Well greetings town meeting TV viewers. I'm Catherine bloom and I'm here with Sandra Dooley and Mary Beth McNulty and we are here to talk about a show we've got coming up. Called the suffragist reenactment society and this has been produced by the Vermont Suffrage Centennial Alliance to honor and celebrate the 100th anniversary 100 months as it were of women getting the right to vote. We were going to tour it last fall and of course that couldn't happen and so we took actually an advantage of the year to do even more extensive rewrites and digging into the script and and we are here to celebrate women getting the right to vote. But we, this is an opportunity to do a little bit more of a deep dive into the origins of this piece and what we're trying to accomplish with it. And so, Sandy, let's start with you and can you just give me a thumbnail, you know, three sentence bio of you first.  When I come out of human services I politics somewhat I was the city councilor of South Burlington. I was also on the Vermont Commission on women for many years. And it was the communications coordinator Lily Talbert at the commission who recruited me to be become part of the Alliance. So that's, that's how that happened. I live in South Burlington. That's great and who all is on the Alliance who who comprises it. They're about 60 between organizations and individuals we have people from AAUW, the peace and justice center, the law school, business and professional women, the Vermont Women's Fund, people from UVM and history professors, lots of different people, high school, especially social studies teachers, runners. It's been great meeting all these new people. This is quite a deep bench we have behind us I don't you know those of us involved in the show aren't even completely aware of who all is out there making this happen. Fantastic.  Who are you where'd you come from what's going on. Um, so I am both an educator and a playwright and I've been writing plays since I was quite young and I'm excited to, it's always fun to have a play produced and I live in Burlington I'm originally from the south. It's been a number of years in Los Angeles as well, but it's great to be a lot and to have a Vermont play to share with books from across the state. That's fantastic we're so glad you're here. Sandy are you a native or are you a transplant as well. I was born and grew up in Pennsylvania, sort of the rural area not far from Philadelphia, but I ended up at Middlebury College, and I pretty much been in Vermont since then, much longer than I was in Pennsylvania. Yeah, it was similar for me so I grew up in Portland, Oregon and came to school on the East Coast but beat it back to Seattle after I graduated and thought I was never going to go east of the Rockies again and I've been in Vermont for almost 30 years and go figure things happen and life evolves and my background is both in theater and environmental activism primarily and I have a history of doing one woman shows which is sort of where the origin story of this piece comes from because I've done stuff around the Iraq war I did a one woman show about climate change. And, and if I'm remembering correctly there's few years ago Sandy you contacted me to ask if I would be interested in doing a one woman show about the history of women's suffrage, and because I had been dealing with the health stuff I said, absolutely not. But I think I know who would be appropriate for this and reach out to Mary Beth, and her theatrical partner, Laura rolled, who's our director who unfortunately could not be here today. And, and Laura and Mary Beth have this little company called complications theater and they seem to be very oriented towards women's narratives and I had a feeling that this would be an appealing thing for you. But Mary Beth did you have to think about it at all before before you made any kind of decisions. Not a minute. We sat down with you and then when we sat down with Sandy, this is, as you say, right up our alley, because of the focus on telling women stories. We, Laura and I started the theater company because we felt like there was sort of a gap around new work, or actually new work development so there's lots of new work that happens in Vermont a lot of fantastic playwrights a lot of really exciting creative producers. And we, Laura and I are both familiar with a process of development. And so when we had the opportunity to really develop new work. We were excited and thrilled to have the connection with you Kathy and then to be able to work with Sandy and all the other folks from the suffrage Centennial it's been just really exciting. And where did the idea of a theater piece come from. Was it was it part of the DNA of the Centennial Alliance or was that something that popped up. Well, surprising way. I think two, two ways to describe the suffrage movement history is that it's complicated. It's, it's largely untold. And we knew we needed a variety of vehicles to try to, we want the story to get to as many Vermonters as possible.  The idea was sort of brainstorming and I in the spring of 2019 that we came up with the idea of a play.  And we're also very woman focused in terms of wanting to showcase talent and we knew there was a lot of talent around. So that's, and people have been very enthusiastic about this project or whatever you want to call it this, this great endeavor. It's really our largest project, which of course, our whole sort of program got scaled back by the coronavirus. Yeah. And did you, when, when you can see you David being a theater piece did you have any sense of what it would look like did you was there early imaginings of what this was going to be or was it was it kind of a great big blank slate for you. Other than the one woman show idea. It really was a blank slate. And we were ready to find people that were willing to fill in a canvas so to speak. And I think we found some great people. And Mary Beth did you know much about women's history or the history of the bridge before you jumped into this. I just knew the big names that are sort of when I was growing up, your social studies textbook would tell that your history book would have the story of everything and women and people of color. That story was in a blue box on one page in the whole chapter is, and usually it was just like at the bottom of a page so there would be like a paragraph and you, I would learn the name, Elizabeth Katie Stanton, or Susan B Anthony. And that was probably the extent of, you know, I knew some broad brushstrokes, but certainly not all the rich stories that I know now. Yeah. And so what's this process been like for you. Did you have any kind of inkling of where you were going to start the story and, and when and where did the notion of reenactment group come from. Which I think is phenomenally clever by the way. Thank you. So I, as a, as a playwright I'm a bit of a nerd, and I love. You know, I have a lot of a number of stories that are in my own head that I want to tell but then this is probably the, the third piece that I've had where I've been approached and sort of commissioned I've worked previously with my friend, Aaron, is the theater teacher there and so I've worked with young people and developing new work. And, you know, so I, there's a research process, which I totally geek out on, and the suffrage and send the Sandy kept sending me. Oh, here's a book. Here's a CD and I don't have a CD player and have to go and stick it in my car to listen to it and here's a CD player. So, it was just wonderful to have the rich resources coming my way, along with lots of email links. There's been some great pieces in the New York Times that Sandy was always really good at my way. And so I had a really wonderful immersive time and then, you know, I came up I knew that there were so many stories so there was no one story I wanted to tell there was no one person that that really leapt out at me. And because it's so complex and it's, we're talking over 72 years of history. And so the, you know, I had three or four ideas, and the idea that I kept coming back to was the idea of reenactors because you see the Civil War reenactors and why do they do that well because they're so excited about this story. So what would the equivalent be for the suffragist and, and it just kept making me laugh, the idea that these that that passion could go into reenactments. And it was a way, you know, it gave me, because of my experience developing new place. I knew I had to have sort of a framing device for telling a bigger story. So it gave me a really nice framing device for pulling in lots of little individual stories, which you know I can imagine is part of the challenge you're talking over 70 years of history, and you're talking history that happened all over the country.  And, and how do you condense it all down so I think, you know, and what people will see when they come see the show is that the basic premises that we are reenacting group and we're trying to figure out one story to reenact for a fourth of July is that there's a lot of information in the town where we're wherever it is that we're traveling to. And there's a lot of back and forth around who are the most who are the most visible members of the suffragist movement, who what are the most compelling narratives what's exciting what's disturbing. So there are the three characters in the play I played a Deborah the president of the society who is clearly representative of a somewhat older generation of women who are who might not be as infused with an understanding of intersectional social justice. And then we have Tori who is our historian and then we have a young woman played by Julia Syos, who is very excited about this and loves the costumes and loves to get on it but she is definitely I think more conscious of the the dark undercurrent of what you know in the there was racism and there was a lot, a lot more going on than just a bunch of women trying to get the right to vote. In thinking about that whole history, Mary Beth, how when, you know, the play has changed a lot from when we were going to produce it last fall to this year. And when you when you began thinking about those, those lesser known threat narrative threads in the suffrage movement. How did you, how were you wrestling with them how did you think about trying to bring in all that stuff as well so it's not just a long history it's a deep history. In conversation with the centennial folks, we knew that we wanted it to be more than just white ladies history. And during my writing time. There's a lot going on in our country related to terrible events, terrible racism. And so there really has been a reckoning and continues to be a reckoning and one of the wonderful things about I'm telling this historic story. The characters the character you play Kathy is in America now. And so there's this wonderful because it's both the past and the present. I'm able to weave that together. And then we start to see, Oh, those conflicts of the past have not really been addressed and resolved. And here we are today with some of these same issues. And so how do these, these parallel stories really intersect, and what is it that we can walk away from both thinking about the past and thinking about its impact on us today. So I feel really lucky, actually, that I had this, this gift of time that an added year gave me because it's hard to write about something that's currently happening you actually need a little bit of distance in order to understand what you're looking at, you know, when when George Floyd was murdered. And we all saw it like it was, it was really close and really hard to have some perspective and so this year has allowed me I mean it's still really close, but at least a little extra time allowed me to to reflect and get some distance and try to think about how this is a, this has been a problem in America from the get go. This racism in our country and this white supremacy and how can I speak to that as a white privileged woman here living in Vermont. And another thing that the Centennial folks were able to do as we Kathy you've been part of these conversations, thankfully, the Centennial folks have been able to help us connect with women of color to support that process as bringing a perspective that I don't have. And that's been really wonderful and I think the play is the richer for bringing in more of those stories and more of those perspectives that so that we can have a richer story to tell and think about today. I was going to ask Kathy, and that is that the whole issue of voting has taken on just so much more controversy and importance we had the effect of coven that radically changed how people vote. And, and in virtually the entire country access to the ballot box was greatly improved, and then we've had a lot of backlash. And that leads me to what I left out earlier and that is the role of the League of Women Voters of Vermont. Really, they have, we are a project of the, the Alliance, the Vermont Suffrage Centennial Alliance is a project of the League of Women Voters of Vermont, and their presidents who Rakanelli has has been the devoted director of this, this process but there's more between the social justice issues that Mary Beth talked about and then the voting issues which are very much a part of the social justice issues became front and center. The more important to go forward with this play became for all of us. And do you, do you find that the conversations that the characters and the player having around how to address these issues are reflected in the conversations you're having with the, with the coalition that you're, you're doing or the organizing with. I have to tell you, Kathy, I haven't read the play in its most recent version. Oh, wow. So, I can't really respond to that, but maybe, maybe Mary Beth can or whatever but I'm, I'm really, you know, the creative process has really been with Mary Beth and Laura and the cast so I appreciate the question. Perhaps you can speak to that Kathy having been the nice piece about being a playwright and developing a play as I was referring to earlier is, you have a draft process. So, I write alone, which is fun because I have that introverted side of me and then I have friends. So, I get to bring the draft to you and Kathy you've been there through several of those drafts I mean you can speak to that evolution of thinking about voting and how the play intersects or reflect some of the, this is larger conversations we're having. Well, I, the thing that I was really struck by from the very beginning is this question of yes we want to tell these stories that are both the told and the untold we want to hear about everything. And we want to be able to highlight all of the women of color who were deeply deeply involved in the suffrage movement. So there's, but there's the challenge of the fact that we are in Vermont, and it's a very white state, and the pool of performers that we have to draw from is a very white small and white pool of people. And so they're wrestling with that question of how do we tell everybody's story when we don't represent everybody has been really fascinating question and I think it's also one thing I've run into as a theater maker is that you don't want to just hire anyone because of the color of their skin. And if you need an actor of color, but there isn't, you don't find the right person. Do you take somewhat, what do you do because you have the opportunity to hire whoever you can find who's willing to participate. If you're not an adept performer because that's not their background, then you're putting them in a position of not being able to only fully realize your vision but also see someone who is not a trained performer, have to struggle with the, with the content and there are people who are naturals but they're also I mean I've you know there's there's a challenge right there you can't teach someone to do something that they have to do while they're doing it. And so, how do you know that question of do we try to write actors characters of color and try to find the actors, or do we write for the people who we know we've got. I know that was a big piece of the tension in a lot of the early piece of parts of development. And I don't actually remember how you landed on the solution of just resting with the with the white ladies, but finding ways to talk about everybody else. So, one, yes. That conversation was certainly part of this earlier drafts and the suffrage alliance participants who would come and because of commissioned piece you were part of the process as well and there was certainly this excitement over can we can we have an actor of color how do we and and how do we tell these stories of the women of color in the movement because we knew we needed to hear those stories. We did not want to be part of silencing or ignoring or erasing any of those stories. So that was a tricky conversation. But the more we talked about the racism, the more, you know, Laura and I went back on fourth of the racism is a white lady problem. We are the ones who need to do the work. And so, more than the, the producer, the producer problem of finding an actor of color, which is certainly something that we need to continue to work and think about and train and have conversations with a lot of women. So, more than that the conversation shifted to the content is that white women need to do better telling this story. And so, that became central to the work and what was so wonderful about having our readers, the readers of color, Denise and Catherine Dunney, and then Judy Dow were our readers and and they were part of the process of helping us recognize where that tension is. And recognize that start how do we move the conversation forward and how do white women do the work. Yeah, and so that became, it became really important that white women engage and white women call each other out on the racism that we need to address. And so, as much as I love working with a diverse group of actors, this play is really about white women doing the work and that's became just that just became where as the drafts became tighter and tighter. And so I think that I think we, we hit upon, you know, the content led us to that that place in our casting.  And so then we had to think about how do we bring in different, the multi, the multiple generations who need to figure this out together. And so having Julia come in as an actor and tell me this character isn't really speaking was a great note. And I that became just really exciting and a way to get women to do the work white women to do the work they need it to do. Yeah, it's funny that I definitely, I don't not having kids myself I don't get to hear. I don't know how the kids are talking these days and it's when my husband is running lines with me every once in a while to run across something he's like what does that mean and like I had to look it up to an urban urban dictionary. Mary Beth, if there's something you think you're going to really come away from or come away with from this whole process. What do you think that's going to be. Oh, I have this. I've thought this a lot. As someone who also wants to be engaged in a wide variety of social justice issues from climate to race to discrimination to immigration. So, sexism you name it, I, I want to do that work. And it's exhausting and disheartening. When you watch the news and, and you see that we're not making the progress that needs to happen now. On that calendar that Sandy sent to me there, there was this line of working for progress for seven over 72 years. And, and I carry that with me that we may not see what we want to see in our lifetime. And the story, certainly the stories of the black women, the suffragists who showed up. They showed up for women's rights, and then retreated with horrible racism, but kept showing up and doing the work, even though you may never see what you want to see in your lifetime and there were so many women Charlotte Woodward as the only person at Seneca Falls who could have voted in the 1920 election. And other women weren't, didn't survive to be able to vote. And that is a lesson of this, this work is, is ongoing and you do the work. And you don't give up when it's hard, and you don't give up when you don't see the progress that you want and need to see that I was that was not the lesson I thought I was going into it but maybe having that extra year of writing. Yeah, help me see that more that we have to just keep showing up, and we have to keep doing the work. I just finished reading John Lewis's autobiography and that's exactly what he says he just has this very long vision of, you know, you may have planted tree that you're never going to see in its full glory but it's worth, it's worth it because there's nothing to do. And I think black Americans who've been doing this work know that lesson lesson, and I'm just, I just got the memo. Next time, I'm going to let everybody know this so the show opens this Saturday at Main Street landing in Burlington, October 2. And then it's going to be touring the state and if folks go to the ticketing website, which is tickets dot cat amount arts dot org and I know that our buddy Kevin from town meeting TV is going to flash the stuff up on the screen. People will be able to see the entire tour schedule and tickets are free right Sandy. And people will have to wear masks, and they have to be vaccinated, or they can have a COVID test within 72 hours. So we're really trying to make things safe because we know people still have concerns about the safety of being indoors in groups. And we're performing without masks that can see our faces because we've discovered rehearsing with masks.  All of you vaccinated. Yeah, we've been all been vaccinated and we get tested every week and so whereas we the performers are as safe as we can be and we actually have masks that will be wearing when we're interacting with the audience up close and then we'll take them down for when we're on stage. Anything either we're so we're you got about a minute left anything either one of you want to say in conclusion about this whole process or Sandy anything that you've learned coming out of this. Well, first of all, what we didn't talk about was how interactive the play is with the audience. We may not have time to get into that but I want the viewers to know about that. I've, I've learned. I couldn't begin to tell you what I've learned because I'm totally new to this but it's, it's been fun and, and I love the idea of tripping around Vermont and meeting people and and seeing how they respond to the play. Yeah, so that's my parting word.  Oh, it's just great to have live theater in our lives again. That is very, very true.   From top to bottom, start to finish and we, the level of support and love and openheartedness that everyone has brought to all of this has been just extraordinary and I am deeply deeply honored to be a part of it all.  Make a date of it travel a travel have a fun time, get picnics, get an Airbnb come see us all over the state will be everywhere from Newport to Brattleboro and Bennington so we hopefully will cover just about everything. So thank you all for joining us today Sandy Mary Beth thank you and we will see you at the theater.


Okay, so in the last video we started making a resume in LaTeX, and we started out with something that looks like this, where you just have different section dividers, and you have content in there. And the whole point, you know, the whole good thing about LaTeX is that you can give it sort of content like this, and you can change everything about it later. So what we did is we added a bunch of commands at the beginning that change what our sections and subsections look like. So now we have this, which looks a whole lot more like a CV. But just for fun, and because we want to learn a little bit more, let's do some extra tinkering with this. Let's do a little more with that. Now just as a reminder, the main package for modifying different kinds of section headings is TitleSec, specifically the TitleFormat command. You give it what kind of divider you want to modify, in this case Section. You give it a kind of formatting you want the text to be in, a kind of number, the distance between the number and the title, and then whatever comes right after that space before the title. And you can also feed it optional arguments like, here I have a title rule giving me this line here. But let's go a little further, and let's look at this. What else do I want to modify? You'll notice that there is a bunch of space between my sub-subsections, and maybe I want to squeeze that out. So in addition to the TitleFormat command, there's also a TitleSpacing command, and TitleSpacing is pretty easy. You just give it whatever kind of section you want to modify, in this case sub-subsection. And it takes three arguments, and they're all numbers, I'll just make them all zero right now. So you will notice that all of the sub-subsections suddenly squeeze up, again let me show you that happening. You can delete them, and then, yeah, okay, there we go. You can delete them, and when they reappear, you'll see them nice and squished up. So what are these three different arguments? It's pretty simple. The first one is just the left margin. So if I increase that by a couple units, you see it moving to the right. The other two, the second one is the space before the whatever section it is, so now we have a little space between them. Maybe I want that a little smaller, I'll say, you know, .25 or something like that. And the last one is the space afterwards. So in, yeah, so you'll see it add a little space afterwards. So you'll notice in the case of sub-subsections, because I have the run-in command, which again makes it so we don't make a new line after the sub-subsection title. This extra space is added as horizontal space. It, you know, makes more space here, but if, let's say, we have the same thing for a section instead of a subsection, or excuse me, a sub-subsection, it's getting confusing. So many sections and so many S's. Let's say we have the same command, but for sub-sections, if we increase this third one you won't be adding horizontal space, you'll be adding vertical space. So now we have a little space here, but, you know, we don't want that, that's ugly. Or maybe you like it, whatever. So just know the main two commands, again, title format and title spacing, if you know this you can do most of that. So let's see, what else do I want to change? I'd sort of like for these sub-section headings like workflow languages, multimedia, I'd sort of want for them to be a little bit more prominent. And one of the ways I can do that is by making them stick out, leftward or something like that. Or maybe I'll squeeze the rest of the text in and I want this to hang out a little to the left, just so you can see them easily when you're observing the page. Let's see, there are a couple ways I can do that. Now first off, as a reminder, one of the most basic commands is H space or V space, and that just stands for horizontal or vertical space. So let's go to my sub-section area and remember this bullet, that is the little dot here. Now I can also add an H space command and let's say I'll add one inch or something like that. And that'll add an extra inch of space, sort of moving it inwards. But I want the opposite of that. But the nice thing about LaTeX, or I guess that was 0.1 inch, but whatever, the nice thing about LaTeX is that you can really just feed it negative numbers and it'll do exactly what you want. So let's feed it negative half an inch, oh that's too much, maybe negative a quarter of an inch, something like that. All right, that's all right. But now I'll squeeze everything else in and the way I can do that is just by going up to margin and making my margin a little bigger. So let's just add the same amount here. So now everything else is squeezed in and the sub-subsections are actually the same place what they were at the beginning. They're just a little bit more prominent now.  So now I think things are looking pretty good. Let's see if there's anything else. Now there are a couple other things you might want to consider. One of them is frames, these are nice looking. So I told you like run and you can give optional commands to the title format command. One of my favorite is frame, so I'll just throw that in there. And you'll notice that it's not loading, oh there's a reason for that, okay hold on, let me change some things. So one of the things I did is I put all the formatting stuff in this first argument. Sometimes it's better to put them in the fourth, remember the fourth argument modifies only the title, while the first modifies everything. So it gets a little confused if you don't have a number or something. So let me, I'm going to move these down and then I'll tell you what I'm going to do. So I'm going to move this to there, yeah still looks the same, that's good. And now I'm going to add frame here, just gets a little, ah there we go, okay. So now we have a frame around this, that looks pretty nice.  I'm going to get rid of the title rule, what else do I want? I sort of want, yeah now that I got that done, maybe I'll add a little space here. Remember the space is just going to, you know, go, it's just the distance between the title and everything around it. So functionally it's giving this frame more space. And I think I sort of also want to have this thing centered, that would probably be nice. So let me go, it's probably best to put it here, fill center. Actually sometimes one of the things you've got to be careful about is you have to have a particular order you put some of the formatting commands in. So oops, okay, there we go. Yeah, so if I put fill center at the end it gets a little confused. It's better to put more general stuff at the beginning. So yeah, this is what we got right now. And you know, I think this is a pretty good stopping point for now. I might do a little bit more later. But this is just to give you an idea of some of the more basic commands. I'm actually going to do another little video on LaTeX soon. But yeah, I think this is enough to give you a good idea. And the next diving board for anyone is just actually reading the manual. Look at the documentation for the title set command or other package, or for other packages and you'll learn so much just with what kind of stuff you can do. But hopefully this is enough to give you sort of to see the magic you can do. Taking sort of this nasty content and just modifying it with just a few commands. You can become pretty powerful in LaTeX. So yeah, that's some LaTeX magic for you.


I got a special guest for you guys today. I got my buddy Roman Price. Yes. Now Roman Price is a serial entrepreneur and founder of LifePulp, which has now get this 1.5 million users. Yeah.  Yeah, it's been a good ride and we did it with zero money on literally just social media marketing strategy. So if one of you kind of dive into us, we'll jump right into it right now. Give us kind of like the four on one on how you grew LifePulp into 1.5 million users. Okay, so pretty simple. I've always believed that there's something that works for me that makes me phenomenal. There's something that works for you that makes you phenomenal. And there lacked a place online where you could share that. You could pay it forward and share it with someone else. There's a lot of social media platforms, but there's no niche to something that makes you better, whether it's inspiration or motivation, anything life related, spirituality, even love, right? And there was no niche social network that can allow you to do that. At least none that I've come across, right? So it was very important to me that I put that together and I did. And what happened was people started loving it. They would come on, they'd see all kinds of things that motivate everybody from all around the world, all walks of life, and it became contagious. And thanks to social media, people kept sharing and sharing and sharing. We probably have over a billion inspirations read thanks to social media. And I think we're at 110 million inspirations read on the site alone, which is really cool. So it's been an awesome ride. So you mentioned social media, viral shares. What platforms worked best for you? Facebook's a killer. Facebook is a monster on another level. Instagram these days, kind of cool. Snapchat, we're not quite there yet, but hopefully we'll get there. But Facebook has definitely been a platform unlike any other. We had one inspiration just on the Facebook page alone that got shared 1.4 million times. Wow. So what are you sharing? Like, is it just like an image with a code inside of it or? Well, see, here's the thing. So LifePulp is an equal platform. I am not God on LifePulp. I am a user, which is pretty amazing, right? So I'm not sharing my own content. LifePulp is basically a voice for the people and it shares the people's content. So quite often we're just sharing things that motivate or inspire that I think is really cool. Like I'm kind of sometimes I'm judge on what gets shared, right? But for the most part, we share other people's content, which is pretty exciting. Just your regular average Joe or, you know, a mom and pop whoever, you know, sometimes it's amazing because like we'll come across amazing like kids in Africa, you know, that will share something cooler YouTube video that no one's ever seen because it only has like 10 or 15 views, right? But it was important to them and it touched their life because it was there through their walks of life. And then, you know, LifePulp gets ahold of it. And if it really is life changing, which is our motto, if it's life changing, we want to share it, you know, we'll shed some light on it, which is which is pretty exciting. So for the most part, we're sharing the people's content, which is pretty exciting. And so they're uploading it to LifePulp? Yes, directly. So LifePulp is open source. And I like to view it as an ecosystem of inspiration and motivation. 1.5 million users and climbing. Yep. And just all you see user generated content. Yes. Yes. User fresh daily and LifePulp is set up in a way. And I got the inspiration from Amazon. They have a one click buy button, right? Change their business. It's phenomenal. So I built LifePulp as much as I could with a one click inspiration button, right? So almost on the site, every single click you make, probably like 95% shows you a new inspiration, which is pretty exciting. So you could literally 10 clicks, you'll see 10 amazing inspirations. And we've done third party studies to where just that mental, I call it mental nutrition. So that mental nutrition, when you absorb it, you know, you could do it in two minutes, you can absorb 10 inspirations, which is nothing two minutes a day on the site. It rewires the mind to a more grateful state. And when you're in a grateful state, the world just opens up to you, which is phenomenal. So what advice would you have for anybody who's kind of looking to do something like that or getting online and building kind of like that content behemoth of a website? Yes.  So when I started, Facebook was a giant. And when I wanted to build a social network, everybody told me not to because it's the dumbest thing you could do. You'd go for the most part to, you know, you look for some seed money, right? And you tell them, I want to do a social network. They laugh at you. Of course. They're like, you're not going to compete with Facebook. Stop. You know what I mean? There's no point. So that was my challenge. I had to overcome that. Now, it didn't scare me at all, to be honest with you. And my goal with LifePulp is I have like a 20, 30 year goal. I want it to be like the YouTube of inspiration and motivation, right? So for instance, when you think video, you automatically think YouTube, right? So when I, when you think inspiration or motivation, I want people to think LifePulp, right? And that's my goal. And it's going to take about 20 years to see my goal is to catalog as much of the, the amazing inspiration and motivation out there as I can in one place. And it's probably going to take me about maybe 10 years or maybe another, another five, because we're five years in, in order to get it to a world-class state. Right now we have about 150,000 inspirational uploads, which is phenomenal. But I think when we get over, over a million, when we get that million mark, the site will be really world-class. It'll almost be, it'll be alive at that point. And what do you need to do to get to a million? Well, if we keep growing at our current pace, we'll get there with Outer Shadow of a Delt, but obviously it's just more user contribution, right? Just because it doesn't run so much off of me. I am the moderator. I, for the most part, facilitate the site, but I just need good people to come on board and pay forward things that motivate or inspire them. And for the most part, we've been doing such an amazing job. We have amazing members. We have a lady, her name is Joy, her handle on the site is Joy to the World. Her inspirations alone have been read 4.2 million times, which is pretty phenomenal. An amazing woman lives in the Philippines, just a soldier of God, a teacher, right? It has an amazing story of how she came on to LifePulp and what LifePulp has done to her. Now, I don't know if that's a personal story or not, so I won't divulge it too much. But she's contributed quite a bit to the site. We have a lot of members that go on daily, and all they do is they make it their mission in life to find something that motivates or inspires them, which in turn serves them for the most part, right? But they don't stop there. For the most part, they pay it forward and they share it with the LifePulp community. And in turn, the LifePulp community does an amazing job of sharing it with their social networks, right? So it's just a system that keeps on giving. And that's one of the reasons why it's been successful. That's one of the reasons why it continues to grow. And the fact that I just did it, right, even though I couldn't compete with Facebook and that wasn't even my plan. I didn't want to build the next Facebook or anything like that. So anybody that's looking to do anything, I started at the worst possible time. There was no worst time. Like I started in the worst possible time. What's I saying? That 20 years ago was the best time to plant a tree? Yes. Right now. Yeah. Yeah. So just do it. Don't listen to anybody. People have an amazing way of talking you out of your hopes and dreams. And for the most part, it starts in like the early stages of school.  You've got to be a doctor. And you're sort of wired to understand, I can't do this. I can't do that. And then you'll have these amazing big goals and then you'll tell your friends and your friends will tell you, you know what, nah, man, like don't do that. Don't quit your job. Don't pursue this. Don't do that. It's called the tall poppy syndrome, man. Exactly. Exactly. You know, if you're like the crab out of the bucket? Yes.  That's it. That's exactly it, right? So honestly, if you have a burning desire every morning to get this done, that is like the best measure of whether you should do it or not. If you wake up and you're more drawn to like Starbucks and a TV show, maybe you should shy away from that project.  Yes, 100%.  For sure, man. You know, just do it. Just go out there and do it. Let me ask you this. Has any investors or firms approached you to buy Lifeball? We've had a number of people express interest, right? Just because anytime you get around 1.5 million registered users, right? Registered users, yeah. Yes, that's a huge difference because a lot of people view just the content. They don't contribute, right? So they're not actually registered. So there has been, and there always is, some form of excitement for people to get on board. My goal with LifePulp isn't to necessarily become the richest person in the world. I have a very simple life. I think I need around $2,400 to be a happy human being every single month. So you got your number down. I got my number down. Wow, that's really important. Yeah. It's an exercise to tell people. I want to have $100 million or $1 billion. What's your real number? Exactly. What do you actually need after tax? Everything's all set and done. What's that number to the decimal dot of what you need to live your type of lifestyle? Yes, exactly. A lot of people don't know that and they throw these crazy numbers around like a million dollars.  You won't even know what to do. I know what you can do with $30,000 a month. Yes, and also $30,000. If you make $32,000, don't quote me on this because it could be off, $32,000 a year. You're in the top 1% income earners in the world. Well, that's a funny thing you brought that up. Yes. When people say the 1%ers, yeah, you're right, around 35 American. Yes.  When people talk about 1%, they're actually referring to the 0.1%. Yes, the 0.1% is a long way to go. The top 1%, not that hard to get into. So like I said, my number is $2,400. I could easily get it down to like $22. I could survive on two grand. No problem. Includes shelter food and just a state that keeps me really, really, really happy.  So LifePulp, when I look at LifePulp and a lot of the decisions that I make based off of this project, isn't so much let's get some more money in. Let's do this, do that. It's for the most part just growth-wise. Where would you say your philosophy came from, like this minimalistic philosophy? Where do you think it kind of originates from? Okay.  Usually when you're in those situations, for the most part, you understand that you need to make a ton of money, you need to have nice cars, you know, whatever.  So that's the mentality. So just make a ton of money. And that was my mentality for a very long time. Up until the age of 27, I was making some really good money. Yep. Right? I had my dream car. It was driving around in a Hummer H2. Nice. Yes. Gas Cozler. Gas Cozler. Amazing car, turned a lot of heads. Yeah. I was living in an amazing place, literally. I had all the toys, all the bells and whistles that I had ever wanted. Wanted. Yeah. Right?  But that just gave me more misery. And what it did, and a lot of people don't realize this, is it dulled a lot of my senses. So I'll give you an example. Going to the keg, right? Once a while for an amazing steak.  Right? But what if you went to the keg twice a day for two months? Yeah. You'd spit that food out. Yeah. Right? So what happens is, if you're not prepared for it, when money enters your life, you tend to go to the keg twice a day. And that's just a metaphor. Because you're buying a lot of these things that you've always wanted. And for the most part, somewhere along the way, there's no sense of achievement when you keep picking up things that you can pick up no problem. And it dulls your senses. And the only way to do that is just to top it. Yeah. Right? And then you get into this. So long story short, I got into a very horrible place and I knew more money wasn't the solution. It was actually death, as weird as it is. So I got to 200 and like 38 pounds, like 30 percent, 33 percent body fat. 200 plus pounds? 200. 238. Wow. Can you imagine being 238? Yeah. So 33 percent body fat, which is extremely unhealthy. Very, very bad place, right?  And this is a person that pretty much, one can argue, got everything they've ever wanted in life. Sure.  I don't even want to eat like food doesn't have flavor anymore, right?  Right?  I hear it. Anyways, really horrible place. And I realized that more money wasn't the answer. And I was always a person that for the most part would experiment with my life. Would this make things better or worse? And when more money isn't the answer, you tend to sort of look at maybe less money is the answer. Sure. I did a phenomenal thing. I think it's phenomenal.  So I did something ridiculous and it was in my opinion short of genius, right? But for two weeks, I gave myself a $20 a day budget. No more, no less. And I went homeless. For two weeks. Really? A lot of people don't know this.   It was just horrible. Was it here in Toronto? Yes. Well, so here's the thing. I was homeless in a Hummer H2. So I don't know how homeless I was. It's not like I was living. It's like glamping. Yes. It's not like I was living on the streets. If anybody's ever been inside a Hummer H2, you could put the seats down and it's like a living room. Yeah, H2 is pretty nice. But that being said, that's where I spent my nights. So I was away from the comfort of my own home. I lived on a $20 a day budget. Okay. Right?  Right? Fifth day rolls around. I'm like, you know what? I'm a smart guy. There's a good chance I could turn this 20 into 40 somehow. Sure. How do I do that? Right? So I started doing my shopping the night before at 9 o'clock just before the grocery store's closed. And there was a lot of 50% off on like really well made like packaged food. Right? I started eating better instantly and that was pretty phenomenal, right? So now I have like four meals stacked for the next day and they're amazing compared to what the $20 would get me the day before. So that part's really exciting. I started pulling up my Hummer H2 to a second cup and I started stealing their Wi-Fi. I started watching TV shows and for the first time I started to enjoy TV. Interesting. Because before, nothing. Yeah. Wouldn't do anything for me. And then I remember it clearly, it was either the fifth or sixth day I had actually, because I had worked so hard to double my food, right, and I had that sense of appreciation, I wanted to enjoy it. I no longer wanted to eat it on the go or eat it at my desk at work or I didn't give gratitude for it. Exactly. Right?  I worked really hard for this. I made this happen. Let's take the time to sit somewhere nice and let's enjoy it. So it was, honestly, it wasn't even a great meal. It was like a boxed sandwich or something like that, whatever it was, maybe it was some sushi. I don't remember exactly the meal, but it was something along those lines. I sat down, this was at Young and Shepard, Mel Asman Square, I believe. I sat down beside a tree, it was a beautiful day. And for some reason I felt I was at peace. And when I took a bite of this sandwich for the first time in a long time, I tasted flavor, which was really rare in my life. And this was a sandwich. This wasn't caviar, this wasn't the best sandwich possible. This was a sandwich from a grocery store. And for the first time I just, I sat there and it took me an hour to finish my meal and I enjoyed that whole hour. I wanted to savor it, enjoy it. I would look around, everything around me was, everything was perfect. And at that moment I realized maybe this is the way to go, right? And since then I've been on a path as weird as it sounds to obtain less in terms of materialistic needs. It doesn't really matter what my bank accounts had. Not that it's super low or anything like that, like I'm pretty fortunate, but I don't have the millions and millions I once wanted.  And it's unreal. What happens at that point is I'm no longer led by the decisions to make more money. So in my opinion, when it comes to business, I make better decisions.  Not the idea. People are a slave towards money and the aspect of, I'm a firm believer in the more you say no, the more opportunities they have.  If you want to get to places in your life, learn to say no 99% of the time. I'm going to tell you an amazing story. I wish I knew the gentleman's name, I do not. But he owns a jet line, right? So pretty successful, right? Fuck, guys balling. So a gentleman really wanted to reach out to him because he had a really great idea. And he went to his best friend. Okay. Okay, this was a story that was passed down to me. And he went to his best friend and he said, I have this amazing idea, I want to reach out to your buddy. I think he has the money, the capital, put it together and make some money. So the airline, the CEO of the, or the owner of the airline, his best friend loved the idea so much, immediately ran to his best friend. He's like, this is phenomenal, you got to hear the guy out. So the gentleman agrees to meet, right? And this meeting only lasted two minutes. Okay. Okay. So the gentleman with the idea to make a ton of money, he started out with, okay, so I have this amazing idea. He went about a minute into like what it is. And then he said, it could easily make us five to $10 million. Hands down will be the easiest money we'll ever make. The gentleman that owned the airline, stopped him right there and said, I don't need to know anymore. Yeah. And it was, it was such a dumbfounded moment. It was like, why? We're going to make eight to $10 million, easy, easy, right? And he said, my philosophy is if something doesn't generate a hundred million dollars or more, I don't even listen to it. And he said, no, right away. And he walked away from a guaranteed five to $8 million because his philosophy is he knows his worth, right? A hundred million dollars or more, right? So I learned the biggest lesson from that is always know your worth, right? And the number is a big part of your worth, but always know your worth. And when you don't, you almost always settle for less and quite often by saying yes one too many times. Yeah. Yeah. Good story. Yeah. I wonder what the guy's doing right now. You know what? I wish I had the proper names and I could do a better job of telling that story. There's not too many private jet planes there. Let's do some research and see how it is. Yes. I also wish it was a little bit more of a rehearse. This was sort of off the top of my head. But amazing story. And like I said, saying no has been probably the one thing that has made me the most successful I've ever been. You know, LifePulp very early on, somebody offered me $10 million for it. Just like that. Very easy to say no. Yeah. Because LifePulp was the only thing that was giving me a purpose. It was like... Well, that's another thing, man. I know a bunch of my friends who've sold companies for very lucrative. I'm talking about multiple sevens. Yes. Ridiculous. Money. Yes. Just a free cash in a bank. Miserable. The majority of them, yeah. Miserable. Because they sold their souls for money. Yeah. Right? That one thing that was keeping them alive, that one purpose, one passion, whatever it was. Yeah. Right? They kind of for them... So they didn't technically sell their souls for money. But to some degree... Well, the problem is they never had something after that. Yes. Because their identity was attached to their startups and the businesses they had. Yes. And as soon as they sold, they had nothing to do. Yes. So I'm a big believer in actually selling your businesses. I think if you have an investor to sell, but I'm also a big believer in like you always have to be responsible for something and creating something. Yes.  However, make sure you have something on the horizon. Yes. Always have something on the horizon. Yes. Never just sit there like, oh, I got money in it. Yes.  Yes. So in my personal opinion, two ways to look at that situation.  If that drives you, that's your purpose. You'll always be happy. But there's a lot of entrepreneurs that they're not lucky entrepreneurs, but for the most part, they had a passion for something. Sure. Do you know what I mean? It was like, it was that guy in the cubicle. He had a passion for guitars and he wanted to build the world's greatest guitar. He builds the greatest guitar. He's having the time of his life working on the project, right? Boom. He sells it. In my opinion, metaphorically speaking, he sold his soul along with it because now he exchanges the one thing that always made him happy for a ton of money and that ton of money is a lot of fun for the first two or three months. But after those two or three months, it's a down spiral. I think it really depends on what you said. It depends on where you are in your life and what you're doing. If it's a lifestyle business, that's attach your identity and who you are. But if you're doing around and raising money, at the end of the day, you got to sell your business because for me, I invest in a company too.  Yes. There's only two ways of getting my returns. Number one, someone acquires us and I get a return on that. Number two is IPO, but the chances of your company having an IPO right now, it's like this. Yeah. But that's also what drives you. Do you know what I mean? That's the thing that makes you feel alive. Well, I want to say that my money is never my driving force, but it has nothing to do with the money. I'm a firm believer. It has to do with growth. Growth drives you. I would say movement and doing new things. I get bored really easily.  But to be at the same place and the same thing for the rest of your life, for me, that's spiritual suicide. Yes.  So I'm always going to be doing new things and playing around and just... All over the place. Life is a game of chess to you. Yeah. With a little bit of chaos. Yes. For sure. 100%. And there you feel alive, which is phenomenal. You're in the perfect state to be doing things like that. Myself with LifePulp, it's something that just, it honestly gives me the most peaceful sleep I've ever had. And kind of organically too. Yes. Yeah. And then again, the more it grows, it's like a baby. Yeah. The more attached I get to it. And it gives me the most peaceful sleep. That's amazing. So let's end it off over here. Three tips that you can give any aspiring person who's looking to kind of better their life. Yes. So self-improvement is number one. Yeah. If you're not growing, you're dying. Yeah.  And if the answer is no, you can't get too far, right? Self-improvement is key. If you want a better life, better relationships, better anything, self-improvement. That could be as little as listening to a podcast, reading a book, going for a walk. If you're stressed on time, stressed with family, go for the walk, listen to the podcast, put the two and two together. But you have to be doing something that's growing you as a person, just because it's really tough to get to anywhere great without growing yourself. I mean, I personally don't think it's possible unless you luck out and we're talking like 0.01% of people it happens to, in my personal opinion. Number two is know your worth. When you don't know your worth, you almost always settle for less. And if you're settling for less, it's really tough to grow, so always know your worth. Number three, get to a place where you love yourself. And this could be the weirdest thing in the world, but I think it's really important you get to a place where you love yourself. I will tell you why. If you fall in love with yourself successfully, truly love everything there is, if I don't have the biggest muscles in the world or anything like that, I don't have the nicest body in the world, but I love this body. I love my mind. It's not perfect. And I've been dealing with a little bit of anxiety lately. I'm veering you to it. But I still love that. I love everything. Everything that happens, I love. So what happens when you get to this state of truly, truly loving yourself? You automatically fall in love with life.  Bro, if you're not going to love yourself, who's going to love you, end of story. Exactly. You know what I mean? Value yourself, love yourself, and love. The definition of love is you have your own definition, Roman has his own definition, I have my own definition. So whatever you define as love, that's your own personal definition.  You do you. Yep. Absolutely. And like I said, the best byproduct side effect, whatever you want to call it, of when you truly fall in love with yourself is you automatically fall in love with life. And at that point, you see things differently. The world tends to open up to you. You literally, everything at that point just becomes crystal, crystal, crystal clear. And I would say those are the three things that are pretty important. Beautiful, man. I want to thank you so much for coming on the show. Thank you, man. Can I say this? Yeah, for sure, man, yeah. I've been a fan of you for quite some time and I've learned a ton from you. Thank you. Like a ton. Your Facebook, everything you post on your Facebook is like religiously, it comes into my newsfeed. I read it all. I love your videos and for quite some, I still do. I look up to you in many ways. Thank you. And just being here is, to me, so phenomenal, man and I appreciate you reaching out and it means a lot to me. So thank you. Pleasure man, thank you for coming on in. Thank you. Alright guys, you heard it. Go check out Roman, I guess Lifepop. Lifepop.com, search Roman Price, I come up at anywhere and everywhere, send me a message. It's all the same. Cool. Peace guys. Alright.


Live from San Diego, California, it's theCUBE. Covering Cisco Live US 2019. Brought to you by Cisco and its ecosystem partners. Welcome back to San Diego, everybody. This is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante. Stu Minimitz here, Lisa Martin as well, but we've got a very special guest now, Ken O'Reilly, my good friend is here. He's the director of customer experience for Cisco Stealth Watch. Kenny, great to see you. Thanks for coming on. Well, thanks for having me, Dave. Good seeing you as well. Yeah, so customer experience. People think about customer experience and security. It's not always great, right? It's a challenging environment. They're constantly sort of chasing their tails. It's like the arms race with the bad guys. So what is customer experience all about in the context of security? So our number one goal for our security customers is to accelerate their value realization. So our challenge is to make sure that they get the value out of the product, that they're buying, because every minute of every day the bad guys are trying to get their assets and their IP. And when they buy a technology, the quicker you can get it up and running and protect, the better it is for our customer. So how do you measure like value? It's like reducing the amount of data that you're exposed to losing. Is it increasing the cost of the bad guys getting in? Because that's kind of, if I'm a bad guy and it costs me more to get in, I'll maybe go somewhere else. How do you measure that? Right, so you're right. So our whole product strategy is to increase the cost for the bad guy to get the IP or the assets. And so for us, we have to understand what the value proposition is for our product so that the customers can realize that value. So whether it's trying to help them with the use cases or operationalize the product or in our case, what we try to do, we have both network users and security users. We try to get both groups to adopt the technology and then expand it from their operation centers to the guys that are doing the threat hunting, to the investigations, et cetera. So that's how we sort of gauge the values, the number of people that are using the technology and the number of use cases, they're actually implementing. So we've been talking about security all week, Stealth Wash, obviously one of the flagship products. Cisco's security business grew 21% last quarter. So that's got to be an interesting stat. Services is 25% of the company's revenue. So you're at the intersection of two pretty important places for Cisco. So specifically when you come into a customer engagement, who are you engaging with? Is it a multidisciplinary? Are you primarily dealing with the SecOps group or do you touch other parts of the organization? So typically when a company's looking, it's usually they're looking for network visibility. So we're dealing with the network architecture teams and they typically bring in the security architects because today they're working hand in hand. And then from there, that's where we try to kind of, what we say, preach the gospel of Stealth Wash. We always say you can never have enough Stealth Wash, okay, because you can never have enough visibility. Because once you turn the lights on and they can see what's going on in their network, it's very illuminating for them and then they realize the challenges that they have and what they have to do to protect their assets. Yeah, I joked at Google Cloud Nexus, like the cockroaches all scrambling. Oh yeah. You know, for the corners when you turn the lights on. And Stealth Wash at its core is, you don't need a lot of fancy AI even though you can apply fancy AI, but you start with the basics, right? What do you got? Where are the gaps? Okay, so now once it's exposed, what do you do with that information? Is the customer experience group come in and help implement it faster? That's part of the value? Yeah, yeah. So time to value. Yeah, so time to value With our experts, of course, we understand the space. We understand our product. We understand the challenge. And of course, our network and security customers are overwhelmed. The stat that they throw out there is that our large customers have any from, we're from 50 to 100 security products. So how do you stand out? So as a vendor, our number one goal is to build that relationship with the customer to become the trusted security advisor. So we know better than anybody how to get that value, how to get it quickly. And the number one problem that they have, Dave, is how to operationalize all these tools. Because StealthWatch sits in the middle, we're a big integration platform. We take data, telemetry, net flow from a lot of different products. And we bring that data together to figure out, to help that customer figure out how to make sense of it, update their policies, create better policies and really tighten up their security posture. They might like to reduce the number of tools, but they really can't, because they're using them. And so what you do is you bring in a layer to help manage that. But you're also solving a problem, just in terms of exposing gaps. And then do you also have tooling to fill those gaps? Or is that partners tools, is that StealthWatch? So we have our own, what we call integration platform, where we have a platform that helps integrate other, not only other Cisco security technologies into our platform, but other security technologies as well outside of Cisco. So, it's a platform that we've built, it's part of our customer experience sort of tool set. But it's a tool set unlike anybody else ever has. So that along with what we do with the DevNet group, we've built our own set of APIs to integrate in with the product APIs. So we can pump data out to data lakes, we can pump data out to sims like Splunk and some of the others. So that's where we are, we're a solutions group. That's what we do, we work on the solutions, long-term value, we work on the life cycle sort of value chain with customers, we're there with them the whole time. Our goal, retention, we want them to renew, which means they're investing in us again. And of course as cloud, as their infrastructure's moving to the cloud and our technologies are moving to the cloud, we have to be there to help them get through all those technology challenges. So, the pricing model is a subscription model, is that right? It can be? Yes, well what we call it, term. All right, but it's essentially subscription. We have switched over the last 18 months from a perm to a term-based model. Which I mean, Chuck Robbins on the conference calls, the earnings calls talks about the importance of increasing, they having a rateable model and recognizing subscription. So, when you say a term, so I got to what? Sign up for a year or two years, three years or something like that. Select three? Yeah. So who doesn't, right? So you sign up for three years and then, but the price book says monthly, I'm sure, right? So you can make it look smaller. But it makes sense though, because you're not going to start, stop, start, stop with your security. You really want to get success out of it. So you got to have some kind of commitment. Let's talk a little bit more about the analytics side of it. And how you're applying machine intelligence. I mean, it's always been some form of analytics, largely for reporting and things of that nature. But now it's getting more automated. So take us on that analytics journey. It's been around for, Southwest has been around for what, five years? 15. Yeah, over 15 years. 15. Yes, yes. Oh wow, maybe I just found out about five years ago. Right. Okay, so. No, but I mean. Take us back five years. Five years. So, the big thing for us in the data that we collect is context, right? So you've talked to TK about the more context you can add to that data. The better you are at analyzing that data. So for us, that's one of the things that we do. We add a lot of context to that data through ice. So identity information, what kind of assets they are. And that's where we get to, through our tools, add more context so that our analytical engines, so like the cognitive threat analytics, the encrypted threat analytics that we have, that they're able to analyze that data a lot better. And that's what we've been doing now for the past three plus years, since we were acquired by Cisco, is to find a way to add more context to the data so that helps our analytics become much more effective. And then you can interact with through APIs, say for instance Splunk, you mentioned that. So you got that data that you can operate on. Do you see a point where the machines are actually going to plug the holes? I mean, are we on the cusp of that? In other words, you see a gap, today a human has to take action. Do you see a point, maybe it's two, three, five, 10 years, but are we going to get to that point? I think so, down the line, I mean because we've seen, as we've been able to get better visibility and better context about that data, we can make better decisions through the machine. So it doesn't take an army of people to read the matrix. We're getting better at synthesizing that matrix down. You take our network segmentation capabilities that we've built as part of the StealthWatch customer experience team. We can get to well over 90% identification of the assets on the network, which is a lot better than anybody else in the industry. So we're getting there, and through the final stages of reading that matrix, we're getting to the point where we understand a lot more what's on people's networks, what those assets are. So as a security practitioner, how do you think we're doing as an industry?  Are we more secure, less secure? And it felt like, you know, as data grew, it felt like we were getting more and more and more exposed. You've seen the stats where when a company gets infiltrated, it takes on average 250 days for them to realize they've been infiltrated, is that changing? Are we getting better as an industry? I think in Cisco we are, because of the products that we have and that integrated architecture. So when we first joined three years ago, that was the drumbeat, and now today we integrate with ICE. We're going to integrate with Next Generation Firewall. Through the integration of the sort of analytics that we've got in the cloud, that's happening. And we are trying to integrate with other products, but you know, you go down on the floor and you see the number of point products, that is a nightmare for our customer. So for us, through the customer experience in our organization, we're there to take that complexity out and bring all of those technologies together. And when you get to that point, then you're really making progress with a customer. A customer that's got 50 to 100 products in the mix, that's a recipe for disaster. And if that, if it's still like that five years from now, customers are still going to be challenged. A big part of your customer experience mission is simplification, speed, time to value. Raise the cost to the bad guys and then do it all over again. Yeah, it's just rinse and repeat and that's a life cycle journey. And that's what we take our customers through. Now I notice you have on your phone, you got the Bruins logo. That's right, right here, brown. So big game tomorrow. That's right. Four, three in overtime, Bruins. Oh my God, I have my heart to take that, Dave. It's going to be an overtime game. Well, as you know, it's rare to have a game seven in any, at the very final one, a lot of game sevens, but not to win at all. I think the last time in Boston was 1984. Is that right? Yeah, it's been a long time. So I'm excited. I know you are. That's right. Warriors fans too, we got that thing going out.  Hopefully there's a game seven for that as well. Yeah, let's go, right? Why not? Why not? Game seven all around. All right, so Charr is going to play with his broken jaw or whatever's going on. Matt Grislich, I hope is back. Yeah, that would be key. That would be key. Yeah, right? Sure, up to defense.  Charr. Oh yeah. That's right. All time. Even though we give him a lot of grief. That's right. He may look snow, but he's the all-time plus minus leader. That's right. Katie, hey, thanks so much for coming in. All right, Dave, thanks for having me on. Great to see you. All right, go Bruins. We will be right back. Dave Vellante, Stu Miniman and Lisa Martin. We're live from Cisco Live in San Diego. You're watching theCUBE.


Alright, how's it going everybody? This is Cup Hockey 2 box break number four. This is from a fresh case So good luck to everybody who joined If you get two or more teams in this you will be entered into that Opeach Platinum giveaway We'll do that at the end of the break. Here's the list of teams. Yeah, so we'll do break 21 through 28 on the Big Hit Express then we'll do Break 30 because that sold out before 29 Wanted it off of 29 Optic basketball. That's a quick break and then anything else that sells in that time period we'll That tonight so we got a sealed six box master case All right, we'll go one two three four five six See on the top one there six so these four boxes will be in a separate break the other ones aren't Super close. I don't know if they're gonna go tonight. Maybe you never know. All right. Good luck everybody first box like I said What's the most difficult part about this Cup Hockey is? The names of pronouncing the names and then getting the cards out of the box Without too much struggle. I usually just end up ripping the box Yeah, I mean it kind of stinks Sean like I don't mind the policy I mean, I guess it's really hard to do the expired redemptions But they could have at least given like a deadline saying like you know in 30 days our expired redemptions will Not be valid so it could give us some time to sell the product with expired redemptions in it But that's my main thing And like they announced like very casually. All right. Good luck What's up, Arthur That's awesome Matthews 90 of 249. What's up? It was on Penini CSM Twitter at Penini CSM Maple Leafs That's going out to Steve Birch Got a nice little rookie patch autograph mural Heist Canon 233 of 249 Dallas Stars That's Joe It's a nice one for the flames Sean Monahan 43 of 99 four color patch auto there for the Flames that is Joey nice one got an Evan Bouchard 1975 rookie class of 2019 for the Edmonton Oilers That's Jack B Couple more in this one Landon bow 67 to 49 another RPA. This one is another for the stars No problem Joe, what's going on with the camera right now? I'm not focusing well stars that is Joe Got another one there and We got numbered To 249 that is Michael Rasmussen. That's for the Detroit Red Wings that one's going out to Steve and be box to yeah, I mean, I don't think it'll hurt older boxes too much, but maybe a little but If the product is like, you know Carried by it a guy who has a redemption, you know like in four years if You know drew lock This stuff in NT or something Maybe like 2016 Dak Prescott Look here. He has over a lot of redemptions Usually they can get the big players assigned redemptions. So all right next one. Good luck Number to 249 Klajru for the Flyers And that one's Wade Preston We got a Michael Dal Cole 38 of 249 RPA for the Islander just going out to Scott C. Oh, I think this one's a pretty nice one Anthony, Mantha One of 99 signature materials for the Red Wings And I know for a fact I Know for a fact the next one is really good. This one's Red Wings. That is Steven B Look at the signature rendition Sydney Crosby. Very nice Going out to the Penguins at Scott C Very nice Signature rendition Sydney Crosby. All right, we got a cup quads six of 12 Sagan Ben Radulov and Klingberg Dow stars great break for Joe Six of 12 And we got a Casey Middlestatt 192 of 249. That's Buffalo Sabres That is John W So you got a nice little two-boxer of the cup. We do have a giveaway attached to this break Anyone who took two or more teams gets entered So you had to do it in increments of two So let's see here who will be entered All right, so Jack got two teams gets a spot Joey Got four teams. He gets two spots Josh X-Line Mark. Whoops mark. There you go Regimel Rick, I know stars heavy break there, huh Steven Steve Wade and that's it 12 on the list. Good luck Name on top wins a free box of 1920 opg platinum shipped sealed to them. You can you know rip a pack each day You can rip it all at once. You could sell it sealed if you want to you can Hold it sealed forever. Who knows three four Five six Seven and eight. Yeah, we all know everyone's gonna rip it Joey. There you go eight times Joey Congrats You get the box. Thanks for ready for getting in those cup hockey two-box number four


Donald Trump has been indicted again. This is the fourth instance and this time it's on charges of election subversion. What is the case about? Argentina's pre-election primaries threw up a stunner with a far right-wing candidate emerging on top. Who is Javier Millay? This is daily debrief on People's Dispatch. These are our stories for today. And if you're watching this on YouTube, don't forget to hit that subscribe button. Former U.S. President Donald Trump has been indicted again. It seems like every two weeks brings a new indictment and this is his fourth one. The charges this time are from the state of Georgia where Trump and his associates are accused of election subversion in 2020. Now Trump has been charged under the state's racketeer influencer, influenced in corrupt organizations that is RICO law. The case is based on calls he made to a top state official in 2020 seeking to flip the state which ended up voting for his opponent Joe Biden. We have with us Eugene Purir to understand the case and what this means for Trump and the U.S. Eugene, so thank you so much for joining us. Indictment number four for Donald Trump and almost every month one seems to come up. And there are a lot of questions. We'll come to that. But first of all, I wanted you for the benefit of viewers to give a bit of detail about what specifically this one is about. We know it's in the state of Georgia, the 2020 elections. So what is Donald Trump accused of doing? Donald Trump is being charged by the state of Georgia and a set of cases that are very similar to the federal charges people may have heard of and they are essentially accusing him through a range of different counts of trying to overturn the legal results of the election of 2020. So there are a number of things that they're pursuing him on, but it includes, you know, attempting to form a slate of individuals who were illegally challenging the election results, intimidating election officials trying to get them to the election results, just in general intimidating people lying about a number of different things in terms of statements that were made by individuals who they are arguing were operating under the direction of Trump about the election results. So what it really all boils down to even though there is a range of different charges I believe 30 individual charges is that Donald Trump is being charged individually for his own actions vis-a-vis the 2020 elections, and as they say to fraudulently overturn the elections, and he's also being charged as the head of a criminal conspiracy, which is saying that everyone who was working for Donald Trump in this process in Georgia to attempt to overthrow, overturn the elections illegally or fraudulently as the court is alleging as the prosecutors are alleging. You know, we're a part of essentially a mafia. I mean, that's the type of law that they're actually using the RICO law that was designed against mafias and criminal organizations. So Trump being charged an individual and the head of a criminal enterprise, but for the same thing. And that is various attempts to intimidate election officials and manipulate the various statistical results in order to change the result of the election on knowing that in fact he did not win. Right. So we've actually seen a lot of reporting on this specific issue. I believe, you know, there are records of him calling the Georgia, Georgia Secretary of State, if I'm not mistaken. You know, there's been the he himself has spoken out and the person concerned, I believe was a Republican as well. So there's been a lot of documentation of Georgia, specifically some of the conversations that happened around the election. But in legal terms, what happens after an indictment, you know, what is what is required for say a conviction? What is the process ahead? Well, now that he's been indicted, the trial process will essentially begin. So there's going to be some extended skirmishing around the issue of when the trial will take place, where and how it will take place. There's obviously will be a jury selection process, which will be, you know, very novel. I mean, this is a very interesting case raising a lot of interesting legal perspectives. And then ultimately, once all those kind of preliminaries are set forward, they will set a date for the trial and then he will go to trial and then these claims will be adjudicated for Trump to be convicted. Individually, they're going to have to prove several different things, but basically they're going to have to prove that he knew he did not win, and that all of his actions were asking people to do things that he knew were illegal vis-a-vis the election process. And also, there will be a chance for him to be held guilty, even if they can't prove what he knew personally that all these other individuals that they have charged were operating under his direction and they just didn't have to be able to prove that he told them to do something, or that they were under the impression that he was telling them to do something, to convict him, essentially not for the crime itself, but for directing others to commit the crimes of intimidation, of false record keeping, and all of these different various issues. So they're essentially going to try to prove two different things. I mean, one sort of what Trump himself knew and what he was directing, but also beyond that, that he was directing other individuals. Essentially what they're doing is making sure if they can't prove Trump himself knew all the different pieces, they can say, well, he directed these other people so that no one can come into court and say, well, I just did it on my own. It wasn't Trump. It wasn't this. If they can prove that they were communicating about it, they can say that he was directing them. So Rico especially is known for being a very low bar for conviction. He was sort of designed to capture mafia bosses, gang leaders who have all their minions doing all the work for them, but under their direction. So, these cases are usually seen as pretty easy in a general sense if you can prove they were communicating with people who didn't commit a crime, but we'll have to see all of this come out in court and there's going to be a lot of novel issues. No president has ever been charged like this before. So who knows how it's going to play out but that's what will happen. We'll see, you know, probably over the next several weeks, the preliminary issues, then they'll set a date for trial probably early next year and then he will go to trial and all the claims will be adjudicated. Right. So Eugene, like I said, like we said, there are four indictments right now. There's another federal case, like you said, regarding the elections, one I believe on secret documents and one on the kind of certain payments. But do any of these actually significantly bar Donald Trump from holding political office from running for president from politics as such? They don't. So Donald Trump, even if he was convicted and sent to jail before the election would still have the right to run for election and if he won, he could in fact, commute his own sentence and pardon himself. So to some degree, the electoral process is the real court here because no matter what happens in these legal cases, if he wins the election, he can then immunize himself from any possible consequence that he would face. Now he could be excluded as a voter in his home state as a convicted felon. I believe he's registered to vote in Florida now and there's a range of different laws around that. So it's possible that he could actually run for the election. He's registered to vote in Florida, which does allow felons to vote if you meet certain things. That's kind of the irony of the U.S. electoral process. He could be actually barred from voting, but he could in fact still win and in fact then pardon himself for the crime. So theoretically, this all is setting itself up to make an even bigger political issue because for his own supporters, they can essentially get him out of trouble if they're able to get across the finish line there in 2024. Right, now coming to the political aspect of this, definitely the Democrats are planning to use this as a big electoral point in the coming elections because like you said, many of these cases, I guess, go into trial more towards the end of the year, early 2024 when really the campaign also begins to heat up. So I suppose the idea is also to kind of bind him down in these processes. But it does seem that in terms of the Republican vote, basically there's not too much of an impact because he seems to be very popular. The most recent poll I've seen which was from just before the Georgia charges, but after the federal charges so that only 16% of Republicans agreed with the charges. So it seems that he is pretty unassailable amongst the reputation is unassailable amongst the Republican voter base they seem to want him to be the president. None of the other candidates are coming anywhere close to him in any poll poll after poll after poll. So it's always possible things could change when the trials themselves start perhaps that could influence people, but it does seem pretty set in stone that the Republican base and Republican voters have decided they want Donald Trump, and they want to take these issues to the ballot box because they believe that he is being unfairly persecuted. And so I think that is also driving Republican support for Trump, because they ultimately feel like this is so unjust, we can't drop him for another candidate. We have to, you know, take the fight into the electoral season against, you know, the forces they've used to be a raid or raid against them. Not to mention that I suppose a lot of people also believe that he didn't lose the election in the first place in 2020. Yes, I think there's a number of these Republicans who somehow think it's true. Unfortunately, they are deeply diluted I mean is 100% false he absolutely lost the election. Almost all of his top campaign officials by the way, stated under oath that they actually believe that he lost the election so all the people working around him, including some of the people who tried to subvert the electoral process and even when you start to look as realistic as it was I mean you've got these claims that there were tens of thousands of ballots shipped from China, that Hugo Chavez, you know over 10 years ago illegally set up voting machines to somehow rig them against Donald Trump. So I mean it's so fantastical and so many different levels but things have become so partisan that I think there are many supporters of Donald Trump who just couldn't believe that he could possibly lose to Joe Biden and have allowed themselves to sort of be diluted and be willfully ignorant about it because it makes them feel more secure about their own political choices and I think they may be you know ruin the day that they were were believing this if you know when we see what happens next year where I think this could really hurt Trump in terms of the broader population. Thank you so much Eugene ironic because on the one hand you see that you know there is there are all these arguments going about the going on about the election on the other like you pointed out many times on people's dispatch significant efforts being made to actually restrict the number of people who can vote which is probably a larger threat to the election system, then what these many of these diluted people might be concluding. It is very true there's millions of people every year sometimes as many as 5 million people that are not allowed to vote because of criminal convictions. You've got a huge range you know almost 30 states with all sorts of restrictions on, you know the ideas that are needed to vote the you know creating all rules about if you have an absentee ballot if you don't initial it in a certain way, then the vote doesn't count and so we're seeing in critical states, including Florida including Wisconsin, including North Carolina which are critical swing states. You know, significant efforts to present prevent people from voting, as well as significant gerrymandering to prevent at the lower levels the congressional on the state levels, the possibility of Republicans to maintain control of congressional delegations and of state senators, even if they're not able to get the majority of votes in terms of their party by manipulating the, the various electoral constituencies the lines of the electoral constituencies so from top to bottom we've seen a massive assault on voting rights here in the United States over the past five to 10 year striking of 10s of millions of people from the voter rolls over the course of the past decade. So so many little tricks and different things that are really the real issue as it concerns the issue of the integrity of voting in America. Unfortunately the right wing has been able to hijack the issue with their false claims of election elections being stolen, none of which has ever been substantiated in any way shape or form by any study at any time. Right. Thank you so much for talking to us and giving us an update on what's happening on this front we I suppose we'll keep hearing more about this the coming months as well. Thanks so much. Thank you. We next go to Argentina where the pre-election primaries called the Paso were held on August 13th. Voting in the Paso helps each coalition of front decide their candidates. In what was a shocking result the far right wing candidate Javier Millay won the highest number of votes which is about 30%. Now Millay campaigns on an extreme platform. He's been described as a libertarian and position himself as an outsider and as you can guess is an admirer of Donald Trump. Argentina is facing a massive economic crisis and Millay seems to be capitalizing on it. For more we have with us Zoe Alexandra. Zoe thank you so much for joining us so maybe first of all could you take us through what happened in the Paso on August 13th. Well this Sunday in Argentina on August 13th were the primary open simultaneous and mandatory elections also known as the Paso which in some context are primary elections and these in these elections. People were able to go to the polls and select the candidates who would stand in the main presidential elections and the general elections which will take place on October 22nd. And these were very these are always very important elections because while they're not binding and while they're not electing people necessarily. They're giving sort of a temperature check on where the support of the population is it's sort of like a more formal opinion poll. If you want to say it like that. And the results in these elections were quite shocking really for many sectors of society. They did not line up for example with the opinion polls that have been taking place in Argentina and the biggest shock was the victory or the lead that was taken by Javier Millay who's from the Liberty party a far right Libertarian party some classified as ultra liberal. Others say it's fascist. Essentially it's a party that has extremely extremely radical proposals for Argentina that attempts to completely attack the system of rights. Access to education access to healthcare and other such things in his speech following these elections Javier Millay said that in as opposed to the slogan of every time there's a need to the right he says that those rights must be paid for. And so it's essentially this this vision that the state should not guarantee anything he also calls for the disappearance of the central bank in Argentina. He calls for the dollarization of the economy, alongside a lot of other extremely extremely backwards in a sense social ideas and positions about gay people about women about the access to abortion. So he's a very threatening candidate to the lives of many Argentinians this is cause a real shockwave in society especially as I said that the opinion polls were not expecting this. The other results from these elections were of course the selection of the final candidates for the two major coalitions which would be the together for change coalition which is the coalition at Mauricio Makri led in 2015 to 2019 when he was president of Argentina. This saw that his former ministry minister of security Patricia Bullrich. She was able to clinch the nomination. She famously was responsible for different security policies. The heavy repression of protests of the Mapuche people in the south of Argentina in the Patagonia region, which resulted in met a lot of violence and infamously the disappearance the force disappearance and assassination of Sergio Maldonado. She's a very divisive figure in Argentina. So that was on one hand and then again the progressive centrist coalition the current ruling coalition, which was relaunch as the union for the homeland also selected their ticket which is going to be led by the minister of finance Sergio Massa. Again, this was a candidate that was endorsed by Cristina Fernández, a kitchener. He was facing up against Juan Garaboy who was a popular leader from workers movements in the country. He's hoping to be able to bring some of that agenda into Sergio Massa's agenda to be able to combat some of these far right populist ideas that Javier Mele is bringing that's responding to different sections of the study that feels sort of abandoned. So those are the major outcomes of Sunday's elections. And like you said a very surprising result. Could you also maybe take us through what are some of the factors that may have actually contributed to this result. We know Argentina is going through a very severe economic crisis. So it is again it is of course a very unexpected result, but there have been a lot of analysts again after these results came up. Many people were shocked it also came amidst a very very tense moment in Argentina. Days before a young girl if their 11 year old girl had been killed by people were attempting to rob her in her neighborhood while she was walking to school. This really shook the nation and it actually provoked a response from right wing sectors to say, And this is why we need more security we need more police. All of these progressive governments have been loose on crime. They don't want to prosecute teenagers. And so there's really been this this whiplash and response this horrific crime, which again has many many socioeconomic factors behind it as well that we won't even go into right now. But this is this really set the stage for this fire right response to this. There was also the killing of a protester on Friday. This was also extremely devastating for people in Argentina. Sorry on Thursday, and it really also impacted the populace the consciousness this was he was actually killed by police while he was being arrested. So this was also very brought another element into this context but overall, we know that from 2015 2019 when Mauricio Macri was in office, he essentially implemented an extremely extremely brutal and harsh neoliberal economic regime, cutting ministries cutting social services, taking out billions of dollars and loans from the IMF. This was extremely detrimental to Argentinian economy. And for example, the left pre candidate one guy boy has consistently called for this debt to be canceled for the government to not pay this debt. Argentina is now forced to dedicate a lot of its public spending towards paying back this debt. Very very challenging. And so this is another factor that when the front of those government took over in 2019 with a lot of promise saying that we're going to leave this neoliberal period we're going to have better times. We're going to reverse all of these setbacks that took place under Mauricio Macri where when he entered office there was no external debt, and that of course increase exponentially. He increased the number of people living under a line of poverty, the number of people living in the street homeless. So all of these things, there was great promise with the front of those government. But of course the pandemic came, they were inheriting, taking on a country with really, really difficult circumstances, structural issues that couldn't be reverted so quickly. A very, very, very staunch and stubborn right wing that did not want to allow any of these structural economic decisions to really go forward. We can remember in the very early in the government when the government tried to take over as it was defaulting on its payments. There was a very strong reaction from the right wing, and that really marked the course for the government it was really only able to take sort of timid measures it negotiated the loan with IMF. And many people in Argentina haven't seen their situations drastically get better or see any real material advances for their situation and so this has kind of given them the sense that okay well, it might not be the Mauricio Macri government may have brought this neoliberalism, but the progressive government was unable to make my situation any better so it's a very, very difficult situation in Argentina. The next couple of months leading up to the general elections in October are going to be very, very tense. Javier Millay has already announced that he was in dialogue with the IMF. He's trying to make agreements with Patricia Bullrich. It's going to be a very, very, very tight contest leading up to these elections. People are extremely worried about what these implications could be. So we'll definitely be following up people's dispatch and so stay tuned over there. Thank you so much Zoe for the updates. I guess we'll come back to you quite soon for further developments in the election as the campaign heats up as well in the run up to the October elections. And that's all we have in today's episode which turned out to be one about two far right wing candidates. We bring you such news from around the world of elections, of struggles by people, movements, of issues of geopolitical interest. So do go to our website peoplesdispatch.org, subscribe to our YouTube channel, watch all our videos and we'll see you tomorrow.