Hey everyone, I just wanted to give a quick couple of announcements of what's coming up on the channel and what you can expect within the next couple of weeks. We're trying to bring you a lot more topics, and we have a long list of history of episodes and the origin of episodes as well as other topics we're trying to produce. We're having a challenge this month in terms of the days that we have available for production, are not quite lining up with days we have available to shoot or write. So we're going to take a little bit of time, a couple of weeks to actually sit down and devote some time to just writing some new content for you guys. Now that being said, our release schedule for the next couple of weeks will be a little bit unorthodox. We're not going to release nothing. We do have a bunch of YouTube shorts that were in the process of we're finishing up writing and we're going to do a whole big batch of film in those and releasing those. So there's going to be a lot more content actually coming up within the next couple of weeks. And we got a new website that we're working on, we got a new store that we're building. So there's actually a lot of stuff coming your way. We've been working hard this year. Now that being said, in lieu of just standard episodes for the next couple of weeks, we're going to be putting in some live streams in place mainly because it's a good chance to interact with all of you. They're a little bit more laid back. For those of you who didn't see our last Retro Dojo live stream, it's basically we pop on an old school video game, martial arts video game, and we just chat. And this is a good chance for us to talk about the topics you guys want to see. We can talk about pretty much anything, treat it like an AMA or ask me anything. I'm willing to talk about most subjects. So if you want to talk martial arts, you want to talk about your influences, your experiences, what you'd like to see on the channel, what you don't like on a channel, anything like that. Jump on in when you see these streams coming up. We're going to have another one coming up this week. Just look at our community tab for that. But when we do these live streams, please just jump on in, join us, hang out. It's more of a casual laid back session. We do have other live streams that we're working on. And we're also trying to put together some more interviews. We had a great response for some interviews earlier this year. We got some more that we're working on. It just comes down to that. We just got to have the time to prepare and shoot and work with other people's schedules as well. And the last thing is we love doing Q&A. We love hearing from all of you. We like answering questions. We like talking about the martial arts in general. There's so much rich material to get into. So what we're asking for this video right here is any questions you have related to martial arts, whether it be a question you want to ask me about, a question, or something you want to talk about yourself, or the question you have about joining in art, or any history of, or whatever. Any questions that you have, please leave them down below in the comments. We'll take note of them. We read pretty much everything. We try to answer what we can, but we're going to take those questions and we'll put them in the live streams and we'll talk about them as well or do other episodes dedicated to question answering. So please, by all means, let's keep this conversation going. We've got a fantastic community, a very intermingled in terms of a lot of different backgrounds. So I think there's a lot of meat here we can talk about. So leave those questions down below. Keep a look out for some new material we've got coming out. And we definitely appreciate everyone who's been with us the past few years. We have a lot of content coming this way that we've been working hard to bring you. We just need a little bit of time to put it together so that we do it the right way. We don't want to just give you guys just rushed material. We want you guys to deserve better than that. So we're trying to do our due diligence and bring you the quality content. So in the meantime though, if you have not seen it, please check out this interview here with Cynthia Rothrock, the Queen of Martial Arts for Health. She was the last interview that we did or one of the last ones that we did. Fantastic person. Interesting story. Check that out. Thank you guys so much and hope to see you in the next livestream.


The very last thing I want to talk about in terms of data sourcing is to talk about the next steps I'm probably the most important thing is, you know, don't just sit there. I Want you to go and see what you already have try to explore some open data sources And if it helps check with a few data vendors And if those don't give you what you need to do your project then consider making new data Again, the idea here is get what you need and And get going. Thanks for joining me and good luck on your own projects


The Dark Millionaire returns to answer your question. Is the Magnus site movement marches forward to 1 million subscribers? Sitting on his throne of thought surveying his 84...  So, let's get this Magnus answer on. This is from a Magnus site. And this is what he says. Hey Tyrone, congratulations on reaching over 700,000 views on your Star Wars teaser reaction. If you haven't seen it, it is on the main channel page. You can check it out. I'm messaging you because I need some advice and I don't feel like I can talk to my family or friends about it. It says, okay, I'm 16 years old and there is this girl that I really like. We are in some of the same classes and stuff, but I find it difficult to talk to her. I'm very confident, but around her I just go kind of weird. Don't worry, that's normal. When I do talk to her, we get on well, talking about things like the Walking Dead normally. I really like her, but we have two completely different social circles. And this is where it gets tricky. I am straight edge. It's clobbering time. What do you see? It's a couple of personalities. W fans understand that joke. I'm straight edge. No drink, no drugs, no smoking, etc. I know that this girl often drinks a lot of alcohol and smokes both cigarettes and weed. Once I also heard she held some cocaine for someone, but leave this girl alone, cousin. Like, finish this, but I will.  Straight edge. And you're being enticed by the bad girl. Just like the nice girls getting enticed by the bad boy.  If this is true, I don't know. I know she used to do these things, but I don't know if she still does. That's your way of convincing yourself to still ask her out. What I need is advice. I already told you what my advice is. I really like her. We get on well when we talk. And the only side I've seen of her being interested in me, when she sometimes watches me in class, then looks away when I look at her. So yes, yes, she likes you. So we both enjoy some of the same things, but we have very different social circles and lifestyle choices. Yes, you do. Yes, you do. To get along, you have to have some base values, okay?  It's this man. Come on now. Okay. So what would you suggest? I have already suggested it. Keep her at arm's length. How do I talk to her more? Don't talk to her more. Or do you think I should just try and forget about her? Yes. I don't mind you making a video answering this. As I imagine it, we take less time than replying via email. But please keep me on. Thanks for reading. I would really appreciate the advice. You're fine and magnificent. So yeah, man. Look, I'm talking to you like you're my little brother.  She's holding cocaine for people allegedly. And you've heard of her drinking, smoking, both weed and cigarettes. She does not sound like men. Stay away, okay? You just think she hot. And look, let me tell you something. I'm gonna tell you something about myself, okay? I'm attracted to bad women myself, okay? Trust me.  And it happened just... Trust me. Stay away, okay? It will give you nothing but hurt, all right?  But you're only 16. Stay away, okay? Hope I've helped you, man. See, some of y'all write me. Y'all don't really know the answers. Y'all just want confirmation from me. And that's cool. You know, I'm a U-16, I'm 36. Okay? I got 21 yards, all you motherfucker. So, listen to me, young boy. I know what I'm talking about. One million subscribers. Woo!


Yes, so today is the 26th of March 2021, you are joining us at give the people what they want brought to you every Friday from people's dispatch of whom of whom we have with us Prashant as usual and Zoe as usual. Also brought to you by Globetrotter of which we have me, Vijay as usual, three of us as usually with you on Friday, every Friday to give you what you will give the people what they want that's you. I hope you enjoy this show. We're going to start today with an event that should actually receive coverage because it's important. You have followed, of course, the very great violence of the Colombian state against the Colombian people. And fortunately, some light is being shed on this by the Rome based international people's tribunal. Zoe, what's happening with the international people's tribunal? What's happening with Columbia? Will Columbia's atrocities finally get some coverage? Yes, today. Well, yesterday, the permanent people's tribunal kicked off in Columbia in the city of Bucaramanga. This is a really historic process, as you mentioned, this is, you know, the permanent people's tribunal is a process that was started in Rome and has gone, you know, into places across the world to support, you know, the struggle for justice for truth and for uncovering the role of the state in many different contexts in perpetuating crimes against humanity, human rights violations. As most of our viewers and people who have been reading people's dispatch and globetrotter chart, of course, would know the column in the situation in Columbia is one of great concern. I mean, since 2016, over 1000, 1000, just to take that number in, social leaders and human rights defenders have been assassinated. I mean, the situation in the countryside is getting to levels that are seen in kind of the early 2000s under President Alvaro Uribe Vélez with, you know, massive displacements happening of communities, you know, reconquering of territories by paramilitary groups.  And so in this context, over 50 Colombian human rights organizations, social movements, peasant movements, indigenous groups, Afro-descendant groups came together and called for the permanent people's tribunal, which has had two sessions before in Columbia. So this isn't the first time that it has come to Columbia to shed light on the crimes of the Colombian state and has essentially come to hear over 50 reports presented by civil society, by social movements, by all these organizations that call it for the tribunal about crimes against the Colombian people. As I mentioned, it started yesterday in the city of Bucaramanga. Today is in the center of memory and peace in Bogota and Tamal, it will be in Medellin. And so they're hearing testimonies from all these different sectors about crimes that have been committed over the past couple of decades in Columbia. There's some really, really powerful stories being told, stories from which there haven't been instances of justice. And I think we see the permanent people's tribunal stepping in when the state is incapable of delivering justice and is also complicit in carrying out these crimes. Columbia is the most clear, one of the clearest examples of this happening. So for people who are unfamiliar with the situation in Columbia, there are cases of, of course, the false positives, which we talked about on this show, where over 6,000 people were assassinated and dressed up as guerrilla fighters to say that the Colombian army had success in their war against the guerrilla and against drug traffickers, if they would say. There's also cases of the extermination of the trade union movement in Columbia, several cases of selective assassinations of trade union leaders, also the case of the extermination of peasant movements. I mean, I could go on, of course, but I really encourage people to tune in. We'll have a report coming out in people's dispatch soon to talk about this really historic, necessary and important case and important work that's going on. And I mean, thankfully we have the people's tribunal. Hopefully we would have justice in a more concrete and institutional sense, but you know, that's, that's what we're left with right now. There are many ways to have a tribunal, Zoe, of course, the Colombian people made their own tribunal when they came out on the streets in 2019 in mass demonstrations led by the Congress of the people and so on. That's a form of tribunal, people coming out to demonstrate and say, look, we don't agree with either of the atrocities that are happening. We don't agree with the economic policy and so on. We've seen in India Prashant for years now rolling protests which are a form of tribunal. I think they are a very important form of politics. There was a Bharat Bandh today that is on the 26th. There was a general strike from 6am to 6pm called by the farmers organization. Tell us a little about that tribunal Prashant, the tribunal of the streets. Absolutely Vijay. So like you said, this is, this was called by the farmers movement, specifically the subject Kisan Morcha and association with the great unions to mark the fourth month of the farmers protests in India. Now, I think it's important that we also mark days like these, take notice of days like these, because there is a tendency, of course, to really focus a lot on protests when they're at their peak. When you have your tens of thousands of people gathering together, slogans, and then everyone sort of notices it. And once the protests are not so much, or they continue for a while, or they're not that big or intense anymore, there's a tendency to almost completely forget about it in some ways. So I think days like these are extremely important because it shows that the farmers protests which were against the three laws passed by the Narendra Modi government and some other provisions as well, that it continues and it has continued, the citizens are still continuing. There are across the country, what are called Mahapanchayats taking place, which are like large gatherings of farmers where farmers leaders, farmer leaders who were in the outskirts of Delhi, they've traveled across the country. You know, there's been a lot of exchange of ideas, exchange of protests, solidarity that is being displayed in all these big, big gatherings. And there's an attempt to make it very clear that this is not just the protest of one region or one set of farmers which has kind of been the government's narrative from day one onwards. And this is just one set of disaffected farmers. Whereas the truth as you've seen over the months is that this is a much larger protest. And the interesting and important thing to note here, of course, is that the farmers in the trade unions working very closely together, with the case in multiple protests in India over the past few years. So trade union activists were also part of the protest today. Say, because for instance, one of the horrifying things which I get to forget about, according for instance to Hanan Mola, the Oriente Que San Saba, over 300 farmers have died in the cities since November, in these past four months. And many of these deaths are not talked about, they're not noticed. They're people who are part of those protests. And their sacrifices, for instance, are something a lot of people don't know about as well. So days like this, Bharat Band, I think are extremely important. There was a usual arrest of farmers, your farmers movement activists and trade union activists in various states, they were detained. You know, there were attempts to, of course, stop these protests, but then nonetheless continued. I think it's very essential because the, especially the right wing sections in the country are trying to sort of frame this narrative of how the protests have fizzled out. And that is a very problematic way of looking at protests because protests continue in various forms. They kind of, there are waves and there is what you call, there are actions that take place continuously. And the Mahapachayat, the mass gatherings are very good example of how the farmers movement is also evolving into being something more structured, something more sustainable, something more, say, engaging with a larger number of people. So I think it's something definitely to watch out for in the coming weeks and months as well, because the farmers clearly are sticking to their stand and opposing that challenge. You know, the farmers protests, as you say, is continuing. As you say, you said over 300 people have died. I mean, many of them died from exposure, I would imagine. It's the winter months and so on. We tend to forget that, you know, it's a difficult time of year to be sitting from November till now. But the government has also been cracking down and there has been repression, as we know, against media, against farmers organizations, intimidation, threats and so on. You know, we just went past the 24th of March, which in 1976 was the day of the coup d'etat, the military junta coming to power in Argentina. Day Argentinians remember very carefully, you know, the day of course that the whole world should remember for what happened to the left. This is of course something of alarm in place like India, although the assembly elections are on and it looks like at least in Kerala, the left Democratic front is going to get re-elected. The left has its roots in Indian soil, including in the Kisan agitation and so on. We're seeing something quite different in Turkey, where the Turkish state has been trying its best to eradicate the Turkish left. And I use the word eradicate deliberately. There's a way in which they're trying to eradicate the Turkish left. You know, since 1990, since after the dictatorship, there was an attempt by currents of Kurdish emancipation and the Turkish left to come together, form different political parties and so on. Since then, many of them have been banned, many of them banned. Just in 2012, another formation was created, the People's Democratic Party, the HDP, which is different than the previous ones because the HDP in a way is not actually a combination of Kurdish emancipation and the Turkish left. It's actually a new kind of party asking for a new Turkish project. It's not just a unity of two blocks. It's got a whole new vision. I talked to the president of the People's Democratic Party, Ertugrul Kuktu, for people's dispatch. I hope people will go in and watch the interview because Ertugrul talks with great feeling about the project of the People's Democratic Party, explains what they're doing and so on. And well, I mean, the government of Turkey at the same time, you know, this is exactly what they want to erase. They want to erase precisely the hope of a different kind of project. And, you know, Mr. President of Turkey, Mr. Erdogan has been extraordinarily ruthless against his opposition.  Now, the fact is, here's the interesting thing, Zoe Prashant. The story that he tweeted is still up. It's still available. You know, there's nothing wrong with the story. It's a basic story, but he has been arrested based on that story. You know, it's incredible. One of the co-chairs of the People's Democratic Party, Saladin Demetri, still in prison, has been there since 2016. You know, on what charge? Again, a charge of promoting the Workers' Party, the PKK. The links between the PKK and the HDP are actually quite, you know, unclear because when the HDP ran in the Istanbul municipal elections, they actually went against the Kurdish Workers' Party. There's a lot of evidence of gap between the two formations, even though there may be some similarity of purpose and so on. You know, but they are being taught with that brush in the same way as dissenters in India routinely get targeted and called naxalites. You know, the same way as Gautam Navlaka sitting in prison, Anand Teltum, they're sitting in prison, get taught with the brush of being naxalites. Because they have the similar orientation. They want to create a kind of socialist society in India. There's no organizational ties. There's no agreement on strategy or anything, and yet the government does this. So they're trying to ban the third largest political party in Turkey on these spurious grounds. Again, sort of tepid coverage on this. I'm afraid, you know, there was more coverage about something significant, which is that Turkey decided to walk away from the Istanbul Convention, which is a convention, European convention on the question of violence against women. It's a very important convention. Of course, it's called the Istanbul Convention, guys. It's bizarre that Turkey has walked out of it. That got coverage as it should have got coverage. But at the same time, they're trying to ban a political party, the third largest political party. This should really have people who are seized by the concept of democracy, should have people little concerned. I would have thought that papers around the world would have contributed opinion articles on the fact that, well, this kind of judicial lawfare, this sort of lawfare against a party, what we saw against say Lula, Brazil and so on, this is of concern. And I just, you know, don't see this happening much. Of course, the question of erosion of democracy must be with us. You're listening to give the people what they want brought to you by people's dispatch and globetrotter. I hope you've bookmarked people's dispatch and go to it. Well, last time I said daily, and I think Prashant and Zoe would like you to come at least two or three times a day. So bookmarked people's dispatch. It's a very important source for movement storytelling. Yes, we are concerned about democracy. That's because our stories are written essentially with the UN Charter in mind. Zoe concerned about democracy. Meanwhile, of course, in the United States of America, in the fine state of Georgia, voter suppression is right there on top of the table, isn't it? Yeah, I mean, in what it likes to call itself as kind of the defender of democracy and the guarantor of democracy globally, there is actually quite strong limits on people's access to democracy. And I think, and this is, of course, on, you know, certain lines on racial lines on class lines with so essentially yesterday, a pretty bizarre vote happened in the in the state of Georgia and the state legislature, you know, passed really quickly called Election Integrity Act of 2021. The law essentially implements a lot of restrictions on voting. So it adds criteria for how to turn an absentee ballot ballots, which of course, you know, in the COVID times, being able to vote by mail, being able to absentee ballot is pretty crucial to be able to participate in the democratic process. It also decreases the use of ballot drop boxes, shortens the time between runoff elections, and makes it illegal for people to approach voters waiting in line to vote with food or water. So on face value, kind of like, what does this really mean? How does this really infringe on voting rights? I mean, I think it has to be seen in the context of the United States where voting rights are consistently infringed upon. And so we've seen, you know, over the past couple of decades, a series of state level laws passed, that, you know, in some way or another restrict people's access to voting. So whether this is requiring a certain type of ID to go vote, or whether it's, you know, changing the period of enrollment and registration. At the last minute, you know, we've seen this in a lot of different states. You know, they just make all these different changes, which restrict people's access to voting. And then of course, in some states, we have the really grave, you know, prohibition of people who have prior felony convictions to be able to vote. I mean, the numbers on this are astounding. In 2020, over 5 million people were disenfranchised from voting because of a felony conviction. And if people know anything about, you know, the system of mass incarceration in the United States, this is a system which disproportionately affects people of color, black people and Latino people in the United States. And so, you know, what are we seeing with all these different voter repression laws is trying to disenfranchise a certain sector of the population, working class people, black people, Latino people from being able to participate. So when we talk about democracy in the United States, you know, this glorious right to vote and participate in democratic process, it's not for, you know, this right is not granted to everyone.  This was actually a really big, significant law, but it's just edging and eroding away on this right in the, you know, every way possible, making it harder, not easier, harder to participate. It was a civil right in a civil duty and obligation, which in some countries is even, you know, an obligation, but in the United States, voting like many other things, like many other things that should be essential rights, human rights, are just for privileged few, you know. You know, it's a, it's a human right. It's, as you say, right after I had mentioned that our standard is the UN Charter where this is very strongly enshrined this idea of democratic principles and so on. In the one hand in Turkey, we see the attempt to actually ban a political party in the same way as they banned Lula from running in the election. And then of course, you're saying that, well, it's even worse in a way that your simple act of the franchise is franchises also in doubt. Gotta look carefully in different countries to see what's happening in terms of the right to vote. You know, in Venezuela, 200 years ago, there was a battle called the Battle of Carabobo, when the Spanish were finally overcome. This process is going to revive a great deal of discussion centered in Carabobo in South America, around the importance of reviving ideas of sovereignty and democracy and so on. I think from today, we're opening up a period of discussion about Carabobo and its meaning for the world and so on. So I mean, I look forward to having more discussions. I hope people will go into their communities and have conversations about what democracy means. Democracy wouldn't mean anything if we're going to continue this mass slaughter that we're seeing in Brazil. For instance, I just looked at the numbers. It's extraordinary. On the 13th of February, 1000 people died that day by the 23rd of March, 3258 people died. There are 12 million infections in Brazil, almost 300,000 deaths. Just pause for a second. In Brazil, there are almost 300,000 deaths. We say that these numbers are second only to the United States. Brazil only has two thirds of the US population. So if you look at per capita, it is beyond a tragedy. Enrique Mandetta, the former health minister, said that this was going to happen, but he was pushed aside by Yair Bolsonaro. The president is extraordinary how horrible it is. Meanwhile, there's vaccine hoarding going on, vaccine nationalism going on. Everything against the principle of Karabobo Prashant. What's up with the whole vaccine business? Absolutely. It's not a mess right now because you have various countries considering or groups considering these kind of export restrictions. The EU definitely did impose export restrictions yesterday and there were rumors that India might do the same. Although India, to its credit, has exported quite a lot of the vaccines produced by the Sedum Institute. But on the one hand, like you said, we're definitely probably entering into a phase of extreme vaccine nationalism. We saw reports of the United States actually hoarding huge amounts of the AstraZeneca vaccine, which it had not given the approval for. But it refused to send to other countries, which will actually need because for whatever reason. So that's happening on the one hand. Of course, on the other hand, there is a very concerned effort which you have discussed in some of our previous shows to actually get the, to remove patient restrictions or copyright restrictions on the vaccine. And this is actually becoming a much, almost a global movement in the sense that India and South Africa had obviously initiated this demand. And now we have at least 100 countries, most of whom are developing to support these demands. We have the WHO director supporting these demands. But this still can't happen because it requires a consensus, the WTO, obviously the United States, the EU, all these big groups, big players are against it. And this is the impact is disastrous because I think there are reports which say for instance that in the developing countries, the mass of people are likely to be immunized by mid-2022 maybe, whereas in the developed countries, whereas in the developing countries, it might take up to 2024. And this is like a huge gap and we're looking at the possibility of hundreds and thousands, if not millions of additional deaths due to this delay. And most of this comes from the fact that organizations or other countries are not able to produce these vaccines because of the restrictions imposed by patents, because the restrictions imposed by the TRIPS protocol basically. So there is definitely a movement, not a movement but a push by many countries across the world to get this done. We've had recently for instance the UN Human Rights Council passed a resolution suggesting that this happened. We've had MPs and parliamentarians across the world writing for it. But at the end of the day, there's still no concrete global will to implement this. And at some level this might look esoterically talking about trade law and intellectual property rights and all that. It's maybe very complicated, but it boils down to a very simple and single point that the rich countries and the rich companies are making profits. Of course, the rich countries are holding their vaccines and making sure that their people benefit. Whereas the mass of the world's population is going to struggle to get access to the vaccine. There is this COVAX initiative by WHO, which is also going to suffer for the same reason because unless these supplies are what you call received by them, they're not going to be able to distribute it. Even now the global map is quite depressing when you go to some of these sites and see vaccine distribution. The amount of concentration of vaccine distribution is horrifying to say the least. And I think it says a lot for us as a global community in terms of how we're not able to do this. So April 7th, of course, is World Health Day. And I think a lot of mobilization by progressive movements across the world is definitely going to be on this demand that there be justice in this regard. Well, it's a very important story. And next week, Tri-Continental Institute for Social Research will release a red alert on vaccines, which is pretty scientific actually. It's all about RNA and DNA and things that I'm struggling to wrap my head around, but look out for that. Next week also on Monday is International Day of Solidarity with Haiti. Important, we've covered Haiti a lot. I would suggest that people go to the various events that are taking place. Perhaps pull down CLR James' book, The Black Jacobins, and have a read of that on that day in Solidarity with the people of Haiti. Started this little segment on Brazil yesterday was the 99th birthday of the Brazilian Communist Party. And well, I suppose the only antidote to the chaos in Brazil in Bolsonaro is if the Brazilian left has its chance to perhaps rationalize the process of the state in Brazil. Rationalize the process of the state. I'm sure everybody's seen that picture of the of the golden class container ship ever given jackknife into the Suez Canal. You see, it's interesting, it's a Panamanian flag carrier with an all Indian crew as it turns out. It's an interesting thing because, you know, I think people need to understand that the Suez Canal essentially is a ditch that was dug in the desert. And it has no real displacement capacity. The company that owns evergreen ever given that's evergreen marine said that there was a big gust of wind. In fact, if you look at the data, there was a gust of wind. The ship very well may have had an accidental jackknife. It's stuck in the canal. It's about nine and a half billion US dollars a day trapped from business by this ship. That's about 400 million dollars an hour. They're trying to move the ship. It's not budging very much. Let's see what happens. It is actually an extraordinary story about the global chain of the movement of commodities. Things are quite fragile in our global chain. This ship ever given has in a sense seized the global movement of commodities. It stopped it. I don't know how long it's going to take to move. They're trying their best to move it. It shows you how fragile things are. Ships are already going south around the Cape of Good Horn. The old journey of Vasco da Gama, Admiral Cheng Ho and so on has to be revived because this ditch has now failed world affairs. There's also vulnerability because of politics in the global chain. I don't want to get too much into this but I do want to mention, because it's an important story, the fight now over cotton grown in Xinjiang. This is long staple cotton. It's a very fine cotton. As a consequence of the debate around Xinjiang and the pressure from the United States and the Europeans on the Chinese, a campaign began to block the use of Xinjiang cotton by companies like HM and so on. But they are stuck because this is some of the world's best cotton and it has become a political football. It's an interesting story and I don't want to get too much into this. We need to actually investigate it more, develop this story more but I just want to point out these are two vulnerabilities in the globalized economy. One, this golden class tanker which has jackknifed in the Suez Canal blocks things up. Secondly, there's a political dispute over Xinjiang which is going to block cotton production. We don't know what this is going to do to producers in Xinjiang. It will have some effect on them. I don't think China can absorb Xinjiang cotton. It's also clear that companies around the world are not keen on this because they would have to use inferior cotton for their products and so on. Things to think about the vulnerability of the globalized system. We've got to dig deeper into some of this stuff. You've been with us for this half hour and we've refused to increase the show to an hour even though the people seem to want that. Some people have even asked us to do two hours. You'd get bored of us for sure. Give the people what they want. It comes to you every week from people's dispatch thanks to Prashant and Zoe. Prashant and Zoe bring you people's dispatch which is one of the finest movement storytellers. Please bookmark the website, go there regularly. Give the people what they want. It's also brought to you from Globetrotter and that's me Vijay. I'm the Chief Correspondent at Globetrotter which is a syndication service. I hope you see our stories here, there and everywhere including most importantly at people's dispatch. It's great to be here on Friday with you. Look forward to coming back next week. Zoe, Prashant, anything else? We're okay. Remember to share the show with your friends and tell them about this bohemian and Bolshevik news program. That's a very good point. Please tell people about this show. We don't have corporate sponsorship. We don't have ads anywhere. We're sponsored by Black Turtle NEX. And we have unique outfits. Tell your friends we want to hear from you. Tell us what you think of the show. 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Guys, today's video is one I've been wanting to do for a long time, Wine Pairing 101. It combines two of my favorites, wine and food. I mean, who doesn't like to put wine and food together? It's been going on for years, by the way, for thousands of years. You might say it's a little bit of an obsession for me, and if you've seen our videos before, you know there's a previous one where there's another obsession we talked about, brushing our teeth. Adam and I actually compete with each other who has the most clean teeth. We went to the dentist, and he won. I don't want to burn everybody's heart, but yours is one of them. So thanks to Pronamo for sponsoring this video. Wine and food, they've been paired together for thousands of years, and here in Napa where I grew up, we've been pairing food since I was little. Of course, you can't drink wine until you're 21, but the whole experience of food and wine together is amazing, and there's a lot of really cool things you can pair with wine. First of all, there's no rules. If someone says, oh, red wine only goes with meat, and white wine only goes with fish, guess what? You can drink wine with whatever you want to. There is no particular rule that has to be followed. You can follow or make your own rules. That's the way I feel, and that's a Tamera truth pop. The thing you do want to start with, you want to go sweet or like wine to heavier when you're trying them all, because otherwise it's like going backwards. If you're like having dessert and salsa, it doesn't work. You want to go the other way around. You want to go salsa than dessert. In this case, we're starting off with our Art Stem Assist Rose. This is a rose that has had one day of skin contact. This is really fruity. Now, there's two types of glasses we could use for these for wine tastings, and there's more than two, but the two we use are stem and stimulus. It kind of is a preference. A lot of people feel that if you put your hand on the stimulus glass that the warmth of your hand will change the wine. It's really dependent on what you want to do as a wine drinker. I generally put my rose wines, pink wines, rosé, same thing in a stemless glass. Our white wines I usually put that as well as stemless glass and red wines I usually put into a stemmed glass. Rosé and chocolate is fabulous together. We have a strawberry white chocolate here, so you're going to get the berries of the strawberry and the white chocolate to go with the rosé. If I could buy it. Oh, cool. This is the marriage favorite. The flavors explode. The flavors of the rosé and the flavor of the white chocolate, they just go together. So, Tamara's been coming to Napa with me since we started dating almost 17 years ago, and we have paired wine, had the opportunity to eat and pair with wine all over the valley, all over Napa County, Sonoma County, pretty much wine country. We've also done that in Italy, Croatia, Greece, Spain, and in Portugal. So, as you can tell, we like to pair wine with food and we like to explore other wine, other food regions as well. What's interesting is, you can also have wine with stuff you would never think about, like popcorn. In this case, this is our Sauvignon Blanc, which is a, Sauvignon Blanc is a white grape, so there's no skin contact there. You can see how light that is. See how light that is in the glass. So, great, great nose on the, on the, on the wines.  So, here we have everything from caramel popcorn to barbecue chips to brandy brittle. All of these, again, will go fatty with wine. So, here's popcorn, you get the salt and the sweet, and you add the Sonoma to it. Again, wine goes with everything. And you have the barbecue chip, savory. Also, the salt comes out with the wine. So, salt and sugar go great with wine. The saltiness really pairs well and contrasts the acidity you're going to get in wine. So, besides the salt, the fruitiness of wine will also pair well with sweets. So, for example, while these wines are all dry, meaning there's no sugar content in them, when you have a piece of chocolate with it, those two combine to create this, this explosion of flavor. So, now you have the, this is brandy brittle. Caramel, the kitchen popcorn, salt, sugar, forgot the wine. That was a good pair. Now we go into the more savory items of cheese, crackers, fruit, which just similar, has a similar way of bringing the flavor out on wine as sugar does, and then salami meat. So, for example, when you see a cracker in a wine, what crackers do is they cleanse your palate, believe it or not. A cracker, doesn't have a lot of taste, no but of salt, that's it.  Can I taste the wine directly? Now we move over to the reds. This case is the Old Vine Zinfandel, which is a bigger, bolder red. Dark wine would go with dark chocolate. Dark wine would also go with raisins, dates, for example, and of course, cheese goes with everything. Ascariah, cheese goes with everything. You won't eat a lot of cheese again? In this case, the Zinfandel is bigger, it's bolder, so the chocolate I'm using is a spicy dark chocolate, so with salt on top of it. You're gonna have the spice, the salt, and the dark chocolate. Obviously, three completely different flavors, then you add the depth of the red wine to it. That's good. Huh, common theme here, right? It's good. Cheese, the dairy and the cheese, it's just, it's a nice, subtle, smooth way to pair with the wine. Fresh syrup, I'm having with Zinfandel, that's good. Kind of something else you can do too, besides the cheese. As you're having cheese and wine, you can also cleanse the powder a little bit with fruit. Dried fruit goes fabulous. In this case, it's a dried apricot. So the apricot will have that sugar content that the chocolate will have, but it'll be natural sugar content. So I mentioned that we have tasted all over the world together, Tamara and I. And I can tell you, it's been kind of fun when you're in, for example, Portugal and they bring out sardines to have with wine, or just different parts of the world where you have different things and different types of wine, different types of food. So again, you can pair wine with anything, we've known that for a thousand years, but these are the basics that are really easy to pair with. Now that I go to olives, I'm going to switch over to our Cabernet. Zinfandel's a bigger wine and Cabernet's also can be big as well, but it's a little bit more smooth. So with our Cabernet, you're going to get all sorts of dark berry flavors. You're going to get some spice in there. So olive oil and olives and cheese go just fabulous with Cabernet. So here's a green olive. I can get another green olive and some cheese. This is Tamara's favorite. I wonder where she gets the cheese accession from. It could be the other way around. Araya has a cheese accession, maybe she got it from Tamara. The olive oil, the cheese, the saltiness of the olive itself, all those flavors together, even with that wine is amazing. Then you add the wine to it with the acidity and the alcohol content and the fruit and the boldness of the Cabernet. It is all those flavors together. The idea is to mess them all, bring them all together into one big flavor-filled taste and that's what these do.  As I mentioned, there's no rules. I think you can drink wine with whatever you want to, but if you really want to get down to it and follow the unwritten rule, think of color. So dark wine, dark sauces, white wine, light sauces. It's better to match the wine with the sauce than it is to match the wine with the food. So for example, maybe I'm having chicken. With chicken, you would think lighter wines, right? Not necessarily. If the chicken's in a pasta sauce, a red sauce, you would then drink it with a red wine. That's kind of the easy way of doing it. But there is what's called the contrast theory as well, where maybe you have a sweet piece of chocolate with a heavier red wine. Those work as well. So there's again, no real actual rule, but if you want to follow the unwritten rules, that's kind of an easy way of doing it. Light to light, dark to dark. You kind of want to match the flavor profiles if you can, but contrast is also good as well. It's actually a blast to do this all at home. They're trying to figure out what you like and create your own. It's all about the presentation and the food, but ultimately it's about the taste. What's great about wine pairing is that you can do it yourself at home and decide what you like. And there's really no wrong answer. So after drinking wine and eating food and pairing them together, it's very important to get the acidic elements off of your teeth by rinsing. You're having wine that's acidic. You're having food that's acidic. So you want to get that out. Just a good little glass of water is the fabulous way of doing it. You want to do this and wash it out by rinsing.  You want to wait about an hour because it'll actually do more damage to the enamel by brushing right after you taste wine or eat acidic food than it will if you wait that hour after rinsing your teeth. Everyone's gone to bed. So I'm back to brushing. Wine and everyday foods have acids that can deplete the minerals in your body, which weakens your teeth enamel, but pro enamel mineral boost is an amazing toothpaste that enhances your body's ability to naturally replenish those minerals. And it boosts the absorption of really important minerals like calcium and phosphate. This toothpaste keeps your teeth strong and white. Oh yeah, of course, I know this. I brush with this stuff at least twice a day, depending on how much wine I have, of course. Let me know in the comments below what other kind of wine videos you'd like me to do while I brush my teeth. And thanks again to Pro Enamel for sponsoring this video. You can find pro enamel mineral boost in a box like this anywhere you buy your toothpaste. Or you can buy it now by clicking on the link in the description and be sure to subscribe to The Housy Life.


So, how can we improve these problems with GANs? And how can we generally improve problems with mode collabs? Lots of people had lots of ideas there, you know? Like, we can use, we can use JSD divergence. We can use arthmover's distance. We can, we can do something about weight decay. We can give it an all too loss objective. There's so many great ideas that people came up with on how we could make GANs better. Now, these ideas are often based on mathematical intuitions. And sometimes mathematical intuitions are great, but sometimes they just hide that there's things that we don't really understand yet. I can highly recommend the paper on how well GANs, long densities, nonparametric and parametric results if you're interested in more details there. So, given these, all these mathematical ideas, and there's countless papers in this list here that deal with different ideas on how to make GANs better. So, did all these mathematical ideas succeed? Well, did anyone find a magical while walking formulation that is not as, doesn't feel as hacky as it is right now? Well, let's see. Let's say we want to measure how good a GAN is. What does it mean to evaluate how a GAN works? It's very difficult. Now, like we want to produce images that are kind of like real images. How could we know that? Here's a very simple intuitive idea, which is the Fréchet Inception distance. We take the Inception network and we use the Fully Connector 2048 neural and width layer. Now, if GANs produce the same probability distribution as images as the real world, we would expect at that layer that the two of them are very similar. Now, like, what does that mean? It means that at some level, all the means should be the same of each feature. Like, if we have a feature at that level, that feature should be matched and of course, the moments should be matched. The easiest is the variances should be the same. Now, you can say the Fréchet Inception distance combines those. It asks how the means are different and then it asks how the variance structure is similar here. Now, we can say, well, how similar are they? Now, first, this FID really makes sense if you apply it. So what we have here is we have FID on this axis versus various different kinds of disturbance levels. You can say we add some color noise, like adding a little bit of color noise. Yeah, like there's a good number of photographs that look like that, but still the FID goes up. And then if we add a lot of noise, the FID goes up an awful lot. If we blur it, the FID goes up. If we do some rotational things, it goes up. Interestingly, only very little. Look here, this face to a human clearly doesn't seem right, but suddenly the activations higher up in a conf net may be quite similar, which is actually interesting because it means that there's something missing there. And then we can add individual random pixels to it. And more and more, and you can say that we already start having very different levels if you have really small amounts of this extra noise there. So FID kind of makes sense as a measure of how real stimuli are. And then we can look at the FID score for the various different gains. And what we can see here is A across restarts and with different hyperparameters, there's a huge variability. Looks like the same network can have an FID score as low as 15 and suddenly much, much higher. We have that for the different data sets here. They look at MNIST, fashion MNIST, CIFA 10, CELABA, lots of different models, but the upshot is huge variability and also the upshot is not one of them is clearly better than the others. So despite all these good ideas, they don't seem to be helping all that much, at least not if we take FID as a measure of quality for a gap. Now there's one thing that I should have mentioned about FID. Why might we expect that FID are a good idea? You can say at the very output of Inception we have object categories. So a good generative model should produce object categories at the same frequencies as we have it in the real world. But you can say we might want to go down a level further and say we want to kind of not just get the object categories, but maybe poses, maybe like additional parameters, right? So therefore, close to the output of an object recognition network, we might expect the kinds of things that we would ideally like to keep constant here. Now here's an idea of improving certain things, which are conditional GANs. There's some things that we can easily do. At least make sure that every class comes with the right frequency and cannot be moded cobs or collapsed away. So in a normal GAN, mind you, we put in Z, which is a random vector, which produces cats. Now we can add the properties of what we are looking for here, where we could say, well, we instead take Z and we give it coded, the class here, one hot encoded. Alternatively, we can take this one hot encoding and add it to the image inputs, which is how we do it in practice. And then we can say here we have different cat breeds. And like this could be Russian blue cat breed. This is another Russian blue breed. Both of them would be one hot encoded, maybe as 1, 0, 0 at the end of this. And then here's Conrad's kind of a cat, which would be like 0, 1, 0, and so on and so forth. There would be different cat breeds here. And now the discriminator, importantly, needs to get that same information. And like if the discriminator would basically get this information, here's the image, and the label is that it's Conrad's kind of a cat, the discriminator would say, no, that's definitely not. Whereas here Conrad's kind of a cat, probity would be high, would be that it's fake, would be much lower. Now let's build a conditional again. Fast sample the labels or just take them out of the data set and then have the label be part of the input to the game. Build a condition again.


Item number SCP-649 Object Class Safe Special Containment Procedures SCP-649 is to be kept in a standard Type II containment locker on Site-77. It should not be opened nor moved from its location unless testing is being performed. Heating implements, windshields, and equipment to clear snow must be present during testing to prevent containment failures. Description SCP-649 is a matchbox from an unidentified brand with a 32 match count. The box is marked with a logo in the shape of a snowflake crystal on the underside that feels cold to the touch. Whenever a match from SCP-649 is struck, snowflakes will shoot out in contrast to the sparks of a normal match. Once struck, the head will show visible crystallization and the main anomalous properties of SCP-649 will manifest. This can also be achieved by leaving SCP-649 open for more than 15 minutes. Upon manifestation, the surroundings of SCP-649 will experience a sudden drop in temperature, which will continue to decrease over time. Subsequently, strong winds will develop. Research confirmed that these winds are able to occur indoors. When the temperature in the area reaches zero degrees Celsius, large amounts of snow and sleet will continuously form in a circular area around SCP-649. The radius of this area has been observed to increase 15 meters per hour with a maximum of 1 kilometer. Closing the lid of SCP-649 causes the expansion to halt and surroundings to revert to their pre-exposure conditions. If left open for an indefinite amount of time, the conditions will stabilize at negative 30 degrees Celsius when the entire radius is covered in 3 meters of snow. Due to the high amount of ice formed by the frozen sleet at these temperatures and the winds, this can cause snow slides or even avalanches on uneven terrain. This arctic climate will keep itself intact until SCP-649 is closed. Whilst not identical, the effect of SCP-649 on its surroundings works in a similar way to the effect of SCP-2082. A request for further comparative research is still pending. Discovery. On 1987, 04, 19, Foundation agents reported unseasonal blizzards in West Virginia. After an investigation, SCP-649 was identified as the origin of the blizzard. On 1987, 04, 22, SCP-649 was recovered at the center of the storm. Local citizens that saw the sudden change in weather conditions were administered class CM nestics. A cover story blaming the winter conditions on changes in local weather fronts, caused by global warming, was disseminated. Addendum, 649A. Experiment Logs. Experiment 649-1. Description. SCP-649 was left open in a testing chamber. And one D-class personnel, D-1226, was asked to interact with SCP-649. Results. D-1226 was wary and asked if he could get answers on some basic questions before interacting with the anomaly. Due to his generally cooperative behavior in past experiments, this request was granted. After the 15-minute mark of opening SCP-649 past, the temperature dropped and D-1226 began to shiver. D-1226 took this as his cue to begin the experiment. D-1226 took SCP-649 and tried to light a match to warm his hands. When the matches did not light, he tried four more times before attempting the same with other matches. Every time a match was struck, the conditions in the testing room became more severe. Six minutes after manifestation, D-1226 visibly appeared confused, had trouble breathing, and dropped SCP-649. Eight minutes after manifestation, D-1226 began to show signs of delirium before beginning to drift in and out of consciousness. He murmured about how it was a beautiful winter evening. Ten minutes after manifestation, D-1226 was ordered to close SCP-649, failed to do so, and passed out. Foundation agents rushed in and re-contained SCP-649. D-1226 was carried to the medical wing for treatment of frostbite and hypothermia. Experiment 649-2 Description SCP-649 was left open in a testing chamber to let its anomalous properties manifest for observation and to collect samples. Results Dr. Pina began sampling the precipitation in soil. During this, she reported the feeling of being stared at. Whilst analyzing the wind, Dr. Pina reported visual observation of small, faint silhouettes in the distant fog. She was asked to leave the testing chamber for a medical check before continuing. Upon return, Dr. Pina was hit by a snowball. Giggling children can be heard on the recording of the experiment. Three D-class personnel in adjusted clothing were brought in in order to traverse to the other end of the room and back and report the possible change in weather conditions or other things that stood out. After 20 minutes without a successful return or response, the experiment came to a halt. SCP-649 was closed and re-contained following standard protocol. Upon reviewing video footage, one D-class personnel can be seen engaging in a snowball fight with small figures around the 40700 timestamp. She then begins to fade away into the fog before traversing through the walls of the testing chamber and disappearing into the seemingly endless blizzard. No D-class personnel have been recovered. All testing with D-class personnel has been suspended. Lesson complete. If you missed the previous orientation, go watch SCP-648, The Labyrinth, right now. After the complete course, watch this playlist.


Concentrations of antibiotic residues vary between different edible muscle tissues in poultry. In which muscles do antibiotic residues concentrate the most? White meat, dark meat, or both the same? And the answer is, white meat. Significantly more antibiotic residues in breast meat compared to thigh. Those were the only two tested, though, even though the present study found greater residue concentrations in breast versus thigh muscle tissues. The possibility also exists that other edible muscle tissues, like legs or wings, could have even higher levels.


basically ties out to it. So if you're thinking that you're going to import from QuickBooks desktop to online, it's likely that you might have to pull in these items of subcustomers. And then when you want to make them into the projects to use the cool new feature, which might be a thing that drew you into it to the move, then you might have to convert the subcustomers, which it looks like they're getting better making that conversion an easier thing to do. Let's go over and look at the projects. So notice the projects by default were basically on when I went in here. If they're not on, you can go into the cog up top and you can go into the account and settings. And within the advanced area, you have your project. So I'm advanced. We have the projects. They are turned on.  So there is our projects. Once on, then do you want to leave without saving? Yes. Then you'll have your projects tab on the left-hand side. It says, run your projects with confidence. Make better decisions by knowing how your jobs are doing. You can watch a video on it. Profitability in one place. Profitability by job, that is. Organize your project finances with a clear view of profits. Keep track of your labor costs. See where your team is spending time and how it affects your profit margins. Eliminate the guesswork. Understand which projects make money and where you should focus your efforts. All right, let's start the project. So then the project, I'm just going to call this one generic project number one. And then we have to notice there's an asterisk here. We have to assign it to a customer. So that's going to be mandatory of the projects. Now, if I had a customer that had a sub-customer, I could assign it to the sub-customer, which again, I might still do if there was a different billing address or something. But I'm just going to assign this one to the parent customer so that we can do some comparing and contrasting of what the functionality looks like if we had a sub-job or a sub-customer versus a project. So I'm going to select Jones guitars. By the way, you might look at the term of projects and start thinking that you would like to break out certain things like another income account. Because what happens with the projects is basically we can run the income statement by project that we're working on as one of the benefits that we'll basically have when we break out the projects. And we can also see it in its own little place now because now we have the projects with more functionality than we had with the sub-customers. So you might think, well, what if I have a particular project in my business and I have a particular meeting or I go to a particular concert or something or a particular, I went to a new idea for my business and then I applied that new idea and I want to see the revenue that was generated from that new idea or something like that. That's not really what the projects are for because you have to assign it to a customer. So all of the money has to be assigned to a customer. So it works kind of like the jobs. What might you use that functionality for? You might use class tracking for something like that. You might use the location tracking could possibly be used and the tags. Those are the other features that can break out the income statement by column. So if you had a particular revenue location or something that you went to a conference and you applied some new thing and you want to see the profit and loss that is tagged to that new thing or that tagged to a certain lead generator that you made or something like that and you can tag the revenue lines and the expense lines related to that particular lead or something, well then that's something you might use class tracking or more likely like tags in that case which can still break out the income statement by that particular thing. This thing is gonna be breaking out the income statement by the jobs which have to be assigned to the customer. Okay, so in any case let's bring this back. January 1st, the end date, I'm not gonna put an end date because I don't really know. And then typically when we think about the jobs we have the status of it's either in progress, it's completed or it has been canceled. So in progress means we've started up, we've started up the job and it's moving at this point in time, we're working on it. Completed of course means that the job is ended so it's now closed so it would kind of be like moving the job from the ones that we're working on to the ones that have been closed and canceled means it was in progress and then of course it has been canceled. So let's go ahead and say, we're gonna say it's in progress, we can add notes if we need to and then if I go into the job, here's our little thing that tells us about it. Your project at a glance, see your project's performance end to end, track income and all your costs including labor. So it's gonna track everything, follow the money, see your project organized by income and costs to make sure you stay profitable. All right, and then see how time is being spent. You can add your team's time and know what they worked on and how it affects your project cost. So basically we've got basically the income and the costs which are now can be broken out by particular projects. So when I assign invoices and expenses, I can assign them to a particular project. So for example, I won't record an invoice right now but just to show you, if we hit the plus button, we've got the invoices over here but you could also do that here by I'm in the project here, I'm gonna close up the hamburger and in this dropdown, you can see I have the invoice receive payment expense estimate and so on and so forth. So this is another area that I can add an invoice for example. So I'm gonna say let's just do an invoice from here and then if I was to invoice, this would be the revenue side of things and then we have the assigning of the project because it's assigned to project number one. It's not assigned to the subcustomer, it's assigned to the project. So if I close this back out and say leave without saving, I'm gonna say yes, leave without saving, that's that and then if I had an expense side of things, money is going out, the money would still go out of the check-in account but now it's gonna go out of the check-in account and I'm gonna assign it to a project. So I'm assigning it to a project over here. Why does that matter? Because when I assign it


What's ya can booktube? My name's Cam, and welcome back to another video. I've been gone for a little while, but I'm back, baby.  First things first, I hope your Christmas and New Year's was fantastic. Mine was mediocre. So I have been gone for a couple of weeks, mainly just because I want to change things up on my channel in the new year, and I've been using some of that time to get the planning for that done. But I'll get to that a bit later. But I've also been quite sick. I still am a little bit up until a couple of days ago.  So that was fantastic. But here I am, back in business, back in the heart seat, baby. I'm going to be telling you about some of the goals I have for 2020. That way, at the end of the year, I can reflect on this video and laugh at what a monumental failure I am. Is that that's too many self-deprecating? OK, I know if you do too many, it gets a little bit sad. I'm going to be breaking down my goals into three sections, and that's going to be writing, reading, and the channel itself. Because I have some things that are going to be changing quite a lot on the channel this year. I'm excited about. Before I get into those three sections of goals I have for the year, I want to just tell you something really quickly that I feel like I need to get out of the way. You might remember last year I started PageNomad.com, which it's not wool shop publishing much, but it is bookish clothing. And what most people don't know is that having a commerce store, it's not just like the pagenomad.com. It's not just like a red bubble store or an Etsy store. It's an actual store on its own. It's a commerce store. It comes with quite a lot of fees and it can be quite expensive. And I'm just going to be blunt. It has been a pretty big failure so far. It's I've gotten bugger all sales and I've tried soft selling on my videos. I've tried hard selling, but hard selling is something that I just I refuse to do. I hate seeing it in other people's videos and I don't want it in mind. I've tried running actual ads as well on like Facebook and Twitter and stuff. And it's just nothing seems to be working at this point in time. Maybe the designs aren't as good as I thought they were. I don't know. I just don't know what the reason is. But basically, yeah, to put it bluntly, it's it's been a failure. It's been bad. And that's a bummer, you know, that sucks, but that's life. It is what it is. It's OK. So, yeah, this this honestly is not a sales tactic whatsoever. But at the end of the month and the first week of February, I'm going to be shutting it down. I'm going to be cutting the cord. I'll keep the page nomad name, of course. I'm going to keep that. But the store itself is going down. So if you do actually want anything on there, this is literally your last opportunity to get them. What are you doing? I'm writing. But you'll be when you start punching those keys. So first things first, my writing goals for the year. It's no secret. I've been pretty slack with my writing for the last couple of years, I guess. Shit. I've been pretty slack. But this year, I really do want to give it a give it a better shot. I guess I mean, I could say that every year. But hopefully this year, I can give it a better shot. I'm going to be trying to hold myself accountable a bit more. I still don't want to set the goal of, like, I have to write this many words every day. I just I just don't think that's completely realistic. But I am going to try and do at least five thousand words a week. More specifically, the the actual goal that I want to set for 2020 is that I want to finish two books by the end of the year. Now, to some people, that might not seem like a lot to others. That might be too optimistic. But I've actually already got both those planned out and both those two books started. One of them quite a bit. You might know I've mentioned in past videos, Descend Seven, the horror psychological horror book. That one's already got quite a lot of it done, I guess. And the other one is a horror anthology. And hopefully I can finish those before the end of the year and get started on something outside of the horror genre, because I have a lot of other plans as well. One more goal I want to set in regards to writing for the year is that I want to actually host some kind of big, pretty big writing, short story writing, competition or event on my channel. You know, like, readathons on booktube. I want it to be a bit like that.  I'm hoping it can be something that brings the writing community together in the same way that readathons do with the reading community. That's my plan anyway. I haven't really given much thought into that and I'm probably going to be looking for co-hosts when I do that. But that's something for later on. Reading goals is a pretty easy one because I've never been a person to really set many goals in regards to reading. Reading is a hobby for me.  It's nothing more. And I refuse to make it anything more than that. That's why I don't have a reading challenge on Goodreads. I mean, if you like setting yourself a challenge or a goal in regards to reading for the year, that makes it more enjoyable for you. Cool. That's completely fine. Me personally, it just adds pressure and makes it feel more like a chore when it should feel more like just a fun hobby. That's that's just what reading is to me. But with that said, I do have a goal that I want to kind of set out for myself this year. And that is to at least get out of my comfort zone a little bit and read something other than just fantasy or horror. Not because I feel like I have to mind you. This isn't something I feel I'm obligated to do, but rather I think it'll actually be fun to maybe expose myself to something else. And I'm not talking about like literotica or anything like that. I think I've given absurd erotic stories more screen time on this channel than genres that I actually thoroughly thoroughly enjoy. I've given them more than a fair shot at this point. I'm talking more like contemporary romance genres and subgenres like that, that maybe I've been a bit snobby about. I don't feel like I've gone out and said that I think certain genres are worse than others, but I haven't given them a chance just based off the limited experiences I've had with those genres. And I just want to just want to give it a bit more of an opportunity to maybe there's something that I really enjoy, because I really like romance movies and rom-coms. But when it comes to romance stories, I'm very rarely interested. A lot of the ones I hear about, especially on Booktube, just kind of sound like contrived garbage. Maybe a lot of them are, but I could also be completely wrong. But yeah, that's that's my plan. That's my reading goals for 2020 is to get out of my comfort zone and hopefully read some stuff that I wouldn't normally do. Now, the one I am, I guess, most excited to tell you about is my channel goals for the year. I've been trying to do something with my videos kind of recently. I've been trying to steer them in a certain direction, but they're still not quite what I want to try and do with my videos. I know this all sounds pretty cryptic, just bear with me. I want my videos to feel a bit more like video essays. I guess video essays are something I thoroughly enjoy. I think they're like one of the best things on YouTube. And it's something I've wanted to do in a bookish sphere for a very long time. And I've considered doing a different channel to do it. But, you know, that's just not manageable. I can barely find the time to upload content on one channel. And what this means is that my videos going forward are going to feel and look a bit different. And some main differences you're going to find is that they will be a bit more scripted because without scripting videos, it's always been hard to get my exact thoughts across. But I've also not really liked the idea of doing scripts because it just feels too stilted. With that said, I feel like I'm comfortable enough now doing videos and making content that I can make it feel natural now with a script. I can still deviate a little bit from the script if I want to. But it is going to help out a lot more. I want to make it clear there's going to be just as many jokes. And my personality is still going to be very much infused in that content. So I'm pretty confident in saying I don't think it's just going to get boring. But you're going to see my face a lot less in these videos. You're still going to see it. You're welcome. But there's going to be so much more editing now. It's going to be crazy. Like I said, there's still going to be lots of jokes, but there's going to be a whole lot of more images and videos. And just stuff just over the top of this video to make it more visually engaging as well. I'm really excited to see how it goes. And I hope you guys like it. If not, I guess that's just just how it is. It's just something I want to try. I feel like every time I finish a video talking about a topic or a book or some kind of writing or reading thing, I always feel like there's so much I missed. And that's not a trend I want to keep going. So videos going forward are going to be quite a bit longer. The editing is going to be a whole lot more than usual. And with both of those things in mind, I should point out that my videos are probably not going to be as frequent as they used to be. It used to be two a week, usually without fail. Going forward now to probably be like one video a week, maybe more. And I'm pretty sure it won't be less. But if I was to give you an estimate, I would say it would probably be about one video a week because editing already takes me so damn long and it's going to just be way more now. But that's the whole thing. I want the videos to be higher quality and I feel like they will be. It's just going to take a lot more effort, a whole lot more time to script them to record them to and to edit them is going to be the big one. But yeah, that's that's basically the update. I'm I'm excited. I'm a little bit scared just in case people won't like this new format. But I guess we'll see. In fact, you're going to be able to see an example of what it is exactly I'm talking about tomorrow. I'm going to be uploading my first it's not a video essay, but the style is going to be like a video essay tomorrow. I won't tell you what it's about, but it's going to be a perfect example of what you can expect from my videos in future. So keep an eye out for that one. But they have it, folks, ladies and gents. That's what you can expect from my channel this year. That that's the gist of it. Don't be afraid to let me know what you think of the stuff I've mentioned. And let me know how your Christmas and New Year's was in the comments below. Hopefully a bit better than mine. Like I said, it feels like I've been swallowing razor blades. I really do appreciate you guys sticking with my channel for so long. And I really do appreciate, you know, hitting 10,000 subscribers before the New Year was just incredible. It's not something I I seeked out like I didn't go asking for it or anything. It just kind of happened. And it was probably one of the best gifts I could have possibly gotten. I really do appreciate that. You guys really are the best. So thank you so much. And yeah, to keep an eye for tomorrow's video, I hope you like it. And I'll catch you later. Never act wild. Never low key on a profile. Catching feelings isn't all. Let me show you how it all spins.


Live from the Oracle Conference Center in Redwood Shores, California. It's theCUBE at the Next Generation Engineered Systems Launch Event. Brought to you by headline sponsor, Oracle. Okay, welcome back everyone. We are here live in Silicon Valley. This is theCUBE, our flagship program. We go out to the event, extract the students from the noise. I'm John Furrier, my co is Dave Vellante. Here live in Oracle's headquarters, Mike Jennings, CEO of Secure24 is here on theCUBE. Welcome to theCUBE. Thank you, thanks for having me. So behind us, you can see we've got the big backdrop. Oracle's getting ready for the big announcement. Larry Ellis is going to get on stage for their big, you know, X5 generation. We just talked to John Fowler in charge of engineering. What's your take on all this? I mean, you're not in trenches with the Oracle engineers, but maybe you are, you're out in the partnership. What's going on? I mean, what is Oracle all about right now? Are they going to open up a little bit? Well, you know, certainly what we're seeing from Oracle as a partner is they're, you know, making a big march towards converge computing. So software and hardware working together as a unified solution. And, you know, as a partner and a company that hosts a lot of Oracle products, both database as well as applications, you know, we're seeing a great benefit from both the supportability and the performance of those merged platforms. Oracle's partnership strategy is pretty clear. I mean, we've been to Oracle Open World now five years with theCUBE there and we've seen the evolution. I mean, it was almost like the lull before the big, you know, energy burst and was, you know, five years ago it was kind of like, okay, the transition was there. And then since then you've seen a lot of activity. Certainly their stock price is really at a high level right now. If you look at historically, almost back to the dot com boom in terms of performance.  They have a good business model. So we know it's a healthy ecosystem. What change do you guys see that they're tapping into? Why are they being so successful and why is their partnership strategy working? So, you know, what we've seen over the last five years, it's a good timeframe to kind of think about things over is, you know, with the integration of the sun platform and really Oracle moving towards integrating both hardware and software together, what we've seen is, you know, kind of a first wave of big performance boxes. So things like exolytics and Exadata and so forth. And we've leveraged those to deliver some very high performance solutions for our clients. What we're seeing now with the virtual computer clients, which we're a new customer of, is really a product that's very targeted at replacing, you know, standard x86 environments and Linux environments.  Did you do a bake off? Did you compare and contrast with other vendors? What was the process and? Sure, so, you know, if I look historically over the last few years, we've spent a lot of time kind of building what I would call our own V-blocks environment. So, you know, the EMC, VMware, Cisco partnership that built V-blocks. We looked at that product line from a converged product. And unfortunately, when it first came out, it didn't support many of the things that we needed around secure multi-tenancy, the ability to incorporate other components like other servers into the environment. And so we gave them a lot of feedback and they've been advancing that product. So in the meantime, we built essentially our own V-blocks environment. So we've been a Cisco UCS shop with EMC storage, EMC backup, EMC replication, and then running with VMware for a virtualization layer and an automation layer, and then Red Hat as an OS. And, you know, what we saw is we spent a lot of time having to, you know, spec out all the components for that environment, integrate all those components in building that out. And so that was typically a multi-month process. And then we had to build all of our own orchestration layer that kind of tied all those components together. And so with the virtual compute appliance, what we love about the product is that we get everything in a box. We get everything that I just described, you know, in the V-blocks environment. We get compute, we get storage, we get networking, we get software-defined networking, we get the orchestration layer, we get the Linux OS layer, and we get Oracle virtualization, all in an integrated device that is highly tuned to run Oracle workloads. And so we're seeing just a great benefit from going from that legacy environment that we would build ourselves to an environment that we can roll into the data center and within two hours of powering the virtual compute appliance up, we can actually start putting test workloads on it and using it as opposed to spending a month building it. So I want to talk a little bit about your business, but before we do, I want to pick up on that. So there's a lot of religious debates about which type of virtualization. I got VMware, I got KVM or OVM. What I just heard from you is I get in a box and it runs Oracle environments just fine. And those religious debates will leave elsewhere. I want to be confirmed and I talk about that a little bit. Sure, so obviously you want to use the right product for the right workload. And for an Oracle workload, traditionally we've had to put Oracle workloads on physical servers. So customers of Secure24 have really shied away from putting database servers on virtualization. And they've done that for many reasons. Part of it is cost reason. So Oracle's licensing for the database on a virtualized environment like a VMware environment can be very expensive. And so we've been running those on physical servers. And so this gives us an opportunity to virtualize the databases and get all the benefits of virtualization, all of the reliability, the redundancy, the transport that we can do with it. And so when we look at kind of that religious debate, for anything that's an Oracle workload, we find that running that on Oracle virtualization is the way to go. All right, let's talk about Secure24 a little bit. Talk about your business, kind of how you guys compete in the marketplace and we'll drill into that a little bit. Sure, so Secure24 is a managed service provider and a cloud transformation company. We don't do what we would traditionally call lift and shift in the managed services business. So we don't go into customers and take their equipment. My mess for less. Yeah, mess for less we don't do. So we really specialize in doing that transformation. So when we go into a customer, we look at their environment. Typically they've still got a lot of physical components in the environment, a lot of legacy components in the environment. That might be a HPUX, AIX environments, so forth. And we map them out a plan to take them from physical to virtual, from legacy systems onto open systems as part of that migration into Secure24. And so as a company, we serve over 180 clients today. They're typically large manufacturing clients. We're running enterprise level applications like the Oracle applications, SAP applications and many of the Microsoft product stacks. And then we're also running a lot of highly compliant application stacks for state and local government that require a high level of security and compliance as well. Secure24 as a business, we're almost 500 employees, been in business for 14 years and based out of Southfield, Michigan. And we typically compete with the IBMs and HP and CSC type companies out there in the marketplace for that enterprise hosting. So you're not a direct competitor, for instance, of Amazon Web Services, but Amazon Web Services has sort of created the whole cloud meme and the theme and how has that affected your business?  Yeah, it's actually been a great boon to our business because as that cloud message gets out into the marketplace and CIOs and so forth, really look at what do they wanna do long term. They don't wanna be in the data center business, they don't wanna be in the IT infrastructure business. And so cloud computing as a whole has really lifted all the ships in our industry. And so we've seen a great benefit from the success that Amazon and others have had in the public cloud computing space.  So talk about from the CEO's perspective what you want out of IT. I mean, you're not, I presume you're not an all oracle shop, you've got different needs. And so from your perspective in the corner office, what do you want out of your IT organization? So from my IT organization, if you think about what we do for a living, we manage over 6,000 virtual machines, over 10,000 devices in our data center today. And what we continually strive for and push for is a high level of automation, repeatability and process. And so we look for products to put into our data center and to manage in our data center that are simple. Simplification is a great thing. And I think over the years, IT has always been viewed as a very complex set of things. Everything from deployment to management to monitoring to maintenance have always been challenges. And so we really look for simplicity in our data center and the way that we design and deploy solutions. I feel like cloud is complex, but the industry is doing a good job of hiding that complexity from the users. Is that fair assessment? I think that's a very fair assessment. It's taken the industry as well as companies like Secure24. We spend a lot of time writing orchestration for our environment to simplify it and to really help the customers be able to click a button and say, I need a new server and have that deployed for them as opposed to having to see everything that goes on in the background. You mentioned some of the companies you're competing with, Mike. There's a big outsourcing component of that. We joked about sort of my mess for less, but I feel as though two in particular, IBM and CSC, they see the writing on the wall. They see IT is moving to utility. In IBM's case, they've acquired SoftLayer. In CSC's case, they're trying to transform. How do you compete with those guys? Why do you win and what do you see going forward in terms of the competitive landscape and what gives you confidence that you'll continue to win? Sure, so really what I see is our competitive advantage to the bigger players in the market is our agility. So the ability to deliver customer solutions very quickly. We've had customers come to us that need enterprise environments stood up in a week and we're able to do that very easily with all the tools that we've built and the way that we pre-provision environments. And so agility is a big component of that. Service level is another. So we have a very focused, hands-on team that works with our customers where we really become an extension of their IT department as opposed to a black hole that they're moving their applications or their compute needs into. And so really that advanced level of customer service helps differentiate us in the business. So how much do your customers get involved in the decision to bring in Oracle products, for example, do they have visibility on that? Are they pushing you to do that? Or do you hide that from them? Not hide, but do they care? Absolutely they care. And so while they're looking for a service level agreement and they're really relying on Secure 24 to deliver a solution, they want to know that that solution is tried true, tested in the marketplace. They don't want us running them on bleeding edge. They want us on leading edge type solutions. And so they look to us to innovate and to be able to take that innovation and drive better solutions for them. So better performance, better uptime, better reliability are things that they're always looking for. And so when we talk to the customers, we do quarterly business reviews with all of our customers and we talk to them about what is our technology roadmap? Why are we going in certain directions? Why did we just acquire last year two fully built virtual compute appliances for Oracle? And we talked to them about the benefits of that platform and then how that could apply to their business and what metrics we could drive for them by moving them to that platform. What was the key things that you mentioned in that, just to drill down on that? So were they indifferent about that or were they more, are they interested in the appliance or were they, oh, whatever? What were some of the comments? So their biggest concern is typically uptime, reliability, and then performance. So typically we're targeting customers that are having performance issues on their applications or databases today that are looking to move to the virtual compute appliance to leverage the performance gains that we're getting out of that environment. And so the big advantage we get over the generalized compute environment that we talked about earlier, that was on Cisco, EMC, Red Hat, and VMware by leveraging the virtual compute appliance from Oracle, it's completely tuned for running Oracle workloads. And so we're seeing, in general, we see a 30 plus percent performance gain in databases running on VCA. And we see that specifically because they're the way that not only the OS, the Oracle Enterprise Colonel for Linux is tuned, you look at the Infiniband network and then you look at all of the caching that takes place in the storage layer of virtual compute appliance really helps us deliver a better performance environment. People want more performance. You got all kinds of stuff, batch jobs, all kinds of stuff that's getting bigger and bigger, more data's coming in. Absolutely. Does this affect their licensing? I mean, does it make it more complicated? How does it simplify? Absolutely simplifies the licensing. And I talked about before having to deploy Oracle databases on physical machines because of the licensing issues. With the virtual compute appliance, it comes with Oracle Trusted Partitioning. And Oracle Trusted Partitioning allows us to deliver Oracle databases in a very cost-effective manner for our customers. So Oracle defines that as each, if you look at a virtual CPU, two virtual CPUs equal one CPU of physical. And so typically when you start a database, you're having to pin it to the CPUs so that Oracle knows how many CPUs you're running that database on. And with Trusted Partitioning, it gives us an easy way to do that for our customers in a very cost-effective manner. It's always a contentious issue with the licensing thing. Well, I appreciate you coming on theCUBE. Mike, what's your take on this announcement based upon what you're seeing here? We've got Larry coming on at one o'clock. What's your take, what's going on here? So my take is the virtual compute appliance came out last year and it came out and they've made some very big improvements to the platform. And today I'm really excited because as we've invested in that platform, we've deployed two fully built virtual compute appliances, one in our Michigan data center, one in our Las Vegas data center, and we took a leap of faith. It was a leading edge product when it was first delivered. And so today, what I'm really excited about is Oracle is continuing to put their brand behind delivering improvements to the VCA platform and extending that platform into the future. So we know that we've made a good investment and it's something that we can continue to leverage going forward for our clients. As John Fallow said, Larry's the master of the long game. This is just one card or one move in the journey. So I'm excited to see what else they got coming out. So we appreciate you spending the time here in theCUBE. This is theCUBE. We are live here at the Oracle headquarters in Silicon Valley for Oracle's big announcement. Larry Ellis is coming on stage as well as all the top executives. Really around the future of their computing, mostly the son announcement and a VCE comparison tape. We'll get into that later in our analysis. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante. We'll be right back.