There are problems in America. None of them have to do with gaps. None of them have to do with a phenomena. And I'll make one last point, and that is that Americans historically have never resented wealth. They've actually admired it and wanted to be the neighbor across the street with a bigger house or the bigger car. We've always aspired to be successful. And I think that this whole attack on inequality is meant to destroy that. To destroy that American spirit of ambition, of wanting to be successful. Instead, we're teaching people to be resentful, to be envious, and to resent the success of their neighbor instead of to strive to be as successful as one's neighbor. Well, thank you. You've raised some very interesting points that we'll want to get into in more detail. But let me turn to Dr. Auerbach first and say and ask you to kind of lay out your perspective. You have said that you do believe that some regulation is excessive, but you find the position against intervention to address income inequality unconvincing. So from your perspective, why is government intervention necessary and what happens without it? Well, first of all, I'd like to just point out that inequality has been growing in the United States by any number of measures, whether one is looking at wealth concentrations, distribution of income. In fact, if one looks at life expectancy, there's been an increasing inequality in outcomes in the United States. Now, I don't think it's due primarily to government. I think government is neither made it worse nor made it better in the last several decades during which this has happened, but it is a concern for us as citizens and it should be a concern of the government. Because the idea that inequality per se is not bad if everybody has a shot and the rising tide lifts all boats, works only if people really believe that's true and it helps for it to be true if we want people to believe it's true. And one of the things that's happened as inequality has risen, I agree it's not so much the problem of inequality, but as inequality has risen, there's been very little growth in incomes for people below the top of the income distribution. And this along with various social problems that have accompanied the slow growth of income have made people very unhappy. And if we just think about it in terms of the political outcomes, leaving moral issues aside, whether it's fair or appropriate for this kind of inequality to exist, just think about it in terms of political outcomes. If we want to adopt policies that are good for the country as a whole, we have to have people buy into those approaches. For example, economists are fond of favoring free trade over trade protection and we're currently having a debate in this country where there's a lot of sentiment against free trade. Well, why is that? Because trade may help the country as a whole but it generates winners and losers. And if people look at the possibility of free trade and see themselves as losing from the outcome, they're not going to support it. So if we want to adopt policies that may be in the national interest but may also make inequality worse, we have to accompany these policies with measures to address inequality. Dr. Albert, your view is on that? Well, I think this kind of boils down to the essential way of looking at the world. There's a certain implicit assumption, certain collectivist view, the national interest. I don't know what the national interest is. I know what my interest is. I know what individual's interest is. There is a sense in which there's a national pie out there and we need to figure out the best way to divvy up this national pie. There is no national pie. There's my pie, there's your pie, there's your pie. And what, as economists, we can do is we can aggregate those pies on a spreadsheet but that doesn't make it our pie. It doesn't make it our problem. And once we accept the idea of a collective pie, then now we've got trade-offs, right? Trade is good for these people. Trade is bad for these people. So we need to figure out, and at the end of the day, the people with the most political voice, the most political power, the people who pound on a table loudest are going to get their way. You're seeing this right now with the discussion in California, the discussion has ended really in California about the minimum wage, right? Clearly there are victims as a consequence of raising the minimum wage. Even Governor Brown has admitted that it will increase unemployment among teenagers. But there are victors as well. There are people who are going to earn more money, right? And there's certainly political victors. And now we're trading these things off. So I'm against this whole notion of viewing the world as a group pie that we are now going to trade off in the interest against one another versus a much more limited role for government which is to protect our lives and leave us free to choose the trade-offs, to choose what to engage in, what job to take, what job not to take, what business to start, what business not to start, who to buy from, who not to buy from, who to trade from, who not to trade from. Even the issue of trade, America doesn't trade with China. I trade with China. Walmart trades with China. I trade with a Chinese person. Walmart trades with a Chinese company. Who cares, right? If it's America, China, individuals are trading. Let individual choose. You don't want to trade with China. Stop buying at Walmart. Stop buying things that are made in China. So these are individual choices rather than collective choices rather than collectivizing these decisions which make them political. I'd like to see these decisions excluded from the realm of politics.  You've made my point for me. My point was that if we want to have policies where government does not interfere in markets, for example, by not having very large protective tariffs, we have to have a political environment that lets that happen. And the only way we can do that is if we have a consensus. You talk about the lack of, there's no collective entity. Well, there is. It's called the voting population. And we have to have a majority of the voting population approve of these policies. I personally favored these policies, but I also understand that if people do not benefit from it directly, they're not going to favor it. There are a lot of people out there on both sides of the political spectrum right now who are very much against free trade because they see themselves as losers from it. They want more government intervention. They favor policies which you're against. And the only way that we can avoid having such policies is to have some sort of a safety net so that people who are adversely affected by these policies understand that they will nevertheless have an opportunity to succeed in society. You know, Dr. Brook, one thing that your book has made, a point you've made over and over is that success is, in your view, based on effort much more than luck. And that's the appropriate perspective to have in a political system and in a government system. But what would you say about systemic biases that are just intrinsic in human beings? And a lot of them have been documented. Now there's gender bias. There's racial bias. Things that make the playing field so inherently unequal if you're just relying on individual effort. And is there a role for government in those kinds of inequalities? No. And I think the role is of education just like I think the same issue is with regard to, let's say, trade. The solution is not to choose different winners and losers and to reshuffle the deck. The solution is to educate people about the benefits of trade, the benefits of freedom, which is really what we're about, about individual freedom, and the benefits of having the government not intervene because people are going to be losers when they do. And this relates to the bias question too. Yes, people are biased. It's a reality. There are racists out there. There are people who are biased, people against gender and so on. The solution to that is not reverse bias, which just institutionalizes the bias and makes the bias legally acceptable and therefore makes racism or whatever the bias happens to be legally acceptable. The solution is to educate, to make it unacceptable, to boycott, to provide social pressure and to teach. So this is the wall of the intellectual, the wall of the educator in my world is a key function. People ask me, what about these cognitive biases? We're not rational actors in economics. Yeah, it's good to learn about these cognitive biases so we can fix them so we can become more rational, so we can make better decisions. That's the role of unveiling these biases so that we can become better at not being biased. Dr. Aback, what would be your perspective on these kinds of issues and the fairness of the system? I think that I would concur that one shouldn't always look to government for solutions and that markets, I mean this goes back to Milton Friedman's classic book, Capitalism and Democracy, arguing that markets can help overcome these kinds of problems in writings of Gary Becker and others talking about discrimination. Sometimes markets help. If somebody who's being discriminated against is eager for customers and willing to sell for a lower price then a lot of people will overcome their biases and buy from that vendor and that's sort of the way the argument goes. Sometimes that helps and sometimes that's not enough. Again, getting back to the issues of both fairness and what's moral as well as simple need for political consensus. Sometimes government needs to get involved. I concur that government involvement is a dangerous medicine and sometimes there can be excessive government involvement. It can lead to lobbying and special interest groups getting payoffs. All true. That means that we should be careful how we use the instrument, not that we shouldn't use it at all. But it's very dangerous when we have government starting to decide, or majorities in a sense, starting to decide what's fair and not what and then legislating it. And this is what I mean by unlimited government when government can now interfere in more and more of our lives based on, yeah, democratic process but based on what the majority inflicts on the minority. Thankfully, we have a bill of rights because I wonder right now what would happen to free speech in America if people actually voted on free speech. I have a feeling it would disappear and we couldn't even have the debate. So I'd like to see government shrink and eliminate and us to educate people about their own rational self-interest in their own freedom and liberty rather than have votes on what's fair and what's equitable and what's biased and what's not biased and what's a religious freedom and what's a secular freedom and all these issues, which, you know, at the end of the day are destructive to the American dream and the American spirit and what this country's really about. But sometimes government's needed to foster the American dream. I mean, think of antitrust laws and regulations. We have those to make markets work better not to interfere with markets. Now, they don't always work. It's a very hard instrument to apply. But I don't think going back to the period before 1900 with the trusts and having individual industries controlled by single companies is going to improve market outcomes. It'll stifle opportunity and I think it's generally been very helpful to have this sort of thing, which is not to say that we should have excessive regulation and we've had periods of deregulation, which were good. But having government not involved at all in some of these cases is not necessarily going to foster to promote the cause of freedom. And to follow up on that, there's a question here to Dr. Brooke about how you started out by saying we do have problems in America and there are entrenched cronyism and government regulation that are causing a lot of problems. How do you get to your pure position and can you get there without the political compromises that seem inherent in our system and government intervention to take care of some of the more obvious cronyism problems? So, luckily, I'm not a politician. So, I don't have to compromise and I'm not going to. Look, you can't... This is going to take time. I'm not under the illusion that tomorrow or in the next decade or two decades everybody's going to embrace my ideas. The way to change politics is ultimately you have to change the people. People have to change their minds. I agree that this is the political process. But they have to have... they have to have something they believe in, something as an alternative to we'll use government and maybe we overreach sometimes, maybe we're underreach sometimes. I just would like to see government out of the economy for good. And I disagree about antitrust. I actually don't view, looking back at the 19th century, the trusts were as damaging as the writers at the time made them out to be. There was clearly a political agenda around that. One wonders what the world would be like if Rockefeller hadn't had the economies of scale to make kerosene and then gasoline as cheap as it did. The world might be a completely different place if that particular so-called monopoly had not existed. So a question... I would even question the existence of antitrust. I think it's a bad law. I think it inhibits innovation. I think it's been shown in the case of IBM and Microsoft to destroy good companies and to move them in a very negative direction. So politically, what I'm suggesting feasible, of course not. There's not a political candidate on the map that comes anywhere close to this. But unless we define a goal, unless we define an ideal, the right always drifts leftward because the left has no problem defining an ideal and never has had. Look at Bernie Sanders. Bernie Sanders is maybe the most leftist candidate ever in America and he's doing very, very well because for years, they've been leftist candidates who've been willing to push the envelope on the left. So they've said, okay, we'll compromise on Obama. Okay, but what we really want, what we really want is 100% socialized medicine. Nobody on the right, nobody, not a single candidate on the right, said what we really want is 100% private medicine and that, by the way, includes no Medicare because Medicare is huge, right? If you really consistent on private healthcare. Nobody on the right said that. So of course you drift leftwards because that's where the goalpost is. There's no goalpost on the right. The right starts out the conversation by saying we'll compromise. We just want to compromise a little to the right and not to the left. I want to set the goalpost. Complete 100% private healthcare for America. Now let's negotiate if I was a politician, right? Okay.


Hi everyone, Joe for jaspyscasebreaks.com with a quick little two box break of 2019-2020 Panini Contenders Optic Basketball. Pick your team number 49 from a fresh case that's right here and if you bought the requisite number of teams you'll get a shot at some break credit and we'll do that randomizer at the end. We'll do the break first. Big thanks to everyone right here. Thanks everyone for getting in. Here's the master case right here for 2019-2020 Contenders Optic Basketball, hobby edition. So first we'll select which inner case we're going to do, use that die right there 1-2-3-4-5-6 and 4-1-2-3-4-5-6 this we'll do for next time. So we've got YouTube two box PYTs, pick your teams. And now let's pop this case open here. How did Marksall get that shot? We've got Lakers. Let's go Mark. Why don't we do that check. So there's 1-2-3-4-5 on the dice roll right so rows of two, if I roll a six I'll just roll again. It's like that. Five so it's the bottom, 1-2-3-4-5, bottom one's here, so we'll put an X across Zion's chest here so we all know it's from the same case and I think for subsequent breaks we'll just, I guess maybe if another one sells out we'll randomize it but otherwise we'll grab two randoms from the back, Lakers up 63-53 at the half, oh it's great, popping fishes I got thrown out of the game. And the next two boxes are up in the store already, jaspyscasebreaks.com if you're watching live go and get it. SGA going to OKC, Summon. We've got Steph Curry, All Star Aspirations for the Warriors, Summon and then we've got Pascal Siakam and Al Horford Blue, Blue is 52 out of 99, Sixers, Robert Runkle and behind Fred Van Vliet is Bogdan Bogdanovich, 72 out of 125, NBA Inc, Kings going to Summon and Van Vliet, base card of course goes to Toronto that'll be Steve Wright, ooh is that a plate? Plate auto? It's in the auto spot I think. There's Uniformity, Sixers, Ben Simmons, Robert and this is a historic slam right here, Dwight Howard, Orlando Magic Edition for Jason, we've got Tobias Harris, Silver, Sixers, Robert, Devin Booker, Red for the Suns, Robert Runkle and the plate behind Christian Wood is a one of one plate autograph Kevin Porter Jr. for the Cavs, Bill Dravrogian with that one, there you go Bill, all aboard, whoo-hoo, there you have it, there's Christian Wood right here too, Pistons Edition, there you have it ladies and gentlemen, another two boxes in the store, check it out, now let's give away some dollar dollar bills, so if you follow the instruction, if you bought at least two teams, you'll get an entry, four teams, two entries so on and so forth, Bill has the plate and a shot at some break credit too. Chadwick bought two, that's an entry, Eric bought four, that's two entries, Jason bought two, that's an entry, Joseph bought two, that's an entry, Matthew Shira bought two, that's an entry, Knight bought two, that's an entry, Raymond two, entry, Robert with four, that's two entries, Suman bought six, that's three entries, Steve Wright bought two, that's an entry as well, 15 spots and once again, it's going to be the top five after, let's roll it, top five after five, we'll get 60 bucks of break credit each to jaspyscasebreaks.com, one, two, three, four and five, after five we've got Steve, Knight, Raymond, Matthew and Bill, Bill got the plate and 60 bucks of break credit, there you have it, I'm Joe for jaspyscasebreaks.com, I'll see you next time for the next one, bye bye.


Welcome to Free Thoughts from Libertarianism.org and the Cato Institute. I'm Aaron Ross Powell, editor of Libertarianism.org and a research fellow here at the Cato Institute. And I'm Trevor Burrus, a research fellow at the Cato Institute Center for Constitutional Studies. On today's episode of Free Thoughts, Trevor is going to be shifting from host to guest. This is because earlier this summer, the Supreme Court wrapped up a term that contained a lot of really big and often controversial cases. Let's start with maybe the most famous one, the one that seemed to get people the most riled up. And that's the Hobby Lobby decision. Burwell the Hobby Lobby. It was called Sibelius versus Hobby Lobby, but we changed our Secretary of Health and Human Services. It usually just called the Hobby Lobby case. It was actually a mixture of two cases. One of them from a company called the Conestoga Wood Specialties out of Pennsylvania. That company is a Mennonite Wood Company. Hobby Lobby is owned by the Green family, which is the same family that owns or his son does the Mardell Christian Book Stores, a very deep Christian believing company. And also important for this case, closely held meaning there's only about five shareholders of the whole company. It's not publicly traded on Wall Street. The question in that case was whether or not a part of Obamacare, which is actually not part of the law itself. Most of Obamacare is a bunch of things that tell agencies to go forth and create rules. So we always hear the laws 2,000 pages. It's actually longer than that. We're still writing many of the pages. One of the rules that was created required employers to give health insurance to their employees if they have more than 50 employees. But that, of course, was sort of changed to 100 employees at all the little exemptions. But nevertheless, you either have to give health care to employees or pay a fine. So Hobby Lobby, which has many stores and many employees, wants to give health care to its employees, which is actually important. That came up in the oral argument. They want to do right by their employees and give them health care. But one of the things that happens in this sort of centralized health care system is it has to be a qualifying health care plan, which is just going to have to cover certain amounts of things defined by HHS, Health and Human Services. Which makes sense. I mean, because if we just said you have to give them health care but had no definition of health care, then they could do effectively nothing. It only covers amputations. Right. Yeah. And it wouldn't achieve the goal of the law. So the law has to define its terms. Exactly. And so one of this included 20 different abortion – sorry, not abortion – birth control drugs, four of which Hobby Lobby, the Green family and the Conestoga Wood family believe are aborto-facients. I always have a problem saying that word, aborto-facients, meaning the way they perform their birth control function is by prohibiting or keeping a fertilized embryo from implanting in the wall of the uterus. They consider that murder and they don't want to fund that for their employees. Violates their religious beliefs. So they make a claim. Now the first important thing in this claim, it wasn't a First Amendment case. It actually had nothing to do with freedom of religion whatsoever because in 1990 there was a case which Aaron, you know well, the Employment Division versus Smith case where Justice Scalia actually, a well-known religious man, said that individual religious people couldn't get exemptions from generally applicable laws. In that case, it was peyote – it was public and park employees and they were park rangers or something like that. Anyway, they were Indians, Native Americans and they smoked peyote and they got caught and they said this was part of our religion. And so they basically – Scalia said, we're not going to give everyone an exemption. The new rule for the First Amendment is this, that there aren't exemptions for generally applicable rules. Right. As long as you're not targeting a religion, a religious practice, then it's fine. But you can't use your religious beliefs to get out of any law you'd like. Exactly. And there was a lot of people upset about that on both sides of the spectrum. So in 1993 they passed the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which commanded Congress and commanded the courts to not overly burden religious belief without a compelling interest. So basically it said you had to – you couldn't – you couldn't pass a law that would burden religious belief unless there was a good reason to do so unless it was narrowly tailored. And those are like very important points of this. So what the court was doing and what Hobby Lobby was claiming was that this violated the Religious Freedom Restoration Act and so was the Conestoga Wood Specialties. And so the two big questions in this was basically, can this apply to a for-profit corporation where they say, we don't want to pay for this for these things we disagree with? And then the second thing was, did the government do this in a narrow enough way, basically? Were there other options for them to get birth control to women other than making Hobby Lobby pay for it for their employees? And it was the second – it was the – for the first question, the court didn't actually rule that corporations have religious rights. They said that the rights are the Green Families and the rights are – I can't remember the name of the family in Conestoga Wood but the family that own that, those are the rights that are to play.  But the person that's burdening is you. You know, you may be doing business as a company but it's burdening your religious beliefs.  It's hard to figure out when you would lose those rights. They said it's the Green Family that's getting burdened here and then secondly, the government has many other options for achieving this goal other than making Hobby Lobby by insurance for these women, these aborto-phishing drugs. How does this play into the idea that we often hear discussed, especially by those on the left, of corporate personhood? Because it seems like the people on the left are always crying the idea of corporate personhood by saying corporations aren't people. So we can't give them, they can't have these protections or whatever that individual people have. But then this case seems to be saying, right, corporations aren't people. They don't have the religious protections here. It's these individual guys here that are getting protected. And so if there is this separation there between the people who make up the corporation and this notion of corporate personhood, where does that come into, who gets the religious freedom or what's going on with the burdening? Well, the legal term person is used differently than other people use that terms. There are many people who are people, who are actual people who don't have full legal rights such as minors or the mentally incompetent, for example. There are some groups of people who have paired legal rights like a married couple who own a house together. The law likes to operate on them as units. So if a married couple enters into an agreement, we can say that the legal persons that would apply in those situations. The more fascinating question, and actually going back, Citizens United didn't rule their corporations or people. They've been legal persons for a very long time. The more fascinating question with the Hobby Lobby case, and it goes back to things we've talked about on Free Thoughts before, is why going into business does certain things to you or why people think that if you enter into the marketplace you should lose certain rights? I think that's the really fascinating question. Well, let me rephrase my question because I'm not sure that I asked it. Because it's a for-profit part, as I was talking about. Not non-profit. But take corporate liability. So there's this idea that the corporation can be liable but the individual people who make it up might not be. But then, if that's the case, then there's this notion of the corporation existing as something like the corporation takes actions that it then can become liable for which aren't the actions of the people who make it up because they're not liable for it. But then in Hobby Lobby, it's why doesn't this question of religious practice or burdening attach to that abstracted entity that's maybe liable or not and not to the individual people under it? Okay, I see. So the two sides of this question. So first thing in terms of limiting your liability, you could... Some people say that the limited liability corporation is like a gift from the state. I disagree with that because you could actually create a limited liability corporation with all contracts and basic tort law. Like you wouldn't be... So if you're a shareholder of a company and the company does something wrong but you own three shares of it that you bought through a mutual fund, there's no theory of tort liability that would let you get attacked for that, right? Be liable on some level for that. In terms of the closely held aspect, I think the question you're asking is interesting because what we don't know going forward in this case is whether or not this would apply to a large corporation that has more moving parts to it. The Hobby Lobby Corporation only really has. I said the five shareholders, maybe seven. I think it's five though. And every single one of these people is a firm believer in the religion and believe that this isn't a border-officiant birth control pill. So the harm is on them. Now, it seems pretty metaphysical to say, well, the harm is on the entity known as Hobby Lobby. But I think the second part of this question is even more important for the ruling, which is there are many other ways that the government could have done this. And what they're really doing in that case is they're actually just doing what Congress told them to do in the Religious Freedom Restoration Act. Presume religion, protect it fully. That's what basically it said. So don't look for loopholes. If they say they're religious, they're religious. If they say this burdens them, this burdens them. See if the government has any other options available to it. And if it does, they lose. That's basically the way it looks. Don't give outs to corporation forms or nonprofit corporations. And many of the government arguments didn't work because they would admit that, for example, religious, a church is a corporation often under the law. Everyone would say that that is a religious corporation. If you're a nonprofit religious corporation or a nonprofit believing like Amnesty International or something, again, no one had any problems with giving them exemptions. Going back to what I said, the really fascinating question is why when you start doing business, do certain other things apply to you? And I think that that's where the left was coming. As soon as you open a business, you are now a public player in a way that you weren't before. So a church exists to advance a religious agenda or to support people who are members of that religion. But religion is at the heart of its very purpose. Amnesty International has a certain set of ideological beliefs that it exists to advance in the world. Hobby Lobby sells paintbrushes and scrapbooking. The owners of it happen to be Christian.  And that's a fascinating question, but I think that that's going a little too far. It actually gets to very core questions about what you're doing business for. Because everyone who does something for profit, whether it's a lemonade stand or when I used to mow lawns when I was a kid in the summer, I just wanted baseball cards out of it. That's all I wanted. So you could really say I was trading lawns for baseball cards with an intermediary, right? Everyone has some extra goal on top of the money, right? And so Hobby Lobby, though, they don't just violently pursue profit. And that's a good way of thinking about this, too, because business is, with a conscience, a huge part of the world right now, especially from the left, right? Whole Foods has a conscience. New Belgium Brewery in Colorado has a conscious day. Sustainable world, you know, doing right by unions, doing right by your workers, fair trade coffee, whatever it would be. Hobby Lobby does many things that are not just trying to get profit. They don't – are not open on Sundays. They play religious music in their stores. They have declined to use trucks to ship alcohol in like a sharing arrangement between different states. They do many things that are part of their conscience, too. So the really profound question, as I said, is that I think they all deserve exemptions. And that's the other really big point of this. You had a problem that should never have existed. You have this problem because people are getting health insurance to their jobs. This was seen as like a war on women versus the religious rights of employers, which by itself is a manufactured problem. It never should have existed in the first place. Women have many other options to get birth control. This is why over-the-counter birth control is a really good idea, and then you would never have this problem in the first place. But if your business does have these beliefs and it runs itself up against a government healthcare system that's highly centralized, I think everyone deserves an exemption. People ask about the slippery slope. I'm saying everyone deserves an exemption. That's one of the reasons why you don't pass Obamacare. It's like you just reversed engineer the principles of a free society from the back end by realizing that everyone deserves an exemption and therefore the law won't work. You just figured out why we don't pass laws like Obamacare. Let's open the door to employers being potentially more controlling of our lives because if the issue here is, you know, they don't want to – Hobby Lobby doesn't want to give money to something that then the employee is going to turn around and use for a service that Hobby Lobby finds against their religion. So they're going to pay money into a pool and then some of that money is going to go towards these drugs that they don't like. What happens then when they say, well, we don't want you to spend part of your paycheck? I mean, this is kind of the like fears I hear from especially left-wing people in my Twitter stream. Is this like they're going to control your bodies. They're going to say you can't do this and you can't do this. If you want to keep your job, you've got to do these things that we like and not spend your money in certain ways and things like that. Is there some sort of line there between refusing to pay for a given service and starting to say, well, now you can't even use? That would require another line, yes, because this was the women are now under the system that is set up. Now, one of the reasons the Hobby Lobby won this case is because the Obama administration had already given exemptions to non-profits and churches and things like this and set up a system to let them to figure out how, okay, you can just provide this and then here's a different system by which we'll get women these birth control pills. So the system already existed. But Hobby Lobby would have no objection or no legal objection to being like, here's your wages now and then you wouldn't spend it on something else. So we're objecting to that. That would be a new level of intrusion that no one should be afraid of. And it's also important to remember that this is a very narrow decision. We will not see many other decisions like this. If the Obama administration had not actually created as many exemptions as they did, like I said, they might have won this case. But because they did this, they sort of dug their own grave and it's hard to imagine many other future claims going forward that are going to be of this nature. Now, again, like I said, I think most of them should succeed, but we're not going to see many of them. Let's turn now to the case NLRB versus Noel Canning. This is the Resets Appointments case now. First important point in this, Noel Canning is not a person. Noel Canning is a company that cans things. I don't know what they can, but they do some sort of canning. And in 2012, in January of 2012, actually I first had to take a few steps back. In 2006, I think it was, Harry Reid, when Bush was president, innovated this new idea. There is a clause in the Constitution that says that the general way that you appoint high-level officers to a government position is with presidential nomination and the advice and consent of the Senate. There is an alternative way of doing it where if the Senate is not available and it's in recess, then the president can appoint a person sort of provisionally until the end of the next session. Now, for a long time, the question has been what is a recess and this has been going back even to the first decades of the country. So the Senate takes lunch breaks. Those are recesses. And they also take two-month breaks in between official sessions of the Senate. And of course, in 1795, they were six-month breaks or eight-month breaks. During those periods of time, the idea was that the executive was the only person who was in Washington all the time. And so if he really needed to appoint someone to a position like the attorney general dies while the Senate is out of Washington and he needs an attorney general, then he can appoint someone on a recess appointment. Now, of course, many presidents, including Bush, including Clinton, going back decades with a bipartisan affair, get upset when the Senate wouldn't approve someone that they wanted to be approved. And so during the Bush administration in 2006 in order to block the ability of George Bush to push people through the Senate without confirmation during small little recesses, such as a break for Easter or Christmas, particularly Christmas, Harry Reid decided that a very unlucky senator who probably made him mad, who was either from Maryland or Virginia, had to drive into the Senate every Tuesday and Thursday, gavel the Senate to order of an empty chamber, even if it was December 23rd, even if it was the day after Christmas, even possibly if it was Christmas, well, probably not because it's an official holiday Senate, but every three days he would gavel an empty Senate to order and then say, thank you gentlemen, maybe have a puppet theater or something and say, thank you gentlemen, and then they would go away. And so by this definition of the Senate, by their own rules, they were only out of session for three days with a session in between that they were doing nothing. Obama decided that that was not acceptable and he appointed four people, three people to the National Labor Relations Board and one person to the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau, basically declaring the Senate to not actually be in session when it said it wasn't session and took about two years to get the case up to the Supreme Court. I have always said this was the silliest, most egregious thing that he has done. It was just over the line. His legal team's memo about this was caused me to laugh out loud more than once in a way that you shouldn't do when you're reading a government document prepared by serious government lawyers presumably trying to seriously do their job and the Supreme Court, like I predicted for years, since it has been years since this happened, they unanimously said that Obama went over the line by declaring that the Senate, that he could define whether or not the Senate was in session. Is there a limit to this though?  The Senate for all meaningful senses is in recess during those times. And so it seems like, this is just this weird cascade of gimmicks. Welcome to Washington, weird cascade of gimmicks. That's what it is. That's an interesting point. The interesting question though from a constitutional interpretation and just a good governance interpretation is people are allowed to do gimmicks. I mean, there's no constitutional obligation to be a serious governing official or many presidents would never have been elected and of course many congressmen especially. There's no constitutional obligation to not play politics, to not block people for purposes that you just don't like. That guy's haircut, you know, there's no reason you can't do that. This is something that they wanted to do. The only really important question in this case, I would say the most basic question, was who gets to decide if the Senate is in session? And the answer to that is not the president. Because even if, because the, well the advantage here is that if you just say the Senate gets to decide it's in session, then you don't have to figure anything else out. If you say the president can sometimes decide if the Senate's in session, then you just give the president the ability to be like, well, they're not really doing that much work. So I think this is not really a session. And sometimes when they're actually in session, they don't actually do anything.  They have like quorum calls where they just read the names of senators for hours and hours and hours.  And that's the rule that I have in constitutional interpretation. And Justice Breyer, I think, realized this because he wrote the majority opinion in this. If you want to propose a rule, imagine proposing giving it to your worst enemy. Just if this is your rule, the president gets to decide when the Senate's in session. Imagine giving that to president, you know, Bush if you're most hated. I mean, isn't that exactly what happened here because as you said, this popped up originally under Bush. So the Democrats, you know, instituted these gimmicks in order to prevent the guy they didn't like from appointing people, but then when the tables turned and now the Republicans can stop the Democrats from appointing people, well then they get all upset. Yeah, and of course, Harry Reid made his same little try to differentiate these two situations in a way that was just embarrassing. Well, this time is different because the Republicans are particularly bad or they're particularly recalcitrant. None of these things were principles. One of the advantages of having a Constitution which libertarians can debate, you know, the virtues and vices of a Constitution a lot and there's a very interesting debate, but at least have a rule that maybe the other side will adhere to even when it goes against them. That's the whole point of it. And now we have this basic rule which was always in the Constitution. The Senate decides when it's in session. The president doesn't and therefore the appointments were invalidated. Going forward is going to be some interesting things about what happened to all the rulings of the National Labor Relations Board for these now invalidated appointees and stuff, but most of those will have to be re-heard. So it'll be interesting going forward, but it was an important decision the first time the Supreme Court had ever heard the question of the recess appointments clause. So a little bit of constitutional history, too. Let's look now at another one that caused lots of people to get really mad. And that's Harris v. Quinn. Yes, as usual. This is a union, so really people don't think straight when they start talking about unions, especially pro-union people who think it's the plight of the working man against everyone else. This case arose from Rod Blagojevich, inmate number, XX whatever, in the governor's wing of the Illinois State President who made a deal with the unions basically, designating that the SEIU would be a union representative for the home healthcare workers of the state of Illinois. Going back a little bit, we have to think about what a union is, and this is important conceptually. So I have common interest with many people in my neighborhood, right? And I could say I could go out and I could clean the streets and things like this, and that I could go and say, I don't have the money, right? I don't have the ability to take the surrounding 10 blocks of my neighborhood, force them all to pay me money even if they don't want to be a member of that surrounding 10 blocks, and then pay me to clean the streets and do things like this. Now, homeowner associations do, but I don't have the ability to just be like, the surrounding 10 blocks are all going to pay me money now because I'm going to help them out and I'll let them vote on what they want to do. And I don't have the ability to do that. It would be like creating a sub-government run by me. I was just thinking that you've given a mini-version of the argument against social contract theories of the state, which is exactly what like, well, these people got together and signed this thing and so now all of us are bound. Exactly. And when I've debated union people on this, I've tried to bring up that point and it ends up being a weird subset of a debate about political authority because I did debate a guy who told me that either I believe in forcibly unionizing home healthcare workers or I should move to Somalia like anarchy because there was nothing in between those two because democracy was what was controlling the union and democracy creates justified political authority on behalf of the union who can now steal from people.  They're organizing public-centered workers. It didn't even come into existence until 1958 when the state of Wisconsin was the first to allow it. People like George Meany of the AFL-CIO in the 50s, he was completely against the idea of public-centered unions. He thought that there would be no way that you could collectively bargain against the state because the state has no ability to go out of business. There's no, you can't take firefighters and have them going on strike. They're just basic things that don't make sense in a union in a union situation. FDR also disagree with public-centered unions. He thought for the same reasons. So they're fairly new and more specifically what they do is to sort of debate over policy. A teacher's union is basically a political party on behalf of teachers searching for certain policy changes from the government that benefit them, which is what everyone basically does with the government. Political parties and different unions. So if you let teachers or anyone else who works for the government forcibly unionize themselves and compel people to be in the union and support it who don't want to be in the union, then you've given them the extraordinary power to tax people who don't want to be taxed and then to petition the government for things that they may not want. So that's the conceptual groundwork here. So we do let people unionize into public-centered unions, but we only do it on a limited basis and that basis is defined by a case called ABUD, A-B-O-O-D which says teachers can unionize, but you cannot take dues from members to spend on political activity. You can only take dues from members to spend on basic bargaining union activities. This case dealt with how far you can draw that logic because the people who were unionized in this case. But teachers' unions engage in all sorts of political activity, right? Well, that's part of the big theory because it seems like everything they do is political. Every bargaining over the contract where you're talking about how many classes you can teach a day, how many kids can be in the class, what the curriculum's going to look like, all that seems political, but they basically say that's not political. What I mean for political in that sense is like ads supporting candidates, opposing candidates, things like that. So public-sector unions don't do those sorts of things? They do, but they can't take the money from non-union members to spend on those things because it violates their First Amendment rights. In Harris v. Quinn, the workers here were home healthcare workers who took care of usually invalid or very sick people in their homes who got Medicaid. So the sick people got Medicaid and then they paid the home healthcare workers out of the Medicaid that they got dispersed. And these people don't work in the same place, obviously. They work in the homes of sick people, often family members, people, mothers and fathers taking care of sons or vice versa. They can't bargain for workplace condition rules. They can't be like, you need another coffee maker in their kitchen because they're working in someone's home. They're very limited in what they can do. They're just getting money from the state. What the unions realize is that this is a huge bonanza to get more and more union members. And they've done this in 10 states. They've gotten home healthcare workers to be unionized via executive order who then paid in terms of dues. The SEIU was then designated the representative of these people in Illinois. And over the course of 10 years, the SEIU took $35 million from people who didn't want to be a part of the SEIU. Now the funniest thing is that you do hear this democracy argument. You have to have a union voted on to establish it. There's a whole procedure for establishing the initial unionization. And then there are secondary procedures for voting on representatives and things like this. So this is when people who I debated on this would say, this is democracy. It's fine. We certainly gave them the power to tax, but they're giving them the benefit of representation, right? And so they had the power to tax, but it's just like the state, right? But again what you actually saw in the situation was so imagine that you are home healthcare worker taking care of your son who gets some money from Medicaid and then one day in your mail you see an envelope from SEIU, right? Just says SEIU on the outside important materials enclosed. You say, why am I getting something from SEIU? I might throw it away or toss it to the side, right? Well that was actually your ballot. Your ballot of whether or not you wanted to be unionized. And the way the rules are set up in most states is that non-returned ballots are not counted. It's a majority of those that are returned.   And what the Supreme Court was asked was was this okay? Could you was there any reason to unionize home healthcare workers other than just basically trying to get money from them to petition the government? And was it violating their rights to petition the government by basically designating representatives for them? I mean that's basically what you did. You had the representatives, Bob Bogovitch and the Illinois Legislator designate representatives for all the home healthcare workers in the ICU and it's all very corrupt as you might imagine. And at the end of the day the Supreme Court said these are partial public employees they don't have enough characteristics of employees to be unionized so we're not going to let them be unionized. How does this how does this notion of forced unionization play into say the freedom of association protected institution? Because I mean this seems to be compelling people to associate against their will. It is. I am against forced unionization as any well there is some dispute in libertarianism about this but the entire problem in the history of labor law is what do you do with people who don't want to be a member of your union? That is the reason there was labor violence back in the day that's the reason you go and slash someone's tires because they're working when everyone else is supposed to be striking right? And so the main piece of labor legislation the Wagner Act passed during the New Deal gave it put a thumb on the scale on the side of unions it gave them the ability to forcibly unionize people who don't want to be in the union if they go through these voting procedures and it mandated that the business has to deal with just that union if these procedures have been followed. Now usually the arguments for this deal with like I said political authority type of arguments that we've talked about before like benefit theory well everyone benefits from being a part of the union so you have to pay up type of thing right? Which is not usually it's not usually transferred to other areas so for example book the booksellers trade union for example right the national organization of booksellers doesn't have the ability to make every bookseller in the United States a member of it because they might benefit from the book what the booksellers trade association does right? They don't have the ability to cartelize themselves and then forcibly extract dues from booksellers who refuse to become a member of the trade association and there are of course hundreds of trade associations that do things that create free rider effects where people benefit from it who don't have to contribute and they don't have this extraordinary power to tax private people and make them associate with you. I'm just seeing I'm having a difficult time seeing how you distinguish this from all sorts of counter examples that almost no one would support I mean I'm imagining like you know I'm a cable TV subscriber I get some benefit from it and then a handful of cable TV subscribers or worse yet the cable company is like well you know we're going to send all of our subscribers or everyone who gets cable period no matter who it's from a ballot in the mail saying hey do you want to be entered into this package that we offer and we're going to forcibly take $50 out of your bank account each month and look we voted and we said yes and now we're going to give you cable TV because hey you you benefit from it like no one in the right mind would support that sort of thing but I'm having an awfully difficult time seeing how that and all the iterations of it we might come up with are distinguished from unions. I have a difficult time too the best argument against that is definitely the unequal bargaining power argument which has been of course paraded out for a long time I have problems with that argument but I think that the arguments against that you would hear from the union side are not very principled in the way that we would talk about them as principled they're more like well it's really important that the rights of the workers are heard right or something like that or this is the only voice for the working man that is out there in the world it's very important that this gets heard so we deserve the right to forcibly unionize people and take money from them so we have more of a power in the marketplace of ideas. I've had people on panels tell me this I've had people say a guy from the AFL CIO I asked him this question I said I think that at least 70% of your members really want to be there and if you were a voluntary union you would still have a ton of money you'd still have a political clout but you wouldn't be able to take money from these 30% who don't want to be there so my question was basically what I just said the AFL CIO is the only thing out there fighting against the autocratic billionaires who want to change the world and favor the 1% or so like that and I said in response did you just tell me that you should be able to steal money from people because you're right is that what you just told me because I think Kato is pretty right so why don't we just let everyone have a 2 cents on their tax returns we wouldn't accept it of course and they can get it back if they're dissenting you have to fill out 37 forms to get it back but it's so important what we say that we're going to do exactly what you were saying a similar type of compulsory dues extraction it seems like a particularly odd argument to make when we're talking about public sector unions where the person they're bargaining with is the state because in that instance doesn't the working man already have a way of making his voice heard which is called voting and that's exactly what Harris V. Quinn was about that was the basic argument of saying that you're ruining their ability to petition the government for their grievances on their own terms if they wanted to create their own the people who didn't want to be a member of SEIU create their own organization or just petition their own governor then they would be actually working at cross purposes with themselves but they're at $16 they give every week or month to the SEIU who is doing one thing and then they're calling their legislative the other thing, yes the whole thing ends up being an absurdity especially when it comes to government you have an ability to petition the government as imperfect and problematic as it is and you can't just unionize people for the purposes of trading off between union loving politicians and the unions themselves let's move on from the controversial topic of unions to the uncontroversial topic of campaign spending with McCutcheon BFEC McCutcheon, Sean McCutcheon a friend of mine, acquaintance I've met him since this case started is a Alabama businessman who wanted to give $1,776 to about 30 candidates both challengers and incumbents and the really important thing to know in this case and in campaign finance in general is the difference between contributions and expenditures a contribution is something you give to a candidate who then presumably goes and uses it to do their campaign activities usually ads and other types of speaking and expenditure is just something you spend on your own if you want to buy a sound truck and drive it up and down shouting about how much you love Barack Obama or something like that whatever you're not giving it to them that's an expenditure and that's the fundamental distinction at the heart of campaign finance law Citizens United was about expenditures but McCutcheon here is about contributions so he wants to give this money to candidates $1,776 there is a $2,600 limit on what you can give to candidates for the general election for the primary and then the general election so total $5,200 for each candidate every two years cycle that contribution limit has been upheld by the Supreme Court is an important way feasible way of combating corruption of candidates buying candidates by walking up to them and saying here's $100,000 contribution vote for me on oil or whatever so in those pieces you're giving non-corrupting contributions or at least Congress has determined their non-corrupting contributions individually there is another limit on top of those limits for each individual contribution which is just the total amount of contributions and that's about $48,600 $48,600 per two year period so you could give each contribution themselves would be non-corrupting according to Congress so the nine would be okay but the tenth would suddenly be violating the law and this case asked whether or not that distinction made any sense whatsoever and it was important but it wasn't that important it was important just because we can't talk about campaign finance like normal people anymore the way that the left talks about campaign finance is quite frankly terrifying to me in the sense of you just hear them talk about drying up spending I suggest to everyone every single time you hear someone say get the money out of politics drying up spending I suggest just replacing all the spending and the money with just speech and then just listen to a bunch of elected representatives literally complaining that people are speaking about politics but that is an aside every campaign finance decision has to be a huge event McCutcheon is he's a nice guy I just wanted to participate in the political system he wasn't trying to buy anyone and the court asks this question does it make any sense to say that the nine donations are okay but the tenth one is wrong and a five four court as it usually is in these campaign finance cases said yes you can do that there is no good reason for that law the really disturbing thing in that case is just as Brier's descent which I nominate as the most terrifying descent of the year it is absolutely terrifying in what he thinks what his vision of a campaign finance regime is which is when the government is involved in regulating the relative voices of the empowered and the disempowered of course always in the name of ultimately incumbent protection rackets or the very surreal system where you actually give elected politicians the ability to regulate the system by which they're elected and expect them to do that honestly and forthrightly I won't go much more into that but I do suggest reading Justice Brier's descent in that to see what we're up against in this fighting campaign finance over the next couple of decades that we're going to keep fighting especially when we're holding just a one vote majority on a incredibly easy question but did the government have any reason to put an aggregate limit on these contributions if it said that individual contribution was okay let me see if I can push back just a little bit on this notion of the tenth contribution being a problem given that these are contributions to lawmakers right and lawmakers tend to operate in a system where they get together in a group and then vote on some policy then it does seem like if you if your contributions in some way influence what that lawmaker is going to do and there's question of whether that's the case but let's assume that it does then giving the money to just a couple of those guys isn't going to have a huge effect on the policies that come out of this system because their votes are just one or two among many but if you can give it to most of them or all of them some level some number then suddenly you can tip over into actually influencing the policies that come out of this voting process yes I'm being somewhat flippant here but yes you would be influencing government and that's what we do here we in America we speak and we write and we do things to influence government now if you can show me that person the person who in $500 limits which is not a lot of money can buy congress in that way I mean then people think that congress are even more of my french horrors than I even think they are I think it costs way more than $5200 to buy a congressman and it still is not the case that you can give more than that individually to them right and the second point on this of course is that money doesn't buy elections it just doesn't I think that people's ideas of campaign finance would be very different if they understood that money doesn't buy elections if we just saw it we've seen it this year we saw everything the Cokes did pretty much in the last election Sheldon Adelson almost all their candidates lost and money doesn't correlate with party there aren't more rich republicans or poor democrats and money actually informs voters and so I think there should be more money in the system I'm a big believer that I would double people can be more informed by voting there should be more money in the system because then that's more rich and a better robust political dialogue let's close with a big victory for libertarian interpretation of the constitution and one that was was rather surprising in its strength and that's the Riley decision is a combination of two cases Riley v California and worry the like Maryland I believe both of them dealt with a question of whether or not after you get arrested the police can then search your smart phone without another warrant to search your smart phone and it might seem to be oh well you get arrested you get searched but the Supreme Court has heard many of these cases where your ability to be searched when you get arrested is limited they can't just search everything that you own search the immediate trunk everything in your trunk if you have a lock box they have to have a justification to get into new areas and the reason you're allowed to search but when they were arrested was because you wanted to make sure they didn't have a pin knife or a knife or gun when you put them in the cell that was the biggest one was officer safety so the question here was about whether or not it required another search warrant and the really important ruling this could be the biggest case of the year in many ways because we have a lot of fourth amendment questions still to be answered about your digital life we still don't know what the fourth amendment status is of your Gmail account because Google owns or at least your mail resides in some weird sense in Google's possession we're not sure about other parts of the cloud and how other companies are holding this but at the same time everyone is putting their life online in such huge ways and it affects our privacy so much to allow the government to just go through everything we have in our private life our Facebook account all these things and just let them go through it and I think the justices realize that your phone has as much on it as a strip search basically and it probably helped that the justices I think all have smartphones I'm not sure but if they all have them but that they understand the sensitivity of the information on the smartphone and the most important thing about this decision is that there's a lot of language that we repeated in every brief going forward that the digital life is protected strongly by the Fourth Amendment it's incredibly important part of your life and that language will be used when we talk about the cloud that language will be used we talk about NSA searches all these things going forward it's a major victory for privacy a major victory for the Fourth Amendment to establish these protections in your digital life does any of this protection hinge on whether the because you talk about lock boxes and things like that and opening the trunk of your car whether the cell phone is locked in a sense so I mean I've got my iPhone sitting on the table in front of me and it's got the fingerprint scanner and so in order to get into it you either need a code or my fingerprint but I could turn that off and I can have it where you just push the button and you're into the phone does that does that make a difference that's an interesting question in this in this case that wasn't a huge part of because the question was so basic did they need any secondary any warrant to do anything whatsoever with the phone there could be future cases as you know a lot of these Fourth Amendment cases hinge upon really small fact changes like having something in plain view because your phone is already off of its lock screen and they saw something maybe like a piece of child pornography or something on your phone like looking over your shoulder things like that would allow them to search further into your phone and things like that and whether that would allow them to make you give them your fingerprint or your passcode could be a very specific situation but I think generally speaking the general rule outside of those exceptional circumstances doesn't matter after they get a warrant they can ask you to open it as they can if they say we got a warrant for this lock box in your trunk then they can say give us the key or we'll bust it open after they get a warrant they can do the same thing with the phone so the security levels on your phone doesn't change it at this point I'm struck by the fact that all of the cases we talked about today were victories that the position that we would advocate as libertarians seemed to be the one that the court embraced and so I'm wondering is this is there something going on here is there something tying all these cases together or is this part of a larger trend maybe of the court moving in the right direction I think it is a trend and you have seen people writing usually hit pieces about the libertarian Supreme Court some of that is because Justice Kennedy the swing vote has been called the libertarian justice of the court because he supports gay rights for example in a way that the conservative justices don't we are seeing the end of a trend where libertarian scholarship has had the biggest effect in academia which is in the legal academy since the creation of the federal society in the early 80s there's been so much more libertarian legal scholarship out there that is changing how people are looking at the world how people are looking at the constitution how people are looking at important provisions of our day life that guarantee the freedom that the constitution guarantees us in our basic common law legal system guarantees us so I think it's going to get better on the libertarian side for the justices who have those libertarian leanings but on the other side there are as many cross currents pushing the other side so what we're actually going to see over the next foreseeable future is an incredibly divided court because there are two very different judicial interpretations out there but the one that we're winning on right now is libertarian and it's good to see sort of a general trend of protecting our cell phones protecting us against forceful extraction of money from unions that are looking to spend politically protecting the basic freedoms of the constitution because of recess appointments that are good that it give too much power to the president at the expense of the senate and the separation of powers and protecting the right of people to have religious conscience in the workplace as well as in their private home all of these things are good trends that have a libertarian vein through them and I think we'll see more of that in the future thank you for listening to free thoughts if you have any questions or comments about today's show you can find us on twitter at free thoughts pod that's free thoughts pod free thoughts is a project of libertarianism.org and the Cato Institute and is produced by Evan Banks to learn more about libertarianism visit us on the web at www.libertarianism.org


The Appalachian Advantage Plan is the simpler, better way to get the phone you actually want instead of paying hundreds of dollars up front.  It's called the Appalachian Advantage available at Appalachian Wireless. On Saturday, October 22, Big Sandy Community and Technical College is partnering with the Mountain Arts Center and ParaVisions for a night of spooks and specters during a midnight ghost hunt. The event will consist of an informational section and then the ghost hunt with local paranormal investigators. It's free to the public. All ages are welcome for that information session and that's to kind of learn almost like a ghost hunter's 101. Like what they do, what they have done, what ParaVisions has done. ParaVisions is actually part of the TAPS family. So if anybody out there watches, you know, ghost hunters or TAPS that's on TV, they are part of that organization. So that's super cool. So they've got lots of stuff on TV as well. Part two of this on the 22nd is you can actually purchase a ticket to go on an actual ghost hunt. So there are different locations that they're going. They're going to be split up into teams. We can't divulge the locations right now because, you know, we don't want a lot of interference coming into that. We want these to be as authentic as possible for our ghost hunters for ParaVisions to come in. The event is meant to educate and welcome those who are interested in ghost hunting as well as those who are skeptical. Hamlin says it's meant to be fun during the Halloween season. They welcome skeptics and critics into this. You know, you don't find a lot of that within art and entertainment. Usually it's the critics, you know, you're like afraid of or things like that. But they welcome this. They want these people to come and be involved. Just bringing together all kinds of different people. The skeptics, the open-minded, you know, all of the above all coming together to have fun.


Now, as we all know, businesses are awash with data from financial services to healthcare to supply chain and logistics and more. Our activities and increasingly actions from machines are generating new and more useful information in much larger volumes than we've ever seen. Now, meanwhile, our data hungry society's expectations for experiences are increasingly elevated. Everybody wants to leverage and monetize all this new data coming from smart devices and renewable sources around the globe. All this data, it surrounds us, but more often than not, it lives in silos, which makes it very difficult to consume, share, and make valuable. These factors combined with new types of data and analytics make things even more complicated. Data from ERP systems to images to data generated from deep learning and machine learning platforms. This is the reality that organizations are facing today. And as such, effectively leveraging all this data has become an enormous challenge. Today, we're going to be discussing these modern data challenges and the emergence of so-called smart data fabrics as a key solution to said challenges. To do so, we're joined by thought leaders from InterSystems. This is a really creative technology provider that's attacking some of the most challenging data obstacles. InterSystems tells us that they're dedicated to helping customers address their critical scalability, interoperability, and speed to value challenges. And in this first segment, we welcome Scott now. He's the global head of data platforms at InterSystems to discuss the context behind these issues and how smart data fabrics provide a solution. Scott, welcome, good to see you again. Thanks a lot, it's good to be here. Yeah, so look, you and I go back several years and you worked in tech, you worked in data management, your whole career, you've seen many data management solutions from the early days. And then we went through the Hadoop era together and you've come across a number of customer challenges that sort of change along the way and they've evolved. So what are some of the most pressing issues that you see today when you're talking to customers and put on your technical hat if you want to. Well, Dave, I think you described it well. It's a perfect storm out there. Combined with, there's just data everywhere and it's coming up on devices, it's coming from new different kinds of paradigms of processing and people are trying to capture and harness the value from this data. At the same time, you talked about silos and I've talked about data silos through my entire career and I think the interesting thing about it is for so many years we've talked about, we've got to reduce the silos and we've got to integrate the data, we've got to consolidate the data and that was a really good paradigm for a long time but frankly the perfect storm that you described, the sources are just too varied. The required agility for a business unit to operate and manage their customers is creating enormous pressure and I think ultimately silos aren't going away. So there's a realization that, okay, we're going to have these silos, we want to manage them, but how do we really take advantage of data that may live across different parts of our business and in different organizations? And then of course the expectation of the consumer is at an all-time high, right? They expect that we're going to treat them and understand their needs or they're going to find some other provider. So pulling all of this together really means that our customers and businesses around the world are struggling to keep up and it's forcing a new paradigm shift in underlying data management. We started many, many years ago with data marts and then data warehouses and then we graduated to data lakes where we expanded beyond just traditional transactional data into all kinds of different data and at each step along the way, we help businesses to thrive and survive and compete and win but with the perfect storm that you've described, I think those technologies are now just a piece of the puzzle that is really required for success and this is really what's leading to data fabrics and data meshes in the industry. So what are data fabrics? What problems do they solve? How do they work? Can you just ask them to tell me? Yeah, so the idea behind it is, and this is not to the exclusion of other technologies that I described in data warehouses and data lakes and so on, but data fabrics kind of take the best of those worlds but add in the notion of being able to do data connectivity with provenance as a way to integrate data versus data consolidation. And when you think about it, data has gravity, right? It's expensive to move data. It's expensive in terms of human costs to do ETL processes where you don't have known provenance of data. So being able to play data where it lies and connect the information from disparate systems to learn new things about your business is really the ultimate goal. You think about in the world today, we hear about issues with the supply chain and supply and logistics is a big issue, right? Why is that an issue? Because all of these companies are data driven, they've got lots of access to data, they have formalized and automated their processes, they've installed software. And all of that software is in different systems within different companies, but being able to connect that information together without changing the underlying system is an important way to learn and optimize for supply and logistics as an example. And that's a key use case for data fabrics, being able to connect, have provenance, not interfere with the operational system but glean additional knowledge by combining multiple different operational systems, data together. And to your point, data is by its very nature, you're distributed around the globe, it's on different clouds, it's in different systems. You mentioned data mesh before, how do data fabrics relate to this concept of data mesh? Are they competing, are they complementary? Ultimately, we think that they're complementary and we actually like to talk about smart data fabrics as a way to kind of combine the best of the two worlds. What is that? The biggest thing really is there's a lot around data fabric architecture that talks about centralized processing and in data meshes it's more about distributed processing. Ultimately, we think a smart data fabric will support it both and have them be interchangeable and be able to be used where it makes the most sense. There are some things where it makes sense to process for a local business unit or even on a device for real-time kinds of implementations. There are some other areas where centralized processing of multiple different data sources makes sense and what we're saying is your technology and the architecture that you define behind that technology should allow for both where they make the most sense. What's the bottom line business benefit of implementing a data fabric? What can I expect if I go that route? I think there are a couple of things, right? Certainly being able to interact with customers in real-time and being able to manage through changes in the marketplace is certainly a key concept. Time-to-value is another key concept. If you think about the supply and logistics discussion that I had before, right? No company is going to rewrite their ERP operational system. It's how they manage and run their business but being able to glean additional insights from that data combined with data from a partner, combined with data from a customer or combined with algorithmic data that you may create some sort of forecast and that you want to fit into and being able to combine that together without interfering with the operational process and get those answers quickly is an important thing. So seeing through the silos and being able to do the connectivity, being able to have interoperability and then as combining that with flexibility on the analytics and flexibility on the algorithms you might want to run against that data because in today's world, of course, certainly there's the notion of predictive modeling and relational theory but also now adding in machine learning, deep learning algorithms and have all of those things kind of be interchangeable is another important concept behind data fabric. So you're not relegated to one type of processing. You're saying it's data and I have multiple different processing engines and I may want to interchange them over time. So I know, well, actually, when you said real time I infer from that I don't have a zillion copies of the data and it's not in a bunch of silos. Is that a correct premise? You try to minimize your copies of the data. Certainly there's a nirvana that says there's only ever one copy of data that's probably impossible but you certainly don't want to be forced into making multiple copies of data to support different processing engines unnecessarily. And so you've recently made some enhancements to the data fabric capability that takes it ostensibly to the next level. Is that the smart piece? Is that a machine intelligence? Can you describe what's in there? Well, you know, ultimately the business benefit is we all have a single source of the truth for a company. And so what we're doing is combining multiple technologies in a single set of software that makes that software agile and supportable and not fragile for deployment of applications. At its core, what we're saying is we want to be able to consume any kind of data. And I think your data fabric architecture is predicated on the fact that you're going to have relational data you're going to have document data, you may have key value store data, you may have images, you may have other things. And you want to be able to not be limited by the kind of data that you want to process. And so that certainly is what we build into our product set. And then you want to be able to have any kind of algorithm where appropriate run against that data without having to do a bunch of massive ETL processes or make another copy of the data and move it somewhere else. And so to that end, we have taking our award-winning engine, which provides traditional analytic capabilities and relational capabilities. We've now integrated machine learning. So you basically can bring machine learning algorithms to the data without having to move data to the machine learning algorithm. What does that mean? Well, number one, your application developer doesn't have to think differently to take advantage of the new algorithms. So that's a really good thing. The other thing that happens is if you're playing that algorithm where the data actually exists from your operational system, that means the round trip from running the model to inferring some decision you want to make to actually implementing that decision can happen instantaneously, as opposed to other kinds of architectures where you may want to make a copy of the data and move it somewhere else. That takes time, latency. Now the data gets stale. Your model may not be as efficient because you're running against stale data. We've now taken all of that off the table by being able to pull that processing inside the data fabric, inside of the single source of truth. And you got to manage all that complexity. So you got one system, so that makes it cost effective and you're bringing modern tooling to the platform, is that right? That's correct. How can people learn more and maybe continue the conversation with you if they have other questions? Call or write. Yeah, I mean certainly check out our website. We've got a lot of information about the different kinds of solutions and different industries, the different technologies. Reach out, scottgeatintersystems.com. Excellent, thank you Scott. Really appreciate it. And great to see you again. Good to see you. All right, keep it right there. We have a demo coming up next. You want to see smart data fabrics in action? Stay tuned.


It's time to find out who our lucky winner is if you will, in just a second, check under the stone under your foot. A specially marked stone will tell us whose cell phone is going underground. So, yeah, I don't know if you want to actually check, but up to you. Anyway, for the ceiling of the 2035 and 2060 tank capsules, may we call on Dr. Bruce Valentino, Deputy Director General for Communication and Partnerships. Thank you, Tony. There are a few additional personalities we would like to participate in this important occasion. First, may we recognize and invite to the stage Vice Mayor Kopi Alipon of the town of Los Valles, the city of Los Valles. Please, sir, join us. Is he here? Vice Mayor Alipon? He's gone? Alright, so let's go on to the representative of the Provincial Government, Attorney Dulce Rabanau, Provincial Administrator. And of course, we have a representative of the municipality of Valles here that we work with very closely, Mr. Mariano Arcelias. Please join us, sir. Okay. Now, to assist in the loading of the tank capsules, we would like to call the personalities in pairs. And as they approach the capsules, I will read out what's going into the capsules. First, Director Conenta Guerta and Mr. Arcelias, please. Ms. Guerta and Mr. Arcelias are putting into the capsule a letter from Dr. Lloyd Evans to Robert Ziegler on this occasion. The program and flyer for today's activities. They're also putting the newspapers from today, the 27th and the 16th. And in fact, one of those newspapers reports on this activity for today, the issue of the irreboot. Please. The second batch will be loaded by Director Christine Cruz and the representative of Los Baños, Vice Alipon. He's not here, right? So, may we request attorney Dunce Rabana to join Ms. Cruz? Being placed in the second batch of items is a USB containing eerie videos, particularly the video of the Director General's message plus selected YouTube videos. The list of all eerie staff as of the end of 2014. And a list of members of the Board of Trustees of eerie as of January 2015. All right, please. The third batch will be loaded by a young representative of our science team, the Afstree. Janelle, June, are you here? Janelle. She is one of the young generation. She will probably still be around when the 100th year anniversary capsule is open. She will be accompanied by our very young Chancellor of UPLB, Dr. Sanchez. So, young leaders of the science community, and they will be placing into the capsule a copy of the National Geographic Magazine, The Teacher's Eerie, the latest issue of rights today, a calendar from 2014 which includes the birds of eerie, and a few famous films from 2014. Films like Frozen, The Guardians of the Galaxy, The Young Roof. May you still be around in 2016. The next batch will be loaded by Deputy Director General Matthew Morrill and the representative of the Australian Government, Ms. Cecil Onrana. They will be placing in the capsule a photo, montage, a video of overview of the eerie campus, and a set of eerie commemorative postage stamps, and the eerie superbac, and two books from the Australian Council for International Agricultural Research. And now for another batch to be led by Deputy Director General Norman McDonnell, accompanied by and with Senator Cynthia Villar. They will be loading a list of rice varieties developed at eerie, all 1200 pages of it, a set of recently released rice varieties, and the current eerie moisture meter. And now for a final and very important set to be loaded up by Dr. and Mrs. Robert Zeigler. Robert Zeigler and Chrisan Zeigler. Please, Chrisan, are you here? Please? Yes, there she is, yeah. They will be loading a set of items, a document that speaks of eerie vision 2035, investing in the future. The eerie strategic plan for 2007 to 2015. The blueprints for the Lloyd Evans plant growth facility. A media kit of eerie. The Cosmos Magazine issue of February, March 2014, featuring the work of eerie. And finally, a set of personal things contributed by Dr. Zeigler, including a cell phone, his cell phone. Bob, you should check if the memory card is still in it. Some frequent flier cards that Bob has collected over the years. And the Time Magazine issue of December 15, 2014, talking about how the world is not enough. There's still a lot of room. All right, now the guests will all participate in the ceremony. A physical plant team will seal the capsules and lower it into place. By the way, this site where the capsule is being buried will be part of the driveway, the front area, the facade of the new facility. So that as the driveway curves in, this spot will be right in the middle of that driveway grassy area. So it's just right to check on again in 2035 and 2060 for those of us who will still be around. And now may I invite guests to participate in the burying of first representing the Philippine government and the Australian government. May I request Senator Villar and Ms. Onrado to come forward, the Philippine government and the Australian government to... Using a golden show, institutions, research institutions, the International Rice Research Institute, and the University of the Philippines of Los Baños, Dr. Zeigler and Dr. Sanchez. Please come forward. Thank you. And finally, representing the local government of Bael, Los Baños and Laguna, first attorney Dulce Rabanon and vice mayor Opie Alipa. And Mr. Mariano Arcelias. Now to close this entire occasion, happy occasion may I request Bob Zeigler to say a few last words. Before we do that, however, please all the honored guests line up in front of the time capsules for a final photo. With the hat and the shovel. And the shovel. We can still probably put the photo in the time capsule. Yes. Looking good. And once going twice, thank you very much. To close the occasion may I request Dr. Robert Zeigler to provide the closing remarks, please.


For the barbecue hot wings, we have hot sauce, ketchup, butter, barbecue sauce. For the seasonings, we have paprika, onion powder, garlic powder. Now I will be having everything below in the description box, okay? Here is my cast iron skillet going away for my hot wings. For the potatoes, we have paprika, onion powder, garlic powder, Italian seasoning, salt. I have three large potatoes, kinda sliced up, excuse me, peeled, but not really. There's my sauce right there. Here are my potatoes. They're gonna boil for about 15 minutes. And here is my chicken. I allowed my chicken to marinate with those seasonings for about an hour actually. Making sure my oil is ready. I'm gonna drop that chicken in. Now I like to fry my chicken between 10 to 12 minutes because I like to finish it off in the oven for an additional 15 minutes with the sauce. There's my sauce there. Traditional hot wings sauce adds for a lot more butter than two tablespoons. But I only use two tablespoons trying to wash the fat. Here I am taking out the chicken. Here are my potatoes. Now I just want to make sure that the fork can go in. You're not trying to make mashed potatoes, okay? This is gonna take another 15 minutes to cook in a cast iron skillet. Here are my wings. Something look good, y'all. Now they are not done. They're gonna finish off in the oven. And here is my sauce. I'm drizzling on. This is about two and a half cups of sauce, by the way. Give or take half a cup or so. And again, this is gonna finish in the oven at 365, 40 out of 15 minutes. Look at those potatoes. Gonna season those up. Now it has butter and olive oil in the cast iron skillet. And like I said, that's only gonna take about 15 minutes to cook. And this is what they look like. Don't they look good, girl? Don't they look good?  So I hope you guys enjoy this video. Let me know what you think. Take care. Bye.