Pulses. Let's see what they are and why they're good for you. What are pulses? Pulses are the edible seeds of plants in the legume family. Pulses grow in pods and come in a variety of shapes, sizes, and colors. The most well-known pulses are split peas, lentils, beans, and chickpeas. The main difference between pulses and legumes is that pulses are dried before they are eaten. For example, fresh peas or legumes, dried peas, or pulses. Growing pulses also promote sustainable agriculture. They don't need much water or fertilizer and they improve soil health. They're good for the environment too, as pulse crops help decrease greenhouse gases. So why should I add pulses to my diet? Pulses are great for your health. They are good sources of protein and fiber, and they are low in fat. Their mix of protein and fiber means they are digested slowly, making you feel fuller for longer. Pulses also have other nutrients like potassium, zinc, B vitamins, and antioxidants needed to keep healthy. And that is not all. Pulses are also easy to cook with. Moreover, pulses are cheap to buy. That means they can save you money. So next time when you plan a trip to the grocery store, make sure to put pulses on your shopping list.


And we're here with Steven Spellacy of Vertensys. Hey Steven, how you doing? Good to see you. Good to see you again. Hey Steven, great to see you. All right, always smiling in the cube. I love it. The cube is our flagship telecast. We go out to the ground. You're on the alum list. Hey, that's awesome. That's awesome, thank you. So you're going to have to concentrate here a little bit. Yeah, exactly. So tell us about Vertensys. I owe virtualization, hot area. Yeah, definitely. Exploding. Tell us about Vertensys and we'll talk about why we need I owe virtualization. Great, cool. So Vertensys is based in the US and we have headquarters in the UK. Our founders come out of a spin out of Zyrotex, which you guys are pretty well familiar with. The technology was originally developed as a high-speed PCIe switch fabric. And the founders basically decided that they could exploit the technology for I owe virtualization. At core, what we do is we take standard off-the-shelf adapters in a concentrator appliance style solution. We plug those in our chassis and then we share using PCI Express base switch, switching, and a virtual proxy controller, which handles all the virtualization layer of the hardware that's being inserted in our device. So the technology is sold for standard server environments, standard rack mount environments. And we also have an OEM arrangement with NEC Corporation in Japan. And they're selling a blade version of our product. So talk about why you need I owe virtualization and why server virtualization drives that need. Yeah, definitely. So obviously, I owe is one of the big bottlenecks in a server virtualization environment, right? VMware hates it when we blame them for all the I owe problems. But hey, it's the fact of life. It keeps everybody else in this ecosystem of business. So the long and short of it is the environments that we're in are very diverse. They have needs for multi-protocol storage, for 10 gig I SCSI, for NFS, for fiber channel, and they even leverage traditional direct attached storage architectures and emerging technologies like PCI Express based SSDs. So with all those different technologies, you need to address the connectivity and the management of pairing those technologies with the servers, whether they be blades or standard servers in your data center. So virtualized I owe provides both greater choice and control of the types of interfaces that you present to your standard servers and your blade systems, as well as it provides a greater amount of density. So diversity and density, as well as you can drive these servers harder because you're offloading in I owe virtualization, you're offloading essentially the I owe process into hardware. So actually you're taking a lot of the overhead and burden off of the traditional host, lower CPU utilization on the server host, greater performance, and your I owe performance is increased because you're driving both the resources in that appliance or in that infrastructure harder and you're getting more out of it through acceleration. So that's the value prop. It's really a resource utilization part. That's how you get the ROI out of it, right? Yeah, definitely. What about flash? How does that change the whole I owe? Yeah, definitely. So that's the new hot device to virtualize, right? So folks are looking at inserting and using PCI Express based SSDs. That's the big talk now, right? So I owe mount applications, data intensive operations on databases, obviously greater scale and hyper consolidation needs on server virtualization hosts. These technologies are going to essentially assist and allow those hosts to scale to meet those new demands. So what we're doing with respect to virtualizing flash, the first in our entree into the space is leveraging our virtual RAID controller capability where we actually take again in our architecture virtualize a standard RAID controller, SAS Saturday RAID controller, which is made by LSI. We present that through our infrastructure back to the host. They see a virtual instance of that same LSI card attached to that are a set of micron P300, high performance enterprise SSD, SLC based NAND. So now our appliance is being presented to a group of connected hosts that have access to high speed flash for boot drives, local data stores. And with the advent of vSphere 5, the ability to tag it as a SSD resource and leverage it for host cache allocation. Okay, so you can by policy allocate certain data sets to that host based. Stay in your swap and your swap operations as well. What is the biggest misconception for folks out there when they think of all this switch innovation, all the network fabric? So obviously cloud is growing, everyone's trying to be there, HP is trying to get a strategy there, has a strategy and they've been in the news lately getting crushed with their recent PC division. The market's really crazy right now. So what's the big misconception? Is cloud that easy? Is the conversion networking really that efficient now and carrier grade? And what are the innovations and what are the misconceptions that people have in this area? Yeah, I think when I think about cloud, I think about an anonymous pool of infrastructure that serves an application. An application can be accessed anywhere by any device. I mean very much buy into that classic utility sort of view of cloud. Underlying infrastructure's got to be easy to use. It's got to implement easy. It's got to be easy to manage and administer. It's got to be supported. It has to be able to leverage standard protocols. So I think those are like the baseline requirements. If you can make an administrator's job easier so they can roll out that 10th server in a rack or that 30th server in a row. If you can get access to those multi-protocol environments like iSCSI, NFS and fiber channel all within a couple of clicks, that's taking the traditional two or three days to provision a network tap or a fiber channel sand port down to a couple of minutes or maybe a half an hour. And I think that's where our customers and even our competitors' customers are leveraging virtual IO in the cloud space as it becomes more and more anonymous. I wrote a post this morning about VMware's moving to cloud and I kind of was kind of talking about the provocative question of OpenStack. OpenStack has got a lot of traction because it's just an intoxicating message. Hey, we'll cobble together all this open source. We all win and everyone's jumping in kind of like, hey, we need a cloud story. Jump on OpenStack. But the reality is delivery, getting the solutions to the marketplace. So that OpenStack really represents the developer trend. So how does all this innovation affect the developer environment? Because at the end of the day, they have to deliver products and cloud is not that trivial. And customers want things like security data on-premise, processor in the cloud and all these same network features that they've had in the enterprise. Obviously, I mean, a developer's dream is to have access to any and all the technologies in the data center and exploit them to their fullest capabilities. From our perspective, having the ability to position and support all these different technologies, as your needs change, the big thing with cloud today is managing service levels. The traditional telco model of bronze, silver, gold and being able to support those differentiated service levels. The key is as your needs change and there's some great features by the way within vSphere 5 to support those changing needs like storage DRS and VASA to integrate more closely with the underlying hardware stack. In my opinion, the successful technologies out there and the ones that will be successful integrate at that level. They show value, they diminish themselves in the model and actually integrate greater into the upper level stack. And I think OpenStack is doing that. They're putting all this intelligence up here and all this lower level stuff is being dumbed down but they have to have APIs and they have to have conduits to be able to communicate with it. And I think that's the key to success. But they have to move pretty fast because the pace of delivery that VMware and others are coming out with real solutions is real. Well, when you talk about, you sort of mentioned earlier talking about allocating certain data sets and high performance and so forth. One of the things we're talking about this week is really the whole notion of cloud service providers delivering a quality of service. How do you guarantee quality of service in the cloud in a multi-tenant environment? How can you, right? It's a big challenge, so talk a little bit about that. Yeah, so from our perspective, our product actually supports a quality of service and bandwidth allocation on the 10 gig side. So all of our products come with 10 gig standard, all the models we sell. So we have some interesting tool sets and feature capabilities right within our native GUI, our command line, our PowerShell interface, as well as of this week, the release of our vCenter plugin. Now an admin can literally go in and fine-tune the percentage of guaranteed bandwidth on a given interface. That virtualized 10 gig pipe can be assigned to any server in your pod, and then you can literally govern, monitor, and watch how that's being utilized. By customer. By customer or by environment, right? So you could buy stack or by individual customers. Well, the reason why we're interested in doing it by customers is because then you can charge, it's a new pricing model, it's not just cost plus. That's right. It's I can now drive more business value and the cloud service providers, I think, that are sharp are going to pick up on that. True though. Back to OpenStack, is where are they in that? I mean, you're looking for, it was interesting your post this morning because you love open source, you're very supportive. I'm really bullish on OpenStack, but they're not delivering in my mind to the level that I think is not their fault, it's just where they're at. I think that it's obviously the vote of confidence on the messaging is fantastic. Everyone's jumping in because it makes sense, but it brings up the Android iPhone kind of discussion. Okay, opens great. Android has been criticized lately on, not just in their markets has been great, but they've been criticized in fact that there's some holes in this and hacking, some interference at the carrier level in terms of RF overuse for error checking where iPhone's just been bulletproof and great customer support because of it. So they're two approaches. I mean, it's like Democrats, Republicans. It's like the, it's a commitment to quality. The individual developer may have a commitment to quality to produce their bit in the open source community, but sort of in the ecosystem at the global level, it's no one's watching what people do. There's a check-in, check-out process in the open source community, but at the end of the day, individual developers can screw up their own little bit. We'll hear about this next, as Amra Awadala is coming on next after you, and he is successfully executing an open source strategy by commercializing some open source, and he's actually doing some good work. So I think there's a plan where open source can work, but it's got to get some meat on the bone, as they say. Well, I just want to ask you before Dave jump in, one more question, what are you expecting to hear this week? And what should VMware be doing? I'm torn because I live in the infrastructure space, so I like to hear all the great announcements about both what they're doing to improve how infrastructures utilize, like Vossa and storage DRS. Those things excite me, and I'm also torn, like you, I want to understand where their commitment is to spread this cloud vision and make it a reality for customers. Because I think customers hear this and they think, well, yeah, I like the idea of private cloud, but at the same time, cloud is something for me that's far away. It's distant for me, right? Not no pun intended, distant cloud, right? Federated distance. But for them, they're still trying to get their act together. So I think vCenterOps is a very interesting proposition for customers, both traditional customers and service providers. I think all this great newness around Vossa and vCenter APIs, this host cache acceleration that I mentioned before is a great new feature and something that now customers can leverage in their data center or providers can leverage in the global. I guess the question might be, what are customers expecting? I mean, customers are, they want solutions. So what should they, what are they wanting to hear? Yeah, that's a big question, right?  So they're in the sort of walk mode with virtualization. They're getting to that 30%, 40% virtualized. They hit the wall with whether it's political, whether it's licensing related or it's technically related, they hit some kind of barrier. And I know that VMware has been spending a lot of time, energy and emphasis on moving beyond that percentage point. So any tools that can be used, you know, new features with APIs and their existing equipment. The last thing a customer wants is to find out that they just bought a storage array or they bought a network switch that no longer works with the brand new shiny toy, which is vSphere 5. So I think commitment in a backward compatibility mode, commitment to existing technologies in the data center. Again, you're bringing more intelligence up stack, the down stack doesn't matter as much, but the APIs need to be there. You know, actually I have a personal question and I want to bring it back to something you were just talking about in the infrastructure side. So how do you become a vExpert and what does that all mean? Well, so I have the luxury of being a vExpert. I was nominated by the community and I'm very thankful and honored to do so. I had the privilege of being a part of EMC's vSpecialist team, which is I think the last time we saw each other prior to my time at Pretensis. And I spent an awful lot of time in the community, both at EMC as well as within the VMware community, writing some blog posts, creating videos, working with my buddy, Chad Sackage, as much as I could to promote the message of VMware integration with EMC's product. So that actually I think, which is what I believe, won me a spot in some folks' hearts and I was nominated this year. Well, congratulations. I appreciate it. And so that brings us back to VMware integration. And I think back to VMworld 2009, maybe even 2008, and it was just so obvious that storage was a huge challenge for a lot of the customers. You talk to customers and they just, all they would do is tell you about all their storage challenges. And so VMware I think has worked very hard with getting the APIs out to the community, supporting it. I mean, everybody's getting the line and of course spending a lot of engineering and resource on it. But it strikes me that there's got to be an easier way. Do you think, just thinking about sort of storage design in general, do you think that storage should be designed differently? I mean, maybe for a virtual world? Was the storage that we have that we're trying to integrate, was it maybe not designed for a virtualized world? Can you talk a little bit about that? Yeah, I think the issue that I've seen in my time helping customers and partners with solutions. Workloads are completely random. They end up being like scrambled eggs, essentially. Because you can't, you no longer can count on deterministic performance of a given type of workload because it's intrinsically a mixed workload in a virtualization environment. It could be a sequential workload against a random workload. They married together a little completely random, right? But your disk, the underlying disk subsystem is trying to satisfy both of those requests. And these are traditional classic disk technologies that have frankly overgrown or outgrown their usefulness in some data centers. Almost some of the bare metal technologies like the SCSI protocol need to be re-engineered, the next generation, to support these new types of data center models. So what do you see happening there? I mean, you've got the big whales in the industry working really hard to do all this integration and obviously maintain and keep their customers happy. You've got disruptors, like you guys in the business, do those worlds come together? Is it the big guys just buy the little guys? What's your forecast there? Does the storage eventually get invisible? It's funny, because if history tells us anything, the big guys buy the little guys. You need the big guys even buy the medium guys. And sometimes the big guys buy the big guys. So I mean, what's interesting about what we're doing right now, I think it's kind of exciting in the storage space. We're not a storage provider. We create a PCIe sharing appliance. But what we're committed to do, we're releasing Q4, is a version of our appliance that'll actually house multiple PCIe-based SSDs. Now, imagine in our world in the traditional data center having to put a single PCIe adapter that supports SSDs on every server in your data center. That would be cost prohibitive. I mean, I think most would agree that you could not do that for every server in your data center. But if you put it in a concentrator and share it across 1632 servers, now that's lowered the cost of entry in the barrier to get this new exciting technology into a new, and that new workload into a traditional data center without having to break the bank and blow the budget for that particular type of purchase. Okay, Dave, we got Amur Awadallah coming up, co-founder of Cloudera. So we got to move along. All right, Steven, thank you very much for coming on, Steve Spellacy from Vertensis. We appreciate the time. Okay, great job. Thanks for coming, great for sharing.


Thank you very much, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, I stand in support of the resolution by the Minister of Finance to approve the amendment of the Health and Citizen Security Levy order to amend schedules one, two and three of the Health and Citizen Security Levy Act as required by section 17 of the Act. This Act, Mr. Speaker, was approved by this Honorable House at the last sitting of Parliament on July 11, 2023. At that sitting, the Minister for Finance provided the rational and justification for the passage of the Health and Citizen Security Levy Act. Fellow parliamentarians were unanimous in supporting the Minister for Finance in passing this Act as a health and citizen security identified as two strategic priority areas that have been on the resource in the past. And it is clear that effective measures required to implement strategies and policies in both health and citizen security must be supported by more resources, which the Health and Citizen Security Levy will provide. The amendments to the respective schedules are essentially to address some areas of oversight and hence my full support for this resolution. Mr. Speaker, the opposition continues to peddle propaganda and mistroofs about the Levy. And we find ourselves in a situation where we have to engage in a constant battle to dispel these lies. The reality is, Mr. Speaker, when we counter with the facts, they peddle other mistroofs, which require us to further counter with facts. Mr. Speaker, it is clear that the government led by the Honourable Philip J. Pierre is delivering effectively on our mandate, including restoring economic growth, building a resilient economy, and providing more resources for our social services. This performance, Mr. Speaker, has now caused the opposition to shift to a mode that I have never seen in the history of this country, a rare form of desperation as they seek to regain power by whatever means necessary. They have abandoned the traditional style of pleading tearfully for restored confidence in the failed policies. This is why, Mr. Speaker, they have chosen to pursue the Cambridge Analytica approach. Our government must be on its guard at all times to respond to this incessant campaign of lies, rumor, and misinformation that will be peddled by the opposition more and more as we progress through the term. But, Mr. Speaker, we are not going to be distracted. We are on a course to deliver to the people of this country, and despite the propaganda and the lies, we will climb to a higher altitude where we can deliver more effectively to the people of this country. Mr. Speaker, it is clear that the Honourable member for Cassuages East and member for finance, the Honourable Philip J. Pierre, continues to radically restructure our fiscal policies involving a major revamping of our income tax structure to remove thousands of our citizens from the tax net, and therefore will not be required to pay any income taxes. In addition, tax amnesties and tax concessions have been provided to both individuals and businesses in an effort to stimulate investment, reduce the cost of building materials for housing, and to grant businesses waivers of penalties and interest on applicable taxes on condition that they make the payments by the stipulated deadline date. This can be aptly described, Mr. Speaker, as a revolution in fiscal policy that will position the economy on a higher growth trajectory, improve income distribution, increase employment, and reduce poverty. Any response by the opposition to those things are trying to insult the truth of our work and the progress that we are making, but we are not going into election mode prematurely. We are going to continue to govern whilst we continue to explain to the people of this country the measures that we are taking, and this is what is called effective politics, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, we understand that no one likes to pay more taxes. This new levy needs to however be viewed within the context of the reduction in income taxes given to households, the substantial tax concessions given to households and businesses, and more importantly, the need to provide additional resources for health and security. This is the whole idea. As a matter of fact, everybody who does civic duty will contribute a small amount, but overall more resources will come into the fiscal framework to allow us to provide for health and security more effectively. Mr. Speaker, we continue to hear the propaganda that the funds raised by the levy will not be used for health and security as it will be going into a general consolidated fund. Mr. Speaker, we have witnessed a major surge in projects undertaken for both health and citizen security, involving the rehabilitation and building of police stations, and now we are about to start the major phase of the St. Joe's Hospital, one of the major priorities of our government, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, the opposition misled and continues to mislead the public on this important project. We are now in the process of not only commencing the construction of the St. Jude Hospital, but also funding has been made available for the rehabilitation of the Judge Odlam Stadium. The provision of this highly concessionary loan from the Saudi Fund for Development has made it possible for us to secure for the very first time, for the very first time, Mr. Speaker, funding for the completion of the St. Joe's Hospital and the rehabilitation of the Judge Odlam Stadium. This is what you call a dose barrel, Mr. Speaker. And the opposition does not know what to do, Mr. Speaker. But we are going to remain sober and focus on the course that will bring the greatest benefits to the people of this country. And now the opposition thinking of the next election campaign as one of misinformation. But we are waiting, Mr. Speaker, and make no mistake. We are going to respond appropriately, not with misinformation, but with the facts. We had the opposition, Mr. Speaker, now complaining about our government taking a loan to complete St. Joe's Hospital. Can you imagine that? It is clear, Mr. Speaker, that the last administration did not have a clear financing plan to complete the box, that monstrosity, and almost committed to the country to an expensive loan through a design, finance, and construct option for over $70 million to complete the top floor only and to be repaired in one year with interest accruing at the rate of 1% per day for late payments. Mr. Speaker, they would have had to find additional monies to buy all the necessary equipment for the hospital. Mr. Speaker, this desperation, this move by the former administration luckily failed to materialize as the general election was called. The rest, as we say, is history. This arrangement reminds me so much of the failed vaccination deal that the leader of the opposition spearheaded. In that case, we were not so lucky as the contract was signed and the government had already paid the money to radical investments limited. Unlike the previous administration, Mr. Speaker, our government looks at the most cost-effective methods of financing our projects and programs. I will have an opportunity shortly to debate the resolution on the loan from the Saudi Development Fund. This will be a great day in the chamber, Mr. Speaker. In conclusion, Mr. Speaker, I wish to lend my full support to the resolution by the Minister of Finance to approve the amendment of the Health and Citizen Security Levy Order to amend schedules 1, 2, and 3 of the Health and Citizen Security Levy Act as required by section 17 of the Act. I thank you, Mr. Speaker.


Coming up on DTNS, Sony won't make as many PS5s as it wants. Amazon creates an invite-only luxury section of its store. And, oh yeah, Apple has new watches, iPads, and a new fitness subscription. There's a bunch of subscription bundles. This is the Daily Tech News for Tuesday, September 15, 2020. In Los Angeles, I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lane. And from the place that my wife calls Mordor, I'm Patrick Vejo. And I'm Roger Chang, the show's producer. We also have the folks from SnoboS with us today. Nika Monford, how's it going? It's going good, Tom. Thanks for having us on. And Terrence Gaines, how are you? Hey, how's it going, everybody? We were just talking about which ones of us spent money on Apple products already and a lot of other stuff on Good Day Internet. If you want to get that show, become a member at patreon.com. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. Walmart Plus is live, offering unlimited free delivery for many items, mobile scan, and go check out gas discounts and more. Walmart Plus costs $12.95 per month, U.S. dollars, or $98 per year. ViacomCBS announced that it will change the name of its CBS All Access streaming service to Paramount Plus in early 2021. ViacomCBS also announced new original programming coming to the service, including series on the making of the movie, The Godfather, and a spy show from Yellowstone's Taylor Sheridan. Google announced Google Meet hardware for conference rooms called Series 1. It includes cameras, a speaker, a computer unit with some optional additional accessories like touch screens and remotes. The system can automatically frame people while they're talking and filter out background noise and enhanced voices. Series 1 runs Chrome OS on the Edge, Tensora processing units. There are three suites of hardware based on room size from $26.99, that's $2,699, up to $3,999 available for pre-order soon. Former Facebook data scientist Sophie Zhang wrote a 6,600-word memo to coworkers about Facebook's response to misinformation campaigns. According to BuzzFeed News, the memo details misinformation campaigns by governments in Honduras, Azerbaijan, India, Bolivia, and more. Zhang regrets not prioritizing such situations and alleged that Facebook executives are motivated by public backlash and focused on the US and the West. Zhang was fired by Facebook this month, turned down severance pay though, so she would be free to send this memo. Adobe Illustrator for iPad was announced in November and is now up for pre-order shipping October 21st. This version of Illustrator works with Apple Pencil and is available to creative cloud members at no additional cost if their plan includes Illustrator. HP decided to announce a product on Apple Day, debuted its Omen Vector Wireless Mouse with USB-C charging. HP claims it can get an hour of battery life in 30 seconds of charging and a whole day of battery life in five minutes of charging. If you go the whole 90 minutes of charging, it charges for use of up to 180 hours. The Omen Vector Wireless Mouse is $99.99 available now in the US. Speaking of announcements, Arlo announced a wire-free version of its video doorbell with rechargeable batteries like the wired version. It supports HDR and night vision with an 18-degree field of view. The Arlo Smart Service for Object and People Detection costs $2.99 per month after a free trial. The Arlo Essential Wire-Free Video Doorbell is available for pre-order at $199.99 shipping this holiday season. Twitter launched a US election tab in its Explore section Tuesday. Twitter will use it to show a curated selection of English and Spanish language election news, debate, live streams, government election resources, and candidate information. It will also run public service announcements with information on voting. IBM published its roadmap for its quantum computer, saying it expects to build a quantum processor with more than 1,000 qubits with 19 to 50 logical qubits by the end of 2023. IBM's current model has 65 qubits with plans to launch a 127 qubit machine next year and a 433 qubit machine in 2022. This summer, Microsoft reeled in its underwater data center off Scotland's Orkney Islands after a two-year experimental deployment as part of Project Natic. The shipping container-sized data center had 864 servers sitting at a depth of 117 feet. Microsoft said that the underwater data center was eight times more reliable than land-based centers, in part because dry nitrogen air underwater inside the container was less corrosive than oxygen. The European Court of Justice ruled that excluding data consumption from a customer's data cap as a special offer, sometimes called zero-rating, violates EU rules on net neutrality. Several European carriers offer packages that exempt certain apps like Facebook or Twitter from counting against data caps, and a case against Hungary's telenoor for such practices had been referred to the ECG. And scientists at Australia's Monash University have produced a device that combines camera sensors and implanted microelectrodes to restore vision to blind people. The system works in preclinical trials on sheep, and the first human clinical trial is set to take place in Melbourne. Video is interpreted by a vision processor and then transmitted wirelessly to a set of tiles implanted in the brain bypassing the optic nerve. The tiles then convert the images to neural impulses. So this is a real working thing that if it works in human trials, that's going to be amazing. All right, let's talk a little more about Amazon launching luxury stores for high-end brands to present products separate from the rest of Amazon and separate in more than one way. Oscar de la Renta is the first official partner, but they say they'll have more. Luxury store partners will have more control over their inventory, their selection and pricing than normal Amazon vendors do. They'll also get some special tools to show off items like a 360-degree view, and only select Amazon Prime members will be invited to access the store to give it that exclusive feel, although you can request an invitation. I don't think they're trying to keep people out, but they're trying to balance that, like, exclusivity feel. I don't know. What do y'all think of this? By select Prime members, I think they mean we'll select all of them. That's definitely a marketing thing, I think. But I mean, Amazon feels a little bit like the place where you go for cheap, good deals, not, you know, exclusively, but I don't think they could launch with significant partners in that way and have that luxury feel without doing a little bit more, something a little bit different, and that might be it. Yeah, because I was going to say I don't do a lot of shopping on Amazon. It's like I'll do my shopping elsewhere, and then I'll say, well, I'll just go to Amazon and buy it. But this way, you can kind of get that shopping feel with all the extra features. So I'm assuming this is a play on staying on the website longer. If there's added luxurious shopping experience versus just throwing a bunch of stuff in my cart and hitting the three months, subscribe and keep it moving. I think it's more on the branding side. I think anytime you say something is exclusive or luxury, people want to get in on it, and they don't want to miss out, so they want to be a part of it. Honestly, I just think it's a marketing scheme to get people talking and get people interested. Yeah, it's targeting. Go ahead, Patrick. Oh, just wanted to mention it's targeting a different, you know, trying to target a different market and its growth. Amazon always needs to get new types of products and new types of customers or get existing customers to buy more. So maybe that's also a way of trying to e-count that little bit of growth they have left, given that they essentially own the world already. Yeah, I think it's funny. Every so often, I'll search on Amazon for something, you know, that's like considered a luxury brand, like, I don't know, some Chanel lipstick or something, and it's there. And I go, oh, wow, it's there. I just wouldn't thought of Amazon as the place to get this. If there was a kind of luxury brand platform on the entire platform, I mean, it doesn't really matter, because I can buy it either way, but I can see where being able to cater to folks who are looking for something that's a little bit higher end on Amazon itself, but it not look like Amazon, it's always like, you know, we're undercutting everybody else kind of thing. Then, you know, it's kind of a win-win. Yeah, Oscar de la Renta doesn't want to show up next to the sardines in your shopping list. Exactly. Bloomberg sources say that Sony has reduced expectations for PlayStation 5 manufacturing by 4 million units to 11 million units by the end of March. They say the reduction is due to manufacturing problems, including yields as low as 50% from the AMD system on a chip. Sony had planned on a far fewer before lockdown number boosted demand for gaming gear. Sony's PS5 price and release date are expected to be announced on Wednesday. That's tomorrow. That is significant. I mean, the reduction in production numbers is significant. The yield seems extremely low for me. It's not unexpected for completely new CPUs to have low yield, but 50%. That has to improve quickly for them to be able to get that thing out the door a little bit more. It seems, you know, we were thinking there are going to be shortages initially, and then they were producing more. Now we're back to shortages, so putting those pre-orders as soon as you can. So is that the trick? Is that a ploy? Excuse my conspiracy theory here. Is that a trick for people to gain? You know, like we mentioned before, you got iPhones coming out. You got Xbox coming out. We got the holiday shopping season. We got coronavirus. We've got all this stuff packed in. So all these different Amazon, Samsung now, we got all these different ways. Are they trying to figure out how they can pick at us to get us to jump in early versus waiting and wait until, you know, things start to die down? There's some Sony supply chain manager right now going, I wish it was a trick. I wish. 50% yield is not what I wanted to see. I mean, that doesn't mean they can't take advantage of it that way, right? To kind of, you know, tweak the demand somehow like better order fast because we don't have that many of them. Yeah, I mean, all of the analysts that I've been hearing from and I follow quite a few and some of them are my friends, they're all saying that no matter how many they produce, they're going to sell out. They're going to sell everything they have given the current climate and the boost that gaming has seen and the excitement of people and the price that Microsoft is forcing and all of those things. I would be very, very surprised. It might be inaccurate reporting. I guess that's possible. But I would be very surprised if that was, you know, a ploy. Well, folks, if you want to get all the tech headlines each day in about five minutes, don't forget to subscribe to DailyTechHeadlines.com. Hey, I don't know if you all saw, but there was an Apple announcement today. A few of them actually. Let's start with the watches. Apple Watch Series 6 is out. It will be available. It's actually available for order right now. Shipping starting Friday, but don't expect if you haven't ordered one yet to get your shipping date to be Friday because they're already starting to push out. It's available starting at $399 for the GPS only version, $499 for the cellular in gray, silver, gold or blue aluminum. Also stainless steel model in graphite or yellow gold and the high-end addition model in natural or black titanium. A few other models out there as well. The big deal on it is it's got the S6 chip, which is a new advanced chip for the watch based on the A13 optimized for Apple Watch. They're calling it Apple Silicon, 20% faster than the older watch and a blood oxygen measurement feature. So 15 seconds to measure your blood oxygen, periodic background readings. There's some other stuff like two and a half times brighter always on display so that it's easier to see even when you're not raising your wrist. A bunch of new watch faces, a new solo loop that's stretchable so you don't have to connect it. You just pull it on over ultra wide band and this family setup where if you want to get your child to watch but not a phone, they can have their own phone number and you can put parental controls on it, stuff like that. Terrence, let's start with you because you and I are the ones who already ordered this. Yeah, absolutely. Like I said, I'm starting to get to the mode where I didn't get them every other year versus every single year so I bumped up to the ceramic version. Like I mentioned Tom, I was interested in the solo loop but they had this whole watch fitting guide and I'm one of those people that's like, I need to go in here and get this now. So it's like I skipped that option and just got the sport loop. But I'm definitely interested to see how the solo loop works because it's unlike some of the traditional Apple Watch bands because there are different sizes versus just adjusting the lock or adjusting the strap to fit your wrist. So I'd be interested to see how that all works as far as the order process is concerned. Nika, did we peer pressure you into buying one yet? Not yet. I've been scrolling on the website looking around. I'm not completely sold on it but I'm leaning but I haven't pulled the trigger yet. I'm still looking at the colors. I'm coming off of a series three here so I feel like this is a big upgrade for me because I'm going to get a lot of that stuff that was in the series four and five that I missed out on. But if you're on a series five. I'm on four. If someone is on a four maybe maybe an upgrade but it's a you're a little more on the fence right because you're farther off if you have a series five and you don't need if you're not worried about your blood oxygen level. I'm not sure you need to upgrade. The only other thing I could see about the six is the chip that gives you the next generation digital car keys. But again, if you're on if you're on a series three, I'm not assuming you may not have a vehicle that gives you the option to do digital car keys. So it's kind of like yeah, I'm still I'm still not missing anything by upgrading. No, my 2014 Honda Civic does not have that you are correct. Only the BMW had the car. I think that's right so far. Yeah, that's the only one that's been announced anyway. We also got the Apple Watch SE, which is essentially the same thing as the five with fewer features. So no always on display no electric cardiogram or blood oxygen monitor. But it does have the always on altimeter accelerometer heart rate compass gyroscope motion sensors $279 for that one or $12 a month over 24 months and they're keeping the series three available as the baseline option for $199. Patrick, what do you think of these watches? The series three feels like the reason for you to feel like you're getting the middle model and not the cheaper one when you get to watch SE. But it's definitely interesting. It doesn't have the big health tracker things on the SE. And I think it's going to be, you know, the way Apple is segmenting all of their product lines is really fascinating because the watch was the last one that didn't have a cheaper model. But now they have the SE things. It's almost like we need an iPad SE and they have really. I don't want to say affordable because obviously, you know, it's it's snobs all around when we talk about Apple as Terence and Nika know. Obviously, but I think this is a very mid range category of products that they're diving into very, very much and it's getting Apple for a cheaper price and still high quality product. Now, of course, if you want the best thing, you still have to, you know, pull out a little bit more money from that wallet, obviously. But I think it's a very interesting strategy and it's working. All right, let's talk about subscriptions. Apple Fitness Plus is a new service from Apple. We know Apple is moving towards wanting to make money off of subscriptions off of services. Apple Fitness Plus is kind of a shot at Peloton saying we've got instructors. We've got workouts like yoga, cycling, dance, treadmill, strength, core, rowing, hit, mindful, cool down even. And all you need are your Apple Watch and your phone or your tablet or your Apple TV. They have an algorithm that'll give you workout recommendations. So you'll see this either in a tab in your activity app or in the fitness app that you'll be able to get for the iPad and Apple TV. They promise that all your data is going to be stored on your device, nothing associated with your Apple ID. $10 a month or $80 a year just for that. They'll be doing a three month free trial if you get a new Apple Watch. But the big announcement was Apple One, which is three bundles, even though it's called Apple One. The main bundle is for an individual. You get iCloud, 50 gigabytes, Apple Music, Apple TV Plus, Apple Arcade for $15 a month. The family plan is $20 a month. You get, again, Music TV Arcade and iCloud 200 gigabytes of storage. Or you can go Premiere in some countries. That gives you all of that Plus News Plus and the new Fitness Plus and two terabytes of storage for $30 a month. All of that's coming this fall. That was the one thing that confused me is like, well, if you're announcing these, why aren't you making them available? They're subscriptions. What they hear right now makes me wonder if they want to have them available at the same time as the new iPhones. Well, I think a lot of the fitness stuff probably they've been working on it and need to make it solid. I have to say of this entire announcement, the Fitness Plus stuff got me the most excited because I just love working out in my garage. That's what I do anyway. Like I put on my VR headset and I work out all the time. Happens. But you know, and like the Peloton or other subscription based, you know, workout services and there are some, but Peloton is probably the most well known. They are awesome, but they're expensive.  But some old, some old, some, some old bike and, you know, then you can get the service for 999 is like, oh, interesting. Yeah. You know, especially since Peloton just released the, I think what are they calling the bike plus, which is their lower tier version of their current bike. So I really, I really do think it is Apple's kind of, you know, hey, we got something over here. That's just as good and quite a bit cheaper. Right. And you don't have to use, you can use any equipment, right? So most of the non equipment workouts, like the hidden, the cool down and the, the strength, you know, they mentioned all you need is dumbbells. You know, but if you do, for instance, what I was interested in Apple Fitness Plus, because I have a rowing machine, you know, some of the other rowing machines are super expensive, but the features for like the classes are not there. The features for the, you know, tracking your distance and tracking all the other things that you would normally want to track on a rowing machine is not there with the services. Well, here comes Apple. They've got all of that. I can use any bike. It's like a win-win or I can use any machine. It's a win-win. You know, who else thinks this is interesting? All of the companies and developers that have fitness apps on the Apple ecosystem, where anti competitive and monopoly issues are very much alive. I think this is a bold move by Apple. Spotify already issued a protest about the bundling just because of the music. Yeah. I can't imagine how the fitness people also feel. I really love how they're kind of tying in fitness and music, though. I barely have time to listen to music nowadays. So I'm like, all right, I want to, I want to do fitness because I want to listen to music. So that's going to be my motivation. So I'm going to pay for Apple music. And Peloton is having these disputes with music licensing so Apple can kind of throw a little shade there too and say, we don't have any problems with that over here because we got Apple music and it's all part of the same bundle. In fact, I think the premier $30 a month is still cheaper than a Peloton subscription. Yes, it is. I think the Peloton subscription with no equipment is like 40 bucks. Yeah. I do want to mention we don't have Peloton, I don't think in France or Europe. And we're not getting Apple fitness plus thing either. At least not until the end of the year, maybe later. And we don't have Apple news either. So I'm not going to work out after all. But you do get, but you do get the playlist from the workouts you can access on Apple music. And listen to our workouts, you know, after we were like, this was really great. Listen, I do think the pricing here is dead center. If you, if you already have like two of these, it makes sense to get it. And if you, if you already want three of them like iCloud, don't forget iCloud. In fact, iCloud may be the most compelling, even though it's the most boring part of this, it does make sense. If you only use one of these, obviously not a big deal. Maybe on two, you're on the fence. Let's talk about the iPads. The iPad Air is now the best iPad out there. 10.9 inch liquid retina display, 2360 by 1640. Fully laminated true tone anti-reflective, all of that. But they moved the touch ID into the top button with the sapphire crystal lens. They've got the newest chip they make, the A14 bionic on a five nanometer process. In fact, the announcement of the iPad Air was more an announcement of the A14 chip, the A14 bionic chip than it was an announcement of an iPad Air. Six core design, too high and for low, 40% faster than the previous iPad Air. Four core GPU that's 30% faster graphics than the previous chip. Two times faster graphics than a comparable laptop, which was an HP. They didn't call it out by name, but they put an HP laptop up there. 16 core neural engine, two times faster machine language than previous versions. Machine language accelerators that are 10 times faster than the previous Air. Also, they made it USB-C, no more lightning on the iPad Air. 20 watt charging, 5 gigabit per second data transfers. Decent camera, 7 megapixel front, 12 megapixel on the rear. Supports 4K video with improved stabilization. So it's even better than the iPad Pro camera at this point. Stereo audio in landscape mode. Wi-Fi 6 supports the new Apple Pencil and the Magic Keyboard, as well as the Fully O keyboards available in silver, space gray, rose gold, green and sky blue for $599 base. Available next month. There's also going to be some carrier models with LTE built-in. No 5G on these. And just to make sure we mention it, the iPad 8th generation is the newest entry-level iPad. It's just a better chip than the 7th gen. A12 Bionic 6 core chip. Works with the full-size smart keyboard and Logitech keyboards. Apple Pencil original, not the new one. Is it $329 or $299 for education? That one also available for order today, shipping Friday. So the iPad Air knocked till next month. The iPad 8th gen available now. But really, I mean, this is all about the iPad Air, isn't it? Yeah, absolutely. I'm pretty impressed with the iPad Air. Just the A14 chip alone, it seems pretty powerful. It's definitely looking like a superb device. And it even has the look and feel of the iPad Pro. So it's definitely a great device from what it seems like. So the iPad Pro is still more expensive than the iPad Air. Right. I guess it has a camera module that is more capable on the back. The LiDAR. Yeah. Exactly. That seems like a weird product positioning. If the only thing it has is that maybe a couple of other things. But that was weird. The only things I was able to find that differentiate the iPad Air versus the iPad Pro was the 120 Hertz refresh rate on this screen display, face ID, and the LiDAR camera. Other than that, the iPad Air is equal, if not better, with a better stabilization on the camera with the price and with the new chip. So it leads me to believe they got to be around the corner, if not this year, early next year, updating the iPad Pro. Or is that too soon? Well, they just updated it in March. They're usually on a year schedule. So I'd be surprised if they updated it before March. But also it feels weird to have the iPad Pro sitting there next to the iPad Air right now. Right. Yeah. So many of the folks that were following the announcement as we were, so much of it was, what is going on with the iPad line? The iPad Air is now better than the iPad Pro. Why didn't you just redo the iPad Pro? I mean, I have to believe that Apple is phasing out the iPad Pro and the Air is going to become the iPad. Because I don't really understand what they're doing otherwise. It is a little confusing. All right, let's wrap this up with the last announcement that iOS 14, iPadOS 14, watchOS 7, and TVOS 14 all out tomorrow. We're recording this on Tuesday, so all out on Wednesday. Not MacOS, which makes me think they're saving that for a laptop announcement in October when we expect we'll get iPhone announcements as well. You can start updating on Wednesday. Go get them. Yeah. So that even the people who would have liked to buy iPhones but can't, they still get something new, so yay. Yeah, and it's pretty cool. I have the public betas on my iPhone and my iPad, and it's a nice upgrade. Definitely, definitely with the widgets is the main thing you want to play around with. Looking forward to see what third party developers do with the widgets because right now it's all Apple stuff. Well, thanks to everybody who participates in our subreddit. You submit stories and vote on others every day, and we appreciate you for it. Keep it up, dailytechnewshow.reddit.com. All right, real quickly, let's check out the mailbag. Let's do it. Mike and Smokey San Francisco said, I have a paranoid thought. When the team was expressing concerns about the body compass radar data, I was surprised that nobody discussed the recognition identification potential of the technology, although I'm sure Tom considered it because it's common knowledge that he considers all ramifications of every story. Isn't that nice for you? Mike says, if the device also uses radio waves to detect your breathing and body position, couldn't it also recognize your unique skeletal structure? Couldn't the same technology be deployed in a public location similar to cameras, but even less obtrusive? Mike, I'm not going to say you don't look good in your tinfoil hat, but it's a big leap to go from radio waves that can detect your breathing to skeletal structure. I'm not saying maybe someday, but from what I know, that would be a big leap for this technology, so you don't have to worry about that quite yet. We also got an email from Edge, who just wanted to take a moment to say thanks for all the hard work we do. Thank you, Edge. Edge wrote, I've been a listener since the TNT days and a patron for two to three years now. I really believe in what you all do, so this year I told my wife, all I wanted for our 10-year anniversary is a DTNS mug. He says, I'm a simple guy, and she came through. Unfortunately, my anniversary is 10 days away and I discovered it accidentally, but she was cool enough to let me have it anyway. So I figured I'd share a picture of it as well. Thanks again. Take care and be safe. Edge, looking good with that DTNS mug and a happy anniversary to you and yours. That's amazing. Indeed, Edge. And thanks for writing in. And yeah, looking good. You know, enjoy the mug. Also, shout out to patrons at our master and grandmaster levels, including Paul Rees, Martin James, and Degrassia A. Daniels. Also, thanks to Patrick Beja. He's our Tuesday person. Patrick, what's been going on with you since we saw you last? Thank you for the factual endorsement. I have it here. I am at notpattering.com and you can find everything I do there. It's a brand new website that looks pretty snazzy. It definitely does. Definitely does. Well, glad to see you back and see you next week. Also, thanks to Nika Monford and Terence Gaines, the Snob OS podcast folks. It's so fun to have you on the show and let folks know how they can keep up with your work. Oh, yeah, most definitely. You can catch us on the web at snoboscast.com. You can catch our weekly podcast. We're on Apple podcast, Google podcast, Spotify at Snob OS. We're getting there. We're getting better. We're on YouTube. We're doing video now. So you can find us on YouTube at snoboscast. Another network just on social Instagram, Facebook and Instagram all at snoboscast. We appreciate the support from the DTNS crew. Definitely appreciate it. Definitely.  So you get that little alert tells you when they're going live. You can watch live. Yes. Yes. We appreciate it. Patron.com. All right. Of course, we appreciate all your support of this show. It's payday. I don't always talk about this, but I, you know, I had to pay Sarah and Roger so they can eat. And that's thanks to you that we were able to do that. So keep that support coming. Patreon.com slash DTNS. Oh, so good to eat. Our email addresses feedback at dealitechnewshow.com. Keep that information coming early and often. We're also live Monday through Friday for 30 p.m. Eastern 20 30 UTC. You can find out more at dealitechnewshow.com slash live. Back tomorrow with Scott Johnson. Talk to you then. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at frogpants.com. Club, hope you have enjoyed this program.


Remember that whenever someone tells you you can't do something or that it's too difficult, it's their limit not yours.


which is, which is psychopathic.   And that's sanity, that's humanity, that's relational. And my son, who I was just talking about with Dominique was telling me that in his work, he's really dealing with a lot of people that are very disturbed. And he said, you know, mom, like, what is that about people in America that think they can solve the problems of the world? And that's when you live inside of an empire, it affects your thinking, just like the war economy affects your thinking in your behavior. So bringing our own selves back to what it is to be relational, one of those things is that, you know, having that sphere of influence be smaller than the sphere of your values and what you're concerned about. So yes, we can be concerned about the whole world. We can be concerned about the genocide. We can be concerned about the devastation to the planet of our behaviors that are destroying it. We can be concerned about a nuclear war. And then when we can be concerned from the place of influence, that is those we touch, which is sanity. Because then we can actually have a healthy relationship to the grief we're feeling, to the desperation that it can cause inside of us and then move into being in relationship with what we are in relationship with to create what is necessary in this moment. And for each of us that is different and that leads us to what today is about. First, I always wanna check in with all of you and, you know, Emily, I'm Jodiom, the co-founder of Code Pink and Emily. I'm Emily, I'm the local peace economy coordinator at Code Pink, great to see you all this evening. Yeah, you can ask everybody to check in before we moved into the program. Sure, I'd love to share a poem before we do that if that's okay, yeah, okay, great. As we've been starting with a piece of culture, a way of grounding this evening, we're gonna start with a poem called The Summer Day by Mary Oliver, which you may or may not know. Just gonna take a breath. Who made the world? Who made the swan and the black bear? Who made the grasshopper? This grasshopper, I mean, the one who has flung herself out of the grass, the one who is eating sugar out of my hand. Who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down. Who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes. Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face. Now she snaps her wings open and floats away. I don't know exactly what a prayer is. I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down into the grass, how to kneel down into the grass, how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields, which is what I have been doing all day. Tell me, what else should I have done?  Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life? Yeah, I love the engagement with the fingers and the heart reactions and yeah, making Zoom a little bit more embodied, I love it. So as Jodi mentioned, we'll just, as we've been doing, taking just a couple of minutes to check in before we go into tonight's topic, which is stories. But yeah, I just wanna open the floor for people to share a little bit about what's been alive for you over the last several weeks as you've delved into local peace economy, whether you're working through the workbook or however you're engaging with this. What have you noticed? What shifts have you been making? What resistance have you been meeting? And also I know that some of you are new to this space as well. You're not necessarily new to local peace economy work, but you might be new to this container that we have here. So you're also welcome to share what's been alive for you that's brought you here. Floor is open. John. Go ahead. Oh, you're muted, John. People hear me. Yeah, now we can. And people hear me, yeah. Okay, yeah, so every day I read emails that I get from left organizations signed to keep up with changes that keep happening. And I've never been a patriot. If there's such a thing as being a patriot of the planet, I'm a super patriot. And I just, you know, I guess my biggest question is for us on the left is how to be effective. The greedy rich and the right-winger seem to be good at it. But maybe some of you have some ideas about how that would work. Thanks, John. Good question. The war economy structure is a big thing and it's got all the weapons and it's got all the money and it's also got most of the mines. So I think it kind of goes to what I was saying earlier. It's finding your relationship with it because I think a lot on the left, everybody, you know, it's like, we're right. So why doesn't it conform when the right and the elite are creating it? You know, it's not a rightness. It's like a literal, and this really goes to the story part of what we're gonna talk about today is it hooks our hearts and our minds against ourselves. It comes in and grabs us and uses us. And it really speaks to the unrooting of people that we've been unrooted from that sense of values, the sense of, you know, what concerns and we become just fodder for the elite, for capitalism and for the war economy to use. And I think that's what you call in them being effective. They're also effective in disrupting. You know, one of their biggest tools is to separate and divide. And we've been divided and separated and chaos has been created over and over again. And just creating chaos that distorts and distracts. I mean, I think one of those is elections. I don't know if everybody knows, but it's a $5 trillion industry of people who work to distort us and manipulate our minds.  We have a nuclear war hovering over us and we have a planet that's in, you know, in a collapse. And we get distracted in this hate and fear about things that we can have a relationship with and have an opinion about, but to be creating like Putin and Trump. I mean, these are just men. You know, it's like, they represent systems. They represent ideologies. It's like, it's no different today.  Hamas is an ideology. It's a value system. And for me, it's a resistance to oppression and violence. And you're creating these like poster children of things that then distort your capacity to be in relationship with what is happening. What is actually happening at a deeper core level and figuring out what you are related to.  So it's, they're very, as you say, John, they own the, they own all the airwaves. Like they're, you know, why ban TikTok? Because TikTok is the only social media that is not run by the State Department. They don't have control of TikTok. So, you know, it's, you know, getting out from under the war economy and so it takes us back to, as I said, it's like we have to come back to a healthy relationship, which is very hard when we've been addicted to this other where we've been made to think we live in an empire so we should be able to affect these big things. And at Couping, I've always said, you know, we can't end war till we end the war economy. And that means ourselves taking ourselves off the war economy and investing ourselves in a more healthy, beautiful future, which is hard to do when it's, you know, trying to just, trying to take your attention and pull it into all these other directions instead of like really being able to take yourself off of it and put yourself into cultivating the future. It's a hard process. We don't realize how much we've been used by it. And we wanna be able to have major effect like they do on things, but until we can literally relate ourselves, find our own little shovel and be shoveling the new world, it will continue to use us. And it's a hard thing to comprehend and it takes a little while to unravel ourselves from it. And today we're gonna talk about story and I can't believe it, but we have one of the great storytellers of the local peace economy with us, Rivera Sun. So, Rivera, we're gonna say a few things, but I mean, once we're done, I know you're gonna have a lot more to add because you are, this is a woman who literally spent her days telling stories and leaving the future with her stories. So I'm gonna just say a little. So, one of the powers, John, that they have is the power of story, but it's not the power of the story we're talking about. It's the power to take a story and weaponize your heart and mind with it by going in and looking something that you value and then using you. And we wanna be able to tell stories that open, liberate, and free, but because story, it takes the familiar and takes us into the unknown through the familiar. So it's, that's why metaphor is so powerful. By finding the metaphor that opens up the world, but a story connects the familiar to the unfamiliar. And that's how we use story in the local peace economy because it's kind of like, well, first of all, story has existed through millennia. Story is the connective tissue. Story is the connective tissue that connects through time. It's what happened around the campfire. It was the relational place around the campfire to describe reality. So that's the story we're talking about. And with the local peace economy, which has existed for millennia, the local peace economy is the connective tissue that nourish life that has been distorted by the war economy, by capitalism, by violence, by the need to control, by greed, all of that has distorted. The role story has been playing throughout millennia to serve life, to help us find our way forward through the stories that are told. I mean, think of fairy tales, that these are powerful tools, but they've been weaponized. And so where is the story that contracts, that takes us into being used by hate, greed, control, or where are the stories that liberate us into a future that is about connectivity, is about love, is about what life needs. So that's very much where story is so core to what we do, the stories we tell each other, the stories that inspire us. Because also stories are inspirational. They're what let, they nourish the heart. So right now, what in this time of so many generations of the war economy, when we say peace economy, some people don't have a relation to it. And it's like looking out at a field and a forever of snow, where there's no markers. And so many of these stories that we use to being markers into imagination of what we can create for the future that is the past meeting, the present meeting, a future that we need that serves life. So those are the stories that we're looking to and you are one of those storytellers and you're here with us. Also you're someone who cultivates a local peace economy in the north of New Mexico. I wonder if you want to share anything after kind of after my riffing off of story is of your own relationship with you as a storyteller. Just a very brief comment, you mentioned fairy tales and I remember and they lived happily ever after. And I figured, well, maybe he did but I'm not sure about her. They're the patriarchy, yes. Thank you for bringing that in, John. Vera. I am so proud of my housemate, my 85 year old housemate called John. All right, Vera, take it away. Well, I've loved listening to you and I'm so glad the thing that was in conflict with this evening or part of this evening got canceled so I could come. I just could have been twinkling, fingering the whole time that you were speaking, especially this idea that stories are much older than war and the war economy. Humans have been around for 300,000 years as homo sapiens, sapiens. War has only been around for 12,000 years. It's a relatively new invention and the scope of human history. And you can bet your boots that story, we were telling lots of heroic, amazing, mythic, incredible stories before war came along and co-opted all of that power, all of that magic, all of that storytelling capacity to expand our imagination, all of our values of courage, protection, determination, strength, creativity, resilience and said, okay, now we're gonna attach this to this idea of organized violence towards other human beings. So they stole it. They stole all of this power and what we're talking about is taking it back, saying, no, you've had it long enough, you don't get to play with these toys anymore, you've been abusing them. And that's a lot of what the work that I do as both an activist and a novelist is and I think one of the things that I work on is taking the fantasy genre and saying, what if a war, the goal of the heroes in the fantasy genre isn't to win the war, but to stop the war? No, what if Code Pink was the heroes of our fantasy stories?  They actually have all the tools of nonviolent action and all the tools of resistance and resilience that we know about as peace activists. And so I'm getting ready to release the next one. There's about six books in the series now and the newest ones about to come out this week, which we're doing with the crowdfunding campaign, which is, this is how it connects literally to the nuts and bolts of peace economy as well, is I'm not published by the big five publishers, they aren't lining up at my doors to make this the next best blood tripping fantasy novel in the New York Times bestseller list. These books are coming into the world because of people who care about peace and story and want to make it happen. So I could say more, but I'd rather hear from everyone else in the stories that you're holding and you're carrying, but I really do feel that this is something very close to my heart and to the way that I live my life and the vision that I have for the work that I'm doing with this one wild and precious life, as Emily was saying with the Mary Oliver poem. Thank you, Rivera. If you could put in the chat, maybe so folks can find their way to your novels and that would be super great. And also I think that was a mic drop with the stories are much older than war. So thank you very much for that. Absolutely. All right, Emily, maybe talk about some stories. Yeah, I just wanted to share my own relationship with stories in this work and then we'll go into some breakout rooms. So I'm preparing for this call tonight. I thought a lot about what I wanted to share about stories and I kept coming back to this conviction that I needed to reflect and share on the way that I relate to my own story in this work, the story I'm telling with my life, my one wild and precious life again, in the way it's part of a larger tapestry of stories, telling a collective story. So I'm gonna share two photos with you. So let me just get that screen sharing going. Oh, here it is. Okay, is this gonna be the right one? Let's see. Let's do, sorry, everything's open here. Okay, are you seeing that full screen? Yeah. Okay, so this photo is from an article called Roots Deeper Than Whiteness and I'm happy to share that, we'll link to that article later. And the caption of this photo in the article is, it's called The Melting Pot of the English School of the Ford Motor Company of Detroit. Upon graduation from the Ford Motor Company's Americanization Program, tens of thousands of European immigrant employees would walk into this large melting pot wearing their traditional ethnic attire. Their teachers would stir the pot with large ores and they would change into suits, grab American flags and walk out of the pot Americanized. I think about this photo all the time because when I first saw it, I just had such a visceral emotional reaction to it because to me it reflects such an important piece of my own story, specifically as a white-bodied person in the U.S. And as far as I know, no one in my family worked for the Ford Motor Company, but in many ways, I feel like whiteness, empire and dominant U.S. culture has really succeeded in rooting in my family. In just two generations, the vast majority of my family now lives by the values and narratives of dominant U.S. culture. We have been acculturated into it, separating from ways of being culture to the earth and to each other that were present previously in our lineage. And just like that, we've been Americanized and with that Americanization have accepted all the false and distorted stories about liberty, justice and the pursuit of happiness that comes with that. Over time and in my own context, like many of you, I came to understand that I didn't wanna pass on this story with my life and that I wanted to live out a different story. And that story is always unfolding and takes many forms. So it's not like I haven't made narrative to tell of it, at least not in this moment. But along the way, I am inspired by other communities that show me the possibilities of another way. Communities like El Castillo, an intentional community living on and with the land near Lake Attitlan in Guatemala. And I just spent several days with a couple of weeks ago and I have a photo here. This is, I have very few photos from my time there because I was not on my phone because I was just able to be present. But this is, to the left is the, their kitchen here, which is shared. I'm in kind of a living space and this is just a peek outside to the, where kind of their dining area, honestly outside. El Castillo really is a peace economy. They share meals and cooking and cleaning responsibilities. They care for one another's children and I have never in my life seen such free children. Like they're running around in the land. They take care of each other. They take, it just, it made me emotional, honestly, to see these children just living the way that they're living. And yeah, they take care of each other's children. They welcome in travelers like me. They live off the grid and source water from a nearby spring. They have ceremonies on the land and just outside the door here, you can see. You might be able to see there's a clothing rack where people can put clothes they no longer want or need or their children's clothes once they grow out of them since there's multiple families living on the land for others to use freely. And the stories I had been given by my culture through my family, through my schooling would never reveal something like El Castillo to me. But now El Castillo is a deep source of inspiration for me and one of my close friends, because we see the future we wanna help create being lived out in the world in the story of El Castillo. And this friend and I have talked for several years about creating something like this together, but now that we've both spent time in El Castillo, we have an embodied experience of it and have learned from their story. And there's a new spark for us in these conversations about what we can create together. And it feels so much more real and so much more possible. Yeah, so that's what I wanted to share about stories tonight. Thank you, Emily. You know, I think stories are also prayers. And I just wanna say that going through the halls of Congress every day that we really lead with stories and we have doctors and teachers and mothers and Palestinians with us telling their personal stories. And there was this one woman, we went to the offices of the 24 women who were in the Progressive Congress of the Democratic Party but had it called for ceasefire. And one of them had received a million dollars from APAC and we went into her office and they didn't want us to meet in her office. We met outside with three of her staff members, all women. And they had only heard the propaganda from APAC, which is a story that they tell that no one is allowed to hear but the members. Like we don't even know because they know we could poke holes in all of it. And so we told these stories and the staff members started to cry that they didn't like, that's how far they were from the truth that we were the first truth and they started to cry. So it really is telling these stories from our hearts, from our experiences and staying in the beauty of what it is to be human and connected is rare. I wanna say being in the halls of Congress, I had no idea how rare that they are sold so many lies and so much distortion. And we look at the layers and layers of propaganda like the New York Times is just propaganda. You know, it is just propaganda for the war economy. So to be able to tell and inspire with our stories is really also a prayer. And so we're gonna go into breakouts, let's see. How about like groups of threes is I think what everybody's favorite thing is in the breakout rooms. So, oh wait, before we go in the breakout room, could everyone put their camera on because we wanted to take a photo of all of you to put on the website of inviting people to join us. And we wanted to get folks like join this little community here. So if anybody that feels like they can wanna take, put themselves on camera. Of course, yes, in whatever playful way possible. I want to tell the story of this. Okay, you can in your breakout group because if we don't win the breakout group, we won't be. Oh yeah, there's a good story about Molly Ivins. Thanks, Sandra, who spent some of her last days with the Codepinkers on retreat in Austin, which was such a gift. So, you ready, Emily? Everyone ready? Smile, you can put peace signs up, whatever feels good to you, but I'll take a screenshot here. Okay, ready? All right, let me do one more just in case. Oh, Miss, you two look so adorable up there. All right, we're good to go. Thank you so much. All right, now I'm gonna put everybody in their breakout rooms. There'll be five rooms.  And Emily's gonna put in the chat if you could say out loud what it is before they go. Sure, yes, I'm putting in the chat now. But the question is what's one story you've inherited from our culture and how are you continuing to tell that story or not with your life? Does the story align with the future you want to create? All right, so we'll also, there it is in the chat and we'll also put it in your room. We'll see you in 15 minutes. So anyone have something that they talked about they wanna share with the whole group? Raise your hand. Any story you were affected by that someone else told that made you think in a new way? Dominique. I want to say I was very happy to be with Joy and Liz. And Joy is the reason why I've come back to these meetings because the first time she spoke at a little breakout group, she said, oh, I'm a poet and oh, I don't know what I can do. And I have been thinking of her, even talking about her to Fred saying, oh, I met this poet who thinks she can't do anything because the role of art is so incredible. Anyway, I'm an elder, but I want to encourage Liz, our third person who unfortunately had troubles with her sound. So we didn't hear much of her, but I want to invite her to, you know, she's her first time. She's a young person. And I think as elders, we need to embrace her and encourage her. How about that, Liz? I think that was beautiful, Dominique. Liz, it sounds like you didn't get to share a story. Is there? Yeah. I did at the very last minute. My audio wasn't cooperating, but it was a joy to listen to Dominique and Joy. So I really enjoyed being able to go into the breakout room and to hear how meetings have gone before them. It's just really nice to hear other people discuss these things. Cool. Well, thank you for the love and care, Dominique. And that's what we're about, is how do we recognize each other and give care and love? Anyone else? Have a story, Sandra? Well, I think because I'm saying is Vara's name right, because we're both older, we've kind of shared the inherited stories from our culture. And she's from Chile, but lived in this country quite a while. And we found our stories now kind of merge around living in communes or in a communal way. Emily mentioned that also. And wasn't enough time to develop things very fully, not very satisfying. And there were only two of us. But I mentioned that I went to seminary and worked on a thesis on the need for a theology of liberation for the oppressors and the not so oppressed. And how the base communities in Brazil, people who've been poor and whose families have been poor and they saw their children poor and they were going to be poor that these base communities helped them tell their stories so that they understood why they were poor and they understood where they were today and they knew where they were going to go.  And big changes came out of that. So that's, you know, we wanna see grassroots who want that to happen. And what I like about the local economy is it kind of feels like it'd be a good base community. And this is a small group and we're from all over the place, which is wonderful. But, well, I've said enough. That's about it for our short time together. Well, that was perfect. Thank you very much. And I also wanna say that, you know, the MST, who you're referring to in Brazil is, you know, definitely a part of our work. And I work with them a lot. And I'm gonna put in the chat, I did a webinar with them this week on hyperimperialism, which is kind of what we're living in, which it's just being defined. And it was people all over the world that work in local peace economies from Chile to Sri Lanka to Africa, you know, to talking about this hyperimperialism and how it affects you. So, I mean, it's in the chat and Emily will include it in the follow-up notes if you wanna take a look at that. I'm the last speaker after two hours. Vijay Prashad is the host of us. So, if you wanna really, it's a good learning. It goes from Lebanon. I'm the last person from the belly of the beast. So kind of a little bit of a worldview, but you'll get to see Yopedro Sedley, who's one of the leadership of the landless people in Brazil, which is a million and a half strong, all rooted in the liberation theology, which is, you know, the local peace economy and the sharing of stories and inspiring each other to the future and inspiring life with our stories. So, I'm really low-tech and I don't know what to do with chats and I can never go back and find a chat. It's okay. Emily's gonna send it in the follow-up email. No worries. You don't need to find anything there. So I wanna give Emily time to show us how to look into the stories that are online. Emily, if you wanna share your screen and give us a little tour. Absolutely, yeah. So you have probably seen the local peace economy Wiki linked in the follow-up emails and the invitation emails, but I just wanted to show it to you in our call here. So, and again, this link, I'll put it in the chat and it'll be in the local piece. It'll be in the follow-up email, but it's the Wiki Observatory and there's a local peace economy section.  And then we have a couple of other people as some others. And there's all these articles here. I could be scrolling for a long time that people have written largely April right now about local peace economy projects, groups, communities and what they're doing. And it's just a huge source of inspiration. And also as Jodi was talking about, it makes, it brings us into the unknown through the familiar. And I know for me, it's just been really helpful to go through these stories and be like, okay, this is what this looks like in practice. So there's stories about mutual aid, tool lending libraries, moneyless economies, about grief and ritual, which is obviously a big part of the local peace economy work as well, like we've talked about in past weeks. So yeah, we could just keep scrolling, find something that's inspiring to you, share it with others. Yeah, lots of ways into this work. So stop my share and we'll put that link in the chat now. And if you have any questions about that, please feel free to reach out. And I'll also put the link to register for the next call, which will be on March 27. And we'll talk about mapping in that call, which is also included in the workbook. Jodi, do you wanna say anything about mapping before we? Yeah, I just, you know, next week, we'll talk about mapping. And I mean, this is a part that I think is so important because when we started, we talked about being rooted. And so much of what the war economy does is unroot us. And one of the places is just where am I? And what is around me? And I know Macy, you know, we've talked about this before about Macy mapping where she was and really learning. So Macy, maybe you'll, we can assign you to talk next week because you were kind of ahead of everyone on this one. But mapping where we... I just set a coffee appointment with the healthcare worker today who does home health visits, talking about meals on wheels and what we're supposed to do with all these unattended seniors, now that no one's going to their house. And we were on point with that. Absolutely, I wanted to bring from her experience too. So great. So yeah, just mapping, it's like that's part of being relational is where am I? Who's here? Because we have been contorted in our relationship to everything, including just where we are, because we can be like in Palestine, but we can't be present with where we actually are, but we're not actually in Palestine. And I wanna say, you know, just to close off that in Palestine, what is happening is uncushionable and human and a disaster that is so hard to hold. And being relational to where you are can help that because it is intended to distort our psyches and our relationship to our own empathy. And so being able to be rooted and relational to where we live can help our empathy not feel that overload that John was referring to at the beginning. It's like, if we think we're supposed to fix it, which is, you know, impossible, then our own empathy is overburdened and not allowed to be the empathy, the healthy empathy that it is. And unfortunately, things aren't as simple as we would like them to be. They're way more complex and way more dark. And so really being able to be in love, in relationship to be in relationship with what we can only be in relationship with is how we stay sane and also in the end actually be of use to what's happening in Palestine. Because if we can't shift what is where we are relationship, where we have relationship, giving people strength to have their own empathy to be actually for what is human and what is humane, then we, you know, Palestine is showing us where we are going. And when we look at what the bigger problems are, we're all at the effect of them and how do we create what nourishes a future is essentially our task. So we all are here to love and be connected and being care of each other and to be in the truth. And we do that from staring our stories from our hearts. Thank you for being here. Thanks for all you do, you beautiful peacemakers. You make my heart swell with love. Thank you so much. Thanks everyone. See you in two weeks. Thank you guys. Thank you for all you do. Thank you so much.