I'm Dan Moguloff from the Campus Office of Communications and Public Affairs and thrilled to welcome Vice Chancellor Research Randy Kast to this edition of Campus Conversations. And as usual, I'll start off with a little introduction to biography and Randy will share a few thoughts about his impressions of the office and the UC Berkeley Research Enterprise and then we'll open it up to questions. So Randy serves as the Vice Chancellor for Research with overall responsibility for UC Berkeley's research endeavor and in that capacity he provides primary leadership and research policy planning administration. He received his undergraduate degree from Cornell and his MS and PhD from Berkeley. He joined the Berkeley faculty in 1983 and since 1996 he has been the United Microelectronics Corporation Distinguished Professor in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. On January 1st 2018 he was appointed as Vice Chancellor for Research at UC Berkeley. He's published over 350 referee technical papers, book chapters, and books and his introductory Computer Engineering textbook, Contemporary Logic Design, check it out if you haven't already, has sold over 100,000 copies in two editions and has been used at over 200 colleges and universities. In the late 1980s with colleagues at Berkeley he developed redundant arrays of inexpensive discs, otherwise known as raid, maybe we can find out more about that later. That has become a 15 billion dollar per year industry sector and then I stumbled on this Randy which we may need to talk about later. In 1993 when you were at DARPA you established White House.gov and connected the White House to the internet. Regrets? Anyway. Without further adieu. Thank you very much and thank you for that very kind introduction Dan. I know that that I'd like to sort of start the session with a little bit of reflections on the job that I took on on January 1st. As Dan mentioned I had worked at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency for a couple of years in the early 1990s and I've been a working researcher and teacher and professor on the campus for my entire professional life so I thought I understood what research is actually about at a major university like Berkeley. I can tell you that there were many things I was not prepared for. One of them is the entire legal context around Native American Graves and Repatriation Act which has been an item of some political controversy actually for many years but has been something that's taking a lot of our offices time at the moment as we rethink the way in which we will engage with the Native American community for the 21st century. Another thing I found myself responsible for much to my surprise is I'm the guy who had to say we are canceling the big game Bonfire this year because through a quirk of campus organizational reality the fire marshal works for the division of environmental health and safety which for whatever reason reports to me. So it's a very broad portfolio that goes well beyond you know thinking about our research infrastructure and how we support our research enterprise on the campus but as I tell my wife every day it's never a dull moment. I just want to step back and talk about research in general when I remember when I was an undergraduate it wasn't here and I had a professor told me flat out you know we don't really care about undergraduates. I mean we're here to do research and work with our graduate students and you guys are basically a nuisance and I know that a lot of the California public sees our mission as primarily being educational. What's the case for the combination? What's the case that you make for why it's important that our faculty and that are in our institution are involved in two very different things at least seemingly very different academic endeavors. Why research here? Well I think that's that's you know a very great and fundamental question. If you look at the roots of our university it goes back to the land grant act of 1862 where a land grant public institution and if you actually go back and read the law that created the University of California in that time frame think of it for a second it's in the midst of the American Civil War and somehow the Congress had time to think about the future and how to think about education training and the advancement of knowledge in the nation they were able to look beyond what was happening on a moment-by-moment basis for what was happening in that time frame of 1862 and their thinking was to make the United States powerful economically at the forefront of knowledge the nation would have to invest in a kind of higher education that was an augment to classical education which had been designed really to train clergy and by the way almost entirely men for careers in the clergy through a classical education that there was a need for a practical education as well and the thought was that we're gonna we're gonna educate people to go into agriculture and the so-called mechanical arts to advance the nation well part of the mission of a 21st century public institution public research institution is in order to train our students to be at the cutting edge of new knowledge they should be taught by the people who are creating that new knowledge who can bring into the classroom not using somebody else's textbooks but to use our textbooks that we wrote that's the person standing in front of you teaching you about these concepts so research is extremely important for the educational mission and I think in in a very large extent this is why the best and the brightest of California want to come to Berkeley to study is the access to the intellectual environment where the creators were not just the interpreters of what the state of the art and knowledge actually is and then again when you go back to that 1862 view of it's important for the economic goodness of the nation to be at the forefront of these areas the economic impact that we have through our research is so important we push forward the boundaries of knowledge in order to understand the world better and to share that understanding with our students but in the process of pushing forward those boundaries of knowledge we create new ways that can help people be better in the world that can help their health can create new industries can they create new opportunities for employment because they're solving society's problems through the kinds of products and services that come about so the university is not an arms length ivory tower creating knowledge for its own sake it's embedded in a system an ecosystem around where it's located in the state to have to to create an educated workforce to create the people who can think about the new industries to support the new industries and to have the kind of regional economic benefit that a great university has and should have so how does your office or maybe your own perspectives how do they relate to how faculty member maintains that balance in other words that it's just as important whether they're see still seeking tenure or in terms of how they look at their workload that balance between educational responsibilities pedagogical responsibilities and what they want to get done in the lab well I have Dan mentioned that that I'm a professor of electrical engineering and computer science I was chair of that department in the late 1990s and also had the opportunity to serve on the campus budget committee which unfortunately or fortunately has nothing to do with the university budget but it is a group of faculty that are representatives of the academic Senate who provide advice to the administration about faculty advancement and so I had the opportunity for three and a half years to sit on a committee where we reviewed the portfolio for advancement cases of probably over that period of time it was more than a thousand cases so almost every member of our faculty was in what one of that came up at least once in that three and a half year cycle and I can tell you that the you know sort of the academic Senate leadership and campus leadership really believe in that balance portfolio of research teaching and service everything everything we talk about is evaluating our faculty on those three dimensions where you are in your career maybe there's a different emphasis a younger faculty member has to create their their national and international reputation they have to demonstrate their leadership in research and scholarship it's so important to establish yourself as a member of the scholarly community that doesn't mean that you could be an awful teacher but as your career advances maybe making more investment in your time of advancing teaching developing new courses new sort of curriculum or ways of teaching become part of the way in which we we credit you know sort of the success of the faculty member and then our institution is very much based on service service to your professional society service to society at large and service to the university this is an insane asylum run by the inmates and so it's very very important that people engage and provide you know their expertise their energy and their insights into running the institution and Berkeley and the University of California is a very strong model of how the administration and the academic Senate and indeed other communities staff communities the community of lecturers all provide inputs and are part of the process of running this place so in your first answer you mentioned the land you know our legacy is a land grant institution and I want in that context I'd like you to talk a little bit about what I've heard referred to as the signature initiatives something that I think we've heard Chancellor Chris talk about that are part of our strategic planning process part of the vision for the future and I've heard you talk about them as sort of almost a reimagining of our land grant mission so tell us a little bit about what the sign signature initiatives are why they're important and what it all means for the institution's research endeavors yes so the Chancellor has initiated a process of strategic planning for the campus to think you know broadly of where does Berkeley wants sees itself in the next decade maybe 20 years in a variety of different very important elements of what the campus does a research is one part of that set of pillars how students experience the university is another very important pillar how we have a financial model that can sustain the university is another part of that pillar but the signature initiatives are part of that sort of research and scholarship dimension rethinking or building on the expertise that the the university has as we extrapolated 10 or 20 years into the future so many universities have these vision statements and you know plans for for where they want to go if a quote that I like to to say it is if you don't know where you're going all wins are favorable you need to know where you want to go to jump on you know those opportunities whether it's for funding or support or or negotiating with the legislature or talking to you know some great philanthropist who wants to support the university you want to know what is the direction that you're going into and so through a process of engagement with a lot of different communities on campus faculty staff many many different inputs the the strategic planning group came up with five signature initiatives that in total are about the major societal challenges that we are facing in the 21st century and there is an appetite of our faculty to address those issues but translate what we do in scholarship into intervening and doing something about those issues that society faces so the the sort of five and there's like a sixth overarching one is environment what as we as a as a society going to do about the environment how do we prepare if we can't mitigate climate change how do we prepare for climate change in the way that we organize society we could be Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos and have a rocket in the backyard and go to Mars but most of us are going to get stuck here and and so what are we going to do about that how can we bring to bear our business expertise to you know how do we create an industry to address this our scientific and an engineering expertise what is our technological and scientific approach to these things our social science expertise how do we build you know sort of the support politically to address these issues all of this is within the environmental signature initiative another major one is to think about work in the age of the intelligent machine we're in the age of the machine a different kind of machine and we're going to have just the set of opportunities of how to amplify human intellect that this new technology will build how do we deal with that how do we prepare ourselves for that and there will be disruptions as well how do we prepare for the way in which society will be affected by these new technologies an example is the inherent bias that's built into artificial intelligence algorithms there in some sense only as good as the set of data they're trained on how representative is that set of data when you think about it when Randy goes in to try and get a mortgage from a banker they're going to look at some data about me and they'll look at how I'm dressed and if I go in with you know sort of genes that are ripped and and maybe a holes in my t-shirt and so on I'm not going to get that loan even though I have the same financials than if I go dressed as I'm by chance or for research and so humans have an inherent bias we have to understand that that exists the systems that are going to in part automate their decision-making will also have some biases built into it but we're developing the mathematics to quantify what that bias is and as a society we can decide the system has a 2% probability of mischaracter characterizing someone who wants a mortgage is that acceptable should it be 1% a half a percent zero so I mean there's so many exciting things you could imagine around that so environment work in the age of the intelligent machine issues related to democracy in the current world that we live in with facts that are now weaponized or facts and anti-facts and how do we sort through that both technologically scientifically humanistically and as a society inequality huge issues of inequality there was an article in the New York Times just a few days ago about California is now the world's fifth largest economy I live in San Francisco and every time I walk from Bart home and to Bart I go down an alleyway spewn with you know all kinds of drug paraphernalia and people sleeping on the streets where the richest city in the richest state in the richest country in the world and we have not been able to deal with homelessness and these addiction problems and the implication it has from generation to generation so you know again how can the intellectual resources of the university be focused on understanding those issues but I take it one step beyond it's not enough to write papers about the problem and to propose solutions you have to go into the community and try those solutions and see how it affects society at large and in the Bay Area in the state of California we should be and are to many extents a living laboratory at the forefront of a lot of these kind of social issues so I sense an appetite of our research community to not just stop at understanding the problem but taking it all the way to doing something in partnership with municipalities state government someday maybe the federal government to adjust some of these issues I mean just want to explore a little bit one part of that a little bit more you talked about translation you sort of refer to it just now at the very end translation into our our discoveries into beneficial goods and services and policy so we going into business I mean were you setting up factories how do we take that more aggressive stance when it comes to that translation that you're speaking so again the faculty our researchers our research infrastructure is very motivated by having impact in the real world impact scholarship has impact if other people care enough about it to build their own work on top of it and not to dismiss any sort of scholarship that is influential in that way in its community but an appetite a sort of a relatively new and increasing amongst the generation of researchers that we have on campus now is translate from the laboratory from what you're thinking about in your research group into action in the community in the real world and so your question is how do we support that and isn't that just sort of like business well again going back to that comments about the role of the modern university as an economic driver why does the state invest in the University of California to the you know extent limited extent that it does invest is in part the return on that investment in an educated workforce a better California and part of that is the way in which we impact the economic development of our region and Berkeley has done more than a share at building up the Bay Area as a center point for information technology for semiconductor technology and increasingly for biotechnology and of course the future involves intersections of those areas the way in which Silicon Valley has moved from being in in Stanford's backyard into San Francisco which is our backyard is kind of an interesting multi-dimensional view so no we're not in the business of business we are in the business of translating new ideas into economic impact and we do have a set of you know services offices capabilities on campus to grease the skids in getting those ideas out of the laboratory to have an economic benefit for the Bay Area region and beyond so I I think it would be safe to assume that that entails increased partnerships with the private sector with corporations we already we already have a lot of those so maybe you could talk a little bit about how you see those partnerships how we protect academic freedom I remember when I started working on campus the campus was embroiled in the controversy of our partnership with BP at the time and concerns about the work that was going on in the lab and concerned about academic freedom and where do we stand in terms of how we're protecting ourselves but at the same time exploiting and using those partnerships to advance the very interest you were talking about first of all there are many issues related to conflict of interest again a big article the New York Times over the weekend about Sloan Kettering and how researchers at that very prestigious institution receive funding from the same drug companies that they were doing trials on and we have a lot of people you know like to throw stones at California Hall of you know bloated administration and so on part of it is that the world that we operate in is so complicated and the compliance issues and the conflict of interest issues are so complicated that we do need to have infrastructure for vetting these things for investigating them when when something goes wrong but to come back to your to your main point in terms of our ability to do research we depend on the state of California to support us primarily the federal government sometimes foundations philanthropic foundations but increasingly industry and Berkeley has had a long history of alliance funded research a group of companies that come together at the neutral playing field of a university to support if you would pre-competitive research and and what is the value of doing this well it extends our research dollars we have another source of funding it brings to the table the perspective that industry has on what are the problems that they do not know how to solve which is a fantastic concept and context for applied research and because it is an alliance you don't have a as much likelihood of a single sponsor directing the research it's kind of a collaborative environment of here are the set of issues this is what we know how to do don't work on the things we know how to do work on the things beyond that and and that kind of direction and feedback is tremendously valuable for the way in which we engage with industry you mentioned the BP engagement of you know now more than 10 around 10 years ago or so this provided a lot of strategic funding for the university to really make a giant critical mass bet on biofuels and sometimes to work with on some you know really essential moving the world forward in a particular direction you have to work with a very deep pocketed you know sort of organization and that was a case of that which has helped in a variety of directions including some fantastic facilities that we have on campus but again I have confidence in our conflict of interest you know sort of apparatus on campus to ensure that and it isn't really in the interest of BP to sort of do exactly what it is they want us to do they have their own science labs to do that they want to challenge us to work on the things they don't know how to do and in return for a strategic hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollar investment in campus researchers to do this they do get you know sort of early eyes on what those great ideas are and you know again we need to think of each one of those relationships on a one by one basis but you know I think in order to get that scale of funding and that scale of upgrade on our scientific facilities it was a good call to enter into that agreement so as long as we're talking about sources of funding for research obviously the federal government remains I believe correct me if I'm wrong far and away the largest provider when the new administration came into office there was a lot of concern about an agenda that seemed to forebode drastic cuts where do things stand how have things turned out what is our relationship with the federal government like right now so this Dan a great question so I want to come back to something you said before about Randy's experience in the White House a little bit so I took a leave from the university in 1992 to go work for a federal agency in Washington the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency in 1993 in 1994 and then I came back I started on January 2nd 1993 the inauguration is June January 20th so I actually worked in the George Bush the first administration for like two weeks before it became the Clinton administration and things really picked up of course when the new government takes over and we were approached by the agency I was working in was approached by two young very dynamic staffers who were working for at the time the vice president Al Gore and they were appalled by the technological infrastructure in the White House and it was kind of remarkable that George Bush's White House had you know plug peg switchboard in 1993 and they also described how they ran around you know on the the you go to the inauguration the president is sweared in then all the staffers rush back to the White House and the old executive office building it's kind of like a land grab of who will get what office so you kind of want to be there as soon as you know like the light switch flicks now Clinton is in charge so they're running around all the offices staking out their new space in the White House West Wing in the old executive office building and they're looking for computers and they can't find any so you may think that the executive branch of government runs the place but who had the best computer set up in the entire White House on the dawn of the Clinton administration in January of 1993 vice president Dan quail for those in the room old enough to remember who he even was and that's kind of shocking in some sense until you realize that the vice president is not only doesn't only have an office in the executive branch he or she also has a role to play in the legislative branch they break the tie if the Senate you know sort of this 5050 so through his Senate office he was able to buy as many computers as he wanted and Bush couldn't buy any computers because the Congress wouldn't give him any money to buy computers what is the point of that whole story it's just that the executive branch is not nearly as powerful as you might think and the people who actually decide on what the budget is and then write the checks are the House in the Senate and right now they are continuing to support in fact almost at historical levels support for research scientific research social science research they've even increased the funding for the national endowment for the art and the national endowment for the humanities even though the president and his OMB director went on record as saying I want to zero those activities so we have been very fortunate in terms of the budget picture thus far looking forward in time part of this is that the Congress voted to basically take the locks off the bank to suspend budget caps and so everyone went on a wild spree of I like this I like that let's put that in the budget let's put that in the budget which has been good for research I have to say but you know there is a reckoning down the road and so I'm sure you're all aware of of the difference between what the government brings in in terms of revenue and what is currently spending that eventually is going to come home to roost and so somebody is going to have to prioritize what the government is spending its money on but right now despite all the rhetoric that comes out of out of government funding remains strong for many dimensions of science take a little turn here take a question that came in from the audience and it goes so how important is it to foster diversity and inclusion in the campus research community and what steps are you taking and perhaps you could expand on that to talk a little bit about gender and ethnic and racial imbalances and the STEM fields and sort of that whole suite of issues and concerns that people have around diversity writ large again whenever individual faculty member let's say submits a proposal to the National Science Foundation of the National Institute of Health they need to articulate their plan you know what the bigger societal impact of the work is and very frequently the way that we can have that impact is by engaging a more diverse community in the research I think this is an area where the campus has done much but could do more particularly in terms of for example that the chancellor and the provost initiatives with respect to student discovery initiatives we want to get students as undergraduates at Berkeley involved in the research enterprise of the campus and in doing that we want to ensure it is a very broad and diverse set of students so for example more female students who are engaged in research in the STEM fields in computer science my field which is particularly egregious in terms of the represent you know the gender balance within that field we can provide help we can provide support to have those kinds of programs going because at the end of the day it's about building a pipeline a pipeline of engagement both to underrepresented groups on campus women in science fields minorities in science and mathematical fields to give them an opportunity to engage to have a plan for as undergraduates build the pipeline for graduate school build the pipeline for becoming faculty but also reaching into the K through 12 pipeline and get to students before they're turned off from careers in these kinds of fields and through our school of education and its engagement with the local municipalities in the Bay Area and the kind of work they're doing in community engaged research a particular focus for the school of education's research is how to open up the STEM fields in partnership with local school districts to a more diverse community of students it's all about the pipeline and so through our research through the programs will run for our own undergraduates through how our undergraduates can go into high schools and junior high schools as role models for hey there's a kid from my community who's studying advanced science at Berkeley I can do it too these are we need we have a lot that we do we are developing a strategy for doing even more and I believe that the resources will be there to lead to success let's stay with the gender issue just for a second unfortunately a lot of the reports about sexual harassment and violence on college campuses not just this one involved to some extent that relationship between a member of faculty and a graduate student how much of a concern is that to you and what is the campus doing or at least in in terms of your office how are you involved in that and what sort of efforts are are possible for somebody in your position to make to ensure that it doesn't happen well I can tell you as a faculty member zero tolerance on this when I was a department chair was many years ago there was a complaint brought forward and we dealt with it very very quickly and as you're sort of aware you know those of us who the room is is sort of faculty staff of a variety of people we go through a training program every two years about what to do how to support someone who has been harassed how to report it how to respond and I take that training extremely seriously and in fact it was several decades ago but the nascent training for new department chairs was very valuable in terms of the particular incident that occurred in my career where I had to report it and engage with the title the title nine office sorry is that right title nine title 11 whichever one it is to deal with these sort of issues I again within our within our complex of research institutes in my role as a faculty member zero tolerance and I think really the office on campus that is the point office on this is the sexual harassment and sexual violence office that Sharon Inklis leads but we work with her when allegations have been made and when this findings have been made in order to some extent our responsibility is to ensure that the individual is properly disciplined increasingly the federal agencies want to be made aware of what that disciplinary process is but we also have a role to play in protecting the research enterprise so imagine that a principal investigator is you know sort of forbidden from entering the campus and loses their principal investigator status for a number of years what happens to their graduate students what happens to their you know sort of postdocs what happens to their research staff and so we have to be very aware of punishing the person who deserves to be punished but also protecting the in some sense the innocent bystanders bystanders of the of the research enterprise so we get engaged on those kinds of things and certainly our supportive of the sexual violence and select sexual harassment office when a rendering of a decision has been made to be to act as quickly as we possibly can in in sort of response to that finding so the next question we're going to change terrain just a little bit come back to money the issue of money and I think the the question touches on some legitimate concerns that people haven't it's as follows given the ambitions of the university how do you reconcile with staff cutbacks 50 year old decaying bill buildings and poor technology support meaning I think what this person is asking you've painted a picture of this wonderful vision in the future and it's I think safe to assume that with that comes all sorts of expenditures what about that balance with some of the more mundane issues and challenges and expenses that we need to address here on campus so University of California Berkeley we face a lot of challenges and you know many of the people in this room have been on the forefront of that in the sense of a totally out of control budget and a huge budget deficit going forward that that was not in control I mean there was we were we have essentially been in financial receivership from the office of the president for the last several years and so our chancellor and the leadership team that we currently have in place have worked very hard to get our budget back in line with our expenditures in part by raising revenues by charging people for things that they you know that you can charge them for and you should be charging them for but part of that has also been reducing services which means letting people go I think the chancellor says two-thirds by revenue one-third by cutbacks and part of that is you know there has been a steady history of underinvestment in maintenance you know in order to make the budget balance and so on there have been a lot of sacrifices that have been made to get us to a point where the chancellor can now talk about we believe that our about a budget will be in balance by next summer and we can think more strategically of where we go from there but there you know seismic retrofit deferred maintenance restaffing essential services that have been you know sort of cut to the bone it's pretty clear when I look across you know the part of the campus that I'm responsible for research support services there is no fat to cut there really is no you know we are operating at a much level a much reduced level of service than we were three or four years ago and it's showing in terms of dissatisfaction and service longer times to process things it's very obvious risk risk to the institution are our lab safe as they should be and so on so I've made some you know sort of strategic decisions on how to staff up in order to you know sort of cover those vulnerabilities that I see in our portfolio but moving forward we're faced by the following challenge our budget you know we'll reduce staffing levels deferred maintenance seismic retrofit we got our budget in balance how are we going to grow out of this where's the money going to come from we know that the state is probably not going to be you know super generous going forward and the trend of less state support will continue we know that how politically charged and difficult it is to try and get some visibility and support for even tuition rises that track the cost of living very political set of issues around that so I think the future in order to implement those visions that I was referring to like the strategic plan and the signature initiatives we have to do philanthropy we have to think about how we increase the amount of money flowing into the campus and the good news is we just closed a year where the fundraising operation almost hit six hundred million dollars and exceeded five hundred million dollars for the first time in the university's history so you know it means everyone in roles like I have we have to up our game in terms of philanthropic development in order to really remain being the leading public research university because even though it's public the amount of support we get from public sources is diminishing we have to if you pardon the expression float on our own bottom in terms of getting the resources we need to run the world class operation that we both are and aspire to stay being and I think that's really going to be the way in which we're going to have to go forward and actually just touch on something that's the subject of another question that just came in so there's two I guess two primary revenue streams that come into the university from the state of California one about sort of general operation support and then also research about the research where do you think things are heading in terms of the amount of research support that we get from the state the nature of our partnership and relationship with the state not around the educational mission about around the research mission right so I should know than the amount of dollars we get from the state for in support of research it's in the general range of something something under a hundred million dollars how do you compare that just for people who don't follow this hundred about a hundred million from the state and more or less from the feds what does that look like our total research sort of incoming research dollars for the last year 2017-2018 was seven hundred million dollars by far the lion's share of that is federal dollars something in the general range of four hundred million I believe three to four hundred million and the largest piece of that interestingly enough is National Institute of Health and Berkeley for a campus without a medical school is is the number one or number two consumer if you would or expenditure of NIH research dollars NSF is next then Department of Defense the state is a partner in all of this and I think needs to be a bigger partner and I'm you know sort of thinking in terms of the new administration there will be a new governor in a couple of weeks how that person we think we know who it'll be but you never know how the university can partner with that new administration when you think of the big challenges that the state faces one area fire fire is a you know our state in the face of climate change in the face of consistent drought in the face of our you know incredible natural resources has been challenged enormously and it's had huge economic impact in the state in terms of insurance expenditure communities that are destroyed you know and the sort of urban the issues of urban planning and the way in which the state has evolved to be kind of like urban development on the doorstep of the natural environment big issues Berkeley has the probably the most distinguished collection of fire experts you sort of land management or forest management expertise and we are a 60-minute drive from Sacramento when they have an issue on what the state can do to address these these sort of problems that our state will have going forward they should the first people they should think of you know sort of talking on the phone should be our researchers at Berkeley we should remember that the border of the campus extends to the boundary of the state we are California State University we are the flagship campus if you need expertise on these issues come to us to help us help the state deal with it so fire is a huge one I was referring a moment ago to the article in the New York Times about California as the fifth largest economy part of that article was about the income inequality in the you know sort of in the wake of these technological and economic revolutions that have taken place largely on our doorstep so the biotech infotech the entertainment in industry is huge and successful in Southern California the agricultural industry the sort of US grown fruits and nuts are like some huge percentage comes from the Central Valley of California and it's a high tech industry these days if you think about winemaking it's a high tech industry these days we are advanced in so many different economic areas but we leave so many people behind we are a point of immigration from many parts of the world so there are large immigrant communities as a faculty member in engineering over my 35 years at Berkeley I saw the the Vietnamese kids whose parents were janitors and then there was a generation of Russian kids who came through who were studying computer science and then a generation of Korean kids and then so each immigrant community would take advantage of public access to an engineering education through the University of California at Berkeley you could see the different immigrant communities that did manage to make it to higher education but many were left behind and so how can our social scientists our school of public policy our school of education our school of public health in terms of engaging with these communities to get them on a path to greater economic success should also be a mission and a partnership between the University and the state government because we want to raise all boats not just the select who are the computer science trained students or the biotech trained students so you know I think that there is a huge role to play and I think I will I hope that whoever the new governor is that there'll be a new sort of engagement and compact between the University of California and the state government to be you know sort of consultants assistance to work with the state government through support for research to have this kind of translational effect on the state of California so we've been talking about things in the news recently and one of the things that's been in the news is this seemingly unending stream of Nobel Prize winners who had some connection to Berkeley they went here they taught here but let's just take one for an example James Allison why did he leave so of course I never knew Jim but as I took on this role and looking at you know sort of the way our intellectual property office works I've I've come to know a lot about the work that he did at Berkeley and so it's very interesting you look at both James Allison and Francis Arnold who was a student and a postdoc at Berkeley and Paul Romer who won the economics prize who was an assistant professor at Berkeley you know the thing is they got trained in some sense and started their careers and in Jim's case a lot of his career was spent here did not hear anymore so you know are we the you know AAA league and not the major league anymore but when you go back and look at Jim Allison's story he has a memoir that he's written and he's spoken very eloquently of he could not have done the work he did to come up with a breakthrough that led to his immunotherapy for melanoma cancer without the intellectual environment that was Berkeley he completely credits the development to the environment at Berkeley the colleagues the students the laboratories the freedom to pursue those ideas the region the reason that he left was that he needed to demonstrate to the world against a lot of doubt that it would ever work he needed to be able to oversee the clinical trials and that's not something you could do at our University you need a medical school and so he went to Sloan Kettering initially to pursue that and to get the approval for the drug that actually is a miracle drug for some kinds of melanoma cancers that literally people with a death sentence can now be cured by using that particular therapeutic approach and it is kind of interesting in a challenge as we look forward of we have a lot of young and not so young faculty who are you know engaged in that translation from laboratory to the practical impact on people where they need a clinical environment to test out their ideas and so this is a challenge for us because we don't have a medical school we have you know partner in UCSF but they're across the bay it's not exactly the same thing we have you know kind of like you know some connection with them but not deep connections so you know part of the strategic thinking going forward given the impact that we will have on the real world is is how do we create that environment for our faculty to have access to clinical capabilities. Paul Alavizatos the provost you know sort of thinking about these things mentioned to me a conversation he had with a very influential philanthropist of you know the the model organism up until fairly recently was the mouse if you want to be at the forefront of biological research in the 21st century the model organism is us and so we need to get on this we need to figure out how to do it if we are to stay preeminent in biological science. So is that part of what's driving it seems as if there's an expansion of multi institution partnerships and a grow a relationship with UCSF it seems to be getting closer is that a correct assessment is there gonna be more of that how does that fit in these mult these partnerships that we have with other institutions. So Dan I think what you're referring to is is an activity that the campus is involved in which I find to be extremely exciting is the Chen Zuckerberg Biohub so Priscilla Chen is Mark Zuckerberg's spouse she is a medical doctor of course they're richer than God the two of them and so they have a philanthropic foundation that they've established but the mission statement of their philanthropy is cure all human disease in two generations wow what a mission statement and one of their first key investments is to establish at a very high level of funding a research institute that draws together the expertise of Berkeley UC San Francisco and Stanford we're actually working with Stanford on something and so you know in some sense each one of the institutions has its own you know sort of strengths and complimentary strengths in this so Berkeley is contributing a lot in the dimension of data science healthcare informatics high performance computing and things of that nature to the enterprise that involves the UCSF access to clinical and Stanford which again has you know some very complimentary as well as competitive expertise in this area but the thing that excites me most about it is the way in which we should be thinking institutionally about leveraging our region where else in the world are is you know the number one public research university the number one health sciences university arguably you know the number one I hate to say it you know sort of private university are all within 50 miles of one another I mean and you can imagine what the challenge is for being in this close geometry geography how we can collaborate together how we can use new technologies how we can craft programs that go beyond what any single institution could even afford but get you know that horsepower of brainpower working on this big in this case health oriented societal challenge going forward I mean it's a very fascinating model really the only other place in the world that can do something similar is the Boston Cambridge area but you know again their private versus private you know it's it's not the same set of differences that we have here in the Bay Area there's really nothing quite like what's going on around here so this is you know sort of a tremendous model to see how it develops and how it could develop in other areas of you know societal challenge that we face so we only have time for one more question we've talked big so far this question I think there are a lot of clearly a lot of people here with us today who are part of the research enterprise and this question I think is in that sense kind of directed comes from and the answer directed to that community what is your office doing to ensure SPO campus regional research administration and either CGA or GGA and Ackerman I'm not familiar with okay to help them all work together do you think it's an issue that that those communities where is it an issue that these communities all seem to have long separate reporting lines that's probably an answer that could you could take days on but maybe a summary and then we'll invite the person to follow who asked the question to follow up with an email I'm going to commit you to providing a longer answer okay so I can follow up with email but I think Mark Fisher vice chancellor for administration is in the is in the audience here we work in a partnership so while it's the case that sort of the end-to-end life of a researcher starts with submitting a proposal all the way towards have you spent all your money and not over spent it and this on our campus spans three different domains sponsored projects research administration contracts and grants and you know I think we're working very collaboratively and really from the perspective of making as seamless as possible and by the way there's plenty of work to do in that regard of what is the process that that starts at the beginning and ends at the end across all of these and you know it's been a you know great opportunity to work with mark on these issues to work with other you know sort of campus leaders on trying to get our overall administrative processes as you know kind of smooth and friction free as possible but bear with us it's a learning process and we're committed to an iterative approach to making it better over time so with that I just want to let everybody know that our next campus conversation is going to be on November 14th it's going to be with Vice Chancellor Julie Hooper who oversees all of our development efforts I think those of you who have been coming have heard philanthropy come up in almost every conversation we're on the cusp of a new campaign a lot hangs in the balance I think it'll be a fascinating conversation and with that I just want to thank Vice Chancellor Katz for what was a really really interesting wide-ranging discussion and thanks to you


Salt-affected soils include both sialine and sodic soils. Sailing soils contain an excessive amount of soluble salts. The presence of soluble salts makes it difficult for plants to absorb water from the soil. Sodic soils carry high amounts of absorbed sodium ions that damage soil structure. Soils become hard and compact when dry and sticky when wet. Both sialine and sodic conditions considerably reduce the agricultural productivity. Over 833 million hectares are salt-affected soils. The map currently covers 73% of the global land area. What are the drivers of salt-affected soils? There are natural and human-induced sialine and sodic soils. In arid, semi-arid and coastal environments, sialine and sodic soils are naturally present. These soils are not degraded, but typical of these landscapes, where halophatic vegetation is present. The unisalt flat in Bolivia is an example of this type of landscape and soil. All the sialine soils surrounding the lake are used to produce crops, particularly the quinoa reel, which is a very nutritious crop. These soils also produce natural vegetation eaten by camelids. Human-induced salinization and sodification. The main drivers are unsustainable agricultural practices. Irrigation with poor quality water. Removal of deep-rooted vegetation resulting on raised water table. Water pumping at the coastal plains. Overuse of fertilizers. Because of climate change, soils at coastal areas are facing seawater intrusion, causing salinity and sodicity. What can we do? Conserve natural ecosystems, parent to salinity and sodicity. Manage soils and water sustainably. Apply appropriate irrigation practices and adopted crops. Manage salt-affected soils in harmony with nature. Let's work together to help soil salinization and boost soil productivity.


And welcome to Lady Aida. Hi everybody and welcome to the desk of Lady Aida, the pre-Eclipse edition. So everyone going in North America is going to see this eclipse tomorrow. Hopefully we will see it here in New York City. But in preparation, I have designed some hardware. So let's go to the overhead. I'll show off some of the testers that I just did.  The B&L, BFF, this is a B&L055, nine-dof sensor, which has a built-in microcontroller. Actually, ironically, a SAMD21, which then converts it from like XYZ into like quaternion angle or Euler angles. And there's also a BMP280, which will give you precision, temperature and barometric pressure sensing. I said against humidity sensing because I figured like we have a lot of low cost humidity sensors and most people want no altitude and that's what the BMP280 would give you. And some jumpers. This is a tester that we designed and let's see how you can power it. It uses a RP2040. And the only thing that's a little tricky is you have to have it upside down because I want to test all the jumpers. So you have to have the board upside down. I'm going to move this a little bit, so it's easier for me to align. And then live demo, but I think it can do this. It's this USB, upside down. There you go. See, it beeps and the LED blinks letting you know that it passed test. It does take a few seconds because the, whenever you want to change the address or reset the B&L055, it takes like 400 plus milliseconds sometimes for it to like wake up and start responding to I-squared, so you don't know why. Anyway, so that's the B&L055. I've also got the two infrared boards that I worked on. Hold on this way and this way. So with these, they're actually, they seem similar, but they're actually, the testing was like totally different. So for this one, this is like a general purpose IR receiver. And so for this one, I have to test a signal from the vertical and horizontal infrared. So there's two sensors here, horizontal and vertical. I don't want to make sure that both are working, so I have to like listen on both. Another thing about infrared receivers as opposed to, one second, this board, the other board, which is a infrared demodulator. The demodulator is like not, it doesn't have any like brains to it. It's like, if it gets 38 kilohertz signal, the pin goes low. It's like very, very basic. Whereas the infrared receiver is actually looking for pulses that conform to a certain number of pulses in the width of the pulses. That's because it's looking for infrared remote codes and the codes like are on off like da, da, da, da, da. This one doesn't care. And so the test is actually different. What this tester does is it sends a short number of control burst codes and checks the horizontal and vertical. So let me just quickly show that off. And it's very fast. You can even see it's getting the signal here. And then the demodulator is a little bit different. I mean, you can only tell the difference from the tester itself. But this has a continuous stream. Oh, yeah, it's kind of as you can see. So you see how it's like a continuous stream? It's any continuous stream, which means that this board would not, should not be passing. So if I test this, yeah, it actually like doesn't see the signal because there's so many pulses that this infrared receiver is like, you know, that's not a valid receiver code. It must be like ambient noise or something. Whereas the demodulator, yeah, the demodulator is happy to show exactly the signal that it's receiving. So you see these are both lit up at the same time. For different tests and different breakouts, I think a lot of people are going to be like, why you have two breakouts, what's the difference between these two? This one is perfect for remote control leading. And this one is perfect for, it can do remote controls, but what's better for is general purpose, like you're bouncing an IR signal or you're sending data over IR that isn't in remote control protocol style. So those are the three testers I worked on yesterday. Another board that I wrapped up is I've had one last mistake. You can see here this little wire for the USB host BFF. But the final mistake I made was so small that I'm comfortable with booking the PCB just with this little wire fix. Basically, one of the things about CAD software is it's very easy to miss. I thought that one pin was labeled a certain way, but it was actually another way. And I ended up swapping the inverted and non-inverted 5-volt enable signal in case you wanted to disable the power to the micro-B port. So I ordered these PCBs out today. So that's kind of fun. I think this can be good for some projects where people want to make very small USB adapters or converters, especially if this was soldered right onto the back here, which you can. You can kind of put it like piggyback. See if I have the host here. But the PCB is, yeah, I put it away. But the PCB is thin enough that you can solder them just like this and then cut the leads off. And then you've got this very short sandwich. But enough clearance that if there's any components on the back, they're good to go. And then, of course, if you have the boards that have an antenna here, you don't want to have the micro-B port in the way. But how are you doing on time? I'm good. OK, let's go to the computer, and I'll show off some. Oops, wait, I won't put that in there. There's nothing more deadly than putting the wrong component in a box because then later, like, where's that part that I can find it? And it's in a box. And all our boxes look the same. They're all black. You know who bought that. OK. I designed a couple of trinkies. So one is a request from AT makers for a TRS trinkie. And this one has, as you'd expect, a TRRS jack. So that's something that's a tip, ring, ring sleeve. So it's used for like, you know, old iPhones back when they or phones when they were allowed to just plug in a headphone jack, they'd have stereo. So ring and tip. And then the second ring would be for microphone. So it's for contacts. And that means you can also split the signal a bunch of different ways.  Two of the pins also have switches on them. So the tip and the first ring have a little switch. And the switch disconnects. So you can use it for detecting when something's plugged in or for a routing signal. And the request we had was to put every pin on an analog input and not connect it to, like, power ground. Like, there is a standard, like, usually sleeve is ground. But sometimes there's different standards. And sometimes you want to put power on a pin. And sometimes you don't. So basically, this has every pin connected to a GPIO. So you have, like, full freedom on what you want to connect it to. Only thing is you're not going to be able to source a lot of power. So you can, like, light up an LED or maybe drive a potentiometer. But I definitely wouldn't be able to control a motor. But maybe that's OK. You know, there's some accessibility switches that are potentiometers or they maybe have a little LED or maybe they have two-way switches. And then it goes into the SAMD 21. Like I mentioned, we have, like, a billion SAMD 21s because I ordered two years' worth and they all shipped in one week. Only a pixel for signaling. You can do on circuit Python on this. And then, unlike the other trinkets, you know, like this one where I have the USB into the PCB, I just use a 2-millimeter thick PCB. Only thing is, is that, like, it is easy to pull out. I'm just going to go the overhead a little fast to show it.   There's another dent that would hold it in place. It's fine for something like this where this doesn't get moved and there's nothing connected to it. This is a temperature and humidity sensor. Like, you're going to just leave it plugged in and it doesn't, it doesn't matter. Can you go to the computer? Yes, I am. No, it's fine. I just finished. Talking about USB A. But for this, because there's going to be this cable attach, it's going to be yanking and moving and, like, you know, maybe the person, you know, pulls on it a little bit by accident or on purpose. I wanted to have a proper USB A connector. And this looks like a blue fruit fratting. Like this. So it sticks out a little bit more. It's a little, you know, adds a little bit more expense. But these are fairly through the through-hole components. You need to do a through-hole processing step. Though it's nice as if they're nice and solid. You see this mechanical through-hole connection. And they really, once it's in, it's like any other USB A connector. It's a very solid connection. So I sent this off, so we'll get it soon. Very low cost, but, like, I think a great accessibility to USB adapter. And again, with Circuit Python, it's going to be, like, so great and easy to be just, like, different configurations, different scripts, just drag and drop it. And now it's an HID keyboard. Now it's an HID mouse. Now it's something else, MIDI, whatever, for all sorts of accessibility projects. The next one, and because we were, I was talking to Liz about, we did this Elgato Lite controller board. Liz did this a few weeks ago. And one of the things that we were chatting about is that there is a protocol from Microsoft called the, it was like Pixel Array, Light Array, HID, yeah, Lamp Array. So they have this new dynamic lighting system, which is, like, basically NeoPixels. And over HID, you can, well, I don't want to see chapter nine, you can do all sorts of controls and light it up.  And so this might be related, but basically they have, like, all these partners, everybody who makes, like, RGB LED toys, you know, keyboards, mice, motherboard, whatever, they're gonna add support for it.  So let's make it a little tricky to help with that as well. And it's really basic because it's just, again, a SAMD 21. And again, because there's cables coming off the end, it connects to something. I wanted, like, a solid USB connection. SAMD 21, regulate our little mini NeoPixel, just for, because it's a little micro indicator, level shifter. So this is a 74HCT2G34, a two-line level shifter for data and clock, and then two 100 Ohm resistors, leaning out to a terminal block, which will come pre-assaulted, so you can easily screw in whatever. And so now you can use either one dot star strip or two NeoPixel strips. The data and clock could be used for two strips if you wanted to. SAMD 21 doesn't have, like, a lot. I don't think, we didn't get DMA working. I mean, you can kind of do it by making it, turning it into an SPI signal, and then you can DMA the SPI. It's like, if it's possible, it's not great. And these are SPI pins. But I think, again, it's designed to be extremely low cost and simple. It's gonna be a couple bucks, you plug it in, you know, and you get NeoPixels out. Okay, and then we had, we're gonna wrap this up and go into the great search, we had a request because people were like, well, you know, you're doing these trinkets with USB, but a lot of people nowadays have modern Mac laptops and the Mac laptops have USB type C. And we have a little adapter, but it's like, wouldn't it be great if the trinket just had USB-C already in? So I got some connectors. Let's go to the overhead real fast. So these are edge, because you want it to be a plug that plugs out. So this is a plug that's actually edge mounted. You see, it's actually like mounted in the middle and it's got a bunch of contacts.   There's just a lot of SMT pads, which is fine as long as you have a mechanical enclosure that keeps this steady. Another thing is, you need to solder this in. I actually don't even know the process because you need to have solder on both sides and then you have to slip this on. So it seems like a very like complicated process to solder this component because both sides get soldered at the same time and it has to be hand-slotted in. So what I wanted to find to be able to do these trinkets is a pickin' placeable or easily placeable, not this like edge-slotted USB-C plug that's fairly low-cost that I can use for my trinkets to make my trinkets into a USB-C connector. So that's gonna be the great search. Yeah, a great search brought to you by Digikey and Ada for it every single week. We have Lady Ada show you how to find things on digikey.com. Lady Ada, take it away.  Let's make sure those trinky. Trinky boards, these trinky boards have a USB-A PCB connector that plugs into a port and they're just very low-cost and designed to give you a little bit of capability using a SAM-D21 or an RP2040 chip. Here's kind of a more advanced trinky. Then we had a couple people ask, hey, can you make a version with a USB-C connector? Now, because USB-C is double-sided and it's also a very fine pitch, you can't really make a PCB that slots. I mean, you technically could, but it would not last very long. I think the traces would come off pretty quickly. So you can't do this hack where you just have a really thick PCB and these pads. Instead, you don't have to have a connector. So what I want though is not a USB-A connector. We have a lot of boards that have USB-A, what I want, sorry, USB-C socket. What I want is a USB-C plug. So go to the overhead again, I'll show this real fast. So this is a USB-C plug, right? It matches one of these cables. It's a plug that can solder onto the PCB. But the thing about this is that it's like this straddle mount, I was just talking about this, where all the pins are soldered onto each side. And so this looks like a very time-consuming process because I think you have to apply solder paste to both sides and you have to slot it exactly has to fit perfectly in and align.  And so this is like, in my opinion, a little wiggly. You can see this is wiggling. I don't know, it's like a little loose tooth. I think it'll be okay, but I think it'll eventually break off. And so what I want is to find a component on Digi-Key that'll let me turn my Trinky, which I just had in my hand. Here you go.  I want the opposite, with a little bit of through-hole connectivity if possible, surface mount, but also through-hole the way the sockets are so that we can pick and place them. But the components are, that, you know, the components need hand placement like this straddle mount. Okay, so let's go to the computer. Now we know what we want. So let's go to Digi-Key and let's type in USB connector, because that's what we want.  Micro-B type A, HDMI, whatever. Also like this part that goes onto a cable. So let's, let's first, look, sorry, stuff on my desk. Let's only look for active. And we want it to be a plug, but I'm also gonna grab this dash in case there's something that didn't get categorized properly. And I want it to be, see, oh, not everything is a selectable. So now USB type C. There you go. So let's apply. All right, so I'm only at 62. And then I think I'm also going to search for normally stocking, because I wanna get something that you can actually buy. So there are like a couple of mounting types, but I think the thing is, is that for something like this, I really wanna see the photo and I look at the datasheet because it's like surface mount might include that straddle mount, although they do say straddle mount here, but maybe do I want board edge surface mount? I don't know. So let's look. And then let's just sort by price to start, because who knows. So this one is kind of cool. It looks like a power connector, but it plugs on the tops. This is for like something would, it'd be kind of cool to be a right angle PCB. Ditto, this one is a right angle connector. This one looks like a straddle mount. So let's take a look at this. I don't see if they have the datasheet. They might not, but it pretty, it's pretty clearly a straddle mount. You can see the little legs, the teens here that they grabs onto the PCB. And then yeah, this is bulk. So this is the fact that the packaging is bulk means that it has to be placed by hand. It doesn't come on a pick and place tape and wheel. This is also straddle mount. This one is very clearly straddle mount because you can actually even see the two layers of pins. I don't want that. This one is like a weird photo, but let's look at what it looks like in person. Also, straddle mount, it's really common. I don't know. I guess it was like mass manufacturing. Maybe I'd go with that. This one, let's look at the 360. Hold on, it's loading. Okay, yeah, this is also straddle mount. You can see the two rows of pins. Ooh. Straddle mount. This is also a straddle mount. This one is not actually, this is like the first one that is not a straddle mount, but it's actually gonna be, yeah, they don't have the proper full data sheet. Let's see if maybe we can get another data sheet. No. Let's see if we can look at the EDA model. Yeah, so this one is actually possible because it has all the surface mount pins when they go on the top, and then it has two through-hole slots, so this one would actually be okay. This one is a little bit, let's see, yeah, here you go. So you can actually see here's the slot, and then there's the two surface mount rows. Only thing is I don't need two rows, and I'm gonna, I'm gonna keep looking. This one did out. This one is actually kind of similar to the other one. There's two rows of surface mount, and then there's a slot. This one actually would be pretty good. This one's vertical, so that's not gonna work. This is a socket, don't know why this moved in here. Another straddle mount, another straddle mount, another straddle mount. These are really good photos of the straddle mount though. Vertical, another vertical, straddle mount, and vertical. This is, oh no, there's like a billion. Well, I know that this is, okay. This one's interesting because it's half surface mount, half through-hole, it actually probably would be okay to use, this is the footprint.  So this is gonna be very mechanically solid. So if I try other stuff and it doesn't work, this for sure is not going anywhere. I mean like all those through-hole connectors plus the slots is gonna be super great. This is another two-slot version, vertical. And then let's look at this. Eventually I'm gonna bump into the one I did pick in the end. Okay, so this is the one, this is the first one that I was like, actually this is what I want. Because you can kind of see on the footprint, there's only one row because I don't need USB three. I don't need all the pins. I just want the data power and ground. And then like a CC pin. And then it's got two slots. It's got a little bit of a ground pad to give it a little bit more mechanical connection. But the two slots I think make it like a good winner. You can see the slots that go through the PCB. And the PCB actually butts up here. You see this is the edge of the PCB. So it jams up against the PCB and then it has this through-hole. So like together, that keeps it from, if you make the PCB cut exactly at the right length, it means it doesn't wedge too much and it doesn't torque too much. So this is the one I'm actually gonna end up using. And I'll just quickly show the, USB type C plug breakout that I designed with this component. So I'm gonna find out if this is gonna be a good footprint. That's the thing I have to figure out next. But this is the USB-C like plug. I think this is the correct length. These are all those pads. And then these are the socket and then the milling layer. See if I can put that front because it's interesting. Let me hide the pads. There you go. You can see this is the milling layer. That's where the slot is gonna be cut out, the plated slot.   So hopefully this will work. I really want something nice and strong so that people don't yank, pull, twist. I'll report back if this works. Hopefully my PCBs will show up soon. I'll solder this connector on and I'll let you know. This is my pick for the great search. That's a great search. All right, thanks so much. Please wear your protective glasses. Yes. If you can stare at the sun tomorrow. And we'll see everybody during the week. Okay, thanks everybody. Bye bye. Have a great solar eclipse week.


Our first speaker is somebody I think most of you know pretty well. He's Scott Horton. He's someone I've known for years and years and years when he was a young guy still doing pirate radio. Over the years he's conducted thousands and thousands of interviews. He's perhaps best known for his book about Afghanistan, this war we never ever ever seem to get out of called Fool's errand, the longest war in US history. And he's got a new book out which contains all of his interviews with Ron Paul. We've got all these books out front and I'm sure he'd be happy to sign them for you. And I'm sure a lot of you in this room used to follow and read Justin Rimondo on AntiWar.com. I certainly did most days. And it's a little painful to wake up in the morning and not see his acerbic overnight tweets from the West Coast. But nonetheless, I think Scott is really the rightful and proper heir to Justin and AntiWar.com. So please welcome him. Hi. How are you guys doing? Yeah. All right. Tom Woods told me always start with a joke, but I couldn't come up with any jokes. So you're going to have to settle for this. I checked my morning email yesterday and on the email list of a site called Defense News, which is pretty much this war propaganda sponsored by Northrop Grumman. They sometimes have some good journalism in there. And they had a story. I said that the Air Force is going to embark on a brand new program to see if they can get the F-22 and the F-35 to be able to talk to each other. That's it. That's the joke. I'm glad you guys liked it. All right. So here's my new book, The Great Ron Paul, The Scott Wharton Show Interviews 2004 through 2019. There's 39 of them in here as current as this June and including my speech that I gave about how much I love Ron here last year. And I'm really proud of it. It's really great. And there's actually a little bit of story behind it, which is that the IRS is trying to kill me. And because I've been working for antiwar.com for literal peanuts for 15 years, so they're going back 15 years on me. And I thought, you know what? I wanted to put this book out anyway, and I thought, you know what I could do is just like remember when the IRS came after Willie Nelson and he put out the IRS tapes and they seized his ranch anyway. I don't have a ranch to seize. But this is my IRS tapes and I figure what better thing to try to sell to make some money to pay off the feds than a book of interviews with the man who every year of his congressional career introduced the Liberty Amendment to repeal the 16th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and set us free. I have a whole rant about income taxation that I'm going to skip right now. The title, I want to apologize to Dr. Paul. I know he does not like the title, The Great Ron Paul. But the reality is that the book just named itself, there were no other titles. What was I supposed to call it? The Great Ron Paul is exactly who he is and exactly what the book had to be called. It named itself. And I want to mention, too, this great sketch by this young artist, Sarah D. Young, who did such a great job on this great picture of Ron for the cover art, which I'm really grateful for. And let me say real quick, too, about another book we published at the Libertarian Institute this year. It's William Norman Griggs' posthumous work, No Quarter, The Ravings of William Norman Griggs. For you regularly Rockwell.com readers, I'm sure you'll remember Will as by far the single most eloquent writer and speaker in our movement. His death was a real sad loss for us, but this book is absolutely a fitting legacy for all of you who loved Will Griggs. You will absolutely love this, I promise. All right. So now, business. Okay. So here's what we're doing here, and here's why propaganda in the 2020 campaign is such a problem and going to be such a big deal. And that is, as I think you all understand, right? The post-Cold War, moderate, centrist, neoliberal consensus has been shipwrecked mostly by George W. Bush's war in Iraq, but also, of course, the financial crisis that was partially caused by that war in Iraq and, of course, the refugee crisis that was caused by the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, et cetera. And that's how Donald Trump became the president. He stomped Jeb Bush and Hillary Clinton, the liberal Republican and the conservative Democrat, the Bill Clinton's wife and George Bush's brother, the two people who represented most this neoliberal consensus. And now that it's fallen apart, they're in a total panic. And that's why we've had to suffer through three years of this fake Russia-gate hoax, where they blamed the Russians for interfering in the election of 2016 instead of, I mean, don't tell me you're surprised we're talking about Hillary Clinton and friends here, instead of taking any responsibility for discrediting their own power and their own right to it and leaving themselves so vulnerable that the American people would even choose Donald Trump if he would stop Jeb and Hillary for us, which is exactly what happened. And so that's why they're so upset. And that's why they're kind of going crazy with all their Russia propaganda. Now collusion aside, we all know as soon as the Mueller report came out, they just dropped collusion completely. Whoever heard of that was someone accused Donald Trump of high treason with the, oh, yeah, no, forget that. Never mind that. But the narrative that the Russians did hack the election and put him in power, even though that remains absolutely unproven, remains the common narrative in this country. If you listen to NPR, they don't just say they hacked the election. They attacked our election. The Russians attacked our election. I heard that just a few days ago. That narrative stands and it's the basis for a whole new level of hype about, you know, as we just begin, as we're really just starting the 2020 campaign season here about the potential for Russian interference and the potential for anything that centrist power does not like as being some kind of Russian effect. Now here's a short aside here. OK, the new Cold War with Russia is all America's fault, not Russia's. OK, when the Soviet Union was collapsing, George H.W. Bush's government promised Mikhail Gorbachev in writing. They denied it was in writing for a while. Like, that was a good enough excuse. But it is in writing. You can find its release now. They promised that if the Soviets would pull their troops out of Germany and allow the reunification of Germany, that America's NATO military alliance would not expand one inch to the east. As soon as Bush was gone and Bill Clinton was in there, they started with the NATO expansion in 1996. At the same time, they did the shock therapy, which is where they pretended, oh yeah, we're going to give you a libertarian laissez-faire market, meaning we're going to take every communist government-owned industry in your society and we're going to turn it over to a few oligarchs who are going to liquidate it and leave. And it just decimated Russia. I mean, it was an economic war against Russia. Larry Summers and the Harvard boys, what they did was as bad as dropping a couple of nukes on them. Really, being America acting as the worst kind of sore winners of the Cold War. And Clinton, of course, also had two wars against the Serbs, the Russian's closest Slavic allies in Eastern Europe. And he began to launch the color-coded revolutions, including against Milosevic in Serbia and Shevardnadze, who had heroically helped Gorbachev to end the Cold War in the Soviet Union in Georgia. When George W. Bush came in, he tore up the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. He expanded NATO even further and he launched six or eight more color-coded revolutions against, which is just a fancy name for a national endowment for democracy, coup d'etat, CIA-type coup d'etat, in Russia's near abroad, against their friendly states, including in Tajikistan and including in Ukraine in 2004. Obama came in and Obama overthrew the government of Ukraine again in 2014 and he used a bunch of literal Hitler-lovin' Nazis to do it, the proud grandsons of the Galatian SS who had helped the Nazis perpetuate the Holocaust in Ukraine. Those were the guys, the social nationalists, that Barack Obama's government used to help overthrow the government in Kiev. That was what led to the seizure of Crimea and that was what led to the horrible war that killed over 10,000 people in the east of the country when those Russian, predominantly Russian speakers, refused to accept the results of this illegal coup against their elected government. And not only that, he supported al-Qaeda in Syria for about four and a half, five years leading to the rise of the Islamic State in Iraq War 3 and necessitating Russia's return to the Middle East for the first time in 25 years. Happy 30th anniversary today, guys, of the fall of the Berlin Wall. So you see, you are all now assets, either witting or unwitting, of Vladimir Putin. You know, he also opposed Iraq War 2, so if you were good on that, then you're also really bad. Just like Tulsi Gabbard is really bad when she fought in Iraq War 2. She's running for president right now. She is currently a major and an active duty officer in the Hawaii Army National Guard. She served at the Balad Air Base north of Baghdad on a medical team. They call her combat that she wasn't pulling triggers, but she was at a very dangerous air base where mortars were coming over the walls and where the roads to and from were laced with IEDs. She was in real danger. Her second deployment, she was in Kuwait. But they call her a traitor in no uncertain terms. They accuse her of being groomed. Oh, see, she's unwitting. It's not up to her.  She's not in control of her own mind. She's under the mystical spell of the Russians somehow. And if you agree with her on anything, then you might be a traitor, too.  That could look pretty bad. And when they're not outright accusing Tulsi Gabbard of being an agent of the Russians, they always get in these great subtle digs. No matter how many times, and Ron Paulians will remember this one, no matter how many times she denies it, they never stop asking her, are you going to run as a third party candidate? Are you going to run as a third party candidate? And you see what they're doing there. They're arguing past the sale. The built-in presumption is you, lady, cannot be the Democratic Party nominee.  And it's just built in. And she says, no, I'm running as a Democrat. I already swore 100 times over, and they ask her every time.  And the other thing that they use against her is that some right-wingers and some libertarians have complimented her. But they don't ever say why. The only thing any right-winger or libertarian ever said good about her, it wasn't about her Medicare for All program. It was that she's anti-war. And they don't want to say, well, you know, some right-wingers are anti-war, so it makes sense why people would admire her for being pretty good. No, they go, oh, right-winger endorsed her. Why does she love right-wingers so much? Why did the right-wingers love her so much? As though we don't already know the answer. Because she's less worse than the rest on the most important thing. That's the answer. And here's an irony, the real irony about Chelsea Gabbard is she's really not that good. OK, Barack Obama's war in Syria was absolutely insane. After September 11th, after Iraq War II, he had America fighting on the side of al-Qaeda just because Assad is friends with Iran. Well, for someone like Chelsea Gabbard, who served in Iraq War II and can tell the difference between the shirts and the skins in this contest, that was never going to be acceptable to her. And she said, this is absolutely crazy and wrong. And she introduced a bill to stop supporting terrorists.  But so she's great on wars for al-Qaeda. But on the wars against al-Qaeda, she sounds like George W. Bush or Barack Obama. She's already written herself a writ for eight years of permanent drone and special operations war from hither to yawn. She put out a thing saying, first of all, it's not blowback. It's not that Bill Clinton was killing Iraqis from bases in Saudi Arabia all through the 1990s that caused the September 11th attack. Know what it is? It's radical Islam. This Wahhabist and Salafi Islam, which is just self-refuting on its face. There are millions of Wahhabist and Salafist fundamentalist Muslims in the world. How many al-Qaeda terrorists have we ever faced total at the height of the Islamic State, 30,040? And most of those are just local fighters. You want to talk about actual bin Ladenite terrorists? You're talking about a very small number of hundreds, low thousands of men who are radicalized politically against the actions of the US government. It's not Islamic extremism. It's political extremism that drives their war against the United States. And so not only does she get the cause of the entire war wrong and falsely put America on the defensive in the entire thing, she then says, you know what? There are al-Qaeda groups in Idlib province in Syria, in Yemen, where we're fighting for them there too, in Somalia, where, wow, Al-Shabaab, now she's defining al-Qaeda pretty broadly. And then she says, well, there's al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb. That's four. And then she says, there are hundreds of these groups around the Middle East that we must fight and must confront and must destroy, which is just a lie, which is completely stupid. And it's so wrong that it's a hole that George Bush and Barack Obama could drive 10 wars through. Don't you know we have to keep weapons of mass destruction out of the hands of these hundreds of terrorist groups that she says threaten us, et cetera. But she's good on not supporting al-Qaeda.  Now, Bernie Sanders real quick. I doubt there's very many Bernie Sanders fans in here. You don't have to agree with the socialist senator from Vermont to notice that they give him the Ron Paul treatment this year, just like they did in 2016. The oftentimes unspoken, but every time, at least, baked-in message is, you cannot choose him. He is a man who is running, sure. But he is not actually one of your choices. You can choose Kamala Harris, or you can choose Pocahontas, or you could choose Joe Biden. I'm sorry, I just forgot her name. I don't care about the Indian stuff. Warren, Elizabeth Warren. You can pick the approved candidates. You may not have him.  And just like in 2016, he'd have a rally with 4,000 people. And Hillary Clinton would be giving a speech to six old ladies in a library. And they would cover Hillary Clinton. They would cover Donald Trump's empty podium. That was a favor to Hillary, by the way, the Pied Piper strategy to promote Trump, to help cheat for her. He'll be the easiest to beat in the general, don't worry. While they give a total blank out and black out to Bernie Sanders, who, after all, is not really more socialist than probably any Republican or Democrat in the race when it comes down to it, and who is very unlikely to start any new wars, as much as he's unlikely to end any either. And he's got a really great, and this sounds maybe trivial, but it's not. It's really important that he has a really great program for legalizing POT on the federal level, and essentially ending for all time the American National War on Drugs, which is for poor and minorities and everybody else in this society. It's one of the lowest and cheapest pretexts that our police state has to use to persecute innocent people. I thought I smelled something and kicked in some guy's door and killed his wife. This happens every week. 50,000 SWAT raids a year in this country. And huge numbers of those are based on bogus probable cause over somebody said that they found a seed or a roach or a thing on the ground. And there's really no way to overstate the importance of something like that if he was able to truly implement it and repeal the national drug war there. It's worth mentioning. And I think that's why that we're not allowed to hear from him, is that he's essentially not under the control of the people who can be counted on. Remember when Chelsea Manning liberated all the WikiLeaks, and Chelsea Manning is in prison right now for refusing to testify against Julian Assange for that, by the way, thank you for that sacrifice. But in the WikiLeaks, there was an email from a corporate vice president at Citigroup. And the email said to Barack Obama's staff, this is who your new cabinet is going to be. You're going to have Hillary as Secretary of State. You're going to keep Gates at defense. I want, what's his name at Treasury and whichever, and they went down the list. And that was where Barack Obama's cabinet came from. Bernie Sanders is not likely to go along with that. And so you are not allowed to consider him to even really be a major candidate, even though if you watch the polls, he wins them. But if you watch the TV coverage of the polls, they just won't say his name. They'll pretend they'll rank him and pretend he got third when really he got first. The lie about him all day, the same way they did with Ron. Remember John Stuart said, what is this guy, the 13th floor in a hotel? You just can't mention him. And that's the way they treat Sanders. You don't have to be on his side to notice that that's what's true and that's the agenda against him. This just in Bloomberg is running. I know, nobody cares, it doesn't matter. And it doesn't matter because of Tom Wood's law. Tom Wood's law that says that no matter who you vote for, you always get John McCain. Which is a pretty authoritarian law for a libertarian, Tom. Thanks a lot, dude.  And you know, here, before I run out of time, Donald Trump is bad on everything, okay? The fact that John Brennan is trying to kill him doesn't mean he's not a terrorist. Donald Trump has escalated the war in Afghanistan, escalated Iraq war three in Iraq and Syria, which is waning now because the Islamic State is destroyed, but there's still thousands of troops in both countries. He has escalated the war in Somalia, even sending in the infantry. He has escalated the special operations and CIA drone war in Libya. And he has escalated Barack Obama's genocide in Yemen, a deliberate starvation campaign against the civilian population there. Donald Trump's Yemen policy makes him absolutely as bad as Barack Obama, who is as bad as George Bush, who is even worse than Bill Clinton. Which brings me to my, oh, but one more thing, though. Sorry. But they still hate him anyway, don't they? And the reason why is because even though he likes kicking butt, he doesn't really believe in the empire, does he? He doesn't believe in America's divine and mystical mission to lead, that is dominate the world from now on. He's sort of just a crotchety old Fox News watching golfer type who says he looks at it more like an American nationalist and says this is just too expensive. The neoliberals and the neoconservatives say, well, the fact that it's against our national interest is what proves what nice people we are and that we're doing this all out of the goodness of our heart. Donald Trump just doesn't buy that and he doesn't insist that we believe in it either and that's what makes him beyond the pale. That's why they've done everything they could to try to stop him by drumming up the Russia hoax in the first place and doing everything they can to drive him out of power now. He does deserve to be impeached and removed but not by a CIA coup but by the American people asserting the rule of law and putting him in prison for his illegal war crimes. And that brings me to my real point, okay? It's been 18 years of this war on terrorism. You don't have to know a thing about it to know that that's not right. We are attacked by 400 men and we haven't figured out how to clean this mess up yet. That sound right to you? And the right, most importantly in America, the American right is over it now and Trump deserves a lot of credit for that not for pulling troops out of anywhere, he hasn't but for talking like he wanted to and for speaking in such absolutes. George Bush's decision to go to the Middle East was the worst decision anyone ever made. Wow, not quite as bad as Wilson getting us into World War I but close. And listen, for a Republican president, one presidency removed from George Bush to continue to speak that way, that is huge. And that is a benefit, that is something that we can use for us, it's already done so much to change people's minds on the right. Now, I don't know if you guys saw this, it was an Associated Press story that ran about two or three weeks ago. It was about how the Kurds don't need us there anyway. They're gonna strike a deal with Assad to keep the Turks out and everything's fine. All your crocodile tears, you can flush them, okay? But then three quarters of the way down the article, there's this one paragraph. And it says that Donald Trump says to his staff in the White House, well, I don't know. When I was at that rally in Minneapolis a couple of weeks ago, the crowd all started chanting, bring them home. So I don't know, it seems like the people agree with me. Now it's his argument with his whole staff. This is the key to everything, okay? When Donald Trump looks out his window and imagines the American people, imagines his constituency, what does he think they think? Does he think that they want to bring them home?  And doesn't it matter what he thinks the right wants? It doesn't, it matter that we have the ability to influence that narrative and that perception. Next week, there's a huge event taking place in Washington, DC. It's put on by a brand new veterans group called bringourtroopshome.us. It's led by a guy named Dan McKnight. He's got a lot of great combat veterans. It's led by all combat veterans. They're all libertarians and conservatives. There are plenty of great left and liberal veterans groups as well. But these guys are essentially from the right. And they're doing good work. They mean to primary Liz Cheney and keep her out of the speaker's chair in the house. If you guys pray, I don't be a good time for that. And they're really doing this great work and they are with this. This is what they want to do. This is one of their tactics. They're going to talk to Republican congressmen but they want to make themselves clear at Trump rallies and at other Republican rallies. In this next year, we have a year. It's still only November 19 right now. It's not too late. It's not hindsight. We have a year ahead of us now where libertarians and conservatives and especially veterans of the 21st century terror wars can go to these Trump rallies, go to Republican congressional meetings and rallies and demand. Our president says he wants to bring them home. Are you with him and us or are you with the Democrats who want to leave them behind and force this issue? And what's the media going to do if at every Trump rally for the next year the crowd breaks into chance of bring them home? You can participate in that. You can help to make that happen for real and think about the counterfactual. What if that doesn't happen? What if that was a one-off in Minneapolis and for the next year no one yells bring them home at Donald Trump ever again? Can you imagine the catastrophe? If that was his sentiment, they just don't care. Apparently I can keep the wars going. No one's gonna object. That's the number one surefire way to maintain our horrible status quo. And here's the deal.  You don't have to be right wing, okay? You don't have to be a conservatives. You just have to be not socialists. You just have to not be of the left to go and participate in this. Attack the right from the right unless you are from the left. In which case I got a mission for you too. And that is you need to attack the left from the left the way our conservatives are gonna be attacking the right from the right, but the left is always attacking the liberals for not being good enough on this stuff. But I got a secret weapon for you, a little ace you can keep up your sleeve. Attack the left from the left by using the right. Go to your local Democrats campaign rally and invoke Rand Paul. Liberals think that Rand Paul is a far right-wing conservative. We use what we're dealt, you know, the cars we're dealt, play the best we can. And you just tell your democratic congressional candidates, you can't be to the right of Rand Paul on war. Rand Paul is a right-wing conservative. If he wants out of Syria and Afghanistan yesterday, then you want out of Syria and Afghanistan three weeks ago. Or else what are you telling me here? And isn't that right fellow liberals and leftists in the crowd that it is absolutely unacceptable to us that our democratic leaders would be to the right of Rand Paul and Donald Trump on any foreign policy issue. And the answer from the crowd will be yes, that is absolutely unacceptable. That may be what the donors wanna hear and that may be what the national security state in DC wants to hear. But that is not at all what the Democrat constituents of America wanna hear. And so if we can attack the right from the right and create a real anti-war movement on the right, and we can hand that tool to our friends on the left to use against the enemies on their side as well. And we could have a great effect. And here's the thing about it, right? There's no magical solution. There's no political solution to our problems. As Dr. Paul always says, education is the key. But these kinds of political activities can be huge for education and for getting the truth and the point across to the American people who need it the most. How much time do I have, none? Two, great. One more thing. Murray Rothbard once wrote an article called Do You Hate the State? And in the article, it's actually a critique of a book that was written that's sort of a utilitarian case for anarcho-capitalism. And Murray Rothbard said, you know what? I'll take a radical menarchist over a conservative anarchist any day. Because we're not here over naval gazing and we're not here over some mathematical equation. We're not here over a marginal change. We're here because we love liberty and we're here because we hate injustice. We are here to save mankind. We are here to fight. And there's a guy, I know him very well. I know you guys know him very well. I always thought, I actually cannot remember whether Murray mentioned Jacob Hornberger in that article or not or whether that was just my imagination because that's who I always picture. The radical menarchist. We have him here just like Ron Paul. We have Jacob Hornberger and he has officially announced that he is running for president of the United States as the Libertarian Party candidate. Applause, applause. Okay. Now for those of you who aren't that familiar with Jacob Hornberger, I'm here to let you know he is good on everything. He is good on libertarian principle and libertarian philosophy on every issue you've got all the way up and down the line without exceptions. He's great. But not only that, at the Future Freedom Foundation, Jacob has written an article every day for 30 years about what is going on in the world. What are the crises that face the American people and why the libertarian answer is the answer for the American people at large to solve the problems that all of our country, that our whole country are suffering under. And he has such a great ability to tie our current crises to our government's bad policies and to the libertarian solutions to turn it all around. And the truth of the matter is, again, it's only November, we have a year. And with y'all's help, if the libertarian movement could join the libertarian party and really prioritize, do everything we can to elect each other to those delegate spots, to make sure to play the libertarian party game as much as we can to ensure that this man gets the nomination, that he is the one who is representing us in the campaign against Donald Trump and Elizabeth Warren or Hillary or whoever it is that they put up there in the fall. This is our best chance. It's been 25 years, it's been 20 years since we had a libertarian candidate who really knew what he was talking about, was really good on principle, was really good on the facts, was hardcore anti-war at the top of his list of priorities. And it's been such a disappointment, the last few cycles that we have not had that. But now we really have a chance. I am joining the libertarian party now for the first time in my life.  There are only 15,000 current members of the libertarian party, you know that? Tom Woods' audience alone could quadruple the membership of the libertarian party. I mean that, I mean that. This is our year to do another Ron Paul revolution, another real libertarian run for the presidency to change this country, okay? Thank you.