Puerto Rico, U.S. Virgin Flags. Order Group 20 Command in welcoming the graduating divisions with your applause as they enter Midway Ceremonial Grove Hall and are announced in the following group. Review Commander, Adjutant, and Graduates, you provide support assignments for today's ceremony. Ladies and gentlemen, you may be seated. Thank you. Divisions. Right section leaders, follow up, permitted to pass in front of the review stand, and we asses as a courtesy to our review nods. Photography is certainly encouraged, but we ask that you remain seated and off the drill deck. The photographers you will see on deck throughout the review are the official photographers of recruit training command. Thanks. You'll see 12 divisions comprised of the 991 segment participating in the graduation ceremony, and soon to join in those powerful names in the world. Please draw your attention to the unit positioned at center deck. There is the review commander of the staff. The review commander is responsible for conducting the graduation ceremony. To date, the commander is Simeon Trenton McWyrd from Mount Elliot, North Carolina. Let's give him a hand, folks. It's a triple threat on our security training, state flags on our 7th training, and the staff on their 10th and final week of training. These units are comprised entirely of recruits. During their night of arrival, recruits are placed into divisions of 88 personnel. Recruit division commanders form the back of the training, and our key individuals in the life of every recruiter. Division commanders must serve as counselors, disciplinaries, administrators, and military leaders. Above all, they must show themselves without standing examples of military bearing, appearance, attitude, and behavior. Each division also has a recruit chief petty officer. This senior recruit supervises the additional staff positions and leads the division in the absence of their division commander. Now, ladies and gentlemen, it is my pleasure to introduce the graduate divisions, the division commanders, and the recruit chief petty officer. As they introduce this division, they'll raise the competitive flag they have earned throughout their recruit chief petty officer, the flag representing their home state will also be raised. Please hold your applause until I'll be starting from division zero, five, one. Petty officer, first class, Joshua Henderson. Petty officer, second class, unhand profile officer, senior apprentice, Roger Woolard, zero, five, two, chief petty officer, Brandon Potts, Melissa Schulberg, Dan Venevedes, chief petty officer, senior recruit, Nathan Williams, from San Antonio Tech, division zero, five, three, commandant, petty officer, first class, Arrellis Gonzalez, petty officer, first class, Mark Lewis, petty officer, second class, Jonathan Rue, chief petty officer, senior apprentice, Makayla Lopez, from Lafayette, Louisiana, division zero, five, four, first class, Jeanette Rodriguez, second class, Anthony Mullen, second class, Emeridge Piedong, and their recruit chief petty officer, fireman, Michael Kressman, from Olive Branch, Mississippi, division zero, five, five, commanded by senior chief petty officer, Eric Spesak, petty officer, first class, Darius Jarman, petty officer, first class, Jocelyn Quijada, and their recruit chief petty officer, senior recruit, Michael Carmody, from Altoona, Pennsylvania, division zero, five, six, commanded by chief petty officer, Rodriguez Mitchell, petty officer, first class, Keith Richmond, petty officer, first class, Vincent Hanby, and their recruit chief petty officer, senior recruit, Alexander Zelch, from Akron, Ohio, division zero, five, seven, commanded by chief petty officer, Ramon Sikietta, petty officer, first class, Corey Alexander, petty officer, second class, Timothy Adams, and their recruit chief petty officer, fireman, Todd Black, from Temple, Texas, division zero, five, nine, commanded by chief petty officer, Wiki Daman, petty officer, first class, Jessica Majore, petty officer, first class, Deja Jinkin, and their recruit chief petty officer, Seaman Carvina, George, from Alamobordo, New Mexico, division zero, six, zero, commanded by chief petty officer, John Reeder, petty officer, first class, Shayna Decker, petty officer, first class, John Liu, and their recruit chief petty officer, senior apprentice, Andan Hood, from Houston, Texas, division zero, six, one, commanded by petty officer, first class, Jocelyn Downey, petty officer, first class, Paul Perriano, petty officer, second class, Aldrin Zaremba, and their recruit chief petty officer, Seaman Dylan Barden, from Norfolk, Virginia, division zero, six, two, commanded by petty officer, first class, Jamie Maylee, petty officer, first class, David Garcia, petty officer, first class, Randy Parsons, and their recruit chief petty officer, Seaman Prentice Terrence Goshane, from Miami, Florida, division nine, one, one, commanded by chief petty officer, Jonathan Golden, petty officer, first class, Daniel Weber, petty officer, second class, Lindsay Lyles, and their recruit chief petty officer, Seaman Trenton McGuire, from Mount Gilead, North Carolina. On behalf of the commanding officer and staff of the recruit training command, we congratulate these division commanders and the recruit chief petty officers on a job well done, in honor, take their places for rival honors.  When requested by the announcement, please stand for rival honors, marching on other colors, a national anthem, and an invitation. As a reminder, military gas shall remain covered throughout the entire graduation ceremony. And ladies and gentlemen, one final note. As befitting the importance of this occasion, our ceremony is conducted in a formal manner. However, we do encourage you to participate in today's graduation ceremony, by letting your applause show the salutes of just how proud of them you are. Once again, welcome aboard. Please rise and remain standing for the arrival of the official party, recruit training command, Observer's Training Command, Judge, Advocate, General of the Navy, arriving just maybe seated. Our future contribution to the greatest Navy this day and may we all live so faithfully can dishearten us. No frustration can discourage us and no fear can take away from us the joy of our integrity, discipline, and teamwork and what we stand for. I thank you, O Lord, for transforming these men and women into proud members of the United States Navy. They are grateful for seeing a new way to live. Values, honor, courage, it is, to take accountability and trustingly exercise toughness and fidelity in life. I pray that your blessing always be upon them, their families, all sailors, staff, and our great nation, the United States of America. Walk with them, O Lord, each and every day and bless them as they take their steps in service, helping us all to work for your greater glory now and forever. Amen. At this point, the commanding officer would issue orders and instructions to the unit commanders. Then the unit commanders would face about and relay the information to their divisions. Today's events show how orders are passed through the chain of command. To your Navy quarterback. Joining us today is our reviewing officer, Vice Admiral Dell Crennell, Judge Attorney General of the United States Navy, as well as my boss, Reverend Frank Niner, the Commander of Naval Services Training Command. I would first like to start by welcoming our veterans here today. Thank you for your service to our country. Would all our veterans please rise and give you a round of applause. Thank you for your service to our country. I would be remiss if I did not welcome the family and friends attending today's recruit graduation and those watching live from around the world. Thank you for making the journey here to fill this hall and see this special event. It truly is an honor to stand on this deck and see these sailors standing before you here now. We have Division 911 joined in the crew. That's our staff division that we graduated today as well as 11 other graduating divisions. Please join me in giving them outstanding, smartly disciplined sailors such as these sailors standing before you right now. They have completed 10 rigorous weeks and for the future sailor grads out there, a couple more, but they have earned the right to where the uniform recognizes a symbol of freedom around the world. Hurry up! That journey that they have started, I want to take a moment to introduce you, the family and friends to your new Navy family. As you reconnect with the sailors shortly and navigate the new journey together, I invite you to learn about our Navy family, your Navy family, but here in Great Lakes and around the world. If you're looking for a start, search Navy Boot Camp, Navy Family to learn more about your Navy family from our website online. Today's graduate serves the bedrock of our naval forces to join other American sailors around the world to defend freedom and liberty against those who are pregnant. I can say with pride this training group is ready to graduate today. Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you 991 of the newest and strongest sailors in the United States. The most teamwork, attention to detail, divisions performing a plus standard recognition flags in the five mission areas. Academic achievement, military drill, compartment readiness, applications and physical fitness. These flags are carried as a visible symbol of the division's success. Each flag indicates that your sailors individually and as teams met performance standards in one or more mission area events. A division that exceeds basic requirements in these areas during their training qualifies as a battle efficiency division and is awarded the battle league flag and recognition of their performance. Seven divisions have earned this honor today and we congratulate them on a job. It excels in every phase of training and earns all flags, qualifies for the chief of naval operations honor division recognition and is awarded the CNO honor flag for this exemplary achievement. This designation reflects a high degree of teamwork, morale and a spirit core as well as the superb leadership of the division commanders. Five divisions have earned this honor today and we congratulate them on this week's individual awards and he'll be joined on the drill deck by our commanding officer Captain Krober and commander naval service training man Rear Admiral Craig Mattington. For achieving the highest overall academic score during recruit training, construction enterprises show Adams Division 055 from Hampton, Virginia as earned the academic excellence. Construction enterprises Adams received a letter of commendation from the commanding officer. Well done. Exemplate extraordinary qualities best expressing the American spirit of honor, initiative and loyalty. Airman Elizabeth Kobar, Division 911 from Garland, Texas is awarded the Navy League Award which is sponsored by the Navy League of the United States. Airman Kobar is presented with a commemorative plaque and a letter of commendation from the commanding officer. Well done. Airman Jonathan Purdom, Division 911 from Owasa, Oklahoma is the winner of the United Service Organization Award for best exemplifies this spirit and intent of the word shipping. Airman Purdom is given a commemorative plaque from the United Service Organization. Well done, sailor. Seaman Tanner Balinsky, Division 053 from Morgan, Utah is the recipient of the military order of the World Wars Award of Merit. This award is presented for meritorious performance during recruit training. Seaman Balinsky is presented with a commemorative plaque on the military order of the World Wars. Well done, sailor. Officer's Association Leadership Award is presented to Seaman Faith Daubert, Division 911 from Tonica, Illinois for demonstrating exceptional tenacity and professionalism. Seaman Daubert is awarded a letter of commendation from our commanding officer. Well done, sailor. It's your honor to recognize the review commander for today's ceremony. Seaman Training, McGuire, Division 911 from Mount Gile, North Carolina. Throughout his training, Seaman McGuire has exhibited great pride in naval service and has consistently demonstrated his potential as an effective leader. He has maintained a high standard of personal appearance and displayed excellent military bearing and command voice. He is also the recipient of the Navy Club of the United States of America Military Excellence Award for best exemplifying the qualities of enthusiasm, devotion to duty, military bearing and teamwork. This award places him at the pinnacle of today's newest sailor. He is awarded a flag letter of commendation. Seaman McGuire, this staff of Recruit and Training Command salutes you as the finest of this group of graduates. Well done, sailor. This might be sails with a round of three cheers. The adjutant will lead all graduating divisions in three cheers for this morning's award winners. The experience includes staff, joint advocate and a legal partner in the U.S.S. Department of Defense staff, joint advocate for the U.S. Sixth Fleet and U.S. Recruit and Training Command, legal advisor to the Vice Chief of Naval Operations, special counselor to the Chief of Naval Operations and a legal counselor to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Currently he is the 45th joint advocate general of the United States in the concerns to the principal military legal counsel to the second to the eighth Chief of Naval Operations. Ladies and gentlemen, unless I get rolled up and sent to jail, please join me in a warm group of training to make a warm group of Vice Chiefs. Here's what I'm gonna say first thing. Wow, what a pleasant crowd. We definitely have the spirit of America in the hall today. Let's give it up for us. And most importantly, those new and old. I'm honored to participate in this graduation ceremony. It's a privilege to be here and celebrating the tremendous accomplishments of these young women and men. Today, these new sailors began journey during the mission of each of them will make their own special mark on the proud history of our Navy. For over a century, Naval Station railings had more than three million civilians into war fighters, including my father-in-law who graduated from a boot camp right here from 80 years ago in December 27th, 1943. Many known for the Americans, bad tested heroes were trained right here at Great Lakes. One of those heroes was Navy cook first class William P. The second African American to ever receive the Navy Cross, the Navy's highest service award. Peddi also picked me and was in the Navy in 1938 during a time of segregation when African Americans were far from general service and limited to serving as stewards or cooks. Peddi also picked me and attended the boot camp here at Great Lakes and was stationed as an officer's cook for the USS Enterprise CV6 during the Battle of Santa Cruz Islands in 1942. While Enterprise was under heavy attack an explosion killed four of the six men at his battle station, the ammunition handler. Struggling through suffocating smoke, flames, and gasoline fumes, Peddi on pain carried the other surviving sailor who'd been not unconscious, off a burning ladder and through a hatch to safety. He received the power part and the Navy Cross were valid. Years later, his wife recounted that he didn't know the man he had saved and never found out his name. That's a ship. USS Pinky, D.D.G. in 1991 now carries Peddi Oscar Pinky's name and the model proud to serve across the world's oceans honoring his memory in the spirit of service he abiding. Looking out at the 12 divisions of this class, my serve of Peddi Oscar Pinky would be extremely proud of the sailors we honor today. A cohesive team drawn from the rich fabric of America each having answered the call to serve our Navy and our nation. You have proven yourselves worthy of where the uniform symbolizes freedom and liberty across the globe. You have taken the same sacred pledge to support and defend the Constitution of the United States that guides my work each day as the judge advocate general of the Navy. Shipments, welcome to the world's greatest Navy. Our Navy power is more than 100 ships around the globe each and every day. Our Navy is flying, sailing, and operating everywhere international law allows safeguarding all nations inherent right to freedom of the seas. And our Navy do not achieve its mission without a dedicated, talented, and exceptional sailors like you. As sailors we answer the call to recognize from our Siena of Appalachia, to preserve the peace, respond in crisis, and win decisively in war. In each of you, I see our Navy's future and it's truly inspiring. You are about to embark on an incredible challenge and rewarding adventure. I can promise you it is a profession unlike any other, a fulfilling career of service to our nation alongside like-minded men and women, your teammates. Your service will demand sacrifice. Some days and some decisions will be difficult. You are joining our armed forces at a critical time in a significant, unwrapping world. But your fellow sailors will always be there, helping one another in our Navy conquer any obstacle in front of us. I want to thank the crew, decision commanders, instructors, and staff at RTC who maintain the Navy's high standards and expertly develop our new sailors. Your contributions and dedication is impactful. I also applaud the men and families and friends of our newest sailors. Your love and support encouraged them to stand up for their country, to embrace the Navy's core values, honor, courage, and commitment. Today, you also join the Navy family in serve by supporting your sailor. Thank you. And most important to all graduating sailors this morning, military service is an immense responsibility that a week's of rigorous training, you are now ready to begin sharing that responsibility. You have earned my respect and the respect of a great nation. I look now at this incredibly impressive group of sailors after serving almost 40 years on active duty and I know that the future of our Navy and our nation is strong. I take great pleasure in being the first to say congratulations and welcome aboard the ship. And he'll be joined on the drill deck fire. Please remain seated until your graduates have been placed. Please join me in one more round of appreciation for our wonderful musicians of Navy band, great section leaders. You can also for tomorrow pick them up. Sailors going on Liberty without a vehicle are to exit gate eight towards the train station parking. Thanks again to each and every one of you for joining us on this most memorable of Navy days. And without further delay.


and welcome to Figments the Power of Imagination. I'm Dan Leaf. I go by Fig and thus the name and I've got a great guest today. We'll get to that in a minute but first of course I have to do my opening rant. What will I rant about the Ukraine situation? Looking pretty dicey in the east and our guest will be able to give us a from the front lines update but if if Russian forces don't withdraw we lose so stalemate that leaves some Russian presence in my mind is absolutely a defeat for the world order not just for Ukraine not just for NATO but for the world order. Secondly I have my Pearl Harbor Aviation Museum shirt on today because it's 80 for 80 day 80th anniversary for the 80 brave men who got into B-25 some aircraft carrier hornets deck and flew to Japan and bombed Japanese islands in a stunning shocking turn of events just five and a half months after the war started the attack on Pearl Harbor. The attack by the Dula raid I think changed the course of the war and affected things profoundly on both sides of the Pacific and you should remember those brave men. We ought to ask ourselves how come we were so good at surprises then and we're so bad at surprises not that irritation we need to do better we should be as imaginative as they are and my guests pretty imaginative about how he supports American troops and State Department people around the world and doing their missions. I'd ask you to go back speaking to the Ukraine and look on the ThinkTech website or the YouTube ThinkTech playlist for the military in Hawaii standing with the Ukraine episode I did an interview with Jay Fidel and I think you'll find some thoughts of interest to you but that's not why we're here today let's talk about why we're here we're here to talk about patriotism without politics and to do that I've got a very special guest the man who I met through my daughter we all met her on figments and she introduced me to his non-profit Spirit of America and Jim Hake aloha and welcome to figments power of imagination you're a pretty imaginative guy how you doing Jim aloha great to be with you you're just back from Ukraine got back Saturday yes and you shared a briefing with many of us who are interested in the work of Spirit of America we'll get to that some I've got to give the viewers a caveat though in this my 28th episode of figments the power of imagination Jim's done a gazillion interviews with people far more important and polished than I am with the Wall Street Journal on major broadcast outlets watch all those if you want to get the rest of the story I really want to find out how this figment happened this unique cherry uh Jim I'd say Spirit of America pretty darn unique isn't it yeah we are one of a kind we're the only privately funded non-profit that's approved by the Department of Defense to work alongside US military personnel or around the world to provide private assistance and support of their missions we have pioneered a very entrepreneurial approach to I'll say national security and humanitarian issues that is a great compliment for what government can do and it's yeah we're we're one of a kind big yes we are one of a kind and the tagline and patriotism without politics in my mind has two elements one is you're not red or blue you might be inside you might be in the bell box but but in your actions they're not politically leaning or constrained and the other is you get beyond what the government can do because it is a political process I've got some old pictures over here well not not all of you but where does that patriot come from that's your dad on the left is a navy cb did you say yeah he was a young 22 year old young man in that photograph he joined the navy to join the fight in world war two he was a cb he was in the european theater he was d-day plus two at utah beach you know and so the cbs laid down all the infrastructure so heavy artillery troops can move it and you know massive numbers and so after the beachhead was established upon d-day the cbs came in laid down all the pontoons so everything else could roll in well is that the source of your patriotism of your sense of service to the country or is there more to the story well i i think there's a lot more to the story because my dad like most members of our greatest generation never really talked a lot about a service and you know it was he did his part he was not you know not honored in any special way but he was just one of the americans that did did his part did their part and that's why we always remember him as the greatest generation um so you know i'm not sure quite what it is i have always felt as long as i can remember that the ideas and ideals for which america stands are the best ideas in the world that every person has the inalienable right to life liberty and the pursuit of happiness i don't think you get any better than that and uh maybe part of that was growing up by when he was born and grew up in the philadelphia area our nation's birthplace you know in philadelphia you're always trying to take you know credit for as much as you can but you don't you don't get you know there you're always uh feel like you're maybe at the middle or bottom of the list and one of the things that we had growing up was a copy of the declaration of independence on the stairway going from you know downstairs to upstairs to where the kids all had our rooms and i i walked by that declaration every day growing up and i can't say i stopped and reflected on each time but ran up or down but that was part of the uh part of the ethos of growing up being connected to our nation's birth so my daughter yateng whom you've met and you know she's an amazing human being and leader about more than anything else she talks a lot about the importance of symbols and rituals and informing your beliefs and and and pursuing organizational goals which is an aside to say i had a similar thing in our household my dad served in the navy at end world war two his father had served in in europe as a marine in world war one right at the end and uh he passed away when i was five but my grandfather's service cap with the globin anchor sat on the same table you're talking about in our in our house of the year and you're right i didn't stop and genuflect to it or necessarily ponder consciously but it was always there just like your declaration of independence which is truly one of the most remarkable documents ever but that's not why we're here and you have had a pretty big family four siblings if i remember yeah there were there were five of us kids uh you know i'm sure at times an unruly really bunch i was the youngest of the five oh you're the youngest but were you the best football player because i gotta show this picture because it is a pretty cool picture yeah that's uh that's my seat hero hero hero hero hero hero the old video on uh 1970s year uh hair helmet and uh yeah that's that's from high school football i was the captain of our team i think my brother was a better football player than i was but uh i were the same number as he did you know in playing high school ball what position did you play i was an offensive guard and a linebacker i played outside linebacker in our small town at 103 pounds so i played mostly on my butt after getting knocked on my butt uh but the family you kind of reinforce your sense of service because i had six siblings uh five of homes survive and you know you have roles and responsibilities that you can't wait to be asked to feel you just do it okay for my siblings i was not always perfect about that so i don't want nasty emails so then you went to school went to dartmouth and stanford and studied business and and had a pretty good career here's a good life picture watching it i think you said it was a clicker's game but it's right after 9 11 right and that those are my two sons they were four and seven at the time and we were at a basketball game in los angeles where i lived at the time and it was 9 11 that prompted me to start spirit of america so i'm reading your face there um that because i was in pentagon on 9 11 we have a shared experience just like every other american that you're uh and it's you know there is a real sense even though i was already in the military as a one star in the pentagon but what can i do but what can i do to confront this situation but you weren't in the military you were venture capitals i'm going to assume that you're doing pretty well pretty well well at the time i was i started a an internet software company called big buttons which was a predecessor to the apps on iphones and tablets today and the same idea you know you press them that's why it was called big buttons you press a big button to get the information you want rather than having to search around the web to find it and uh i started that i actually closed the first round of funding for that on the exact day that the nasdaq peaked in march of 2000 and which was both good news and bad news because the good news was you could get a frothy market to raise money in the bad news was everything went downhill from there and it made it difficult to make it through what i referred to as the internet extrusion process at the time so when the attacks of 9 11 occurred i was looking for a buyer for the the software that we had built and my immediate thought when those attacks occurred was i wanted to do something to help and but i didn't have any idea what i could do that would be useful and it was and i didn't have any government and military background whatsoever i didn't i never met an active duty member of the military at all no kidding yeah no no no kidding and uh wow so that i didn't uh have any background was a good thing for two reasons one is i was open minded and you know didn't know what couldn't be done that's a little bit of the obvious one but the the other part was that i knew i didn't know so i wasn't going to be the so-called smart guy who could figure out what needed to be done in iraq or afghanistan or anyone else so the very you know we'll talk more about it but the premise of the organization was based on listening to people closest to the problem and listening to what they say is needed rather than come in from a top down customer what's that the customer kind of well yeah right exactly what a concept no kidding and you know one of the things in international the world of international aid and assistance is one kind of how the country operates around the world is the just about the exact opposite of what we know in our own economy has given us the most dynamic and innovative economy in the history of the world but what we use as a nation mainly driven by our government institutions uh you know great in many ways as they are is a top down approach which doesn't it just doesn't work as well as more bottom up entrepreneurial approaches and it's heavily constrained there are i think you're right there are pluses and minuses to it speaking to the leader of government coming out of a long period of isolation complained about dealing with the us for arms sales so why should we do that i said well there are two things you get better stuff because we make better stuff and secondly you get all these constraints and these rules and they reinforce a legitimate ethical approach business but sometimes you have to be faster than that and that's where your business approach really delivered and i have the baseball that's with the spirit of america logo on that you sent to some of us on the board of advisors there but that's that's was your initial idea came from what somebody a soldier in afghanistan was doing with with local people to connect with them yeah it was a really remarkable story and a genuine light bulb moment so it took me a lot of figure out what i could do that would actually be useful and especially as an entrepreneur you learn pretty quickly that you can't confuse motion with progress that you actually have to produce results or you're dead you know there's figuratively speaking of course and so i stumbled upon this was in 2003 at this point where people still channel surfed right now if everything's on demand you don't really channel surf as much if at all channel surfed i came upon this national jay grapica that was telling the story of the special forces team in afghanistan and the scene that caught my eye was these special forces soldiers playing baseball with afghan boys and girls and you have this sergeant first class j smith telling a story about how this came to be that you know he and one of his teammates on the you know special forces a team you know brought over their midst to play catch the kids working for them in their kitchen started to use it to play catch themselves and the sergeant called his wife back home and said honey can you send over to bats balls and mitts so these kids can play a real game and one thing led to another and here's this whole wild scene on on national geographic and so everything crystallized to me at that point in time and i thought this is just great this sergeant his name is j smith he did this on his own initiative you know the idea that anyone would bring baseball to afghanistan would be absurd in a way and he was fired up when he was talking about it and i thought okay there have to be other men and women serving around the world serving our country around the world who want to do something to help the local population and build relationships and better express who we are as americans and they just need some help to do it because they can't do it through government channels you know quickly enough or what have you and i was sure that there would be other people back home like me that would be happy to help if only they knew what was needed and that i could use the internet to connect the two essentially to build a platform that connects supply with demand and what was that was a central idea and so after that i tracked down sergeant smith through the producer of the show we were in touch through email i you know wanted to see him in person to talk about this idea because anything else wouldn't give me a true read on whether it was a good idea so he said okay meet me at fort bragg on uh june 1st and i said great where's fort bragg and uh anyway i found out it was in north carolina and i went there we met and i laid out the idea just what i said which is you know you or people like you need something to help the local population wherever you're serving instead of asking your families you ask me in my organization and i'll use the internet to get people to help and uh jay kept saying this is going to save lives and the third time he said it first this was the first active duty member of the military i'd never met and i had no idea that you know special forces guys are not you know welcoming and eager to meet outsiders and all that sort of thing and i just thought well he has enthusiasm it's natural so uh he explained that because of the relationship that he had built well he and his team built with the villagers by doing things that helped build trust and goodwill with them that the villagers formed the night watch patrol to protect our guys from al-qaeda with them crossing the pakistan border at night and so he he actually explained how this was going to save lives and at that point i thought oh man now i really have to do this i mean i can't hear that and i would never forgive myself if i didn't give it a shot uh understanding that so that's when i started the organization so i do have chicken skin as we sit stay in hawaii say in hawaii um and i wish we had hours to talk about this you and i've talked about it before but you you are representing the best of america um through the spirit thus the name of of being altruistic wherever we are and it's not because we're a better country we were blessed for these incredible circumstances of geography and and everything that led to founding a life liberty in the pursuit of happiness foundation to our our country but also business because america does good business but the government does not do good business and you're bringing that responsive customer focused approach mixed with the altruism of military and diplomatic service overseas it's it's a it's a secret sauce in my mind it really is yeah well and you need both it's not yeah and and so what we bring is a critical and what has been missing piece of the ecosystem to bear which is private entrepreneurial capability that is fast and flexible um has certain kinds of know-how it's not about the money it's about all kinds of things and how you think about doing things more bottom-up approaches but what we do would be impossible without the collaboration with our troops and diplomats so it's it's not that one is better than the other you just need that kind of ecosystem and to get that kind of ecosystem required basically an act of congress and an agreement that only took agreement with the department of defense that only took 15 years to get to get uh in place but that's all solid new yeah and you had the perseverance to do it i'm going to take my brief break now so we can um get to the the rest of the story then talk specifically about ukraine on may second i'll have another great guest i'm blessed with great friends uh to talk about imagining history you can feel uh clint churchville is one of the founders of the pearl arbor aviation museum here on fort island it's an incredible place clint's an incredible guy he's also uh got a unique initiative going on here in hawaii that i'll tell you about but let's get back to jim and spirit of america so you did this you got it started yay you you can go back to business and then leave think deck running but you only did that for a bit and you came back and it's become your life right yes i i did it and why did you come back because you did go back to business for it for i i i did and i should note that the first two officers i met after starting the organization were then colonel joe dunford who was the chief staff to major general jim mattis was the first marine division in camp penalty yeah we have a picture view with general mattis i think yeah yeah you do and uh so that they would well and the shot the other shot is uh at the marines evening parade here in washington dc so uh we did a lot with the marines in iraq and then later in afghanistan and so in 2009 uh then uh you know colonel dunford uh was lieutenant general joe dunford three star marine officer and he invited me to be the guest of honor at the marines evening parade down here you know in washington dc which i had never heard of but it was well and the funny thing is when when he called me up uh to invite me said i'd like to invite you to be the guest of honor at the marines evening parade and i had no idea what he was talking about and i was i said well thank you joe i'll i'll work on my wave you know like like this and jim it's not that unfortunately didn't hang up the phone i said jim it's not that kind of a parade anyway so uh it was you know it's with the uh marine corps band the silent drill team the the just an incredible honor and a deeply deeply moving experience and i thought that if what spirit america had done up to that point in time meant that much to uh general dunford and the marines that they would you know give me and give the organization that honor that i owed it to them to do everything i could especially to help the marines and their deployments to afghanistan because i knew there are our decentralized model of assistance would be a really good match for afghanistan so i came back to the organization and here we are yeah so folks go to their website take a look at the work they do more broadly than ukraine and who's endorsed that their board of advisors myself notwithstanding is an incredible list of leaders who believe in this unique one-of-a-kind model that's worthy of your support and i'll provide that uh link so you can consider donating later you're we have to get to ukraine in the remaining seven minutes so you're just back i know that spirit of america is providing all non-lethal assistance no bullets found missiles so like your helmets body armor um food first aid kits right that's in large in large numbers to the people of ukraine yes i mean so for americans who want to save lives and help ukraine win spirit of america is truly the the best option and what we're doing is taking ukraine side and this is very consistent with what us troops and diplomats are all geared to do which is how do we help ukraine prevail in this genuine battle of good versus evil so most humanitarian assistance organizations that you know we've all heard of will are neutral which means they will not support right uh any side in a conflict well we're taking the side of ukraine in this conflict and i understand we understand that it's not only about ukraine and the terrible human suffering that's taking place there at the hands of russia but it's about the the really the fight to defend the free world that's happening and the front lines right now are in ukraine and it is good versus evil and i've been in a good versus evil fight might be imperfect against imperfect as well but the world order will suffer if the russians are allowed to be victorious in any source so win is almost a dirty word do you get much pushback from donors when you say we're not neutral we're a not neutral charity slash non-government organization or is that something people find attractive well in this particular case i think it's pretty attractive because it's so clear and you know i think people are uncomfortable a little bit with the idea of winning you know it's it's you know it's a little hard to explain and it's you know the world is a complicated place war is you know messy terrible complicated as well and the idea that you would try to affect something to win is just outside of most people's frame of reference but when you talk to people about it they go well of course we want to help ukraine win there's so much at stake you know and and for us you i look at the situation and say well we can help the victims of war all day long but shouldn't we try to stop the suffering at its source you know that's what we need to do and that's what we're doing with the non-lethal assistance to ukrainian armed forces and the civilian volunteers you know people like well you served big so you're not a great example what i'm saying but the other people who just from any walk of life who were taking up arms to defend their country and defend the innocence that are being attacked and killed by the russians every day and if there's any beauty in this ugliness of war it's been i think and you've been there i haven't the response of the common citizens of ukraine who picked up arms and are defending their own lives by their homeland and their freedom yeah it's inspirational and so what i think we see is or some of the benefits of a free society you know as in america where right nobody told nobody told me to start spirit of america i just did it and nobody told these ukrainian civilians who were volunteering to go you know fight as part of what's called the territorial defense forces nobody told them they had to do that and people were you know you have grandmothers who were throwing molotov cocktails at russian tanks not because somebody told her to do it or a side or the job it's it is an expression of a free society which is one of the reasons why it's so important for americans to to help the ukrainians in this fight and um it's a lesson to others who may be oppressed attacked invaded i can think of a few countries locations that face that you're actually providing spirit of america is actually providing some training um to those who decide to uh man up woman up whatever join the militia but that's based on a long-standing relationship how long has spirit of america been engaged in ukraine because you can't do this instantly you need relationships no and it's true and a lot a lot of people look at the situation kind of try to rush in and it's much more complicated than it seems you know you think okay well to send some body armor and helmets or first aid kits over to ukraine to a soldier easy day and it's not but uh we have been active in ukraine since 2014 since the i'll say the most recent original russian invasion and you know there have been i think before this war started somewhere close to 20 000 ukrainians who've been killed at russian hands in in that country and uh one of the first projects that we did was help to stand up ukraine's first armed forces radio station to meet the information needs of the ukrainian soldiers on the front lines between 2015 and and well up well up until now uh the station is still still broadcasting and it's an answer to you know the mass of russian propaganda and misinformation which is polluting that uh that region and it seems that the ukraine is winning the information war which is shocking shocking um so you've got relationships we we only have a tenth of the time i'd love to talk maybe you'll come back get an update as things progress in ukraine but i know because i've assisted minorly in minor ways with some of your efforts in asia but you're in africa you're in the middle east you've been in syria afghanistan iraq the african continent laus bungolia vietnam uh pacific islands i think uh does that work go on even though you clearly jim haix focused on ukraine as the boss does does that work continue yeah our operations uh all around the world are continuing and you know we are supporting the efforts of u.s military and state department personnel in all the places that you you mentioned and you know a good way to think about it is for anyone serving this country abroad spirit america is the best friend they could possibly have because our only agenda is to help them succeed in what they're trying to do and to advance both uh you know our interests in national security objectives but also bring people to choose our side and to choose a side of freedom democracy you know what we stand for as a country and uh you represent the very best i think jim of what we stand for and you know it's it's hard not to get choked up to see it in such an important time uh when the country seems so divided uh you you unite the efforts of civilians government diplomats in the military we talked a little bit about this because united we win divided we don't win and the bad folks win and there's a lot of symbolism we talked about in in what america is and what america needs to be we're not perfect no country is but we bring a lot of hope to the world and you expand the impact of that hope through spirit of american i'm proud to be associated with the organization and to know you uh folks i'm going to ask you to donate to think tech why too because they make this possible but before i do let me give you our youtube playlists for both the old pigments on reality and this show uh so scan those bad boys and please click like because it makes me feel good remember that this is truly a not-for-profit endeavor go to spirit of america's uh website take a look and donate if you can if you just want to feel good go there if not if you got a headache go there you'll feel better um jim thanks so much uh for all you do for being a friend and for your leadership how many folks are there around the spirit of america team we have 27 now we've been doing a lot of work and getting the kind of donation support you should but you need more and they need it uh friends to save lives and to support freedom so uh let's stay in touch jim i'm sure we will we always do and uh i hope to have you back on uh maybe in a few months when we know more about the outcome in the ukraine well pig thank you for having me it's been a both a pleasure and an honor to be with you and uh thanks everyone for watching and listening in today all right god bless jim thanks folks thank you for joining us for pigments the power of imagination i'll be back as you know in a couple of weeks to have clint churchill and talk about history uh think tec hawaii is a great non-profit also needs your support to bring you citizen journalists like me sharing their ideas on a really wide array of topics that otherwise would make here so thanks for watching and aloha thank you so much for watching think tec hawaii if you like what we do please like us and click the subscribe button on youtube and the follow button on vimeo you can also follow us on facebook instagram twitter and linkedin and donate to us at thinktec hawaii dot com mahalo


the Four Seasons. Okay, I think a fellow poolside guest this morning said it best. I overheard him talking to his friend. He said, in quotes, it's the Four Seasons. You ask and they make it happen. You ask and they make it happen. Why did True Love and I come to the Four Seasons? First of all, we're here celebrating our wedding anniversary, our seven-year wedding anniversary. And basically, we have an emotional connection to the hotel because we were so blessed to have our wedding reception here. That's a story for another day, how that happened. Well, I'll tell you one reason it happened here and not at another hotel in Denver. Basically, True Love, in her brilliance, she created a bidding war between the Weston, the Four Seasons, and I believe maybe the Ritz Carlton in Denver here. So like, when we were getting ready to get married, we were looking for places to have the reception and we both have big families and so we needed a, you know, a large space somewhere with a ballroom area. We have large families and so True Love and her brilliance started calling up, boom, boom, different hotels saying, okay, this hotel is giving us this. Can you match this? Oh, they're going to reduce the dollar per plate by this much. Can you match that? And boom, boom, boom, boom. And so this hotel that we are in now had just opened and they were like, listen, we are here for you, we will accommodate you, just like the poolside guests said this morning, you ask and they make it happen. The Four Seasons, okay, another, I'm going to share a lot right now because I'm so excited. Ronald Reagan, where did, where did, how does Ronald Reagan come into this discussion? Basically, he said back, I believe in the late 80s, trust but verify, trust but verify. And he was talking about the denuclearization of Russia at the time in the late 80s. So like he trusted that the Russians were stopping their nuclear program and expanding it, but he needed to verify it. Same with, I know that's an interesting history tidbit to connect to the Four Seasons, but I need, as someone who appreciates branding and companies and entrepreneurship and business models, I need to verify the service that we receive here at the Four Seasons. And so this is a book, it's literally called The Four Seasons, and it's by, it's about Isidor Sharp, who is the founder of The Four Seasons. And I believe he's still the chairman, he may have retired, I actually need to verify that. So Isidor Sharp, he's from Toronto, Canada. And this book I read over the last three months, come on in. And so this is how I am verifying, Tula have just arrived by the way, here she is. Four Seasons, I just got done bragging about you. Oh, I love you. So this is how I am, so I'm trusting the service that we're receiving here, but I needed to verify it and be like, how are they doing this every single time that we arrive? It's verified in this book. And the business philosophy, the outlook on customer service is outlined very clearly in this book. And so how are we able to come here? Because listen, we know this, you're paying a premium for the service you receive at these hotels. Like, they are the gold standard of hotel leadership and service and everything, food, oh my gosh, food in the entire world, The Four Seasons. And so how are we able to do it? Well, basically we pinch pennies. As you know, like I drive a 2002 Toyota Corolla. Yeah, I'd love a brand new car. I'd love a car that was built in the last decade. But that's not the reality right now. I could easily, we could, well, not easily, but we could have hired someone to paint our house. But you know, then you're looking at $3,000 to $5,000 out the window. And maybe we cannot afford to come in the lap of luxury and enjoy this space. And we would rather place our finances and our funding into experiences rather than material things like, listen, yeah, a paint job could happen like that for $3,000 to $5,000. But you take some of that money that you would have spent painting and you put it into other areas. Yes. I'm just the idea, excuse me, that, you know, everybody has decides what they do with their money. And for us, we found what helps us rest and renew our soul and our life and our marriage. And so we, we just choose like, honestly, I feel like when you first hear, you're like, oh, that'd be nice if we could afford to stay there. But truly, anybody can afford what they want.  So it's for us, it's getting to be enjoy this. And the customer service. Yes. Yes. High quality enjoyment. It's just heaven on earth. And we were just saying last night how, how awesome it is that we both relax and get renewed in the same way. Like some couples need to travel the world or like they want to go, they want to go run Ironman together or they want to, you know, like for us, we have our separate hobbies. And then like when we come together, this is what we enjoy doing. Resting by the pool. Very much. They're resting by the pool. So anyway, not to mention we got 20% off everything because we booked early. Oh, perfect. Boom. I didn't even realize that. Did you know that? Yeah. So that is why we choose and how we choose how we can choose the four seasons. We pinch pennies. We say no to new cars so that we can say yes to this stuff. And like, we love that. Like, we would rather put our harder and cash into experiences rather than things, even though someday, yeah, we'll, we'll need to upgrade our car. Anyway, we love the four seasons. We love you guys. Thanks for watching. And here's just a few more clips from how Isidor Sharp has set up a system of customer service and just lap of luxury here at the four seasons and question of the day, how do you rest? How do you renew yourself the best? That's it.


Now, we are going to speak about the second part, which are the COVID multiposs, the challenge of this epidemic supposed to database like Ferazone and what we did about it. And what we did actually are very specific resource for SARS-CoV-2 multiposs that were issued for HIV, HPV and some of the most important virus in terms of human impact. So the SARS-CoV-2 virus is an RNA virus, it's a 30 kilobase genome, it's the biggest genome of RNA, you get RNA viruses, about 28 proteins and one of the first challenges is when the sequence came out to annotate the proteome actually early January 2020. So the sequence came out and was available in JinBank pretty quickly actually, they were able to update and put that available very quickly, but for it to be available in Varzone could be as pretty fast, but in Uniprot you see it's kind of a problem because there's a lot of program and complexity of annotation on proteins, which is not a nucleic acid because nucleic acid pretty much find the open reading frame and it's annotated where for proteins you get thousands of things you could say about single protein when you know how to analyze it. So the first problem was to name actually the open reading frame because the literature in the polyprotein of the COVID you have one polyprotein which is in two parts and it's actually assembled by Retro and also proteins which are assembled by subgenomic RNAs, transcriber subgenomic RNAs, some were called NSP for non-structural so NSP867, but the other was also called in Dr. NSP because they were non-structural so you get NSP6 which was this one but also this one, so we agreed very quickly with the scientific community that this should be called open reading frame 126, 129, 10 and this would be called NSP so there has been no problem. So this was the first thing we had to do then we have to be sure of the gene model of the virus and you see for example in gene banks they put the open reading frame 10 but we find no correlation, nothing similar in other corners, it's very small and there is no subgenomic RNA so we did not annotate it in VALZO or in Uniprot but we annotated for example the RF9 which will presume to exist and turn out to exist, RF10 turn out to be not transcribed, not expressed and some people expressed it and find some would be functions but actually it's not made at all in the virus but these open reading frames have functions actually. So we made this work before putting in VALZO then the virus mutated a lot you know all about the variants so mutations occurs by replication errors but also by cellular editing enzymes so the cell have a system to edit the RNA in the cytoplasm which is kind of antiviral system because if you change the sequence of a viral genome it will end up to be non-viable but if you don't kill it you can make you stronger like you said Friedrich Nietzsche and that's what happens in the COVID because we see from the transmission that many mutations for example in Omicron or Delta came from this system so the virus exploits actually the defense of the whole cell to have more flexibility in the sequence and the advantage is most leads to spread more and escape immunity. I will skip that one. So the scarcocov 2 variants are nicely described for example in Nextrain which is also related to Swiss institute of bioinformatics through making a very clean and nice phylogenetic analysis of all the sequences I never which is millions now of sequences and you see the different kind of lineage for the last one VQ1 XBB which are circulating a lot in Europe and in the US but also a few others in East Asia but Delta beta stopped to be circulating for example. The big issue there for doing a viral resource for example is the name of all the variants because Nextrain is using this naming system which is very convenient so we got 20 for the years and ABC AG and so on. So for example what we call the Delta is 21, 21 IGA Omicron is called 22, 21 depending on the year it appeared. So this is one nomenclature of of lineages. What you have to know is that international committee of taxonomy for viruses is dealing with general taxonomy but not below the species so every naming system of lineage whatever you want genotype serotypes named under the species it's not covered by any official means. So everybody can do what they want and that's what they do. This is a pongo which is a very important resource for variants in coronaviruses. The way they name the different lineage in Omicron so this is the BA45 so don't read everything. It's quite a mess and this is BA2. So you see it's pretty completely different from what we use into into Nexpot and it's much more detailed but yeah it's a bit confusing if you look at it at once. Then you have GZ which is also naming differently a lineage with different systems so at the end of the day we've got pongo, GZ, an extra way of naming then came WHO which gave names like Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta, Omicron which is a pretty good thing it's easier to under and make a kind of official way to name the variants because all of those are not official it's resource doing what they want but WHO as an official posture can really give insight into the more current way of naming. Then for example to put the variants into into viral zone and to provide a sequence but we need a sequence we need a reference sequence and that's also a big issue because WHO and very people give names to lineage but they don't give sequence and what people need very quickly if you say there's a new microvirus people will have to know at least one reference sequence so if they want to study it if they want to make a PCR to identify it in people and anything you want to do now is linked to the sequence so you need to have a reference sequence but in a lineage many mutations occurs not all of them are present all the time so we kind of choose to take mutation that are observed in more than 80 percent of sequences so there is there is a resource called Outbreakinfo.com which is linked to Outbreakinfo.com which is linked to GZdata and they analyze the sequence and give you even the the rate of sequence found into this lineage for example in peak it's like 70 percent of sequence have this variant it's 100 percent of the sequence have this variant in the Omicron for example so this is a way to give access to some some mutation landscape of any kind of variants and it has been quite a difficulty to find reference sequence so at the end of the day we have we make an agreement between the BVBRC and US Viper people which provide also reference sequence and the next trend and other people in Los Angeles to agree on the same reference so every resource we display the same reference sequence for Omicron, for Delta, so on so it's to make things more comprehensive for for users so we've made a resource I will show you in our zone about coronavirus and then variants page with the described variations links to pangu covariant outbreak next trend links to reference genomes and proteins so that people can get really harmed on the sequence not just any rhythm mutations in the literature okay so just showing you up that in life so coronavirus resource we made so we got the the basic fact sheet which is knowledge of the virus with a genome we have a little bit more data on the protein it's made polyprotein and interaction with small brain this is kind of simple but a lot of people walking in biodiesel jumps on walking on coronavirus so these people needed a lot more information to work with it so we expanded the the usual fact sheet for this virus so we have more inside description of the protein of how it's made the transcription in the virus making subgenomic RNAs a special sequence of how it works and your link to paper describing if you really want to know we made a coronavirus life cycle of course I showed that before we have links to the proteins in uniprot and covid resource i would tell you a bit more pdb as well because pretty much all resource reacted to to to give more information so we have a kind of simple i would say interactome there which we have interactions shown for SARS-CoV-2 other were shown at first for SARS we would say one for 2003 so the different attraction for which we really have a good function okay so these are by similarities but you are also some large-scale interactome available or some resource like perosource net which gives the interactome with thousands of proteins that could really represent real interactions but we are not sure yet okay we have made some idea of the covid so it's very simple way to show it how it's working time we analyzed a bit the vaccines so what are the type of vaccines for this so in the future we'll expand to many other viruses or maybe make pages on type of vaccines because we have so the new mRNA vaccines are made there are like some mutations inserted into the proteins there so the proteins is modified or it is modified or it is expressed or presented with pseudo reading for example the mRNA you get a dosage of the vaccination global knowledge about it for example the another adenova vector vaccine is made where put the gene of the SARS-CoV-2 how it is modified you see it's more evidently modified in Jensen it is in AstraZeneca for example in activated vaccine mostly used in China right words and subunit vaccine also Novavax so pretty much all kind of vaccines have been tried for for coronavirus and it allows us to make a stupid bit of description and give also for example the Novavax use a lot of more mutants so you get access to this information it's not always easy to get now about anti-viral drugs so on the replication cycle you could find ways to block the virus at some parts and if you block the virus in one part of its cycle it will be dead and you have different ways to do so there are spike maturation inhibitors that have been tried or dosomal fusion inhibitor but it turned out that the COVID-cooled fusion the plasma membrane in some cells bypass this also protease inhibitor there is a polyprotein if you prevent the virus from leaving it then you're okay polymerase inhibitor the virus uses a special polymerase to replicate its RNA so you have different kind of of anti-inflammatory antibodies different kind of ways to to catch the virus and stop it and here I put a lot of description of what main that have been tried because actually there are two sums of molecules that have been tried some of them are approved like this one actually well they're pretty much quickly effective in the country much of them it's not perfect yet but it gives an insight this page is hard to keep updated because it moves very fast and I should time stamp it actually so you will see that some pages in our zone like variance going to it that time stamp so you know last time it was updated because when the information can be changing a lot over time we don't have necessarily the means to to keep the term the path of updating that every time so you know if the page is a bit outdated or not so you'll see that last update is 20 January so it's pretty close to now so the variant page have several things and you have a 3d structure of you directly into the page of the the trimer of spike protein and you can see directly on it because you can see that you are asparagine 540 so this view gives you access to all the amino acids you want to so you see the famous mutation the first one that appeared in covid was p614g you can see what it is so this is a part of the protein which is on the membrane and this is a part exposed to to the to the receptor that will bind the receptor and that will also interact mostly with antibodies and you can see with the alpha gained a lot of mutation all over the place some in a receptor binding um up to the micron if you see delta a lot of mutation as well on this part is many antibody escape this is antibody escape on receptor binding but when you go to omicron you see there is a lot of mutations going on now and many parts of the protein um and the last one is uh it's bb15 which is you see all this mutation so it's kind of nice to have a view on the 3d structure even though what you really need if you want to work through sequences so here's a picture we described on a linear way the different mutation that are presented more than 80 percent to do before because it's a lineage there are many variants into the lineage so we present the the major mutation that are represent the lineage actually but define the lineage so for micron i just put the mutation defining the omicron basic strain and then you have the special mutation for every kind of omicron variants so you have to add up these two to really have omicron and alpha delta gamma and then you have a list on a smart table in which you can have access to the omicrons which are now circulating but also the old lineage alpha b the beta delta and so on on this table you have um link to pongo which is for example kov lineage so you have the lineage in pongo which should be describing okay the localization in the world and everything so this link are convenient you have covariant which is link to next strain which describes also the variants in other ways using the same reference strain that we are fully um your bbrc so bbrc is a us website public made for for study of pathogens or the virus and bacteria inside and the part of us they give you also um a lot of data on not only the virus and their genome but also on variants of of covid so you see you have to have a representative strain link which is the same bar zone defining mutations um so here in bar zone also show uh so i made it drop down menu because there are a lot of mutations it's easy to scroll down the name synonym of so we call that the way using pongo uh but it's 21 key k k sorry in next strain or it was named previously like this which was a bit complicated now it's b1 you have access to the genome here so the kind of reference genome i told you we struggled to to agree on and then display on different resource so this is the gene bar country we call the genome so now uh if people need to they can really access to the direct sequence of um um one of the best reference we choose we choose um the reference at the basis of um of the outbreak mix so at the basis of the tree so that it's one of the first so it should cover um better the whole diversity that will happen later because if we take a later diverse sequence it could not cover all the lineage uh and also get access to spike protein because it was miss most study protein in the covid also from gene bank okay because they are not always present in uniprot i will tell you uniprot takes a long time to to update uh when uh gene bank is very quick so at the time we we make for example xbb1 which is there the spike protein is not yet in uniprot so we'll interact with them okay um so this is for the variants let's go back this um we also put a notation of variance into we push it into swiss plot so in the swiss plot code of spike we have line of variance with the name and all the code so it appears in uh in the swiss plot as well uniprot and people can really pass this data directly from the database if they want to because it's there but again it's a challenge to release quickly in uniprot um so to to make something about covid when the covid pop out in in january seconds of covid pop out in january 2020 we make that notation very quickly analyze the proteome and it was like two weeks we are everything ready but uniprot will not be released at a time before april 2020 which is pretty long way when the new virus is eating the world so uniprot decided to make a special part of west side which is an early website to see the entries so uniprot is a very big boat with a lot of of annotations who are program working at every release so we could not really steer the boat toward the covid but we could make a sister website just for the covid in which we release just these entries and that's what they do and it's a covid 19 uniprot website in which you have the latest annotations and they are they're at every release of uniprot they're released right away so they are like in every two months they're updated which is pretty much the best we can do with all the complexity of uniprot but as you see the the new pandemic posed a new question to speak database is how do you update how can you provide the right data that people need at the right moment i think maybe we could do it better if there's a new one but we are learning so um now there are 11 millions of SARS-CoV-2 genome where it was in main or now it might be like 15 millions i don't know deposited in gz and also it's a bit complexity because people deposit gz which is not a public public database it's owned by a foundation and then some are pushing nsdc database which is a public gene bank gene bank dbg share in the world so there was about five million which is already a lot actually so you see the number of genome submissions per country quite it's not the same some countries are sequencing and submitting more than others in in gene bank i mean and in gz also there are more submissions all over the world okay Switzerland actually is submitting to both database because well um database made by swiss city to buy informatics that gather every second for swiss around and push it into gene bank on gz so everybody's happy about it okay now about the multipox virus so again we have a new emerging virus which is multipox a box virus we did not add a new man since the viola was eradicated so it's much more complex virus you see it's a DNA virus one of the biggest feeling we know already you see the size compared to multipox particle it's much much more bigger and it's a 200 kb genome and about 200 200 proteins encoded by by it in a complex way so we have made a lot of previous work with experts about box virus biology that we have leveraged to to create also a very quick multipox special arch resource so for example the variant of multipox or pox viruses is pretty complex two layers two membranes a lot of proteins so for example sars you get one protein at the surface of the virus okay just one the spike and just another one inside two but here you have more than 20 proteins in the mature variant and even more developed so it's much more complicated the receptor is bound by this complex which is made of maybe 10 proteins and so we we had established that in 2016 so we put that into the resource so that people can understand at least the complexity of the variant of the receptor binding and see it's quite different virus than for example corona virus if you want to study it it's definitely not the same so we have made a pox virus resource that I can show you up so it's there so again the classical fact sheet we had already before and then for example we draw a genome so you see the genome is much more complex there was also a lot of problem to name the genes because in biology where there is no standard to naming genes and proteins at all there's no concentration people are doing naming the virus the sequence the way actually they want so we have a huge problem of diversity especially happened in pox viruses every kind of vaccine have different way of naming their genes they were based of different regions which are cleaved by restriction enzymes and then a number but as these viruses are the genetic plasticities that recombine that change the way of genes are organized we ended up with many genes that were similar completely different names in even in vaccine analysis so now there's it was agreed to put an official nomenclature of genes recently so we use that and this this picture show you the old nomenclature of the new one so it can be easier to link between the literature the old literature and know what we are talking about so you see the genome also it's called the main functions we have actually pretty much all genes in the viruses could be classified some are made for genome replication or transcription so in blue and you see in pox viruses it's pretty much in the center of the genome some for assembly embedding in green so it's disseminated in center or so far as proteins in yellow but also you have osmodulation protein which are presented on peak and you see that the extremities of the pox virus are full of osmodulation protein and this is where the genetic plasticity comes really they can change exchange get new genes on daily genes modify them very quickly in these extremities so as to change easily between host and to adapt to host as well so this is a genome we also have some interactions of the pox virus you see the main interaction described again for for clear function that we identified so you have the name of the gene old nomenclature new nomenclature of PG and where they are actually acting what functions they are doing we have so a list in which you can access to the protein so there are pop-ups also summary of what is in the database you have vaccinia because vaccinia is pretty much annotated a lot of work has been made made in the last 30 years on the vaccinia proteins multipox kind of new in the blocks so we find less less data on the function in the multipox entries and in the vaccinia so put two together because there are homologues and and also the host protein are interacted with here for example etfr and this one this is a vowel etgfr and there are some models also make of go-cabs so it's gene autology made a model that describe on pretty much large pathway of interaction between different things so it's more like bioinformatics things but it could be pretty easy to read and can be reusable by computers and artificial intelligence so it's kind of way we go between the literature of interaction up to the bioinformatics in it so for interactions of course life cycle that was made with expert a few years ago it's pretty much the same multipox vaccinia structural protein i show you the antiviral drugs so there are already existing antiviral drugs you see three most used known and you have two kinds of drugs so again when you stop the cycle somewhere you kill the vase often you need to stop the cycle at different parts because otherwise could evade just one push like for hiv one leads to make strain as well in which you can see the multipox circulating this is the new lineage that came out in the world and so far multipox have been getting down after after infecting a lot of people about the world it's still present but in many countries it kind of goes down the new infections unfortunately did not mutate much so we hope it will remain so okay and so this is what i wanted to tell you about about this this resource you can see that we made also the first one we made was for hepatitis b so i told you the hepatitis virus are pretty small but they're to go through a live around the dotaal sinusoidal cells which are very small holes so a big virus like adeno or Ebola could not really reach the hepatocytes it's kind of filter and maybe it's not a surprise that hepatitis virus are one of the smallest so they can really reach the cell the target so again some some some replications in which you have links to for example the HPV surface protein so more details on these virus again for RPS like for example the variant is pretty complex again like we made for pox where the description one of the best description of variant is very complex and not really sure how they interact but trying to make sense of the literature here and HIV resource also that let's make in collaboration with a swiss South Africa general program some people in studio the oliver for example in South Africa we work with him to do that because he's been working a lot of HIV so again users suspect the drugs some interactions so we get a lot of interaction that has been showed up with a rating of how sure we are which really are the functions sometimes it's not really it's just one paper but some sites can give you like thousands of interactions even like 10% of you imagine interacting with HIV which I don't believe is really true but it's it's what Lashka Interatomics gives you as a result so it's raw data okay and I think it's it's over it's over for this presentation so now it's time to thank people in the team working so Edward Casso is a programmer making very nice work to to create new things pop up everything makes JavaScript and everything's made by him Chantelillo is the first time with which we funded we created the files in the first place and Patrick Masson is also an editor which I put a lot in especially in the direction we are working in the swiss port group and the direction of island bridge and I want to thank a lot of collaborators over the years that help us to develop the the source there are more than that I can see everybody and I thank you very much for your


four o'clock instead of three o'clock. Yeah, that's better. Good morning everyone. This talk is about testing anyone not testing. Whoa, brave. The other track is kind of you don't care about efficiency so you can go to that one. So Kieran is talking about testing but he's taking it actually beyond unit testing. And we will hear about a bit of testing interface on hardware devices and things like that. Kieran is working for TED Electronics here in Christchurch? No, I actually work for Yellow Pages. Oh Yellow Pages? Well okay. I used to work for Tate. Oh he used to work for Tate, so now Yellow Pages. Yellow Pages being lucky there. So yeah, welcome Kieran and all about testing. Hello. So is this a talk about testing? Of course it is, but I think the point is it's not a talk about testing in the way that we normally as developers think about testing. It's not about unit testing and integration testing and what's good practice. It's about what happens when you have complicated interfaces and the testing is more from a testing, test analyst point of view, a testing department's point of view than a validation that what you just changed didn't break something. So that's also in the name. We're using Python to test, not testing of Python code necessarily.  It's a bit of hardware. It's anything really. So what's the problem we're trying to solve? Originally when I was thinking about this talk, I was considering it in the problem space that I know which is hardware testing. So I worked at Tate and Cisco testing hardware devices, but I read an interesting article recently about a software shop who essentially came up with the same stack solution to the problem. And really it comes down to a single question. What happens when your tests start taking too long? And obviously this question changes depending on your context. In the context of unit testing, it's probably minutes. If your unit tests are taking five minutes, then no, you're going to start running them and you're going to have a problem. In the case of hardware, I think this question gets answered a lot quicker because if you imagine I have a Nexus 5 here, if I was to perform a factory reset on this, does anyone know how long that would take? I actually don't know the answer because I didn't want to do it. But I suspect it was about 10 minutes probably before you would have a usable system back. And from a testing point of view, you should probably be doing that every time because you want consistency. But it's completely impractical if you've got 500 tests to spend 10 minutes resetting one device. So why do tests take too long? In the classic unit testing case, I think you just simply have a lot. In the article I was reading, they had thousands, 10,000s, and it just gets to the point where it takes a long time. This kind of comes from both the unit testing case. If you have a system that's complicated enough to have thousands of unit tests, you're going to have a lot of external systems that you're going to be interfacing with. And usually in this situation, we cheat. We set up something that has a fixed login that you hard-coded into the code that it uses for its testing. But you get to a point where if you have a system which has to provide you with that resource, then you have to manage that resource, you have to configure it, you have to make sure it's in a known state. The second point is that insurance consistency can take a lot of time. And this is especially true in the hardware space. It's probably the biggest problem with automated testing of hardware devices is they're completely inconsistent. So what's the solution? Obviously it's to run things in parallel. We wanted things to run faster. But what happens when we try and run something in parallel? So I'm going to take you on a little bit of a journey, I guess, a bit of a story. We started with some unit tests that take too long. So what can we do about that? We can obviously spin up some Docker images maybe since we like Docker. We can SAP the code on there, split up the code somehow, maybe a sweep per image, and we can run them, which is all nice. We can check the outputs maybe, see if it worked. But we probably want to know the results of those unit tests. That's the point of running them. Did things pass, did things fail? And we probably also want the logging output because we're good people, so we're providing logging and debugging of what we're trying to achieve. So we're going to add a custom test runner to what we're doing, because we want to be in control of putting those tests, of what tests we run and what files get generated and where we put them. But if we stop approaching this as a tester and start approaching it as a developer and start approaching it as a tester, then we get to the point where the results are quite important because that is the output of your work essentially. So the business is going to come to you and say, is this a regression if you find a bug? And you're going to have to say, I don't know, because I don't have a record of this particular test running on X version or X hardware at some time in the past. So results becomes a service, it's no longer just some files you pull off and look at because you're not just validating your current changes, you're validating the entire solution that you're trying to test and you really want to record those results and be able to filter them based on platform inversion and all those sort of things. But let's say I'm testing my phone and I get a test case that says, I need to fill up the 32 gigabytes of space on this phone. What happens when I fill it up? Does it give me a good error message? But there's a 16 gigabyte model of this. So you get to the point where suddenly your test case has to define the fact that it can only run on a 32 gigabyte model and not a 16 gigabyte model. So we suddenly had requirements before we can even schedule anything. It's no longer a simple case of just making some workers, putting your code base there and running a command. It's put the code, analyze the code base, figure out what your tests need and then you have to have some sort of resource allocation system which can take in some requirements to a certain resource matches that, give it out and then you have the added complexity of that because you get to the point where you're supporting services because this isn't just about an XS5, I need a server that's plugged into this probably to be able to talk to it. And maybe I want two phones because I want to make sure if they can make a phone call between them then your entire test runner becomes very complicated because you have to take in an arbitrary resource definition, decide what it is, make a driver for it, make sure it's in a state that you care about and is acceptable for your tests. So we're gonna add test framework to the list. And for me, this is basically a stack which would provide a good level of automation. It would be, I have made a couple of these, one was a lot worse than the other one and the second one wasn't great either I think and obviously part of these, every part of this stack can be satisfied by existing services in some cases. Although I am surprised that in general I haven't found many generic solutions for these. And I think, I've certainly seen this belief that automation is free. I'm not sure if from a developer's point of view we see it but certainly at a managerial level they see this, we're spending lots and lots of money every month regression testing our products and they think I will write a script and I'll be for there forever and we'll be able to use it. But I think as a developer you can appreciate that if you have a stack that is that complicated it's not free. There's a lot of maintenance, there's a lot of work involved with trying to set something like that up and maintain it over the course of your product especially as the developers. When you're on the other side, the developers that are breaking things and changing things and making your life difficult. So I wanna talk about history. What do I mean by history in this thing? I mean that, Greenfield's is really not that common and actually you usually walk into a project that already exists with a lot of legacy stuff lying around. And this is a process thing that you try and fix your technical debt. But from what I've seen these projects are generally driven by the testing departments, not the developer departments which is probably something that would be good to fix. And the problem with testing departments is they don't have developers. So you end up with testers getting thrown in the deep end saying automate this, it can't be that hard. So they choose Python because it's easy. And it is easy to learn as we've been hearing recently. But it is still very hard to make a complicated software system that works well in lots of situations. And the amount of times that I've walked into a code base and seen a test case which is a good two, 300 lines long which is an exact copy of another test case in the same file times 50 with three or four lines changed in each test case is really problematic when you get to the point of you wanna change one thing about how the setup works but the setup's distributed across 50 files in your code base. So I think the other point about testers becoming the people who have generated this is they're also the people who write your test case is a lot of the time. Which is the right place for them to be actually because they are the domain experts. In general, your testers know the product the best as far as the customer is concerned. And they're the best people to decide if that feature is acceptable for your customer or not. So this is obvious, but I think I still have to find myself, sorry, I still need to remind myself of this quite a lot when I'm trying to design something. Just because something's cool doesn't necessarily mean that it's what you should be doing. And often it's this argument about what's the right abstraction between the right design decision between trying to abstract everything out so you don't repeat yourself to becoming incredibly complicated and you cannot understand the code base for the sake of a few lines. So, how about some Python? We're here to talk about Python. I've got a few examples of some solutions that I've come up with for some problems that I've hit. The first one is about requirements. This is annoying at best. It's simple in the case that we're talking about before there's only two options. But for some reason hardware companies seem to be prolific in making lots of variations of things. So, for example, at Tate, we've got some ex-Tate people here. They have five, six, seven, eight products probably. Each product would have five or six models in it. And from a tester's point of view, they wanna say I can run on any series of this product or I need this particular model or I just care about having this platform or this hardware variant or... But from a technical point of view, being able to consolidate those into something that you can throw at a resource management system and say, do you have one of these? It's quite hard. So, we're using Python. So, we're using an object. So, this is a representation that a developer, a tester will care about. They wanna, next is five, that's 32 gigabytes. This is their requirement from my example before. But the system really cares about models probably. Well, you need some level of absolute. So, having something that could translate the top one into the second one is quite nice. And basically, this was just a JSON-backed tree structure. So, it could enter at any point in the tree and if it had enough information, it could expand outwards from that point. And obviously, it's a model. So, I mean, it's an object. So, you can do cool things like, can you compare them? Can you all them together? Because obviously, the next is six came out and it only has a 32 gigabyte and a 64 gigabyte model. So, they are both applicable to our test case in this example. But from a technical point of view, what we really care about is, it's any of those actual models because that's what we can throw out our resource management system and say, do you have any of these things that you can give to me right now? Test frameworks. What do I mean by test framework, I guess? I think all knows unit test, all knows as a runner, a unit test is a test framework. But when you get to the point of, you've got 10 different resources. So, at Cisco, we had a test case which was, can you load a video conferencing box up to its maximum port count? The maximum port count is 104 HD calls. It takes a lot of hardware and resources to be able to, in real time, have 104 HD calls being up on a box. And you'll probably give up 10 different things you've got to orchestrate to be able to do something which, on paper, is incredibly simple. Take it to max port count, can you add one more call? But from a testing point of view, it's a lot of pain. So, you want a framework that really helps you and supports you to do what you would expect. I want to be able to write, well, I want to be able to set up method and it's a method to configure my environment. And I want to be able to write a single test case which lets me test what I want to test. So I need to have everything available to me. And I think simplicity is a key point here as well. Coming back to the point from before about, we need it to be easy to understand and we need it to be usable by a lot of, a large variation of people who are competent and not so competent in Python. So, super. We all love super. It's a pain point, I think. But it's a pain point because multiple inheritance is a complex beast. And unfortunately, when you have lots of things which are very similar, multiple inheritance is quite a nice solution to that. But it's incredibly easy to forget to call super. I do it a lot more than I would probably admit to most of the time. And I spend a lot more time debugging, missing a super call than I would definitely like to admit. So, what can we do about that? What if we turn our setup methods into decorators rather than having a call super, rather than having a setup chain which can go all over the show in a really non-obvious way? Why don't we just make it explicit that this is a setup method and that we need it to run that X point in a chain? So, when I implemented this, the setup sequence for the test framework for a classic test case was probably 15 or 20 methods. There's a lot of stuff that's happening under the hood to set all these resources up for you. So, in our base class, we can have some nice descriptive names rather than just setup. It doesn't really mean anything to anyone. And then the user just says, this is the setup that I need to do for my test. And obviously, we can use the power of Python and the inspect module to then load this class into memory and make a little function that'll tell you exactly what will be run for your setups. And it'll tell you where you can find them if you wanna know what they do and on what lines. And obviously having good method names here gives you a lot more visibility and to probably what that method should be doing. Debugging. So, use a debugger, it's the usual go-to. But a lot of the time, you're not debugging the code that you're writing, you're debugging the scenario you're trying to test. So, why didn't the 104th call connect? You don't know, it ran overnight. You got some logging, doesn't seem to tell you anything. What you really wanna do is be able to stop your test case. At that point, so you can investigate your environment, you can try adding another call to the box. See, just play around with it basically. Because there's a lot of value in that if you had to go and manually try and get that up to 100 port count without your scripts. It's a good half an hour's work to collect all the resources up and whatever. So, IPython gives us a nice little embedded concept. This is also true of the normal interpreter. You can, if you call that from your Python code, you will end up in an embedded Python, IPython shell. So, there's an argument to the second part of that call that will give you the depth, which is very nice.  So, you can have the context that you're called in. So, let's have a, let's have an example just to prove that it works. So, I've got an object here. We've got a local variable that proves that. I can actually see the local variable. We've got an interrupt point, which always interrupts, but in my case of the framework, you can essentially call the test runner with telling you, telling it where you wanted to interrupt it. And then it will keep running when it finishes. So, so usually you would call it like this, and it would go off and do stuff, and you'd go have a coffee, and then suddenly you'd come back and you'd be in a Python shell. And I added a nice little thing that tells you exactly what your context is, so she can get a bit lost sometimes when you're doing this. But you can see, I do have a local variable in my context, and I can do whatever I want. So, if I needed to talk to one of my resources, if this was a proper framework, I could go resource.whatever. And when I quit out, it just goes back to doing what I was doing, and everything gets cleaned up, everything does it as it was. And I can run that on a server. I can, yeah, it's completely flexible. And yeah, so that was all I had. So any questions? I did the running.  So you've got a whole test framework and people say, oh, that's testing, so that's enough. But actually, do you also have to, you want a unit test framework for those tests? Absolutely. Using those resources. Yes, I would, for that stack that I put there, each of them I would consider to be a completely separate service that should be tested in its own right. So, most of them, the ones I've written, were web frameworks. So the results service, you post results to it. You post to the resource management system your requirements, and it will give you back something at some point. So yeah, absolutely. You should, but I think for that case, the normal unit testing frameworks that we have, like Django test and unit test and knows and all these things are what we know, what we understand, and we can easily use them, reuse those. That's, yeah, that is a problem. But basically, you've got lots of moving parts when you've got a system like this, because you've got lots of versions for everything. So, generally, you would have, well, in my experience, you have a concept of the device under test being on your testing version and all supporting devices being on your known good versions. So you can split that round, obviously, and put everything on your known good versions and put your infrastructure on your testing versions and run your infrastructure against known good releases and see if you get what you got before. All right, more questions, make me run. Hey, Karen. Are you aware of any open source test frameworks available for testing specifically for testing hardware? No, which I am quite surprised about. I'd love to learn of any if I could find some. But I think in this space it's, the requirements are so varied and so different across hardware. I think that it's very hard to make something generic because when you're making software, you're always trading off against something and what trade-offs you make completely depend on what features your framework ends up with. And the problem with testing is you can't just turn around and say, no, I can't do that. I mean, most of the time you want to turn around and say, actually, you can do that. So I have to kind of design it like that and you end up in a situation where you have very specific frameworks designed for your specific use case. So generalizing them can be quite hard, but I'd love to see someone try. Any more questions? Well, I have one because I'm interested in the whole question around maintaining your tests and not have them as second-class citizens in your code. If you have any tips to share around that, for example, if you're not a sole tester, but actually a team of testers or multiple people touching on your tests, what are your tips and experiences? I actually just removed, I did have a package of testing for a project I'm working on at the moment and more, a web-based one. I just moved it back into the code base for these were service tests, essentially, what I would call service tests, which are end-to-end tests of a large API framework. And the reason I did that was so you could change them in parallel and the diff had the service tests in them. But I think it's a process thing to try and maintain them as first-class citizens in that context. I mean, unit tests, yeah, I don't know. I do see what you mean. It is there's this disconnect between testers who want to write test cases and developers who just kind of want to validate something that they are currently working on and don't want to regression in that way. And actually moving to a case where you, your tests are, as you say, first-class citizens and have a lot of thought put into them as opposed to just being what it is, a test exactly what I did is definitely valuable, I think. But I guess I can't say I have much experience with how to make that happen. Excellent, any more questions? Any hands? No, then join me in thanking Kieran for his talk.