you write your app in terms of a common contract. You don't deal with it when you design your application. Now the actors, what we call Wasm Cloud Actors, these are the actual WebAssembly modules. This is what you write your business logic in, what we like to say, write the right code. You're writing just the code that you want in order to make your business logic work. You're not copying and pasting a bunch of code or re-implementing open source libraries, especially not compiling it into your application logic. These are stateless reactive modules and because they're WebAssembly, you get all the advantages as a developer of being able to deploy anywhere after you've built a WebAssembly binary. And the last step, what really makes Wasm Cloud work is a distributed application runtime, is the lattice network. This is running with NATs under the hood. They have a project booth over at the project pavilion, go see them, they're great. But what this does is it represents the resources in a Wasm Cloud application at a flattened layer. Everything, no matter where it's running in the cloud, on the edge, on my laptop here in the conference, it's all treated the exact same. And that really makes it a lot simpler once it comes to actually moving your app from Dev to Prod or deploying it in a different cloud than you currently support. Now this brings us to the question, well, how does Cosmonic fit into this? So the whole idea of what we're doing with Cosmonic is we're trying to make it a painless experience to develop these server-side WebAssembly applications and eventually, this is where I get to the point, if I'm being 100% blunt here, someone has to manage it eventually, right? Like, no matter what you're running, Kubernetes, Wasm Cloud, someone has to run it, we run it. And part of that is making it easy for cross-platform cloud device development. And honestly, this last point's the most important. We're not here to pitch the product, we're here to point out that this is all actually running on Wasm Cloud. So everything we've built for the product is actually running in WebAssembly as these actors on the system to make everything work. And you'll see parts of it today, we'll use it because it has a beautiful way of representing the application, but we're just showing it to be able to see the pretty side of it. But we're actually building a real application with this. This isn't just some experimental thing, you can build a real thing with it. So we're gonna start going into that now with our first demo. All right, enough with the slides for now, we can actually get started with the fun stuff. Let me get out of this. Okay, so I wanna paint the stage for you, right? You come into work on a Monday and your boss or your PM comes to you and they say we have this really important business application to code up. We need a web app that can display a random comic from XKCD. Do you think you can get that done by the end of the week? And you say, yeah, I think I can do that. This is everyone's Monday, right? This is what you guys are doing. So when we sit down, we start writing this application when we're thinking about how we're gonna design it, right? We need a web app. So it needs to be a web server respond with an HTTP response and then show something in the browser, right? We may need to generate a random number to get a random comic. And then we need to fetch our comic, whether we use like a library or whether we just curl it or whatever. So I'm gonna start with the finished product because that's the most fun part.  It's completely random, so you can get really anything. And this is it, right? You did it. Thankfully, you wrote this with Wasm Cloud, so they asked if you could finish it by the end of the week and you finished in the first 15 minutes on a Monday so you had a pretty chill week. So this is the finished app. This is our business logic. Kind of introduce the stage. Let's look at what the code looks like. So we can actually zoom in a little bit more here. This is gonna be our XKCD actor. This is an actor and a capability pair. The actor is where you're writing, again, your business logic. And even if you haven't seen Rust before, you'll be able to grok this pretty well. We found out that one of the newer XKCD comics was the like number 2600, so that's the max we're gonna generate. And in order to make this app, it's very simple. We have a trait called HTTP server and the contract that comes with this trait is a single function, handle request. Receives an HTTP request, returns an HTTP response. Very common level abstraction of an HTTP server. Now the business logic, how we actually implement this. First thing, generate a random number. We use the number generator capability since WebAssembly actually can't use random like crypto stuff because it's on the system. So we generate a random number. And then we actually found this great open source capability provider that implements a function that you can get a comic by a number. So great, we'll call out get comic function and then return it as an HTTP response. That's it. Three lines of code, minus little nice formatting in order to do that business app. You get right down to writing the logic right there. Now that's all fine and good. It works great. You're running this in production. Your management team is really happy. Now let's take a look at the provider, the open source library or the capability provider that actually implements that get comic function. You'll see a lot of similar things here. Get comic handler. We take in a number. We request that URL. We make sure that it was successful. And then return that as a little byte vector of an HTML page. That's how we're actually implementing this on the provider side. So someday, you get a little notification that your provider or the open source library has updated. You're like, great, I'll pull in the new version. It's going to be even more secure. And you go to deploy the next version of this provider. So this is actually the WasmCloud dashboard. We haven't hit it yet. So I'll just explain it really quick. We have up in the top left, our XKCD actor is running on the right. We have our HTTP server provider. That's what's actually getting the HTTP requests and forwarding it off to the actor. And then in just a moment, we'll have our newly deployed, updated version of our XKCD provider. Now, all of the things that make your business logic and these requirements talk is configured at runtime. So even though I just killed the provider and I brought a new one back, we can go back to the XKCD comic and see a SEB1. We can see our new updated version, while it still works, has a very critical vulnerability in it. So this is pretty unfortunate. I didn't mean for this to happen during the talk. So we can actually look. You can go back as the deployer of this. You can go back and see that this SEB1 is recognized everywhere. The maintainers caught on to it or released a patch version. That's great. But instead of having to go and recompile our entire app, the part where we wrote the business logic, recompile, run it through our testing platform, make sure that nothing broke. Maybe this was a minor version bump, because they already included something else.  This one's nice and wholesome. I'm not going to tempt fate anymore, because I've looked at a lot of XKCD comics. There's some that you don't want to show up. But that covers the first part of our talk. We want to talk about downtime-free migration, patching, and what was the last one? Failover, fan failover. So that was the first part of our demos. So hopefully, that speaks to how easy it is when you can separate the non-functional requirements into a separate unit that you can deploy. You don't have to spend a ton of time redeploying your app. And for a log4j type of vulnerability, that's the one place that it updates in an enterprise. It's not every single app that depends on that common library needs to update. So the next demo that we want to go into, you just want to show a little bit of a diagram to show what's going on. So one of the common things that you will see as a microservice example, especially if you work at Big Corporation, is this classic Spring Boot Pet Clinic example. You have an API that goes out, an API gateway that forwards requests to specific services that respond to that. There's a visit service, a vet service, a customer service. And all of these things are in there. But you'll also notice that this diagram, it's very enterprise-y looking. I did not make it to look enterprise-y looking. This is literally from the Spring Boot examples. And look at all the stuff that goes on around it. You have to have the Spring Cloud config server, the service discovery elements, the login things, all these different requirements. And then the HTTP stuff and to talk between the different services, all of that extra baggage. And you have to have that in your actual code. So what this actually looks like if we do it in Wasm Cloud, is something a lot cleaner. So you'll see that you have the user that's on top that's connecting to an HTTP server. It can literally be any type of HTTP server because it's just a contract. And that has the clinic API. It returns UI assets through there. And it also forwards requests on, which then talk to a SQL database contract. It doesn't even know what SQL database it's talking to. In this case, we're talking to Postgres. And all of these things are just done and configured at runtime. And it's a lot more simple. There's no other logging servers that are set up. There's no service discovery. You're just able to connect between these different things. And so we're going to actually show you what this looks like and what you can do with it. Yep. So demo time around 2. So we walked through the architecture of the pet clinic. Let's take a look at the pet clinic. So we've got this. I've got this running on my local little dummy user. I'm running in dev. So I just have some test data in here. We could add in a pet if we wanted to. But really, we can look at what kind of vets we have, what kind of pet types they could specialize in. Really, from the business logic perspective, a simple application. Something that you could probably drum up in about a day or two when you think about just the relationship between owners and vets and all of that. Now to show you what this looks like in terms of Wasm Cloud components, I'm going to show you that through the Cosmonic dashboard. And like Taylor mentioned earlier, everything that you're going to see today through Cosmonic, you can do with open source Wasm Cloud. And we encourage you to try it out. Just a little bit easier to visualize here. So there's two main views we're going to take a look at in Cosmonic. The first one is the infrastructure view. This is where you can see all of your different infrastructure, your virtual hosts, no matter where they are on a flattened canvas. So taking a look here, we actually have our first host is the Cosmonic application, running all the actors and capability providers that power what we're going to do in the demo today. We have a Wasm Cloud host running in Azure. That's an x86 processor. It's on Linux, and it's in South Central US. I think that's Texas. We have our Pecmonic application. This one is running all on my local machine. It's got the API, visits, vets, and customers, our HTTP server, all of that. And what we want to do, especially with these other hosts, this Azure host, and on the right, this AWS host that's an ARM processor running in California, we want to take this application that's just running on our local, and let's deploy it to prod. Let's push it up to the cloud, take these WebAssembly modules there. Now the second view, which is where we're going to be doing some more interaction, is the logic view. This is where you can see, again, flatten topology view of all of your application components. So you can see our API is right up here. And then if we come down past some of the Cosmonic components, we can also see visits, vets, and customers, all linked together to our Postgres capability provider, and then HTTP server for the API. So again, everything running on my local, not super fun for a distributed application framework. So we'll just go ahead, terminate all of the actors from the lattice here from the WasmCloud network. And we'll take them, instead of running my laptop, let's put them in the cloud. So our clinic API, the API gateway, we can find a WasmCloud host that's running in AWS to host that actor. And any host can respond to this, but all that we really care about from this perspective is that it runs in AWS. That's our requirement. Let's run it in the cloud. Also, it did just start that fast. That wasn't magic. Yep, it is actually running in AWS. And the second thing, our customers actor, we can find a host there. Go ahead and start up our customers actor in Azure. Let's see what's next. Our vets actor, say, instead of cloud specifically, we'll have a region requirement. So we can run this in the US West 1 region, which we know is our California host that's running in AWS. And then also, last but not least, we can run our visit service in the region South Central US. So great. We've taken all of our application components, the same WebAssembly modules, and we're running them from an M1, an ARM MacBook Pro, put them up in a cloud provider on an x86 Linux, ARM Linux, all the exact same WebAssembly module from an OCI registry. If we check our infrastructure view, we can see visits and customers are on Azure. API and vets are on AWS. And if we hit our little refresh here, look at that. We still get the same data. And that's because all of the configuration that we set up at runtime is automatically reestablished when we push our business logic up to the cloud. So it has no bearing on the actual location. We just immediately redirect the request over to the cloud host. So that's the first part of our second part of migration. So we moved our resources to the cloud. But we're still using my dummy test database. So next, what we may want to do is migrate to using our prod database. And we don't want that to just be a local Docker image or implementation of Postgres. We might want that to be RDS or an Azure Cosmos database. So we can come to the logic view again. We can take a look at this link between customers in Postgres, and then we can throw it away. We can redraw this and then tell the runtime whenever this customer's actor makes a request to a SQL database, we're instead going to access this one. And once we draw that link again, we hit refresh on the WasmCloud pet clinic. And look at that, some real data, some Cosmonic employees. If we click in here to Taylor, we can see his beautiful dog checks, which I've seen a ton of pictures of this weekend. And my dog Archie, all coming from our Azure Cosmos database. So when you're in production, you wouldn't live swap from databases without a perfect strategy. But this is a show that you can move from dev to production in a completely seamless way that's configured at runtime. Our actors, our pet clinic actors, didn't have to change or do anything to make this happen. Yeah, it's kind of, we like to call this the knob. You can turn the knob from monolith to distributed. We didn't have to do anything else except move it around. And we're adding more utilities to the actual open source WasmCloud tooling that will allow you to just automatically do this and automatically redistribute based on certain characteristics. Right. So last part of our talk is, before a little bit more slides, is failover. So we have these actors running in different clouds, but they're kind of spread out across clouds. It's not really a resilient application. There's no replication. There's no different. There's no scaling in different clouds. So let's go ahead and set up a little bit more of a resilient architecture. So we have visits and customers running in Azure right now. Let's go ahead and take some instances of both of those and run it in AWS. So we'll start an instance of visits and an instance of customers in AWS. Great. So we come down. We take a look at our application components. You can see we have two replicas of visits, two replicas of customers. From this view, it doesn't matter where they're actually running, we just know that we have two of them, because it's all going to route there the same. And we can actually come back to our host. We can look at our Azure host, and we can just terminate it entirely. Get rid of it. Those actors are gone. We come back to our pet clinic. We hit refresh. We navigate around. Immediate live failover to the other cloud that we have set up. So using WasmCloud with this interconnected Lattice network, wherever the available compute is, is immediately where your request is going to be routed. And through some NATs and GS things, that also has a preference on location, choosing a closer location. But just to note, this is still hitting our Cosmos database. So if you trace this request that's happening right now, it's going from my laptop to AWS in California, previously to Azure or the other actor in Texas, but now all in California. And then over to New York, wherever the Azure East region is for our database, and then coming back. That's the request that you're watching our pet clinic resources coming back with. All right, so just to kind of nail this demo home or wrap up kind of what we did, this is the application diagram. What we started with when we decided, oh, let's write a pet clinic app. We'll sketch this out. And this is the architecture diagram that we ended up with, like what we were actually running in production. So we took all of our actors, we threw them off onto the AWS and to Azure, accessing a Cosmos database. And I know that as I'm pointing this out and trying to point it all out, like this is what I look like as I'm describing it, but it's just all to say that designing the application, the way that we wanted our business logic to be, didn't have to be concerned with, no matter how crazy the end architecture diagram looks like. So that leads us to this question. Well, how are you gonna use it, right? So let's talk about what can you do right now if you wanna try this out? The first thing is you can write a very basic service. These are generating data processing, image processing, those kind of things. They're standalone services in most cases or part of a pipeline. And you can try rewriting one of those. We've seen quite a bit of success of people trying that out and being able to at least give little examples. If you watched, if any of you were at the WASM video, you may have seen Colin's talk where he showed some of the things that Adobe liked this or just little tiny services that they could do. And then another one is just a small part of a service that you were planning on rewriting anyway. So we have this concept that we like to call the bridge to the future. We consider WASM to be the future, but we also know everybody is running things on Kubernetes and on other platforms right now. But we have open sourced as Cosmonic, something called a Kubernetes supplier that allows you to automatically hook in anything that's running in Kubernetes to be able to connect to services running in WASM cloud, automatically. And it's actually all built using actors and receiving events from that and then publishing things into Kubernetes. It's actually really cool and interesting if you like some of the more advanced Kubernetes stuff. But that's just one small part of a service you can rewrite, try it out, see how it works and still connect it back to everything you have. And the last thing is a full stateful application. This is where you could use all the different providers we have or write your own to connect to the different data sources you need. This is for Greenfield application, obviously. But like I said, we're doing that. All that stuff you saw running with the Cosmonic dashboard, that's all running on top of WebAssembly. So that's just what you can do now. So with that, we have some references of things you can go check out if you wanna get involved and that's it for now and we're welcome to have any questions. Yeah, you can see the link to the... I think there are mics up here and somewhere back there if anyone wants to ask any questions and please do come to the mic so that anyone on the live stream can hear you as well. Or if not, then we explained it perfectly or put you to sleep. Just so you know, the little QR code up there that leads to our community Slack, you scan it, join right in, feel free to ask any questions. Of course, Taylor and I are there and would be happy to engage as you try this out on your own as well. We have one question coming. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, yeah. So how does this fit in with GitHub's flow? You know, with... Like coding something on to GitHub and then pushing it out, so good, yes. Brooks actually is about to release a blog post on that so I'll let him answer this question. Yeah, so what we found with GitHub, I personally am a huge fan of GitHub actions. I think it made CI CD a ton simpler, there's a ton of open examples for that and when you get to, you know, part of our demo, we started actors in different locations from an OCI URL and in generally, some registries don't end up implementing the OCI spec but GitHub CR actually does and so part of the thing that we're really trying to do with GitHub is create a nice seamless flow where with our tooling, you generate a little actor project, you get started, you write your hello world, you push it up to GitHub and then what comes with that is a build pipeline and a release pipeline. So, you know, as you're working, automatically get, you know, tests and making sure you're following best practices. As soon as you push a tag or push to main, that actor is automatically pushed to GitHub container registry, GitHub packages. It actually implements like a more general OCI spec so it doesn't have to be just Docker, which is great and then from there, you can pull it from anywhere, you know, started in Azure, started in GCP, all the things. Did I answer your question? Any other questions? I think we're good, oh wait, there's one right here. Come up to the mic, can we have one? We have a little time. We have time still. So, how do I run this in my IDE? How do I run tests and get the providers and so on? Yeah, good question. So, right now, like we mentioned in the beginning, there's still limited language support in general for some of these WebAssembly things. The main language we have the best support for is Rust. We have other ones coming down the line and the nice thing about WebAssembly, why I mentioned it being polyglot is you can just use the tool chain you already have no matter what the language. So, for example, all the Rust, we still use cargo test, we still use cargo build, all of those things are still the same. When you do it in another language like go, which is one of the ones we're looking at, hopefully doing soon, you'll just do go build. There's nothing different and so you get to use all the same IDE tools. You don't have to worry about custom Docker things or having this Docker image and then having to deploy the Docker image and connect to the Docker image. That's not something you have to do anymore with it. Well, I think last call before I... Okay, well, thank you everyone for coming. We really enjoyed seeing all in person and have a great rest of the conference.