Hello, I'm Chris Kelton, and this is the first live Q&A for the Historical Controversies podcast. Welcome to everybody that is watching live, and of course, for those of you who cannot join us at the moment, this will be on YouTube and on Facebook later for you to watch. But let's dive right into this thing. The first question we have comes from a listener, Todd. He says, I'm curious as to your motivations for covering the Civil War and the history leading up to it. Are you drawing parallels to our current political situation? Do you think that another split and war is coming? Is this simply an attempt to provide a comprehensive and balanced history of the period, or perhaps a cautionary tale? The why is actually a lot less dramatic than you might have hoped. I am in the early stages of a PhD in history, and my area of specialty will be on 19th century United States history. So a lot of the decision to cover the Civil War is a way of economizing on effort. I have to do a lot of Civil War reading anyway. My dissertation will be on the Civil War. So this is easier for me than things that I will not have to study so heavily. But of course, the Civil War is also a very, very popular topic among libertarians. I think there are a lot of liberal, a lot of excuse me, lessons that can be drawn from it. And there's a lot of this history that even people who think that they've read everything that there is to read on this, there's always something new to be told. So there's a lot of reasons that I decided to do it. But a lot of it is just, it's easier for me to do something that I'm already reading a lot on. As far as the, are you drawing parallels to our current political situation? It's a question that I've actually been asked about this quite a bit by people that just I meet in person. And the answer is no, mostly because I don't like topical politics. I don't pay attention to the news or anything of that nature. Mark Twain once said, if you don't read the news, you'll be uninformed. If you read the news, you'll be misinformed. And I decided a few years back that I would rather be uninformed than misinformed. So I do get a little bit of what's going on because you can't really avoid it unless you live under a rock. But I'm not a big fan of topical politics. I always joke that I'm not really interested in politics until the politicians have been dead for at least 50 years. So I don't know of another civil war is coming. I'm always a little fidgety when people try to use lessons from history to make predictions about the future. There's nothing really wrong with it. But that's not, of course, what history is.  And that's true in the sense that there are similarities in different areas of history, but of course, there are differences as well. What I will say is this, if you look at the history of the 19th century, our current political situation, regardless of how little I try to pay attention to it, is is far less divisive, far less hostile than it was in the 19th century. We're talking about a period in 1856, right? When a guy was beaten into a coma on the floor of the Senate by another congressman, for God's sake, like our politicians are getting along far too well today. Democrats and Republicans get along far too well for my tastes anymore. So as as divisive as as things seem right now, especially after the Trump election, I still don't think it holds a candle to the 19th century. Now, I do know that there's some talk about like California being split up into states. I hope we see some stuff like that, whether that kind of action, whether modern secession would lead to war, I have no idea. And I'm not immodest enough to try to hazard a guess on that. It's more just, I think the Civil War is an interesting topic. And a lot of people agree with me, so we're going to spend some time on that. From Nathan, your episode on the formation of the Confederate government was quite interesting, and I would like to do further reading on this topic. My question is then, firstly, what sources did you use for your research on that particular episode? And secondly, where would I be able to find the records of the debates and proposals for the temporary and permanent Confederate constitutions? The first part of your question is easy to answer. I used a book called A Government of Our Own. The Making of the Confederacy was published in 1994 by William C. Davis. It's a wonderful, incredibly well researched book. I actually feel bad sometimes when I only use a single book for an episode. Because I try to make sure I read and draw from different secondary sources because you have competing narratives. But for a topic like this, there's not a whole lot of alternative histories to pull from. So there really is just this. And for a lot of episodes, in fact, there's just one book that just really is the comprehensive work on that topic. And that would be William C. Davis's book, A Government of Our Own. It's a bit of a dismal read. It's a lot of political debate. I skipped through a lot of the boring stuff in the episode. So there's a lot in there that I didn't talk about. So if you are interested in it, it's, of course, still worth picking up and reading. But if you flip to the back of it, I wanted to bring it into the studio with me actually so I could show this, but I'm in the middle of of moving across the country so all my books are packed up, so I don't have it. But if you flip to the back of it and you look at the notes, you'll find that there are no clean records of the constitutional debates. And I suspect I don't know this. I don't know who Nathan is, but I suspect that the second part of that question is referring to the actual United States constitutional debates in which you do have left behind some very clean and comprehensive records. This would be Max Farron's records of the constitutional convention, which were actually from James Madison's notes. And they also have the publication of the ratification debates, at least to those that have survived, which not all of them did, but some did and they've been published and you can buy them on Amazon. And if you look at books like Brian McClanahan's Founding Fathers Guide to the Constitution and you look back at his notes, he's, of course, pulling from multiple sources. He's a good historian, but James Madison and Max Farron made it so easy from him because so much of his notes are just Max Farron's records of the debate from James Madison's notes and the collection. I forget who collected the ratification debates, but those two sources are almost all of his notes and you don't have anything that clean when it comes to the Confederate Constitution. So the notes for William Davis was just a lot of personal letters where politicians who are part of the debate were writing to other people about what they were talking about. So this is I mostly say this because William Davis did an incredible job in compiling all of these letters and sifting through them and reconstructing this debate. It was not an easy task. I suspect he's pulling from archives in Alabama, archives in Georgia, archives in all kinds of different places to construct this history. And I think he did a wonderful job. He's a great historian. Garrett asks, I had never heard of the 19th century filibusters before you talked about them in the podcast. Were there any other filibustering expeditions aside from just Cuba and Nicaragua? The answer is yes, but they weren't very interesting. So there were some others that took place down in New Mexico. I think I might have mentioned those briefly. There were some that actually tried to invade parts of Canada in, I think, 1830s, 1812s. I don't remember the details of these. There's one historian. I think his name is Robert May, who's written a few books on filibusters. I have a bibliographical essay on the historical controversies page at Mises.org where I list all of these books that talk about them, but they weren't anything as juicy as the filibusters in Cuba and Nicaragua. But I'm glad that somebody asked this question because I do also want to mention that for those of you who may not have listened to those episodes, the filibustering episodes are really interesting. Since we started this podcast a year ago, I was supposed to mention this in the introduction, by the way, this week marks the one year anniversary of the podcast. The 53rd episode will air on Wednesday. But since I've started this, I have done no other episodes that I've gotten as many comments and as many compliments on as the episodes on the filibuster in Nicaragua. And for those who did not listen to that episode, the filibuster in the 19th century did not refer to a congressman standing on the floor of the Senate and talking for 13 hours, which would be a really, really boring topic. It actually referred to private military expeditions in other countries to try to conquer them and institute American-style governments of some sort, whatever that that may mean to the person conducting the filibuster. And in the 19th century, there were two really famous ones that took place in the 1850s, one led by Narciso Lopez in Cuba and one led by William Walker in the country of Nicaragua. And I did a six-part series on the Nicaragua episodes. And on the metrics for episode downloads, these are my least listened to episodes. People skip over them, yet they are also the most complimented ones. I get so many people that call them out specifically to tell me, oh, I've never heard of this. This is amazing. So this is kind of a self-plug to go back for those of you who skipped those episodes. You want to listen to those filibuster in Nicaragua episodes. It's just good TV. There's no real libertarian lessons in them or anything of that nature, but it's just an entertaining story of how Cornelius Vanderbilt helped overthrow William Walker when he established himself as president of Nicaragua. It's really fascinating stuff. So there were some other episodes in Canada and Mexico and some other places, but they were really uneventful and they're not really worth reading about. But if you want to go see my bibliographical essay and you can find the sources for them from Joseph, my understanding is that most historians today believe that slavery would not have died out on its own if the South had won the war or had been allowed to peacefully secede. What is your take on that question? That's a very, very common question, especially when we're talking as many of us here do about the justness of waging the civil war. And of course, even Thomas de Lorenzo himself and the real Lincoln says that if Lincoln had waged the war for slavery, you would have a much more compelling defense of the war. But the fact of the matter was, as I've pointed out in the podcast, Lincoln was not waging the war to free slaves, at least not in the first half of the war. He was doing it to retain the union and he was willing to protect slavery if that would retain the union. As it turned out, it would not. These compromise proposals wouldn't work. But Lincoln did attempt to institute them as a means of bringing the slave states back into the union. So it's a very common question. It's like, well, if they had been allowed to secede peacefully or if the Confederacy had won the war, would we still have slavery? How long would have it taken to died out? And most historians do believe that it would not have died out on its own very easily. And this comes from some old history made most famous by two guys named Stanley Ingerman and Robert Fogel. And they published a two volume book called Time on the Cross. The second volume is just their data on this. This is also pretty much the founding of the mathematical method in economics. So for people that are interested in econometrics and its applicability to economic inquiry, well, in history, you have client metrics, which is functionally the same thing and its application to determining historical causality. And that was founded as part of this debate on the profitability of slavery. And what Fogel and Ingerman determined was that slavery was profitable. Well, of course, it was profitable. It's like saying water runs downhill. If it wasn't profitable, it would have already died out. The question is not whether or not it was profitable, though. The question should be, is it was it, excuse me, was it as profitable as alternative forms of labor would have been? And that's a much more open ended and difficult to answer question. And then you would also have the question of would it have been profitable without the government subsidizing or socializing the cost of owning slaves in the form of laws such as the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, this socialized to the cost of slaves because it imposed the the cost on the north of capturing and returning slaves, even if you were an anti-slavery citizen in a northern free state. And this is one of the reasons why the Fugitive Slave Law was so controversial. I devoted several episodes to this in the second season. So you you do see the lowering of the cost of owning slavery and therefore the greater profitability of it. But of even greater note, I think to people that might be listening to this is something that you probably couldn't have come across unless you've been at the Mises Institute because it was just pulled out of the Rothbard archives by the Mises Institute's archivist, Barbara Pickard. And Mark Thornton has recently written up something about it that I don't think has been published yet, but he was generous enough to let me read it. And it was a letter to the editor that Rothbard wrote in regards to this original debate back in the 60s, right? So this thing has just been sitting in the archives for the 60s. And what Rothbard said on the question of the profitability of slavery was that slavery itself wasn't profitable. The agricultural system of the South was profitable, but it was profitable because of exogenous factors. And those factors would have been in place with or without slavery. So had slavery not been in place, the profitability of that agricultural system still would have developed around whatever form of labor system. And his reasoning on this, which is just basic economic reasoning that you can find him espousing in some of the later chapters of man economy and state, if I remember my man economy of state correctly. And I may not. So go back and double check me. But it's he's basically saying that the profitability of slavery is going to, in the long run, being absorbed by the original slave catcher or the slave trader. When they sell the slave, they are going to factor in the future rents from that slaves labor into the price of the slave. So in the short run, you may get some some profits by them underestimating the long run profits from labor productivity and new new slaves being born to that slave. But in the long run, this is all going to be determined in the selling price of a slave. So the slave itself would not have been profitable, but the slave based agricultural system was profitable because of other factors that still would have been in place with or without slavery. So this is all to say that, of course, without slavery, you still would have had a profitable agricultural based system. It was not dependent or I should say more modestly, it was not necessarily dependent on the slave labor because you still would have had economic development with or without that slave labor and that letter was never published, presumably, because it was a very counterfactual economic letter. A Rothbard was not making an historical argument. He did not side historical evidence in it. He was just making an argument that's typical to economic theory, which is very counterfactual and that's not going to be very readily accepted by most historians who are a little fidgety when it comes to counterfactual arguments. But of course, that's what you deal with in economics. So that's an interesting and original argument about the profitability of slavery.   And yes, it would have eventually died out because we already saw it territorially shrinking further and further south. And in border states, you even had slaves trading at like a 10 percent discount because of the risk of running away. So the cost of owning a slave was very different than the cost of paying a wage labor because you have all these other factors that go into it that we already, I think, saw the displacement of slave labor in a lot of areas. And I think that's one of the reasons why the South felt so threatened to buy it in the 1850s is because it was already on the demise. But of course, most historians today think that it's enough to say slavery was profitable, therefore it was going to last forever until it ended by a war or something of that nature. So I do disagree with them. From JJ seems to me that secret societies have a heavier hand in history than most historians are willing to admit or explore. America had a history of deep suspicion of secret societies. As you know, what are your own thoughts as a historian? If I may call you that, you may call me a historian. I am currently getting my PhD in history, as I mentioned earlier. But my master's degree and my bachelor's are in history. So I hope you can call me a historian. I'd like you to if you don't want to. That's OK as well. But as far as the secret society and I think in the subject of the email JJ put in parentheses, conspiracy theories. So I kind of want to tackle those as separate things because there are topics that I typically try to avoid just because you can't help but alienate people. If you try to argue in favor of anything that some people see as a conspiracy theory, then you're going to alienate the people that are just like hard evidence, standard narrative. We're going to believe that.  So there's there's no way to really dive into this. But as far as like conspiracy theories and secret societies go, I will mention one conspiracy theory that is very historically interesting and actually relevant to the first season on the war on drugs. And that's the mafia when Harry Anselinger, the godfather of the war on drugs, was just making his bones as a federal agent. He had this crazy conspiracy theory that there were organized crime families called the mafia that were pulling the strings in the underworld. And everybody kind of laughed at him about this. But it turns out that was completely true. That was going on. He was right. And evidence came out that vindicated him. But that last part is what's key when you're looking into that stuff, at least key to me is evidence came out to vindicate him. So what separates a conspiracy theory like we think of like, you know, jet fuel doesn't melt steel beams kind of thing and a conspiracy theory that's an actual theory that of people getting together and designing something in government in secret. Like, of course, that kind of thing happens. But what separates the two in terms of serious theories and something that that people ridicule, ridicule is evidence. And that's really what I wait for. So there's a lot of this stuff that's neither provable nor disprovable. There's a lot of people theorizing about it. But there's not much good evidence. And a lot of times on these things, like the JFK assassination conspiracy theory, for instance, you do see people putting out evidence. But then somebody else will weigh in and that evidence really doesn't seem credible.  And then there's physicists that show you that, oh, that can actually happen. I don't know. I just don't I don't have the time or the energy to wait into those questions. So I usually just try to avoid them to be honest. As far as the secret societies, since you specified that, again, I think it was just in the subject line that you mentioned conspiracy theories. But as far as secret societies go, that answer kind of translates. You know, I remember when Bush was president, people talked about the skull and bones. I don't know. I don't know anything about this. That's the thing about secret societies is their secret. And so as an historian, I try to stick to what I actually have access to evidence for. And if I don't have access to evidence for them, I can't say that stuff's not going on. But until there's actual, like, concrete evidence that I can get my hands on, I try to just avoid it. I retain a healthy degree of skepticism, but I try to just avoid those topics not because they're not interesting or potentially important, but because I try to stick with what I can know with some degree of certainty. And that stuff's just very, very difficult. You alienate people. One side or another is always going to think that, you know, like you're you're talking about absurd stuff. And I just try to stick with with what I can, you know, if you call me on it, I can point you to documents and say, look, right here, this is very, very credible. And so that's that's what I usually try to stick with. From Brian, I, like Murray Rothbard, am very open and practice revisionism in my study of history. However, one of the main objections to this process by orthodox historians is that it leaves aside certain elements of history in favor of a particular ideology or to conform to current public opinion. Is this criticism unfounded or is there a legitimate danger to radically changing the narrative about historical events? I actually am very glad somebody sent this question. By the way, this is kind of cool. I'm not going to say Brian's last name, but Brian, my first year at Mises U, I met Brian very briefly. I don't even know if he remembers this, but I was roommates with his high school history teacher. So I remember that, Brian, if you remember that, that was my first Mises U years ago. So that's very, very cool. I am a fan of revisionist history. You know who else is a fan of revisionist history? All professional historians. And I actually wrote an article about this, I think, on the Mises Wire. I don't remember the title, but if you just go to Mises Wire, search my name, revisionist history or something like that, you're bound to find it. And I tell the story of a debate between the historian Eric Foner, who went to who's a professor at Columbia. He's like the greatest living expert on the reconstruction era. And he was on a debate in 1992 with Liz Cheney, and they were talking about the standards for history textbooks. And during the debate, Liz Cheney accused Eric Foner of being a revisionist historian. Of course, this is a pejorative. This is a very insulting thing to say in the minds of most people. Well, Eric Foner tells the story of a reporter calling him up the next day. And I don't know if the story is true or not. This is as Eric Foner tells it, but it's still a funny story and can help elucidate this topic. Then the some reporter from Newsweek, I think it was, calls him up and says, Doctor Foner, who was the first revisionist historian and Foner allegedly replies? Oh, well, that was Herodotus. Of course, Herodotus, for those who don't know, was the first real historian usually noted by people. He was an ancient Greek. He just wrote the histories. But he established the discipline of history in the minds of a lot of people today, centuries, centuries ago, right? And of course, the Newsweek reporter, as Foner tells the story, responds, do you have his phone number? Of course, it's very amusing. It's possibly not true. It's possible that he just made this up because it was funny, but it's still an important way to illustrate the topic of revisionist history. All real history is going to revise something. It may not be significant. It may not be controversial. But if it's not revising something, what's it contributing to the literature? All right. When you're when you're conducting history, you're not just showing that you know a lot about something. It's not just pedagogical. There's there's a place for that. There's a place for textbooks and teachers, of course. But contributing to the scholarship requires you to actually go and revise, refute or expand on the existing literature. And all of that is going to constitute a revision in some sense. So any real history is revisionist history. And this hasn't been very controversial among professional historians. The epithet of revisionist historian is usually one slung by people who are not actual historians, and that's not a bad thing.  I think everybody should be that person. But there is a difference in the way that we view it after you've gone through, like, methods classes. And the first thing I was taught in the very first methods class I had by a non-libertarian standard progressive left professional historian, somebody with whom I disagree a great deal. She said, all history is revisionism. So this isn't like a libertarian take on things or a Rothbardian take. This is just the way that history is conducted. So I encourage you, Brian, to continue revising history. The question should not be whether the history is a revision. The question going kind of back to the previous question on secret societies and conspiracy theories. The question is whether you can support your arguments and support your revisions with, you know, documentary evidence. And that's really the burden of proof that's on the historian. Revisions are good, but they need to be supportable revisions for them to have validity. Of course, you can get accepted having false revisions of history. Some of you may be familiar with the controversy around the Duke historian Nancy McClain, who wrote a history about James Buchanan.  And this is because of James Buchanan, who won the Nobel Prize in 1990, something for public choice economic theories. And he liked a lot of Austrian economists. I don't know much about James Buchanan myself, but then you have somebody like Phil Magnus, who's gone through her book in detail and just said, look, you're wrong on this point. You skipped this archives. You misrepresented this. And she just gets all this stuff wrong. And it's not so much that she was offering a revisionist theory. It's just that she's getting stuff wrong constantly in her book. She's misciting sources. She's ignoring sources that are relevant to her argument. And this is really bad history, but it's not bad because it's a revision. It's bad because it's dishonest, right? So that really should be the burden of proof for an historian or the burden of being like a valid historian is just your honesty, not whether or not you're revising a quote unquote standard narrative from Will. He says, I love history and I love the podcast, but where does all this fit into Austrian economics or libertarianism? The first season on the war on drugs obviously has libertarian elements all through it, but a lot of the more recent episodes don't have much to do with economics or liberty. I'm just curious how all of this fits together. And that's a good question, I think, because when I first started the podcast, I was really trying to tie this into Austrian economics or libertarianism, because I felt like I needed to for the audience. And I kind of evolved out of that for better or worse, partly just because there's only so much you can do trying to make a libertarian or an economic lesson about everything. You know, you try to weave that stuff in where it belongs, but there's a lot of really interesting history that you can't derive. I mentioned the filibuster and Nicaragua episodes. They don't really have these libertarian or economic lessons. And then they're just really, really interesting. And I think that's OK. And a lot of people like that and that seems to be well received. So that's kind of what I'm continuing with after the first season, especially as I go into the Civil War. You know, I'm talking about battlefield stories and things of this nature that don't always tie into the stuff that's necessarily interesting to a Mises Institute audience. But I think they're just interesting in general. And I hope that that's enough because if I'm just sticking with, of course, what has to do with libertarianism or Austrian economics, I'm going to run out of material as soon as I finish Robert Higgs books or, you know, the topics that he or people like Ralph Raiko have written about, because there's a lot of good stuff there, but it's been done. And I do want to offer something something new. And I think that this is the way I can do it. And it's also about offering the historical context. But more importantly, I think would be Mises's theory and history. My favorite book to talk about. It's my my favorite book by Mises for one thing. And it's also Rothbard called it the most under read of Mises's four major treatises. Right. So Mises had four major works. This would be theory, money and credit, socialism, human action and theory and history. And theory and history is the least read and least understood work, according to Murray Rothbard's preface to the book. If you read it, it's a fantastic book. And what Mises says, and he says this in human action, but he elaborates on this a lot in theory and history. And then later in the ultimate foundations of economic science is Mises says there are two sciences of human action, praxeology on the one hand. And that's the one most people are familiar with that the pure a priori logical deductive method of deriving the laws of human action, the universal immutable laws. And this would include the laws of economics. And on the other hand, the second science of human action is history. And history is not a priori science. Mises says that it's a it's an empirical science, but you are able to employ tools such as praxeology that can help inform your interpretation. But you also have to employ documentary evidence as well as all other knowledge of the natural sciences. For instance, you want to talk about history, it does help to understand basic laws of physics and things like that. It seems pedantic and obvious to say, but it's an important element in understanding how we would employ praxeology and then combine this with empirical evidence to come up with interpretations on history that are accurate. And what Mises said was economic history is no more important than any other strand of history. What you should be looking at is history that incorporates all of these different strands, religious history, military history, cultural history. All of this stuff is important in informing us about the motivations of historical actors and therefore the causes of historical change. Because contrary to Marx and Mises, of course, spent a lot of time talking about Marx's terrible theory of history in that, contrary to Marx, is human action is not determined by economic factors or it's not determined by anything, at least not entirely. It's influenced by the environment around you. And that includes all of these different things that we subsume into various strands of history, like cultural history and religious history and economic history. But it's influenced by all of them simultaneously. Humans don't exist in a vacuum, but humans also have free will or Mises actually says more modestly that we should just assume that they do because we can understand human action better with that assumption. And therefore, when we're understanding human change, we have to acknowledge this idea of free will and the way that that has an effect on the choices that people make, right? So all ideas have some level of originality and historical change can only take place because human beings are making choices based on original and unique ideas as individuals. And Mises thought that history as such was a very important science, probably as important as economics, economics was his specialty, but he devoted an entire treatise to the theory of history or theory and history. And he thought that that was a very important aspect of the sciences of human action. And it's my belief that a lot of what people misunderstand about praxeology, where they try to fit it into this empirical economic paradigm that you have in like mainstream economics. I think part of that is because they're ignoring the history element where that stuff actually does have valid application. Mises said praxeology was pure a priori, but there is an empirical science of human action and that's history. And then there's a lot of, of course, substrands to that as well, like psychology and things like that, depending on how you interpret that. But, you know, he talks about this in the first hundred or so pages of human action, but then theory and history and ultimate foundations are where you look for that. So I don't think that to be a Mises Institute type thing, it has to necessarily be Austrian economics or libertarianism because history was something that Mises devoted a lot of time and energy and thought to. And so just by doing history as such, we are following the tradition of Mises and Rothbard, who wrote a great deal of history. And I think he is the best, you know, modern. He offers the best modern display of Mises's method of historical inquiry, which Mises called thymology and all of his many, many historical works. Let me read real quick, see if there's some questions in the comments. Looks like one person asked, will you be using referring to any of the books on Lincoln by Thomas D. Lorenzo? I've read them more than once, or I've read the real Lincoln more than once, I should say. The answer is probably no, just because two reasons. One, historical, or I'm sorry, Thomas D. Lorenzo's historical writings use primarily secondary sources. I'm already using secondary sources, so it's easier for me just to go to the sources he used. And then I can form my own opinions. I don't agree with Thomas D. Lorenzo on everything. I do want a lot of things, obviously, the very fact that I'm doing this for the Mises Institute tells that, but I do have some disagreements with Thomas D. Lorenzo. So if he's using secondary sources, I can just bypass him entirely as the middleman and go to the secondary sources that he's pulling from. And many of the people that I cite are ones that he cites in his books. James McPherson's Battlecry of Freedom, Jeffrey Roger Hummel's emancipating slaves and slaving free men. I'd rather just go straight to them. And then they're citing primary sources that I can go to. And the other reason is D. Lorenzo's work is not chronological. It's topical and I'm following a chronology. So books that are organized in that way, there's nothing wrong with it, but it's not very helpful to me. So I think that because D. Lorenzo and I are pulling from a lot of the same influences, you're going to hear a lot of overlapping stuff. But as source material for the podcast, there's not much reason for me to to use his book. I have read it. I agree with a lot of it. I disagree with some of it. But but it's just not very useful for me for functional reasons. Let me see. One person asks, it seems like you focus on US history, but I love financial history. What about a podcast history of John Law? So the problem with that is just my own limitations. My focus on US history is, as I mentioned, I think very early on because that's what I'm getting my PhD in. It's economizing on effort. There are other things that I'd like to do outside of the US. But until I've gotten through all of the work with a PhD, it's probably not going to be practical. Financial history is very interesting to me as well, but it's not very interesting to a lot of people. And that's one of the reasons why you're like the history of money and banking. This kind of stuff, if you read Rothbard's book on that, there's some fascinating stuff about this like private central bank called the Suffolk Bank that I love to talk about. But it is hard to weave into a historical podcast of the style that I'm doing. And as far as the history of John Law, I just don't know it. I could learn it, but I'm probably not going to any time soon.   I know the history. I know, and that's what I'm going to talk about. This stuff I don't know, I'm happy to learn, but there's still that limitation. So I don't think that that I'll be doing that just because, one, it's hard to make financial history very interesting as a storytelling medium and two, what you specifically asked about with John, John Law. I just I'm not knowledgeable on it. And that would actually go for another question about Switzerland and Lichtenstein about being decentralized democracies. Same thing. I find that interesting. I just don't know European history. I'll tell you my last question that I got before the live Q&A was from Phil. And he asked, what do you plan to cover after the Civil War? And I think that'll relate to these questions here, which is that right afterwards, I'm going to do reconstruction, which is just a continuation of the story. And then after that, I don't exactly know because of exactly what I'm saying here on my limitations. I may just continue doing into the gilded age and progressive era and continue with US history. That's an easy, interesting topic that people in this country at least tend to not get super tired of. And hopefully I can bring new elements to it that even if you're familiar with it before, I hope I'm bringing you stuff that you've never heard from anybody else. That's my goal anyway. But if I do continue into US history, it'll it'll probably be for these pragmatic reasons that it's just what I'm going to have to be reading a ton of anyway. And as long as I'm reading it, I might as well incorporate it into the podcast and have a little bit less effort put into doing that. What I'd really like to do, though, I think the one that I keep going back to in my head when I'm thinking about other topic ideas that I'm not an expert on now, but I'd really like to become one if I am going to do a lot of ancillary reading is the history of the Soviet Union. I read a Martin Malleus book, The Soviet Tragedy, which is a wonderful book. I highly recommend it and it just kind of piqued my interest saying that there's a lot more that could be done here. People interested in Austrian economics, libertarian takes on history. The Soviet Union is an obvious topic. History of communism in general would be an obvious topic. A lot of the stuff around the smaller Cold War things, you know, in Indochina in Korea, this stuff is fascinating. I've read some books on it, some books on North Korea, especially at a great interest in that for a while. And I'd like to read more and this would be an excuse to read more. So eventually, I think I'd like to do that, but I don't know when that will be because, again, it'll have to be after the completion of my PhD and defense of my dissertation, which is going to be so U.S. centered that if I'm able to continue the podcast at all during that entire time, it's only going to be by keeping the podcast pretty U.S. centric as well. So for those of you that would like me to branch out into other areas of the world and other time periods, I feel I feel I'm with you. I think that stuff's interesting too, but it's just not going to be feasible for me in the foreseeable future, at least until I finished my PhD. OK, I think that's it. We will call it here. Thank you for those of you who submitted questions and those of you who tuned in live. I hope this went well. Being live was terrifying for me. I like I like recording and having people able to edit out all of my many, many mistakes, but this was fun. I hope we're able to do it again. If you are not already a listener of the podcast, please, as a personal favor to me, subscribe on iTunes or Stitcher. Please leave a positive review. This helps us get out when people search for historical topics. The number of and high degree of good reviews are part of what allows that to show up to the people that maybe aren't Mises Institute listeners that are just looking for an historical podcast. And those those good reviews really help us out. And you can also support the show at Mises.org slash support H.C. All of which all of those contributions will go to books. I can guarantee it. All right, I'll call it here and thank you for showing up. Goodbye.


My name is Sharon Thomas Yarbrough and I'm your host for Sister Power. Sister Power's vision is that women everywhere will learn to live as sisters, to respect each other's differences, to heal each other's wounds, to promote each other's progress and to benefit from each other's knowledge. Our vision is to create activities and services designed exclusively to increase women's networking opportunities and to build the knowledge and skills that lead to self-sufficiency and empowerment. Wow, I am so happy to have my special friend and a special guest and my sister, Dr. Katherine Waddell Takara, and first and foremost, you were a professor of ethnic studies and interdisciplinary studies at the University of Hawaii for 30 years. My nephew, Stephen Yarbrough, was a student in your class and he would tell his mother that your class was the one that he had the most fun and that's the class he would always look forward to and Bernice asked him why and he told her it was the stories that you would share with the students, it was the stories. So tell us, Katherine, just tell us a little bit about yourself. Okay, well, history is funny, but I was born and raised in Tuskegee, Alabama. My dad was a teacher who helped, he was a veterinarian, helped found the Tuskegee Veterinary School. My mom was a professor of French and German and English. And so I guess you could say that I grew up in an educational environment with people from all walks of life, young people, students, people who were so enthusiastic about learning and opening doors to their possibilities. I was around my mom a lot on campus, it seems that I was always the observer. I was always kind of outside and inside, you know, I was kind of an outsider and an insider and I think that's part of being an artist or a writer in that you have to be a part of to experience and yet you have to assess from afar.  Yeah, there you are, tell us about that picture. Well, in those old days we had the group called a Jack and Jill. And so most of the Jack and Jill members went to the lab school at Tuskegee and we had various events. I even have an event where we had a luau, never knowing that I would end up in Hawaii. And also my father loved Hawaiian music, never knowing that I would end up here or that he would end up here.  And by the time I got to high school, out of the lab school, the school was very difficult and it was difficult because half the school would have to leave early to do the harvest and start early in September to do the planting. And so it was always a challenge for the teachers in the high school to keep up with everyone kind of on the same page. It was really hard. And we got hand-me-down books and just everything was really substandard. And my parents said the only way out is to get an education. And so they sent me north with, I had some feet, you know, some input to a Quaker school, which my father knew of because he went to Lincoln University for his undergraduate work. He was actually a roommate of Langston Hughes for half a year. And he also, that was when Thurgood Marshall and all of those distinguished black people were at Lincoln University. I think it was founded before the end of the Civil War in 1862, Lincoln. So his contacts at Lincoln, plus him, had these contacts with the Quakers because it was Quaker kind of environment in Pennsylvania, Bucks County. And so I ended up at a Quaker school. And that was a really big influence on me, aside from being a shock, being the only black person at an all-white school, but they had this meditation. I mean, this quiet time. That's part of their service. And then you only spoke when you were inspired. And so that was a part of my formation, I think. So I would go between the all-white world and the black world for vacations and summers. And so it was a sense of being an outsider and an insider that started quite early on. Do you view writing as a kind of spiritual practice? I do. I definitely do. When I started writing, actually my mom, you know how mothers are, she gave me a journal every year from the time I was six or seven. They called it a diary. And she would say, Kay, did you write in your diary today after school? But I kept them all. And I have them to this day from when I was seven years old. And as I work on my memoir, which I'm starting to do now, it's so interesting to look back and see those things which I was attracted to in those early years and how they kind of snaked through to the present. Why is poetry important to you? It started out being important because I admired poets. My parents would say poetry out loud. When I was growing up, my dad would break out on a poem or my mom would break out on a poem because they had to memorize in those old days.  And children, I did not have time to sit down and write long treatises except for my academic articles. That was the thing that took the time. But with poetry, I could use a few words with some symbols and some metaphors and God's grace and make the connections, the correspondences in a short and concise way that could touch people on different levels depending on who was reading it. My goodness. Can you describe the time when you first realized that creating was something you absolutely had to do? You know, my mother was a creative dresser and she was a creative soul in a way. I think that I started out by admiring beauty and aesthetics through the way that my mom dressed. Now, we could not in Alabama try on hats or clothes. Explain that. We could not. Because of segregation. They would not permit us to try on shoes. So my mother, she was a very proud woman and she liked style. She liked beauty. She was going to shop from the Sears catalog that most people shop from because of what was available. So she would take me in the summers to Philadelphia or New York or wherever so that she could stay in a hotel, a nice hotel and go shopping in a nice store and try on her clothes and create her costumes, her outfits. And then she was also part of the Javawak. That was the theater group, the Thespian group in Tuskegee. That was another thing.  I mean, there was this culture that was around me that encouraged creativity and originality, I think. Where do you write? Now? Now. Where do you write? I write in nature. In the beautiful backyard of yours, the front yard. Even in Alabama, even at George School, the Quaker School, I started out as a pre-med student. And the chemistry and the organic chemistry and the calculus and all of those things, I quickly found out that those were not my calling. But I wanted to be a doctor because my dad was a vet and I had helped him sometimes on the weekends with the operations and things when his helper wasn't there. So I was fascinated by all the biology, but what it took to get there was not me. I would prefer to go on someone's scooter, motorbike, whatever, out to the countryside, sit under a tree. I had this story that I swallowed a daisy, and that was my creative thing. And I would sit out there, me and my daisy, and write. And you spoke of your father. And I don't know if a lot of people know that your father, who I was privileged and honored to meet, was a Buffalo soldier. Yes. And what does that mean? That means that he went to Lincoln, and then he worked all his way through school, as many of our people did. And he worked at the same place, which is called the Homestead Hotel in Virginia. That was where all the Cudahays and the Rockefellers and all those people would come with their special car and all their servants and all of their dining outfits. They were formal. And he was a porch boy, which meant that when they threw something on the ground, it was his responsibility to pick it up and give it back to them. Something dropped. He was always there. But as time progressed, his responsibilities progressed, and there was this one white woman, who was a Quaker, who saw how diligent he was through eight years, because he started when he was young. And so she arranged for him to get a scholarship to go to University of Pennsylvania, where he was, I think, about the second black to graduate from that school. And he was in the ROTC there, but of course those were the segregated times. And so when he graduated, when he got his veterinary medicine degree, he was called up in the Second World War, and he went to North Africa and Italy, and he was in charge of 12,000 horses, not directly, but people overall. He was overall in charge. And so at that time, they called the black units, the Buffalo Soldiers, went all the way back to the Civil War after the Civil War, when whites did not want the blacks in the military, and so they sent them all the way out west and they ended up, what, telegram system and building the roads and opening the parks and surviving with the Native Americans because they taught them how to use the buffalo in the hard winters, giving up their quarters when the white troopers would come out and they would have to be out in the cold. So it was quite a history, the Buffalo Soldiers, and now those same units, 125th and whatever, they call themselves the Buffalo Soldiers, although it's all integrated because of this distinguished service that they performed. I didn't know that. And to carry it over one little bit more, on the big island, it was 125th, I think, that went up to the top and took all the volcano equipment up there. I wrote about this in Honahoe, the magazine. So that research could be done at the top of the volcano. It was an all-black unit. That was the only ones that could get up there because they had this experience of working, clearing the national parks, Yosemite, all of those parks. That's what the Buffalo Soldiers did. Good information to know. Didn't I know that? Does writing energize or exhaust you? It energizes me. When I don't write, I feel constipated. I feel not functioning properly. And so, when I do write, it's exciting. It's exciting. All right. Well, we're here with Dr. Catherine Waddell-Takara, and we're going to take a short break. Don't touch that dial. We'll be right back. So caught up in the confusion. Nothing is making sense. I'm Dr. Sister Power. I'm here with our special guest, Dr. Catherine Waddell-Takara. And the theme of this episode is the power of the word stay woke. Tell this global audience about yourself. Okay. So, when I would describe myself, I would, as I said, insider-outsider, but I'm also kind of a humanist. I have my PhD in political science. I had a master's in French. I think that that whole thing of me being a traveler or a voyager on a journey have been very inspirational and influencing my writing and jump-starting my writing.  For example, when I go to China, I've been there eight times now. Except for the first time, my Chinese is very poor, but I go by myself. And I visit people that I've met through the years, but I go by myself. I have to ride the train by myself. I have to subway by myself. And my Chinese is not very good, but the excitement of it, the adventure of it, I think just does something. Well, you are brave. How many languages do you speak? I speak two. I speak French very well. I speak English, of course. And I speak a little bit of Mandarin. I speak a tiny bit of Spanish. Oh, go ahead. And I study Latin, but it's really only good for finding words. Do you get writer's block? I think that writer's block is something that the writer puts on him or herself. I think that a writer has to be courageous and have a lot of persistence and fortitude and be used to rejection because a lot of times, if you want to publish something, it's not immediately accepted. But my counsel would be just to keep at it. You know, it's anyone that has become anyone has stuck with it. There's a certain stick to it-ness that you just can't beat it. So 30 years down the line, I'm still writing and someone else has given up, you know, 10 years ago or 20 years ago. My good for them. Do you read your book reviews? No. You don't? No. I like that.  Both are true. All right. I like that. What do you consider to be your greatest accomplishment? Hard one, Sharon. Well... Inquiring minds want to know. Well, I have a wonderful family. Yes, you do. I loved teaching for the 30-some years that I talked. I loved inspiring students and providing knowledge. Teaching them to reason and to be critical. I really enjoyed that. I think that was really important. And teaching black history and black culture and always interspersed with a little bit of spirituality or metaphysics that's all been a part of my gift or my sharing. And I call it a gift because it's not from me. It's inspired by my parents, but it's from higher. Yes. And I am ever grateful to that. I'm ever grateful to that. I was at a forum today and someone gave me a question to ask you. Wonderful. This is a question. What's the best advice you ever had about how to be more creative? I know that I can answer that. The best advice. Well, my parents always said to stick with it. They always said stick with it. They didn't necessarily think I was going to be a writer. They knew I was going to be a teacher. They knew I was different. I would wear... I would go barefoot and my mother would say, that's so crazy. That's so country. You don't do that. Or I would put flowers in my hair and she would have something to say about that. So they accepted that there was something. Yeah. But I think the stick-to-itiveness and completion have an aim, make your efforts, and complete. I love that. I think that's... Great advice. Great advice. If you didn't write, what would you do for work? Creatively, that would have to come out. And so, of course, I would teach because I teach in my writing as well. But maybe I would try something new. You know, I've tried calligraphy a little bit and I've tried painting a little bit. It didn't anything, but I think that if I couldn't write, maybe I would... Do I sing? Oh! I used to be in a little singing group. We were called the Spinettes. Wow. And that was when we were in Tuskegee when I was in the 60s, when everybody had a little singing group. But I don't think that I would be a singer. Maybe I would work with my hands and some kind of a clay. I love to make jewelry. I do do that. Oh, yes, you do. You have some beautiful jewelry on now. Thank you. And you were talking about your books. We have a couple of covers of your book to show our global audience. You want to tell us a little bit as they're coming up? Tell us a little bit about... Turmalines. Turmalines. Well, that is a book really that reflects my black heritage. It's called Beyond the Ebony Portal.  And turmalines are very interesting stones. I like crystals and things like that because I think that they have energy. But turmalines are very hard. Next to sapphires and rubies and diamonds, the hardness is turmalines. And they're interesting because they come in different colors. And those are not all turmalines on the cover because I couldn't get but so many, but they come in a rainbow of colors and they come black, really black. And they come just in various colors, red. And that's like we are. I thought that black people were many different colors and each color carries an energy or a property. And so I layered it. And I talked about it in the introduction. And let me just say that in my introductions I really like to do research. In all my books I have introductions. And in most of my books I have glossaries because I use a lot of foreign words and all. And so... All right, let's move on and show selling... Well, it was Shadow Dancing. Tell us a little bit about your trilogy of this. Shadow Dancing right there. Selling Survival in China. Okay, well that was pretty gutsy I think because the whole subtitle, Selling Survival, could have a negative connotation but it was really a political comment on how China has been bursting ahead. And this book was written over a period of almost 20 years from 1995 when I started to go to China until 2000... Well, I finished it in 2017. And one of my interests in the beginning was to find out the influence of Africans in China and Chinese in Africa. And so I wrote in my introduction the students that I met, the African students that I met, the relationship between China going in and helping to build Africa but at the same time as many other countries taking resources out of Africa. And so... But the whole idea of ancient civilizations and I think that African and Chinese are two of the most ancient civilizations and they were trading way before anyone was thinking about stuff, you know, before Christ was born and all of that. So I like to bring out this information so that people can respect and care for each other more rather than either say, oh, well, I'm the best or I'm the lowest or whatever. There is an equality that exists or has existed that we have to continue to remember. I mean, we're all one in the spiritual world. We're all for the same, whether it's from planets or whatever you want to call it, but we all have the same stuff that stars are made of, you know. We have the minerals and we have the electrical energy and we have all of these things. So, yeah, so selling survival in China and I put the political section in the middle. Initially I had it in the beginning. I started out instead with friends and foods because that's very Chinese and then I did travel on the train mainly, train culture and the hardcore government political stuff and then I did loss because I usually do these kinds of progressions of death and the meaning of it or whatever that I can garner. And finally, generations and continuing. And so that's kind of, I like to take my readers through a series of things. For example, in love seasons, it's like seeds. And even in Pacific Raven I have seeds where... And that was the first book. And the title of that book became the title of my publishing company, Pacific Raven Press. And it became the title because I was like a black bird that flew in from afar and settled.  I had to research that a lot. Again, coming in and making it my home for 50 years now. So, yeah. 50 years. And in our closing, on an average, how long does it take you to write a book? Well, you did say that your last book, Shadow Dancing, took you 20 years? Well, yeah, not really. What I did was I wrote along the way. Along the way. And then I put it together in about two years. What do you mean put it together? Well, I wrote every year I was there. Oh. And then when I organize, I do it by themes. It's like playing cards or something. I throw out my pages according to themes. And then I create the book. So that's how I do it. I have a 25-page glossary on that book. Now, whether... I have my copy, my autograph, personally autographed copy. Tell the people how... tell our global audience how they can contact you and get a copy of any of your books. Okay. Well, my contact information, I guess we can put on the bottom of the... of the... my card. But you can also just call Pacific Raven Press. I've been Ka'a Ava, and I will be happy to mail books out to you. You have to pay the postage, of course. Or it can be ordered on Amazon or from Ingram, the distributor. Well, in closing, tell us something about you. Well, I'm a dreamer.  Even though I'm older, I still like the spice because it keeps me going. Keeps the blood pumping, if you will. I've always been a blended family in terms of ethnicities. I've married people who are not of my race. And I've had lovers who are of my race, you know. So I like variety. I think that each culture has something to offer, to give, to inspire again. And so there we have it. I've been married now 42 years to my Japanese-American husband. Harvey's wonderful. We've had a wonderful, wonderful time. This has been such a fun, fun time. There's so much more for us to go to. And again, our theme, the power of the word, stay woke. Stay woke! Be attentive. Have attention and intention whenever we start something. Intention. I love that. Thank you for joining Sister Power. We have to have you again. There's much more to say. Again, everyone, I'm your host, Sharon Thomas Yarbrough, Sister Power. Dr. Catherine Takar. Thank you. Oceans of Aloha, peace and love.


Hello and welcome to the session. In this session, let us first discuss family of lines, a set of lines, satisfying a given condition a family of lines. A family of lines can be represented by a linear equation in x and y involving one ordinary constant which is called parameter of the family of lines under consideration. We come across various forms of equations of lines as y is equal to mx plus c or x cos lambda plus y sin lambda is equal to p or x upon a plus y upon b is equal to 1. Each of these equations has two constants which have some geometrical significance which implies that when some definite values are assigned to these constants we obtain a particular equation of the line. Let us take an example for the equation y is equal to mx plus c the constants m and c are fixed for a particular line but vary from line to line and these are called parameters. For the equation y is equal to mx plus c m and c are the parameters for the equation x cos lambda plus y sin lambda is equal to p lambda and p are the parameters and for the equation x upon a plus y upon b is equal to 1. a and b are the parameters if we fix one of the parameter and assign different values to the other parameters then we will obtain different lines for different values of this variable parameter. All these lines will have a common property are called as family of lines or one parameter system. Therefore the equation y is equal to x plus c in which c is a parameter represents the one parameter family lines with slope equal to 1 as the value of theta is equal to 45 degrees and tan of 45 degrees is equal to 1 therefore slope is equal to 1 and there is an infinite number of lines in the family similarly the equation y is equal to mx plus 5 where m is the parameter represents an infinite number of lines whose y intercept is 5. Now we are going to discuss about family of lines parallel to the given line. Let the given equation of the line be ax plus by plus c is equal to 0. Now we need to find the family of lines parallel to this given line and the required equation will be ax plus by plus k is equal to 0 for different values of k we can have family of lines parallel to the given equation of line here we change the constant term with the new constant term and the remaining terms will be as it is. Now we are going to learn about family of lines perpendicular to the given line. Let the given equation of the line be ax plus by plus c is equal to 0. Now we need to find family of lines perpendicular to this line. We know that if two lines are perpendicular then their slopes are negative reciprocal to each other. So here we interchange the coefficients of x and y in the given equation of line. Now change the sign of either of x or y and then replace the constant term by a new constant k therefore the required equation will be minus of ay plus bx plus k is equal to 0 for different values of k it represents a family of lines perpendicular to the given line to obtain the family of lines perpendicular to the given line ax plus by plus c we first interchange the coefficients of x and y in the given equation of line then we change the sign of either of x or y and replace the constant term by a new constant say k and thus we get the required equation of the family of lines perpendicular to the given lines. Now we are going to learn about how to find the local of the point of intersection of two lines whose equation involves one parameter. Here we eliminate that one parameter from the equation of the lines and the element is the required locus. Let us take an example find the locus of the point of intersection of the lines x plus y is equal to 5 minus lambda and towards minus 3 y is equal to 2 plus 4 lambda when lambda is a variable we have given the equation of the lines as 2 plus y is equal to 5 minus lambda mark it as equation 1 and towards minus 3 y is equal to 2 plus 4 lambda mark this equation as 2 the required equation of the locus will be obtained by eliminating lambda between the lines from equation 1 we get lambda is equal to 5 minus x minus y now substitute the value of lambda in equation 2 we get 2 x minus 3 y is equal to 2 plus 4 into lambda that is 5 minus x minus y which implies that 2 x minus 3 y is equal to 2 plus 4 into 5 that is 20 minus 4 into x that is 4 x minus 4 into y that is 4 y which further implies that 2 x plus 4 into x minus 3 y plus 4 y minus 22 is equal to 0 that is plus y minus 22 is equal to 0 which is the required equation of the locus this completes our session but you enjoyed the lesson.


Tom here from Orange Systems. And the first question is, what's running in the background? I just know this gets asked and I think this is kind of fun. It's a tool called Hollywood that is a Linux package that makes it look like I'm doing something Hollywood, like really important and flashy screens in depth. But it's not about that. This is about what's in my rack. Now we've done a few rack tours in the past and I wanna do an updated video on this and this is just the hardware for how we set it up and how we cable our main rack that runs our main workloads for my company in terms of things we don't run in the cloud because it's way better to have your cloud at home. At least that's my opinion as much as possible. But the lab video I'm working on is gonna ask questions about this and I'll refer back to this video for the hardware. So there's an intertwining of both our production rack and our lab because it all starts in a production rack that feeds the lab. So I figured this video seems like it should come before the lab video. Plus the lab video is gonna be a lot more technical about VLANs and how we set it up because we test a lot of equipment. We need a way to test equipment, networks, and software that we may be demoing or trialing. We build several computers in there, several virtual machines and how we pass them around between production and lab is kind of related to all this as well. That's why I wanted to make this video first though to talk about that hardware we did because, well, that's an important question when you try to spec out what you're trying to build or assemble from the tall rack itself down to the individual components and the Ryzen systems. There's a link down below to the Ryzen systems we built for both lab and production. And there's a link down below to the 45 drive server that we use for our storage. And other things you'll be seeing, I've got other videos down below linked. So I'll have all the parts as well if you just wanna look at the components that we use to build this. Now this whole adventure starts at the very back of my building. So that's where we're gonna begin real quick here. We have a feed in the back. We have two cable modems, two separate ISPs. Cable modems are just reasonable for what we do. We get business class internet from two different companies. And then that feeds over to the front of the office. Now this is all gonna be split between a lot of different VLANs and we also have a segmentation of production versus lab. And versus lab is kind of fuzzy because there is the clear cut production which doesn't even go on the Unify network. And then there's everything else that does go on the Unify network to make things really easy to tag any port we need for any area of the office for any type of project. So let's take a look closer at the rack itself and dive into those details of how it's wired. And these are the two feeds from the two different ISPs that come in and bring us to our 8200 right here. Then from that, we have the WAN 10G that fills into the USW Pro which is one of these aggregation switches. This has a lot of different VLANs running on it. It runs, well, a lot of the different things including our lab and random things in the office. But then we have one more connection which is this one right here. Now this connection is gonna go down to right here and then goes into a separate switch. Everything over here is on the Unify network and then as I said, it splits to our lab but the Aruba switch is the more protected network and it just has a few VLANs to segment out each of these things. We have each of the green ones for the IPMI management and then these connect to a couple servers to do the communication with a couple of the production things. Now the way that follows down into the case here and these are each one of our Ryzen servers, you see that the green is for the IPMI. This is for what we just call the other.2 network but there's a little bit more to it than that but to keep it simple, that's any of the production stuff. It is a physically separate network versus over here. Orange is for storage and the black is part of the main network so we can VLAN anything we want over to this and like I said, between the lab and any of the other things we have running but nothing necessarily production, maybe a few office computers on there, just that different segmentation and then we repeat that as we go down to the next server and then down to the 45 drive server. The 45 drive server is only for storage so it doesn't really need to have any of that other network access so it just has connection here for storage and connection here for office. Separating the storage is nice in keeping them all this separate color which we'll look around right here. You can see how we looped them all up. We left some service loops in there to just come around and come to the back, bringing them back up through here. We're just using this to feed the cables to give it a nice look but we know all the orange are storage then we have these two 25 gig connections which are back down to our Ryzen's and then we have this and it's labeled for where it's going front switch, back switch and of course the green here is a 25 connection to our lab aggravation rack, aggregation rack 25 gig as well. Pretty straightforward setup. It's about label and simplicity so you're not spending too much time guessing it. Now there's one extra connection in here that actually goes around to this which is our UNVR Pro we have on this side. The UNVR Pro, definitely really cool. Also neat feature that you can do this and see what's going on on different cameras right on the unit. Definitely really cool. Maybe I'll do an update or review of it but the UNVR Pro is nice. It's among the things we use. We have Synology and Unified Cameras. All the Unified Cameras tied to this. Synology camera system is tied to, well I should say Synology, NVR and different cameras we test in the office. So we do use both systems because we do sell and support both systems. But then coming all the way down here to the front of the case these are the two Ryzen one, Ryzen two and of course our 45 drives with that extra slack we're able to slide this in and out relatively easy and it's all powered by an extreme power UPS right here and we're sitting about half load on it so it's not pushing it too hard. And leaving all the slack in there is what allows it and you can see right here is we need to roll it out for service. Nothing's in the way. Slides in and out real easy without it getting caught up on anything. One thing I wanna note is that a Rubus switch we are not using the Instant On and I've done videos before on it but I'm really not impressed with the Instant On Cloud. It's good for basic use but I don't find the Instant On Cloud all that great. We've actually just turned it and this is a nice thing about the Rubus switches that they have local interfaces. So we turned it on just to use the local interface and not reach out. But the Unify we self host the controller ourselves so all the Unify network is controlled by us and that's gonna be covered more in depth of course in the lab video when I dive into it deeper. Now let me know what you like, what you don't like and of course what you'd like to see in that lab video where I'm gonna get a lot more technical on VLANs and how we set things up. I really wanna help people with a roadmap in talking about like XCPNG and the software used for our lab because I wanna make sure it's very accessible for people to create their own, build their own cloud at home. This gives you really good experience and despite what you might have heard not every workload is going to the cloud. There are still lots of workloads done locally. Some companies are choosing to run their own data centers and saying, well the cloud bill came and it turns out the cloud bill doesn't pay off quite as much because even though compute prices are going down, cloud bills keep going up and it has more companies thinking more consciously about do we host some of this internally? And of course a lot of home users and people of more technical acumen like I imagine a lot of my audience you really like hosting things at home and so do I. I think it really keeps us engaged with the technology and it's a lot of fun and just great learning. So leave your thoughts and comments down below. Head up my forums for a more in-depth discussion and thanks.


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