Good morning and welcome. Before we get started this morning, because we're expecting a larger crowd, so for both the courtesy of the folks around you and for our speakers and our panelists, if you could make sure your cell phones are turned off at this point, it would really be helpful. For those of you I haven't met yet, I'm Frank Verastro. I'm director of the Energy and National Security Program here at CSIS. It's my pleasure to welcome you this morning. We're going to explore the topic of energy security, climate change, and transportation, and options for transforming the transportation sector. To be sure, consistent with our economic, environmental, and energy security goals. Today's session is brought to you in partnership with the Natural Resources Defense Council, and dear and serious, you'll see them on a panel later today, and with a grant and support from the Rockefeller Foundation. So we appreciate that and we'll talk more about that later. Typically we like to open these sessions with some poignant and insightful framing. I'm actually going to save that a little bit because we have a special guest for you this morning. Beth Osborne from the Department of Transportation, and Beth is on a tight time schedule, so we're going to ask her to make some remarks and take some questions, and then we promise that we have her out of here by 9.40 a.m. So I'll save longer remarks for a little bit later on. Beth was recently appointed as the Deputy Assistant Secretary for Transportation Policy at the Transportation Department. She's focused on surface transportation reauthorization, which I'm sure there's many of you in the crowd that are interested in that. The Secretary LaHood's Livability Initiative, and she coordinates CAFE, tailpipe emission standards, safety, and climate issues. And in her free time, whatever that is, prior to joining DOT, she worked as a congressional staffer on both the Senate and the House side, most recently as leg assistant for Senator Tom Carper of Delaware, where she handled transportation, trade, and labor issues. Before that, she served as policy director for Smart Growth America and as leg director for environmental policy at the Southern Governors Association. She's a native of New Orleans, New Orleans, and she earned both her BA and JD degrees from LSU. She's graciously agreed to join us this morning. Next, we'll have some public remarks. This is all on the record. Take some questions.  Well, thanks for having me today, especially on my short timeframe. I appreciate it. I'm going to start off by just telling you a little bit about me, and it may sound like it's not related to this at first, but I swear it is. I started out when I came to D.C. as an air quality person. And when I was in law school, I thought I wanted to be an environmental attorney, and going to law school disavowed me of the idea that I wanted to be an attorney. But I definitely wanted to stay involved with environmental issues. And when I came here, I worked for Congressman Ron Clink, and he was on the Commerce Committee. We spent a lot of time on criteria pollutants and the beginnings of a global warming conversation. When I went over to Southern Governors Association, Governor Huckabee and Glenn Denning are responsible for switching me over to transportation. They coordinated on an initiative dealing with the impacts of compact development and smart growth on quality of life and transportation. And I was fascinated by it, and I never went back. But one thing I've discovered as a person who works on air quality and transportation issues during my career is not many people do. And you see that in the development of both the climate change bill and the transportation bill. The folks who work in air quality tend to be very focused on what the Clean Air Act focuses on, stationary sources, utilities, heavy manufacturing. Mobile sources come up in very particular ways, but rarely, and when they do, it's mostly focused on programs like transportation conformity, which a lot of people would argue has not been the most effective program, and most recently, tailpipe emission standards, which I'll get into. On the transportation side, you've got people very focused on transportation, but not focused so much on air quality, and they often see environmental issues as a barrier to getting transportation done. And so you see very different policies in the development of the two bills and almost no coordination. And the coordination doesn't fail just in terms of the policymakers, but really in terms of the interest groups too that work on the issues. There's just not a lot of crossover in transportation and air quality, which is a problem. We need to recognize the role that the built environment plays on energy use and greenhouse gas emissions. When people talk about the built environment in these terms, they will talk about building efficiency, which is a very important thing. Buildings are responsible for a great deal of emissions. However, a lot of the policies we put in place to deal with more efficient buildings has resulted in the buildings, new buildings being built that are very efficient, but moving buildings from the center of cities out to the exerbs and increasing transportation to that building by so much, we more than make up for all the benefits of the new building. You see LEED certified buildings on green fields out in the middle of nowhere. My husband works for the FBI and used to be downtown, and I think we can all admit that the FBI building downtown is not so great. And it's a beautiful building that they build out in Tysons, but now whereas over 30% of the workforce used to take transit down to the FBI building, now every single person drives out to the building in Tysons because they don't even have transit outside of a very, very small window and really only about two shuttle buses in morning and afternoon from transit. So it makes it incredibly inconvenient. And federal policy prohibits the use of a shuttle from downtown out to the building for anything other than making meetings. You can't be for commuting. So building efficiency without location efficiency is not a successful strategy. I get worked up about these things because I've seen us make these mistakes several times and there's a fear that we could make it again. In 75, when folks realized we needed to reduce our oil consumption, we created fuel economy standards. And we were very effective. Sometimes we feel like we weren't because oil usage increased, but we did increase the fuel economy of our fleet by a great deal. The problem was we allowed vehicle miles traveled to increase wildly. It went up 132% between the fuel economy standards in the late 90s. Only 13% of that was due to population growth, according to USDOT. And GDP growth was only about 60% over that time. So whereas people say that it occurred because of population economy, the numbers don't hold true. Last year, when gas prices shot up, we did see people change their behavior. We saw them buy more fuel-efficient cars, unfortunately just temporarily. They're now going back to the same gas guzzlers. And they shifted their ways of travel where they could. We saw transit ridership just go through the roof. We saw people try to walk and bike. But in the majority of communities in this country, those aren't really very viable options. And so what we discovered was people reduced their oil consumption by lowering their quality of life. This is a very disturbing situation because it sets up a competition in most people's minds between reducing oil usage, reducing greenhouse gas emissions, doing what's right for our national security, for the environment, and on the other side, their personal economic well-being. And the sad thing about this is this doesn't have to be the case. We have designed their communities so that they have no choice but to see that alternative. Another thing that it was a little frustrating is while the price of oil went up, we saw people talk about the fuel economy of cars, which is a good thing, though Congress had just increased CAFE the year before, and we've gone and sought a more aggressive increase in CAFE and tailpipe emissions through our most recent announcement on that. But a lot of the conversations centered around investment in alternative fuels and what they meant by that was wind and solar, which is very helpful in a state like Hawaii, which uses a lot of oil for its energy production. But until we've electrified the fleet doesn't really do much to lower gas prices for the average American, and electrification of the fleet is decades off at best. So the deal is we cannot succeed in reducing our oil usage and reducing our greenhouse gas emissions from the transportation sector if we're not addressing the transportation system and how far and how long people have to drive. We can raise CAFE, which we have. We can improve the use of biofuels, which I think you'll see in the energy bill. But while that brings the emissions and the oil usage from the transportation sector down considerably, it does not bring us to our targets or really even near our targets. So that means we either attack the issue or give up the goal or transfer the responsibility for the ever-increasing emissions from the transportation sector to another sector, which is a ridiculous prospect. We can absolutely take care of this problem with transportation. It just requires a coordination between these policies and a focus on the issue. A lot of folks will say that if we do a climate change bill with an upstream cap that we'll address this problem. An upstream cap means increase people's gas prices. And the problem is that, one, if gas prices are where they are today and a cap and trade system raised them even by the largest numbers I've seen, which is not very high, it would not do much to change behavior because gas prices are inherently so low right now. The other thing is that transportation or that price signal is sent to the user, but the user is not in charge of the transportation options they have. And that price signal doesn't go to transportation planners. So it's a mismatch in terms of creating a market. And cap and trade is a great market-based program if you have a market. But in the transportation sector, most people don't have a market in order to choose which mode they travel by. People need safe, convenient alternatives to driving, and that requires a major capital investment in transit, sidewalks, the redesign of our streets to support walking and biking, as well as a concentration of development, infill development, mixed use, mixed income developments. Make sure that people are close to the things they want to do. They're close to school, they're close to work, they're close to the grocery, they're close to restaurants. I think of my mother who does live very close to many of these things. So check box one. Box two is can she get there on foot? Well, she could, but she'd have to play a real-life game of Frogger for those of you all who remember Atari. And you do find some communities that have great sidewalks, though they tend to be disjointed, but they don't link to any place that anybody wants to go. So while they might be useful for taking a nice evening walk, they're certainly not a real transportation mode. To address, to get better outcomes, we're going to have to address transportation, the climate change bill, and climate change in the transportation bill. One thing we should be considering is the fact that success in terms of reducing oil usage and reducing greenhouse gas emissions has a very negative impact on the funding we raise through the user fee for transportation. And that is true both in terms of a gas tax and a VMT tax. If people have the alternative to get on transit or ride their bike, they're not driving as far. And of course we don't want people to have to spend two hours in their car a day in order to do what they need to do. So, and the other thing is historically raising money from road users has not resulted in the transit investment that a lot of people would like to see. So looking for other sources of funds that don't come with a historical break might be a useful conversation to have. The administration is working on a lot of these issues. We're working on a reauthorization position as well as our reaction to the Waxman-Markey bill. I don't have a lot of answers yet about where we're going to come down on these issues. What I can point to are things we're already doing in transportation. People have heard a lot about the high speed rail program and really just greater investment in intercity rail period which can do a lot to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and oil usage in intercity travel. We're also involved in a livability initiative with the Housing and Urban Development Department. We're looking to coordinate our programs to make sure the housing programs consider transportation. We're locating affordable housing close to transportation alternatives so that we're not locating people on property that might be inexpensive but requires them to increase their transportation so much that it comes out a wash. And transportation programs that look at the reverse where we're putting transportation what the impact is on household income, those sorts of things. HUD has a request into Congress for a new sustainability program to improve regional planning and we're looking at ways to make sure that if they get funding for that which we certainly hope they do it is fused with what we do in transportation planning to make sure that there's again not a mismatch in programs. The goal is to coordinate local economic development planning decisions with housing, water and transportation decisions in funding. We can do this in a way that lowers all our costs and comes out with better outcomes. Right now a lot of the investment decisions we make in transportation push off costs onto other programs like the water programs and housing and onto local governments and that need not be the case. We're also starting to see these issues, initial attempts to address these issues in Congress. The Waxman-Markey bill does address transportation planning. Unfortunately right now it addresses it in a whole new transportation planning program handled by EPA. And since we're trying to break down stovepipes in general and look for greater efficiencies overall creating an unfunded totally separate planning program in EPA versus a pretty well funded even considering the situation of the Highway Trust Fund at transportation might not be a great mesh for good success. In the transportation bill we're expecting to see a bill in the House soon but early indications are even though they want to look for performance standards which I think everybody agrees is a good thing the initial reports are those performance standards would be set by states and cities separately. And again if we're looking to coordinate policy and make sure federal dollars are spent well we probably need to discuss what we expect to get from those dollars from DC. So I can offer you almost no solutions today because we have no administration positions on these issues but I can lay out all the problems and things we're trying to consider and hopefully we'll be able to come back with our position on the near future and I'd be happy to take any questions. We only have two simple rules on questions here and those of you who've been here before you understand what they are it's when you're recognized identify who you are and to the extent you can state your question in the form of a question that would be real helpful. And why don't we go ahead. You want to start? Oh sure. I'm Mitzi Wertheim. I run something called the energy conversation and the whole objective was to bring together as many departments and agencies to get them talking to one another to do exactly what you're proposing. My question is I'm really excited about how you are bringing people in to think systemically about these issues. My question is how well is it going? It's a good question. I've only been on the job for about six weeks so far but we've already spent a very large amount of time together and there is extreme excitement and I think it's in a very productive way. There's been some encouragement from various sectors for us to form MOUs and formal agreements which we have tried to stay away from. We feel like that's a way to spend a lot of time negotiating one piece of paper but the second we change over personnel we lose the MOU to a great extent. Our goal is to figure out what we need for our programs through our various reauthorizations through our various funding requests and then make sure this stuff gets in constant law and regulations so that it lasts. And we are going through these programs systematically right now to figure out what that would mean. It's a lot of upfront work but we hope it will be very productive down the line. We have standing weekly meetings for our overall group. We're breaking out into working groups and meetings separately. There is a ton of work going on and I hope that we can show something very tangible for folks in the very near future. I believe you had your hand up first. For the last many, many years I've been working on something called the Climate Change Technology Program which is an interagency thing. I've worked quite a bit with transportation trying to get them to think big picture strategy on how to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions and I finally saw very encouraging signs of life in the last say eight months starting today going back. So a little bit of bridging the transition. They're working on something called a comprehensive strategy for transportation. And one of the problems I've always seen in DOT is that you're so stoked by highways and rails and green and freight and transit and read et cetera that you really needed somebody at the LST level to kind of bring it together. So I'm wondering how is the strategy going? Is it really going to catch hold and is the Secretary now standing up to lead and coordinate that which would be proud of you? There's some very, very positive signs initially. We'll start with the bad news first and head to the good news. The bad news is our program really doesn't support doing what you're saying. It's a very regimented, structured program. The funding flows by stovepipe and as long as the funding flows by stovepipe you are not going to get past it. It can't be done just by the mechanics of the program. Most recently in the Recovery Act Congress put together a discretionary grant program actually with no earmarks of $1.5 billion and our solicitation for that went out on May 18. It's been nicknamed Tiger Grants. I can't honestly tell you what that stands for. But transportation's something. But it is the first discretionary multimodal pot that's going to be managed out of OST and the goal is to do exactly what you're talking about and frankly we consider it kind of our audition to Congress. Look at how we can handle this so that you might consider that doing this on a more permanent basis is a good idea. Our applications are due on September 15 and there's a lot of anticipation on what we're going to receive. It's a Recovery Act program and therefore the projects have to be close to completion in the next few years to really be competitive. It has to be well distributed over rural and urban communities and across the country so there are some restrictions. It's not purely competitive. It's going to be interesting to see what we get in and how many people have had innovative proposals kind of in the bag waiting for something like this. But we're very sensitive to what you're saying and we're trying to figure out what that means for a long-term bill and hopefully we'll have some proposals out in the very near future so that we can tell Congress what it is we're thinking before they get too far ahead. With your counterparts dealing with the international aspects of climate and transportation if you could talk a little bit about that. Speaking of stovepipes, at DOT even within the Under Secretary for Policy's office there are two different offices. One is policy which tends to be domestic and surface and then the other one which is aviation international affairs. Historically these offices have operated almost completely separately and we've gone out of our way to stop that and to really cross over and make sure we all feel like we're part of the same office to start to look at what you're discussing. We particularly understand when it comes to aviation that most everything we do is going to be done on the international front because clearly planes don't stay very well within borders. So hopefully that will increase. A lot of this with regards to greenhouse gas emissions we are working with Congress and it's the best way to do that. But from the Department of Transportation's perspective we want to make sure that we are sensitive to the international processes that are in place. We feel like there's a lot of success we can have through that and we want to make sure that that's reflected in whatever policy we put together. But the coordination has improved really dramatically already. I tenor consultant. Could you comment on in the sense of coordination that went on to get NHTSA and EPA together on the CAFE standards and the tailpipe standards and does that bode well for the future? Yes, it really does. There are a couple things going on there. I don't think it's any secret that NHTSA and OEQPS have not had the greatest relationship over history. But this process was an incredible opportunity to break down some of those barriers. We spent a lot of time together. Our folks at NHTSA have worked unbelievably hard. And this is yet another example of a DOT program that is incredibly structured, incredibly dictatorial in how it will run versus an EPA program that almost has no structure whatsoever. It was amazing in our conversations. Under the Clean Air Act they could do almost anything they wanted to do. I would say, but the law requires us to do X, Y, and Z. So the coordination has been tricky. It's a joint rulemaking and we have to make sure we comply with our separate and extremely different statutes. But the process we've gone through to get to where we are today, while some serious bumps in the road has resulted in a much improved relationship and I think a lot more trust than we had before. We're already looking at other tasks that we're going to have to work on together and looking for excuses to continue that relationship in every way possible to continue to improve it and make sure that these programs are well coordinated. I do think it's a good example of what we can do when people really want to make those relationships work. And if we can make it work between the Energy Act and the Clean Air Act, there really isn't anything we can't coordinate. I'm Dick Van Adam with the Science and Technology Policy Institute and last week I spent a considerable amount of time at the Intelligent Transportation Systems Conference, which was a very long stove pipe. I couldn't figure out which sessions to go to, but there was kind of an interesting set of things on climate change way over here. Vehicle intelligent transportation over there, a little bit on public transit, very little, and no integration of them in any comprehensive or coordinated way. Part of the thing that struck me is that I don't see within DOT maybe there is some mechanism for strategically assessing the interrelationships between these in some sort of analytical way, region by region, area by area, providing support to the regions. San Francisco struck me as being particularly aware of the interdependencies and trying to build some planning capabilities, but I don't think there are any planning models and analytical tools to help do that. So where in DOT would that kind of strategic assessment, planning support come from and how would you get that to support the regions when they're trying to do that? You know, it's a really excellent question, and again it comes down to the structure of our program does not lend itself to a lot of that. We do have some folks in our planning office at FHWA who are looking at best practices and trying to pull people together and let them know what's out there and upgrade models, and that's very positive. But if you ask people what the transportation program is, they will say it's a federally funded state-run program. Well, a federally funded state-run program is not conducive to a federal bureaucracy that can provide the assistance you're talking about. So we need to look at this in reauthorization, look at the structure of our program in DOT and what our role is with regard to technical assistance and research and modeling and pushing technology out and those sorts of things. This has not been traditionally seen as the role of DOT. And certainly with some policy changes we could be a lot better in those respects. Thank you. I'm a fellow here at CSIS. I'm also a member of the Federal Biomass Technical R&D Advisory Committee and I drive a flexible vehicle. So my question is going to be about E85 and where we're headed with the biofuels program. As you know, there's a federal mandate in place that steps up the amount of biofuels that have to be absorbed in the market. It's a national program. I actually worked for the Senate when this was being developed and at that point a lot of us thought it didn't make sense to have it a national program given the concentration of production. Nonetheless, here we are. Now with what's happened with the auto manufacturers, GM, which was the only company that made a real commitment to producing flexible vehicles. It's not clear how much they're going to do. As far as I know, there's no mandate or even consideration of requiring manufacturers to start making most vehicles flex fuel. There are a number of people here in this room who have been dealing with this issue as long as I have and we see this sort of disconnect in public policy and within a few years and this is leading to redundant infrastructure, potentially infrastructure that will be abandoned soon because there will be enough ethanol to serve certain markets. Are you really discussing this? Is this a priority for the administration at this point in time? It's a... I was on the hill when this was developed as well and remember the discussions about whether or not a national policy had the chance to work. It has been difficult and frustrating. In the tailpipe emissions standard, CAFE standard, we have continued to include the flex fuel vehicle credit which we think will help with that. It's very interesting what some of the ramifications of this program can be whereas all three of the domestic automakers have made a commitment to build flex fuel vehicles, though GM to the greatest extent. Most of the flex fuel vehicles they tend to build are six and eight cylinder engines and a lot of these mandates we put very heavily fall on the federal government. The department with the largest domestic fleet, civilian fleet, is the post office which gets better fuel economy and uses less oil by driving four cylinder engines. So we have to figure that out.  That's not a good enough goal. It has to be flex fuel on every type of car. Encouraging people to up-size in order to use a flexible fuel just does not get us where we're going. So it continues to be an extremely complex issue. You're right. There's a focus on other technologies as well and there seems to be a large movement of people that want to see us just simply electrify the fleet which may be a wonderful goal but again decades away. So I think people are trying to grapple with an extremely complex issue and try to figure out how this fits in with the rest of the goals and I don't know that we have answers right now. I probably have time for... Well, we'll do two more questions. Can I ask about the charging department? It's an excellent question and I would even back up and take it from 20,000 feet. A lot of people just don't want to deal with mobile sources at all. I've actually heard people, especially economists, say it's just hard. There are too many inputs and the car is creating a tight market cap when you've got inputs from the fuels and from the user and how they travel and from the way the community is designed and the transportation options provided and the types of cars and there's so many different points of contact there's not one place to leverage to shift these issues like you have with stationary sources. You also just have so many different little tailpipes that it's extremely difficult to control. I really would like to see people step back, admit that we're not going to fix this overnight, admit that we could make a big impact quickly though and start looking at all three legs of the stool. How do you deal in the short run with making a market for biofuels or for alternative fuels? How do we create a good market for fuel-efficient vehicles? How do we allow people to drive less in the first place? How do we convince people that a sidewalk is as sexy as a hybrid car? You know, I think that people, if they felt like we were on course to a good solution would be at rest with that. The discomfort is people are uncomfortable going into the issue of the transportation sector period and when they get there they discover there's not one quick answer like we'll just raise cafe standards and fix everything, which is what people want it to be. And then when they get there and they look at all the solutions, they recognize that it's a hodgepodge and it's difficult and they have to coordinate and even then it's not going to get fixed overnight. And that's a very disconcerting place to be, particularly for policy makers, that want to be able to explain very quickly how they're going to make things better. And so we need smart people helping us figure out all those individual pieces and then helping us frame how they all go together to make progress recognizing that this isn't getting fixed in the next 5, 10 years. But I think having solutions makes people more comfortable with that reality. Bob Hershey, I'm a consultant. You've talked about a lot of issues that have trade-offs. What kinds of technologies are you looking at which will improve the situation within these trade-offs? That's a big question. You know, within the transportation system there's a lot we can do in technology with ITS which was raised, just better operation of the system we already have. There's a lot of conversation about technologies that can go into vehicles that can help with better communication between them and therefore better operations, but also in terms of shifting us over from a gas tax to a VMT tax which is not the sexiest way to sell the technology. But, you know, again, while people really want to jump into technology and we discuss technology a ton with regard to the tailpipe emission standard and CAFE and safety and those sorts of issues, what we're talking about in terms of VMT isn't really a technology.  There are some technologies we can do to help with the planning to make it better in terms of better modeling, in terms of being able to overlay different impacts of separate transportation and land use decisions which will have remarkable impacts on quality of life, oil usage, climate change, air pollution, water pollution, affordability issues. You can go on and on and on but you do need some good technology and planning tools to allow people to compare what different things do to all of these various factors. I think of what Envision Utah did in Salt Lake City in the Wasatch Valley and they had four different proposals that looked at land use and housing and job and economic development and transportation decisions, A, being kind of business as usual, B, being a little more transit heavy and C, being a lot more infill development, transit heavy and then D, being the ultimate smart growth solution. And they found very interesting things out that surprised people. C, even though it wasn't the most compact, the most smart growth, the most transit, performed better than D because in the valley when you had development too compact you increased air pollution because it got trapped. You actually increased infrastructure costs because you were having to take care of so many people in a small area and these are things you can't really compare until you have the planning tools available to you to make these somewhat boring-sounding zoning and development decisions. So we can talk about vehicle technologies, we can talk about operational technologies but we do need to talk about these models and planning technologies not just in terms of helping policymakers make the right decision but helping them communicate what those decisions mean to the public because one thing Envision Utah did really, really well was get huge public buy-in by being able to explain a very graphic and tangible way that people got to interact with what these decisions would mean and so when a decision was made people were really bought into that decision. Yeah, Envision Utah.org, I believe. It really is the coolest program and I have a bias, I have a rule in my office that no one brings up Portland. No offense to Portland but we've heard about it. We need to hear about somebody else doing those cool things and Utah really has an incredible program that honestly started by extreme buy-in at each local government level. It's actually an outside group that came in and brought all those local governments in little by little but there's some lessons there that could be applied really almost anywhere in the country and I would love to see that repeated. Beth, I would tell you, I'm not only comforted by the fact that your substantive grasp of the issues is most impressive but the blend of enthusiasm and pragmatism but it's going to take a long time. This doesn't happen overnight. I appreciate your candor. I very much appreciate you coming. We may have you back if that works into your schedule. If you'll join me. Maybe if you do, I'll have something to say about the administration's position. Wouldn't that be exciting? No, you got time for that. Join me in thanking Beth Osborn. Thank you.


Thank you. Sorry about the wine there, I don't know what's going on. I'm going to talk about TCL as a minimalist language in the sense that as a language it sort of has no syntax, not no syntax but no keywords and a minimalist syntax that lets you inject your own commands and in fact the things that ship out of the box are the same sorts of commands that you can make yourself and so you can make it be whatever you need to be and this is the long lever with an easy grip because you can make it feel however you like and then do whatever you want. So I've got no slides to show, I've got some demonstrations to show. I'll talk briefly a little bit about the history of it and then get into a couple of the features and specifically get into tweaking some of those features to show what you can do with it. First of all, I guess how many people are already familiar with TCL as a language? Small, maybe less than half. How many people program with the C API? Two? Three? Okay, so we're going to get into some C, just a heads up but it's good, it's fun. First of all, so TCL was started, was launched onto the world in about 1987 and what brought it there was the inventor's frustration working with command languages leading up to that. So what he did was design integrated circuits and built tooling for the work for the integrated circuit work and they had specific tools that they wanted to build and commands to drive their tools and every time that they were doing their work, ad hoc, they would build the control languages that they want and end up building something that was slightly different time after time incompatible time after time in ad hoc from time to time. On sabbatical from his work at the UC Berkeley, it occurred to him why not write a standard kind of a thing to do this that would be a simple kind of a shim that you can inject into whatever the tool, the specific work, the things that they're interested in and have a standard library that would do that. At the time this was before the wide distribution of GUIs as far as tools go so people were typing all of their commands and this was the conception of TCL. It was launched on the world in 1988, so it developed conceptually in 87 and launched in 88 so at about this time Pearl 1 was out Python, I think still had about six years to come, Ruby was still in the future, Bash was in the future, so often I think that TCL is lumped in with languages as a scripting language which is fair, it's interactive, it's got a redevelop print loop, it's got the quick sort of prototyping I guess that people associate with a scripting language so you could say Ruby, Pearl, Python, TCL as far as languages but it is unique in the sense that it doesn't have any keywords and it's built to be injected into a thing that is more interesting than what it is and then it provides kind of a substrate to have the interesting thing that you're working on put commands into it and then make them available. So for example what it would do is give you things like looping constructs and decision and variable assignment and simple things like that so you can have a tool that does an interesting thing and leave driving that tool to something else, this is all very abstract but we'll, that's not that abstract but we'll get into some specific examples later on. One of the things that is interesting about TCL is that it's what's called homo-iconic which means that the icon is the representation of what it works with which is to say that in this case code is data or data is code, you'll be familiar with this from lists for example where it runs as lists and it parses lists and so we can emit a thing and run that thing. TCL is the same way but it uses strings, indeed it used to be pure string run as a language so it would be shooting strings or arrays of characters around as the method of its operation that's different now but conceptually it's the same thing, everything is representable as a string. So what that means is that commands emit strings and strings are the things that you run so you can have the emitted part of a command as a runnable thing. The commands are also, I was thinking about it in the sense that it's kind of like a socket pair in the sense to try and figure out what a command is where with a socket for example you've got an IP and you've got a port or a pair, another IP and another port and that is a unique identifier between two machines and there's no other thing that is like that as well. With the commands they have a name but they also have a little piece of data that comes along with them. They also have an implementation that could be separate from the name and in this sense it's almost like the Magritte painting, Sisi, Nepas and Pip where you might wonder what it's doing or what's going on and indeed you can take the standard commands and rename them or delete them because there are no keywords in TCL so it is a substrate that runs a thing and that's it. So it provides a substrate, it ships a bunch of commands but you don't need to use them and indeed a lot of people rewrite them. Example, looping structures, you have wiles and fours or four each to run across a list and it does the obvious thing. You can say 4x in list of things, do some stuff and it will properly do those things, iterate over it but I've written things for example that would take a JSON blob as a command and iterate over all of the pure nodes or recourse down the children nodes as a looping structure. So the JSON parser you can take any minimal C version of it and quickly write a nice little interface to TCL for it and turn it into a first class looping kind of a thing within TCL because what a command in TCL is really, really basic. What I'll do I think is launch a couple of demos and so I'll show you some loops and command invocations and we can show some substitution as well how a command can have its output be another command and run that and rewrite some looping and do a little bit of introspection as well which is another good thing as simple as what the substrate for TCL is. It has really great facilities for introspection which is to say you can tell you what it knows and as far as commands go for example and within each command you can say of what type are you which may sound interesting because TCL is often one of its mantras is everything is a string which means that it parses strings and it emits strings. Strings are generally considered type-less and duck typing for example where you just instantiate a variable and have it do the right thing or do something I guess is both attractive and can also be a cause for consternation or outright errors for example if you're trying to work with something as an integer and you feed it something that's not an integer and internally interestingly I think we might touch on it there definitely are types in TCL but everything is still representable as a string so it's the kind of default marshalling method maybe I should have left that off. Method so the strings come and go there are inferences that you can make with the types as well but let me load up some code and show off some of this type stuff that I was talking about so what I've got here is some C code I've got 400 lines 425 lines and this I'm going to load into a default TCL interpreter which I can launch like this and for example with the introspection I can do something like this and get a list of the things that it knows these are the things that ship out of the box so it's tell, socket, subs to open etc etc the code that I've got over here I can load that up as a module and what that looks like is package require and I call this one number like because I was working with some numerical stuff as an initial example so this module is loaded now and if I go back over here what I've got is a command that's called number like and then 1 so this is my own registered command and somewhere in that list it's going to show up what does it do though it is identity I've got another one that is the same and what is interesting about this is that from here this is the prototype and this is the actual code for it this is the one command is registered here I've got two sub commands that it will take and this is like I said TCL doesn't have any keywords it's got a few simple parsing rules I won't get into them there are 12 of them once you know those 12 you know everything that there is to know so I've got a sub command here that will do add and delete it tells you what it wants it does the obvious thing these are also composable so what I can do is this 3 gets returned as a thing but I could say number like 2 add number like 1 add 3 oops number like 2 add and it does the right thing I'm going to do this and load up something else I've got with respect to the introspection this series of commands here make 1 x, y, z, and a lets you instead of having c code to make a command what I've got is a command that makes commands so this one was called make 1 so this right here takes an argument and takes two arguments actually it takes the name of whatever you want to give it and a base value this is another number emitting kind of a thing and it will create the command right here and it gets injected into the interpreter and it's instantly a first class kind of an object so here I can make four of them and what I'm going to do actually is edit this a bit so you can see here there are the commands that we just created here x, y, and z but aside from that with the commands they let themselves be introspected as well so I know from a command what it's backing c structure or c code is and that is the signature of the c function that it gets called with and I can also determine what a specific piece of client data like discrete specific information belongs with each command so for example if I've got a thing that emits a number the number that it is emitting is going to be carried with it in memory and between with those two different things the backing function and the unique client data that it has I can identify things that are of a type so example I've got a command called like me and what it does is loads it takes two arguments it takes a reference command and a list of candidate commands which are the things that it wants to compare is anything in this list the same as the first reference piece so if I run it I've made commands here that are x, y, z, and a there of a class of commands that just emit numbers if I run like me and I see which things are like x x, y, z, and a are all of the same kind of command so they're all like x and I run that against info commands which is a list of everything that the interpreter knows about what it does is properly identifies what those commands are you might notice that x itself is missing and that is the case right here with the commands there's information that is associated with the commands and I test to see is the backing procedure for any command that we're testing in the list the same as what the reference command is if it is we're going to move on and do some more testing here we're going to filter out other commands so we're going to say if the object data the special piece of memory that's associated with the command is not the same as what we're testing against then that means that it's not the exact same command because if the special memory is the same between the reference command and the one that's in the candidate list that means that the special command is in the candidate list and we don't need to say that it's like itself so if it's not the same then we go and append the element from the list that we're testing because it passed two tests it's the same kind of thing but it's got a different memory so this is just an example of the commands sitting on the substrate and sure yeah, no, that's got it we've let's show it pretty quickly but yeah, are there any questions, comments? practically speaking it's often hidden in enterprise networks it's often buried in F5s and A10 network edge appliances it's used with storage companies as well 3PAR and Hewlett Packard use it for their work in the industry it's also used with computing design so cadence and mentor graphics for example everything that's in your computer has been touched by TCL with electronic CAD often used in prototyping as well and the joke is that it's easy to prototype so things often get whipped up in TCL and then work well enough that they just get rolled into production as well so it also drove the orc army and the lord of the rings so if you enjoyed that you enjoyed TCL yes I do and the way that I came to it to begin with was as the question is whether or not I enjoy writing things in TCL I think it's fine it starts out I find it very legible and then I think that the worry is that it's going to be like using duplo blocks or crayons later on because it seems so easy to use that you're going to outgrow it but the good thing about the malleability of it is that you can extend it as you feel fit and I came to it out of pearl which is pearl and so very strict full of special sigils and variables and things like that that are you have to know some of the deeper inner workings and I find that TCL is enough of a blank slate with a few rules that once you know those it doesn't get in your way at all but it's sufficiently malleable that it's interesting I've used it to do system administration for hundreds or thousands of machines at a time to do network connections and pull databases and turn those things into commands and make it do something interesting thank you very much Brad


So let's record, we're recording. Let's see if Joe Kelly Meister is on here. He might be, maybe not, but guys, any questions that you have, this is now the time that I want you to ask him. So post him in the webinar's channel and let's get some questions answered. If you guys have, and again, if you guys have any questions about upgrading, about signing up, basically anything as it relates to getting in our wonderful club, you can literally just hit my direct line or DME right here. I don't know if Joe is actually here today, let's see. Oh, you know what?  I think he was in line for like a burger or something. He was waiting until like 12, 10, my time. So let's see if he's here. He's probably just waiting, thinking I'm still talking about the slack.  Damn. I'll tell you what, man. Dude, what we could change it up today, man. Does someone want to come on? Aiman, Alex, does anybody want to come on? I could bring like Tay. Ah, shoot. I didn't realize Joe was out this week. Hey, if you guys want me to riff, I can riff, but I could bring someone on as well, whatever you guys want to do, whatever you guys want to talk about. Tay's like, nah, you're too vulgar for me. Who's got some, Harry, where's Harry? Someone tell Harry Haas to get in here. I'll bring him on. Why not? I don't think he's trading right now. He's in witness protection. Call that little Canadian out. But guys, if you do have any questions, just bring them right here. But if I don't see any questions here soon, I'm just going to start riffing, man. I'm just going to start talking about my stuff. So badly want to talk about the presidential election, but I'm not going to. I'm going to keep that for a different conversation. I would only bring that up if Joe was here, man. I'm telling you, right? Because we have so much fun talking about like the state of the market, but... Wow, that's some nasty sell-off right there. That was crazy. Yeah, definitely no politics, not today. All right, guys. Well, until maybe Harry comes on or something, let's talk about some stuff. So let's go back to actually the, let's go back to, hold on one second. Let me expand this as much as I can. One sec, guys. Let's expand this and let's talk about some of the things that maybe I do every day or what I'm looking for, or maybe you guys can look for on a general basis when it comes to price action. So let me just, I'll just show you some of my process, literally just some of what I do every single morning. So again, guys, one of the number one things that you can do every single morning is reach out to Alex's watchlist channel and then see what's running, right? Like Bows posting scans in the main room, Alex is literally talking about the exact levels he wants on everything, but when it comes to exactly what we are thinking, or at least what I'm thinking every single day, let's talk about some things. So check this out. Let me, I gotta keep moving this little icon so it doesn't get in the way of the charts.  So ITRM guys, the one thing that we talk about every single week, so if we have a ton of stocks moving, oh, I definitely will, Bram, give me a sec. The thing that I wanna convey to you guys is the thing that I've learned over seven years that is really, really, really in a nutshell helped me, man. And I tell a lot of members this, if we get on like a trade or call or something is twofold, twofold. If you incorporate these in your trading, you are going to see unbelievably massive results or something for the better. Are you guys fighting trend and are you guys using hard stops?  Dude, so many times it blows right through the level that you wanna quit or stop out on that trade. It keeps going and then you're frozen and then it just keeps compounding and compounding. I mean, I'm telling you right now, if you guys haven't seen some of these crazy, crazy moves and what they can do where a stock goes from two to 40 in a day, this is, look, this is why we have hard stops. Yes, of course you can cut yourself off mentally. We can always do that. But dude, at the end of the day, Harry's banning himself from after hours for a week, got it. When it comes to hard stops guys, the reason why we have them on is for the anomalies.  Number two, so are you guys using hard stops? Number two is are you fighting trend?  Let's see, what were the runners? I know some of the weak ones were C-Tech, C-Tech and Adel. So let's take a look, right? C-Tech today, what do you notice in this stock? Dude, it's up a lot, but it's beaten down. This is not what's called a hot chick. So we've got kind of verbiage and lingo at MIC and it's very, very much tailored to which side of the trend is intact for each stock. This is what's called a broken down stock. There's a lot of overhead. I'm gonna draw some lines for you. Check this out. Oh, nice. Let's just take a quick look at what Bao just traded. Ambo, yep, right back to VWOP, state of resistance. Nice job, Bao. And a red to green line as well. But let's take a look back at C-Tech guys. So check this out. Let's just draw some lines for the pre-market, right? The top of pre-market, and you could do this every single day to the point of basically the open, right?  This is called overhead. These are longs underwater on their position. Anybody who bought from basically 240 to 382, correct? Dude, that's almost half the entire move is people are underwater. Look at that. I mean, you could just eyeball it for God's sakes. If you did Fibonacci retracements from zero to 100, that's like 50% basically. So what happens when something like this happens? We are wanting to short a resistance point and the more coupling factors you have is the more that it is stronger, right? Like the more it's just way stronger. So on outer lines, I'm always putting near the tops, right? Like the points of resistance that I think it is probably a good chance of failing off. And I like these. I like these in the morning. It didn't quite reach my line, so I didn't hit it. But the whole point is, is this actually, Alex was calling it, he wanted 250, which is about right here, because not only was it a whole and a half dollar number, it actually correlated with a VWAP push and fail. So this was kind of like a double resistance and it lines up even right here. So you guys can really take that into consideration, but any pops on this, there's so many long traders underwater that this is actually probably going to be followed with some kind of resistance and sell off into these what's called, quote unquote, relief pops for the guys that are bagholing their position, correct? The reason why I wanted to introduce that versus this one is ITRM, look at the way it was trading pre-market. There's not a lot of people underwater. Now, I'm not talking about the daily chart. I'm talking specifically intraday and pre-market. If this is up from, let's say 66 cents up here, this does not look like what C-Tic looks like or C-Tec, this was another one. By the time this opened, guys, look at this, I wanted a VWAP push. Why did I want a VWAP push? Because this was trading so far under that any relief pop into this resistance line. God, I would have scaled. Now I'm a little bit more conservative and I wait for outer lines more than the next guy, but dude, this was my bread and butter. If this would have made it up to here, this I would have been like foaming at the mouth. Like this is what I'm looking for. This just really kind of tapered off and then didn't do anything until zombie hour, right? And then if you do draw a line, which you should every single day on your charts, at 1030 Eastern, after the first hour, this is when you need to kind of wrap up your shorts. This is when we kind of lose the edges short buys traders. This is the first hour, this is where the edge is. This is where you are going to see a lot better results as a short buys trader and then things tend to zombie, man. Volume dries up, it comes back and spurts, pumpers may bring it back in and then when it comes to volume, simply take a look. Let's take a look. The reason why this came back so strong is the volume was not only meeting the levels of the morning, it was expanding upon it and this was the highest at least intraday the stock had ever been. All you had to do was pay attention to the volume. You see that? It's dead. There's no demand here. You're buying this down here until you do start getting little perks and then you get some actual, some fluidity. You get some momentum. And then again, I'm just gonna lay this out for you guys. I'm just gonna lay down at 11 to 12, like I showed earlier. You have another edge in shorting. Like I said earlier, this is what Bao does every single day, man. He's shown up in the morning. He's using the majority of size. And yeah, so let's take a look at what Bao's actually saying right now. Notice after 3 p.m. and NDM, I haven't seen this one yet. Oh yeah, man, see, look at this. So two things, two things, guys, seriously, two things to pay attention to. Not only is the trend still pretty much intact on a multi-day kind of trend upward. And I like to just eyeball it, man. Like I don't even have to connect the points. This thing is just up from yesterday, went up in half hours, yeah it did but it reclaimed pre-market so you know there's some strength in there. And then what did we say? What did we say? If you draw a line, 3 p.m. Eastern Standard Time is when shorts lose their edge. That's when they lose their edge. This is not a time you wanna be short, especially on a strong stock, on something that has been squeezing, on something that has been holding, on something that is a multi-day runner. This is dangerous to short. So when you get a VWAP reclaim around this time period, dude, you better not be adding to your position and adding blindly without a stop.  No dude, that's very dangerous. Because something like this, if this closes super strong, can gap up again. Look what it did, look, I'll just give you an example. So when something does what NNDM did, like yesterday, right? Like literally, let's take a look at this. This was yesterday's price action. When this is strong and closing high, it's closing strong into the close. You have two very, very common options. You have the option of one, a nice after hours run up. But because dude, the strength is spilling over.  But if it doesn't do a massive run after hours, sometimes it'll just close right where it is and then you'll get a gap up right here tomorrow where it starts there, you see what I'm saying? People thought they were in the clear right here. No dude, and then this thing was like, uh-uh. Because not a lot of people were under water from the day before, even right here.   That doesn't matter, dude, that doesn't matter. Look, I'm not saying fundamentals doesn't matter. Don't get me wrong. That totally matters. That offers an edge. What I'm saying is, is you can't play your bias and you can't say, look, just because I know an MDM should be down, I'm gonna short and I should be right. You need to remain, the market can remain way crazier than you can remain solvent, right? Is that, that's the old saying? I know Baal knows it exactly, but the market, irrational, right? Like the market can be irrational way longer than your account can be solvent. Price action in volume always will trump everything in my opinion. And I'll bet you, I'll bet you even if you ask our fundamental trader, markets can remain irrational a lot longer than I can remain solvent. Yep, John Maynard, Keynes. So check this out guys. This is our fundamental trader right here. I showed you guys earlier. Chicago Trader, his real name's Matt. I know he will tell you. I know because I picked his brain before. As much as he can tear apart an SCC filing, like I can tear apart a Tinder profile, he will tell you that due to the end of the day, if price action is telling you you're fucked, guess what, you're fucked. You need to have hard stops and you need to know when to do it. Now, this doesn't mean that something can't fail in at 3 p.m. This doesn't mean that at all. This could close back down to 240 day. I'm not trying to guess it. I'm not trying to anticipate. I'm just saying that your edge as a short is not here. That's the whole point. You just want to kind of lock up your shorts by this time. Does that make sense? You have an hour window in the middle of the day as a short bias trader if you're not trading the immediate morning. The famous last words, but this time it'll be different. And the thing about trading is it's a probability game. The reason why I had trouble as a short in my first year and a half is because here's what would happen, guys. Here's what would happen and I'll give it to you in a nutshell. I would be right. And, you know, Bao did this in his early days too, he would tell me. I would be right 30 days in a row.  That 31st day, I'm stuck short from fricking 202 on NNDM on that 31st day. And I'm adding here. And then it goes to four and I'm stopping out and I'm losing the month of games. I can't tell you how many times I did. Dude, I did that for a year straight. So I was like, dude, I'm king short. I'm baller, I'm cocky. I don't need a hard stop. Dude, I didn't use a hard stop until a year and a half ago. I've been trading for seven years.  And guess what?   You got to incorporate hard stops. Number one, well, here, I'm gonna do it. I'm gonna write out. Like I want you guys to screenshot this. I swear to God, dude. Number one, hard stops. Number two, don't fight trend. Number three is basically, well, I would say time-based trading. Master time-based intervals for trading. Dude, if you can master these three things, dude, you're gonna set yourself up for so much success, man. So much fricking success, guys. I screenshot it if you have to. I swear to God, hard stops. You cannot leave it up to a mental stop because when an N and D M comes or a U O N E or something crazy, it only takes one. I knew traders who were like, it takes one. I knew traders who made 30, 40, $100,000 a day. Then a stock comes around and they lose a million. Bro, you wanna live like that? Look at what Alex has done. The reason why everybody wants to be Alex. The reason why Alex is the most disciplined trader in the world, the reason why it's not about making $20 million in a year is because Alex is literally walking process. I'll tell you what he does if you're not familiar. He is up a million dollars on the year on process that we teach. He's not withholding information. He's not withholding everything. He shows you watch list. He shows you commentary. He shows you the lines. He shows you what he sized and he shows you a P and L. He will trade with a $35,000 account. Hear me here. You gotta hear me on this because this is how important process is. Alex will trade with a $35,000 account. Guess what?  Dude, look at this. This is from our boys at Cobra. This is my main man. These are the guys at Cobra, dude. This is literally Chad and all these guys. And Chris, look at this. As prerequisites, we've generated your profit loss for the time period from January 1st, 2020 through September 9th, 2020, based on cleared trades through your account held by our clearing firm, which is Wedbush. We have determined your profit and loss for this account during this time period is a total of 453,000 net after all fees. Guess what? That's one account. Here's his e-trade. Here's his e-trade, 499. That's Cobra and that's e-trade. And I think, is this the third account?  That's a million dollars if you add it all together, guys. That's a million dollars. My point is, and I haven't even gotten to it yet, my point is this, Alex trades an hour a day and he cuts himself off an hour. He, dude, I'm telling you literally out of this million dollar year, I know for a fact, maybe three days, Alex traded a little bit in a lull, a little bit, only because maybe Bao wasn't around to slap him around. Bao was probably out sick. Bao was probably out partying. Something happened where Bao wasn't there that day to say, hey, dude, cut it off.  My point is, is Alex's walking process and it's teachable, it's scalable, it's repeatable.  Why, why are you in that room? Swinging $500,000 P&Ls down 300 up 100. Guys, can you, look, I'm just saying can you, can you repeat that? All I'm saying in this is everything that we teach are repeatable. In fact, you can literally be Alex, but you gotta do, you gotta put in this, I'm not saying it'll be easy. I'm saying trading is not an easy career, but it's simple. And Alex has simplified exactly how he did it. He posts it, he talks about it. We talk about it every single day. GSE 224, I didn't know Alex watched all MIC content before it gets posted at LOL, he never stops on it. You think Alex needs to be in this webinar right now? No, dude, he's in Miami. He has technically on a vacation slash work life right now, but it's a different norm for what he's used to in your journey. You think he needs to be in this webinar right now? No, dude, he will outwork everyone. Alex will outwork. Yeah, I should be on a beach with an umbrella in my drink, literally Alex. Dude, Alex, the reason why he makes a million a year, making the most amount of money with the least amount of stress, why? Because he has a process, because he sticks to his discipline.  I've never seen anything like it, dude. Now he's taking it to health. Now he's taking it to his body. He's working out.  That's the point, a million dollars in a year or look like Terry Crews in a year. Like he's extreme, dude. I'm telling you, he's good, but he's crazy. The point is guys, if you cannot repeat what you're, what the people in charge of your room, I'm not even gonna say mentor, I'm not even gonna say guru, I'm not even gonna say fooboo, just the people in charge of whatever room you're in, moderators, whatever, can you repeat what they're doing? Are they teaching in a way to where they're not necessarily revenge trading or buying breakouts or pumping stocks or front running or doing anything that is basically, I hate to say it, but agenda purposed. Does that make sense? Agenda purposed, they are after their own gain first. They don't care about you.   They don't know your name.  That's my point. That's the difference of MIC, dude. That is the difference. And Alex is the walking epitome of this and what you can become. So again, if anything, guys, this webinar is almost like a little bit of a motivation today. And if you guys have questions, I mean, ask them away, serious. But this is more of like a look, I'm telling you, you can do it, but you've got to put in the time. You've got to put in the energy and you've got to put in all the resources. If you are in our chat and you are not reading this one, like probably valued at $700, which we give away for free every single day. If you are not reading this watch list every single day and reading the commentary, well, guys, you got to watch the video. You got to participate. You got to ask for help.  Obviously, you know, we can't trade for you. We can't learn for you. You got to get out there, but we have all the appropriate tools. And if you master these three things, man, which basically is processed is, I mean, I go goes without saying, number four would just say basically, D, all of the above. Yes, that is my final answer. This is what process is. Having a hard stop, having your certain criteria, not fighting trend, cutting off at a certain time based on time-based intervals for trading. If shorts only have the edge for the first hour and then 2 p.m. to 3 p.m. Eastern, you really want to trade low. You want to trade midday unless there are exceptions. The way Bow trades is he is able to take a full advantage over this process, but guess what? He's so good at channel trading and hitting the resistance lines perfectly that if you have the best patience and discipline and you give yourself tight risk like he does in just channel trade, you can actually see a career in that as well. Bow does that every single day. He will maximize the morning, size the F down and channel trade. But here's what happens. Is he is cushioned from the morning of using size and or bigger size that by the time channel trading comes around, if he's up 8,000 in the morning, yeah, risk $400 on a trade. If it lines up, risk $300 to make $600 and then he just keeps patting the wall. Does that make sense? Does that make sense? It's hard to beat Alex. We need to work hard and putting in lots of time. Alex's life motto, dude, is make the most amount of money with the least amount of time. So again, there are guys on Twitter claiming to make 10 million a year and guess what? Maybe some of them do. But what level of stress are they dealing with? Do they go home and literally hit their girlfriends because they're so stressed from losing $400,000 today? Like who knows, dude? I don't even wanna be a part of that level of stress. Go in, base hits. So that was another thing. Actually, I think it was Austin who said this recently and it just stuck with me. Austin's got really, really good analogies, man, or at least sayings that work for trading. So one of the first that he's known for is guys, front side shorts require front side covers. Just because a stock is pure front side does not mean that there's not a short in it.   Oh, I'm sorry.  C-TEC. Yeah, C-TEC, that's what I was trying to pull up.  Does that make sense? You're gonna wanna hit the simps. This is what Alex did today. Nice, thank you, Alex, for posting those. Check this out, guys. NNDM side chick, right there, poppin' a VWOT fail. Let's go peck. This was a chat pump. Once it started topping out and stuffing, Alex shorted. And if you guys look at peck, it was actually a low-hanging fruit. So this is where you correlate. And this was a failed pumper, not MIC. This was a failed competing pumper service that bought the shit, alerted to his room, lined up with previous day resistance. Alex took advantage of that right here, especially when it started stuffing. You saw that and covered right there. Dude, nail and bail, sick. NNDM again, once it broke down, once the top was for him, he got his move, then you size down, hit it, VWOT again. The first two bounces are the best. The first one's obviously the best. The second one can work. Stay careful on the third. J-FIN, boom, I forgot this one. Oh, that was the one I forgot. Nice, thank you, Alex. I totally forgot about this one. Dude, I was even saying it in the open. I was like, dude, I'm saying VWOT and Adderline right there. See how that core aligned with all this? Check this out. How many points, how many times, and again, I don't need to get it to the scent, just eyeball it, top, top, top, top, top, top, consolidation point, it just kept bouncing. This is a form of resistance. So when it's way under and it pops back to that, if you could combine VWOT with this, and I mean, if you wanted to get exact, yeah, it's pretty much right there. And look, this isn't rocket science, guys. It's not rocket science. So again, broken stock, side chick, weakest stock of the day. Alex was not trade, I don't even think he did. I don't even think he hit ITRM today. Why? Because it was the strongest. Alex has not made a million dollars in the year shorting the strongest stock of the day. I don't know how much more easier it can be, it can be taught. He mentioned it was a side chick. He put in the watch list today, ITRM, potential hot chick of the day, boom, let it form a top, then we will join a pop to short after a death penalty open, which happened, which happened, but here's the thing. Alex has already made his money, dude.   Who wants, Val or Alex? Do you guys wanna come on?  He's there now.  Alex, you on the under Alex Smiths? Yeah, there you go. Yo, do you hear me? Take the floor if you're there, buddy. Yo, do you hear me? What's up, buddy, yeah. What's up, dude? What's up? How you doing? Dude, I'm jealous that you fucker, you're in Miami. Like, how much better does it get? But I'm not on the beach, bro. I'm in my hotel room right here. And in about 26 minutes, he's gonna be on the beach. So let me kind of, I'm not gonna give too many details of it. I'm just gonna give like a date and a time. So we are planning a Miami meetup on Saturday, October 10th at 1 p.m. The location will be disclosed soon, but we are going to start back up our meetups. And this one is gonna be great because both me and Bauer are gonna be there. So mark your calendars, Saturday, October 10th at 1 p.m. Miami meetup. Guys, you can screenshot my screen right now just to get the details right here. Miami meetup, Saturday, October 10th, 1 p.m. It's the time, not the p.m. Oh, yep, sorry. I just meant to say 1 p.m. Yep. So that's it. Yep. Dude, that's gonna be so much fun, man. I'm in the process of moving, guys. So I won't make this one, but I'm gonna tell you right now, you're in good hands.  It's gonna be great because when MIC started, our goal was to kind of throw these meetups and get traders to meet each other. And because of the pandemic, it was put on hold for the past eight months. So now that Miami's opened back up 100%, and I'm here, it seems like fate that we should throw our first meetup back from COVID in Miami. So I'm excited. I'm looking forward to meeting everyone again, and it should be fun. Guys, this is what they look like, man. We get traders together, man. We meet you guys. Seriously, if you go through the after, look at this, dude. These are our meetups, man. Look at it over there. This is a community, man. This is in the beat. This is one of Alex's friends that comes to all our meetups, dude.  Yeah, it's gonna be fun, man. I wish you were coming to Tosh, but I know it's kind of a lot right now. I have to kind of get everything settled. It's a little bit short notice because again, I wasn't really planning on staying in Miami, but I love the vibe and the audience here so much. I decided to stay a few more weeks, and that's busy. So Bao's gonna come down too. Gonna see him for the first time in almost a year. Oh my God. So it's gonna be really fun to hang out again. Yeah, man. Bao just booked his flight today to Miami, dude, next weekend. So I'm telling you, it was so short notice. Unfortunately, I just conflicted with my schedule, but guys, it's gonna be a lot of fun. Definitely make time, man. When we created MIC, and Alex basically just corroborated this, is our goal, dude, was to do it different than everybody else. And look, every now and then, someone will do something where they put it in a loop. Do we want to meet thousands of traders? We wanted to literally like- And now that we're gonna start back up again, everyone else is gonna start back up again too, bro. Just you wait and see. Dude, like how much fun we're, Alex, how many in-person meetups do you think we've actually done? Seriously? Well, MIC's been around for two years, and for one of those two years, it was COVID. So in that one year span that we- One year. We threw about six or seven meetups in one year. It was basically every other month. And dude, in like two boot camps. Oh yeah, two boot camps, exactly. Shit, man, we did a lot. But it should be fun, man. I'm excited to hang out with everyone. That's awesome, man. Who's going right off the bat? Anyone here? I know a lot of people are probably gonna catch up to this webinar, but is anyone, ah, dude, that's awesome.  Hell yeah.  Now Alex is gonna order like 10 pounds. That's it, bro. I'm gonna clean him out. Yeah, guys. So it's gonna be a casual meetup Saturday, October 10th at 1 p.m. It's going to be at a rooftop. So we're gonna be outside. We're gonna not be in an enclosed location. Should be really, really fun and excited. There's gonna be drinks there and stuff. So we're gonna keep it casual. We're gonna keep it good. It's gonna be great to put a face to all the names that we've been seeing because again, our goal, our mission was to kind of unite traders and bring them all together because trading is very lonely. We sit in our desk for eight hours a day and we're mostly not that social for whatever reason. And it's really hard to talk to people about trading because they don't really understand what it's like. You can't go and tell your friend that you're making or losing $100, $200 a day. They're gonna think you're gambling, but we're gonna be surrounded by traders. Maybe you could find a tab in Florida. Maybe you could find someone that trades a similar style as you. There's a great way to kind of step out of your comfort zone. We've been locked up for such a long time and what better way to start getting unlocked than to kind of hang out with me, Bal and the entire team.  That is not what this is about. We were all beginners, bro. I remember when I was trading on my setup Costco, dude. I went to Costco and I bought the cheapest computer that they had with the cheapest monitors that they had and just with so much lag and so much nonsense, but that's how I started. Alex, I'll do one better. When I first started trading, bro, when I first started trading, obviously I was in the most well-known chat room that we both wore that came from. That produces a lot of guys getting in the market and I traded for the first year and a half from TD Ameritrade on, I didn't even know what it was at the time, but dude, I did the first bounce it up on my mobile for a year and a half. Oh yeah, dude, definitely. I remember some of the first stocks I was trading was like plug and all these crazy things. And it just goes to show, man, that was where I started. Bow started with these massive screens that he has a very famous story where he had it on a desk and the screens were so heavy that the desk crashed like... Dude, that's the best story. ...freaks out. So we all start somewhere and yes, I'm very blessed. I'm very lucky to be... Basically, I went to Best Buy the other day. I went and I was like, again, same thing. Like, yo, what's the cheapest setup you got here, bro? So I went, I got the cheapest setup they had, set it up and took it from there.  Yes, I'm in Miami now. Yes, I'm really finding success, but at the same time, I still remember what it was like to be struggling every single day to find consistency. And the thing that really helped me, really, really helped me, is just dumbing it down to being so simple. The basics, right? The basics. Short at resistance, cover at support, walk away in zombie times and ignore the hot chick. And do not fight. I just keep it that basic. Exactly, bro. And hard stops, hard stops. And if I just kept it that basic, you know what? I went from making 5,000 a day, losing 10,000 Tuesday, making 30,000 Wednesday, losing 50,000 Thursday, making 100,000 Friday. I was starting to lose my hair, lose my appetite, find so much depression. And ever since I dumbed it down and made it simple, sticking to the side chicks, sticking to the broken stocks, putting hard stops and walking away in zombie times, shit, we're in September, October's about to end. And I think I'm up even more money now. It's crazy. Well, I know. Let's be as real as we can, dude. You could probably push up $4 million a year, but dude, why? It's gonna stress you. Oh, definitely, bro. I actually underperformed this year. So I've actually had years where I've made more than $1 million in the year, but I was trading eight hours a day, trading nine hours a day, sitting in front of the desk at all times. And to me, this year, I underperformed in terms of P&L. I didn't make the most money out of anyone, but I could guarantee you that I traded for the least amount of time. And I don't know about you, bro, but if you tell me that I could trade for an hour a day, make a million dollars and have the next 20 hours to do whatever the hell I want, whether it be working out, going to the beach, drinking, meeting people, I would take that over making extra money, working more time, because at the end of the day, there's gonna be a certain point where the happiness is more important than the money. Well, right now, if I'm able to stay stress-free, it just pours into my trading for the next day as well. Every day that I trade stress-free, it goes to the next day. Dude, and it's like a lot of new traders really don't understand this concept, but we are trying to kind of input this in your mind, guys, is like, look, Alice can probably pull a three, four million dollar a year, but here's the difference between rich and wealthy, man.  Dude, if he makes really good money and has 22 hours in the day to do whatever he wants, because he traded for two, you know what I mean? It's like not into getting sleep, but if he has the rest of the day due because he only traded an hour, that's wealth, dude. Again, my goal, I've met a lot of traders, bro. I've been blessed to meet a lot of traders that make five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10 million dollars a year, right? It doesn't matter, dude, yeah. And you know what it takes to get there? It takes literally 24 hours of focus. It takes constant studying, constant education, constant improvement, constant everything, and it is possible. And if I set my mind to it, I can do it. But for me, based on what I'm looking for out of trading, I'm looking for freedom. Quality of life. Freedom and time, right? Because I don't want to sit there. I don't want to sit there for eight hours a day and just trade and trade and trade. And then by the time the market is closed, the press and my day is already gone. I'm very, very happy and very satisfied doing what I do, sticking to the process and being able to walk away. And you know, every time that I walk away after a good day, it just makes my day better because I'm already starting on a winning streak, right? I have a great day. I have a stress-free day. It kind of gets these endorphins going in my system that says, all right, you kicked-ass trading today. Now time to kick-ass everywhere else. If I'm sitting there and draining my time, draining my energy all day trying to make an extra dollar, I'm not going to have that same high and that same happiness as I'm getting right now. So it's all a matter of perspective. And for me, guys, what I'm looking for is trading for the least amount of time and making the most amount of money. Dude, I love that. And going back, bro, to this picture, because I literally can't tell you how hard I laughed when Balf first told me and Alex because we're in a group chat together. And he was like, dude, these computers were so big. He goes, I was the middle of the night, dude. Sounded like an earthquake when his desk fell in the open. Yeah, Balf thought it was an earthquake.  And if you know anything about Balf, he loves his trading setup more than anything, especially his mobile setup. And he's superstitious about it.  He doesn't even have clothes in a suitcase. He just gets clothes, dude. As long as he brought his computers, he forgets clothes. Yeah, most of the time he brings the computer, sets it up and makes enough money to go buy some clothes while he's wherever he is. Dude, I was laughing so hard because Balf was like, when the pandemic first hit, Alex, do you remember? Balf was like, dude, people are quarantined at home. He's like, I've been trading for 20 years. I've been quarantined for 18 years. Yeah, exactly. We've been quarantined our whole life being traders. And that's where the meetups come in, right? We know what it's like to be quarantined. We know what it's like to be alone. And it's hard to talk to people about trading. And you know what? I'm very, very, very proud of the whole meetup thing that we created. And we started because if people are copying it, it means that there's something really organic and something really good there. So while these people are just doing it to do it, we actually get enjoyment from it. So be prepared to see plenty, plenty more of these happening as the restrictions on COVID end. Oh, 100%, man. And I will definitely be at the next one. Alex, real quick, are there any sectors that you and BOW avoid personally? Sectors? I definitely avoid blockchain, man. I'm not a fan of it. Oh, like cryptocurrency stuff like that? Yeah, like you don't do it in any kind of sector. I don't really touch that stuff, man, because I don't really understand it. Maybe not in terms of sector, but maybe certain news catalysts that I avoid are phase two, phase three trials. I don't really like those. Huge names attached. I don't like when companies have Amazon or Walmart and their PR. I'm basically looking for the scammiest of the scam companies. And if they have something like Walmart or Amazon, even if the deal is fake or real, it is still possible to be pumped, you know? Yeah, dude, because if, look, if Warren Buffett's name is in the headline, dude, that's gonna, I mean, for the uneducated trader, they're rushing to buy it. Exactly, exactly. So we have a list of rules, and I think you even have your list of rules that's posted at like six or 7 a.m. every single day in the mail. Yeah, it's so early in the mail. I think it's at like 4 a.m. Yeah, it's somewhere in the room, but we have like a set of rules. We have a process. And I'm pretty sure that we have videos in the video library that cover all the stuff too. So we just, we just have literally every, like I'm trying to think like what we don't have for a new, if you think about the MIC video library, it's basically a search engine guide. So we have so much content and so much videos and so many lessons that if you just go to the video library search bar and type in something, you'll be able to get a full database of all of these videos and all of these things that we're talking about. And that's kind of how you could refine and improve your process too, right? Bound it. Here's a whole rule list, guys. Here, I'll show you how to access it. Just download it right here, 4 a.m. Eastern every single day in the main room. It's just, dude, it's just gonna show you how to stay safe. Oh, should I just do an offering? And again, guys, you have to remember that trading is a game of pattern recognition, right? So in trading, your goal is to find patterns that work and wait for them to show up and execute the pattern again, right? So Bal and I have been trading for so long that we've seen the same patterns happen over and over and over again, right? We've seen the same observations like the zombie rule or the first red day or the low hanging fruit. So we've basically done all the heavy lifting and all the hard work, finding a strategy that works, right? And that's the reason why we found it is because we lost so much money trying to figure it out on our own, right? So now you don't even have to figure out the strategy. All you have to do is join and learn the strategy and wait for that pattern to show itself again, and then that's how you capitalize on that setup. So I'm basically waiting every single day for these low hanging fruits, the first red days, the death lines, the BWAP proclaims, all these setups that are different patterns in my head and I'm just waiting for the stock to conform to the pattern. And when that pattern presents itself, I put capital at risk and I try to take advantage of that opportunity, nine times out of 10, it's gonna work. And that one time out of 10 that it doesn't, my hard stop is gonna save me. Exactly, man, exactly. Dude, it's not a surprise, it's not a coincidence that the same process that I'm using is what James is using, Harry is using, Faye is using, Tom is using, and plenty of all these other members are using to find success. It is not a coincidence that when someone joins MIC that they don't leave or they don't cancel, it's because they find so much value in it. At the end of the day, MIC is $6 a day, right? And if you can make more than $6 a day, which is, I paid $55 in commissions today. So if you can make more than $6 a day trading, then this is all worth it. And to me, the way that I see it is that you with this 200 a month or $6 a day is basically an investment to make five to 10 times that per day. And guys, be honest, dude. It's like, be honest with yourself, seriously, write a spreadsheet budget yourself if you have to, dude. I went to Starbucks right before this and guess what? I need a latte to perk up. Dude, it was $6.56, man, that's a day in MIC. Yeah, bro, are you crazy, dude? It's like, come on. I know Tosh could afford it because he's a great trader and he's making money, but for most people, you shouldn't be spending $6 and 50 cents on a goddamn coffee. Guys, for real, man, it did, man. That can be a full day of education. And trust me, if you just take 1,000 shares and make a 10 cent scalp, there is half your membership paid off in one day, guys. All you have to do is put in the work. And you know what I've been learning about this whole workout journey and everything else because I'm very new to it, right? I'm very new to this whole working out and exercising world because I really despise it. But the more that I do it, the more I realize that the only thing stopping me is my brain. My brain is telling me to stop, right? And if I'm just able to kind of trick my brain and convince my brain to keep pushing and keep going, I see the results and it makes it worth it. So the point I'm trying to make is, guys, take a chance, try, take it seriously, put in the work, watch the videos, and you will see success. It is not an coincidence that I'm the one that is watching all of the videos before they are posted. I, all the moderators send me the videos. I watch them, I approve them or deny them. And then I put it up in the video library for everyone else. So I am the most up-to-date with the content and I am one of the mentors here. So why shouldn't you be doing something similar, right? If you want to see the same results as me, do the same things I do.  Dude, we tell you every single day. I mean, it's so funny. Alex is like, dude, literally think about what Val just said. This is like the funniest thing and it's so true. I rather spend $500 on a Supreme T-shirt to look rich than join an MIC to be rich for real. Guys, do you know what lifestyle inflation is?  Do you want to hear a funny story? Do you want to hear an answer? So I have, so I guess a lot of my friends know me as like the stock market guy now or I guess Instagram, whatever. The point is that I have a lot of friends that say, hey, I have a friend that wants to get into trading. Can you talk to him? Can you do me this favor? And you know, I'm a pretty nice guy. I do favors for a lot of people. So I met with this one kid who was a friend of a friend and this was maybe like a couple months ago and he's like, look man, I'm really excited to get into trading. I saw all your stuff on Instagram and YouTube. I really want to get started. Like, how do I get started? Like, what do I do? What should I do? And I'm like, look, your best bet is to get the annual and to get the accelerator because the point is that you're not going to be able to find success in one day or one month. If you truly put in two or three months of studying and use the other nine or 10 months to trade, you will find success. And he was like, you know, it's a little bit expensive, you know, I don't really know if I can afford that. And then I was taking him downstairs and he was looking at my shoe collection and I have a pair of these off-white Nike's that are $2,000, right? Oh, I know which ones you're talking about. Those are second. Dude, I have the same shoes. And I'm like, wait a second. So you can't afford to pay $2,000 for a full year, but you have the same $2,000 shoes that I have because I actually like shoes and I could afford it and I have the same shoes. I was like, why do you have those shoes?  And that's what's happening, guys. That's exactly what happens. People are buying shoes, Gucci belts, this, that, when they can't afford it.    Dude, we live in a world, man, where broke people try to impress other broke people to appear rich, but they're actually broke. It's like, dude, it makes no sense, man.  It's like, dude, nobody cares at the end of the day, you just build your own education, man. It's unbelievable, bro. This guy's telling me he doesn't, he can't afford it. He's not, he's interested, but he can't afford it yet. He has a pair of shoes that he literally cannot afford to have. Dude, here's the thing, here's the thing. Alex just said it perfectly. Dude, I love these. I remember when you showed me these the day you got them.  Get the accelerator course, learn how to buy 10 of these. Like, I don't get it, dude. I don't, everybody wants to buy a liability. Nobody wants to like get an asset. And I didn't start buying sneakers and watches and all these toys until I started to have a shitload of money in the bank, right? And I didn't waste my time. I didn't waste my money on this stuff. I want to conserve as much money as I had to be able to use it in ways I thought was necessary. And now that I've found a little bit more success and I've kind of gotten a little bit border with all this shit, I kind of screw around and spoil myself because I feel like I deserve it. Whereas a lot of people should really honestly be focusing on building their wealth and building their education. And you know, when I went to college, college was $20,000 a year. MIC is a 10th of that price to make 10 times that amount, you know? Look, and here's the thing, man. Don't set yourself up to fail.   Someone who gave up on- And guys, we're here every day, every week, man. I was here the other day, I was here yesterday. I was here today. I'm here every single day trying to help you guys, being there for you. Bow is here, the moderators are here, so please look at the value that you are getting. Look at the value you are getting, and trust me, it is worth way more than that $6 coffee a day. Dude, I remember when Bow saw those with the tag on and he was like, did you steal those from like Foot Locker? Yeah, Bow cuts off that tag on who's half the value.  But that's it, guys, that's it. So I'm gonna probably wrap up here, Tosh. This was all my name, seriously. But if anyone has any questions, they could text you, two, one, three, four, five, eight, five, nine, nine, seven. And that's it. Yeah, guys, if we didn't get to any questions, we really talked about an important topic today on psychology. So seriously, I'll just answer them in PMs, guys. So if you missed anything or you want something answered, obviously our PMs are always open. A big thank you for Alex coming on, man. He's in Miami. He should be on a beach right now. But again, man, he's putting in the time to teach you guys. We all are. I'm actually, I'm actually for the first time in two years, dude, in two years since inception at MIC, I'm taking the next couple of days off, man. I've never taken a weekday off unless it was a holiday. But because I'm getting in the process of moving and everything, I'm gonna take tomorrow and Friday off. So today is your chance to contact me. Yeah, so if you guys need any help with anything, Tosh is gonna be gone tomorrow and Friday. So feel free to DM me, DM the moderators and we'll all be here to help. Yeah, guys. And then, dude, they forced me to take a day off, man, I'm telling you right now. Now I gotta go buy smoothies and skinny jeans, as Bal says. That's part of pamper day in process. So, dude, I love you guys, man. This was a fantastic webinar. Alex, go enjoy Miami. Again, guys, we have the Miami Meetup coming up. So just keep it in your days. Yeah, more information on Monday about locations. I will announce the location details and sign up sheet on Monday during the YouTube Live. Dude, awesome.  Later, bro, have a good day. See you, man. See you, guys.