Hello. Thank you so much for coming to this presentation. We are very happy to see so many people here. So Ivan, we are both from EXO, which is an association related to GiffyNet. And well, we'll give an overview of what Giffy is, its relationship to free software. That's an overview. So, this presentation is mainly based on this document, which is what is GiffyNet's introduction to GiffyNet wrote by Roger Puello. You can easily, very easily find it on the main GiffyNet page. So, it's to be acknowledged for that. So, there are many misunderstandings on what Giffy is, so I will start by telling what GiffyNet is not. GiffyNet is not an internet provider. It's not an ISP. But we use the access to the internet. We can use this kind of access. It's not a subscription service, but there are many companies and organizations that provide this service on top of GiffyNet. It is not a second-class network, some hobbies network. It is connected to the core infrastructure of the internet. It is not just a Wi-Fi network. We are using more advanced technologies like optical fiber right now. And for many years we've been doing this. It is not a single corporation of any kind. It's not a public or private corporation. There are many corporations, many organizations that are part of GiffyNet or participate in it. It is not something held by a single organization as well. GiffyNet itself, as a network in this aspect, has many, many owners. And it is not some kind of very radical movement trying to change the world and make it burn. We are transformative with, let's say, political, may say in the broad sense, political movement. But we are not very radical in the sense. And we are not a geek-only or hobbyist-only project. There are many kinds of roles. Everyone can participate. Everyone can play their role. We are not some wild west place at all. We have very clear rules that we will introduce to you later. And it is not actually a new idea. This is an application of the common pool resource handling to something that is new, like computer networks. This also happens with free software. So it's just a new version of something very old. I will explain a little bit of the technological project of GiffyNet. Before I talk about techy stuff, let's see a little bit of context. GiffyNet started in a little area in the countryside of Spain and Catalonia, named Ozone. There are almost no broadband internet access. So nature started to collaborate and self-provision their internet access. They were not geeky people. They are farmers, normal people that wanted to access that public resource. As Ivan said, it's a common pool resource like some other resources like free software. It has some fundamental conditions that it's free. Anyone can do anything like hosting hp.net web pages. You are free to do anything. It's open to anyone. So you can join and study the network, see how it works and improve it. And it's neutral. So there is no discrimination on the content or who you are to access the network. It started from using community Wi-Fi hardware, like the Lensys BWLRT. In 2008, it became an autonomous system and joined the Katniks Internet Exchange in Barcelona, where we exchanged traffic with other ISPs and connected to some top-level providers. In 2010, there were more than 10,000 mothers and we started to deploy optical links. Nowadays, there are more than 33,000 nodes and almost 50,000 projects. During the questions, we will show you a little video of the growth of the network. Here you can see a map of the nodes that are actually on the network. About the infrastructure that we run on, we have a Drupal website where anyone can register and post their node configuration. We use OpenLDAP for authentication, both on the website and the network resources, like Internet Proxies. We use some tools like Smokeping, Weathermap or GSTOIP for managing resources related to the network operation center in the Katniks. For config management of the network protocols, we use Beard, Quagga and BMIX6. It's a mesh routing algorithm. We use SNMP as protocol, both by CACTI and some Drupal modules that we have developed to publish the usage information. Almost all routers on Gifinette run on Genealynx firmware, although there are a lot of closed source systems that we are trying to change. It's what users mainly use from MikroTik and other platforms. We have some supporting services for the users to collaborate like Simpa for the Miling List, Rocket Chat that is widely used to communicate among users and EtherPAT and MediaDrop for video publication. There are a lot of self-developed projects that started with the needs of Gifinette. As I said before, there are some primordial Drupal modules that let users create domain names and associate to resources. This information is replied to all the DNS servers of the network that are geographically distributed among the different geographical areas. Also, there is a package that is named an SNP service that those of the SNP collecting and services as a RD tool images to the web page. Also, we have developed a main routing firmware that is used a lot in the network and it started like 2009 and it's actively developed right now. We also have some tools for managing the proxy access that is the principal way of accessing internet in the beginning of the project. Also, Gifinette has collaborated in several European projects that involves research. For example, a confined project that lets developers try application and services and we bet that is a framework for testing on commodity with the hardware. Also, some projects like R&P modules and a distro for installing services. Now, Ivan will continue with the social project. Thanks. Before, at the end, I already introduced many of the tools and the concepts. Thank you very much, I cannot take where he is now. We have a big issue with the projects we developed and it's dissemination. Many people in the network don't even know that it exists. The long-term funding and maintenance, for instance, we had these European projects but now they are done, it's a little bit difficult to pay someone to actively develop such complex tools. Any idea or suggestion on this will be very, very welcome. Regarding the social project, very similar to what Adriano already mentioned, we consider the access to telecommunications and the internet to be a human right so we work towards that. We want to facilitate access to telecommunications and the internet and access that is affordable so it doesn't discriminate on how rich people or poor people, it's for everyone. We put special importance on the fact that some people, typically left behind, can access the internet like people in the rural areas where it all began. We call Gifineta Community Network because we feel a community, we know each other, at least locally, in the different areas. We are a pretty diverse community, of course we would like to be more diverse but I think it's okay right now. There are volunteers that participate in its expansion. We have all kinds of associations like EXO that I introduced you before. Gifibages, yeah, pretty big associations. We have companies that work on top of Gifineta and provide their services on their maintenance or installation of nodes and infrastructure. We have of course the users. We consider users to be also part of the community and we share their interests. We have the public administrations that help the network deploy by giving us access to some key places, key locations or is in the legislation as well. We have these very clear rules that I mentioned you before. We have this free open neutral network commons which is like the GPL license of Gifineta. Everyone that participates in the physical network itself must accept it explicitly by signing it. This is the base for everything else in the network. Like some of these governance tools like a complete resolution system that we apply when there are not so agreeable situations but there are and it has proved to work pretty well. And there is the foundation. The foundation is like a legal personality for the network whenever it is needed but it is not the owner of Gifineta. It is not Gifineta itself. It's a tool for Gifineta. And someone to guard for the network to develop according to the rules that I mentioned before. Legally it's a private not-for-profit foundation. It has many other roles that you can see here. And it is a telecommunications operator in Spain. It's a research resistor as such and it can provide access to other ISPs that want to share this connection in the catnics, in the neural exchange point in Barcelona that David mentioned before. And it's a common resource pool. This is a concept that was described by Eleanor Ostrom. It's a Nobel Prize winner. She introduced this concept and this has existed for millennia, for people running resources that must be shared between several people like the Earth. Fields or things like that. It's a very, very old concept. And when using such a resource concurrently, one must make an economic administration of it. So by the fact that everyone uses the same resource pool and develops it together, we can manage to make a more efficient use of it and to avoid some kind of duplicity that other ISPs and telcos produce just because everyone has to have their line and pay for it. And I think it's very efficient. We do not have that. So all participants cooperating in the development and service providers can offer their services at a price or there are services that offer them for members, many, many kinds of models running on top of it. Well, these are some of the professional services offered in the network. You will see internet access in the bottom because it's like a big local network but it does not provide access to the internet by default. So one of the ways or the many ways to access the internet besides web proxies and things like that are these ISPs that operate on top of Gifinnet, which are pretty competitive and much cheaper than other ISPs in Spain by grace of using this shared common pool resource. Okay, so to avoid another topic in common pool resource handling, which is the tragedy of the commons that is that someone uses the resource but doesn't provide anything to make it grow, we have this compensation system that applies to, let's say, big players in the network like big ISPs, big associations, volunteers that put a lot of effort. So we run this system where you can compensate collectively the resources that you put and the benefit that you get from the network. Okay, so to summarize, we have proof in these years that this kind of model can work. We have this sophisticated compensation system that has been awarded by the European Union in 2015, I think. So, 16 there was another network, a Scottish network, I think it was a community network that also got a similar price. Yes, we have the recognition of the European Union. I think we can, it has proved sufficiently that this can be a model for future access to the, for providing access to the internet to everyone and affordable and... More efficient than the resources. Yeah, in an efficient and socially good way. So, thank you very much for listening. If I have any questions. Thank you. We'll play this video in the background while you... Ask questions. If you have any questions. Six minutes for questions. Don't forget to repeat the question. Okay. Let's put it five first times. Faster. It usually... So the first question is how do we provide the internet access with tablets or whatever? For example, I can explain the XO use case. We use IP IP tunnels, but there are some... There are ISPs that use IPv6 mainly and do... NAT operator for the IPv4. For example, there are many techniques use it. It depends on the operator itself. Can you repeat it? Can you repeat it? Well, yeah. You ask about the routing and... Yeah, you are asking that how we manage the routing in all the network. Well, we use mainly BGP and... OSPF. And well, there are some partitions on the network. They start as islands and the users decide which protocol use and then when they join the network, there are some problems that we must solve using filters or any technique. The political situation in Barcelona and Catalonia in general influenced the development of the internet in the last couple of years. So the question is, how did the political situation in Barcelona or Catalonia influence the... How it influenced the growth of the internet? We changed something. So I wouldn't be sure to say that this QMP project was born in some way to support the very quick deployment of a mesh network. QMP is a quick mesh project. So I don't know if you can consider this to be supporting some kind of political movement. The city of Barcelona became kind of the turf of the social movements. So maybe you have more support now from what you have before. Did it change anything? So regarding what he said about the political movement in Barcelona, that changed very alive in the last years. We got support from them but we are very informal ways of getting support. I wouldn't be able to answer. It seems that there is some interest as we can see in the social meetings that the major is interested in. Yeah, the major house. The major house is interested and we got support. It seems that interest has grown. The conduct for end users, how do you make them sign them? Is it only for end point users or for end devices users? Like the family of three. Everyone has to sign it? So regarding how does people sign this agreement, the commons? How do we do it? How is that? They have to register on the website so they can place the note of the network and configure it and for registering you have to accept the contract. It's one per note. One per user and with a user you need a user to create a note. We assume that they read it and use it. As all the services do. But when introducing the concept of the network, we are told by signing it also. So the question is if EXO is an ISP and how do we get and if we need to connect directly to the EXO in the catnics or we must go over other notes. The infrastructure of GIFINET is the free path and EXO is available through GIFINET. So in particular we have a machine at the catnics hosted with other machines of GIFINET of the foundation. And through GIFINET we reach the servers and then we establish tunnels, except technology, but it's done like this. I think it's done like this for other ISPs. You reach their servers and directly. There are some optical fiber links from the catnics and there are some GIFINET connected directly by these optical fiber links. Directly. I'm an example. He's asking that if you can connect directly to the catnics, yes you can. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's time's up. He's a fortunate owner of another that connects directly to the Teldon building where? I can explain it like a catnics. Okay, thank you very much.


Hi everyone, Joe for jaspeascasebrakes.com coming at you with 2021 Hanini, rookies and stars football, serial box break number 17 from jaspeascasebrakes.com. At the end of the break, we'll re-randomize everybody's names. Top eight get spots in that hit parade football break. Filler wise, we just got to do one more of these and then we're in breaksville on that hit parade. So get in on it, jaspeascasebrakes.com. Big thanks to the folks who got in on this one. Thanks everybody. All the teams are in. So let's do the break first, first dice roll, four and a one, five times, different dice roll for the giveaway part, one, two, three, four and a one, fifth and final time, four and a one, five times for the teams, one, two, three, four and a one, fifth and final time. All right. So no trading windows in these filler breaks. Here's the first half right there, second half over here and let's get into it. Let's print and rip. We got a little poll going on tonight. Don't forget to vote in our Thursday night football poll. Twitter link is in the chat. At jaspeascasebrakes on Twitter, we'll often do stuff like that. At the moment, we've got 66% of voters taking Atlanta minus two and a half. I'm personally on the short home dog Carolina plus two and a half. Here, come on. Long last rookies and stars here on Thursday the 10th, your Thursday, my Friday, but whatever day it is. It's a good day. As long as we're doing breaks, got to trade Lance, Jalen Waddle, Jamar Chase, rookie cards, Joe Montana in the back right there. Jamar Chase should be back a couple of weeks, I think. Jalen Waddle is having a nice season. Hopefully, Trey Lance will bounce back from his injury and do well next year. Let's grab everyone's names again for the final dice roll, one through 32 and top eight will get into that hip parade break. That's a nice break too. Six and three, nine times. Top eight after nine, good luck, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, and ninth in final time. Now, after nine, it's only the top eight, so from nine through 32, it's sad times. Donald, very close, but not quite. Appreciate everybody taking the risk on this. We've got to do one more of these, so if you feel like trying again, jaspyscasebreaks.com. Top eight, you're happy, you're in the break. Patrick is happy. Zach, Anthony, Patrick, Patrick, Patrick, Donald got in, and Zach, we've got you a spot in there, Donald. There you go gang, congrats to the top eight after nine. I'll see you hopefully a little bit later tonight for that break, jaspyscasebreaks.com.


So, we'll assume you had a good weekend. All right. Well, I guess I got to stop chatting and start getting going here. Okay, good. You can hear me. Great. I'm glad that you can hear me. All right. I'm glad everybody has shown up. Thank you for coming today and welcome to our little mini lecture today about how you should start with SAS, SAS software. This is the last of my little lecture series on case studies and SAS integration. I'm a big SAS evangelist. I'm always getting in trouble with SAS because I'm always talking about them and they're not open source, right? So I'm like a free sales rep for them. Really, they don't pay me. In fact, I get in trouble with them for talking about it. But why do I talk about SAS? It's really ubiquitous in my field of public health. And so I'm happy that you showed up today and I can share some of my knowledge with you about SAS because I've been using, I've been a user a long time. So this is about how should you start with SAS? And I'm just going to be really philosophical with you. You can be born again in SAS. So I'm not really that young. Like I'm in my 50s and I've been using SAS for 20 years. But I feel born again with SAS and you'll see why. So there's some challenges in the future with SAS. I'm just not going to lie.  But there's like something I really see that's really awesome in the future for SAS that's different from the past. So you really want to sit and listen to what I found in my research. So I'm Monica Wahee and I'm a data scientist sort of in the healthcare space. A lot of you know me already, but I'm an epidemiologist and biostatistician. And so if you're new to learning SAS, so first of all, if you're not new to learning SAS, then you already know SAS. You kind of know what I'm going to be talking about, but you want to stick around to really see what everybody's saying about SAS now. Because if you've been using SAS, that means you've maybe been using it since the maybe 80s, maybe 90s, maybe 2000s. Some people have been using it that long and you have a really different view of it than when you're just starting with it. So when was I just starting with it? I was just starting with it in the early 2000s. If you're just starting with it now, you might be able to relate to the story. Okay. So when in about 2000, if you went to a College of Public Health and you went to learn SAS, this is what would happen. Okay, is you would take a biostatistics class that would meet in a classroom like Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. And then you'd have a lab that would meet on like Saturday or something for a long time and it would meet in the computer room at the school. When you sat down at that lab, there would be somebody like a teaching assistant at the front who's a biostatistician, and that person would teach you like how to log into the SAS server. So you'd have this command prompt, it would be kind of a black screen, and you'd be typing out, you know, there'd be a cursor and you'd go into SAS. And what you could do is you could create code and you could launch code. If you did that, you had to make sure that the code was mapping to the right data sets because the data sets would be on that server. So you'd be creating code on that server, running the SAS code against data sets on that server. And every time you did that, you know what you would have to do? You'd have to look at the log file, right, because you'd have to see if the code you executed worked. So you'd have to call that up. Remember this is all command prompt. And also, what about your results? You know, let's say you ran proc-free, you look for two-way frequencies. Well, you'd have to also type that in to call that up.  The problem is in the year 2000, we already had it like Microsoft Access and I was running Microsoft Access databases. So these are databases that kind of look like, you know, Microsoft Wordbooks, or Microsoft Excel, like today. When I was learning this and I was going, oh, you mean we don't have any windows or like, you know what I mean? Like because I had these expectations I got from Microsoft Access. And I was like, are we really going to keep doing this? I mean, isn't there going to be a more Microsoft Access-y like version of SAS? Well, the answer was kind of, yeah. I just needed to wait about a year or two when they came out with PC SAS. So PC SAS, you installed on your computer, you can even install it on pretty powerful laptop. And when you would run it, you'd run it as an application and it really kind of did look a little like Windows XP. Oh, I see someone in the chat. Oh, hi, Ebenezer's in the chat. Everybody say hi to Ebenezer. He is my fan and colleague and a great digital marketer. If you ever need digital marketing and science-based contact Ebenezer. All right, so PC SAS was like wonderful because I was so like done with the command prompt stuff because I wanted to look at the log file and the output and everything at the same time. I wanted to look like Access. And so PC SAS was all Windows-y and looked like that. And so I was really happy, right? But think about it. It's PC SAS. So what happened to the server and this whole networking idea I just was talking about. Remember when you go on the command prompt and your data is on the server? Like everything's on the server. It's this beautiful SAS environment.  So that's what I was thinking back in 2000. So just to recap, there was this weird command prompt stuff going on. They gave me PC SAS at school. I loved it. It looked really Microsoft Access-y, Microsoft Word-y and stuff. But I was wondering what's going to happen if you try to network this, okay? So if you kind of remember the evolution of the internet, you know, the internet was there in 2000, but you really couldn't put data online.  So when they sold stuff, it would update and they had the worst time. And this must have been before 2003 because I was living in Minnesota and this was happening in Minnesota. So then I moved to Florida, which was totally a mistake, but that's another story. But anyway, so, you know, data handling on the web was just not good. So people didn't really have databases on the web. So this early period of PC SAS, you know, I never really thought about SAS serving to the web. I was like, why, you know, it never even occurred to me. But now think about it, that's the big deal, like serving data to the web, interacting with the web and SAS and everything. So when I was back then, I was going, okay, what is the future of this? And I wasn't saying it like in a negative way. I was just saying, like, we clearly need the analytics, like SAS analytics is amazing. So how are we going to get that analytics by the data and by the team without a SAS server? Because I can't build a SAS server on my laptop, right? So now fast forward is 2023. Let's say you're newly learning SAS now. You might have like similar kind of thoughts because even though maybe you're learning SAS Viya or maybe using SAS ODA, the free version on the web. Let's just admit it, it really doesn't handle like modern programs, right? It really feels very legacy, you know? So how are we going to do this now? How are we like SAS Viya exists on the web, SAS ODA exists on the web, which is amazing. You'll hear me go on and on about that, how awesome that is. But like, okay, now what are we going to do? Like now SAS has met us, you know, met R and Python and SQL and stuff on the web. And now how do we work with it? Like, what do we do? Like SAS wouldn't use literally for many things for decades, okay? But some of those uses now, I'm so you'll, if you showed up to some of my earlier lectures, you'd find that there were components that were so amazing and SAS 20 years ago, that now if you adapted them, you're kind of like, oh my God, how do we get out of here? Because even though they're still awesome, it's like the world around SAS changed and now there's something like way better. And you'll see this when I go through the research I did for this presentation, what I mean by that. Well, before we continue, I just want to make sure you know about that I'm holding free online workshop and application basics for SAS integration. So what is it? You can see the sessions on the slide. It's three sessions. They're going to be like two to three hours because I don't know how many people show up. It might be longer, so you'll budget for three hours. So, and it's Monday, Wednesday and Friday next week. And it starts at noon Eastern time, because I think that's probably the best time for everybody internationally. So what's going to happen at the workshop? The workshop is based on an actual online course that I developed that's part of my data science mentoring program. So if you want to elevate your skills and data science and produce portfolio projects and actually do some real world applied projects, you're going to want to check out my mentoring program. But what this this workshop, it just takes one of the courses from that mentoring program because there's a foundation courses. And I'm actually going to teach it to you. So it's an online course. You can go through it on your own, but I'm going to teach it to you so you don't have to. And what I'm going to do is talk the courses exactly like mainly about applications. So if you're like me and you came through like master's public health or you learn biostatistics, whatever, you probably didn't learn about how computer applications are built or about business applications. And so it becomes really difficult then if you want to do application integration. Oh, that's great Michael that you're interested here. I'll follow up with you afterwards and we'll connect. That sounds good. Wonderful. Yeah, so, you know, we as we move forward in health analytics and public health. We the word application now we're going whoa somebody's using their diabetes application somebody else's, you know, saving their steps in their steps application. You know, how are we going to take that data. Of course we're going to want to put in SAS right eventually like if you want to make a model. How are we going to put SAS in that pipeline. And that's the it's sort of like the agony and ecstasy of SAS.  And if you're new SAS you're going to start cheering because I have bad news for old people new people unfortunately. But anyway, if you just want the news, please sign up for this online workshop. It'll be a blast because we'll all get to discuss the thing about making application pipelines. Yeah, there's a lot of technicality do it but it's really design it's really thinking. Like I'm an epidemiologist and if you've heard of like Bradford Hill causal criteria, you know, it's really doing that kind of head work into figuring out how you're going to make your application pipeline and make your dashboard saying or make your analytics gorgeous or whatever. Okay, so you'll have fun. I guarantee you'll have fun if you show up at this workshop. So, and please hurry up and sign up because it starts tomorrow. Alrighty, so now I'll get back to the regularly scheduled program. And I'm actually checking the chat I'm learning how to use zoom. So please feel free to ask questions that I might even notice. Okay, so today, what if you are new to SAS so I just griped about how freaked out I was learning SAS 20 years ago when I was like going oh my God this is current and Brahms and I just am using access over here. You know, like I was, I don't know, you know how like sometimes young people have like really high expectations of technology I've got to come down from it now. But I said, you know, I need to refresh myself I need to figure out what it would be like if I were that today. So I went on Reddit and I put the link in the slide but it's really not important who is actually saying these things so I just kind of cover their names. What's important is the points they're making. And this is actually a two year old post, but you know SAS kind of moves slow so I think the stuff still applies. And so the question around I went on Reddit, you know Reddit is kind of the social media where people talk anonymously and very frankly they tend to talk very openly. I'm not a big Reddit user but I found this and I thought this is great so just to step back. Reddit why would I be using evidence from Reddit well part of the problem was what I started looking for was just reviews of SAS, like people just writing up like Gartner writing up oh SAS as this new component or whatever. And I actually just cannot really find anything like I found a lot of marketing material from SAS and case studies from SAS but the problem is they were not you know if you're in the open source community you're really used to seeing very technical marketing stuff. Even if they're not really selling anything like if you're a consulting company that sells like our integration right like you'll do services. When you talk about like our packages you use you talk about how awesome they are and it's not like you're really selling our you're selling kind of yourself right like that you can apply these packages, you know, and so it's sort of weird like how does SAS make a marketing message right and I think that they don't maybe don't realize that they have to get technical with us they have to start talking about their components and making diagrams so that's what I'm looking for that's what I really want to see. But, you know their private company so then how much do they want to share, you know, so I don't know what they're going to do about that but the bottom line was, I couldn't find like really good evidence based official just opinions of what they were doing or case studies or use cases. So I went on Reddit. Okay. So this is the question I picked and I think it's really good. The questioner says I just moved from Python to SAS for four months due to new job requirements. So I'm imagining this person's like a data scientist and maybe works on contracts and so Python. I don't know Python I know our but Python is open source, and it's pretty complex just like our so. So this person adopted SAS for four months for a project at a job. And they asked you so they had four months of experience with it and they asked I wonder how you think SAS compared with other languages in a future. So I'm going to sort of interpret why I think this person was asking this is because they probably had this experience that the SAS was really challenging, where to buy that. And we're like wondering should I now that I know four months of SAS, and it's hard. Should I throw myself in the SAS, or should I just back away from it's to her. And the short answer I would say to that person is depends on how you feel like if you really like SAS. If you had a good experience and you want to throw yourself in the SAS, I would say do it.   It doesn't matter which person you are either person throws yourself in the SAS or not. There's a place for you data science. So that's the short answer. But now I'm going to, I'm sort of going to frame it. Should you throw yourself into mastering a challenging data science programming language that has been around since the 1970s. So that's maybe what this person is asking. And so I, in 2000 that's still a good question, right. So, 20 years ago it didn't matter whether I said yes or no to that question because SAS is still here. We're all still using it and at the time it was the only game in town now it's a question right like we've got Python and everything. But like I said, the advice I give this questioner is if they enjoyed SAS, you know, they liked it and they saw a future for themselves and then, yeah, throw yourself into it because there's going to be a role for you. But if you really don't like it, I don't know if you're going to like having a whole career in SAS. But that's, but what's different about SAS today. And that's sort of what I'm going to say is, is in the olden days, you kind of had to be in for a penny in for a pile of SAS like you had to set up a SAS service shop, and then just keep living in the SAS environment, and not really integrate, not use SQL, not use other things. Or you had to just figure something else out, which there wasn't anything else like if you really need to do analytics and you just think about the SAS, right. But nowadays, SAS is different because we have Viya, right.  I don't know much about Oracle NetSuite, but just the word NetSuite made me think, oh, maybe this is like online Oracle. If it's online Oracle, just think how easy that would be to integrate with online SAS, like SAS Viya.  Which is what you wanted in the first place. So I'm kind of getting in my head of myself, but that's sort of what's beautiful and new.  So one of the things that kind of disappointed me was I found sort of a theme that open source solutions work better and are cheaper right now. So, for example, let's say you have a problem, like you need to do principal component analysis. And you don't, you haven't done it. And these people suggest go look for an open source solution before you turn to SAS, even if you have a SAS job. So this one person said that their department got rid of SAS due to infrastructure issues and high costs, and that they converted all the SAS workflows into Python and saved a lot of money. The reason I put this up there is I wasn't sure you could do that. Like I didn't even, I wasn't sure you could do that. I wasn't sure that was even possible. So the fact that that person said they did it, and they said they did it two years ago, I'm like, okay, well, maybe not in every shop but it definitely was possible in that shop. And in the next shop where it says my company's doing the same thing. Now this is something really interesting. This person says they are porting everything over to Python and some stuff to nine. My understanding is nine is a platform you can do AI on and other automation, which is open source. Okay. So word porting. Okay, I have not heard anybody use that term, since I was like a teenager. So I'm like, okay, that we say migrating now, we don't really say porting but when I was little, you know, because we're stealing software we poured it over from one system to another. You know, I mean it's bad but you know but you couldn't even buy it that's the thing is you go to computer stores and they wouldn't even sell the software. So the problem is if today you've got a problem and you want to solve it with SAS, you're probably going to get it's easier for you to get a return on investment with an open source solution. Now just make, here's the fair comparison. Okay. SAS costs a lot of money but they give you a lot of support. They give you a product and support like they'll come and help you like SAS whenever I've worked somewhere where SAS we have SAS, they are like hands on helping me they're on the phone, you know. So I love that about them and when you get spoiled of that, and you're fighting with our Python, you miss it. Okay. So SAS is not just software it's support it's a whole bunch of other things. Okay, but still it is easier to get ROI with an open source solution, even if you dump a lot of effort into it, because of certain structural barriers basically because of that whole SAS environment thing. You know, if you're outside the SAS environment. It's really hard to get good IO in and out of the SAS environment so it's just. So this is, this is a big problem for SAS right now. You know what I mean, like that you can have open source solutions to some of the things that they sell to you, and the open source solutions are cheaper and easier to implement. It's not everything, certainly not everything, but that's some of the problem with some of what SAS is sold. Like, there are times in the past where those components were awesome like if you think about the output delivery system. Oh my God amazing. But now the output delivery system I'm sorry like it's old fashioned so if you're depending on it in your workflow, it's like what are you going to do now, you know. Even people in SAS shops are trying open source solutions first before looking at adding SAS components for all these reasons for the structural reasons for the fact that you actually have to pay SAS to the component. You know, then you have to change your workflow so I would keep recommending that but that's not going to work each time. Okay. Now this is kind of a problem. And I think SAS is undergoing an identity. I don't know if I want to call it crisis but an identity shift. I think they're really trying to change their image, because they don't have a very good image among like influencers.  I'm like I have a book about SAS. I'm a LinkedIn learning author on SAS. Like, that doesn't pay me, they threaten me. So I'm like, you know, you can't go around doing stuff like that, and get people to love you and want to like your posts and stuff SAS, you know what I'm saying and so that's my rant about SAS. And this is that rant, if you look at it from a different point of view sounds like what these people are saying person one two and three. I put like you can download the slides and see their entire ran. But basically SAS is kind of spoiled because, like I said before, it was really cool to have that SAS environment if you had a SAS server you're very happy. And you could just add components you could fill it up with data that thing just ran like, beautiful, like it was beautiful. I love you. You know, I love going to that computer room using the SAS server just go so fast and it had everything you wanted. But the problem is, they didn't really innovate until it was too late like they kind of didn't get on and started realizing that are and Python were kind of competing with them. And so one of the people, these people are saying SAS is always trying to sell us some expensive add on that doesn't work as well as Python or our solutions.  Now, if you need to make a dashboard or something why would you use SAS why not use Python there are and so. And if you come to SAS you're like we need to make a dashboard they'll try to sell you something that's not going to make you a dashboard as good as Python or art. So, then people get mad at SAS when they act like that, you know, then the other problem was it's hard to do remote work with SAS. But to be honest with you that only applies to legacy server setups. If you are in startup and you buy like SAS Viya and you are completely on that on the web. I'm sure remote work will be like no problem. The problem is, is if you had one of those beautiful SAS environments, those are physical environments right, and you can, you know, like tunnel into them, you know, like, tell that kind of stuff, but it's not really like, it's not like we're used to doing remote work like you're in the SAS environment like and you have to navigate it is really, I've done that and it's really like awkward and stuff is a little passion. It's like easier to just be on site at those SAS servers, and there's SAS consultants you can just hire them to come to your site and do stuff, you know, but then do you really want to like adopt server SAS today and the answer is no don't start a new SAS server. That's not a good idea today. The reason why anybody needed to put data on SAS servers was because you needed to serve it to the analytics component as efficiently as possible so you don't have IO problems. Now, you can serve it to SAS Viya from Oracle NetSuite or whatever. So you don't need to build a SAS server but if you have one. Like what are you going to do now, right? I guess hire consultants like need to come over and see if we can take care with your server. Person three, I'm sort of like paraphrasing what they said is now this is another problem. We can't find someone with the necessary SAS skills, but we already built everything in SAS so we were stuck. And so that's why if you happen to be the kind of person who's new to SAS and you're like, wow, this is a really interesting program. These products are really interesting. I'd love to automate stuff in macro language. I'd love to learn all of these components. I'd really like to make pipelines in SAS. If you're feeling that run after that feeling, throw yourself into SAS. And you probably, I mean, there's only so much you can do on your own outside of an organization, but if you can get yourself into a SAS using organization like most pharma organizations in that way, you can just have a blast. Like if that's where you're at, there are just so many solutions you can build in a SAS environment. And so, and you'll get paid a lot because like every time I look for the last 10 years, people are not becoming SAS users. They're not adopting SAS. New people are like, no thanks, I'll go to Python, I'll go to R. You can just download them. You can download R in Python and just use it. Of course you can use SAS ODA on the web, but it's not like there's a whole open source community behind SAS ODA telling you what to do. And although if you read my book, Mastering SAS Programming for Data Warehousing, I'll show you how to take my free online course. I'll show you how to do it. But yeah, so if you like SAS, the future is yours. You'll just keep getting more and more money in your salary. But another problem is that will only work. You'll keep getting more and more money in your salary if the SAS shop stays SAS shops, right? So one of the other problems that they were running into was that it actually from one of my earlier lectures, some SAS shops are just running out of money. They just can't pay. SAS keeps increasing their prices. Of course, it costs money to run a business. But people just can't pay, or I should say people, organizations can't pay. So what they start to do is sort of make, take some of their operations, like especially visualizations and stuff, and start like taking them out of SAS and moving them, migrating them to R, migrating them to Python, maybe migrating some data storage to SQL. They start just migrating some pieces out of the SAS environment, some functions too. But think about it. If that's going to happen, you still need to know how to use SAS really well. Because instead of operating in the environment, you're going to have to get stuff out of the environment, and you're going to have to know SAS and something else, because you're going to have to study the SAS version and then rebuild it in Python or R. So that's all going to be going on. So these are legacy SAS shops. That's activity that's going to be going on at all of them. So one person made this observation, or two people made this observation, that SAS, I quoted this, SAS being intertwined with education was a big deal. And I do want to emphasize that. That is why a lot of SAS users who learn SAS in college don't know much about applications in general, right? Because if, I mean, theoretically you could learn a lot of informatics in a few classes and a master's in public health or a master's in biostatistics. But the reality is SAS is so hard to use that you spend all your classes learning SAS, although I've been told that it's a little different now that they're trying to introduce R and Python into these course curricula. But how SAS got to be such a monopoly over education is to really start in the education space. And really, you need to have a university to run a SAS server. And, you know, if university are running a SAS server, they have all the components. And the idea was, you know, if I'm at the University of South Florida using their SAS server and I can use their geographic stuff, and I can use their sentiment analysis stuff, and I can play with SAS Enterprise Guide or whatever.  I can't use the USF server anymore. So I'm going to want to go to a workplace that has SAS, and I'm going to tell them I want this, you know, SAS Enterprise Guide and everything. And theoretically, that's kind of worked really well actually for SAS, because not only have they always been intertwined with education, they've also been intertwined with the government. Like, I was sort of curious about, like, I was reading some stuff. I don't know a lot about CDISC, you know, these different pharma standards, because they're sort of new for me, like I'm that old, right? And what I realized is that SAS had a lot, like SAS was part of writing those standards. Well, that actually answered a question in my mind. And that question was why about 10 years ago, there was kind of a kerfuffle in the R community that people were using R for clinical trials, and they were having trouble going through the FDA with their results. And I thought it was because the SAS engine is super amazingly awesome. Like that engine, when it calculates stuff, it calculates up to five zillion p-values, okay? And I don't think R does that. So that's what I thought they were talking about. But what really they were talking about is they just didn't trust people to rebuild the SAS macros and other programs and have them perform the same.  But the blacker box would be SAS, right? And so now I better understand that. So I want to make sure you understand that SAS as a company is extremely powerful, and therefore they're involved in education, they're involved in the government, they're involved in these standards and stuff. So for better, for worse, they're not going away. And if you embrace them, you will get the benefits of knowing SAS because they're in everything, right? So that's the positive. The negative is you're going to have to know not just SAS, okay? Hopefully I've just convinced you of that.  The reality is encroaching upon SAS and you have to do integration. Like you're going to have to do some integration. Even if you're a SAS shop, even if you've got a server, you're going to have to do something like it's never, you can't just keep buying SAS components, it's not going to work. So I mean, even if you say, okay, well, I want to migrate to Viya, okay, that's a whole enterprise because what if you want to put your data from the SAS server into the cloud? Well, that's whole shebang right there. And so what I'm just saying is that even if you throw yourself and you're like, I'm going to be the SAS superstar that saves the day for all of these legacy server places that has the creative solutions that does all that. Well, the problem is you're going to have to get a whole lot of other training in informatics that you didn't get in your master's in public health, your master's in training. You know, that's not statistics. That's informatics. That's like business systems and stuff, which is why my free workshop. This is basically an advertisement for it. So another thing, like I'm in healthcare and epidemiology, I was actually surprised not surprised that people were saying that finance and banks are stuck in SAS. I know healthcare second SAS for these other structural reasons. But these people are saying that banks are second SAS. People in healthcare are not so negative about using SAS, like SAS is pretty cool.  Well, they don't like it, these banking people. And the second person says banks got comfortable. And Nersha did the rest. Most banking models don't need more than proc reg anyway, due to regulations requiring interpretability. You know, and so it really looks to me like in the finance industry, SAS is really not the right solution. They don't even really need it. So I don't even know what's going to go on there. And it takes a while, like if even if you want to leave SAS and do something else, even just for a function, like, let's say that you have a, you have a set of reports, right.  And let's say you decide, okay, well, let me just generate the report and instead hand it off to our Python to have them serve at the reports of the web. Oh my God, that is a huge, huge task because the first step is to break down whatever SAS was doing and super document it. And then the second thing is to go try to build it in our on the web or whatever. And then you got to do that validation thing is so much work. But if you save money and save time and your users are happy and you don't have to buy some component next year. Well done work because you can probably, as the web evolves, you can probably keep that report going. But I don't know if you can keep that report going in a SAS environment. So that's kind of the way I would see that. So finally, we have the SAS champion. So I've read to you a lot of negative stuff about SAS, but I don't see negative stuff as saying negative stuff. I see it as opportunity. There's a lot of opportunity in SAS right now, just for even what I just described, like breaking down macros and figuring out what they're doing. You know, and you can use open source software to help you with that. You can use SAS to help you with that too. And if you actually work at a place that has SAS, they have SAS licenses. You can call SAS. Like, I have to tell you that the people at SAS have been really helpful to me. So and you'll hear that they have a really good reputation for helping people. So I can't oversell that more. Like if you actually have SAS, you should really lean into it at a workplace because we don't have it at home, right? Okay, so this first person said, I just kind of summarized what they said, SAS works, and though our in Python are better at something, SAS will still be around for a while. And I would say where you really want to look at SAS is as a competitor to, and this is my opinion, and I don't know if I'm off on the deep end, but a competitor is something like AWS or like big analytics. So imagine you have something like a snowflake setup, like a cloud storage setup. And how does your data get in there? It gets in there from like a sales, a big sales, like database, okay? So now you've got, you've got everything sort of in the SQL format, relational database and snowflake, which is cloud storage.  Maybe you're selling like apps or something or selling, I don't know, something online. Okay. And then you want to ask business questions of your snowflake data, but your snowflake data maybe is relational. So maybe you want to change it shape into like a warehouse or something. And then now what? You can just lay that right on top. And now you're doing the big data thing, and you don't need a server. And so that's sort of like kind of what I'm, you know, thinking about is that SAS will be around for a while, but maybe we need to get creative with how to use it. So person two said SAS works, but only big companies can afford to keep paying for it and supporting it. And there's a doing the labor pool.  I hope they have good pricing for small business because they did not have good pricing for small businesses for PC SAS 20 years ago. It was really accessible. I really hope that they have. But remember you have SAS ODA, which is free. So always play around with that. If you have public data and you want to try something, definitely use that. But then the other side of what person two says is that you're going to really need SAS users forever. And they're going to need to be really good at everything. They're going to need to be good at macros, reporting, enterprise guide, enterprise minor. You know, all of that data management data steps, you know, because look at all the problems we have, right? We have people migrating on the SAS. We have new people adopting SAS via like so there's all this activity in the in the future near future. It's just weird activity. It's like some like legacy people will be like exiting a lot of SAS and new people will be adopting SAS in a new way. So it's just going to be like really chaotic in my opinion. Oh, and Quentin's adds that he has a long back. So Quentin's in our local Boston SAS user group. And he says very true. SAS support is amazing. With SAS software you get validated software backed up by free technical support. And again, what's especially awesome about that is when you're trying to build pipeline solutions in your shop, you can literally call SAS and they'll be they'll collaborate with you like they'll help you because they're trying to sell you components and stuff, but they're not just trying to sell they're trying to sell you solutions. So one of the biggest problems I saw with SAS shops is that the SAS shop itself was lazy. Like they were lazy.   And so part of it is that like though that banking thing I'll bet those people in the ID department there just don't even care. And so, but on the other hand, if you that's what I say if you want to lean into SAS they were so happy to help you. I mean, if you are paying customer, they will help you because they know you're paying a lot and they do want to use their components. And it's not necessarily their components are not necessarily better than other things. But if you're in a SAS environment, usually their components are going to work better for you as a first pass. I don't know how SAS is about demoing things but I would say if you're in a server environment and they're trying to sell you a component demo it see if you can demo it because or if it's in Viya, you know, it might run better than an open source solution. Like you just don't know. So, so don't, don't make assumptions. That's one of the things I learned at SAS is, first of all, SAS has an awesome log file. Let me just shout out to the log file. It's very easy to collect data about how your SAS code runs. So do it, you know, try different environments actually do scientific studies because remember if you're running five zillion reports and you can shorten that each report by like one second just think about how much that matters right. So this inertia is the main reason why companies use SAS today, instead of migrating. And I would say that that is true about, maybe not all of SAS but like the components you probably shouldn't be having in your SAS environment anymore. This person over here on the right side of the slide says something really hilarious. When SAS has a problem they just pretend it is a new way of doing analysis. They used to be kind of guilty of that. But I think now they're getting, they're coming around to being more realistic. Like they understand, you know, SAS didn't have any competition for a very long time. Like I like to clarify. I learned SQL like in the early 2000s. And I already knew SAS. So I kind of knew access and I learned SAS and I was analyzing stuff and then I learned SQL. And so I was sitting down I was doing a SQL query. And if you know SQL, like you can do a count query where you take like a, like a categorical variable and you can count it, right. And I remember I was sitting in a SQL classroom and I was like, oh, look, I did a count query. And then I was like, then I said to the teacher, I was like, oh, how do you do crosstabs? It's like a crosstabs. I'm like, yeah, like this is like gender by like education group. And he's like, I don't know if you can do that in SQL. And that's when it started to hit me. Like, Brock Freak is amazing. Like you can't, I mean, you could do it in SQL. And I even once met this guy who was trying to impress me. He was at a statistics conference and he was saying, guess what, I programmed an ANOVA and a linear regression in SQL. And it didn't impress me. I was like, whoa, you did that? Like, and he's like, yeah, it took like all night to run. And then I was thinking, oh my gosh, like that's SAS, like that's SAS analytics is right there. That's the difference between SAS and SQL. But on the other hand, in SQL, you don't need a million commands to just do a query, right? Like it's not data stepping. So that's the kind of issue, right, is like data storage versus analytics. So you can still get the SAS tools to work for you today. But besides the real analytics, the hardware analytics, it's kind of hard and expensive. And they're generally better open source tools. So this is the challenge. If you've got a legacy shop, you're going to have to just relook at your shop and just see what to do right going forward. And also, businesses changed, right? Like print shops? Like what do print shops do now? So these are business changes that need to be reflected in your data system. And that's just the pain that we all have to go through, I think. But the take home message I would leave for everybody is that SAS is the cobalt of health data science, and that's not an insult. It's just a reality. So my mom was a cobalt programmer. And by the way, cobalt is a really elegant program, she tells me. Although keep a lot of documentation, which I would say about SAS too. And during COVID-19, you may have noticed a lot of unemployment systems around the US just broke. Like they couldn't print unemployment checks. They couldn't do stuff. Well, my mom said a lot of those systems are actually in cobalt. And there was just nobody to program that cobalt. And my mom didn't want to do it. She's done with that. So I mean, I told her you can make a lot of money, but she's not into that. But if you are into making a lot of money, you could do that. Like you could prepare for that inevitability. Like where you're the SAS expert and there aren't really any. Because it's kind of going fast. Like the real SAS experts, like when I was at the Army, I was there working there from 2008 to 2011. And we had the super, super duper SAS expert. And she actually was retiring. Like if I had kept working there, we would have had to replace her. And she's like an indicative of that generation of SAS programmers. Those people just retiring. And the new people are not like throwing themselves into SAS at high rates that same way. So part of what I'm trying to tell you is if you're new to SAS and you're liking it and you're seeing this vision that I'm describing and you want to be on that train, this is what you could be doing. Like in a lot of like future times, you might be saving people's like data. You might be saving their research projects the way cobalt programmers could have been saving people's unemployment. So to be clear, SAS alone is not the future. There's no future in setting up a SAS server today, a physical one. There's no future in setting up today. I mean, it's just we're on the internet at a different time. But the future is probably in SAS analytics because you can imagine probably pretty easily a situation where somebody goes online and they go to do sales transaction and they're overpricing it. You know, like their pricing, like for surge pricing, like tickets, right? And that request gets handed off to SAS analytics to run a little AI program and come back with a price. That's the highest price I'm going to pay for that ticket given the features of my variables. You can see that handoff going back and forth to buy us. So somebody's going to have to actually build that, right? Somebody's going to have to design that somebody's going to have to figure out the AI or even, you know, what I think is so funny about AI is we always had framing ham. I mean, that's just like risk scores and stuff we could be doing that and it's a lot simpler than AI. I guess that's explainable AI. But anyway, I mean, this is what SAS is for and we can do it now. We can really, we don't have to sit in a doctor's office filling out a little risk score thing. We can literally hand off real-time questions. Real-time questions to SAS Viya have it run the algorithm handed back to us like it's a dream, but it's not the dream we were originally having. So now the future looks more like, to me, is trying to get data out of SAS servers and into the cloud so we can do the thing I was just describing, right? And so there's a big opening in the future for SAS users. And so I would just say if you're SAS users, you should go and take advantage of it. All right. Well, thank you for putting up with me talking so long. I'm not talking this long. But anyway, I guess there's a lot to say about SAS. I just want to remind you I'm Monica Wahee and I'm a SAS user, but I use a lot of other things that you could tell. And I want to encourage you to sign up for my online workshop. It starts tomorrow, so hurry up and sign up if you want it. It's free. And especially if any of the topics I said today really stimulate your thinking, just sign up and come to it and we'll be discussing exactly those topics. Well, thank you so much for showing up today and I hope you have a good rest of your Sunday. I'll see you using the link in the description.


Good morning everyone. We're up before the sun, so there's not much to show you outside. Hopefully the sun decides to join us at some point during the day. We got to go to Arberg. Arberg, Manitoba. I'm gonna pick up a load. Apparently it's going to be quite a while. They warned me in advance that it takes quite a while to get loaded, so maybe I'll get a nap. Well, I don't know if they need me to like to actively help the whole time, but it could take they said up to six, seven hours or so to load, which is fine because they warned me in advance, right? So I could plan ahead and okay, I agreed to this. It's not just like, yeah, go get loaded and then it takes all day. They wouldn't do that to me. Not on purpose anyway. But anyway, so we got to go up there. I'm hoping I can get a nap or something. If not, that's fine too. Man's got to work. Let's get going. Arberg is two hours north of me, where I am here in southern Manitoba. Well, I missed my opportunity to take the detour because I didn't know traffic was stopping here. This is TransCanada 1. Something must have happened. I see a fire truck on that side of the road over there parked. I saw one car in the ditch a few miles back. There must be slippery sections on the road right now, which I wouldn't, I wouldn't be surprised. I haven't quite noticed the slipperiness yet. Maybe I've just got better tires. I knew that it's winter time, right? There are going to be slippery sections. So you drive as if the whole road is ice. But somebody woke up this morning and forgot that it was December. Hopefully everybody's okay. Man, I wish I would have taken the service road. Could have gotten around this whole mess. I just saw brake lights down the road in front of me, right? And I thought everyone was slowing down. I didn't know we're going to come to a dead stop. So now we're right between roads, right? There's mile roads. Every mile there's a road that crosses the highway. And then that road would let me get onto that road over there. We might get to the next one. Jump on there. It depends how far ahead this accident is. This guy's got some squeaky brakes. Oh, squeaky, squeaky. That's not me. I don't know what's going on here. I know this Mercedes is really getting impatient in front of me. And he wants to blow by everybody on the shoulder, but there's people parked on the shoulder up ahead here. I don't know if they're involved in this accident or what, but this guy and those guys are blocking the emergency lane for if an ambulance needs to get by, you always have to leave the shoulder open so that ambulance and emergency vehicles can get by in the backup. So often you see people either parked on the shoulder like this or driving on the shoulder, plugging it up, and then the ambulance can't get through, right? You can actually get a pretty big fine for that. In that case, you're blocking emergency personnel and you don't want to get caught doing that. Oh, I see. In the ditch off to our left, there is a pickup truck upside down by the looks of it. Oh, no. Shoot. So these guys stopped here might have been witnesses and they're just sticking around to give their way, which is nice of them to do. You know, they got to be at work this morning, too, but it's nice to be able to, you know, give your witness statement into the place just so people know what's going on, especially if somebody caused this, you know, so that the correct person gets punished for causing an accident or injuries. It's always good to have witnesses to counsel what happened. I'm not sure if you're going to be able to see the pickup because it's behind these off to my left here. It's behind that white pickup right there, but we're stopped here, though. So there's vehicles in the ditch here off to our left, but we're also stopped because there must be something up ahead. There must have been some kind of pile up or something. This is a very busy highway, so it's going to back up fast. Watch this Mercedes in front of me. He's going to, he's going to cut out onto the shoulder right away. Oh, it's just going to get past this pickup. Oh, no, they're not upside down. There's just two cars from the ditch. Block your view of it. Sorry, guys. Of course, right? Of course. Oh, you got rear ended. Okay. So traffic must have been out of stop. And then there was a pickup truck that rear ended. A four door sedan there. Put your phone down, right? I bet you anything, Ed. His phone in his hand. I bet you anything. Oh, this guy with his brakes. Yikes. He's been beside me this whole time. So, okay, so this accident wasn't what's causing the back up here. I got to close my window. This guy's brakes beside me or just been there, but I know. Don't worry about it. I'm in there. So I don't know what's going on, man. I thought for sure this Mercedes was going to jump out on the shoulder, but I think because there's cops right off to our left here, this accident, I think that's why he's holding back. It went to our little further ahead and the cops are further behind us. I bet you anything he's going to jump on the shoulder.  I really need to get going though. I don't got too much time to play with. I got to be up in Arbor before 10. He said between eight and 10 and I had arranged it perfectly now that I would get there at about quarter after eight, maybe 8.30 with some delays. This has been a delay. So we still have time. I just, I didn't want to get there right at 10. Like that. They gave me a two hour window, which is nice of them. I didn't want to use up that whole two hour window and show up right at the end, just barely making it. Because yeah, if it's going to take them six, seven hours to load me, they obviously want me there early enough that they can get me loaded before end of day, right? 10, 11, 12, 1, 2, 3, 4. Yeah, if it takes six or seven hours, we'll be loading until four or five or later. Yikes. Yeah, I got to get moving. I got to get, everybody, I got to get moving. Don't you know I'm in a hurry? Don't you know? I want to get on that service road. I wish I could just drive through the ditch. I don't think I'd make it. My steer tires would cut right into that ditch and get stuck.  It'd look pretty bad if I would jump the ditch. No, we won't do that. We won't do that. The idea crossed my mind, but just because the idea crossed my mind doesn't mean I'm going to do it. Keeps thinking about it. Keep an eye on our right side there. Come someone who's impatient. There he comes. Oh, oh, are you going to follow him? I know you want to. I know you want to, but you know you're not supposed to. He's so conflicted, you know? It's like he wants to do it. Oh, and that guy cut into traffic up ahead of us there. That just boils your blood, doesn't it? Put down all the way down on the shoulder and cuts into traffic up ahead just to beat some of the rush. Meanwhile, all of these people are nicely waiting in line. Oh, I get it. I get why you want to stop them, right? Makes your blood boil. Every person here is feeling the same way. Yeah, it wants to get in front of me. I saw you rushing around people on the shoulder, buddy. I shouldn't be letting you in. Do I get a thank you wave at least? Oh, I do. Oh, okay.  Okay. I saw you cheat and getting around traffic on the shoulder behind me. I shouldn't have let you in. At least he said thank you. So this is what's causing all of this here. Hell by people the way they drive on Deacon's Corner now we're on the east side of Winnipeg. Oh, and this guy's just flying up beside me too. Dude, did you not just see that accident? Slippery out here. It's people foggy. That doesn't help. Maybe that's sort of what played a factor in that accident. Maybe it was foggy, but no, no, no, no, no. It's not that foggy. It's not that foggy. If you look both ways, you should still see headlights coming unless the guy who hit him was running without his headlights on. Who knows? I just hope everyone's okay. If there was anyone in that passenger seat, they would have definitely been hurt, but hopefully they'll be okay if there was. Man, hate seeing that stuff. So I've arrived. I had to back into their yard here, leaving enough room on the side here for vehicles to get through. I believe I'm picking up these trailers here or someone similar to it. I don't know. They're just on break right now. They're going to come out and greet me right away and figure out what's going on. I'm here messing around with my wabasto bunk heater again. Trying to get the thing fired up again. If you remember from last week, I've been having trouble with it. It needs service really badly. The burner is probably a little bit filled with such or something. So it has a hard time igniting.  And then it's hard to get it going again. It's getting service soon, but I just, I don't have the time now to do it. I'm going to get it done when the old blue gets service next.  But in the meantime, I'm hoping I can get this heater going. It doesn't want to fire up at all today now. Sort of tempted of just getting it going and just leaving it on, just constantly burning. That's probably not good either, but at least it's on then, right? I can turn it way down during the day. So that's just giving a light, a light heating in the cab and then turn it up at night so I can shut the truck off. Not good to leave those things running forever and ever either, but it's only for a little while, a couple of weeks, I'm hoping. I just need to keep this thing going for a couple of weeks. I haven't been able to get it going today yet, but we'll get there. The weather's cleared up at least, right? So that's good, no more fog and the roads were good and dry by the time we got up here. Oh, I hear the bunk heater starting now. I don't know if you can hear that or not. Okay, so it has lit. It's just for the first couple of tries, it snuffs itself out. It'll start and then it'll snuff out and then I'll try again and it'll start and snuff out, start and snuff out until finally it gets warm enough that it keeps going. Let's see if we can get it going here because I might be sitting here for like six to eight hours, they said. So, well, here's a four-clean driver. I'm going to talk to him. See you in a bit. Okay, I had to straighten myself out a little bit here, but he's about to load me. I don't think it's going to take six to seven hours. They have it all stacked and ready. They're just going to plop it on the trailer and it looks like it'll be done, but I don't know, maybe there's something like, they have it all ready to go. It's going to plop it up on there and it looks like we'll be ready to go. So, I don't think it'll take that long. As for my bunk heater, fired up no problem, second try. I hope it's taste like that. I would rather not spend the money into it, but I know I have to. It needs to be serviced. It needs to be serviced. It's having issues. It needs to be cleaned out. Stuff, stuff happens, you know. It's always something. It's always, it's always something. They helped me tie it down. So, that was great. I didn't get a nap or anything. I thought I'd get to a nap and it didn't take six to seven hours. It took like maybe three. They were all ready for me, so they threw it on the trailer and we're ready to rock. So, we're about 10 miles north of Arbor. I'm going to go down to Arbor and then stop and check on everything. See how it's doing. Make sure that everything's still tight. And then I head over to Emo, Ontario, which is right close to Fort Francis where I always cross into International Falls, Minnesota. So, we'll go down there, unload first thing in the morning, and then I run up to Canora, grab some lumber, tarp it, and then head down to Brainerd, Minnesota with that. That's the plan for the next couple of days. This is Deacon's Corner, Petro Pass, on the east side of Winnipeg. This is where we were driving past this morning when that accident was slowing us down. Looks like they've got it all cleared up. That was a bad one, man. Someone got T-boned at highway speed, you could tell. Like, the passenger door was in the center of the vehicle. I hope no one was sitting in that passenger seat. Man, the driver looked like they'd probably have been okay. Probably it was scratches, bumps, bruises, concussion, maybe. Like, obviously from being hit. But the driver's seat looked like it would have been all right. But it was an older model car too without the side airbags. It was like an old green Taurus, like Ford Taurus. Anyway, we're here to just top off our fuel tanks. I just put in 150 liters, which is how many gallons? 39 gallons. Just enough to get me down to Emo and then get back up to Canora and then back down to Brainerd so I can fuel up a full tank in Brainerd tomorrow night or the next day, day after tomorrow. I'll get cheaper fuel down there. So I didn't fill it up completely. It was kind of close, but not completely. Just enough. Because I like to buy my fuel words cheaper.  I rant on and on about this all the time. I am the fuel bargain hunter. The Foo Argon, the Fargon Hunter. Or the Bargafool. Bargafool. I'm the Bargafool Hunter. Okay, I need to put the camera on. I'm starving. I'm going to go inside, grab some food, coffee. And we got another four, four and a half hours of drive today. So let's get her done. Do you see that truck parked right over there? That's where I was going to park. But that's okay. We're in Emo, Ontario and that's the gate where I got to deliver in the morning. Someone else is delivering there before me. They got to the gate first. So I'm just down the street. Like literally, you can see it from here, right? First thing in the morning, I guess I'll let him go in first. He's got two boats on the back of his trailer to unload. That'll probably take maybe a half hour or so. So they open up at eight. I'm guessing by 830 he'll probably be rolling out of there. I want to make sure that as soon as he rolls in the gate that I'm right in behind him that no one else sneaks in there. But if someone does, I mean, I'm parked right here, right? I don't have to move the truck until I see him move. So that my clocks don't get all messed up, right? Should work just fine. So we'll get this unloaded, be out of here before noon. Probably way before that. If I get in there at 830, get unloaded. It'll take a little longer to unload me because I got all these trailers. I'd say they'll probably have me unloaded in an hour, I would say hour, hour and a half tops. So 10 o'clock probably be out of here. An hour and a half back to Canora. 1130, noon. Back there for noon. Get loaded. It usually takes about two hours, two to three hours in Canora. Two to three o'clock be out of there. Come back past here, go through international falls down to Brainerd. That takes about six, seven hours. So three o'clock, nine o'clock, 10 o'clock we should be in Brainerd. If I start my day here at 830, I should have until 1030 when my 14 hour clock is up. And I can do all of that in less than 11 hours of driving. I'll be driving into the U.S. So where I'm stopping here, I have to stop for a consecutive 10 hours so that I'm legal to go into the U.S. tomorrow. And then I only have 11 hours to drive in one day once I get there within a 14 hour window. You following? I should be able to get there. Just barely. I should have like an hour or so left on my clock, hour, hour and a half maybe, depending on if there's any delays, right? So we should make it down to Brainerd tomorrow. And where I'm delivering, they unload until 10 o'clock. Shoot, I don't know if I'm going to make that. I'm going to have to rush. I'm going to have to rush. If I can get there by 10 o'clock because the night crew is there until like 2 in the morning, right? And they'll accept trucks in there. That's where you take the tarps off inside. They'll accept trucks until 10 o'clock. So I can get there by like 9, 9.30 at the latest. It takes six hours from here. I hope that it's fast when we get to Canora.  I could get there earlier, let's say like 8 o'clock. 8 o'clock's great. I'll get in there, get unloaded, get empty. And then first thing in the morning, I'll be ready for a reload, right? Okay, so tomorrow's going to be a rush day. Rush, rush, rush, rush. What day is not a rush day? Everybody wants their freight yesterday. It's definitely a different, it's a different beast. It's a different thing altogether on this regional stuff because I'm on a regional position now, right? But long distance is more relaxed.  No, no, no, no.  It's just rush, rush, rush, rush, rush. You want to squeeze as much possible revenue into the week as possible. Just grab it all in there so that you can get home on the weekend and perform all your honey-do lists. So the work never really stops. Plus, on the weekends, you got to take care of this again, right? Sometimes you got to take an extra day off so that this thing can go into the shop. There's always something to do. Kids, when you're living at home with mom and dad, take it from me. I've said this before, but take it from me once again. Enjoy it. Savor it. You're in school right now. Enjoy every second of it. I know you're excited to grow up, you're excited to get out on your own. I was to, and believe me, it's awesome. Being on your own as an adult is awesome. You can do whatever you want, whenever you want. Like I can eat as many cookies as I want to. No one's going to stop me. It's great. It's awesome. I have my own house, my own car. Now I have my own businesses. I'm my own person taking care of myself and my family. Growing up is awesome, but don't be in such a rush to get here. Because once you're here, you can never go back to there where you are. Never. You never get to go back to there. Now for the rest of my life, I have to make sure I'm the one in charge. I'm the adult. I'm the parent. I'm the husband. I'm the one that has to make sure that nothing goes wrong. All together with my wife. We're a team, right? We're a team. We work together. But all the responsibility falls on me now.  Whenever. You can wake up in the middle of the night and have six cookies. Who's going to stop me? I can do whatever I want. But at the same time, I also have to pay the bills.  Don't rush out of the house.  But if you've got a loving family at home, oh, just enjoy. Don't be in a rush to get out. Save some money. Oh, don't listen to me though. You do you. Okay. You do you. I rushed out of the house. I moved out when I was 18. Ah, looking back, obviously, I wish I would have stayed home longer. I mean, I had a great home grown up, great childhood, great life, great parents, a great home. Why was I in such a rush to go and be an adult? Just so that I could eat as many cookies as I want whenever I want. Like, I have the rest of my life to do that. But that being at home with mom and dad, having them take care of everything, having them pay the bills. Like once you turn 18, I think you should be paying rent if you're living at home with your mom and dad. You should be paying rent. But that's still nothing compared to having to pay all this. But you get it, you get it. So don't worry, when you get in, when you get to be an adult, it's a lot of fun. It's a lot of fun. You can determine your own life path. You can do whatever you want to do. It's great, but you'll get there when you get there. Okay. You don't have to get there tomorrow. It'll come. Okay. Anyways, enough of this, whatever this is, I'll see you tomorrow. I've got a long day tomorrow. So I'm going to go back there and have as long of a sleep as I possibly can. I have not gotten a lot of sleep this weekend. Constantly on duty, all the time. And when I'm at home, you know, it doesn't stop there either. But I have nothing to complain about. I've got a great family at home, great wife, great kid, great dogs, great home, great house. That's good. Who needs sleep, right? Sleepings for dead people and babies. And tonight it's for me. I'll see you tomorrow. Remember when you're out there on the highways, drive safe around everybody. It's not just you on the highway. Everybody else is trying to get home to their families as well. Keep your head up on a swivel. Keep your eyes on the road. Keep your stick on the ice. Pay attention and drive safe. I'll see you tomorrow.


So we we instead of thinking of our diet our sleep the things that are gonna make us a strong Lifter have a good physique in the long term which are boring not sexy, but they're the truth We're focusing in on the miners our supplements Tanning my balls and the Sun not masturbating before I work out and Everyone's favorite topic knee sleeves belts wraps which one's the magic pill and in this video today We're gonna dive in I'm gonna give you my honest review from a guy who's been powerlifting 15 years I've created and worked in the equipment industry for over eight years And I've tried nearly every knee sleeve on the Sun and here's our review What the hell are we doing a fit check that that's the fit check that's not a fish That's a runway walk this guy good company good company Good company good company. All right, dude. Oh, sorry. Sorry. Sorry. Sorry. Sorry. Sorry. Sorry. Sorry. Sorry. Sorry. That's undefeated One of my favorite companies one of my favorite teas just a old basketball tea. They made No, it's clean Some Reeboks that basically are like samba's Indoor soccer shoes just clean.  I got the question of the day though. You ready? Sure.  Oh That's good, right just because just because I make the rules. Yeah, I know but like what's the alternative?  Dicksford? Dicksford nipples for the truth for dail. Yeah, it's just like one or the other This one just like no pick your teeth. You have to know.  How's that?  I'll die I'm getting rid of all the main one.  Well, no, that's one of them. I'm just I don't know if I want to get rid of that I got mine, and it's a little cheeky. I Think of these questions like in the shower, you know soaping up. I'm like, oh, I'm gonna get counted.  I'm banging that thing. It's so good. So good though.  I'll just have a pizza instead. Yeah, see that's cheating. No, no, that's good That's genius Second one then second one hamburgers Well, that's not cancer controversial. That's controversial. You basically said pizza or hamburgers No, that's not that controversial. No, well, you know if you want to dig into this thing And I'm signing my life away because then I could still eat a cheeseburger different item. They're good sleep, you know You never go wrong But we'll talk about after but I think I think all of the equivalent games a little overrated in general But it seems like a really good sleep seems like a really good sleep. Yeah, yeah true true Crazy to think about because I know a lot of you guys may be a little bit newer and some of you OGs About and kicking with me for a while knee sleeves are kind of a new thing in powerlifting And I know that sounds crazy because all your favorite lifters are using them and talking about them in the latest To throw their hat in the ring is Inzer back in the day Inzer had a sleeve, but it was more of a fabric sleeve than a neoprene and so it wasn't allowed in rock competitions But now the internet's spoken tiktok's taken off your favorite power lifters wearing the Inzer sleeve and I wanted to try them out I would like to say this is anecdotal and I'm a little bit of a hater on equipment in general. I Don't think a knee sleeve is going to make or break your performance and it's not even going to make or break your PR Everything we have has a small learning curve and a lot of it comes down to comfort ability If there was one piece of equipment that made everybody PR Black and white then there wouldn't be multiple brands on the market being used. It's just that fact, right? If SBD hypothetically added 20 pounds to your to your squat and no other company was even close Other brands wouldn't survive in the free marketplace. That's just kind of How it works, right? So let's start off with that Second thing is when I use the Inzer shout out our boys Seabass editor, filmographer King Han Show here at third S3 SB. He'll welcome you guys in with open arms What do you call that a utility player? He does everything He let me use his insers So my SBDs because I don't like to haggle with things are like a XL or 2 XL and his insers are medium So putting that out there. They're obviously going to feel much tighter on my knees Having said that the insers felt really good I haven't worn a really tight knee sleeve and I haven't worn a new knee sleeve in a very long time I use the SBDs my SBDs are probably three years old now and the wear and tear is moderate I don't squat with crazy frequency and I was obviously building the gym and COVID so that took some time off But the insers really did to me feel like a light wrap and when I say that I mean the sensation I felt on my knee. I don't mean that in the sense of the rebound out of the hole A lot of people say stuff like that and they don't define it So they say oh, yeah, dude feels like I'm in a squat suit But a squat suit can give you like 300 pounds on your squat. That's not what I'm saying They felt quite restrictive in in a supportive way They felt very grippy a lot of people who haven't trained in knee wraps won't understand But knee wrap squatters called a bite like the wraps kind of bites you and I could feel that bite around my knee Especially in the back which probably means it's doing something on the rebound But I don't think again at the end of the day. It's gonna give you you know, 20, 30, 40 pounds of You know PR, I think they're great. It seems like they're highly durable. They fit well I know everyone's complaining about putting knee sleeves on It's the same game to me if you roll them properly and fold them up and then getting them off My tip is this is actually a good example I got these three quarters on people try to rip straight from the top But by the time you've already trained this part of the knee sleeve will dig into your leg a little bit What I suggest doing is pulling that bottom of the knee sleeve down Even just a quarter inch give it one of these guys and then kind of like ripping a band-aid taking that top off and ripping it down There's a billion tutorials online about people talking about folding it to get them on But if you're not sweaty and you're getting them on for most people It's pretty easy to get them off getting them off so little dip or sorry It's easy to get them on getting them off so a little bit more difficult. So there's a suggestion for that Overall right now if we were to do a tier which it's not popular in fitness. We should make it a thing see bass Yeah, but in tier list everywhere else are popular right movies gaming food Everyone does it but no one does it in powerlifting for some reason or fitness Maybe we'll do a tier list of equipment companies which would be fun, but right now what's S tiers the highest? Yeah, I would probably say Inzer is an S tier sleeve SPD is on the edge of a plus an S tier I can't decide yet And then we're probably going you know a tier B tier. I'd probably throw the slingshot in the in the Stoics For the big brands, that's probably where I'm at right now I'll probably need a little bit more time with the insers to give a final call But that's where we stand it today. Hope that help you guys out. I'm not sponsored affiliated with any of those companies So that's just an honest review to give it to you from a guy that's been in the industry a very long time If you like these videos a little bit entertainment a little education give it a thumbs up Be sure to share it out new videos every single week man join our discord links in the bio like mighty community early access to all of our Gear you get the first drops a lot of exclusives and giveaways happen for our apparel. I hope to see you guys in discord I'm in there every day chatting. I hope you guys have a good one. We'll see you later


It all started with this famous study, published in 1980. Johns Hopkins researchers were trying to figure out why states like New Mexico and Arizona had only about half the colon cancer rates of states like New York, New Hampshire, and Vermont. Maybe it's because they got so much sun. And so they proposed that maybe the sunshine vitamin D is a protective factor against colon cancer. Since then, sun exposure has been associated with lower rates of 14 other types of cancer, too. Vitamin D may also affect cancer survival. Higher blood levels of vitamin D were associated with lower mortality of patients with colorectal cancer. How much lower? Like nearly half the mortality. And the higher the D levels, the lower the death rate appeared to fall. This may explain why the survival rate from colon cancer may depend on part on the season of diagnosis. The risk of rapid death is lowest if you're diagnosed in the fall after you've spent the summer building up your vitamin D stores. But look, there are other risk factors that could be seasonal, too. Maybe people are taking advantage of the fall harvest and eating healthier. Maybe that's why the lower risk in the fall season. Or maybe there's more drinking in the winter. And in the summer running around outside, not only are you getting more sun, you're running around outside, getting more exercise, which may itself be protected. So these kind of studies just provide circumstantial evidence, establishing a cause-and-effect relationship between colon cancer and vitamin D deficiency using observational studies is challenging because of confounding factors like the exercise. So-called lurking variables. For example, there may be a tight correlation between ice cream sales and drowning deaths. That doesn't mean ice cream causes drowning. A more likely explanation is that there's a lurking third variable, like hot weather, summertime, that explains why drowning deaths are highest when ice cream consumption is highest. That's kind of a trivial example, but this actually happened with hormone replacement therapy. Women taking drugs like Primerin appear to have 50% less risk of heart disease, and so doctors prescribe it to women by the millions. But if you dig a little deeper into the data, yes, women taking estrogen had 50% lower risk of dying from heart disease, but they also had a 50% lower risk of dying from accidents and homicides. So it probably wasn't the drug. See, the only way to know for sure is to put it to the test. In a randomized clinical trial where you give half the women a drug, see what happens, and a decade later they did. And instead of having a 50% drop in risk, within a year of being given the hormone pills, heart attack and death rates shot up 50%. In retrospect, the lurking variable was likely socioeconomic class. Poor women are less likely to be prescribed hormone replacement therapy and more likely to be murdered and die of heart disease. Because of the lurking variable, a drug we now know to be dangerous had appeared protective. Besides lurking variables, there's also the possibility of reverse causation. Maybe low vitamin D levels didn't worsen the cancer. Maybe the cancer worsened the vitamin D levels. This may be unlikely since tumors don't appear to directly affect vitamin D levels, but cancer treatment might. And simple knee surgery can dramatically drop vitamin D levels within hours thought to be because of just the inflammatory insult of cutting into somebody. So maybe that could help explain the link between lower D and lower survival. And hey, if you've got cancer, maybe you're spending less time running around at the beach.  In fact, about double the risk of breast cancer recurrence in death in women with the lowest vitamin D levels. And vitamin D levels also associated with longer survival with ovarian cancer and other cancers like lymphoma. But bottom line, as we learned with hormone replacement, is that you have to put it to the test. But there weren't a lot of randomized controlled trials on vitamin D supplements in cancer until now. We now have a few randomized controlled trials, and vitamin D supplements do indeed appear to reduce the risk of dying from cancer. But dose, the researchers suggest maybe getting blood levels up to at least around 75 nanomoles per liter, levels not reached by as many as three-quarters of women with breast cancer or a striking 97% of colon cancer patients. Getting up to these kinds of levels, 75 or perhaps even better, 100, might require about 2,000 to 4,000 international units of vitamin D a day, levels of intake for which there appear to be no credible evidence of harm. Regardless what the exact level is, the findings of these kind of studies may have a profound influence on future cancer treatment.