to give the stage to Hannah and, yeah, the NMQ. Three of these microphones work. Okay, great, cool. I'll just assume they're all going to work, and if they don't, you can tell me to start speaking. Okay, all right, well, I'm Hannah, otherwise known as Bubbles, apparently. And that's Murray, and that's Daph. And we're going to be talking about the Debbie and New Maintainer process. We're going to give a bit of an idea of the history of the process because in talking to Debbie and developers over the past six months, yeah, we've realized that many people actually don't know how the process came about and what exactly happened. So we thought it would be a good opportunity to tell you all exactly what happened and look at this and see whether the New Maintainer process is actually achieving the aims that we might have hoped it would be. So precisely what we're going to talk about is on the screen there. We're going to give a history of New Maintainer process. We're going to explain how the process works today, look at the aims, and also see how we could do better. So over to Murray. So when Debbie and started off, there were, unsurprisingly, wasn't much of a formal process. Basically, well, at this point, Ian Murdoch still controlled access to the archive. So if you wanted to get a file in there, then you could either sort of get friends with him and you get an FTP account, and then you could just upload things directly. But for a lot of other people, there was what we've called a staging area. So you could upload a file and then Ian would look over it and then, if it looked reasonably sane, it would get put into the archive. So that's obviously, you can see that has some analogies of what, well, if you know about the NM process, that will have some analogies to you about what happens today. But this is a pretty simple version. So it's very informal. And this is just a quote from BDEL. Should we read it out? Yeah. So, yes. He read Ian Murdoch's WM Manifesto, well, let's read it, resonated with it, and dove in. Within a couple of days, he was asking Bruce Parran's how to country it, how to package an email to Ian to us, tell him who he was and what he'd done. And he just got an email back from Ian, thanking him for the contribution and saying, welcome to the project. So quite different to the new maintainer process nowadays. Yeah. After a while, they stopped working. So as they've been and got bigger, more and more people joining the project, this process was too simple. It needed something which is a bit more sophisticated to deal with the amount of people who wanted to join in and contribute to the project. So they set up a new maintainer at devin.org email address. You send an email to this address, to ask for an account. This email would go to Bruce Parran's and he would read your request and create an account for you. Funny enough, they stopped working after a while. Yeah, one person doing all the work. That's something to do with Bruce resigning. Yeah, and that. I think this is actually, it's actually stopped working before then. This is... Right. Exactly. Yeah, this is 1996-97. Yeah, yeah. So in April 1997, Bruce delegated new maintainer approval to the security team. And applicants were supposed to say who they were and what they planned to do in Debian. And the security team would assess their applications, decide whether they were suitable and create an account for them. Seems fairly simple, seems like a good plan. Yeah. Yes, well done. So, a couple of months later, yeah, that was in April. In September, fortunately, who knows what would have happened otherwise, but fortunately, Elmo and Joey came to the rescue. So, yeah, they hatched a coming plan and decided how they could infiltrate the system and take over the new maintainer process. And as you can see, this is very complicated. You can see the conversation that took place right there. There we go. Yeah, so here's a quote from Elmo about this. We've instituted minimal procedures and we had to have a trust path to you. We didn't at this stage, this is comparing to the situation today. We didn't have this whole novella question and answer thing. You merely had to say what you were going to be working on and you didn't actually have to show that you could do this already. You just had to have an interest. But on the other hand, they did phone and talk to every applicant, which obviously gave them some idea of, well, does this person exist and does it sound a suitable kind of person to be in Debian? Yeah, after a while, this stopped working. So, people complained about the speed of applicants getting processed. Because there was only two people doing the work, it turned out that there was a big gap of people. Just too much work for people who are also active in doing other things in the project. Very busy people. Just couldn't keep up with the workload of doing NM. So this resulted in... Do you miss a slide? Okay, so there was lots of discussion. And after many emails, the result was a person who had four steps. Initial contact with the applicant, checking the identity of the applicant, checking that they are who they say they are. An internship period where they get involved with the projects and get through a sort of trial period. And then after that, they get reviewed by the NM committee and approved or rejected. Oh, maybe we did miss a slide. No, we didn't miss a slide. That's fine. Anyway, so as a result of this, Elmo decided that he was happy to remain on the NM team. The details of the new NM process were worked out by Dale Sheets. And as you can see, there's Elmo loving NM. Thank you, bubbles. Anytime. And the new maintainer process is pretty much the same today. So, yeah, just some of you probably have gone through this and will be all too familiar with it. But for those of you who are either in the process or thinking about going in, I'll just summarize the overall shape of what the process is today. So, well, first of all, we can say who are the people involved? Obviously, as someone trying to get into Dabian, you normally get referred to as an applicant. So therefore, the person who you really deal with as an applicant is called the application manager. So this is someone who'll send you a lot of annoying messages saying, can you answer all these questions? Can you fix your package? Yeah, I found like you've got some double spaces in your Dabian rules file or this kind of stuff. I'll ask you to remove the comment and then I'll put it back in the next day. Yeah. Yeah, so you speak to the application manager. There's also this sort of mysterious, shady figures lurking in the background somewhere of the Dabian account managers. And as the applicant, these are sort of somewhere bit distant from you. But you kind of know they exist and, in fact, they're really the people you're trying to impress because you've got to get past your application manager. But if the account managers aren't happy with you, then you won't get an account. And then there's these other people who kind of float around somewhere around the process where the front-deaf members and they're basically responsible for sort of running the day-to-day stuff of New Montana. So they do things like they assign incoming applicants to application managers and make sure that everything's ready before the information goes off to the Dabian account managers to actually create accounts. And there's a couple of other changes just to sort of finish off the history that have come in over the last period to kind of complete the NM process as it is today. But it's quite significant that kind of gradually came in but is now meant to be a definite requirement is that you should have made some contributions to Dabian before you apply. So you shouldn't... Nowadays, if you apply to NM without having done anything yet, then basically the idea is you just get turned away at the gate and so I'm told to come back a bit later. So, for example, for the majority of people who are trying to become package maintainers, it's meant to be a requirement that they should have a package already in the archive that they've been working on. Also, another requirement in that that's kind of related is that if you're a new applicant to the system, you've got to find... Well, it shouldn't be that hard for most of you, you've got to find one Dabian developer who's happy to write a short paragraph about you saying, yes, this person is suitable. So again, the idea there is basically that if you've been doing work in Dabian at all, there should be at least one person who thinks you've done something worthwhile. If no one knows who you are at all, then probably you haven't done enough yet that it's any point in you trying to enter the process. So, this might sound very complicated, but in reality, it's not actually that difficult to do NM. So for those of you who haven't done it yet, you've got to write a simple guide for how to go through the new maintainer process. So the first thing to do is start connecting to Dabian. This is fairly easy. I believe we have a question. I should congratulate you for staying within Enrico's range of 7 plus or minus 2. So once you've started contributing the project, then you find a developer to bribe. This doesn't have to be very much maybe... Yeah, money, all works well. Yeah, nothing too ostentatious. Yeah. Then you just have to wait for a while. Eventually you get an application manager assigned to you. You then use your lead skills to impress the application manager. Your impressed application manager will send a report to the virtual then impress the account managers. Now you need to hug Elmo. This might be a bit difficult. Given that she's... Yeah. Just in terms of... He lives in London. We've got his phone number. So if you need to know how to do it, just ask us afterwards. We can demonstrate if... I don't know if I'm so happy with that. Okay, that's good. Once you've hugged Elmo, he'll create an account for you. And then you can profit. Pretty simple all in all. I don't know. Why are you talking about brief bits about the new maintainer templates which were produced by Jurg a while back. And these are a set of template questions for applicants. They're designed to be used by application managers to kind of guide the entire process. And they cover things like philosophy and procedures. So you'll be asked to answer questions about the DFSG and tasks and skills. So you'll be asked to do stuff with the bug tracking system. That kind of thing. And many application managers follow these pretty much to the letter. Some people use them as a basic guideline, which is I believe how they were intended. And some application managers don't follow them at all. So I believe after producing those template questions Jurg was appointed as a new dam and he checks over the applications. You can see a very nice picture of some application checking there. And Elmo creates the accounts. Yeah, so you could say, well, has the NM process as it is today worked? And overall you could certainly say, well, we'll talk about some criticisms in a moment. But overall you can say it has worked because the NM process as it is came in. It was, well, there was this way to get into Debian in principle, but it was it become impossible that you could apply and nothing would happen. Whereas since the NM process has been in its current form, there have been, well, our latest figure was 715 people have come through this process in five years.  And well, it would be a bigger fraction of the people who are still Debian developers at the moment. Yeah, it's about 75% of the current number of active Debian developers. Right, so this is obviously a great thing. We've got new people in Debian. But I think we feel that it's worth looking at whether we can improve the process and do better. And the most frequent criticism is that new maintainers, this is the process. This often puts people off. They hear it's a long and arduous process and I think this is quite discouraging to people who are considering applying. People tend to get stuck when they're halfway through the process. They lose contact with application manager for some reason or another. It's not clear what happens, but they get stuck, they get put on hold, they eventually get rejected. I think there's a problem that people don't often understand what the application manager is expecting for them. They know that they have to communicate with the application manager, but they're not sure exactly what they have to demonstrate. One of the main problems is the wait for application manager assignment. This is largely because of the limited number of application managers. We have 904 roughly active dev-in developers in dev-in today, but of those only 34 are active application managers, which is few point eight percent. It actually turns out that there have been many, many, many application managers over the years, but for one reason or another people have stopped being application managers. It would be interesting to see how many people here have been an application manager? How many people are currently and they have an application to the moment? Yeah. All hands drop. I think that could be representative of dev-in as a whole. So lack of application managers is a problem. I think we're going to take questions for the most part at the end and just small comments and stuff now. So what should we be aiming for? Clearly the overall aim of the process is to have new people in dev-in suitable people. As long as we're doing that then we're basically doing okay. But and the key things for being suitable for being a dev-in developer are having an appropriate outlook, having a philosophy in favour of free software and having skills so that they can do useful things in dev-in be it packages or translations or whatever. It's interesting to consider a warning in a nightbook. In a nightbook you have like five seconds to react. Yeah. Okay, thank you. So it's interesting to look at the relationship between the application manager and sponsors of people. So sponsorship is an official developer that sponsors a package for somebody who is doing things for dev-in but it's not an official developer. So it's interesting to compare the role of application managers who act in an official capacity to bring people into the project and sponsors who work in an informal less efficient capacity to sponsor new people. So the difference between testing people and teaching people and there's obviously some overlap between those two roles. So some things that I've been, well we've all been thinking about lately one thing that I'm particularly interested in is theory versus practice. So because so many of the currently active application managers use the template questions this got me thinking about the extent to which the new maintainer process was actually contributing to the dev-in distribution. So if you ask people a bunch of theoretical questions and get them to write academic answers on them that's fine. They're very much demonstrating that they have an abstract knowledge of these concepts but answering questions doesn't directly benefit the project. Obviously it does mean that you can test whether people are appropriate for being dev-in developers but the actual product of the new maintainer process is then just a set of answers. Many application managers won't let these answers be put online. I know my application manager isn't too keen for that. This is because it makes the job of other application managers harder when they have to check whether somebody's just copied the answers to questions. But this means that the entire process certainly as I'm going through it at the moment has been at least so far a lot of answering theoretical questions and then sticking a text file in my home directory and that's it. I really feel doesn't contribute towards the distribution towards the project as a whole. So I'm really interested in whether we could go about actually testing skills in a much more active way. So for instance rather than asking questions about the bug tracking system let's fix some bugs. Rather than asking questions about documentation, translation, internationalization, QA, just anything where we could be doing tasks it's better to be doing the tasks and actually seeing whether people can do them than just seeing whether they abstractly know how they might go about doing the tasks. And I should say that although I have been answering many theoretical questions from my AM we are actually doing some more practical stuff for the later stages of the process. And another thing that I've also been thinking about is collaboration and communication. Debian is a large community. We've got 900 and something Debian developers. That's a lot of people and a lot of people who are intelligent and want to have their say on things. A lot of people who post a mailing lists and who feel really strongly about the project which isn't that surprising. Most tasks in Debian will require collaboration. This might be in the form of working with other developers or it might be in terms of dealing with users fixing bugs, asking users about the bugs that they're finding, that kind of thing. So one thing I've been wondering about is whether we should actually be making a more concerted effort to see how people respond in terms of communication and collaboration skills. It's great if you can package stuff. That's obviously very important but if you can't hold a coherent conversation with your users or if you can't collaborate productively with other developers how much are you contributing and it's not clear how we could test for these skills or even whether this is the right thing to do. We could look at mailing list threads just as we're asked to look at licenses and say whether a license complies with the DFSG, points out ways in which it doesn't. We could ask applicants to look at a mailing list thread and say how they would respond to certain posts. There are many ways we could look at this kind of thing. So I think that's something that we should at least think about. There's some more general discussion which as I suspect some of you have have things to say. I'll just ask how we should actually think about the NM process. The conventional way to think about it is people normally see it as just this big test that you have to get through and really it's seen as a barrier to getting into Debian that people think well I want to do stuff for Debian but if I want to get a real membership of Debian I'm going to have to go through this silly process of kind of preventative measure. Maybe people think that's a good thing in some cases because it's keeping out bad inappropriate people but it's still generally seen in a pretty negative light. But I think it's worth remembering that we can see the NM process in a much more positive way that you can say well Debian is this community and just as in the real world if you move to a country you don't immediately get citizenship. You have to show that you want to actually be the same for Debian and it's not just then a question of trying to exclude people but it's a question of how can we actually bring people in and make sure that they do become full members of Debian and in many ways you can then say actually well having this formal process makes us a lot more open than many other projects. There are a lot of free software projects where there's this very small group of people who are the core members of a project and it can be very full member of the project like that. If you weren't in there at the start often those people really want to keep a very tight control over it and not hand anything on. Whereas for Debian by the time as you go through this process you're being brought in and by the end of it you're a full member just as if you well with the same rights as if you had been in Debian from the start including for example obviously the voting rights as well as upload rights. We can positively see the end process not just as some kind of big negative test but as something that should actually be bringing in people and meaning that by the time you've gone through this process and become a member of Debian you should have a feeling well we should have people who have a feeling of responsibility and commitment not just to their own package that they want to get in their new ISE client or whatever but they should actually have a feel this towards the whole project that and also of course to the more general free software community. So that's basically it at this point we'll be happy to take questions and kind of open things up to more discussion we have just under 15 minutes left and we do have to get out of here pretty promptly at the end so keep your questions short we will cut you off if you go on for too long yeah. Microphone. See I have the microphone. No I just wanted to make a quick observation on what Hannah was saying about collaboration during Andreas is small groups in Debian talk I even suggested maybe making us part of the new maintainer process serving a kind of apprenticeship in one of the teams that we have in Debian already because that way you know we can see how well people are working with others and that kind of thing. So next question it's quite a challenge to keep that one short but I'll do my very best so we have about 900 developers and in my last statistics that was about 180 actually active which makes about 700 developers that are more or less active or are completely inactive and all of those which enables them to write to the archive I think this is a huge security problem now I appreciate the work that you've done you've done a great presentation of the NM process and I think that also all the people who have worked on improving the NM process in the past couple of months have done a great job but I want to raise the question whether it is actually what we want do we want to streamline this process to get more and more people into Debian and maybe this is what we want if that is what we want do we also want to make sure that we can get people out of Debian again because I don't think that we are going to be able to scale just in terms of number of developers we see it now we're not scaling well and it's just not going to get better yeah I I think that's a really great point I think we definitely do need a procedure for getting rid of developers well we do to some extent already I mean there are the missing there are people working of course on the missing in action checks trying to pick up when people stop working on their packages and well and then either sort of politely or less politely if to sort of encourage them to give up those packages and lose upload rights basically if they're not going to do anything else I mean there is some procedure that already I mean obviously yeah it's unclear exactly how we're going also I mean another well a related question is when you have people who are if well if you've got someone who's uploading a very rarely changing package then it's an open question of should that person have full upload rights I mean I think it's dangerous to say they don't need them therefore they shouldn't have them because as I was saying at the end is good if we can have people who genuinely feel that they are a full part of Debian and it's dangerous to start saying that you don't sort of this package you're doing doesn't really count we won't let you in and I think something related to this is also the fact that you don't have to be a package maintainer to apply to be a Debian developer you could be somebody working on translation or documentation writing yet everybody who passes through that new maintainer process gets upload access so this kind of I feel we're in this kind of conflict situation at the moment where on the one hand everybody should know how to deal with packages because they're all going to have upload rights but by the same token that means that people who don't actually want to maintain packages are being forced to go through and develop knowledge that isn't necessarily appropriate to them so perhaps we need to look at how developers do or which developers do different tasks and maybe look at restricting upload access depending on whether people are actually package maintainers and whether people are actually writing documentation and doing other tasks I will follow up on that just quickly it's not just upload access it's actually shell access and that can be very important particularly if you're doing website stuff but to follow up on your question about security surely you're more concerned that there's people who are going through the NM process who won't get in who've been explicitly rejected but have packages in Debian anyway I mean in person every package in Debian should be there by a Debian maintainer and the process should be short enough that realistically maybe the first upload isn't but every subsequent one should be I just have a mic here I just want to come back to my question from the release team that on the one slide there was a 7 plus 1 item list and there was a single person named on it and so if somebody wants to go to Huck Elmo in a restaurant and they both two get some food with Salmonella and they go to the hospital for few weeks what will be with our new maintainer process maybe we find some other person who is nice to Huck perhaps a nice woman to get some more people in but what you're saying is we need to clone Elmo just find some okay at one point in time during the last year I did actually raise the point of separating more the actual features you get with Debian developership and I see them as being the ability to vote your Debian.org email address, shell access and upload rights and upload rights should only be there for those people packages to maintain I know so many translators contributors bug fixers, user support people, PR people that don't even bother to go through the process because they don't need to and I think we should learn from that a quick follow up on the security question I think in order for a non maintainer to get a package into Debian they have to go through a sponsor and I know a couple of sponsors that will just simply take the package recompile and upload it and not look at it and I've seen it a lot of times before I think it's okay to do that when you've worked with a guy for a girl, sorry for a couple of months for a couple of packages and you know that that person is generally reliable you have no reason to believe otherwise but it's definitely not okay for new mentees and I think we definitely need to do something here too we need to probably institutionalize the monitoring in some ways well again the sponsorship system works a lot better when it is as you suggest someone who you actually work with a particular sponsor and try and learn from them but that's not actually enforced in the current system and it's perfectly possible just to go on to ISE and say I've got this cool new ISE client who wants to sponsor it and wait for someone to come along who will say yes and there's nothing to enforce that the next time when you have another upload it adds a root access hole or something that is actually even the same person who looks at it I have a comment to make the current process does have a requirement to fix some RC bugs and the packages check is at the end maybe it should be a bit sooner so the AM can get the impression of your packaging skills and not only after you answered all the questions yeah I mean another thing worth noting is that if the AM is doing well if the AM is doing their job basically they should also be looking at what you're doing in Debian outside their direct communications with you so they should be looking at what you've done on mailing lists what other bugs and packages are working and not just the packages that you've sort of explicitly maintaining yourself so I think often people applicants often don't notice how much the application manager is doing it's the only really cause to note if the application manager asks directly about it a couple of notes one about the length of the AM process often we complain about the length of it but I've been following some applicants which are not my applicants and more than complaining about the length of the process we're complaining about having to do these things they totally wouldn't care about and I mean they have other things to do in the project they would like maybe to maintain another package but they hold back in like studying maybe a sub policy that they don't care about or writing a main page for a software they don't use and so having to figure out also how this software works so that's one like focusing more on people needs for example when I've been on AM I've been looking at the packages people would maintain and ask questions about that specific area because I remember that I've never been asked questions about like the Python policy but then well no that's the wrong example because I have a bug saying I don't want to look into the Python policy I want a co-maintainer so not the Python policy but I've never read the per policy but then when I had to maintain a per package I looked at the per policy and I did it so that was one can I comment on that? I think that's a really good point and I think it's important to make sure that we do check all of the skills and areas of knowledge that any given person working within Debian will actually touch upon during their time as a Debian developer but the way we're doing that at the moment is to have this kind of one size fits all procedure and test everybody on everything and that's perhaps not such a good idea as you're saying but then we get into the situation of how we structure the procedure if we don't do that kind of thing because then you're putting a lot of well you're basically asking application managers to put a lot of effort into working out what's appropriate for each person and I think that might reduce the number of people who are willing to be application managers but I think it might be worth doing so I guess the question would be how best to do that Well okay that was one and the other thing is at this point about having different levels of upload access like I've been an applicant who was maintaining like localization packages I had an applicant who was maintaining Python packages and that was like and they knew such a huge deal about localization and Python policies and everything so I was really happy about let them go but then I have no idea if one day they will maintain a shared library what is going to happen and I was not wanting to bug them about shared libraries at that point but then why not like that would be a huge infrastructural change so I guess people will tell me like if you want to upload a shared library then maybe there's a little bit of an M to go through just to make sure that you know what's involved because what's happening now is that people don't know about shared libraries they happen to have to maintain one and they have no idea there's a library packaging guide they have no idea of the things involved and you get all sort of havoc I also have a few comments on the things that were said earlier I do know that you can't manage to check more than just what direct communication with the applicant and so if they do look at what you've done in mailing lists and so on they also already have a few of social skills and whatever so that is being tested implicitly on some level maybe it should be more obvious in the evaluation form that the account manager fills out because not all account managers do look at what's happening on mailing lists even feel they could possibly bring that kind of thing into their final report for the account managers so yeah, I would agree that it's perhaps not A second point is that I think it's good to allow account managers a little bit of freedom in judging people I know my account manager did I never went through the tasks and skills part based on what I'd already done within the Debian installer team the internship which was fairly intensive and so it already does work in that way that in some cases if there's a really good reason that it's a bit more flexible than the process that's been and I think that's a great thing I just worry that we're heading in the direction of just very standardized testing and I'm not a big fan of standardized testing a very last remark I agree that it's not really useful I don't think it's very useful to assign people tasks like fix an RC bug because you need to have an RC bug that is suitable to that person and it will often take a lot more effort to find a RC bug that is suitable to their skills than doing more general tasks and having standardized testing that's the downside of what you were proposing absolutely firstly I agree with everything you're saying about the new maintainer process I think you're exactly right and I think that the people who are worried about the question of allowing people upload access when they might not need it or shall access when they might not need it is very that's a really important question but I think there's another effect of the fact that most people going through the new maintainer process are going to be maintaining packages which we're overlooking which is that one of the consequences of being a developer is that you get to vote in Debian elections and at the moment we are effectively denying people who might be doing masses large amounts of work for Debian who might be heavily involved in other kinds of work Debian's lawyer can't vote we're not allowing them to have any say in the direction Debian heads in and I think this is terribly one sided and I think it's it's really doing these people in Debian and injustice I think it's a problem we should fix I think it's that's because the YNM process has at the moment it has technical permissions for doing uploads intermixed with the more social aspect of voting these things are tightly bound together so perhaps if we can separate out your ability to upload versus your ability to vote that perhaps address that problem okay well I'm afraid you're out of time but once again I invite everyone who's still have questions to ask to continue discussing the topic but just outside I also have an announcement I think just a small announcement for those who volunteered to help doing the formal the diners this evening we will meet at 5 p.m. at the Cantina who volunteered please be there so thanks


Education, education is the process of facilitating learning, or the acquisition of knowledge, skills, values, beliefs, and habits. Educational methods include storytelling, discussion, teaching, training, and directed research. Education frequently takes place under the guidance of educators, but learners may also educate themselves. Education can take place in formal or informal settings and any experience that has a formative effect on the way one thinks, feels, or acts may be considered educational. The methodology of teaching this called pedagogy. Formal education is commonly divided formally into such stages as preschool or kindergarten, primary school, secondary school and then college, university, or apprenticeship. A right to education has been recognized by some governments and the United Nations. In most regions, education is compulsory up to a certain age.


Hello, thank you for being here. My name is, as I like to introduce myself, Ben, like Ben Franklin. I'd like to first thank the ancestral health society for giving me this opportunity to speak here at the symposium. Yeah, so nobody really wants to hear a lawyer talk that much or that long. So I'm gonna try to make this short and sweet and no pun intended. All right, so warning labels on sugar. Let me, oh, let's see if this is advancing. Ah, here we go. Lawyers are all about the fine print, so we're gonna start with that. The disclaimers that I don't claim copyright to for some photos, it's very important that I say that because I'm an IP attorney. The no client attorney relationship is formed by this presentation and then use this information at your own risk. The attorney cannot predict or guarantee results. If anybody is going to take photos, by the way, that I would love it if you could share with me through social media or just tag me or something, I would be very appreciative. And then some disclosures that I have is that I have clients in this nutrition field and then I have an opportunity to work on Prop 65 defensive litigation on behalf of actually a furniture manufacturer whose product contained a flame retardant as a listed chemical. So then that's kind of part of the qualification of me being able to speak with you on this subject. Okay, the title of this talk is called Warning Labels on Sugar. Before we slap a single warning label on anything that's sweet, we need to understand what a warning looks like. So here's a couple of examples. This is a warning from the happiest place on earth, which apparently contains chemicals known to the state of California to cause cancer, birth defects, or other reproductive harm. Sounds very, very happy to me. Here's a photo that I snapped at Starbucks. You can see this at every single Starbucks for apparently the coffee there might give you cancer. And then here's another one, trees in California will also give you cancer. So they're really kind of all over. Did anybody hear nah from California? Oh, quite a few. Welcome to California. So it's a little nutty. All right, so what is the law behind all these warnings, right? It's a law called Proposition 65. The official title is the Safe Drinking Water and Toxic Enforcement Act of 1986. But since it was a voter initiative statute, which is something that made it into, it was a proposition that voters voted on and became a state law. We call it Prop 65 by the number that it was proposed onto the ballot. It requires businesses to provide warnings to Californians about significant exposures to chemicals that cause cancer, birth defects, or other reproductive harm. There's these underlying terms because they're particularly important. They're legal terms of art. And in one of the most important terms here is cause, and then we'll go over that in just a little bit. Other provisions of the law, it prohibits businesses in California from knowingly discharging lists of chemicals into drinking water. And it requires the state government to publish a list of chemicals, okay? That's also gonna be important. What chemicals make it onto the list to cause all these issues? Okay, so regarding these legal terms of art, you have cause, or as we know in tort law, it is called causation, okay? And this is really important because it establishes responsibility. In order to be liable in a tort, you have to actually cause the tort. And so this is not unique to this law. It's kind of unique to all the common law that's ever been in tort. So the best example that I like to give, everybody likes to give is like car accidents. If you were speeding, you cause that accident. You hit somebody, you cause that accident.  Now causation itself does not have to be A to B. It could actually be chained. So then if, for example, car A hits car B and car B loses control, it hits pedestrian C, then A would have caused the injuries to pedestrian C as from A to B to C. It's like a chain of causation. Another legal term of art that we should pay attention to is the list of chemicals that I mentioned. They generally need to be chemical compounds with cast numbers and things like that. We see that a lot of organic chemicals and contaminants, things like pesticides, additives, they tend to make the list, they populate most of the list in California, but also more general stuff like tobacco smoke. Tobacco smoke is listed as a chemical. I mean, we could kind of say that, okay, it sort of isn't, you know, it's kind of a quirk in the grand regulatory scheme. So before I go too deep into this slide, I just have this big caveat. I think everybody in here, almost everybody here will know more about the actual research for all of this stuff, more than I do because my day job as a lawyer is not a researcher. I mean, I'm not a scientist. So this is based on my understanding of kind of like being a layperson, looking at the research for somebody who's involved in this field for a number of years. So here we go, that's my big caveat. I believe sugar is carcinogenic because sugar causes insulin resistance, which then contributes to obesity, which then is a risk factor for cancer. In terms of reproductive harm, there's also a case for that because insulin resistance we know is linked with PCOS, polycystic ovarian syndrome, and then also insulin resistance to obesity, which is a big risk factor for autism. One of the most significant risk factors for autism is the obesity of the mother. So you can, you probably already have a question here, we have a chain of causation, right? All these things are in a chain. And what happens when you link causation in a chain? Every single link in the chain of causation is subject or vulnerable to attack by somebody who is defending, right? Like you say you're suing some person in a potential lawsuit and they're like, okay, well then maybe we can't establish this particular link between insulin, between IR and obesity, or obesity to here, and then so therefore we could say that the entire chain is faulty and that we're not liable. And you can expect very, very vigorous legal defenses based on that. So wouldn't it be nice if we just had sugar that went straight to all this stuff, all the cancer birth defects and all that? Wouldn't it be nice, right? And honestly, when I was putting this together, I was thinking to myself that there's no such paper, I couldn't find anything, and then so I'm gonna be up here blowing smoke. But hey, guess what, I got really lucky. Not that lucky actually, this was all over the news. It was a study in the BMJ, published in the BMJ actually, just very recently, it was May 7th of this year, is the sugary drinks cancer study. This was headline on CNN.com for something like 12 hours before it disappeared because it was probably in line with the profit motives of exactly zero people that make anybody any money. The facts here are that a 100 milliliter per day consumption of sugary drinks contributed to an 18% increased risk in relative risk in overall cancer, 22% increase in relative risk of breast cancer, and if that form of sugar was fruit juice, then there was a 12% increase in relative risk. I thought something that was really impressive was that they really tried to get rid of a lot of the confounding factors, which was they looked at consumption of artificially sweetened beverages and they found no link between, if you drink fake sugar and cancer. And also they controlled for a bunch of other stuff. One of the most significant things was BMI. So you could actually say that from this study, not only this study proved that link, that sugar contributed to cancer. You could also say that obesity itself was not independently relevant or that no link was found. They were able to control for that as a risk factor, independent of the sugar. Another way to say that is just simply that you had an increased chance of getting cancer regardless of how fat you are. That's colloquial. And when you think about this, by 18%, you might already be asking the question, 18%, isn't that just like the red meat study with the colorectal cancer? Wasn't that almost also 18% and it's like enough to give me PTSD? Just thinking about 18% all day. But I think it's significant for a number of reasons, especially because it was only 100 milliliters of sugary drinks per day. Okay, this is really only 11 grams of sugar. It's said in the paper, sorry it wasn't in the results. And it's only a third of a can of coke. Now you guys all met people who eat or drink a lot of junk food. Nobody drinks a third of a can of coke. They're probably knocking down two or three a day. So they're probably easily doubling their risk or tripling their risk. It's probably way more than 80% if this ends up being linearly extrapolatable. So I got really lucky, I found this particular paper and I'm sure that as more research is done, there's probably gonna be more. So adding chemicals to the list, there are four ways to do this. It's basically that you need to be identified by another credible institution. One of them is the International Agency for Research on Cancer. It's a sub-organization of the World Health Organization and then it could get in that way. It could get in through being recognized by all these other federal agencies, the Environmental Protection Agency, Food and Drug Administration, OSHA, so on and so forth. And then also another way that prescription drugs get to be added because prescription drugs can have a lot of side effects which may include cancer. But the thing that we're gonna talk about and is the most relevant to citizen input and just public action in general is the state qualified experts comprising of two committees, okay? I'm gonna go on to this next slide. This is administered by an office in California called the Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment is OE double HA. They administered two committees. One of them is the Carcinogen Identification Committee and the other one is the Developmental Reproductive Toxicant Identification. This is DARTIC and as you can see the Prop 65, you remember it was causing cancer and causing reproductive harm, right? There were two different things. So one committee does the cancer thing and the other one does the reproductive harm thing. But you can see that there were a group of expert scientists appointed by the governor to identify chemicals that are clearly shown through scientific valid testing according to generally accepted principles to cause cancer. So you really needed to be legit in the way that they determined this. My next question was when doing all this research or who are all these committee members, right? And I found out that they're actually generally people who are fairly credible. They're doctors, they're professors, they're researchers. Surprisingly, not that many political appointees. I thought it was gonna be all political appointees or partisan hacks and I didn't find any people who were in that category. So it was pretty impressive the way that this was being run. Couple of more notable citations in the law is that they're really, really required to get public input. Science scientists from the OEWHA prepare a hazard identification document contains the scientific evidence. The public has an opportunity to submit relevant information to the office that may be included in the document, right? It's also that even the public is very strongly recommended to do so, to encourage the prepare written comments if they wished to have a scientific issue considered by the committees. So this is a great opportunity for people to comment and we'll talk about that in a little bit. The legal standard here is that it needs to be, as we mentioned, clearly shown through scientific valid testing according to generally accepted principles that cause cancer or other harm. And they also consider all these other things. In addition to scientific valid testing, they consider fact finding in court decisions. So there has been a lawsuit on that chemical in the past where the court has made certain findings. It'll usually make it into the report. Scientific peer review, they look at a lot of different articles. And also importantly, public comments by individuals, the organizations and businesses that have a stake. So some of the more famous chemicals that have made it onto the list in California, this is the most recent one. This one was actually a bit of a headache for one client of mine. They were wondering about whether they needed a label on their coffee. And it was a question bugging people who sold coffee in California. They were trying to decide whether to label cancer causing chemicals in coffee. They decided against this. And this decision is very, very recent. June 7th of this year, 166 page fact finding reports stating reasons against warning labels. There was a ton of public comment saying that coffee shouldn't be labeled. And then a lot of findings that coffee contained beneficial chemicals that actually prevented cancer was part of the finding. The reason for this was because of the chemical acrylamide. You might all be familiar with this, but acrylamide is a chemical that is formed by burning food, essentially, like starches that if you subject it into high heat and they were charred that acrylamide was formed. And acrylamide itself was found to have caused cancer. It wasn't even controversial. In 1990, it just made it straight onto the list. And in fact, there's been a lot of enforcement action against actual acrylamide. There is a court case by the attorney general's office against a Frito-Lay, other potato chip makers to either get their act together, cut acrylamide levels, or get a warning label. Either you cut your levels and pay to find or you got a warning label. Well, guess what? They decided to consent degree cut their levels. This was an actual really significant success of the law. It resulted in an actual reduction of exposure to toxic chemicals to the public. Yeah, it's because of this court case and this law that we're all eating less acrylamide in general. And then there's also many other lawsuits that resulted in a similar reduction that manufacturers when faced with a lawsuit, faced with the fact that they had to put warning labels on everything, decided that they were gonna clean up their act. Other famous chemicals, alcoholic beverages, no-brainer, tobacco smoke. They're all listed fairly early in the regulatory screen. Glyphosate, fairly recent, 2017. This was very contentious. It generated an astounding 1310 public comments during the hearing process. So many people commented on glyphosate and it was finally listed 2017. But in very high concentrations, that kind of permissible, recognized safe level was something like 1500 micrograms per person per day, which is really why you don't see more glyphosate labels on all the stuff that contain wheat or soy. It's because those products don't contain it in that particular concentration that would make it significant under Prop 65. So why is all this important? What has Prop 65 done or what has it not done? Policy ramifications. You may have heard the saying as California goes, so goes the nation. One of the things that we see is that you may have seen cars that have 50 state emissions on there, like you can buy a car that has an emission level that's acceptable to all 50 states in the country. Well, it doesn't mean that the car automatically knows how much it pollutes when you drive it across a state line. It doesn't know where it is. It's just that it simply meets the most stringent standard, which is California. And the reason for this is because it's really expensive for manufacturers to make different versions of their products to comply with each state's requirement. So they just make it comply with the most stringent one. There's a lot of container traffic that passed through West Coast ports. 73% of it passed just to the north of us in the ports of LA and Long Beach, which are right next to each other. It accounts for 32% of the U.S. shipping total for container traffic. So basically as soon as these containers land in California, they're subject to Prop 65. And there's really even no debate. It's like, why even bother? Just make a complaint. Here is a warning sticker for Prop 65. You can buy these 500 on these, 500 in a roll. Sticking on our product is for the low, low price of $13.79, free shipping. This is a, it kind of comes out to like 2.3 cents or 2.7 cents per label. Very, very cheap. And part of this is because it's frivolous litigation. And then I put frivolous in quotes because depending on your perspective, litigation may or may not be frivolous. If you're a manufacturer, anybody who sues you and says that they've been hurt by your product is automatically frivolous.  If you're somebody who's been hurt by that product, then well, maybe not, right? Maybe your litigation's very meritorious. Their private litigants, people in the public can sue under Prop 65. So it doesn't have to be the attorney general that enforces. It could be private litigants. And so there's been a few law firms, and this is, people kind of trot this out as examples. They base their entire business model under Prop 65. There's like five law firms in California that only do Prop 65 litigation. They're on Berkeley figures. And a lot of businesses are just so scared of being sued that they just slap warning labels everywhere. A lot of times it's impossible for them to exhaustively test the cut products come from overseas. Who knows what that factory was making before the factory retooled to make their product. There might be residues and stuff like that. It's just way cheaper to warrant than to test for a lot of manufacturers. So which is why you see these warnings everywhere, including on possibly trees, right? And then also a warning label issues. You just, this is a Christmas tree light set and one, two, three, four, five, six. Does anybody actually read all that when you buy a Christmas light? You go home, you plug it in. Anybody actually read all that? No. I've always wished there's one person to raise their hand and I can make fun of them. But yeah, so this is just the situation where there's just too many warnings. They're non-specific, our primal brains are not adapted for these, oh, some chemical, some product, something dangerous, you know what? Like what do I do with this, right? Why are you selling this to me? And so they're just, most people end up ignoring them is what's going on. It's kind of the boy that cries wolf and that's definitely a problem. So why should we care, right? Why is this important? If the warnings are just non-specific and we can't act on them, why should we care? I hate to be the proverbial canary in the carnivore meetup, but the vegans are coming. The vegans are coming. This is a resolution that was proposed in the California legislature. This was right after the 18% colorectal cancer red meat study came out that this was sponsored to try to add processed meat to Prop 65 as a chemical. And you would imagine that the office of the OEWHA would be very, very persuaded if the California legislature instructed them to look at red meat to look at red meat as a potential carcinogen, right? Who did this? Back by the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine. Anybody know those guys? Yes, absolutely. Yeah, Dana Rogers here Thursday morning. I was a recession chair. Yeah, we went off on that. And then apparently they added their name. It's called the like, and they added them social compassion in legislation. Yeah, this is too long. I just call them the Physician Committee for Fluffy Animals. Fluffy Animals is essentially what it is. It is actually a PETA front group. They share funding and they share some board members. And these guys were notorious for leaking Dr. Atkins medical records to the Wall Street Journal saying that he died of a heart attack. So they were really at war with the whole Atkins. They don't like low carvers. They were at war with this long before. Probably any of us were really into this. This photo right here kind of just sends shivers up my spine.  Yeah, that guy. It's as of Ansel Keyes, asexually reproduced and made 300 copies of himself. This is the photo right here. Yeah, so yeah, all these white coats, right? Like you're supposed to be persuasive. They're really on the war path. They're really everywhere. I was able to find this. This was again in the California Assembly incentivizing plant-based meals in public schools. There was a city council resolution that failed in LA. They were going to mandate that every restaurant that did business with the city of LA offer at least one vegetarian option. This kind of screws small people. It doesn't affect the big chains. The big chains can make the changes fairly easily. They have the resources, they have the marketing. A lot of them are doing it right now because it's like good press. But this is gonna really be very, very tough on the smaller players, the people who don't have a choice, the mom and pop, maybe we're thinking like the ramen store, that restaurant that only has one type of bone broth and they have to make something that's completely vegetarian or vegan based on these regulations, which would really, really clearly be very onerous to them. They really are, they're making changes. Whether we do anything or not, they're already pushing for this to happen. So what can we do, right? There are a few organizations that are pushing back. The one that comes to mind is the Nutrition Coalition is run by Nina Ticholtz. She's conducting some, a lot of lobbying, like at the USDA front with the Dietary Guidelines. She's trying to go ahead and get some common sense back into the guidelines. Another thing that is really, really relevant to the whole office of this OEWHA committee is that we should assemble a library of helpful research, starting with that sugar study, right? I'm sure there's other ones. There are things that we've heard really, really exciting at this conference. Rob Abbott with his crowd-funded research on hypothyroidism, and then the thing that he's doing with Lucy Mayling next year. A few other people, this kind of like ground-up research that we are doing, we have to do it because nobody else is gonna do it. It's not in line with anybody else's profit motives, right? Except for the people who are actually suffering from it. Is the dietary and lifestyle changes actually gonna be helpful? If we have research, then oops, then we can go ahead and try to effect some changes through letters and petitions, organizations to send up to the committees. They have to, by law, consider our comments. They have to respond to each and every single one. You can imagine that glyphosate report, 1,310 public comments in the response that the record of facts and stuff, that was a labor of love for these government bureaucrats. So they really do have to pay attention to us, is the idea. And also, encourage and support litigation, I was not able to find a better way of saying this, but what I kind of had in mind was with the McDonald's hot coffee case. The one where the coffee was too hot and it spilled on somebody and then they got sued, right? That kind of went around the internet and then was made the butt of jokes for probably like years and went around. But when you think about it, court cases are vetted very stringently by judges. Judges don't want bad press in opposing counsel, right? So they have to constantly survive these motions, these motions of dismiss, failure to say to claim, so motions for summary judgment, all these different motions in order for the lawsuit to proceed, in order for that lawsuit to actually gotten to the jury and then for the plaintiff to actually receive damages, the case must have been fairly credible, is what I'm trying to say.  Which was the truth with that particular lawsuit. And so in conclusion, I wanted to mention a few things that I've observed now that I'm six years in with this community, I feel like everything in the last few years have been framed in this kind of like right or left, liberal or conservative, Republican or Democrat, and one of the things that had fallen victim to that is food choice. I understand that because politics are as old as human civilization, but you know what's older is actually basic facts about the human body and biology, right? A million years old. The body is going to do what it's evolutionarily programmed to do regardless of how we try to frame it. And biology is really nonpartisan. There are facts here that are gonna help us win the argument and I believe that it is our job to leverage those facts so that we can win this fight. And I am done, right on time. Thank you very much. So if anybody's got questions, Ben charges by the minute or the question, I'm not sure how this works, billable hours will apply. I've got a question here. That's free for 10 minutes. I got a question and since I have a microphone and y'all haven't cut me off yet, I'm gonna ask it. Is there any consideration of multiple causalities? So something that may be duplicitously causal. So this plus this plus this, where there is an implication that multiple factors are involved. Right, confounding factors, absolutely that would factor into court law. That's a common defense, is to say that your cancer was caused by something else you did. It requires a careful vetting at the court case stage. As I said, the cases are all fairly carefully vetted. They're dismissed really early if it's something doesn't make sense. It is kind of like the job of the attorney to really prep their client, the plaintiff to make sure that they really have eliminated all the other factors. Right, thank you. Very interesting talk. Thanks for laying it all out there for us. Thanks for coming. Yeah, so I've got two, maybe three questions. One is on that study that you found connecting sugary drinks to cancer where you got the 18% uptick. Over what period of time was that study? Was that a short-term study? Because sometimes cancer takes a while to develop, right? Or was that an epidemic? I mean, what was the methodology there? The epidemiology was epidemiological, but it was from a large French nutritional study. They didn't just study this particular outcome. It was a nutritional survey that was sent out to over 100,000 people and followed for an average of five years. So then it was... Survey-based. Yeah, it was survey-based. But then what they did was they sent out a survey for over a two-week period. They sent out three surveys to a random participant for a random two-week period. And they did this repeatedly throughout the year. So they got a relatively good sampling of the particular population at any given time. But it's still then observational, not causal, right? It's observational, yes. But it was over a two-week period. I have reasons to think it's reliable because it was very recent in memory. It's what did you eat on this day, like two days ago or three days ago or something like that? Yeah, so. And then they back it out, they make an estimate. Right, I believe the question took the form of what did you eat on this day? And then they collected everything. And then it was very recent. Like that questionnaire went out three days after or four days after or something. And then they got sent three questionnaires over a span of two weeks. Like you just knew that when you agreed to participate in the study that you had to do this like for every two weeks of forward. So I guess that leads to my next question, which is, all right, observational. You're not looking at something that is a carcinogen in a really low dose where you can really see strong effect, something that's just a real carcinogen. But sugar is something that, yeah, on average it might cause this effect in the whole population. But then for subsets that use sugar responsibly or whatever, it's no big deal, right? It's fine. I have sugar and too much sugar. Right, yeah, like so what if we get a warning label, right? On sugar is the question. So that's so on the flip, I mean, if you kind of go with that, then it opens you up on the meat thing. And I guess I'm concerned with going away from very, very strict dose dependent kind of studies to more essentially milking the data to get a trend on a whole population and not looking at the fact that a single compound, sugar, meat can be beneficial or not when put in context with everything else, unlike carcinogens. So what's your thought on that? My thought on that is that, as I've said, if we don't do it, the vegans are doing it. So this is independently happening to me regardless of whether we do anything here or not. And it's been shown in litigation that this has actually caused food, not food, but manufacturers of all stripes to actively reduce that particular content or ingredient. So it's one of those things where, I mean, it's kind of happening everywhere. There may be one day in which Prop 65 will have to be reworded, but this is the law right now. If we don't do it, other people are doing it. That's essentially my response. Thanks. Thank you. Thank you for doing this. I'm very passionate myself about this topic. Can't come soon enough. And sorry that I came in late. Oh, no reason. So same, my question is about the same study and I might have missed this. Are we talking specifically about sugar or HFCS, high fructose, do we know? And will that confound the research in? So this was actually encompassed the broad range of sweetened beverages. And then they got a lot. They got soda, they got fruit juice, they got energy drinks and sports drinks. They got sweetened dairy products, which is like chocolate milk. They got all sorts of stuff. It was actually really, really comprehensive, like sweetened artificial, not artificial, like sugar added sugar beverages. So was it broken down for specifically each of those would cause cancer or just as a group because? Just as a group. It just seems like that's gonna create more time and objections from all of the different makers of the different products. Yeah, I believe that it was just a group. But then they did say that the average sugar content was 11 grams per 100 milliliters. Yeah, that was the average sugar content. Yep, thank you. Okay, well it seems that this study is the hot topic for everyone's question. So yes, mine is about that too. Cause it says that the consumption of artificially sweetened beverages is not associated. So I wanna know, and I don't know if this has been looked into yet, or if there's a plan to, since obviously it's saying the difference between artificial sugar or regular, I mean, is it also like looking at applying also this warning label to things like natural sweeteners like honey and Stevia, maple syrup, coconut sugar? You know, I don't recall seeing that particular a question that was in the actual study.  I'm not sure if there were checkboxes for all the things that you mentioned, but there were checkboxes for like, there was something like 5,000 different types of foods that you could choose from. So conceivably, you know, honey, Stevia could be in there, but it wasn't, as far as I know, it wasn't in this particular paper. But the data bank is still there. This is part of a large scale nutritional study and everything is like kept in computers. I would imagine if some other researcher wanted to go back and look at it in another aspect. So I mean, do you think there's been any look at that? Like as far as like, like honey and cancer, is that? Not that I'm aware of. But as I've said, I'm not, this is not my day job. So like, I think a lot of people here would understand that a lot more and know how to go about that. One of the things I love about these conferences is watching the microphone get adjusted as different people of different heights come up to the microphone and just say it.  Thank you. My question is, well, it has to do with kind of current trends in the marketplace and this could be confirmation bias on my part, but it seems like low calorie drinks like LaCroix and like sparkling waters are becoming more and more popular. And like people are kind of shifting away from sugary drinks. My question is, I guess it's an invitation to play futurist, like where do you see things being in like two to three years? Do you think there'll be a warning label on sugary drinks? Will they be as prevalent? What do you think's gonna happen? I think this is going to be a significant multi-year effort. It is one of those things where I can see significant pushback from all people of all sorts of stripes. I mean, sugar is everywhere, right? Anybody who's got added sugar in products is going to fight tooth and nail against this proposed regulation. So then there are people like us who might conceivably push for it and there's gonna be a lot of pushback. I don't think this is going to be maybe not five or even 10 years. It's going to take a while, but then depending on the quality of the research and how much research we can get out and then if the case becomes more convincing then certainly this could become a reality sooner. Or Proposition 65 might have changed, or it might have already changed because of the multiple criticisms about this law from a lot of people whose profits are at stake, right?  So I guess I wouldn't, the short answer is I wouldn't hold my breath to see sugar warning labels in everywhere. I think a lot of times the regulations, even if they do come out, a lot of people will avoid that label. For example, for the last product, what was the one that I mentioned, the one with the Attorney General suing that particular product is that they decided acrylamide. So they decided to reduce acrylamide levels to avoid a warning label. So that could conceivably happen to a lot of products. A lot of manufacturers say, okay, we're just gonna use less sugar. We're gonna use a substitute or something like that. And it's already happening, right? People are using Stevia mixed with cane sugar to reduce the amount of sugar that they're using. So that could entirely be true. Thank you. Thanks.


Confusing words in English, just and only, from espressoenglish.net. The word just has two definitions. One is very recently. For example, I just washed the floor, and it's still wet. In this case, the word just means I washed the floor just a few minutes ago. Here's another example. Is Dana in? No, sorry, she just left for lunch. Again, in this case, just means very recently. The second definition of just is the same as only. For example, I have just one brother. Is the same as I have only one brother. Here's another example. He ate just half a sandwich. Equals, he ate only half a sandwich. So, how do you know when just means very recently and when just means only? Here's one tip. Just plus noun is the same as only plus noun. Just two students pass the test. Only two students pass the test. Students is a noun, so these two sentences are the same. However, just plus a verb is not equal to only plus a verb. The sentence I just washed the floor means I washed the floor recently. The sentence I only washed the floor means I washed the floor, but I didn't wash the table or anything else. When using just, the word order is important. For example, I just ate two pieces of pizza means I ate the pizza recently. But if we change the word order and say, I ate just two pieces of pizza, then this means I ate only two pieces and not three or four. Thanks for watching English Tips from Espresso English. If you liked this video, please share it.


It's the end of the day, almost time for the bell How many options will you sell? Fire up your platform, get ready to enter But first let's get the mindset centered Ay, ay, let's go raid We follow the plan, that's how we get paid Test and trade, have success Find what works for you and forget the rest Stats and probabilities is what we're a dismiss Greed and doubt, focus on the process Not the money and the profits We'll flow like honey, power our lives Let's start the show, come on trade hackers Get ready to go, zero date options Time to make bank, get locked and loaded Then be ready to play A little bit green, 10 year yield down about a half percent Oil down a half percent, natty gas slightly red Grains are all red, euro and the pound Pretty flat, bitcoin down 1% Redded about 70,000 VIX in the 12 handle, 12.87 Down about 2.5% on the day Another quiet day which is beautiful For zero DTE, unfortunately I did not take Quite the advantage that I did yesterday But still, pretty good My challenge portfolio No stopouts, I've got my one DTE I've got my two re-entries Up about 7400 in that account And then in my other account I did four different price action trades Up about 4,000 in that one And What was I going to say about that? Oh, well, here's what I'm still in Got a couple contracts on this one 3035's got one contract left On the 4025's And then on my re-entries Got half left Need a little bounce there to get center My three two Just left of center My one DTE Need a little bounce as well 45% on my one DTE would be at 620 It's trading at 750, so a little bounce A little more contraction in IV would get that one Let's see, Chad, are you with us today? Chad doesn't look like he's on you Just me again, my friends, just me again A lot to talk about today Actually not really, there's no premium So no power hour trade for me Chad's still out there gobbling Although I thought I saw him trading today Getting a little bounce back up to 28, 29 What else did I do today? So let's see I just realized that my SMH got hit And I did not see it Must have happened when I stepped away So let me post that right quick When did that happen? Born new, okay Give me a second, let me post that The option selling channel Okay, so I closed that, we booked 30% on that Didn't hold it to 50 because we only had it on for about a week So out of that one Added a new time fly today Which is this one here In the April 19, April 22 By the way, if you haven't heard The TOS analyzed screen is having a little issues Displaying P&L on diagonals So it looked like I was up 700 bucks As soon as I put it on, but that's obviously not the case I also got my NDX trade on It is just left of center I added another hedgehog in Nasdaq Futures Just put that on today Got a couple in ES I added a 1-2 DTE double calendar Very small, again not doing well Short, holiday week I just need to not trade those at all during holiday weeks I mean, I went pretty small But just not really a reason They just don't have the punch that they do normally On my last couple price actions One's trading at 380, I've got an order to close at 270 My last contract in this one I've got an order at $1, trading at $1.30 The at the money butterfly Already trading for $1.50 So my homes might have some action today I need about another dollar to come out of my 1DTE To hit profit target My 1-1 is trading at $1.20 I've got my profit target at $0.65 to close at My 3-2 is trading at $1.62 I've got my profit target at $1.00 on that So we bounce up a little bit more, should hit What I do is I'll go back to the back tester And if it's two basis points away from the criteria Chris, then I'll back test it to see if that Makes any kind of a substantial difference And if it doesn't, I'll go with it Today, like today I should have gotten in my quiet tranches But I didn't So I missed out on those because The filter was messed up on the bot And I didn't even think about those until It was too late And I was already in some price action one So I just skipped it Yeah, if it's close I always just check before it's about to fire And if it's close, then I'll make that decision I don't know if there's really a Better way than that to do it Yeah, so I missed out on my quiet tranches As well So that's unfortunate But it could have worked the other way too I mean, ideally I'd like to just Have the bots Fire based on the criteria They don't fire Criteria wasn't met The issue is some of these little Quarks the bots have been having lately Pretty frustrating Like this morning when nothing fired Had to enter everything manually I know Jordan Trades Stewards frustrated as well And he's hearing about it So hopefully that gets fixed It's happening too often If it happens two or three times a week That's just ridiculous Low of 25, high of 35 10 point range all day ES futures traded Only 666,000 Yeah, just super, super light Most of needing to roll puts up in our MES strangle 87 day one got in it 34, just under 17 So I'm going to give it till tomorrow If we hold around here or push up I'll roll puts up there Yeah, Feesh, what I've done is I've created Toss OCO templates So that in that case I can easily Go in and just kick them in Which is what I did this morning So yeah, it's frustrating though I probably would have made more in my Challenge portfolio because I just I didn't Get exact position size Per my compounding Like the bot would have taken I went in a little bit lighter Than the bot probably would have So I missed out on some money there So that was That's really the main thing For me today I got everything on but it's a little Lighter, I could use one more little bounce Get out of everything And then Market can do it every once I mean look at the daily chart These last two days have just been Little specs Especially today Barely see any tails on that day Yeah the My homes is looking good I did get in a couple Some 30's And some 25's at a buck 30 each See where those are at later See if I need to Wiggle my way out of that one And then Those are in my tradier account So I'm waiting for Waiting for the rest of my Price action reentry trades to come off To free up my strikes here And toss to do the End of day one What is magic my homes? Gonzalo come on Where you been my friend No it's a It's an end of day strategy You can check it out in the It's located in the zero DTE Courses It's basically an end of day short Butterfly That can magically Be morphed Into it Basically a vertical spread DRB overnight So VIX overnight Moved down max 0.25 Basically we just don't want VIX to contract Too much for that Criteria to Work out One more little 5-point bounce That's all I need That's it just a little baby 5-pointer Dick K are you on here today? Here he is Did you uh did you get in your quiet Quiet tranches? Yeah I had to manually do my NDX As well I had to manually do all my trades My two re-entries In my Challenge portfolio, my 1DTE My NDX Everything So the criteria was Just out of range And then by the time I realized it It was too late So I didn't manually fire mine SPX gapped 0.2% I think Trade Steward had it at 0.25 Maybe Trade Steward had it at 0.24 Yeah so officially On the toss indicator anyway it was 0.2 Trade Steward had 0.24 Looking for $1 on my $25.40s it's at $1.35 My $30.35 is looking for $2.70 It's at $3.80 Still need a little more upside At the money $30 fly $30.60 Tronche 2 Going for Tronche 2 you can get inverted Right now Pick a straddle Pick a straddle and you straddle Did you guys skip your calendar Decade you do your calendars Friday Or the 1, 2, 1, 3 the last couple days It's just not worth it On these holiday weeks man I did reduce size significantly But it just passed The 4, 5 did good The 1, 2 and 1, 3 that I took off this morning Were basically a scratch One lost a little bit In other news I did have a Delicious Ahi tuna steak for lunch today Seared For perfection So that was good That was probably the highlight of my day I am the NT staff Chef Ken Wuga didn't fire because Well I don't know Actually I had conflicting strikes So that was the activity that I saw That it may not have qualified with the low premiums Which I don't I mean that's kind of the way that I play wuga anyway Is I If I have no conflicting strikes I'll do it and if it's not an update I'll do it So that doesn't matter too much to me But yeah That's the thing with that one Wits are so tight It's tough not to have Conflicting strikes if you're trading Multiple Strategies around the money I just I'm about to open Another account my wife's name So I can Free up some more SPX strikes baby I was going to do it on trader Until that It ran into that trade Steward issue I added it There's a link If you go to the trade plans channel It's right there He doesn't talk about it because it came after that But I posted a link To the back test there I mean if my kids were old enough To be allowed to trade options I'd open accounts in their names too I know the answer to that Alex Yeah as soon as my kids turn 18 They're going to have naked options Traded like crazy Multiple bot edit I have not Multiple bot edit I don't know if I've ever even seen that I see edit multiple bots Oh that's handy Yeah I picked two random ones in it There's a big warning so yeah But I'm like the tranching bots that would be perfect Huh See now Meach That's why we keep you around here buddy Every once in a while You come through with a little nugget like that And just completely redeem yourself You're trying to get something named after you You're trying I got to appreciate the effort I appreciate the effort That just doesn't roll off the tongue very well though Alright SPX at loads of day Big three point move lower We really kind of peeked at it At the top of that first five minute bar It's been basically all below that Already at a buck 80 In the 25 fly Meach if you find a trade We'll We'll name it the golden corral trade How about that There you go Golden shark Golden butterfly, golden corral AKA the Meach Yep that's right Kelvin Oh it's going to qualify We might be able to get in In about 10 or 15 minutes here If we're hanging around a strike Just start with a one lot So you You know Just understand which strikes you're using On the verticals that It's kind of confusing at first I would love a bounce up to 52.30 That would Get me out of everything Yeah I'll be doing it on toss Sometimes I have to do it in trade here Because I don't have any strikes available in toss But I will today Just not wanting to give me that little bounce is it By the way if you're just joining us today Obviously premiums are very low So not any new Power hour positions You can check my trade plan In the trade plans channel That's updated once a month I'll be updating that for April here in the next couple days I'll give you All the details of exactly how I Trade Zero DTE including power hour Just for my challenge portfolio I'm going to add a little bit of update Power hour in there Add that ratio Diagonal On FOMC days That's about it Yeah LaSosa like yesterday I I got in As soon as it was at two bucks And then it kind of hung around the same strike So I added some more at like two 30 Or something like that So that's What I'll probably try to do again today The issue with doing that Is if it runs away from that strike Then you're kind of stuck With a smaller position than you wanted The challenge is going awesome each The back test of my challenge Going back to May Got me Got me to 152 million And I'm outpacing The back test I should be at least at 200 million Account size In 18 months And when I add the update power hour to it It takes my back test up to 749 million Which means I'm really on pace For about a billion No it is going well though I Started doing it a little bit before March But March first was kind of my Official Official date and the account value So the starting I was trying to start the account at 100, oh jeez I just got stopped out of something Flush So I got stopped out of my remaining price Actions, got stopped out of my Remaining I still got this one on Stopped out of my remaining re-entries Still got my 3-2 on Stopped out of my 1-1 Vix spiked up to 13 Little fleshy flush Let's see what that pumped up These butterflies to 20 is now at $1.50 In my trader account here 25 calls $1.60 So this isn't The end of Dayma Homes Thing but just to kind of give you a little bit more Into this This is what I did in my trader account When I was trading at $30 I got into A short butterfly For $1.30 I moved down to $25 Sold those for $1.30 For $1.60 So now I've collected A total of $3 Or $4.20 So I've only got $80 of risk here If it goes down to one more strike I'll have zero risk with a free shot So I'm going to put an order on the $15 For $1.60 for now Still coming down Still in my last remaining 3-2 Right at yesterday's close So I just got filled On the $15 So just got stopped out of those So I'm in no more re-entry So I still have my $1.00 DTE Which is not doing so hot as it was In fact it's basically a break even now In the red tiny bit I still look a profit if we bounce But it's Very close to profit target So here's what I've done So Let's see I don't have the time stamps On these but Basically when I was trading up here Around $30 around this area I sold some $30 Flies $30 is the mid-strike For $1.30 Came down to $25 Sold some $25s for $1.30 Came down to $20 Sold the $20s for $1.60 Came down to $15 Or close to it Sold the $15s for $1.60 So now I've got My worst case scenario is I could make $400 Because I've collected over $5 in credit And I've got a free shot if this thing really moves Up to I did a 5 lot of needs so I could make up to $2,900 if we Fall big or bounce big Cody sometimes it depends Like sometimes I'll start Layering in at a buck If you get a dollar credit though You've got to cover 5 different strikes To get to that $5 credit In this case I Was getting a $30, $30, $60, $60 So I was able to Do it across 4 strikes And have a free shot It's the same concept as the Mahomes Calvin it's just starting a little bit earlier And layering in at different strikes As opposed to just waiting for the one At the end of the day So I have those in my trader account So I'll do my one end of day One here in toss $15 is currently selling For $1.50 I mean that big movement Kind of pumped up Pumped or Reduced the credit so Now we'll see if we can even get $2 Of course it's in between strikes Once it gets towards $20 or $15 I have a better idea of what it's trading for So I just got to remember To close out my one DTE Since it's not bodied So I've got about 21 minutes to go 11 minutes Until the MOC number We get a Fed head say something What happened? It just needed to move Been cooped up for too long For two days it had been cooped up Had to move 15s are selling for about $1.60 Maybe $70 Kind of settle down here for a minute The next 10 minutes NDX pushed out a range on that move Alright so we need to get To either $20 or $15 The next 7 minutes To give us a shot I don't think it's going to be trading at $2 now But we'll see So what I was saying about my Challenge portfolio before I got rudely interrupted By SPX and that flush Is Yeah so I was trying to Start the challenge portfolio At I took some money out of the account I was trying to start at about $130,000 And then through And so I was like Instead of taking more out I'll just leave it So my official starting balance At the first of March was $141,000 And now it's at $199,000 It was over $200,000 Until just about 10 minutes ago I haven't compared that to the back test yet But Yeah just in March So the 15 fly trading for about $1.80 So my percent Allocation was Look at the SPX still coming down About to hit the expected move to the downside My allocation was So I was going to do A reentry just using 50% of the buying power but I decided to Split it up so I'm doing 25% In the 3-2, 25% in the 1-1 15% In the 1DTE and 3% Into Early RIC and 3% in the late RIC And the 52-11 bouncing back Up a little bit about 15 minutes to go 15 fly Only trading for $1.70, $80 At the MOC number Here in about 3.5 minutes VIX up to 13.25 You know we're in low volatility when you say the VIX UP To 13.25 At a little over a minute It's not going to get there Still coming down So no more homes but my other flies are doing good It's not doing good for my 1DTE though MOC number in about 40 seconds MOC should be coming out here Shortly $4.9 billion sell side So I'm going short $4.9 billion sell side Yeah it sure looked like that one It was anticipated isn't it Well my 1DTE was Almost a profit target now it's going to be red Close it out here in about 4 minutes We need somebody to get the inside track On this MOC number before it comes out Elliot You got any connections Nancy's got the number Nancy definitely has the number Nancy got the number about 10 minutes ago Maybe 30 minutes ago I'm going to get out of my 1DTE Still green in my challenge portfolio But I was really green Do I have any puts that are worth anything? Nope Yeah I'm still holding my MOC I have seen quite a few times where it It's been a few minutes but After a flush like that I'm not super confident we're going to get lower But continue to hold My butterflies expired right here I'd make about $2400 Alright let's get one more flush Why stop here One more 10 point flush $5210 butterflies trading at $250 You think we still got a 5 point move in us Coming down baby Let's go My 10 MOC Futures just take some profits off here I'll leave the remaining 4 into the close Took it off too soon look at that Wow Took it off about 10 seconds too soon Look at that little baby run My butterflies are now our 2900 max profit If we stop here And don't bounce What time did you get into your butterfly madam? Did you get in for $2? You could have got in right when I was talking about it for $250 Alright A little over a minute See one more little flush for my futures $5205 Come on down Just melt Melt into the close I'm out at $65 Alright so MOC and the butterflies helped Green in my portfolio Challenge account But not as green Alright all Tomorrow is a new day Tomorrow is the 27th So we'll be streaming for 0DTE at the open And for power hour Alright all take care Have a good night Cheers