Hello and welcome back to the War, Economy and State podcast. This is the Foreign Policy and International Relations podcast for the Mises Institute. And I am Ryan McMakin, I'm executive editor at the Mises Institute and with me as always is my co-host, Zachary Yoast. And we're here today to talk a bit about military spending. Now Americans and especially US policy makers in Washington like to act as if there's no downside to military spending. You're not giving up anything to do it, there's limitless money. Dick Cheney famously said, deficits don't matter in order to justify endless spending in Iraq and Afghanistan. And is that true? Do deficits not matter at all? Do they have no effect on American policy or on the dollar or on the standard of living for Americans? Now the reality is, as we'll talk about here, is that you give up a lot in order to spend endlessly on military expenditures. It can be very costly in terms of inflation, in terms of devaluing your currency, in terms of granting the government more power. As Murray Rothbard was always clear, the biggest problem in terms of empowering the state has long been war and national security issues. That's long been the justification for pretty much all of it. In terms of going back to the state's birth back in the 17th century or even earlier. It's about war, it's justified by war. And here we are still encountering people who think that war is good for the economy, that there's really no price in terms of massive amounts of spending. So we're just going to talk about some of the issues surrounding that here today. And really it just continues to be an issue because of the large amounts of money the U.S. is spending to Ukraine. And Zach and I were just looking up these numbers, because of course they're constantly changing. And even in January, these numbers were at least $110 billion that the U.S. had already sent to Ukraine with more than half of it in terms of military spending. And of course you can't really believe what they tell you in terms of, oh well, the other half is not military spending, it's humanitarian spending, or it's some sort of like democracy fund, whatever that those sorts of words mean that they use. Given that Ukraine is ranked, what did we decide Zach, what number most corrupt country in the world? Number two in Europe, behind only Russia. So when you do send money to Ukraine, you have no idea where it ends up. It's no better than sending money to one of these African governments where the ruling class controls essentially everything, has all the guns, keeps all the money. And so we're flushing a lot of money down the toilet in Ukraine. And some Americans are starting to pick up on what the cost of that is, though. You will see in social media and elsewhere complaints about how what you've got are, you've got record number of people on food stamps, on disability, you've got bridges literally falling down, and people are being told, well, we got to send another $100 billion to Ukraine. Now I of course don't think any of that should be federal spending, the state should be allowed to keep money so that they can actually afford to build bridges that work and so on. But we shouldn't assume that everything is just so fine in the US that this country that has nothing to do with us therefore requires hundreds of billions of dollars from the US to keep it going while Americans are expected to pay ever larger amounts of money in regular taxes and in inflation and also lately in borrowing costs because constant deficit spending and borrowing also has the long term effect of sending up interest rates as well, which means you can't get as cheap a mortgage as you might have otherwise. So let's look at a bunch of these issues and I think part of the reason, Zach, that we thought about this was because you had come across some thoughts by Ludwig von Mises on military spending and maybe you can give us the short version of that and just some of his early thoughts, Mises being the leading liberal from Europe in his time and having a pretty deep understanding of war spending, what are some of the salient issues that he thinks that we should keep in mind when it comes to war spending? So this essay it's just called on paying for the costs of war and war loans and it was delivered as a talk in the summer of 1918 and it's just a fascinating short little essay for a lot of reasons. One, because it's very clear that Mises is a Austro-Hungarian patriot. He does not think that the, you know, that nations don't exist as some libertarians seem to think today. But what's another fascinating thing is how this is the summer of 1918 and he's saying, you know, we're doing a pretty great job so far. And, you know, then just a few months later, everything collapsed, but it's just sort of shows how World War One victory was an open question, sort of, right up to the end almost. But what's really interesting is his points about basically how are we going to fund and provide, you know, for a war? And I think one of the most important points he brings up that's totally forgotten, it seems, by people today in the age of modern monetary theory and whatnot is, he says, quote, war can only be waged out of currently available goods. One can fight only with the weapons on hand. All military needs must be met out of existing wealth. It is the present generation that is waging war from an economic point of view and it is this generation that must bear all the material costs of the war. And then he goes on to say, future generations, we're just going to be leaving left stuff because we blew it all up. But I think this is quite relevant because even people who are, you know, more economically literate than most people these days seem to not be making this connection when it comes to our aid to Ukraine. It's just sort of like there's a limited amount of material goods and services currently in existence. And if we're sending those to Ukraine, well, they can't be used on things here. And so when we get into our enormous annual budget deficit and things like that, it's highly relevant. People just seem to think there's this, there's not really a cost to what we're providing to Ukraine, leaving aside the potential for World War Three or, you know, an outbreak of nuclear war or something like that. Or, you know, the tens and tens of thousands of people being killed and millions displaced and all that for Americans, you know, if you are, you know, spending resources to build him our missile systems, those resources can't be used on other things. And sort of what was the impetus for me looking into this was, as people, I'm from Pittsburgh, people might recall last year, it was quite ironic. It was literally the day Biden was in town to visit a bridge collapsed in Pittsburgh. And, you know, Pittsburgh's called the city of bridges. We actually don't have the most bridges in the world, but we have a ton of bridges all over the place everywhere. And this bridge just collapsed. So everyone was like, oh, gee. And a few months ago, the county shut down a few bridges, I think, one or two bridges they just were like, well, these might collapse. So let's not drive on them right now. And so to me, it just was sort of, you know, like even setting aside where the source of funding comes from for building the bridges, state, federal, you know, privatized the bridges, whatever, resources are finite and resources are being allocated to war. And so they can't be allocated to other things. Or if they are being allocated, they're being, you know, there's less resources, higher costs, things like that. Yeah. And Eisenhower makes this point as well, right? This is, it's always fun when you find a choice quote from Eisenhower, right? A lot of people note his, his farewell speech and the whole military industrial complex issue. And it's fun. You can get a lot of quotes from people like Truman and Eisenhower complaining about the CIA and the U.S. security state that they had created and then regretted they had created later because the U.S. was changing so rapidly from a more or less free country into a, into a surveillance state that took a few decades to truly materialize. But you can really only date it back to the forties. And actually, we'll look at that in a coming episode when we talk about the release of this, these secrets and the, the prosecution of this Texara guy and how most of the laws under which he will be prosecuted and the laws claiming all the secrecy. They really only date from the National Security Acts of the late 1940s. This idea that, that there was, that there were state secrets in a way comparable to today in the year nine in 1901 or 1875. It just simply is untrue that the surveillance and security states a new thing, it's a post-World War II thing. And it comes with huge amounts of spending. And Eisenhower made this point, was that, and you pointed this out, was for every billion dollars you spend on the military, that's just money you cannot spend on something else. And people just have to admit that. And, and this may have been one of the reasons why Eisenhower was one of the very few presidents where military spending actually went down. Now, I don't go overboard on praising Eisenhower, who certainly didn't, didn't do anything to, to rein in the new deal. But he did have an understanding of the consequences of military spending, unlike most presidents. And he was relatively sane on that issue. And that's just one of the costs, then, of military spending. We can look at a variety of other costs as well. For example, well, of course, this is Salerno notes, right? And he's got a good essay called War and the Money Machine. And there's only three ways to raise funding, right, for a war. You can tax people, you can borrow, or borrow money, get convinced people to lend you money. Or you can essentially tax them through the inflation tax, that is, through simply printing or creating money. And this has led, then, to a need to borrow immense amounts of money, increases in the interest rate, more central bank intervention. And these all have real economic costs for people. They impoverish people. They limit the number of resources available. They destroy the buying power of the dollar. And let's just look at some of the historical way that war has been connected to that. Specifically, I've noted this in a couple of interviews recently and in an article, too, as I've been writing a lot on the origins of paper currency and the decline of the gold standard and how states during emergencies, quote, unquote, what the state determines to be an emergency isn't necessarily an emergency. But in cases of emergency, they even when there was a gold standard, these countries would go off the gold standard, like explicitly. And they would just say so. And this occurred in England, which had already been, well, as Britain at that point, had already been in a real and or de facto gold standard for decades at that point. And just said during the Napoleonic Wars, well, we need to be able to just simply create money in an unrestrained way. So we're not going to honor any any trading in of bank notes for gold. We're off the gold standard and we'll come back to it someday. So that essentially is what financed the war. Now, after the war, they would then go back and try to do enough austerity measures so that they could get the price of pound sterling back within a reasonable level of where it had been before the war. But that, of course, then requires that people pay after the war through austerity measures and through a declining standard of living to get back on the gold standard. So there's a real cost there. And then in World War One, of course, that broke the gold standard completely, where, again, they just announced we're going off of it because there is a quote unquote emergency, a much less of one, by the way, a totally an unconvincing declaration of an emergency. Whereas I could see in the case of the Napoleonic Wars, you could claim there was a real threat to British independence and World War One, not at all. But they decided that was an emergency, too, which, by the way, grew out of a secret treaty that the British government had and didn't tell anybody about. And so then that destroyed the gold standard. After that, Western Europe went under the gold exchange standard, which wasn't a real gold standard. It was just a matter of settling accounts in gold between nation states and huge banks in some cases. And so that was it that destroyed the money. And so in spite of all of these claims that war is good for the economy and all of that, we can see repeatedly that war is actually a means of destroying the currency in terms of its connection to gold and stable value. And that war generally is provided an excuse to manipulate the currency. But even after the end then of the gold standard, you still had a need to manipulate the currency in terms of interest rates. So all of these massive amounts of spending and borrowing that governments must do during wartime, that then causes interest rates to go up if you were to continue selling all of that government debt in the marketplace. And if you look at that issue, you can see what happens then is that central banks intervene and they just start monetizing the debt. So even during the gold standard, you just took it. You took the government off the gold standard and spent freely that way ruining people's purchasing power in that case. And then in later eras, you ruin their purchasing power. By just printing more money and pegging interest rates at a certain way. And here I'll explain how it does. There's a good passage from The Great Deformation by David Stockman. And he's talking about World War Two. He says, during the war, the Federal Reserve became the financing arm of the warfare state, making short shrift of any pretense of Fed independence. Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau simply decreed that interest rates on the federal debt would be pegged. Obviously, the only way to enforce that peg was for the nation's central bank to purchase any and all treasury paper that did not find a private sector bid at or below the pegged yields. Accordingly, the Fed soon became a huge buyer of treasury securities, thereby monetizing federal debt on a scale never before imagined. So this was a money printing scheme where they realized that if you just kept rolling out huge amounts of debt to the public saying, hey, buy our government debt, buy our liberty bonds, all that sort of thing. Well, you're going to have to, people are going to run out of money or a desire to invest in that at some point. So you're going to have to then raise the yield in order to entice people to buy that debt and you can't keep doing that because that makes then the price of your debt go up, up, up and soon becomes unmanageable because then your debt service, it would be as if your home mortgage, the interest on your home mortgage kept adjusting up constantly and you just had to pay more and more on it. So they say, oh, you know how we'll solve that problem? We'll just peg the interest rate and how do you do that? Well, you just get the central bank then to buy all of your debt. So that's the post gold standard scheme that is used to finance wars. And the US has been using that in a full blown fashion as it did during World War Two or in a somewhat limited fashion where you have constant ongoing intervention from the central bank to manipulate interest rates and keep them to a manageably low level. And we've seen that in a new extreme version over the last decade or so. And now here we are facing high inflation rates as well as 32 trillion dollar debts and also debt service that's now reaching eight hundred billion dollars, which, by the way, is about equal to the entire defense budget now. So there's a tradeoff right there and you just have to keep asking yourself, well, are we just going to spend then a trillion dollars a year on debt service in order to keep all these wars going? And I think it's a good question. And I wonder, people, do people understand this at all? Or is the I assume the public is just completely in the dark in it. It doesn't care and has been convinced that it doesn't matter at all. So I don't know what's going to need to happen in order for people to think that you just can't keep spending like this, maybe just by pointing out things that can't be bought because you spent so much money on the war in Ukraine to defend one of the world's most corrupt governments. I don't know, but I guess we'll find out, especially as the financial situation worsens in the US. Right. And so going back to Eisenhower, why I love this speech, which is it's called The Chance for Peace, but it's also called The Cross of Iron Speech. Yeah, it's it's sort of astounding. It's like the most like literate any politician, you know, well, maybe aside from like Ron Paul has been on like the idea of like of trade off trade offs exist. So this is great line. Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed. Those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children's children. And he gives a few examples. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this, a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine fully equipped hospitals. It is some 50 miles of concrete highway. We pay for a single fighter plane with a half a million bushels of wheat. And then he keeps giving more examples and more examples. And then he says, this is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron, which itself ties back to money. I think that was William Jennings Bryan, if I remember correctly, a cross of gold. He wanted to devalue the currency with silver. I think not my area of expertise, but it just, this talk is so great and just pointing out, you know, don't think of really what we're sending to Ukraine as a hundred and whatever billion dollars now. Think of it as material things that we now don't have.  Well, you know, we could have fixed that pothole really with this money.  It's really mind boggling. Eisenhower, you know, I'm sure he would, or his speechwriter at least, could write a humdinger of a speech now, given the current craziness.  And in a way, it's sort of like that. Similar, we need people to think in concrete terms, you know, is, you know, is the bridge you take on your morning commute collapsing? Well, you know, we spent $8 trillion on the war and terror between 2001 and 2022. Well, you know, and it's amazing how much the right wing, for lack of a better term, I mean, conservatives, people on that side of things, they really do associate military spending as just being costless. And I've gotten submissions as editor here from people trying to make the case that government spending on socialist stuff, on like health care, welfare, well, that's wasted money, but military spending, we can all agree that that's justifiable. And of course, you just ask them then, well, the economic effects are indistinguishable, right? This is where Rothbard makes all sorts of good arguments in terms of all government spending, regardless of what it is on, distorts the economy, causes price increases in certain areas, whatever it's spending on, and costs you a lot of money. Because if the government is spending, is buying up huge amounts of steel for military operations, that's going to inflate the price of steel. And if you need steel for your factory to produce automobiles or some civilian purpose, well, guess what, you're paying a lot more for that now. And I mean, that's exactly the point that Eisenhower was making in a less technical way, was that's government spending. It's going in one place, and not only is it taking resources from one place to another, but it's also driving up prices. And your own government is competing against you then for resources. And that's a thing about government spending. It doesn't matter what they're spending on. Now, if you're just making some blanket statement that all military spending is fine, yeah, come to me and convince me that the F-35 has been a very sound and prudent way to spend U.S. dollars. You're not going to convince me of that. These are huge boondoggles that take place all over the place. And not to mention the fact that the Pentagon doesn't even know where its money is going. It repeatedly fails, audits has no idea what the money is going to. We've spent trillions of dollars on wars that have been lost as you pointed out in the cost of war project data that they send out. And you need to get specific. If you're going to convince me that military spending, we can all agree, is just fine. And what they then try to do is they try to pin on you this idea that you must be some sort of pacifist because you don't want to spend a trillion dollars on the F-35. And how does that work? Especially if you note that the reason the United States faces no foreign threats is because of the Navy and the nuclear arsenal. So that's my position. And this idea of having a large army, the army serves no purpose, really. The standing army, right? The National Guard has a defensive purpose. The standing army has no purpose except to occupy foreign countries. It's very necessary for wars like Iraq and Afghanistan. And it has really no use other than that. And you could say very similar things about the Marines exist really to start miniature wars with other countries. They're very useful in that, too. Very little defense purpose in terms of defending U.S. shores and deterring any sort of foreign aggression against the U.S. Unless you believe that the entire world is the realm of the U.S. and the U.S. needs to be everywhere always defending every little corner that Washington could construe represents some sort of interest. Somehow the most prosperous period for the United States involving the greatest amount of gains and standard of living, the U.S. didn't engage in any of that at all. The U.S. was primarily concerned with trade and with peace. We're talking here about the 19th century. And except for the period leading up a period around World War I, even in through the 20s, there was so little intervention. Even if you look at the stuff that was going on in Latin America, that didn't even, that I mean, that just doesn't compare to what the U.S. is doing now. So sorry, this false dichotomy between either spend endlessly on everything or you're some sort of pie in the sky pacifist is a complete BS claim that those people like to make. And by the way, all those stuff you just read from Eisenhower. Man, can you imagine a president saying stuff like that today? I mean, if it was even a Republican getting up and saying there would be denounced as some sort of hippie.  So that's where American rhetoric is now in terms of military spending. And so we got a long way to go, but you can see what's going on there. And this brings us to an issue you brought up, right? About how, oh, the U.S. spending isn't big at all when you compare it to GDP. And when you look at actual inflation adjusted numbers spent on defense spending, military spending, it's higher than it was during the Cold War, during the Reagan years. And there are some periods where it's slightly lower now in inflation, adjusted dollars compared to some peaks like in the days of the surge that we were told was going to win the war in Iraq, I believe, was where the surge was. I can't even keep track. And that, of course, all just failed miserably, but there were some huge spending in those years, which now inflation adjusted spending is slightly below that, but certainly near or at historic highs when you can look at almost all years. The only time it was higher was during World War II. And but you've got people out there claiming that, well, the GDP has grown. So now we're at like a historic low in terms of the percentages that people are spending on GDP. So let's look at some of the actual numbers, right? The numbers are around 800 and we're quickly rapidly heading to $900 billion in terms of military spending. And these are just off the chart sorts of spending, even by Cold War standards. And certainly when Eisenhower was faced with those sorts of numbers, he wanted to actually cut spending. And this was in the days of the Soviet Union testing new nukes. So completely, it could have easily been justified more military spending back at that time. But now we're being constantly told, oh, you need another $150 billion to be spent. Biden puts in his request. Congress spends even more than is requested from the White House, because it's just so popular to keep spending this sort of money. And no talk about cutting back whatsoever. And so, no, military spending is not at some kind of historic low, except by that one single measure is of compared to GDP. But if you think about it, there's no reason why military spending should keep up with GDP. Think about it in terms of, say, the U.S. population increased by 50% from 200 million to 300 million. And that could then you could argue, oh, well, that would increase GDP by 50% too, because you're assuming everyone's at the same level of productivity. Why should that mean that defense spending needs to go up by 50% as well? Now that the Dallas metro area has 50% more people, it now requires 50% more military spending to prevent the Chinese from rolling through Dallas? What's the rationale? There's no reason why a larger population, larger GDP, should require defense spending to increase in kind. So that's a nonsense measure. What we need to be looking at is just in terms of how much money is really being sucked out of the economy for all this. And does any of it have anything to do with defending North America or the United States specifically? And very little of it does. Right. And I think with the people being like, oh, we're spending so little as a percentage of GDP, these are probably the poor rich, like the people who make six figures but are living paycheck to paycheck because they engage in lifestyle inflation rather than maintaining sort of a moderate, modest sort of lifestyle. It's like, I got a raise, time to upgrade to an even bigger house, new car, et cetera, et cetera. So we have to continually be living beyond our means no matter how much money we get. And on the point of how much defense, I mean, I recall a few years ago, you wrote a rebuttal to some free market economist who said, well, you can never have too much defense as a good. And it's like, this is crazy talk. It's not exactly like we have a market process for figuring out the optimal level of defense spending. But even without that, we can use our brains. There's no power on earth that can invade us. We have nukes. We have the Navy, as you pointed out. And no one has the power of projection capability to cross water, to get here, all those sorts of things. And another thing I'd point out is that the one, to my mind, I approve of this. Some libertarians don't like me. I get a bad check mark for it. But I'm all in favor of arms exports. I mean, I'm okay with the government restricting it. In some capacities, I don't think firms should be selling weapons to Russia or China, for instance. But like Taiwan, I'm quite an advocate of selling oodles of weapons to Taiwan. And, you know, we're not selling weapons to your crane. We're giving them, you know, gajillions of dollars worth of weapons, just handing it over. And again, for people who consider themselves, you know, national security hawks and whatnot, they don't want to face the trade offs that exist between sending stuff to Ukraine and selling weapons to Taiwan. There's a lot of debate about, like, oh, to what extent is, you know, all the stuff we're sending to Ukraine responsible for the backlog, which is just shy of $20 billion, last I checked, to Taiwan. And people are like, oh, we're sending different things, yada, yada, yada. But ultimately, I don't think that is a very good argument. One, because of just material scarcity, it's like the steel that's going into whatever we're sending to Ukraine might not be something, you know, we should not probably be sending Abrams tanks to Taiwan. But the inputs to the Abrams tanks would probably go into things I would be an advocate of selling to Taiwan. And even aside from that, we've drawn down our arsenal. I think we've sent Ukraine a third of those portable anti-tank missiles that I'm sure I'll remember. The high bars? No, no, not those man portable, I can't remember what it's called, or things like stingers. We've sent down such a huge portion of our arsenal of those things, our stockpile of those things. So, and as we covered in an early episode, it's going to take years and years to replenish our stockpile just because it's going to take so long to do so. But those are things we can't sell or even just send to Taiwan in the event of an invasion or something like that. So there's these trade-offs that they don't want to admit. And you mentioned Himmars. A drill with Japan had to be canceled in January between the U.S. and Japan because there was not enough Himmar ammunition for the drill to take place. So the idea that, oh, what we're sending to Ukraine and oh, pivoting to Asia, those are two different things that don't have any bearing is just ludicrous nonsense that it betrays not understanding trade-offs and material realities of existence. Well, and this is just where a lot of people just go off the reservation claiming to be in favor of any sort of free market economics, but then somehow all the rules are suspended when it comes to defense spending. And that was an important point you raised there as well is that there's no market process that's actually working here. So unless you go over into full anarcho-capitalism, any sort of defense spending that is advocated is a completely arbitrary number that has just simply been made up by policymakers on guesses about what would be necessary and it has nothing to do with price allocation or anything like that. So you have to argue then that this amount of money you think should be spent is absolutely necessary. You don't have any market anything backing up your decision or your claim on that. So you can't claim that the market is on your side or some sort of free market notion dictates that you have to spend X amount of dollars. It's just not there. It's going to be arbitrary no matter what. Now you could say, well, we just have to live with that. That's the way it is. Okay, fine. But again, you're going to have to show that that money is prudent and also take into account all of the resources that are being sucked out of the private economy where the price allocation system actually does work. And you know, you brought up the issue of weapons manufacturing and all that. Mises has some interesting stuff on that. I believe it's in his short book. He's got a short book called Interventionism where he talks a little bit about what should be done with weapons manufacturer. He talks about the issue of how weapons manufacturers in Europe, they were stifled by price controls that were slapped on the weapons manufacturers. So he was saying that the ability to defend a regime against the Nazis and so on had been crippled by anti capitalist sentiment which had been designed to prevent quote, unquote profiteering by weapons manufacturers because they had been cranking out weapons but because the state was buying up more of them, they were increasing prices and then it's just so should you then slap price caps on weapons that are being produced by a private manufacturer. This is a real sticky issue when you get down to it. What is this intersection between private manufacturing and government purchases? It's not really a functioning market either because if your only clients are governments, where's the market?  They're completely a government funded company. There's no market there. So yeah, none of this whole, oh, this poor private company has been badmouth, yeah, whatever. This is like claiming that some company that produces nukes is a private company, right? There's nothing going on there. I remember, I think it's in Hulsman's biography of Mises in the World War I period, Mises criticizes there's this like government policy. There were entrepreneurs in Austria-Hungary who started up firms and factories to produce ammunition in the calibers for weapons captured from the Russians. So this is entrepreneurial useful function and the government shut it down. I can't remember if it says why, but it's just here we actually, I think his point was the market is this weapon is a useful tool that by engaging in war socialism, we are making our ability to wage war less effective. And that was an example of utilizing the power of the market to aid in the war effort. And of course, the government quashed it. How many times have you heard that the government is in good at anything and messes up everything and can't be trusted with anything? But then when a war starts, suddenly the generals are geniuses who know exactly how to do everything just right. I mean, this is a line of thinking that we still have yet to overcome.  They never believe anything the government says to them. But then the government told them one day that Iran was a bad country and should be sanctioned and invaded. And then they were 100% on board the next day. So this is, I think as long as that sort of thinking prevails, it's going to be very difficult to argue against this sort of military spending. But I think in the end, we're going to have to make very hard choices in terms of military spending because if this spending on the debt increases due to rising interest rates. So it's no big deal. It's basically free money. It really is free money to borrow when T-bills are at under 1% or something like that, right?  People are buying all your government debt. And what do you have to pay back on it? Almost nothing, a functionally negative interest. And so you can get away with that for a while and then make it seem like the latest war is no big deal. But when you start to get to a point where you're paying $800 billion, $900 billion in interest payments for the $32 trillion national debt, which of course is headed toward $50 trillion, as Janet Yellen admitted recently in the next 20 years, you're going to be paying a whole lot of money just out the door for nothing, for nothing in the present time. So all those Gen Zers are going to be paying through the nose for past wars that the US thought was a great idea. And I really don't see how they can push interest rates back down for such long periods of time without causing, of course, ongoing massive amounts of price inflation. So they're facing real costs. And that's something that's never mentioned in terms of military spending right now. They never include the proportion, the fraction of interest payments that came from defense spending originally. They don't even mention all the back pay, so to speak, that occurs in terms of caring for disabled veterans who were rendered crippled by these various wars. You got to pay for that. But of course, they could cut that money so they can pay for more F-35 stuff. And it's really despicable, really.  Now we do have to cut Social Security because now we have to pay $1.2 trillion in interest payments, and we just don't have the money for Social Security anymore. It's going to be really interesting to watch what the old timers have to say about that. Medicare also, of course. And they're just going to have to start cutting these other popular programs in order to keep up military spending if they want to keep it at the sorts of breakneck increases that they've got going right now.  We've been living in this period where we could pretend that was true because interest rates were so low. But there's going to be some coming ups and downs, or it might look like things are going down again. But in the long term, you can pick rising interest rates, or you can pick runaway inflation. And you're going to have to make a decision. And so you're going to be paying for all those wars one way or the other. And so pick your poison, really. We've been put in this position by all of this spending and by all this central bank buying up the debt, monetizing the debt, pushing down interest rates, creating basically a false economy around which all this has been created. And you can't keep it up forever. Wars do not actually help your economy. They destroy the economy. Just look at what happened to Britain after World War I and II. And Western Europe in general, they destroyed their economies with those wars. They would be so much richer now if they hadn't had those wars. They'd be richer than the U.S. still. But they decided to go with that. And you have to make those choices. And the U.S., the music is going to stop at some point, and you're going to have to find a chair. And not everyone's going to be able to find one. Yeah. On the point of veterans care, the Watson Institute estimates it's we're going to have $2.2 trillion in obligations for veterans care from the war on terror over the next 30 years. And also I should note for listeners, we're recording this on tax day. And as a self-employed person, I don't have any withholdings. I have to hand the check over to the government. It's quite sad to think, oh, it's just $100 billion to Ukraine. But when I'm writing the check of my income, it's sort of depressing when I think all the money I'll ever pay in taxes to the government, a thousandfold that has already been blown up in a Russian airstrike on some arms depot in Ukraine. It's just little, little salty about that today, especially. Well, yes, happy tax day to everyone. And that seems like a good place to end this discussion, just as a reminder of where all that money comes from for the next war. So thank you for listening to War Economy and Stay. We'll be back next time. Our plan is to cover the secrets and the prosecution over the latest leaks about Pentagon, Pentagon spending and the wars. And so hopefully we'll have everything we need to talk about that next time. And so thank you for listening. Have a great week.


Good afternoon. I am Shavina Baker and I am the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Educator for the Northern Illinois CTE project team. And today we have a Trailhead video with Amy Fisher, who is an entrepreneur and an esthetician. As you might know, our Trailhead series is specifically designed for teachers to be able to show videos from individuals in industry and then show those directly in their classrooms. So it is my hope today that we will learn a little bit about Amy and her career, as well as get some insight as to what it takes to become an esthetician. So good afternoon, Amy. Thank you so much for joining us. Could you tell me just a little bit about yourself? Yes, well, my name is Amy Fisher. I grew up here in Rockford and I also went to Cosmetology School here in Rockford. I graduated from Educators of Beauty back in 2018. And then after I left there, I went directly to working at an eyebrow shop. I worked there for about four years and then I decided to open my own brow studio, which is where I currently work now. That is amazing. So could you tell us just a little bit about your career and what you're excited about as it pertains to your career choice? I guess what excites me the most would be being able to make people look and feel better about themselves and make transformations on people. And so what type of transformations do you do for your clients? Mostly eyebrows. That's what I specialize in, but I also do makeup and lash extensions. And could you describe what a day in your salon looks like for our students? Yes. So like I said, I mostly do brows. So since it is a quicker service, I'm able to fit quite a lot of people into one day for my schedule. So it's a pretty fast-paced environment. Okay. And how many clients would you say that you see a day? On a full day, I would say about 45. Wow. That's a lot of people. So from day to day, do you find that there are certain seasons that you get more business than other times? Definitely summer. Everybody wants to look really good. Yeah, because we're outside. So what brought you to this career field, Amy? What made you think that this was going to be your career path? Well, I've always been interested in anything concerning the beauty industry. I remember when I was a kid, going to church, I used to bring my little tweezers and do all the girls' brows in the nursery at church. So it's always been something that I've been interested in. Okay. Did you know in high school that that was going to be your career path and what types of things that did you do when you were preparing to become an S? Well, back in high school, I originally thought I wanted to be doing hair. So I didn't really take any classes pertaining to that. Everything I learned back then mostly came off of YouTube. And then while I was in school, I kind of went more towards, because I'm a cosmetologist, but the work that I do now would be classified more under aesthetics. Okay. And have you ever worked in a hair salon or did you pursue that career path? Not at all, actually. After I graduated school, I went directly to doing eyebrows. Okay. And what were your favorite classes in high school? We have a lot of high school students that are going to be watching this video. Were there any things that you excelled in that translated into your career? Honestly, my favorite classes in high school were probably English and literature. I grew up in a pretty strict Christian household, so I wasn't really able to express my liking for the things in this industry back then, but yeah. So for the people that are watching this video, like I said, students and teachers, specifically those who may be interested in cosmetology or being an aesthetician, what advice would you give someone who is interested in your career field? I would say try to narrow down what you're most interested in within this industry, and then specialize in that, that way you can really master your craft. And do you have any like idols or people that you follow on social media that kind of give you inspiration? I have a few girls on Instagram that I follow that their work is just like chef's kits. Okay. And what would you say is the most difficult part of your, your career? Probably that things are constantly changing, like with trends, so you have to constantly be learning, I guess. And what's the latest thing that you've learned in your field? The latest thing would be eyebrow laminations. Can you tell me a little bit? What is it? So it's basically like an eyebrow lift, so it uses a solution to lift the way your brow hairs lay to give you a fuller appearance. And then it also includes eyebrow tinting, which just darkens the color of your brows. Okay. I might need to try that. You are. Amy, we also know and have learned through this interview that you are also an entrepreneur and a self employed business owner. Could you talk to me a little bit about what inspired you to go out on your own in the steps that you kind of took to make that happen for yourself? What inspired me? Well, I guess I've always wanted to work for myself. What was your other question? So being an entrepreneur, how did you take that leap in instead of working for someone else decide to work for yourself? It's something that I thought about for a long time before I actually did it. I definitely wanted to build my clientele before I did so. So once I felt like I had my clientele locked in, I just went ahead and did it. And what are some of the challenges of being a small business owner? Let's see. I would have to think about that one. That might have to be a loop. That's okay. We can come back to that one. So one of the things that we focus on in this Trailhead series is the essential skills. And essential skills are skills that students will need to be successful in the workplace and in their careers. So the ability to be able to communicate, the ability to be able to resolve conflict, the ability to be able to manage their time, the ability to be professional and presentable and all of those things. What essential skills do you think that you use to be able to be not just an esthetician but a small business owner? What type of customer service and do you need to have? I definitely would say communication would be at the top of the list. Also, being able to pay attention to detail and then also being able to work closely with different types of people from different walks of life. And if I were looking to be an esthetician, but I was afraid of not being good at my craft, what would you say gave you the strength or the resilience to be able to do what it is that you do? Well, I would say to someone that is a little afraid, try to see if you can shadow a cosmetologist or an esthetician for a day that way you can get a feel for what the job really looks like. And also just don't be afraid to make mistakes, especially starting out you 100% will make mistakes because that's how you're going to learn so. And you're dealing with people's faces. So talk to me a little bit maybe about an experience that you've had where you've had to use some of those essential skills when dealing with the customer. I remember starting out, I was doing a wax and I accidentally waxed this lady's whole eyebrow off so I feel like honesty is the best policy. Always be honest with your clients. Always communicate with them, let them know what's going on. So even if you do make a mistake, if you kind of talk to them about it, it kind of cushions the blow. And when you're talking about being a business owner, specifically as it relates to your field, what type of licensure do you need to be able to open your own salon? What type of, what is the process to do that? So you'll either need a cosmetology or an aesthetics license. For cosmetology, it's a year long program and then aesthetics would be about six or seven months. Okay, okay. And what advice would you give to non-traditional students if a young man wanted to go into being an esthetician, what advice would you give to that individual? I would definitely say go for it and just don't let people discourage you, you know, based on your gender, you know, because I used to work with a young man at my old, my old broad-threading shop and he was very good. So just don't be discouraged by what people may say. Okay. And so this is a fun question. People often talk about, you know, their failures and how they overcome failure. How do you celebrate?  What are some of the things that you do to celebrate your successives? I guess I like to celebrate the most with my family. It's very, it's rewarding being able to make them proud and also I'll just do like little things like I'll buy myself something that I've been wanting or give myself like a little self-care day, stuff like that. Okay. Let's double back to the question that I asked in regards to what excites you about being a business owner. What are the things that you take pride in about owning your own business? I guess I take pride in it's something that I built for myself. And what are your future plans? Well, I plan to expand so I would like to expand to a larger location and be able to teach classes in the future. And would that be for a cost so that people could actually come and learn from you? Yes. Awesome. I really appreciate you taking the time out to speak with me today. I know that this information will be extremely valuable to potential students who are looking to either go into cosmetology, want to be an esthetician, or even want to be an entrepreneur and go out on their own. So I really appreciate you taking the time to speak. Of course. Thank you for having me. Right.


They want you to have a use if in you They want you to have some use of moments. I know what the right answer is, but I can't give you the right answer, bro I'm a free spirit.  Yeah, I knew this was a banger when non asian youtube commentators made full reaction videos This went viral on reddit so many people sent it to us wanting our takeaways wanting our analysis And I'll say this anytime there is something trivial that could spark deeper discussions that people don't normally want to have I'm here for it. Hey, and also anytime. There's any sort of OC ABG on YouTube It's always interesting. Anyways guys if you're interested by our analysis, please hit that like button and let's get into the first clip My name is Nikki. I Grew up in Orange County, California Currently a full-time student in San Francisco Do you think your dad knows your type? No, I do not think he knows my type at all Perfect guy for Nikki in my eyes We expecting family person Not out there calling in a lot once in a while. I'm okay with that but not every weekend have their goal Like what they looking for in the future for themselves Not just for Nikki at first because if they don't have any goals, so you lost. I'm still young, you know I'm looking for some fun adventure. Oh man right off the bat. You see the generational differences Obviously the dad is looking for somebody more mature grown long-term and of course. She's got blonde hair She's got a septum piercing. She got the OC via twang That's like not with the old ABG AZ and gangster days But you know, there's more modern fluid like kind of did see white wash OC vibes where she's like my dad doesn't even know What I want I tell you if a girl talks like this with this accent.  She's studying in San Francisco. Is it pharmacy or nursing? It's one of those two for sure Born and raised in Egypt Travel around for a bit ended up out here in California for fun. I'll be surfing or skateboarding You just want to go and just pack and take off without saying anything or anything to anybody If I ever find the chance Adventure when you thinking like okay, I'm gonna go to like China and just pack See the right answer. I should say no, I would never just leave without telling anyone But I mean Backpacking in China sounds kind of fun Yeah, you know, I mean I'm just like living my life doing my thing, you know, it's just like just good vibes Hey, you got to give it to use of though. He is being honest. He said hey dad I know what the right answer is, but I can't give you the right answer, bro I'm a free spirit. He looked like he walked straight out of like a stuicy ad or like a vans ad See Listen, he's being honest, but yeah, I could tell you right off the Batman. This dude is handsome. All right He's like ambiguous looking Ambiguously ethnic looking so I'm just like yo this guy's got it going on He's clearly charismatic and he clearly knows what he's bringing to the table and trust me He gets attention from women. I can tell you and not only that too.  I'm an actor You know just like live life day by day. That's a whole different lane. That's not your problematic Like I'm trying to rule the world through equity, bro He's more playing like the cool stoner You could find me on the wall of pack son or the van store Let me tell you this for an Asian dad who is thinking about a long-term husband for his daughter This guy is a complete nightmare. What's your name? Wilson Wilson. Yes. How are you Wilson? I'm doing good Tell me about yourself myself. I'm born and raised in Singapore. My parents are from Indonesia Currently, I'm a junior at the University of Southern California studying computer science Oh my god, my Singaporean brother. Don't let these girls get you down. Okay Wilson for different folks. Yeah, I mean listen guys Wilson by all means seems like he comes from a family with money all the indications are there chindo Chinese Indonesian from Singapore Studying at USC right computer science now. Hey, maybe I just get a fang job. It's kind of easy But then if I really want to push myself, maybe get some shares then I go join start up I'll say this He seems more like the face of almost like a tutoring or a Chinese language learning app Whereas you see seems like the face of like urban outfitters like he's like on an ad at urban outfitters So I mean you got like completely different lanes right here I mean, this is just a good boy from Singapore. Listen, he's stagnant standard with the hands behind his back Speaking to mr.  Listen, this guy is not a bad-looking dude He has a really good smile. He's tall and he comes from a good family I can tell you this in Asia in Singapore where he's from He's probably ranking a 7.5 or 8 but maybe in America when you're putting him juxtaposition against surfer dude Youssef who's like a model actor. It's gonna be tough. He's probably looking more like a five. Yeah, I mean in Singapore Wilson's probably not gonna do bad He's probably gonna jump from like a six to a seven point five in America due to the coolness factor He's probably getting decelerated to like a six or a five point five, especially in her eyes Oh The results came out the dad ranked Wilson near the top Yusuf at the bottom I think the only reason he didn't rank Wilson at the very top is he didn't want to seem racially Prejudicial or discriminatory or preferential and then Nikki the daughter ranked Yusuf at the top and Wilson All the way at number five and I think that that's what got the internet triggered either way I think the man is fear, you know guys were commenting because they're like all look girls Classically choosing the cool f-boy stoner over like this guy who's about to be rich But he's a nerd but he's on his P's and Q's and then I think the Asian guy internet was like dude Asian girls always publicly ranking Asian men in the last place so disrespectful Yeah, I mean I think this is an interesting conversation for people like we don't know exactly what Nikki is thinking Or if she did any post interviews But a lot of people are speculating that she's like a self-hating Asian but she grew up in OC So I think she grew up around Asian guys, but I think if there was a Kevin win in the dating pool I think he ranks higher than Wilson. I just don't think this is her type of Asian guy now I do think it's a little foul. She ranked him at the lowest I don't know clearly he is very much not her type because she's really not looking for him I mean, let's be honest I think there's some racial aspects of it too not that there's not every single type of Asian guy and like every ethnicity But I would say Wilson is for sure more of a Chinese guy stereotype Whereas like Korean via Filipino guys I would say they would have a higher ratio of your Kevin win guys who like really spend a lot of time Morphing themselves, but also like being more what like modern urban outfitters pack Sun festival girls want Oh man, I was looking forward to going to Singapore man. Those hawker stalls look so good The chicken rice man. I wasn't on YouTube obviously seeing the dad's ranking and the girls ranking be very very different is very interesting And that's what caused a lot of the controversy David But let's go through some of our favorite comments and some of them were kind of heated But some of them were very insightful the first comment was like damn man This girl is every dad's nightmare He seems down to earth honest and easy to talk to and his daughter just ended up a basic party girl And then other people were like hey, man That's the world we live in with social media and all these celebrity influences You can raise your daughter right and try your hardest and she might just end up a party girl looking for quick fun from hot guys I think this is making a lot of assumptions that listen. Hey mr. Tommy Tran seemed like a really cool dude in this video But that doesn't mean he like raised his daughter a certain way I'm just saying like, you know, you raise your daughter in America.  You got a son named Travis Those are very American names This is likely to happen. But is this so bad? I guess is a question out there You know, not only that it's the OC to like obviously we're from Seattle I'll tell you this being raised in Seattle. There's a lower likelihood Obviously, they're still a likelihood that the girls end up being party girls because there's no party culture in Seattle Andrew The next comment was from like a lot of angry guys or angry Asian guys that are like dude Girls are always making this type of short-term mistake when they're young in 30 years They'll be like, yeah, I was young and dumb and everybody makes mistakes because they're gonna come crying back to Wilson Because Wilson's gonna have the bag and he's gonna be rich I think that this is false because I think Wilson not saying he's not a bad catch Listen, I think Wilson's gonna do fine in his life He seems like a really nice dude and a lot of girls out there would like to date Wilson I think that Wilson at no point in his life or Nikki's life Are they a good match because I just think personality wise and just culture wise. It's actually so different I don't think Wilson's gonna be looking for Nikki in seven eight years either And I don't think Nikki's gonna be looking for him Because I think this is a false like idea that a lot of guys have that just because a girl rejects you when she's young That she's automatically gonna like you when you're a little bit more established I mean who's to say that you're gonna want her anyways I for sure might think that he wouldn't be ranked in fifth place in ten years though I think she will like three or four in seven or eight years I think Nikki will appreciate and respect the Wilson's a little bit more But that doesn't mean she's gonna get with Wilson Of course the next one comes through from you know Asian identity or like the angry Asian male internet where it's like dude Asian women are always going on these shows on Jubilee and picking Asian guys last we're just not picking an Asian guy at all So typical, ah man, it's so tough man because Obviously, I don't think Jubilee set it up this way But I will say this if you're an Asian girl going on a dating show and I've seen this happen in Australia The Asian girls who choose to go on dating shows are usually not the type who are looking for an Asian guy You're looking for something outside of your circle. You're looking to put yourself out there You want to be seen and you want to do something different So yeah, do I think that there's obviously a lot of Asian women out there who like Asian guys and appreciate and respect Asian guys? Hell yeah, but I don't think the ones that go out there Necessarily are looking to meet Asian dudes. Listen, man If you get crazy tattoos and like a septum piercing and you get you know more exotic Hairstyles and then you're this dude who totally looks like a CS major or an accountant It doesn't mean that you don't have girls in your pool, but they just might be in the engineering program They might be in the CS program They might be in med school to be a doctor, you know what I mean not necessarily a nurse no dishonorses but I'm just saying like It's difficult because that you like you said there's no way that a girl like Nikki is ever looking for a guy like Wilson possibly even in Singapore and I'm not even saying on like a world scale that their values to the world or in society is Like very different or that Wilson's might not end up being a little bit higher in a way No, just a Nikki, but I'm just saying like it's just not a good match culturally and of course you've got the classic dude I can't believe Asian girls went on this show and picked him last place. This is so disrespectful to Asian men Yeah I mean if she was trying to do something for Asian people then she ranking the Asian guy number five was a little bit mean But at the end of the day, I don't think she's thinking about them I don't think it's that deep not to say that there wasn't some type of like maybe Anti-fab attitude in her because she's so American eyes and he does Wilson does have a little bit of that accent and he's clearly like a really nice mama's boy So she's just like ah like I could probably get a Wilson whenever I want maybe but like I said I don't necessarily think that Wilson and her are ever a good match in any shape or form or at any point in time because Just culturally that they're very different long story short guys I think that like Asian guys they're pretty mad about a lot of things But I just don't know if this is the best example because there's a lot of other variables at play That make it like unclear why she made her decision Andrew There was even some disagreement about who to blame You know We're staying in sort of like the Asian guys that are mad at Asian girls like space right now because some people were like dude I'm just mad at the Asian girls who think they're white and then other people were like nah, man I'm more mad at girls like Nikki who still pick non-Asian guys even though they're from like OC Probably from like all v it or all Asian high school That's even worse and the other people were like nah, man I'm blaming the boba liberal girls who think that this is okay, and they're not proud even though they date Asian guys But they only date hot Asian guys. What about regular Asian guys? So I was like, oh man, there's a lot of smoke for everybody from this crowd They don't even know who to be mad at yeah I think it's tough and sometimes this crowd is probably never gonna get the answer that they want I'm gonna be honest. However, I will say this Nikki to me. She feels like an American girl She's gonna have plenty of dating options in America as a woman. That's fine I think Wilson though if he splits his time between Asia and America He's gonna have a lot of options. He might not he might have less options in America than she will But if he goes back to Asia, I think he's seen as a good catch Wilson I got the plan for you associate yourself with the fame company.  But but why stop at Singapore man go back to Indonesia. That's a bigger market Then of course you have the guys firing right back being like dude It is totally not about him being Asian bro. Wilson has like no chin bro. His jawline is weak He doesn't even lift. He's a total square like fob, dude I mean dude if there was a buff Kevin win with like tattoos, she totally would have picked him But he just wasn't there in the episode I actually think even if there was a Kevin win, I don't think she picked some number one I think Yusuf is such a different product and a different type of guy than she's used to meeting I don't even think they meet on the dating app to be honest because I think Yusuf Swice left on her But I think that in this vacuum where she gets a chance I guess to go out with an Egyptian surfer stoner model in LA She's just gonna do the thing that is so different, you know, but I actually think that yeah a Kevin win would probably rank higher Yeah, she would more like end up marrying the Kevin win like you said like the guy who's like five out of ten Kevin win But like an eight out of ten at a thing job That would probably be her perfect vibe in like six seven eight years David What's your overall takeaway ma'am my overall takeaway is that it's tough because a lot of women in America They want you to have a Yusuf in you. They want you to have some Yusuf moments They want you to be adventurous when you need to be adventurous, but then reliable and have a good job So there's always this balance that a lot of guys are trying to find but it is hard right now Wilson is a Wilson and Yusuf is a Yusuf Can you be in between? I think that's what's going through a lot of guys heads Oh, dude for the generation Z that I see this like from like kind of those rich private school families I think Wilson's a little bit of a different case because he's from Asia being a nerd That like wears like Nordstrom's clothes and being proper. That's completely acceptable in Asia You can even get a cute girlfriend doing that in America Because there's so much subculture here and like some people call it downward assimilation of whatever whatever like if that game Playing doesn't really work in the American environment like nearly as well unless you stay in fob circles So to be honest man, it's tough like some people especially from the OC That's the home of like Jabba walkies a B. DC all these Asians to launch in all these brands that are like hyper non traditional But still Asian a little bit at the end of the day. I mean listen ABG culture comes from the OC You got to be what the ABG's want right and some of the ABG's. They're so open-minded now They want a Yusuf. I mean because there's even different types of ABG. She seems like a little bit more of like a whitewash one I mean my overall takeaways are Andrew the different people just like different things, but is she wrong? She's not wrong. She's not wrong because look at how she was raised. There's gonna be some Asian guys mad about this I mean all in all guys. You can't fault Nicky Nicky is a girl from the OC with blonde hair and all the kind of like Festival markings of a girl from the OC who's like wants to have fun and be an RN or be a farm tech or whatever But she grew a beaten fur. Yeah, that's what I'm saying and Wilson is like almost a guy from like 50 60 70 years ago Or at least 30 40 years ago. I know the type. I'm still Chinese I still spend time in Asia that type of guy that Wilson is in Asia is He's definitely not like the top 10 out of 10, but he does quite well He's six foot tall. He's rich and he's probably gonna get a good job like way deep in the six figures But in America we have to understand especially in the 20s. I mean, I don't even think it fully changes in the 30s People care about subculture and like you said everybody's looking for that like hybrid BMW a hybrid Lexus Everybody's looking for a luxurious Tesla where it's really like up on all metrics, you know They get what they want and then no downside and all upside But it's very difficult to find and I do think that a lot of young guys right now in 2022 that are Asian guys are Trying to build themselves into that and that's why a guy who can do computer science Might get buff and get a broccoli cut right now because they're like, huh the niggas of the world That's what they want So this video did go very viral and sparked a lot of conversations for a number of reasons You let us know in the comments down below if we miss some of course I generally think that women want to balance between the Yusuf and Wilson, right want a stable job That'd be cool, but to be a little adventurous, you know, be a little bit more free-spirited when you can It's a hard balance to find a lot of people are trying to find it right now And Andrew to circle back to your original point that you said way in the intro People learn a lot and care a lot what ABG's think you just didn't know that They just do every time an ABG says anything in a YouTube video People care, you know why because they're considered sexy. That's why exactly. All right guys. I know Thank you everybody. Let us know in the comments down below We are the hot-pot boys. We're gonna keep analyzing and reacting to videos Let us know if you like these types of videos too. Thank you so much for watching and until next time. We out. Peace


If you suffer from menstrual pain, and you are looking for a natural way to alleviate it, then this no more cramps tincture is for you. It is in stock and ready to ship. Go to whatchelsieats.com and click on herbal blends.


Hi, this is your host, Sopil Bhartiya, and welcome to another episode of TFR Newsroom. And today we have with us, Mav Turner, city of DevOps business at Tri-Centus. Mav, it's great to have you on the show. Thanks for having me. And today we are going to talk about Tri-Centus test automation, which, if I'm not wrong, was released this week. So, but before we talk about this product or project, I want to talk a bit about the company itself. Talk a bit about what is your focus area? Our focus area in general is improving quality in the software delivery process. And so that touches a lot of different areas. And there's a lot of fun things that we get to do there, a lot of projects we connect to and integrate with because ultimately you can't deliver software unless you're in a connected ecosystem. And so we're constantly trying to improve what that quality engineering journey looks like for our customers. And, you know, we serve customers from the global 5,000 to small startups. And each of them are in a different stage of their life cycle as far as the maturity of their processes and what they're trying to accomplish. And we really are trying to just overall help the industry improve the quality in which they can deliver and build, deliver, deploy software. Since we're talking about now, build, deliver, deploy software, talk a bit about because we kind of, of course, live in a dev ops world. But the fact is that there are still soft silos within companies, you know, there are also there are different areas of expertise. So even if we like to call it DevSecOps, there are security people, you know, they're networking folks who understand networking, they're storage folks who understand storage, so they're always specialized area. So talk a bit about what are you seeing the reality in the industry that you do know the pain points and that's when, you know, you try to address some of those pain points for your customers and clients. That's a great question because again, because of the breadth of customers that we work with, we have large companies that are trying to do agile transformation that are still moving from a waterfall world to a more agile delivery process. And on the other end of the spectrum, we have customers that are on the bleeding edge from a process perspective of DevSecOps and working together as teams in these new, more modern architectures and trying to say, how do we make sure that our application is working when the infrastructure underneath it is changing, right? And our security requirements are changing and the infrastructure layer is owned by us or not owned by us or the ops team is embedded with us or it's separate. And so we see pretty much every possible combination that exists out there and how teams are operating. And we think that that creates a real opportunity and really that's what we're trying to do is create tooling that can easily be used across these different personas so that these teams can work together, whatever the definition of team is for that stage of that company and depending on the maturity and their priorities. And one thing we talked a lot about and I'll probably talk later in the context of the specific product is regression testing versus progression testing and different companies depending on the industries that they're in, the maturity of that organization have a stronger bias towards, let's make sure that our regression testing is super tight and that our release processes are no bugs because we can't afford failure all the way to the other side, which is say, look, we want to value progression, the move fast and break things crowd, right? We're okay, we can accept some failure or we can build that into our systems and we can accept some of that loss. And so that's a massive spread of goals and business objectives that we're trying to help different companies be successful with. And sometimes we have specialized functions like the security team or the operations team or the development team or the performance engineering team, right? That's another thing, depending on the application, you may have specialists that are focused on how do we scale and ensure this application can sustain the load that we're gonna put under it and how does the application respond in those environments? What are the operational impacts as we scale up this load, right? Is it horizontally scalable? So we understand the cost model. All those things come into the story that we're a part of that we enjoy working with customers on. Excellent, and that kind of creates a nice segue to my next question, which is about the announcement of Tresentes test automation. So talk a bit about why you felt this is the time to release this and also what problems that we just talked about is this product solving. For sure, so it's super exciting. We've been working on this for a long time and so it's great when you've been working on something to get it out to market and to release it. So super fun to talk about. Basically, what we're seeing is we're still seeing a lot of organizations struggle with how could they can ensure quality in the process and how they can bring the entire team, whatever the definition of the team is, like as I just mentioned, into that quality process. And one of the things that we felt like was important to do that was to deliver a cloud native end-to-end SaaS-based test automation that allows for these teams to work together for test creation, orchestration, execution, at whatever stage of the software delivery lifecycle that the customer is in. And so when we look at the Tresentes kind of history, a lot of people know us from our Tosca product. And so we were able to take that core IP that we've built up over the last decade to put that in a different form factor and bring it to a different part of the market than has traditionally been able to leverage these tools. And by doing so, we hope to be able to improve the quality of all product teams, frankly, no matter where they're at from a maturity or scale perspective, so that they can really quickly get into the product. They don't have to deploy anything. They can get into the product, create their test end-to-end and again, leveraging that Tosca IP that we've built up over so much time and then orchestrate and execute these tests to ensure that the applications, whether those are homegrown applications, packaged applications, whatever type of application they are, but that their works is expected and that those teams can move quick and develop, have this as part of their CI CD pipeline so that they're not being stopped by kind of a manual test process that prevents them from releasing often. So that's kind of what we're trying to do, write these enterprise applications and collaboration across the QA teams, the development team, the operation team, the business stakeholders, bring all that together and an easy to consume dashboard with great visibility to help the businesses go faster. I also want to talk about something which is happening right now in the industry, which is economic downturn layouts are happening. I mean, we don't want to go into the whole layoff and cost cutting thing because during pandemic, companies would like, hey, just throw 50 developers at the problem and they will solve it. So a lot of hiring was going on so now the market is kind of maturing and also there was also a gap in supply and demand of skilled folks.  So that is a totally different topic but the thing is that teams are like kind of shrinking or people are looking at, I don't look at it exactly as cost cutting but as becoming more cost efficient. So talk a bit also about how does this help teams or organizations become more cost efficient so that the teams are more productive versus wasting a lot of time on things which are like mundane or unnecessary. You're right, that is a whole topic. It's very interesting, very pertinent topic but I'll try not to go too far down the rabbit hole there. The reality is it's about change, right? Teams are changing whether that's teams are shrinking, being reallocated to different projects but at no point is the business saying, therefore let's lower our quality bar. Therefore it's okay for us to fail more, right? And so that to me is the key here is that, whether you're saying do more with less or it's this change and that's we're having a solution in market and we started building this before the economic macro change but even now it's even more important than ever because you'll have new teams, new people get brought into new environment and not know what they need to do, how can they add value, how can they ensure quality is increasing during these particularly challenging times and that's why the usability is so important. This SaaS form factor if I can use the term is so important because there's so much change and even now, like you said, if we take aside the cuts and staffing or the moving, the reality is different projects are being reprioritized, things that were top priority six months ago are no longer the main priority and so how do we ensure that as these shifts are occurring and people are being brought onto new projects that they can really quickly add value, right? Whether that's by leveraging a product like this or by doing some of the exploratory testing that is always gonna be important and never goes away no matter how much tooling you have is always a key part of it but to me that's the real aspect here is that there's a lot of change, prioritization of projects, reallocation of resources and making sure that you have the right set of tooling to survive through that change is actually the heart of this whole agile conversation, right? Being able to value the people over the process, being able to jump in really quickly move forward versus some of the things where we say, hey, we've got a five year project and we can build these expertise, I actually don't think that that's gonna be, I think that's gonna be less and less common as we continue. So I think that aspect of change, COVID was a big instigator of that and I think we're just seeing that continued acceleration and we're just all feeling it in a much more in-depth way than maybe we have envisioned that we would. First of all, thanks for taking that question out. One more thing that happened in the pandemic was that a lot of companies who did not have their digital presence or online presence, even I remember even the local store where I used to go and buy Indian groceries, they closed and they started offering online orders and they delivered. So a lot of companies, they quickly moved to their accelerated digital transformation journey and also they were looking at, once again, due to lack of enough talent people, they were looking at low code and no code kind of solutions as well where they did not have to initially invest. So talk a bit about, since as you said, folks have been working on this even before this whole economic thing happened. So talk a bit about all the other changes that are happening in the industry with low code and no code. How does this fit in there and how it helps develop state? Because it's not just about, it's just once again, go back to the point of no, less work in the pipeline means they can do more things. It's funny, as you were saying that literally last night I was ordering from my neighborhood restaurant which added online ordering during the pandemic and there was a button that said do not add this to the production. You could see that it's clearly the money wasn't familiar with the product usage and that's fine, right? Where everybody's trying, everything is changing really fast and there's no code solutions, whether it's a restaurant creating an online ordering system or it's an internal team that's building some business application are enabling us to move faster and really the goal is that not that we're replacing developers or replacing testers. That's always the catchy headline, right? We don't need developers anymore or we don't need testers anymore that's not the reality at all. The reality is we wanna make sure that we're building fast. It's the same reason that we use frameworks, right? Or libraries when we're building applications from a development perspective not because you couldn't possibly build it all from scratch but there's no need to. And that allows you to focus that creation on something that doesn't exist. And that's something I talk to my teams about a lot. So I know that you could probably rebuild this charting library or this other component but if we can build off of what's already there now we can focus on what doesn't exist and what's really unique in the industry. And so it's about putting that creative development and testing skill sets on the things that move our businesses forward and leveraging those skills to move as quickly as possible. And that's where a lot of this no code from my perspective, no code, low code really pervade value in the industry is you can use those resources that are those development time and resources to go build the thing that doesn't exist and create the new thing and you can go really quickly with the low code solutions. Now, there's still challenges there that we can talk about as much as you want, of course, but that's to me is the true vision and the value of those low code, no code solutions in the industry. Now let's look at the commercial aspect of it. Talk a bit about the availability of this TTA how folks can access it or how well integrated it is with other tri-centres product and services. Yeah, sure. You could go to the website today, go to tri-centres.com, go to the product page, start a trial, it's all SaaS, it's very easy to get up and running quickly. You know, that's the great thing there and really users can just get their hands on and start using it. If you're familiar with other tri-centres products such as TOSCO, for example, it should feel very familiar in a lot of ways. If you're not, we've really focused on our onboarding process to make it easy for you to get in, understand the value, how to start creating you as first test, how to really quickly get value out of it. So that was really the goal here was to again make this even more broadly consumable than what we've been able to in the past. And so hopefully your viewers here would be able to really quickly go to the website, start a trial and really get a sense for what it does. I think now I have, I mean, of course, this is a topic where you and I can sit for hours, but I think basically we have a good understanding of this product, project, company, and also some market dynamics. Is there anything else that you feel we should be talking about or you think that we have covered some basis today? The last thing I guess I'll add is, this question comes up all the time. So I think it's important to add about manual testers. Oh, because these tests, and it's a little bit connected to your previous question, does manual testing go away? Does it, and to me, what I would say is, if you're a manual tester today, if you're an organization that has that, the goal is that that manual testing evolves out of what I've seen a lot of people do, which is important from the follow this workflow or follow this process to more of the exploratory.  One is test automation, right? There's a lot of products and frameworks and things to learn. And obviously that's where we play a lot, but there's also this exploratory testing concept can help you become a better tester, independent of the stack and the tooling that you're using. And so I think if your heart is in that kind of quality world and you really want to evolve, but you're a manual tester today and you don't know if necessarily the, all the tooling and frameworks are the most exciting part, there is still this exploratory testing thing that will always exist. And it's really about how do we make sure that we're up-leveling all of the different skill sets. And so I'll just a little shout out there to the manual testers and some options for them as they think through where they want their careers and skills to develop. Matt, thank you so much for taking the time out today and of course talk about this test automation suite. Also, the insight that you shared about where the industry is heading and the importance of automation as well as manual testing. So I really appreciate those insights and as usual, I would love to have you back on the show. Thank you. Sounds great, thank you for the time today and look forward to talking in the future. There's a lot of great questions and great topics to discuss.