Ahoy, ahoy, and welcome to the video. Today, we're going to read a tale by Ethagon, called In Response to Nuclear Warheads. And it is a tale about the Foundation's use of nuclear warheads, actually. Which, as you can imagine, might be a bit complicated. Let's get started. Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. I am Director Weld, and this is the fourth time that I speak to the committee. I come to you today to propose the abolition of all on-site explosives, especially regarding those of nuclear nature. As you are all well aware, the Foundation's history with nuclear warheads is a long one. We used them since, well, since they were invented, the time of wars. We did our best to stay out of all these wars, and yet we couldn't help but use the greatest creation for ourselves. And what did we use it for? Threaten our own staff. Nuclear warheads soon became the new method to easily resolve major security breaches. Not a normal bomb, mind you. An atomic bomb. Unfortunately, it took years of hindsight to realize that these warheads contaminate a site with atomic radiation for the next billion years. And you know what can still thrive in that radioactivity? Anomalies. Some of them. But I don't have to tell you that some are too much in our line of work. I wasn't there when the disaster of Site 21 happened, one of the biggest Keter breaches in our history, followed by the uncall of five of our best task forces. What stopped them? Not the Keter, they had it almost in check. What stopped them was the premature decision of someone at that site that it would be time to bring out the last resort and blow everything up. Now, we've got a focal point of anomalies that control a still functioning site and no human can contain them because they die if they enter. And I know at most sites we don't use nuclear warheads anymore, but that's not because of the things I just said. They are only out of use because of the veil breaking that these explosions cause. After all, it's difficult to hide a radioactive cloud that travels through multiple continents before dissolving. At least the new explosives can remove a site without making a single sound and don't leave a huge, never to be used again crater. Incidentally, locations in more remote areas are still dependent upon atomic bombs. But you know what really bothered me about Site 21? It's not the radio activity it spread or the abominations it now houses. It's the fact that we lost five of our best task forces to that explosion. Five task forces we could have needed that year. Five task forces filled with young enthusiasts who could have served the foundation for a whole lifetime. And if those soldiers were still alive, they could have prevented a lot more of the last resorts that we had to use. Now, since I'm speaking to the ethics committee here, I also want to note that knowing that you were working under the watchful eye of a bomb that could explode any minute does not help your productivity. I also honestly never understood the argument that these explosives are our best bets against raids. Is it not the point of stopping a raid to not lose the objects and people were housing? And surely a raid was never that extreme that it would be worth it to eradicate all personnel and other anomalies with them. Now tell me, who here knows one anomaly that breached containment that could have been neutralized by a nuke? Yeah, not that surprising. Now tell me again, which of those couldn't have been neutralized by a gunshot at the right time? I thought as much. Now if you don't take anything else away from today, at least promise me this, that you will stand against the council's decision to arm my department and other foundation fronts with on-site explosives. I don't think the explained anomalies I house are a danger to anyone. And while the foundation may not publicly exist, we fronts will take consequences. We have many good soldiers who train their entire life to prevent breaches, triggering a bomb is just the easy way out and a dishonor to their jobs.  Thank you for your time. While the council appreciates Director Weld's ongoing worry for staff, this motion cannot pass. What is clearly missing from this proposal to be truly worth considering is an alternative. If I understood Weld correctly, his alternative to the current solution is, we must be better. And while that certainly is a goal to gravitate towards, it is not always obtainable. After all, we're only human beings and there is only so much we can do. Then what exactly do we need to expect if these human efforts are not enough? Do we just accept that the last breach will cause a K-class scenario? Shouldn't we have done everything in our power to prevent that, even including that last resort? I do want to give a bit of perspective on these last resorts. In the last 50 years, all in all, four sites decided there was no other option. And while we are aware that 21 was a tragedy, stricter controls were implemented afterwards for all sites, those other three incidents in the end saved humanity. However, Weld is right about one thing. Atomic bombs are extremely ineffective compared to more modern explosive devices. And as such, all sites still dependent upon atomic bombs will have them replaced. That motion will pass. The general proposal is denied by the council. I will not go into the psychological effects of the awareness of on-site explosives. If this is a problem, it is the duty of the ethics committee to find a solution.


Off to the gym answering your questions today, excited to do so on this Labor Day weekend, and we'll be doing quite as much filming today, but we're going to kick it off right from the get-go here with a question from Matt on Facebook. He asks, three weeks, I am three weeks into a 10-week block for my second half marathon of my running career. Congrats, Matt. August, you ran 112 miles and biked 90. What are your thoughts on replacing junk miles with, in quotes, with cycling for less impact and injury prevention? I'm giving it a whirl. I'll let you know how it goes, Matt. On Facebook, Matt, thank you for the question. My first thought is, if you can mix, so listen, I struggle with the phrase junk miles. I prefer to say, I do believe there are junk miles out there where you're literally pounding your body into the ground for no reason. One idea, Matt, is I love the idea of biking, but if you have access, and this is the tough part depending on where you live and for everyone out there, I am a huge fan of big, big soccer fields. I'm talking three, four, five, six soccer fields stacked together and doing loops on there. So, Matt, maybe if you have a bike, you could bike to find a soccer field in your area if you have it, bike there, do two to three miles, because for me, and it's a little bit of a mental game, I like to get that running motion often, and basically every single day, unless I'm on a break after a peak race. So, anyway, Matt, that's my idea, is bike to some grass soccer fields, and I know it's a little boring, but put on an audio book, find your favorite podcast, and just do two to three miles jogging on the soft surface. All right, Matt, thanks for the question. On Facebook, and away we go, off to the gym, get the lift on, get to the pool, get to the stretching, and oh, how sweet it is to be in a car that drives, because the clutch in the other car, like I said, it was done. So, in case you guys didn't know, I did purchase a car two days ago from a family member here in Denver, so that's why I'm in this guy. All right, rock and roll. So you never know what you're going to find at new pools and or rec centers or lack thereof when it comes to pools, so there was only a kiddie pool at this rec center. So, you know, just about three to four feet deep. So that's not, you know, I'm not the tallest guy in the room, but I need a pool that's a little more than three to four feet deep. So I did not get the aqua jogging in today, but that's okay. Yeah, you'll roll with it. You'll roll with the punches and see what you can figure out. So, okay, let's get you another question. Here's another question for all of you, and this came in from Facebook. I do believe, maybe it was Instagram. I forgot to write down the name, but here you go. He says, let's see. I work a physically demanding job and some days I walk 20 plus miles a day. That's a lot. Oh my goodness. On hard days, I try to reduce my training, but it's tough when I have a high goal mileage week. Sorry I didn't say that, right? I'm pretty new to running, started a few years ago, so I'd love to hear what people do who work labor intensive jobs. That's a great question. So I think it's totally fine. If you know you're going to have a hard week of, and I used to mow lawns in high school, sorry, actually in high school and a little bit in college as well. So I had to really think about my training up in Buna Vista. Mowing lawns anywhere from four to eight hours a day, depending on the day. And I had to plan out my training accordingly. I think it's totally okay to reduce your volume of training 10 to 20%. If you know your week of work, whatever you're doing, whether you're delivering mail, whether you're swinging a hammer, like building houses, whatever the case may be, because when you're on your feet, in my opinion, you're not recovering as well as obviously you could be if you were typing at a computer or if you were even actually even working in a restaurant. I used to wash dishes in high school as well. And I would be on my feet for six to seven hours straight washing dishes, and it was tiring. So I get it. I think 10 to 20% reduction in volume is totally legit. Don't hesitate to do that.  So that's my little tip. And then, oh yeah, question of the day. I posed this question on Strava and Facebook and it's everywhere today. And it's basically how many miles did you, that's right, the end of the month. Check in for miles. How many miles or kilometers did you run in the month of August? And how do your legs feel? Okay, so that's the question of the day and it fits in really well with this question from the gentleman who has the labor intensive job. All right, rolling back home. All right, Instagram, here we go. So today's vlog is a Q&A vlog on this Labor Day weekend. So ask me anything. I promise to answer the first three questions that come in. Ask me anything. Go. All right, YouTube family. I just, I just filmed that for Instagram. I will answer in today's vlog whatever questions come in from all of you. And okay, it's live. Next question, sorry, I got to get the phone here. And by the way, back from the drive home. So Jansen asks on Facebook, how do you know how much vertical to work into your training? He's giving examples of a 50K or 100K race. What is the amount of climbing to be safe? So Jansen, it certainly depends on the course that you're racing. I would say if it's a hilly course for a 50K, I like to get at least 5,000 to 10,000 feet of vertical gain. And I'll put it in meters as well on the screen right now. And then 100K, so I've actually never raced 100K. The furthest I've gone in a race is 50 miles, which is 10 miles short of 100K. But I think my rule of thumb would be 10 to 20,000 feet of vertical gain per week. Again, depending on how hilly the course is. Like there's some 50Ks and 100Ks that are actually pretty flat. But if it's hilly, especially at altitude, and if I had to retrain for the run rabbit run 100, I would have reduced my volume of training and I would have increased my strength training, meaning just go out and hike big mountains with weight on my back. I was running probably 90 miles a week last year for the run rabbit run 100. I would have reduced that to 75, and I would have tacked on another, at least another eight to 10, eight to 12,000 feet of vertical gain per week. All right, Jansen on Facebook, thanks for the question. Can't wait for the questions on Instagram. They're gonna be rolling in. Oh, better take the phone, better take the phone.  First actually, first question that came in via Instagram was, what is my favorite junk food? Good question. Let me think on it for a second. Let me think as I'm making my salad. Three, two, one, machine. Absolutely delicious. Oh yeah, crush that salad like there's no tomorrow. Okay, I'm struggling a little bit to come up with my favorite junk food, but I will just say that my go-to snack, if you all know, is definitely, okay, can't close that, is definitely dark chocolate, no doubt. But another one of my favorite snacks, I know, I know it's not that crazy, but just coconut cashews from Trader Joe's. Absolutely delicious. Now I realize these are not really major, major junk foods. If I had to pick something that I could, I could put down two dozen chocolate chip cookies any day, any day, dunked in milk, no doubt, or Oreos, I guess Oreos too. So if I had to pick one, that would be my go-to junk food. Okay, here we go.  It's just not my thing. All right, taking the trash out. Okay, I gotta get the chores done on a Saturday. Okay, here we go. Next question is coming from, this is from Ryan in Wisconsin. Thank you, Ryan, on Facebook he asked. He's running his first marathon in Chicago. Congrats this year. I've done plenty of road and trail halves, but never a full yet. My ultimate goal is to get a BQ Boston qualifier by the 2022, is that how you say that? 2022, Boston, and before my 40th birthday, and he's wondering what my thoughts are on whether or not my rabbit singlet is good, it would be good for a marathon. I would say yes. Very lightweight. Now here's one crazy thing. You might need to push sunscreen on your back and shoulders because it's very lightweight. Like these shoulder straps, if I can say that are very thin. So just something to keep in mind, like you might need to put more sunscreen on your back and shoulders, but very lightweight. I'm sure Nike, maybe Adidas, I don't know. I know there's probably lighter singlets out there, but the breathability of this rabbit singlet, I'm really enjoying. So good question from Ryan in Wisconsin. All right, we march on, everybody. We march on, just getting stuff done today. Uh-huh. Hi, Michael, we're gonna, oh, let me just raise this camera. We're gonna open up a package that arrived today. Hold on, YouTube family. Okay, so speaking of singlets, I've heard of this company before. Okay, I thought it was called something else, Janji. I thought it was, yeah, okay, Janji. I actually don't, it looks like they're from Massachusetts. I don't know what's in here, but it feels like outerwear. So we're gonna open this up with all of you, Janji. I've heard of them, but I've definitely never tried anything from them. Let's do this. All right, what, what could we have here? All right. Oh my, okay, I gotta open these right now with all of you. This is cool, running shorts. Oh, running shorts with roses on them. Okay, that is pretty cool. Look at the color of those. Oh, and they feel really, really nice. It says the Mexico collection. Okay, that's amazing. Thank you, Janji. What else do we have here? Is there a tank top? That's what I, or a singlet. That's what I'm kind of curious about. Hold on, Michael. Oh, I don't even know what this is. Whoa. Hold on, you know how it is. All right, you go, you go explore, Michael. Bottom line, I'm excited and this is cool. Janji, oh, pants. So cool. Look at that, Joseph. Han, look at these. True loves in the house. Han, those are roses. And Han, Janji just sent this to JNJY. What is, water, oh my gosh. Okay, look how lightweight this singlet is, sure enough. Han, we're having a good old time out here. Open in, open in some outerwear. Thank you, Janji. And so anyway, roll the tape, more Q and A's. All right, everyone, continuing with your questions. Thank you for sending them in all over the place. Ah, there was one on Twitter actually. Okay, hold on, where is it? Okay, here it is from Lloyd. Shout out to Lloyd. Compression therapy has been a big part of my recovery from a recent soft tissue and muscle injury. Have you used before and do you have an opinion on using compression sleeves for recovery? Lloyd, I love my compression sleeves. In fact, I just ordered some compressed sport, brand new sleeves that will go on my calves later. But Lloyd connected a picture here to his tweet. I don't know if you're gonna be able to see that, but there's these new, basically your entire leg is, actually I'm gonna save it, and your entire leg is in these sleeves and it helps with recovery. Now a lot of ultra runners are using this compression system. Lloyd, I would say I'm very interested. I've never used it before, but yes, I am a fan of compression for recovery. Good question, Lloyd. Okay, moving on to Instagram. These are the top three. I already took one, where's the next one? So the question is, do I like the Hoka Evo Speed Goats EVO? I don't know if you say EVO or pronounce it out EVO. I will just say EVO. Basically, that is from Stax14 on Instagram. Yes, the answer is yes. I'm gonna give you my first impressions in the next, I'm gonna say the next 36 to 48 hours, so stay tuned for a second video publishing very soon. Absolutely, I'm excited, very excited. These are the shoes that Jim Wamsley wore when he set the course record this year at the Western States 100. Everyone at the race was wondering what he was wearing. It was this shoe, the Hoka Evo Speed Goat. Okay, enough of that. Stay tuned for the first impression. Okay, moving on to, this is from Liam Dennehy, how to get better at running short and steep hills in cross country. All right, here you go. Quick feet, eyes up, as I always say, pump your arms. That's actually my go-to saying, eyes up, pump your arms, quick feet. So move from your head down to your toes. So eyes up, pump your arms, quick feet, but short hills in cross country, like you don't wanna coast those hills, but you also don't wanna put yourself into too much oxygen debt. So depending on how long the hill is, I would, if you have runners around you and you've been running with them throughout the race, make sure you don't get dropped on the hills. And in fact, I would actually use it as an opportunity to test your fellow competitors to see if that's a moment where you can, I almost said break them, meaning pull ahead, see if they can go with you. If you're feeling strong enough, the other answer would be definitely hit the gym. Like make sure your legs are strong. Whether it's single leg squats, like I was doing today on that basu ball today, just like those little exercises to make sure your legs are as strong as possible, that will help a lot. Liam, I hope that helps. Good question. Holy smokes. A lot of questions coming in on Instagram. And this is from D. Shepard. Shepard, I hope I don't disappoint you. He asked, what shoes do you plan to run in for the Amsterdam marathon? I don't know. I'm still testing out. Sorry, I keep dodging that question, but I will have an answer for you. I would say by late September, mid to late September. All right, keeping going here. This is from Andy Roland. Have you ever done a track 24 hour event? Do you ever plan to? Andy, I have not. Yes, I would say yes. It's probably gonna be in my mid to late 40s, but I wouldn't mind just seeing how far I could run in 24 hours around a track, even if it just turned into a food and eating, hang out with friends type of situation. Good question, Andy. Moving on to Nate Gamble. He asked, how much does talent influence running? Can the average Joe's, such as myself, who has grit and a passion for the sport become a sponsored runner? Thanks, man. Keep up the good work. Nate, I would say talent has a lot to do with how you might perform, let's say after college and get a sponsorship. I hate to say it, but a lot of runners who are really good in college won't even be sponsored for very long after college because it's so competitive and the money is just not there. But I will say you can find your niche within running. For example, I kind of thought maybe I could be sponsored after running at CU and it didn't happen. I didn't pursue it as hard as I probably should have, but now as a mountain runner, I have found my niche and I'm not pursuing a sponsorship, but I think if I wanted to be sponsored, I could be. So I would say don't give up on your dreams. Work hard, harness that grit as much as possible and you could achieve great things and be patient with yourself. You might not, frankly, if I feel like my overall strength is just starting to come into its own in my 30s. So don't give up on your dreams as a 22 or 23 year old. You might hit your peak physically as a 32 year old or maybe a 28 year old. And frankly, if you don't mind running the marathon, that's when marathon runners peak is in their early 30s. So I'm not trying to discourage you. I'm just being a realist and yes, you can achieve great things, but yes, talent does help. It really does. I'm not discrediting talent at all. So good question. I believe that was from Nate. All right, here we go. We'll take one more here out on the patio. This is from Odium. Let's see. He asked, how do you get the perfect shot when record and what type of camera do you use? So I film with a GoPro 7 and then a Canon 1D, very expensive camera. How do I get the perfect shot? I've been actually, I've been running for 21 years. I've been taking pictures for 22 to 23 years. I've actually, my dad was a photographer. So I've been training my eye for a long, long time. So good question from Odium. All right, enough for now. We're gonna do a couple more here in a minute. I actually got to roll out. I'm realizing I'm not really rolling here. All right, everyone, let's finish this blog out. I know we're going a little long here, but there's a lot of questions and most blogs are not like this, but you have questions. So I'm gonna try and provide as many answers as possible, provide a little value on this Labor Day weekend. Okay, diving back into Javier on Instagram. He asks and I know I only said three, but I can't help myself. If you're asking questions, I'm gonna provide some answers. Here we go. I know I'm late, but I'll still send a question in. How has life changed with your YouTube growth over the past year? Javier, I love this question. How has my, what has not changed is this light going out? Hold on. All right, so what has changed, Javier? What has changed? One thing that pops into my mind is going up and running in the mountains. I almost every time I go up there to graze or now Long's Peak, I'm always seeing folks who have seen the channel, watch the channel, give me a high five. So that's really neat. Just to be able to connect with runners in the real world. I just, I love it. Now sometimes I'm running up the mountain as fast as I can and I don't really talk to those who are saying hi because I'm breathing so hard. But anyway, that's pretty neat. Javier, oh man. I mean, I would say it's given me some nice purpose in YouTube, a little more focus. As you know, it was just a daily, just, it wasn't, it was still cool, just a daily vlog, you know, over about a year ago, but just that nice focus on running actually provides a lot of mental relief because I love running. It's easy for me to talk about and I don't have to feel like I have to create something out of nothing every single day if that makes sense, Javier. So it's been nice to niche down to running. Good question from Javier. I appreciate it. I could go on and on, but hopefully that gives you something to chew on. Okay, let's see here. Moving on to some questions from, let's just jump in to Colin. He asks, how many miles on your old car before it gave out? 192,000 miles, but here's a fun, a fun little trivia. My car in high school was a 1987 Chevy celebrity. I gave it away at 300 and like 35,000 miles. So that's a fun little trivia question there for you. Okay, moving on. And I have not seen these questions. I'm just diving in as we go here. Hey Seth, glad I found your channel. This is from Sebast... I'm not even gonna try and say. I found your channel. It has helped me prepare for a second 50K Ultra next week question. How important is it to have more than one pair of running shoes to alternate on training days? I think it's important. I love, well, obviously now my life has changed a lot. That's one way Javier that my life has changed is the shoes. But I think it's important to alternate. I think wearing the same shoe with the same drop every single day, I think your foot and your ankle can get, frankly, used to that ride and that drop. I like changing it up, especially for easy days. I like that zero drop to stretch out the calf, stretch out the soleus. And for 50K training, I'm guessing your 50K is a trail race. So you might not have access to trails. So having a road shoe and a trail shoe is also important. Man, but at the end of the day, it's like you gotta pinch pennies, save money. Don't feel like you have to have more than one pair of running shoes. But if you're able to, I think niching down your running shoes, it really does, over time you'll realize it really does make a difference. And how much lug depth is on the bottom of your trail running shoes also makes a difference for aggressive trails like Long's Peak or buffed out trails like I ran on yesterday, where it was just nice and smooth and the Evo Speed Goats did really, really well. Okay, good question. Moving on. Oh man. Okay. Tristan says, hey, I've been getting this pain on the top of my foot near my ankle. And I'm wondering if it's because of my shoes. Anything you think it might be, I can't really find anything on the internet or anything that will help it get better. I have a cross country meet this coming Thursday. So Tristan, you might be lacing your shoes too tight or you might be using the wrong type of lacing, the wrong type of knot or the, yeah. And so I had troubles with, remember the Vemaro 14s, Nike Vemaro 14s? I don't know. I'd love, I'll be curious to see if I pick up the Nike Vemaro 15s whenever they come out because I had major issues. I never really figured it out fully. I had pain on the top of my foot near my ankle. So it might be the shoe lacing system just doesn't work with your foot. Yeah, I'm gonna leave it there, Tristan. Good question. Always talk to your doctor if you have a foot, if you have a pain on the top of your foot, if it doesn't get better sooner rather than later. All right, moving on here from JECXC runner. Here we go. What training philosophy do you use? Former college runner here wanting to get back into some longer races, half full and maybe even mountain. Awesome. So I'm an Arthur Lideard guy because that's what my college coach who I have a lot of respect for, Mark Wetmore who I would argue is one of the best American distance running coaches of all time. No doubt. And he was a student of the Arthur Lideard training system. Now he's added his own style to the Arthur Lideard training system but our training methodology I should say but that's definitely my go-to. And a lot of people bring up the Maffitone with me and I know about the Maffitone. If I'm saying that right, I have no clue but I do not follow that training methodology just so you all know. Arthur Lideard is my go-to guy. All right, moving on. I'm trying to be a little more rapid here. Some ultra training tips. That is from Decorated Dust on Instagram. Some ultra training tips. Gear is really important. Nutrition and hydration is really important. Way more than a marathon. And now I haven't raced a road marathon you really wanna be dialed into your nutrition in an ultra race and he'll work.  And I would say you don't have to run ultras.  And I don't want you to go to a 50K and run for 15 hours. I don't know, whatever the case may be a long time and not enjoy the experience and never wanna go back. So I would just encourage anyone out there who's interested in racing 50Ks and above, make sure you have enough time in your life to be able to do that and that might require you cutting out some other things. That's what I discovered through the ultra running scene. Okay, moving on. Bada bing, bada boom. This is from Vegan Runner Taylor. Amazing work on the Pikes Peak Ascent. Thank you. I love the amazing vlogs because I gained so much inspiration. Oh, thank you, thank you, thank you. Okay, this is not a question, it's just a comment. Thank you, Vegan Runner. I appreciate it. And let's make sure I'm not missing any others here. Okay, maybe one more. This is from Scott on Instagram. What affects ground contact time and vertical oscillation? Does it matter to running performance? I have a running dynamics pod that captures these. So Scott, you know me, I go simple. I don't even know what you're talking about. Vertical oscillation, but I can guess. So if you don't know my style, I'm just like, I'm not a tech guy. And I think it really does come down to time. I would love to get into, no, I would not. I shouldn't even say that. Like it just like power meters and heart rate monitors and it just doesn't interest me. And here's the thing in running, do what you love. Like for me, as I train for the marathon, a lot of you are kind of trying to figure out why the heck am I still running up in the mountains? It's because I love it. Okay. And so I think in this world, we need to continue to pursue happiness, right? Part of the declaration of independence. Like I don't enjoy even trying to figure out the heart rate monitor on my new Sun 2.5 watch. And I frankly don't have enough time. But so anyway, sorry, Scott, to go on a little rant there. I can guess that vertical oscillation is, ah, vertical oscillation. I can guess it's like, frankly, maybe how far off the ground your feet are coming through your gate cycle. And so there's that. Now what affects ground contact time? I would say your ankle, your ability for your ankle to snap in layman's term. So basically it's that snap and it's that, it's a snap. And I'm gonna focus in your knee, but I'm gonna focus more on the ankle. Like just boom, just that boom, boom. And I'm a big fan of light on your feet. That's why I always say mountain running is dancing in disguise, like just light on your feet, barely touching the ground, quick feet. That's why I do the quick feet exercises. So anyway, Scott, that's not a great answer, but I appreciate you asking anyway. I just, oh, maybe if somebody, when I have more help with this YouTube channel and somebody wants to come teach me about power meters and heart rate monitors, I will sit down and listen to you. But at this point, I just don't have time. Okay, moving on. Okay, this might be the last one. This is from Junren 0314, half tights or shorts. So you know how I like my shorts. I'm not afraid to wear short shorts, but I must say half tights in the wintertime critical. Why? To help keep the hamstring warm, to help prevent pulling a hamstring. I'm a huge, in fact, I just, actually I bought a pair of New Balance half tights.  I love you guys. Thanks for bearing with a lot of Q and A. I hope I brought you a little bit of value on this weekend. Have a great Labor Day weekend, a great Labor Day, tomorrow, and go grill, go have a good drink, enjoy time with your loved ones. And I already asked the question of the day, keyword, oh boy, let's just go with QA for Q and A, QA, so a little acronym there, I guess it would be. All right, shout out to two random blogs on the right and left, because I didn't even think about it. Right and left, two random blogs from yesteryear. I love you all, thanks for being here. Seek beauty, work hard, and love each other. See you tomorrow.


All right, thank you everyone for joining us. This is time stamp April 4th. This is the sales and sales session we're going to be covering. My name is Dan Borden, technical marketing. We're going to be covering a click through demo of the secure capabilities. A click through demo is basically a PowerPoint or slideshow full of screenshots that are created in such a way that a person can get the sense that they're going through the product, but it is also guided so things that I'm saying are should be in the speaker notes so you can pick it up and sit on a plane and read through it and practice to yourself. And when you give this or just sent this to someone, we're not hiding the fact that you're not in the product because you can feel what the product interacting with it is like. All right, so who can share? Okay, so you should be seeing my slideshow. Start the presentation. Do that because I can keep it contained within a window. So this is, as I mentioned, the secure capabilities. So this is the secure stage, which is focused around application security. When you start by talking about, there are a lot of tools out there and what we've learned over time and heard from customers again is that the ability to deliver on the promises of web ops and on quick application delivery of quality products is hampered quite considerably by the fact that there has to spend a lot of time maintaining the tool chain and integrating all the different pieces together. BitLab, we have capabilities across all of those stages integrated together working out of the box so that that integration doesn't have to be done by the customer that you can pick it up and you can start using it, put it in and building secure applications. This particular demo is going to focus on this secure stage here that we have highlighted and particular capabilities there around what kind of scan security. Just a quick overview. I think continuous security is what we want to talk about here. The notion of doing waterfall security with iterative development, obviously there's a mismatch there. What we need to do is have iterative application security to match iterative development. If we're going to quickly do small iterations of changes to our product, we need the security to work in the same way. What we're about to show you is that capability how BitLab can enable and empower the development team to become part of the security team by giving them all the information upfront about the security levels of their application and their changes and even the ability to fix and resolve those changes before we get pushed back to the main branch and for the security team to pick it up and start worrying about all of the changes that they're developing. Hey, Dan, your audio is a little bit muffled at times. Sometimes it's okay, but other times some of your words are hard. Thank you. I will try to enunciate better. My head does not quite work so I'm working with my unusual audio setup. Let me know again if I drown out and talk up. Thank you. So we're going to start with planning and creating. This is an area that the development team starts at. And so because we're talking about how GitLab is helping application security, we're going to look at it from the developer's perspective. The developer is going to start by looking at their issues that they're going to work with or they're going to have issues that they're working with. In this case, we have a change that we want to make to the main page. GitLab has issue boards that are usable that can be used to keep track of all the work that needs to be done and what stage they're in. If I jump into that issue, I can see just a quick brief. There's some changes that we want to make to the main page. Normally, I would create a merge request from there when I'm ready to start working on the solution. The issue is the problem statement or the use case or user story we need to solve for. And the merge request is the start of the solution. And that solution or that merge request captures everything around our solution. In this particular case, we've already run through this. And so there's a merge request already created. So we're going to go ahead and take a look at that. So I'm in the merge request. And this merge request, as I mentioned, captures all of the discussion, all of the changes, all the test results, all the information about the change of the developer is working on. I remember the issue is the problem statement. This particular merge request, we see that things started been run through. I can go and I can even see like the changes that were made, for example, we changed the background color. We changed the string. We added a logo here so I can get a quick understanding of what was changed as part of the solution. I can also see the pipeline that ran in order to run that change through and validate and test it. So take a look at that pipeline. And this is where we start thinking about verifying. This is where we're verifying the work that we've done. This particular pipeline is one that runs out of the box when you get lab. It's called auto DevOps. And it does many things. One is which is it picks up the code and it figures out how to build it. And then we're going to focus in here on this area where we're doing a lot around test. And in the test stage out of the box, we're running many different cases of the security application suite. We're doing code quality checks for one. And that's not security based. That's just static analysis and looking at are we making good quality decisions around our code and how we lay it out and the syntax and everything. The container scanning, which is going to focus around the application environment, the container that our applications being put into, because it's not enough just to secure the code. We need to make sure that where it's running the application environment, it's going to be very secure as well. Dependency scanning over here. Is going to look at all of the, all of the other libraries, all the other software that our code, our software is dependent on. And it's going to check those to make sure that those don't have vulnerabilities or if they do, they will flag that as well. So especially in this day where more and more open source software is being used to build at the other software. We want to be cognizant of the vulnerabilities in those libraries. And then it will do, and is doing all these in parallel. So it's scaling out and doing this in parallel, but it will also be doing license management scanning. So this is doing a license compliance check. It's looking again at those vulnerable, at those dependencies and it's understanding the licenses that are attached to those libraries, those dependencies, so that we can make sure we don't accidentally adopt licenses that are against our policy. So for example, I made this organization not be okay with adopting a license that says, I'm going to give away for free all of my code and my software. So that can be flagged in a policy and then license management will scan through every time a developer makes a change to make sure that we haven't adopted one of those licenses accidentally. And again, if you think about it as single code change in, you know, small one line change can add a license or new sets of licenses because we may add new dependencies from that. And we're going to also do static application security testing SAST that is going to be looking at the code itself. And it's going to be scanning for vulnerabilities, looking for things like buffer overflows and known, you know, versions and things that we need to watch out for and repair that could introduce vulnerabilities otherwise. It's going to also just do testing. This is part of security, but it is part of our testing stage where it's going to run the developer to find test unit test functional tests, et cetera. And then once all of these are done running, we're going to kick off a review app. Now, this review app is kind of a little bit of magic here because the lab is tightly integrated with Kubernetes. It's going to take the changes that we've made. It's going to spin it up in an environment that is specific. It's a staging environment specific for this one change of this developer is working on, this team is working on. This is unique. A lot of staging happens further right in the pipeline where we've gone through and actually check the code back into a release branch or to a default branch. And so this is much better for every developer change we're able to do this review app. This allows a developer to actually interact with their application, not just check it based on code. This allows stakeholders to actually interact with their application with their change. And I'm pointing this out particularly in this discussion around our security capabilities because it also enables our ability to do this next stage, which is dynamic application security testing. With dynamic application security testing, we're not just looking at the code. We're actually looking to catch vulnerabilities that happen when you put all the different pieces together. So things like cross-site scripting attacks. We're able to find those. And this is sort of DAST scanning is going to be doing that. But no, to do that, you need a running application. We also do performance testing as well because we have a lot of that. So this is a lot of testing that happens and goes on. And one of the values here is that you don't have to go dig into each of these to go find the results. We actually bring those all back together into this merge request. It's a single merge request around this, again, around the change that the developer or the team is making. And all that information comes back here. For example, here is that review app. I can easily go and take a look and I can see my changes took place. Again, this is a simple app, but we could do a full application. We're going to take a look now at some of the results of those scans, license compliance. In this case, the Walton team can take a look from the merge request or the management team or anyone else of are there any new licenses that were introduced as part of this change. In this case, there weren't, but we can also take a look at the full report of all of the code. And we can see that overall we're using nine licenses of different sorts. I can dig into those licenses and understand, go get more information about it. And we can also see all the packages that we are using as part of our software that are using that license. So we can get a good sense and overview of where vulnerabilities might be. I can block this. If I have the permissions set up in this project, I can block this to license or approve a license so that it doesn't flag or that it does flag. For now, we'll just leave this alone. Again, if I have permissions, I can manage at the project level and I can actually preset a policy that says these are the licenses that are using the ones that we don't want to have. And then that will get flagged with every change of the developer. Moving on. We also did a lot of different security scanning. And I can look at those vulnerabilities again right from the MR and scroll down to give us a little bit of room here. And right in the MR, I can expand and see, I got 59 new vulnerabilities. That was some pretty bad changes that I made there. And those are listed here. So I can take action right here from the MR, from the merge request. For example, this first one, predictable pseudo random number generator. I can go in and get the details. I can go deeper into that here. And I'll just stop for a minute from my, from my spiel to a point out, there is a, this is the kind of shortened version. You see there's a lot of boxes layered on top of pointing out lots of things at once. There's a longer version of this also available, which does go a box at a time, but it also goes a little bit deeper in areas like this, for example, where you can go and actually see the source of the information. And so that's also available. This is the like 10 minute version or so. So back into, into the presentation, I can get more information about that vulnerability. I can see all the details about it. I can from here dismiss the vulnerability. I can create an issue from the vulnerability. Or if the one's already been created, I can do that. So here we'll just go ahead and cancel and come back here. I can also see exactly where in my code, my changes that vulnerability got triggered. So this is very helpful for troubleshooting and resolving issues. If I dismiss the vulnerability, it looks like this in the print in the, in the vulnerability list out, crossed out when I go get details, I can see who dismissed it on the pipeline, more information about that dismissal. Now you may be saying to yourself, well, hold on, we're giving the developers, the power to basically shuffle stuff under the carpet. And that's not the case. If I dismiss the develop vulnerability as a developer, it's going to carry through. So vulnerabilities that don't get fixed are going to bubble up to the project level. So we can take a look here at the project level. In this case, spring up secure server. Right. So that, remember that was on my change, right? And there's lots of developers working on the change for this one project.  It looks at master and then tells me about my vulnerabilities that are in my master branch. I can see that that's like, that's the, that the Cypher one that I dismissed is also still here and showing dismissed. Again, this is at the team level. So you may be asking me, okay, well, wait a minute, what about the security, you know, the security team, the security admins, the analysts, are they expected to go down into all of the different projects and all the different merge requests and look for vulnerabilities to verify that things are getting dealt with. No, they're not. If I switch to now looking at the group security dashboard, and this is where more security admin or analysts will be looking at, I can go up to the group level and a group and get lab is a hierarchical structure that I can make to have, you know, represent my departments or my groups, a larger sets of projects that work together. So there's lots of projects under a group and that group has a security dashboard. Looks a little bit different. That rolls up that information and all the vulnerabilities from, from all of the projects below. I can filter by severity, by report type, by project. I can get an overall view. Hey, there's seven, you know, high, high vulnerabilities here in this, in this group. I can get trending information. So, you know, that live adjusts to what I'm looking at. And I can also see those vulnerabilities again across the different projects. So like in this case, I can see that all of these critical or all these highs are in tests. So I'm not worried about that. I can also get a quick view as an administrator pay. I can see that as a security person. Sorry that, that the vulnerability has been found that somebody's also created a issue against that. So that's going to be dealt with. I can go look at that and I can interact with that person through the system. I can also see those ones that were dismissed that got bubbled up. So I can, and take action on them. I can get more information. I can decide to create an issue and assign it to someone to say, Hey, this needs to be dealt with. And I can dismiss it as well. So at a high level, I have the ability to take action as a, as a security admin. To not have to dive, dive, dive deep into, you know, the merge requests and the lower level. So speaking of, I talked about, we're really about empowering the development team to, to fix the problems before the security admin has to catch them and say, you can ship this, this is no good, right? Let's kick it back. We want those discoveries to happen and be fixed as early as possible. So I'm going to talk about remediation. One of the things we're focused on is what we call auto remediation. And along the way, there's several capabilities that we're introducing to enable that. We're looking at our project here where I found an issue, which is the ability to download the patch. So we've identified what the problem is. We've identified what the patch is. I can look at that. I can download that as a developer and get applied to my code. And then commit that back in to, to have it go through the cycle and resolve the problem. Now the other thing we have that we just recently added in the last release. Is the ability to start the merge request. And apply the fix. So I can do that right from here. Which will then set me up with the branch and everything so that I can apply that fix. Now where we're heading to the, in the fullness of what we're going here is to have those vulnerabilities found and fixed automatically. Now this, we're not there yet. We're working towards that, but you could imagine as a developer, rather than coming in and seeing the message that I have, I can't, I can't do that. I can't do that. I can't do that. I can't do that. I can't do that. I can't do that. I can't do that. I can't do that. So as a developer, rather than coming in and seeing the message that I have, security vulnerabilities that I need to fix. I'll be able to come in and see that there were vulnerabilities and what they have in the fix. And that's where we're going with this. So that is a quick overview of a secure capabilities. So Dan, I had a quick question about the last slide. Yep. Um, so whenever you hit create merge requests, this creates an entirely new merge request rather than just adding on a commit to the offending merge request. Uh, I believe that's the case. Yes. Okay. Because, uh, this change may be right when we do merge requests, one of you small ones that have a small change associated with them so we can keep track of like what's doing, but if I make a merge request and I make some code changes, like I changed the front page and I also fix a bug and, and I also fix security vulnerabilities under that same single merge request. It starts getting larger and having more effect across everything. So we want to kind of compartmentalize. Yes. Thanks. And that is a, what is it? Get lab flow pieces. Thanks. Thanks for your question. Okay. Um, we're going to just keep going through with questions. So, uh, um, so I'll point out, um, before we do that, uh, to find this, I usually like to start, um, to find this and other clip through demos and all the other demos, you can do the Google search. Um, get lab demos. It is the top natural hit. And this is the page where we consolidated all the demos, videos and whatnot that we'd like you to know and learn and use. Um, along here are the clip crews. I'm sure it might happen to be on that with some instructions on how to run them offline. Uh, this is the directory that has all of them. Uh, and they're also just here. You can run them from here as well. These, I believe, are set on auto play. Um, there are some that are on auto play. We can get directly to the slides from here as well. So you can see, there's a few of them. Uh, we have this short one that we just covered. And at the very top is the long run. Uh, the long one does dive into, um, some pieces deeper. Um, that we didn't see the kind of window over the top of, uh, like, um, but basically dive in closer and like only say, Hey, we could create a, uh, a, uh, new issue out of the vulnerability. We actually will take a look at that. So you can see that all the data is holding. Okay. I'm going to stop sharing. Number two, inspire questions. If you guys have typed one into the chat, I probably haven't seen it. Uh, I will take a look, but feel free to verbalize as well. Hey, Dan, it's Dan Astor. Um, great stuff, man. Really, really impressive on the demo there. Uh, one, uh, uh, thing just, it's just a minor point that I noticed on the project security dashboard.  If that's the default, the only thing that it just detects the default, uh, branch. So I mean, I'm sure you know that, but 98% of the time it's going to be master, but just in case somebody, I changed my default branch. That's why it's there. The only thing I noticed on that, but that's a very good. Thank you. Cool. I'll make that adjustment. No, it's question comments. Uh, there was a question in the chat, Dan, um, from Mike. Is there any demo for how to onboard a project and sast, uh, and make sure it's getting fully. Um, On board a project and sast, um, There's no demo on that particular right now. Um, if there's a method for that, it might be valuable. We can certainly work on that. Um, And by onboarding, I think you is particularly focused on the scan and fully. Yeah. So I can, I can talk to that. Sorry. Um, the, The process for like getting a project in the check marks is a, you know, two to six months sort of task for any existing code base. Cause you have to make sure that the scanner understands the code. You have to make sure that the rules make sense. You have to remove or add or change rules to make the, the results actionable and reasonable. You don't want like a million false positives. You don't want a million false negatives. Right. So there's a whole onboarding procedure that they like to sell as a professional service. Sort of thing. Do we have. Any, any material on how to approach that. At all. Uh, We don't, but I think that's an excellent idea. Yeah. Yeah. So we can, you know, I'm part of it is right. Part of it is, part of the idea here is that you don't need to do a six month onboarding. Now granted. There's a different level of output right now between what we, you know, we. Do and what they, you know, ultimately do. They're, they're the super tool right now. Um, and we're, we're getting, you know, we're working towards that. Um, ability to identify false positives and things like that. I think we'll come. Um, but right now, uh, you know, part of this idea is right. We are looking at what is the software we're figuring out. What do we need to scan for? Part of what the magic that happens behind the scenes is, okay, we're doing sass full, which, which language and, and you know, what, what do we, what do we run? Right. And so we're figuring that out behind the scenes. Granted. That doesn't cover all of the complexities that check makes and show covers today. But that is the start of the path. And the philosophy is that you don't exactly what you're saying. Me, you know, six month engagement by, by professional services in order to, you know, to, to get that level of scanning. Yeah. That's what we're working towards. Okay. Thank you. Again, I would even suggest your autodevops one because that's set up. And that's just, it does what it needs to do from, you know, being set up for autodevops because it's automatically going to call, you know, sassed in there. Yeah. There's a, there's a click through demo like this on auto devops that you can look at that does talk about just getting a piece of software in and running it through the, the system and getting the sass scans and looking at the results. And what is nice is we have recently templatized auto devops so each of those sections of the pipeline are split out into their own discreet CIMO files that you can import. And so we're actually seeing customers create very complex pipelines to do a lot of different things more so than even auto devops does, but then they'll import the sass component or the import one component of the auto devops. So that's another way customers are using auto, the auto devops. Is taking that as a templatized way to do certain types of jobs. I want to, I want to address Larry's question about the find and fix vision. The auto remediation, there are, there's, we're on the second NBC. So we've, the first one was to show that a patch was available to download. The second one that we have right now is to actually create the merge release for that, for that patch. And then, you know, we'll continue to improve and automate even more so we can actually run the pipeline and show the results. That'll be kind of the next part, but so I don't want to leave with the impression that it's a future. It's, we already have it. And someone had asked our other vendors doing that, our competitors doing the auto remediation. They're starting to, not the traditional application security vendors that have been around forever because they're too, they're not as tied in to the development process, but some of the more recent players that take over the DevOps approach are starting to do auto remediation. And in fact, Forester's report that's going to be coming out shortly really points to auto remediation as being a, a key capability going forward for, for the, the leaders in the software composition analysis space. Thanks. Yeah. The demo does show the, the few screenshots of the parts that we've done towards that.  Common in the product today. So there's a question from Simon about, can we scan projects that aren't going through our pipelines? So. We're not really optimized for that. But you can, set what I would do for that is you have code that's sitting in the repository. You can set a, a scan of that grant of your default branch to happen with, with the schedule pipeline that will basically run through and run those scans and get those results. So it is still through the pipeline that is our automation mechanism. But I don't think we're, we're not set up today to break off and saying, just do a SAS scan on this sitting code. Yeah. That's not really the strategy in terms of why you would use GitLab for, for scanning. You'd use GitLab for scanning because it's built into your CICD process. As opposed to trying to, to scan with us and then send it somewhere else. I think it was more like, if there's a thousand projects and a hundred projects, like if there's a thousand projects and a hundred are being actively developed, let's say, but there are 900 older projects that aren't actively developed, but are still used in the company. They would want to have a security audit potentially of whether those live projects that aren't being actively developed are secure as well. That was the, the sort of thinking behind it. Okay. Yeah. For that use case, we do have a plan. I can't point to it off the top of my head, but we do have a plan for that. Cool. Thank you. I had a question. When William was talking about using the template, the YAML template files, and many customers are pulling those in for the scanning. Now, but in the case of, if there are a minority of projects that maybe use some older code that we don't scan against like Cobalt, and maybe they want to scan those with Fortify, are they able to take those templates and do a little customization on it so that Fortify would be brought in and run as part of the CI CD process with GitLab? Is that doable? You certainly could from a pipeline that's a custom pipeline call Fortify or some or any other scanner to scan, to scan code. We don't have a snippet for that or a YAML file for that. Those components that William talking about are specifically offered the pieces that we provide. Okay. Yeah. I think, so I think there's, there's two concepts. One is we have these predefined jobs, things like our SAST and DAST. And previously you had to copy and paste code to get that kind of functionality. And now those individual types of jobs are, they just ship as templates with GitLab. This is a very recent update. So I don't, I wouldn't say we have a lot of customers do this, but I do know of customers do this and we're working to get like some webinars out. All that's to say is that's one bit of functionality. The other bit of functionality, what you're talking about is if somebody is doing some scanning on a language that we don't currently support, could they port that into the MR? And I have heard of that. I don't know, I don't know Cindy, you probably have more depth on that use case. I'd have to understand why you'd want to do that. What would be the outcome you would expect for a language that we're not supporting. So it's not in the repo. You're not doing CI CD on it. I'm not sure I would understand the value of that. Now I can say though, we do have customers that are importing results from other scanners into our pipeline, but not for like the use case, you mentioned COBOL, you know, it's not for something that we're not already handling. The one that I'm, the one that I'm aware of and I ought to dig up the details on it, but I do believe there's a couple, a few customers or users that are, they're doing a scan and that scan outputs a certain format and they're doing a data transform on that format to put it essentially into the JSON format that our UI component ingests. And so that on the MR, they get not only our scans, but this other tool scans are also showing up in the MR. I see David perhaps nodding has had, maybe you're familiar with that one. Yeah. Thanks. You're exactly talking the case that I did, the one that I'm familiar with is that, you know, we're looking for a particular, like I said, JSON format for those results. You know, this is kind of a, you know, I don't know, it's you know, type approach here, but if you were to get the results of whatever external scanning tool into these appropriate exact format that we're expecting, then it's quite possible you could get at the show in the first place, but if that format changes in any kind of way on our side, then of course, and that format's not going to show any longer. So that's, I've heard of that working in that sense. Yeah. This is a non-supported use case. Exactly. Well, I guess I had a similar question to that or maybe the use case. So I've had a couple of questions from customers and kind of the bottom line is when we talk to the security team, they're most worried about the fidelity of the system. Right. When we talk to development, they want to understand how do we get it in the pipeline? How do we shift it left, et cetera? But the, the security team, the InfoSec team is really worried about, Hey, how do we match up against either existing products that they already have that's doing type of security? What's the fidelity of it? And I think they see the feedback I've gotten, it seems like, okay, we see you're early on in that journey. And maybe we'll reevaluate you later. Hold on. I'm sorry. We're four minutes over. I think this is a great discussion.  I think we can have a whole separate. Session on this and we should, we know there's some, some work to do here. This is a, from the perspective of presenting what we do have. That's what this is covering. And I want to cut it off at that. And let's maybe, maybe say we can set up the next discussion to go deeper. Yeah, I think the positioning would be important for y'all to understand in terms of, there's a difference. Those that have incumbent products and those that don't, in terms of approach. So, so Brad, and everyone else, we'll set up separate discussion to go deeper into that and cover that with enough time rather than rushing the answer in the end here. So thank you all for, for attending. I hope this was helpful. Send us feedback.


You need a financial advisor with the freedom to focus on your specific needs. Whatever your goals, Reeve Potter can create a game plan tailored to you. Call Reeve at 432-0777 at Pikeville, Kentucky to learn more. The East Kentucky Science Center and Varia Planetarium has paired with Remake Learning Days across America to host an autism sensory experience for individuals with autism or sensory challenges. We're going to have our exhibit hall filled with different sensory activities, our classroom as well, and then in our planetarium we're going to be having a calming laser light show. We'll have that running too. So it's basically we're opening up the Science Center specifically focusing on those who enjoy sensory activities in a calming environment to be able to just explore and do some science in a way that's comfortable for them. Remake Learning Days is a national effort to give kids hands-on relevant and engaging educational experiences in the arts, outdoor learning, science, technology, and youth voice. The event will feature a calming laser show along with other sensory friendly activities. It's incredibly important to have opportunities for interactivity and safe spaces for those with sensory challenges and to be able to come and enjoy and explore science just like anyone. So, especially in this area where I know there's not a lot of opportunity to do things like this, especially outside of school. So we wanted to kind of reach out to this community and be apart. The event is free for those with autism or sensory issues and their families. The sensory experience will be held from 6 to 8 p.m. Thursday, April 28th at the East Kentucky Science Center and Varia Planetarium. For Mountain Top News, I'm Brianna Robinson.


This is Witchspace news for Friday the 18th of October 2019 I'm CMDR Buur In this weeks news the Scourge is ripping through phase 2 and will have a liberal sprinkling of community news that's caught our eye this week including the CMDR that draws art right across the face of the galaxy a hooning video that'll have you gripping your seat and a fantastic week of CMDR art from Spiver and more If you find this video useful hit like and subscribe and remember to click the little bell icon you can also join the Buur Pit community on our Discord server and if you want to help support the work of this channel you'll also find us on Patreon links to everything you need are in the description below The ongoing Interstellar initiative the ominously titled The Scourge hit phase 2 on Wednesday this week with the not really a surprise revelation The Miracle Grow wannabe fertilizer EX-7 produced by the Rockforth Corporation is in fact the source of a terrible blight that is wreaking havoc to food crops across the bubble The original poor harvests that prompted the arrival of the EX-7 fertilizer have now in fact rather embarrassingly been attributed to natural causes and the subsequent vegetable plague that is sweeping across the stars is linked to the use of EX-7 Quite what the Rockforth Corporation is up to or why the EX-7 is causing these issues has not yet been revealed and so all sorts of tin foil hattery is, as you can imagine, still rife As a result of the revelation the galaxy has unsurprisingly rapidly fallen out of love with the dodgy vegetable steroid and a new community goal has been established to rid the galaxy of EX-7 The Toverry system has taken on the task of safely destroying the mega mushroom juice up powder and paying commanders handsomely to deliver the nutrition nuking substance to them Meanwhile, a new system state of blight has appeared in the BGS showing what systems have been affected by the great cabbage cold epidemic What direct effects the tapioca typhoid has on the BGS are yet to be fully exposed but there are rumblings that the demand for basic foodstuffs is up and luxury goods are down in the blighted systems To help boost the initiative, ship manufacturer Lake on Spaceways has reduced the cost of the Type 6, Type 7 and the mighty Type 9 freighters by a significant margin As of our recording, the community goal is proving popular with three of the eight tiers already hit If you want to get involved within your chance to rid the universe of the civilization ending flower flu won't last forever I'd also like to give an honourable mention to Potato Pox and Rhubarb Rabies that didn't make it into this cut of the news One of the main tenets of Elite gameplay has always been to play the game your way Indeed, the game's tagline is blaze your own trail But I think even Frontier themselves have been surprised by the way that central idea has been adopted and adapted by this very creative community I seriously doubt anyone could have predicted organisations like the Fuel Rats or the Hull Seals existing when the game started Groups of players whose sole MO is to rescue and refuel stranded commanders Indeed, our own Commander Rini exists in the game almost completely to shoot video footage and take pictures touching almost no other part of the game unless it serves that purpose directly Now witness the extraordinary works of Commander Zibadian whose entire gameplay experience seems to revolve around drawing pictures on a galactic scale Plotting his roots on the Galaxy's spanning website edsm.net the lone commander has so far drawn a Lego space logo and a Coriolis station with a couple of cobras from the original 1984 Elite He's just now embarked on his next venture the logo for the in-game player faction The Hammers of Slough It never ceases to amaze us here at the pit how different any two people's experiences can be in this extraordinary game To marvel at Zibadian's works and track the commander's current progress head over to the Zibadian YouTube channel which is linked below Commander Yagashura posted an entirely flight assist off low level hooning session from the GD 140 system this week We featured this kind of thing before notably from Commander Sandaling but this one is no less amazing and is both calming and terrifying in equal parts There's some serious skills on show and if you want to learn this stuff for yourself then Sandaling and Yagashura are both part of the community from the Newton's Gambit Discord and they'll help you get started with this most unique Elite Dangerous skillset Links to everything you need as always are in the description below The stellar photography, videography and fan art community has been holding a week long competition this week to produce famous music album covers with an Elite Twist Regular viewers will remember we featured one of their competitions before when the theme was movie posters This latest competition is no less inventive and creative You can find the SPVFA linked below on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter And finally, there's another 24 hour charity livestream heading to the community This time in aid of the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention Commander Link Savage will be playing Elite Dangerous continuously on Twitch for 24 hours on the 2nd of November That's it for now, thanks very much for watching We'll be back later this week with more videos Until then, 07 Commanders, follow the Greens on the way out and do please keep clear of the toast rec We very much look forward to seeing you next time


Thank you, we're back from break it's 11 o'clock on April 27th, and we're in the process of trying to understand some language that was shared with us from folks who've been working together to clarify a section of s 120 on the 340 be language PBM insurance company issues. We have reached out to Sarah teach out to be with us this morning if she can't be here, we will we will reach out again and we'll bring the folk you Helen laban Devon green will bring you back in to have a conversation with us about the language so Jen what i'm going to suggest is that if you don't mind. I think we should have the language up to look at it, and then there are some pretty specific questions about the. The meeting of this overall I think that. You did bring us this recommendation and Sarah teach out is going to be with us in about five minutes, which is good just had a note from her. So we'll we'll we'll go ahead and. I can't see everyone so. Helen or Devon. Do you want to walk us through this at this point and talk about it, I think our specific question, one of our specific questions was on the implication that the patient benefits from. This so why don't you tell why don't you talk with us about what the problem is and then how this solves the problem. Center comings I think you were going to say the same thing I was going to say it, I don't understand what the problem is we're trying to solve. Thank you good so Devon and Helen i'll turn it over to you collectively and you can help us understand what the problem is and how language in this bill might solve that problem. Sure, so Helen layman by State Primary Care Association at this language is responding to a very specific action by pharmacy benefit managers and and in particular express scripts has done this federally, it is a move to increase the regulatory. Or the sorry the administrative burden on pharmacies around 340 be drug prescriptions by changing the system by which they need to report file claims for prescribed drugs that are going to a 340 be entity, and the in the background intent of that move by the PBMs was to both have a chilling effect on participation in 340 be and also set up as a structure by which they might in the future change the pricing on those drugs that are that are in 340 be nationally there is not anything there's safeguards on the 340 be program broadly, but there isn't anything nationally that protects against this particular way of getting. At the PBMs will reducing participation in 340 be, however, if states have something on the books and state statute that says you can't. add an additional regulatory or administrative burdens on top of participating pharmacies, then the PBMs, including express scripts have been. honoring the state statute, so this is very, very narrow, this is part of a national effort state by state to address this problem, I think North Dakota past the yesterday West Virginia is in Utah. Tennessee is looking at it Ohio, so this is a this is a movement by a lot of different states to address this issue. And so is a very targeted piece of legislation that's simply trying to cut off that avenue before all PBMs start down it and, as I said, as part of a national effort in this regard, and we did originally take. statutory language from what was being seen in other states that worked with blue cross blue shield to adjust it to make sure that was appropriately narrowly targeted to this one issue that we're dealing with so that's the intent of this. Language, which is why it probably reads a little bit funny because it is so very targeted. Can you. Before.  Yes, okay I was just going to say the effect of what express scripts is doing is if the pharmacy doesn't comply with in 10 days they lose the entire express groups contract which creates a real access issue and is a pre draconian response. So, can you explain that clearly for the committee, because it sounds like this then would have an effect on patients, can you talk a little bit about that. yeah and Helen can jump into I think there's a short term and a potential long term effect right so they're saying pharmacies if you don't do this within 10 days. you'll lose your contract with express scripts which creates an access problem for patients and then the other pieces as Helen mentioned it's potentially setting up. prescription drugs that are flagged that may have their prices changed later to reduce the amount of subsidies that healthcare providers receive from the 340 b program so that would go towards. The access around you know, a lot of healthcare providers rely on 340 b funding and if it's cut or if part of it is lost that could potentially lead to. You know, lots of access in other areas like services and other things. Right, I would concur are so the. The impact of this legislation on the patients is preserving the integrity of that 340 b program which is being used to reduce drug costs it's also being used, for example, many of my members use it to invest in prevention rights so they'll use it for. A healthy food programs with schools and with children and families, you know, to prevent those chronic diseases, such as type two diabetes that require drugs down the road so it's a really. strong approach and a strong component of what the fqhcs and other participants in 340 b are are are doing to serve Vermonters and we don't want. That funding to be diverted to national pbm companies we wanted to come to Vermont to serve Vermonters is what we would like to have happened. Senator hooker go ahead. Thank you so thank you women for being here and clarifying this but but to be clear this isn't going to affect and neither does any of the 340 b programming affect the cost of drugs for. Consumers for consumers, but it helps the providers to provide services that they would otherwise not be able to provide because the cost for them for drugs would be at a higher rate. Am I understanding that correctly. Yes, I would say the fqhcs often do pass on the savings so it can be used to reduce the price but you're correct in that the mechanism goes through the practices to the patient. It's not a it's not an automatic discount like 25% off all drugs in Vermont sort of thing. And we are and I should say that this legislation is preserving the status quo that's all we're trying to do is not move backwards and what's currently available so so that's what this is attempting to achieve. Thank you. Senator Cummings. You're muted Senator. I understood some of this. The 340 b is a federal program right. Yes. And that's where the fqhcs and the hospitals by their drugs at a certain rate. How did the farmers, where did the pharmacy benefit managers get to play in this. Well they're sort of the middle man right so I'm, I'm. 340 b drugs go through a PBM. This is Sarah I can jump in. Please do welcome Sarah teach. I'm facing my hand but I don't think you can see it. Now go right ahead. This is a conversation. Yes, so Sarah teach out. I represent Blue Cross Blue Shield of Vermont and health insurance companies use 340 b or. Pharmacy benefit managers to operationalize essentially the drug benefit for our members. And so the 340 or the PBM contracts with the 340 b pharmacy and with all other pharmacies and when commercially insured member goes to get their prescription drug filled at one of these pharmacies. It's the PBM that manages the, you know, the administration of that purchase. So I think I emailed you but commercial commercially insured patients pay the full price for these drugs, and it's the spread on the low price that the 340 p b pharmacy gets the drug for and the amount that they sell it to the commercially insured patient for that's where they make their revenue. You know, the rebate pieces arcane for sure. When we contract with a PBM, we look to these rebates to lower the prices for our members because we build in the price of drugs into the premium, and we also include what we anticipate the rebates to be so when we start losing these rebates what will happen is premiums will increase and that's our concern here. I did want to also say that until this July ESI has been the PBM representing and working for Blue Cross, we are switching to a new PBM starting in July that I don't believe is using these practices. So there'll be a shift at least from Blue Cross's perspective on office forks, and we really would like the study to look at what's happening with the rebates and who's being impacted and that's why we have the piece there about looking at the impact on patients, commercially insured patients as well as the impact on the 340 b pharmacies. Okay, so who would like to help us go through the language here so could Helen can you please restate the problem that we are addressing and then as we go through this language how that language resolves or solves that problem or begins to. Helen can you do that. Certainly I can I can I can state the problem. This is Sarah's language to which we have agreed so I don't want to overstep into her lane and walking through the language that she clearly knows very well since she wrote it. The problem that we are attempting to resolve is that I say PBMs plural express scripts as Sarah mentioned was the first one to actually do this. They have added an additional administrative requirement onto pharmacies who want to participate in 340 b that they that they use a new modifier system to identify those 340 b claims at the time of filing the claim and they have given a very short turnaround to come into compliance or your or the pharmacy cannot participate as part of 340 b program as Devin indicated. We, the pharmacies in Vermont have found it impractical to comply that quickly with this rule so this language would prohibit them from implementing this new administrative burden, it would additionally as Sarah indicated, have a I don't know if it's called a commissioner task force a group with DFR and the AG office to look at the that bigger problem so this is a this is a year long temporary fix it during which time we will have these entities who do have deep knowledge in this world. Look at the issue it and report back with a longer term solution. Okay, that that that actually begins to make some sense, I think, and helpful. So, there was a communication between and among you all I have a couple two questions one, you've included the Attorney General's office here. Can you explain that. This is Sarah and I will admit that I did not ask the Attorney General's offices this is okay but they do, you know, do some reporting to the legislature I believe on what is happening with drug pricing, and so have some, you know, work in this space already. I think we felt like either the AG's office or the Department of Financial Regulation had sort of the appropriate connections with national organizations that could help them do this work. And we have since reached out to the Attorney General's office and they agree that they have that expertise and can participate in this. Oh, thank you, Helen. Okay, so that that answers one of the questions and there was also the concern about the date of January 15, and I think the last email I received this morning, or late last night was that that date might be July 1. So, instead of was it December 31. Was it the December 31 2022 date that would be changed. I'm trying to remember what the backdoor. It's the effective date and if you look down under for the way it's drafted here it takes effect immediately and expires at the end of 2022. I'm not sure if it can take effect immediately. I don't really know how quickly this could happen. And then we were trying to decide whether a year made sense or through a calendar year. You know, plan years aren't exactly the same. For example, Blue Cross contracts with a PBM on a fiscal year we do July 1 to July 1. So I wasn't sure what the right time period made the most sense. Okay. What would be the recommendation from the group. I think we would recommend starting on July 1. I'm always 2021. Right. And then it could go for a year. Okay. I think we would like it to start immediately just because this, this is happening now. And so understanding that it may not be able to happen right away but we, we would rather it go into effect sooner rather than later. Yeah, so it would, it would take away the three or four months for someone to impose an administrative burden of some type. I got it. Okay, I understand that. Okay. So, Jen, do you have specific questions about the language you're looking at or is that something that you can sort out. I think the one that I'm not sure was talked about yet was this in the report language the possible state of purchase to the developing issue of pharmaceutical manufacturers ceasing to pay rebates to commercially insured Vermonters, and we were, I think confused about how the about manufacturer rebates directly to Vermonters and is that what was intended or is this. A good question. They don't pay the rebate directly to the Vermonter. Maybe to benefit Vermonters. Take away. You're suggesting that. So that's something I think that we need to resolve because that right now it's inaccurate so I think I need to understand if this is the issue is the issue really about the manufacturers and and paying rebates to however you want to say it to benefit Vermonters or is it about the PBMs. Not passing along the way I don't I don't I need help framing I think framing this particular issue. I guess more manufacturers ceasing to pay 340B crisis, or to participate in the 340B program. I don't know Sarah is that I mean, this seems to be looking more at rebates at right at at manufacturers and rebates unless at PBMs. Anything having to do with PBMs going forward. Great. So the source of the problem is that the pharmaceutical manufacturers have stopped paying rebates for drugs that are being prescriptions that are being filled through 340B pharmacies. But isn't that a requirement of the of their purchase I mean if they're selling their drugs in the Medicaid program isn't that sort of one of the underpinnings of the 340B program. But what I'm understanding is they're putting in administrative burden on the pharmacist. So once that's in place then they don't have to pay the rebates. PBMs are doing that but there are some manufacturers this is all part of what's happening with 340B right now there are some manufacturers who have just refused to pay the 340B price on some drugs. And so I don't know if that is supposed to be looking at that or if it's looking at rebates. Yeah, so Senator Hardy before you ask your question my suggestion is going to be that this language obviously has isn't isn't clear so we need to add clarity to this. Otherwise it's not helpful. What I'm going to suggest is that that Helen, Devin, Sarah work with Jen to bring clarity to this and this would be something that we, we can look at tomorrow morning. But so but go ahead Senator Hardy. Thank you Madam Chair and thank you for that suggestion because it seems to me that one and two are directed at trying to solve a problem that's been brought on by pharmacy benefit managers. And three is trying to solve a problem that is apparently because of pharmaceutical manufacturers. So there's a disconnect between those two. And if we're trying to solve the first problem then wouldn't we want the report to be on how to solve the first problem and if we're trying to solve the second problem, then we need to have more information about what the second problem is. So, it, there's just a disconnect between one and two and three and that's where I got very confused as to who who is the causing the problem it sounds like maybe there are two problems to solve. But that's not clear in this language. So, comments from Sarah, Devin. I would say that I think that the underlying theme here is that we regret that we were caught a little bit off guard, such that one or one and those one and two were necessary at a late stage in the legislative session and we would like to now get out ahead of what's going to be happening nationally, so that we aren't in this situation again so I believe the number three is meant to be inclusive of multiple brewing national issues including this one so that we aren't having these rush discussions at the end of the session in 2022 but instead have a proactive approach to what we what we're going to accomplish. I do understand that to be the case but it's not clear that that's the case so my suggestion again is for you folks to put your heads together and work. Again, is that makes sense from your perspective to work with those with them and, and keep us in the loop, so that we can come back to this tomorrow morning we'll put it on our agenda. First thing. What we usually started I'm not available at first thing but I can probably what time are you available because I think I can be here because I have a bill going in the house. I think 1030 they move to a different topic that I will, I can catch up on. Okay, so we'll put it on our agenda. For 10 o'clock 101015 has that we'll we can we'll we can firm that up a little bit. Madam chair can I just add one quick thing also when you're looking at it the effective date language seems a little funky. Yeah, that's not yes I will I will. There's a lot there. I need. Yes, I need to better understand the intent there and then I will do it as either just session law language or a perspective repeal of statutory language. Okay, thank you Jen. Okay, so let's take the language down. And I guess one question for the committee is did you I think you heard different testimony from from different witnesses about whether the language to take effect on passage or on July 1 and did you make a decision on that. I would recommend on passage, simply because if we don't put it on passage there's a period of time within which administrative decisions can be made that will interrupt the 340 b program decisions by pbms, or maybe one. I just wanted to confirm that because you, you'd heard. The committee disagrees with that. I would say that. All right, so let's let's do this. We, I think we now are getting closer on that section. Sarah you also sent me an email this morning. I mean, first thing it was later in the morning, because nine o'clock about the section on this administrative costs for insurance. Can you. That is section or is it nine or 10. I think it's section seven. Which one. I think it's sections. So, I guess section seven of all. We provide a ton of information both to the Department of Financial Regulation and to the Green Mountain care board about our administrative costs as do all insurers. And so if you're going to have this additional report, I would recommend including additional information. The two pieces that I would know is that there are a number of contributing factors going into Blue Cross's administrative costs. One of those are the Green Mountain care board bill back, which is increased by on average 17% a year since 2016. And then the other thing is the state's shifting of costs that were typically before this, born by the state of Vermont and general fund dollars which is the billing for Vermont Health Connect, which is now also being shifted to health and administrative costs, as well as the costs to administer health care reform for the state of Vermont. So we've spent millions to change our computer systems to enable the capacity to do capitated payments. And so these are all costs that are drivers of administrative costs and so to just compare simply health insurer administrative costs to the CPI is not a very thorough picture of what's happening. So in this, as you understand it is a Green Mountain care board. This is a report from the Green Mountain care board. So I think this is an opportunity for the legislature to look at some of the issues that you're talking about because one of the things that Blue Cross and Blue Shield has done that is very commendable is to work with our health care reform efforts. So it's not, it's not a negative this is not all negative so but you're suggesting that if we're looking at this, we should ask for broader descriptors. Right, because the what this study asked for right now is just health insurer administrative costs and compare them to the CPI. All right, well, can. Yeah, any other information pretty pretty dry right. Why don't we do this. It would be helpful. If you don't mind providing us with perhaps some categories of information that might inform this a little bit better. Right as a committee whether or not we want to keep this section in the bill after we've looked at that be helpful. We don't I'm not interested in having administrative burden, but it is a Green Mountain care board report and if the data is there, and it helps us understand what's going on in the insurance world, administratively. I think that's helpful. Senator Cummings and then Senator Hardy. I think though it administrative costs in order to get a clear picture we need to add in the things that Sarah listed you know, there's a cost to doing the things we're asking insurers to do and we need. It's like unfunded mandates to school you got it. You exactly and so sometimes the administrative cost is a result of us. I think. Senator Hardy. Thanks. I was just. This was language that you had had requested Madam chair and so again, sort of like what's the problem we're trying to solve. I mean, because it's not very well. It's not fleshed out and so we'll look and see what Sarah if you don't mind bringing us some clarification of what would help us understand the administrative costs. And then we can decide as a committee to include this as a report from the Green Mountain care board or not. That's it. We hear consistently that administrative costs are too high. And then we ask for things like participation in healthcare reform efforts and all payer efforts without understanding that there is an administrative costs associated with that. Some of that needs to be is on our shoulders on us. Okay. So anything else that. So, Sarah, thank you for that and Helen and Devin thank you. And you can reach out or Jen will be reaching out to try to put together some language that makes sense to us and that does articulate and solve the problem all at once. Be helpful. Okay. So committee. So we're, I think we're finished with that part of S 120 of those sections of S 120. That so many states are reacting to this across the country I think is a is an important, important for us to know that so Jen on S 120 as it goes forward. We had talked in committee about making a committee bill but it seems like that becomes complicated. And we're known for complicated in our committee but we don't need that for this bill. So do you want me to put it back as a strike all to S 120. I think unless a committee disagrees, I think that makes a lot of sense. I think that has been confusing to for some people not to know what the bill number is 2,488 goes. Yeah. No, it's fine. It keeps it, it keeps it where it belongs. Senator Hooker when you were in appropriations that the issue came up I understand if you want to. I don't understand what the number was going to be and what they, you know, so I think Jen is correct that it could be simpler if we just kept it the way it was. Keep it simple. Okay. Anything else on that. Okay, it still has a bit of a ways so let's try to solidify our work on S 120 tomorrow morning. Then our clerk can take a vote. Did we actually take a vote. Nellie on Friday. I believe we did. I'll double check that out. We do any paperwork. Okay, did you do paperwork. Senator Taranzini. Well, having voted in the positive I'd like to have a reconsideration of my vote on S 120. So, Senator Alliance Sir to interrupt we had a positive vote of S 20S 120 of a 500. Oh, it was a 500. Alright, having voted in the positive I would like to ask the committee. If I might reconsider my vote. If I might vote on a committee bill was it not Senator Taranzini. This was yes. Yeah, okay. I would like to reconsider my vote. Is there any. That means that we, if you, if you agree with me and allow for me to reconsider my vote, then the vote on Friday becomes null and void and we start over. Okay. Sure. Okay. I mean, that's, that's proper procedure. Got it. Is anyone not all those in favor of allowing for me to reconsider my vote. They I and raise your hand. I. Okay. So now committee I'd like, why don't we hold off on a further vote on S 120. And until tomorrow and we'll try to do what needs to be done to the sections. Senator Hooker. So this just negates the whole committee bill and what Jen will bring us tomorrow will be the strike all that I'll be reporting on. Okay. Yes. That we that that hopefully we'll get to a good place with the PBM language or 340 B language. If not, it's gone. Yeah. After all of our gymnastics with this bill, is there even a, do you know about a path for it, given the late date, we're working on that. Okay. We're working on that. Appreciate nothing. I really would like to have this bill go forward. I think it's very important for it to go forward. So I had a conversation with the pro tem yesterday about it and we're working on it. Thank you. Yeah. Yeah. Okay, anything else on that one. Okay, so we have a little bit of time so you can start to contact people on the Children and Families Council for prevention. Or not anything else. All right, Nellie, we're good.