Our next speaker also does not need an introduction. However, he slipped me 20 bucks, so I'm going to give you a brief one here. So Michael Oslam is recognized as one of the nation's leading experts on Asia's regional and political issues. He's a resident scholar and the director of Japan Studies at the American Enterprise Institute. He's the author of several books, including the most recent, The End of the Asia Century, War, Stagnation, and the Risk to the World's Most Dynamic Region. His awards include being named the Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum, a Fulbright Scholar, and a Marshall Memorial Fellow by the German Marshall Fund. He is a frequent contributor to Wall Street Journal, Forbes, and National Group. Dr. Oslam received his PhD from the University of Illinois and a bachelor's degree from Georgetown University. Please join me in welcoming Dr. Michael Oslam. Mike, thank you very much, Admiral. Admiral's, Congressman Forbes, ladies and gentlemen. It's a pleasure to be here. I really appreciate the energy, the passion, the humor that General Neller brought to the conference. That's over now. So I do. It's always a pleasure to be here. Come back to Newport, people say it. I can tell you as a member of the non-defense community in Washington, D.C., just how important the work that the Naval War College does, which you do here, the way that you train leaders, is becoming not only in a capital but in a world of increasing uncertainty and complexity. And that's really what I want to talk to you about today. I actually wanted to come in and give you a good news story. A few years ago I went out to Asia because I wanted to understand the future. I had worked on Asia for decades, like probably a lot of you in this room. I had lived there. I had studied it. I taught it and I was working on it in policy ways in Washington, D.C. And like everyone, I had watched it go from this city, like Shanghai back in the 1980s, to this. And there were good reasons why in just the space of a couple decades, we thought that the 21st century was going to be the Asian century. Whether you looked at economics and trade, 40% of global output, for example. Whether you looked at the growth of militaries, the world's largest militaries and some of its most advanced militaries. When you looked at the increasing political influence of Asia across the globe, its cultural reach, whatever you looked at, you thought this was the dynamic region. This was the part of the globe that was going to define our future. And I wanted to go and not do what everyone was doing, which is just write a book about the inexorable shift of power from West to East, but actually talk about how our future, our American future, had to be an Asian one. That we had to discard our Atlanticist DNA and embrace the Pacific within us so that we too could take advantage of those opportunities that we all saw represented by cities like Shanghai. So I went out to Asia to write all that. And a funny thing happened on the way to the book. And that is that everyone I talked to, from heads of state down to, yeah, the cab drivers on the streets, talked to me about their fears, their worries, the problems they were facing. It wasn't trying to sell me on the idea of the Asian century. It wasn't saying, hey, your time in the sun is over and you got to get used to it. Instead, they were saying to me, these are the things that you guys in America aren't paying attention to. So of course I ignored them because I knew the book that I wanted to write.  I got five days, I got to get it done. But I kept hearing it over and over and over, over months that I would be going back, whether it was India, whether it was China, Taiwan, Japan, Vietnam, Malaysia, name it, any of the countries. And after a while, it sunk in and I realized that this was the great untold side of the Asian miracle. The thing that we had become used to had another side to it. It was as the late great radio commentator Paul Harvey used to say, it was the rest of the story. And so ultimately that's the story that I wound up telling, that I wanted to bring to us to say, you know what, we have to change our mindset because if we don't, we're not going to be able to deal with the reality of the Asia that is out there. So I had a couple of problems then on the way to figuring out how to do this. The first one seemed sort of simple, but it actually wasn't. And that was the basic question. What's Asia? If you ask two people, you get three different definitions. When I was at Yale, we used to have a, or still do, have an East Asian studies department, a South Asian studies department, Central Asia, maybe Southeast Asia would sneak in there somewhere. The US government does it the same way. You have assistant secretaries for East Asia and South Asia, or eventually you will, but generally you do. They'll be there. So everything's divided up. But that wasn't the Asia that I heard the Asians talking about. And granting that however you defined Asia, and we heard one earlier definition today, it was going to be a judgment call. The Asia that I kept hearing the Asians talk about was this Asia. It's what I call the Indo-Pacific region. It's that great sweeping arc from India up to Japan. It's continental. It's peninsular. It's archipelagic. It's the world's largest countries down to smallest city-states. It's political regime from totalitarian North Korea to free-wheeling democratic Taiwan and South Korea. Biggest economies to non-existent economies. Nuclear powers to countries that basically don't even have a military force. And that doesn't even account for the thousands, when you add it all up, the thousands of religions, languages, dialects, microcultures that make up the most dynamic region on Earth. And of all the places, by the way, that I've either worked with or talked to Asia about or deal with Asia, there's only one that I think gets it right and gets this right. And not surprisingly, it's U.S. Pacific Command. The AOR of Pacific Command is essentially this, of course, stretched out mostly to the west coast of the United States. Navy, of course, you got it right. But everywhere else, we still divide up Asia, even as the Asians begin to think of it differently.  I think you guys know this, but most Americans don't.  Today, nearly one out of every three persons on Earth is of Indian or Chinese heritage descent. So to paraphrase Leon Trotsky, probably something you don't do too much here at the Naval War College, to paraphrase Leon Trotsky, you may not be interested in Asia, but Asia is interested in you. It's more than half your world. But again, it wasn't the Asia that I saw unfolding before me as I was going through it trying to figure out how to write about it. It was a different Asia than what we saw on MSNBC or on the Wall Street Journal and the pages of our magazines. So I knew the Asia I wanted to talk about. The problem was what exactly was I going to say? I'm a historian. I didn't want to be predictive, try to predict a war, predict a revolution. I did learn, by the way, that that's the way to write a bestseller. I will never make that mistake again. I will write a predictive book. But I did want to be diagnostic. I wanted to analyze the trends that we had not paid attention to. And at the end of the day, I realized what I really was talking about was a story of risk. We heard a little bit, Tom Mink, and talked a little bit about risk today earlier. But it was really a story about risk and different kinds of risk. And so then the problem became, if I'm going to tell a different story about Asia than what we're used to hearing, a different story about half our world. If it's a story about risk, first of all, what kinds of risk? And secondly, and more difficultly, how do you conceptualize risk? I mean, this is a great map. I see what the countries look like and the oceans look like. I know what the geographic map looks like. Ultimately, I figured out that it sounded too simplistic, but it helped me work through it all, that maybe we should think about Asia in a different way. Maybe we should try to create a risk map of Asia. What would that look like? So we came up with this sort of Lord of the Rings style looking map here. Just a different way to think about it. And if you'll join me on a short tour of this continent of risk Asia, this skull island of risk, I'll walk you through what I discovered as I spent several months going through Asia. And the five big, bold regions that you see are what I call the risk regions. They're really the risk trends that correspond to what I would consider the biggest dangers that Asia faces. Also the five main chapters of the book. And then I'll let you know what some of the prescriptions were at the end of it and then hopefully have time for a few questions. The book starts up there and that quadrant up in the north failed economic reform. And I think that really gets to the story we've told ourselves about Asia for the past half century. A land where all the roads eventually would be paved in gold. That whether it was going to be Japan back in the 1970s and 80s, the four tigers in the 80s and 90s, China since then, that this was the area where all you had to do to make money would show up. If you wanted to hit water, just fall out of the boat. That's what Asia was for probably half a century in our mindset. Today, we have a very different Asia. And I think those days are over again without being predictive. But you think about how our debate over China has changed in just a couple of years when we know that China's gone from 10% growth down to 6.5% growth to wherever it's going now. Where you look at Japan, 25 years of being unable to get out of economic stagnation. Or you look at India, supposedly the world's fastest growth rate now, but with enormous structural problems that seem in many cases unlikely to be solved or Southeast Asia, which may never reach that takeoff stage that we assume. Massive and crippling debt throughout the region. With a $20 trillion debt bomb. Labor shortages in countries you wouldn't think about it like China, for example, Japan obviously, South Korea. I'll talk a little bit more about that in a second. Environmental devastation. Problems with innovation. The macroeconomic picture and the microeconomic picture. For example, in China today, net private wealth is shrinking. Even as we're told that it's the largest economy in the world, China is falling behind the United States in net private wealth, which is probably the most important way of actually gauging how healthy an economy is. So our mindset has to change when we think that all we got to do to make money in Asia is show up, because we're about to enter, or the young people, let's say, who are about to go into their professions, are going to deal with a very different Asia. We're going to have to be smarter in making money. We're going to have to be more strategic in making money, and we're going to have to recognize that the countries that we thought might develop to a position where they could actually play an influential role on the world stage might just not ever get there. That's a big chunk of the book. But I realized there were other risk regions that actually were affected by economics, or they themselves affected economics. In the middle one, there are the next one that I talk about. I don't know if there's a thing there. No. Oh, that's not what I wanted to do. Sorry, guys. The next one I talk about is, thank you, is demographics, which is something that we just don't pay nearly enough attention to in Washington, D.C. It's what I call the Goldilocks Dilemma. You either have too many people or too few people. And demographics is going to be the single greatest driver for political systems, economies, diplomatic relations, and even security over the next generation. On the one side, you have countries with too few people. Countries like Japan, which is already losing people year on year, has been doing so for almost a decade. Its demographic rate below replacement level was crossed back in the 1970s. 45 years where Japan has known that its demographic downturn is coming and has done nothing about it. Hot on its heels is South Korea, Hong Kong, Taiwan. Every advanced society, developed society, better way to put it, developed society in Asia, faces a demographic stagnation or demographic decline. But because they're wealthy, because they're rich, they've been able to deal with the demands of an aging population for entitlements, services, and the like. It's going to be very different for China. About 2030, China's population is going to level off. I mentioned a second ago, China already has a labor shortage because all the available skilled labor has been sopped up by the market. Right now, that labor market is actually, the labor pool is actually shrinking in China. About 2030, that population is going to begin to decline. China's not going to be wealthy. We know that. Per capita, it's not going to be wealthy. It will not be able to respond to the demands of an elderly or an aging population who want entitlements and social services. Things that the Communist Party and the government have never been known for giving. This will be, I would argue, the single greatest issue in Chinese politics going forward, bigger than the South China Sea, bigger than dealing with the United States on trade. It's going to be, how do you account for an aging population? Now, on the flip side of that, too many people. Again, these are crude categories, but too many people. Countries like India, Indonesia, Vietnam, young countries where, again, people are demanding from the government, things government is ill-equipped to provide. Education, infrastructure, jobs, opportunity, stressing these governments, many of which are democratic or are trying to move in democratic ways. Not Vietnam, but others. Demographics spills over into the economics, as you can see. It's something we should pay a lot more attention to. But it also spills over into that big region down in the south there. Unfinished political revolutions. Now, I guess it probably sounds a little bit counterintuitive, right? Chinese Revolution was 1949. Japan's major restoration was 1868, so on and so forth. It doesn't go down the list. But if you look at the political regimes in place in Asia today, almost all of them are under one kind of major stress or another. One of the greatest problems that political regimes in Asia face is corruption. It eats away at their legitimacy. We just had a million young South Koreans in the streets of Seoul demanding the impeachment and removal of the former president, Park Geun-hae. They were not out there simply because they were upset that she was embroiled in some sort of pay-for-play scandal. They were there because they no longer believe in their system.  They don't believe it offers them any future. In Japan, voter participation rates have been cratering for decades because of a general apathy, a sense that nothing's going to change and no matter what you do, it really doesn't matter, which interestingly actually accounts for these wide swings in the vote, the popular vote, giving all the power to one party and then all the power to another party. Not a healthy two-party system, but Hail Mary passes to try to get someone to solve these problems. You look at China, a massive crackdown happening on civil society today. NGOs, lawyers, the media, because the party is worried about its legitimacy as that economic rate comes down and that implicit social contract is called into question. Unfinished political revolutions in countries like Thailand under its second military coup in a decade, or unfinished in the case of Burma, which we rightly celebrated as having a democratic free election, but if you've looked carefully, it's only gone part of the way. It's still repressing minorities. The military still has a huge role to play in that country, enshrined in the political settlement, and we have a lot of questions about how democratic Aung San Suu Kyi and her party actually is. So don't take it for granted that Asia's political regimes are stable, but at least be aware that the strains on them is causing them to try to deal with their problems in a variety of ways, two of which I'll mention as I close up the comments that deal with region-wide problems. We move from unfinished political revolutions over there to the East, lack of political community, running counter to our narrative of modernization, which is that as nations develop, create a middle class, often though not always liberalized, as they trade with each other, trade with the world, they create a regional sense of identity, an Asia that we could clearly define. Our model for this, of course, is post-World War II Europe. You often ask an American what they think about Asia, and they'll say, why isn't there an Asian Union, like the EU? Why isn't there a NATO? Why is Asia just still sort of seemingly stuck in the 19th century? And it's true. Today, despite a new plethora of different types of talk shops and initiatives, be it the East Asian Summit or APEC or the ASEAN Processes Association of Southeast Asian Nations, everything in Asia today regionally is done either on an ad hoc basis or bilaterally. And one of the best examples I'll just mention it is the Rohingyan humanitarian crisis. The Rohingya are a Muslim ethnic group from Burma that have been oppressed by both the junta and the current democratic government that have been fleeing in boats, floating out in the middle of the Indian Ocean, trying to get away. And the response from both ASEAN and the entire region is to throw up their hands and say, there's nothing we can do about it. So the Rohingyans are dying on their boats. They're dying on the beaches. We're discovering mass graves in Thailand and other places because Asia is not able to form an effective community and what we don't have, interestingly, is any type of central leadership in Asia. The three largest countries in Asia, Japan, China, and India, have no allies. They have no real partners. Japan's gone a little bit forward on creating some relationships, but not one of them is trusted by their neighbors for two reasons. One, their size. They're either too big geographically or too big economically. Two, that each of them, in their own recent past, was a colonizer. Japan, India, and China. There's simply no trust. There is a leadership gap, a trust gap that prevents Asia from forming the type of community that could solve or begin to talk about or address its problems collectively. And that's particularly difficult for the last region, that little Cyprus-like looking island off the coast there. The threat of war. Again, running counter to the stories we tell ourselves about how nations modernize, they get rich and wealthy, check in Asia, got a middle-class check, integrate with the world, check. They should figure out that it makes absolutely no sense whatsoever to fight over rocks in the sea or imaginary lines on a map. But today, the problems that Asia has territorially, borders, history questions remind us more of 19th century Europe than we do the 21st century. Every major nation in Asia has a territorial dispute with its neighbors, and some, like Japan, have territorial disputes with all of their neighbors. But worse than that, these are disputes that have festered for decades. We are now in a full decade of talking about the Senkaku Islands in the East China Sea, the Spratly Islands in the South China Sea, and we are nowhere closer to having them solved than we were 10 years ago. In fact, I would argue, we are closer instead to some type of violent encounter, armed encounter, because of a mistake, a miscalculation. You have air forces buzzing each other at 600 miles an hour in the skies over the Senkakus. You have Navy ships, paramilitaries, coast guards, fishing fleets all coming together around the Senkakus, around the Spratlys, around the Paracels. Ships have already been sunk. Fishing boats have already been lost. One day there's going to be a loss of life, and with a trust deficit, no working relationships, no Asian Union or Asian NATO to deal with it, we could easily find Asia spiraling into some type of conflict. The data points that we use, which we should be using to chart stability in Asia, I think only point, unfortunately, in one direction. They're going downward now. Again, I said I wasn't going to be predictive. That does not mean there will be war. It does not mean there will be economic collapse. It does not mean there will be revolution. But we've accustomed ourselves to thinking about Asia in one way. And I think the task for the next generation, certainly the next decade, certainly the young people here who are just starting their careers, if you're in the Navy, you're certainly going to deal with this region at some point in your career, is to create different tool sets. We've gotten pretty good, I think, over the past 25 years about thinking about a rising China. And we heard a little bit about that earlier today. We have to create a different tool set now. What does a moderating China look like? What does a declining China look like? What does a potentially unstable China look like? That can be just as challenging and dangerous, if not more so, than a China that's growing and is confident. Nations that worry about their future, worry about their stability, feel existential threats lash out in unpredictable ways. They use trade as a weapon. Now they have other means, cyber, things that we've heard about today. It does not mean that it will happen. It means that the bottom line of all of this is don't be surprised. Don't be surprised by a crisis happening in one of these risk regions. We need to understand it, we need to think about it and prepare for it in order that what we hoped would happen in Asian century of growth and prosperity, and most importantly, I would argue, American participation in all of that can actually take place instead of dealing with something that would actually dwarf all of the problems we have today. So I know you're looking forward to a break now. There is a bar outside. But I will be happy. I've got about 15 minutes to take any questions that really walks you through most of the book as well as the arguments I have about why we should be thinking about Asia in a different way. I'm also happy to talk really briefly about some of the ideas and suggestions that I came up with to how would we deal with this. So yes, sir, in the front. So if you all heard the question, it was about... Yeah, the question was... I'm not going to repeat the whole question. The summary is the lack of trust due to Japan's unwillingness to come to grips with the war and essentially war guilt and apology. Partly, yes. There's no question that Japan has not done what Germany has. This predates the current Prime Minister, Prime Minister Abe. But it's also interesting that China and South Korea actually did not make a big deal of the enshrinement of the 18 Class A war criminals at Yasukuni Shrine when it happened in 1978. They only started making a big deal of it much later, actually in the 2000s. So last decade, when they felt that Japan was starting to get a little too uppity, that Japan was starting to break some of those post-war bounds that had kept it from rearming fully or participating abroad. And there's no question that Japan struggles to address the war. Prime Minister Abe, I think, has gone as far as any Japanese leader can or will go. Part of this, actually, sir, interestingly, it is partly a linguistic issue. The words that Japan uses to apologize do not translate in the same way that our word of sorry does. There are different words that are used that carry the same meaning, but you don't say sorry. You express remorse and regret. But if you speak Japanese, you understand that's as deep as you can go. The textbook issue is a problem. On the other hand, it's a free market for textbooks. They are not government textbooks. There are free market textbooks. Schools get to choose from a variety of textbooks. Not to condone it. I've seen those textbooks. I've taught in Japanese high schools. Those are issues and problems. But we also have to recognize that China and South Korea find this a convenient political stick with which to beat Japan when necessary. 70 years. The Prime Minister expressed his remorse before Congress at Canberra, at Pearl Harbor. It's actually been done since 1996. It does take all sides to come together. But I would argue that the real distrust is more structural. It's some of the things I talked about here. Thank you. Other questions? Yes, sir. Let me summarize. North Korea and Russia. Let me start with Russia and then get back to North Korea because I'm not sure exactly what you're asking on the North Korea problem. It's easy to summarize. There are no good answers. I think everyone in this room knows it. I think I'll start with North Korea then. Our strategy is containment. It's the right strategy. We don't phrase it as such. It is increasingly going to be one of deterrence. But we have to make sure that we don't get trapped into thinking it's like Cold War style deterrence. It won't be. It's going to be new models of deterrence. I'm not a nuclear expert. We have some in the audience. I mean, I've dabbled in it as many of us do. But we will have to think in different ways about deterrence. We cannot wheel out the old Cold War models. We have to think that the North Korean regime is rational. That's why it still exists. And there is a recognition on the part of China that... Let me put it this way. They don't like the current leader, the current dictator of North Korea, Kim Jong-un, but they like North Korea. So we can't conflate the idea that they're really getting angry this time with Kim Jong-un, that they want North Korea to go away because they don't want North Korea to go away. They like it as a buffer state. They want Kim Jong-un to go away. And if that happens, I wouldn't be surprised at all. On Russia, it's very interesting. I started off. I got into this whole business doing Russia in Asia because it was the Cold War and no one was talking about it. We can only think about Russia in a European context here in the States. But it has just as long and important... Well, not just as long, but a long and important context in history in Asia. But it plays a very different role. In fact, the real spur for Japanese modernization in the 19th century wasn't Commodore Perry and it wasn't the British, it was the Russians. Coming down actually in the late 1700s from the north, threatening the home islands, what became defined as the home islands. They weren't even defined back then. Russia has always played a role, but it's played a role of spoiler. It's played a role of maneuvering between the powers. It doesn't have a...  We had to keep the subs in their bastions. We couldn't let them out. We had to keep them up in the Sea of Ohotsk and other areas. That was the only time that Russia was a really major player, geostrategically in Asia. But they still have lots of relationships. They still sell a lot of arms and armaments. They still have enormous energy supplies that Japan and China argue over and tussle over to get access to. Putin is playing a weak hand fairly well in Asia. And if we wanted to really push the edge of the envelope, in which you might have thought might be the case early here in this year, 2017 or so, because of Russia's different geopolitical role in Asia, you could see the United States, Washington and Moscow getting together and saying, you know, we face the same concerns. We worry about freedom of navigation. Russia doesn't want anyone else owning that Arctic route that opens up. But other countries want that Arctic route because it cuts three weeks off the trip from Shanghai to Hamburg. And so you could see us talking about maritime security relations with Russia. Maritime domain awareness, information sharing. Really hard to do after 2012, 2013, 2014, almost impossible. But it could happen because Russia plays a fundamentally different role. Yes, sir. We have seen over a long period of history as well as going on right now today with China and Russia. The use of nationalism by leaders to take the people's minds off domestic problems and they focus outward. So Putin's doing it, Xi Jinping is doing it. I wonder, rather than having a long question, if you could just apply the term nationalism to what you're talking about and tell us how you see that playing out and what the risks are. Yeah, it's a good question. I think it's natural. You know, I think governments use all means of attempts to both unite, unite their populations, get them on board with their plans because as you say, there's often a disconnect between the governments and their peoples. Anything that accrues to national power. I'm never surprised that a government is going to use nationalism. We use it, other countries use it. It can take virulent forms. It can be directed back in the last decade there were some riots in China against Japan because of the Senkaku's issue that's been boiling, set at the boil for a few years. But what wasn't really reported in the press is that if you went to the protests there were signs going this way to the protest, this way out of the protest, all set up by the government so that they could channel it and get everybody where they wanted them to be at that moment and get them on camera and show the Japanese that boy, you better not tangle with us because there's a million Shanghaiers who's really upset, but it was all being manufactured. I just returned from Beijing and we're 70 years after the war. Well, just two years ago, Xi Jinping introduced two new national holidays in China. One, to commemorate the defeat of Japan and two, to commemorate the Nanjing massacre. Now, it's your country. It's entirely fine to do that. We should celebrate more of the victories that we've had in our conflicts overseas. But you do have to ask, why now, why 70 years later? What are you getting out of it 70 years later than you were? And if you go to China and you go into any of the hotels, I was staying in the Hilton. It's as beautiful. I want to live there. It's as western as you can possibly get. But you start flipping through the TV and they've got great TV. They have all the different provinces have their official TV stations. So you can be in Beijing and watch TV coming from Xinjiang or TV coming from Kunming or wherever it is. A scientific estimate that at least 40% of the prime time shows night after night for the entire week-plus that I was there were wartime anti-Japanese dramas. Still being played, and that's not anything new. That has been going on for decades. You flip on the TV, you see perfect Japanese, I don't know if they're Japanese actors or whomever, perfect Japanese coming out of their mouths and it is just night after night after night. So it is stoked up. The thing that I think we should question a little bit more, we haven't looked at it as carefully, is not nationalism in Asia to populism. I think we should begin to investigate populism and populism can shade over into religious populism. We have to think much more carefully. We have done a terrible job overall looking at the rise of radical Islamism in Southeast Asia. But we just had a city taken over in the southern Philippines. We just had the mayor, he's actually the governor of Jakarta, defeated in his bid for reelection for supposedly slandering Islam and now sentenced to two years in prison in the country that we said was the most moderate Muslim country in the world. We have a province in Indonesia, Ache, in which Sharia law is the law and so we have video, regular video of public canings and beatings of people for transgressing Sharia law. We need to think very carefully about this and then regular populism, regular populism. The populism that swept Rodrigo Duterte into office in the Philippines. Why? Because of this unfinished political revolution, this sense of corruption that the system wasn't working for the ordinary people, we now have a radical populist firebrand in office in the Philippines which affects our U.S. Navy and our U.S. Marines and Air Force and Army who were hoping to have access to new bases and work with a long-standing partner and all of that's been put on hold. So ultimately all of this gets tied together. Time for just a couple other questions if you have them. Yes, sir. I have a question about disputed borders, if you will. A number of scholars and analysts among them, I believe, Robert Kaplan have suggested that one of the reasons that China is able to build up its navy and to develop a maritime strategy is that its borders are now secure for the first time. Are you saying that its borders are not secure? China. So China looks at it in different ways. Secure borders versus territorial disputes is a different issue. So the expansion of Chinese claims into the South China Sea over the Paracels and Spratlys creates new borders that have to be integrated into defense doctrine. That's something I don't think we've talked about that much. And I actually think of it, I gave a talk out at U.S. Strategic Command a couple years ago at their strategy forum or the deterrence forum which by the way was very interesting. We've talked a lot about Asia and China here in Omaha, it was all Russia. Not surprisingly. It's StratCom, but it was all Russia, nothing about China. But we haven't thought at all about China. You talked to China about these islands where they've built schools, they've built hospitals, people are coming in for tourist visits, they've got post office boxes. It's Chinese territory to them. So is that covered by a nuclear umbrella? Does that rise to the level of sovereign national territory that the Chinese are asking those questions or asked our Chinese interlocutors about those questions? So their borders are changing, but not all of their borders are set. Taiwan, the best example of the border that is not set. You know, movements in Tibet, movements in Xinjiang, all these different areas where the Chinese know that should they break away, Hong Kong, it's an existential threat to the party and to the government. But they see any crack in those borders as potentially leading to an existential threat which would have spillover effects on a level that we couldn't yet, I think, fully contemplate. Am I done? That's it. Thank you very much. I appreciate it. Thank you. Okay, 15 minute break. Back in the seats, 17 minute break. Two, three, 15.


to my website. So would you take some pictures of me if you have them and you can tweet me or just grab me and shoot me? That'd be cool. My talk is so you don't have a business card and I have a little bit of frustration with my fellow WordPress brethren and sister-in because I come to work camps or I go out networking and meet somebody who's really interesting. Got to fix one thing? I don't know if we can hear me now. I can start again from the beginning which is cool. No, I'm gonna start from the beginning. Well I'm Ray Mitchell and this as I was saying the talk is something that came out naturally because I meet with a lot of WordPress people. This is not my first word camp but Raleigh is the first word camp city that I ever attended and I was just so excited about meeting so many people using this tool and this platform to build their business and do so many different things that you want to keep in touch with them and I always ask for it do you have a business card and invariably more than half of people go no I don't have any or I don't use business cards I know and it always perplexed me because I fancied myself kind of or I've kind of grown into being a networker over the years. So I'll talk a little bit more about that journey and why this business card thing is kind of important for us particularly if we're freelancers or small agencies or anybody who relies on other people to bring us business. So a little bit more about me in the summer of 2010 I started 6-4 web design I decided all of a sudden because of another business that failed I needed to do something different. I had a consulting business I did leadership training and development for small businesses I figured I was going to start this business I had a whole lot of corporate experience and I was going to go out on my own and started training business. Unfortunately it was 2009 in the middle of a recession and nobody wanted to pay for training. Well in 2008 where I was thinking about starting this business I built a fancy website for myself because I don't want to pay for one. Everybody asked me where I got this website for my business but no one wanted to do business with me so I figured I'd start doing web design as a business. So that's how I started 6-4 web in 2010. Made for you is another brand that I started very recently last summer things go on in the summer to also do web design for small clients. So as we talk about this presentation the title definitely was clickbait because I'm not really going to talk too much about business cards so if you're a print designer hoping to be in your glory typography nerd maybe next year. So I talked about my journey into becoming a networker and doing networking. I was an anti-networker. Before I started the consulting business I spent about 20 years at American Express and operations and there was one guy in my team that was always in networking. For a lack of a better name or not to use his real name. Where's Joe? Oh he's out networking. Joe's a slacker. Joe doesn't half get his work done. He doesn't manage his people well. Why is he always out networking? Finally Joe had to leave American Express because he wasn't doing his job as effectively as he should have. But Joe landed a cushy job three levels up as a vice president as virtual as networking. So maybe there was something to it and as I kind of look back on it I was networking in the company didn't call it networking but I was the guy that if you wanted something done if you wanted to know how to do something you'd call me because either I could do it or I can tell you who could do it and point you to the right person to get whatever task you needed to be done done. It was a skill that I cultivated knowing who's out there who's doing what being good at my job knowing what I was going to do and I would help people is yeah send me an email Ray do you know who can do this or Ray can you do this and I'd always find an answer. It was networking but I didn't know it was networking. Fast forward a little bit I left American Express started this consulting company and literally I moved from slacker and schmoozer to someone who had to go network. That was the point where I entered my gripping grin phase. Hi I'm Ray Mitchell and I give up business cards call me if you need me and I'd give business cards and it got to be where you go out to these networking events. Chamber of Commerce is having something I bring a stack of cards and throw them out like they were making it rain at a club of ill repute right but as a networker or as an inexperienced networker that was supposed to do. You give people your card and then magically you get business after they have your card. Doesn't always work out like that and those of you who've been in business for a little bit and freelance for a little bit know it takes a little bit of work actually to cultivate business. It takes a lot of time I didn't know that because working at a big company I didn't have to network. My my check came every other week in direct deposit everything was cool. Somebody asked me a question I'd answer it and if I didn't answer it the check would still come in two weeks but when you're working for yourself you're working for a smaller business you've actually got to go out and generate this business you've actually got to go cultivate it. I got frustrated at this process. I built this fancy website. I knew the technical pieces of my consulting work but I wasn't getting work so there must have been something wrong with it. So I'd go back to my office and work on it, post a website, build another training package. You know maybe the design on this flyer is not right. Maybe I need to do that. And fortunately I had a guy who saved my life from a networking perspective and I owe him a lot. He called me to go to one more event at the Chamber of Commerce and I just got frustrated and I blew up at him. Chris I don't have time for any more of this networking. I got to work. I'm working and he kind of calmly just told me about what I needed to do. And effectively said Raymond, networking is the work. If you think about it as a small business person the only way that you're going to get it out because you don't have the multi-million dollar budget to run ads on television. You can't necessarily afford to put those digital billboards on the highway. The way you get out is really one-on-one letting people know what you do, how you can serve them, how you can fill their need. It's kind of embarrassing for somebody who professes to be a web designer but over the years the majority of the work that I get does not come from my website and those are even doing this for a little bit. You know you probably realize that as well. It comes from the interactions that you get with people.  Or people in town know your reputation for doing good work, for being fair, for being on time, having quality, having a standard and they refer you to someone else who needs work and that's where the work comes from. So in that statement that Chris made, I went from networking skeptic or networking heretic to networking evangelist because I see how important it was and it was a skill that you don't really learn in the corporate environment because your check comes every two weeks.  When you have to go out and actually do it yourself, it becomes important and I realized that and I told everybody I left behind at the corporate world, hey you need to start doing this network. You need to start going out. You need to start making connections outside the walls because once you get outside it's pretty cold. You don't have that built-in network that can help you do things. So I talk about this networking. I don't know how many of you are active networkers but the question is, you know, what is the purpose of networking? The purpose of networking really is just to build and forge relationships. Networking is building. A woman that I network with uses a statement that's pretty similar to this and she talks about networking is you either spend time building relationships, you spend time building your knowledge or you spend time networking building your bank balance, making money. Those are the three reasons to network.  It's not just about you. You need, if you're a good networker, to know about them, to be able to reach out and get resources, resources that cover things that you don't necessarily do. From a knowledge perspective, networking provides an opportunity for learning. WordCamp is a great learning experience. For those of you who, this is your first WordCamp, it's probably overwhelming with all of the knowledge that you're getting in. For those of you who have been to more than WordCamp, you're back because of all the knowledge that you've got and all the relationships that you've built. So networking adds a lot of value to your life and can add a lot of value to your business. Of course, you network to build your bank balance. You're out seeking balance. You're actively seeking business and one way to do that is to let people know about your business endeavor and what you do and how you can solve problems that make you money. I use the phrase networking but it's not really networking. It's really the process of building relationships because if you can actually build a real relationship with people, they trust you. They know your character. Over time they learn your ability and they're willing to refer you work or make an introduction that can make a positive change in your business. So networking does not have to be a fixed kind of meeting that you go to every week. It can be but there are a lot of other places and a lot of other ways that you can network. There are business networking groups. You may have heard people refer to BNI or leads groups. Chamber of Commerce events, if you're a member of the Chamber of Commerce, that's a great place to be if you're in business because chambers of commerce typically are made up of business people and you have a little extra credibility as a member of that chamber speaking to someone else who's a member of that chamber and that helps grease the skids for building a relationship. You can network in your Uber. I do a lot of that because I ask people what they do. Is this your full-time job? No. Well yeah, we talk about it. What do you do? Well I work with small businesses and nonprofits to build them a website and we talk about that. I give them my card. A lot of times they are not working at their dream job. They're Ubering and it's an opportunity for them to use my network to get introductions to people who can help them in their career. So networking really is kind of a two-way thing. Provides an opportunity for you to build a relationship for the future that is mutually beneficial. Grand openings of new businesses, ribbon cuttings. It's a great place to meet other people who are interested in business, who are also interested in their community and potentially interested in doing business with people from their own community. That's one way to go out and shake hand. Not in the grin and grip and throw business cards out, but to meet some new people. And if you make it part of your regular routine to be involved in your community, you will see people who are also involved in the community and they will recognize that you're involved in your community. They'll want to get to know who this person is that they always see in the community and that's where you build a relationship. Conferences like WordCamp or Convert South or Internet Summit, you get to meet people in your industry. The people in your industry are potential referral sources. Civic groups like Rotary or Kiwanis, your church, there's an opportunity for you to see, be seen, to meet and talk about what you do and that is a way of promoting your business through networking. Little League or soccer games, if you're not actually playing, you're sitting in the stands with parents. You know their kids, they know your kids, maybe you can get to know each other, build a relationship. Because through the relationships, and it said, people do business with people that they know, they like and they trust. The way to get known, to be liked and to be trusted is to be consistent and be out in the public at all times. So when you're networking, you've got to have a way to talk about yourself and your business. Depending on your view and where you've heard, the picture is the elevator switch. They talk about the elevator pitch, the elevator speech. I typically talk about the 30 second commercial because you want to get good at being able to talk about your business in a short time, to be able to give a concise description of what you do so you can explain when you're sitting next to someone in the Uber, or sitting next to a parent at the soccer game or at the Y, you can talk about your business effectively. Typically, you're going to let them know what you do, who you do, for and the type of businesses that you work with or who you'd like to do work with. You want to do it in a way that is compelling and creates interest, right? So if you compare and contrast the way you say this, kind of appropriate for work, well, Rich, what do you do? If Rich responds, I'm a web designer, everybody knows what web designer is, I don't need to be interested in that anymore. I can turn my head, I can get popcorn, I can do something else. But if Rich says, hey, I'm not just a web designer, but I own a business that I help small businesses, they become more effective and they get a presence online that helps them win more business, that's a different statement. If you're not on the design side and maybe you're a developer, I work to build reliable platforms that business owners get that maximize their business. Again, that's something interesting. Well, tell me a little bit more about what you do, you build a platform. Is that a box? Or is it software? Gives an opportunity to answer the question and engage them to actually get a little bit more curiosity about what you're doing and you can reel them in and talk a little bit more about your business. If you go to networking events, probably the most, I won't say you hated, but everybody sees the financial advisor coming, right? Or everybody sees the insurance edge and you know what they do. You don't necessarily want to have that conversation, right?  Let's get together for coffee so we can talk about my insurance, right? If you talk about how you protect family's wealth or how you ensure that if there's a crisis that everything doesn't fall apart, well, how do you do that? Well, I help people by fully funding their retirement through life insurance or something like that. It forces the second question and through that second question gives you an opportunity to distinguish yourself in their mind enough that they might actually be interested in talking to you a little bit more. With that 30 second commercial, the goal really is to get the person that you're talking to to say, well, how do you do that? If you can peak their curiosity enough to get them to say, well, how do you do that? Now you can really talk about how you solve problems and who a good referral partner is because not everybody you speak to is in need of your services, but they likely know somebody who could use them. And if you can explain how and why you do what you do, it's more likely that you'll get a referral. So in the networking environment, here's a little tip. The first person who gets to say, so what do you do? They're the winner and it's not a competition, but they're the winner because it allows you to kind of frame your 30 second commercial in the context of what they say. If they say I'm a small business owner, you can kind of quietly but not smile too broadly, but start going like this. If your market is small business owners, because now you can talk about how well you serve small businesses. If they're a big corporation, you can still smile and go like this, but now you frame your 30 second commercial is we help larger businesses achieve these goals. By having a little bit of information, you can be more specific about how you solve the need for people like the person you're speaking with. Networking is kind of an interesting thing and a lot of times when you go to a networking event, it's kind of strange and people have different skill at networking. You'll run into people who you meet, hey, how you doing? What do you do?  They literally tell you everything they possibly do, every service that they have, every customer they have, every solution that they have, whether you're in the market for it or not. If networking is about building relationship and working with it, there's no need to actually go through this process and just cover them with everything you do. If you're an established, if you have the intention of being an established networker, you're around for the long haul. And if that's the case, treat the conversation like you're going to come back and speak to them again, like you expect to see them in an event again, because you're working to build a long term relationship, a relationship built on credibility and stability. If you're hit and run, you're just, again, making it rain with business cards.  I was talking to my wife, I saw an article on maybe on NPR's website or something like that. They're talking about building friendships. And networking kind of is the same way in terms of repetition. They say, in order to actually build a friendship versus acquaintances, you have to spend 90 hours with someone doing the same thing. And it's not necessarily you're both doing the same thing, not bicycling or something else. But, you know, if you have a cup of coffee together, after you have 90 hours worth of coffee, you probably have a good relationship, right? If you are volunteering together in an organization, I'm a Rotarian, a lot of people join Rotary thinking they're going to get business. Those people who come exclusively for business, they usually hit the door and then head right back out. But if you work together with people who are volunteering for 90 hours, you get to know a little that something about people, you understand their character, you understand what they're interested, you understand a little bit about their family, how they operate. You see them in action because you're watching them when they're doing other things. And you get to understand them. So, as a network, if you make the assumption that you're building a relationship over time, it's all right if you don't get business the first time. It's all right if you don't get a referral the first time. It's all right if you don't spend more than a minute talking to each other. It's the over time building the relationship that makes sense. So, I talked a little bit about the elevator speech. I really believe in helping people with networking. I talked about my networking evangelism. I talked about my debt to Chris who shook me on networking. If you need help or want to work on your 30-second commercial or your elevator pitch, visit that website and I will work with you on helping you build your 30-second commercial. No charge, no obligation. That's my give back to people who have helped me. Once you've gotten past that 30-second commercial and you're actually sitting next to somebody or talking at an event, you may ask 30-secondsecret.com. So, what do you talk about when you're sitting with somebody? I mean, if you're an introvert it may not be your natural thing. I really don't accept that fully because if you're in business and you need to go talk to people, you can be an introvert when you go home. But when you're out, you got to be out. So, what do you talk about? You could talk about cars, but I would encourage you to talk Ford. Ford is an acronym. It's kind of easy to remember how you can actually start a conversation. You don't need to use every letter in the Ford, but if you use those things, it is an opportunity to talk. It's an opportunity to get to know somebody. And over time you may get through all four depending on how long your conversation is. But it's very easy, depending on the circumstance. If you're at the Little League, oh, is that your kid out there? Yeah, that's my son. Oh, my daughter's over here. And that at least gives you the ice breaker to get into the conversation. You're not always going to start out talking about family, but you may talk about what you do or, hey, so what do you do for hobbies? What do you do that's exciting here in Raleigh? That recreation is potentially the ice breaker. There's two of these acronyms, this Ford and Form. Form is actually probably a little bit more business appropriate. And when I say business appropriate, once you start to get a relationship with somebody from a business perspective, and you're actually having that one on one meeting afterward, Form probably Form, F-O-R-M works a little bit. It's family, giving me details about your occupation in specific, still recreation. But what's your message? What's the message I should go away with about your company, which is the who you want to work with? What types of businesses that you support? Because at that point you've probably established kind of a relationship for business, and you have the real intention to try and give this person some support from a business perspective. So understanding their message and being able to repeat that effectively helps you look credible when you're talking to one of your clients about this other guy who can actually solve their problem. So remember the acronym Ford. You don't have to, you know, it's good if you have a couple of questions in each of the categories. You don't have to wear the same question out. And if you have a couple of questions related to family or occupation, it makes it a little bit easier and makes it sound a little bit more natural. One of the things I learned about networking at WordCamp, and you may have already heard this phrase, or you probably will hear this phrase, but it is the icebreaker question for our little group. It's, so what do you do with WordPress? Has anybody heard that today or in this trip? One of the back, Sharon knows that. But it's a very common question and it's actually good for us as a crutch where we don't necessarily like to network as much. Everybody kind of has this interest and the question is easily understandable. Well, I built sites. I'm a dev. I've never used WordPress before. Everybody can answer that question and it immediately allows you to get pulled into the community. So at Donut to Networking tomorrow, please ask the question. So what do you do with WordPress? So we have the acronym Ford. There's another acronym that we are going to not use in our networking pursuits. It would be very implied if I went up and burped at you. When you're networking, please don't burp. All right. Stay away from bad jokes. That's going to be hard for Corey who's a comedian. But stay away from bad jokes. I'm not saying your jokes are bad. But if they were bad, you shouldn't do them in a networking event. Oh, now she's leaving me. All right. Uncomfortable childhood experiences. You know, and it's kind of there jokingly, but realistic.  It's not an effective networking tool to be a downer. All right. And of course, the last two that we're familiar with don't get into a deep conversation in religion and politics. You can, but you take a risk, right? Networking is a two-way street. I said it's value for both parties. I am not a big proponent of BNI, but Dr. Ivan Meisner is the founder of BNI. And he stated that and the principle that they operate on there is givers gain. And I really truly do believe that. If you're always trying to do for yourself and you're networking with the intention of helping yourself only, you're not going to prosper. People will back away from you. They will see how transparent you are in your attempts and keep their distance.  If you're free with giving referrals you get known as somebody who gives good referrals and people reciprocate. Givers gain. It's easy to give. When you're networking it's not about you. And it's easy to it's easy. If you have that spirit, if you have that heart for networking it's easy. What can you do to help this other person? Is there an article or resource that you can give them that would help them in their job or help them to find more clients? Is there someone that you know that this person just needs to meet? Once you start getting in the WordPress community a little bit more you will find that you can make a lot of connections and there are people that you want to introduce to each other because it would be good for them to get together. It'd be good for both of them if they knew each other. You can be that connector. Is the person you're talking to a good resource for your clients? If they are it makes you look good if you bring them a good resource. Are they a good resource for your family? If you see that this person is reliable and trusted, wouldn't you want your family members to take advantage of that? That's a benefit and it gives this person business. Is the person you're talking with a good partner for your business? Is there a potential relationship that you can gift them your business? You know to be able to turn that over because it builds your business and it builds their business. When you meet somebody in the networking event it's important not just to take the cards and put them in your desk. Definitely need to follow up after an event. We meet a lot of people at these events make the effort to catch up and touch base again. You know hey it was great to meet you. Are you coming to Sunday session? Let's talk before everything gets started. Let's meet for coffee next week. Let's have a call next week and just talk a little bit more. Hey can we go out for a couple minutes? Are you going to the after party tonight? Let's sit down and have a beer or let's not have a beer and watch everybody else who's having a beer, right? I use LinkedIn a lot because it's LinkedIn is kind of the role of X online. It's your connections and it's really meant as a platform for sharing contacts. So I typically send a lot of LinkedIn invites. When I'm referring someone or putting two people together for an introduction I try to always use the LinkedIn profile because it immediately shows that person's history and credibility and gives a little bit of esteem to the person that I'm recommending and putting together. So you can learn a little bit more about Michael when you check out his LinkedIn profile at linkedin.com blottyblot. So do you have a business card?  How many of you actually have business cards today? All right, that counts. You had the intention. That's okay. They're in your car. All right, you need to have your business cards and I'm like really dancing on a razor's edge because I've been giving up business cards today and I thought I had enough but I don't know that I have enough. So business cards are important. If you don't typically use business cards you can do it. They're not expensive. I would not necessarily recommend going to that one that everybody knows because there are places that are cheaper and much better to get business cards pretty inexpensively like really inexpensively and it's an opportunity to set yourself apart and distinguish your business by having a good card. So I'm going to talk about bad business cards. Bad business card is one that has too many fonts and there's too many things going on. You know unless like I say you're a copywriter that does ransom notes keep the card simple, keep the card legible, right? Choose a lot of curly curly swaths with curlicues and all that and make the font really thin so that when it's actually on a card as opposed to on your screen when you're designing it you can't read it. That's not a good business card and while you're at it make the font really tiny because you want your logo to be big so you have to make the information really small like the phone number or your email address. That's not a good thing for a business card. Some of my favorites are light gray on white cards. You know, I'm getting old I can't read like I used to, right? So make it light gray on a white card and make the font really small. Thanks for your card and it gets tossed, right? The other one is laminate the card so no one can write on it. You know, you can make a nice card but only make it glossy on one side that way they can turn it over and write why they wanted to talk to you on the back, right? And then use an image that doesn't relate to your business. You know, the dream catcher is always good on a business card or the howling wolf when you when you have nothing to do with a howling wolf or a dream catcher and then if you're going to use a picture make sure it's like really tiny so it gets pixelated when you blow it up on on the card too. In seriousness there are a couple of tips that you can do to have a good business card.    You can actually go to Fiverr if you wanted just to spend 20 bucks and get a logo that's kind of different than everybody else is using or you can kind of do it yourself. My logos I am not an accomplished graphic designer. Typically it's a font, another font and I twist it a little bit but it's something that's clear and legible. It's something that's easy, right? When you do your own business cards be sure to proof them multiple times. Get somebody else to look at it because my first set of cards that I that I ordered, thankfully I was ordering smaller quantities then but I left out my website. You know, you could kind of, you could kind of figure out what it was because I had my email address on it. So people might just like, well, you know, well, it's Ray at 6-4-Web so it's probably 6-4-Web is the website but yeah, as a startup small business I literally had to go through all of those cards without the website on it. So I make sure that the information on the cards is correct. They're not that expensive so you can actually, you can't actually remake them but you got to wait and then you have this box of cards that sits on your counter. Well, what happens with mine is anytime I run out of good cards I pull the old guys without the website address on them and give those out until the new ones come in, right? One other tip, the back of a business card is essentially free. There's no reason to have a business card information just on one side, right?  A blank card on the back is okay because you can write on it but would it be great if you just spent, you know, $3 more or $5 more for that box of cards? Had them print out your services on the back of the card? Have them print out, hey, download our free guide on how to design a logo on the back where they can join your email list?  I changed my cards up every little once in a while so my current card has services on it but the card I used for a number of years was I have a downloadable document about the 10 things you need to think about when you're going through a website project. If I gave someone my card, I never gave the card with my name up. I always gave it to them with the offer up so they'd see that and then turn the card over and see my name but it allowed them to join the list and it allowed them to get some information that might push them in my direction because I'm trying to show that I'm giving stuff away that's credible and kind of helps them make the decision. So there's an opportunity really to use your business card as a billboard so think twice about leaving the backside blank. So I'll ask you again, can I have your card? I'm Ray Mitchell. You can connect with me here. Definitely I like to connect send me the LinkedIn invite. I'm Ray Mund with the U, my mother did that to me but you can look for me online. Pretty frequently active on Twitter and I'm trying to get my toe on the Instagram thing. So thank you. Any questions? Yes. It just depends on who you're talking to. That might work well here but I can give you a whole lot of reasons why not. People are afraid to use Facebook as a person in my personal life. I don't text because texts are like hand grenades. People send you a request by text turn away and then you're expected to respond to it so I don't text. If I delete the text with your information it's gone. It's probably better to take a photo of the card if you've got it or send them a text or the VCF file with your contact information. But have the card. People can see it in what is the movie? American Psycho. I don't know. Has anyone seen American Psycho? The first one? They go into this like I don't know in 20 minute scene where they're like comparing business cards because that was like a big thing. It's like what kind of paper and what font is it? Oh it's especially custom designed font and that provided a little bit of status and notoriety. Your card has the ability to do that more than an email or a Facebook message when you're not connected to them already because it doesn't go into their inbox. It goes into the someone sent you a message that you don't know in box that most people don't even know they have. Michael. I feel you. The most success I've had is with my local Chamber of Commerce. I live in Winston-Salem and I don't belong to the Winston-Salem Chamber. I actually belong to the Clemens Chamber which is the bedroom community next to it. Just by virtue of that's the one I joined and that's the one I got business and traction from. And you can but it's also the one that I spent the most time with going to the meetings, meeting people, building a relationship. So we are just as much friends now as we are business colleagues. And people see my work and people see that I come to the meeting every morning at 8.45 on Wednesday and he's reputable. And he contributes to the group. And he's consistent. So people give me referrals because they know that I will do the work and they're willing to hire me themselves but also, more importantly, recommend me to their customers because recommending someone to a customer is a big deal. If this person falls short on whatever you recommend to them for it doesn't make you look better in your client's eyes, it makes you look worse. So I take those referrals seriously and work to cultivate that. So that's the power of networking because by that same token, I've had jobs where and particularly it's kind of odd in the web design business but I had a client literally tell me I don't need a contract. I don't need any information. Mark said I should work with you, just do this. And it's like, well, I got to give you something because I don't work without a contract. But a little he was sold because someone else told him to do business with me. So that's the power of the networking and working together in that way. Yes. Have you ever experienced this when you get a card from someone where they have their website but then they're... Yes. And I love those because it's a marketing opportunity, right? Because if they don't have the business address, match the email address that matches the business, it's an opportunity what it means a person who built their website didn't sell them email, right? So what else didn't that person do to help this person in business? And my favorite is A, when Time Warner merges with Spectrum, what's going to happen through your email address? Is that road runner thing going to go away? Did everybody has? Or are you really a reputable company as a financial advisor or a firm when your address is aol.com? And you have that conversation with people and they realize that it's an opportunity. And email is an easy way to get in the door for other services. I haven't even said the financial advisor yet. I don't. I'm pretty out there with it. Because it's a logical thing and I'm not overly harsh. I said, hey, why aren't you using branded email for your domain?  You spent the money to do that versus I am the best whatever at gmail.com. Any other questions? Yeah. Oh, well, let me ask you a question. What is your name? Adam. I'm Ray. What's your question, Adam? You mentioned. No, no, no, no, because I'm cheap when I'm in an Uber. That's the first thing. But literally it's not. This networking is not necessarily a strategy to gain business. If at the end of the conversation while you're in the car for 20 minutes, they ask you a card. Great. I've had plenty of opportunities to pass and connect drivers who are looking for work with people in their industry. So I may get business out of it. If I take 100 rides, maybe I'll get some business out of it. But if I can meet 100 people and have a good conversation with 75 of them and maybe help five of them as opposed to doing nothing and just listening to the radio on the Uber, probably a better thing to do. Are we still recording? I can tell you later. Yeah, but there are places you can get them online. You design them yourself from a pricing perspective. 2000 double sides, glossy on one side for I think 60 bucks. Where the big box stores is like 500 for 65 bucks. Sure. The name. I was born in 1964. There are some Bible verses that are chapter six verse four that were very meaningful to me. I left my last employer under good circumstances. I left, but I was a little bitter about the way it finally actually did go down because they replaced me with somebody who was definitely under qualified but wouldn't keep me. I was actually living in Canada at the time and I had to come back to the U.S. They wouldn't extend my stay in Canada but they hired somebody who was not the right person in my mind. So I had a little bit of bitterness but there was this Bible verse that essentially said pay attention to your own stuff. Do it well and you'll get your reward in the end. And that was a principle that I kind of stood for. And the 64 was pretty easy and it's web design. So 64 web. And that's where it came from. Yes. I will try a lot of different types of networking but I'm consistent. And networking is like, you know, as I said, Chris said networking is the work. I have networking meetings in my calendar. They are inviolable because it is like going to work. You need to attend regularly. So find the ones that work for you. Find the one that you're, you can get in sometimes there. There may be another designer or a developer or another marketing person in the group. So you can't belong. So you got to find one that you can be in and work within contribute. Yes. A lot of times the business section of your paper will have networking calendars. You can check the chamber of commerce. You can check in North Carolina, we've actually got good community college system. If you go to the small business center at the community college in North Carolina, the state is paying for you as a business person to get education and training. They can actually refer you to different networking groups in the area and they may actually conduct some on site. So that's a good way to get started. And then as you're out in the community, where are you from? When you get back to Goldsboro, what do you do? Find another person who does similar work and ask them where are some good places to meet people. There's enough work for everyone. You don't necessarily want to be in the same group, but they can give you what's going on in Goldsboro. Yes. All right. So I like WordCamp because if you follow me when I speak at WordCamp, you get stuff that I charge my clients for. All right. So the easy-peasy way to give somebody branded email is to go to G Suite by Google. It's $5 an address, $5 per month per user, but it's branded. But you have the conversation. So literally my process is, oh, it doesn't match. Let me immediately go to the website and see what the copyright date is on the website. If the copyright date is not current, that means they don't have somebody who's paying attention to it. And then you can go and, hey, I'm a local web designer. I see I got your card. We met. Are you interested in potentially getting branded email for your company?  It matches. Because one of the things is that, you know, because, you know, particularly anybody for me, the signals, if they're using the cable company's email, the cable companies are always merging. They're changing the services. They'll change the domain on the email when it suits them and doesn't suit you. But you'll lose that. But if you had your own email branded to your domain, you control that and it actually helps your business. Is that something you'd like to talk about? And by the way, when was the last time somebody looked at your website? We can talk about that as well. Thank you. Okay. And if there are any more questions, if there are no questions, thank you. See you at donuts and networking in the morning if you're not going to be at the beer garden tonight and hopefully we can strike up a conversation.


In horse racing, the Xacta is a wager challenging bettors to pick the top two finishers of a race. And the Derby hitting the Xacta can make you a lot of money. The last 30 years has had some stunning returns. In 2005, Xacta returned a Derby record of $9,814 for a $2 bet. Rich Strike lit up the top board last year on top in a $4,101 Xacta payout. One strategy for playing the Xacta is boxing. Select the number of horses you'd like to finish in the top two spots and then box them in order to play all the combinations. If you decide to box three horses, that's going to cost you $12. Boxing four horses is $24. How many horses you box is up to you. As long as two of your horses make it up to the top two finishers in the Kentucky Derby, you hit the Xacta. If you think you know which horses will finish in the top two, maybe an Xacta is the bet for you. Bet the Kentucky Derby Saturday, May 6 with Fandall Swartzberg.


Here we go. Functional relations. It's super simple. It's a fancy term that means cause All right There's a reason we use it you can get into it if you really want to go into the radical behavior some stuff the philosophy of skinner But if you think about functional relation what you're really thinking about is Functionally related how is one event functionally related to another how is turning up the heat? Is it functionally related related to me taking off my clothes? Maybe you never know right? So we do experiments to discover functional relations. There's a reason. We don't call it causes. I swear I'm not gonna get into it here. I'm really trying hard not to talk about it. It's a challenge because Because every time we say the word functional relation it's functionally related to me talking about cause and getting in depth and really going off On the topic, and I don't know if I can control it, but I'm trying really I have disproven The fact the talking about functional relations are functionally related to me talking in depth about causes Which means falsification We'll come back


So this talk is part of an online course on commutative algebra and will be about Nakayama's lemma. So we will start with some examples just to motivate the problem we're going to solve with it. Suppose R is a local ring of analytic functions near a point, say sin near the point nought in the complex numbers, for example. So the maximal ideal, m, is just the functions vanishing at the point zero. And now we see the intersection of all powers of the maximal ideal is equal to zero because m to the n is equal to the functions vanishing to order n at the origin. And you know that if a power series vanishes to infinite order, then, so if an analytic function vanishes to infinite order, then it must actually be zero. Now let's look at the case where R is the local ring of smooth functions near point nought, let's say in the real board complications. And again, m is maximal ideal of functions vanishing at zero. And this time the intersection over m to the n is not equal to zero. And that's because we can have functions vanishing to infinite order at zero, which aren't, which don't vanish near zero. For instance, we can have e to the minus one over x squared for x not equal zero and nought of x equals zero. And you can see at this function here, all its derivatives at the origin vanish. So it lies inside this ideal. So we have the following problems, sometimes the intersection of all powers of a maximum ideal is zero and sometimes it isn't. So we'll just have a third example before discussing this. So here I'm going to take R to be the union of all formal power series in x to the one over n for all integers n greater than or equal to one. And again, we see the maximum ideal is now going to be the things with constant term one, sorry, constant term zero. And this time the intersection of m to the n is not zero. In fact, it fails in an even more drastic way because m is actually equal to m squared because you can, if you've got a power series in x to the one over n, then it's the square of some power series and x to the one over two n. So in fact, the intersection of all maximal ideals, all powers of the maximum ideal is just equal to m itself. And the intersection of this fails to be nought in an even more drastic way than before. In general, we have a map from ring R to its completion.  That means you take an element of each of these rings and make sure the elements are compatible. For example, if you've got the ring of polynomials over x and you take your ideal m to be the ideal generated by x, then this ring is k, this is kx over x squared, this is kx over x cubed and so on. So you can see the inverse limit is just going to be the ring of all formal power series in a polynomial x. So the question is, is this map injective? And if it is, then the formal power series ring is a reasonable approximation of ring R and if it isn't then you've lost a lot of information. And you can see the kernel of this map is just the intersection of all powers of m. So the question as to whether a map from a ring to its completion is injective is the same as this question we've been asking about whether the intersection of all powers is of a maximum ideal is zero. And our aim is to show that the intersection of m to the n is zero if m is a maximal and R is a notarian local ring. And to do this, we're going to need two lemmas, one of which is Nakayama's lemma, which we're going to do today. And the other is the Art and Rhys lemma, which I'm going to do next lecture. So for the rest of this lecture, I'm just going to be discussing Nakayama's lemma. So Nakayama's lemma says the following that says that if m is a finitely generated, that should be capital M, module over a local ring R, and with maximal ideal m, then m times m equals m implies m is equal to zero. And it's got a really simple proof and it's a very useful lemma. It turns up something like half a dozen times in Eisenbud's book in various places. It's traditional at this point to point out Nakayama wasn't actually the first person to prove Nakayama's lemma. It seems to originally do to a crow. And furthermore, Nakayama apparently really disliked having this lemma named after him, but the name seems to have stuck and you can't really do much about it. And the proof is really easy. Suppose m is generated by a one up to a n. And then we're going to take n minimal. And if n is greater than or equal to one, then we can put a one is equal to some of m i a i because m is equal to m times m.  Too many m's here. And this means that one minus m one times a one is equal to sum over i greater than one of m i times a i. And we notice this is a unit because in a local ring, one minus anything in the maximum ideal is automatically a unit. So a i, so a one is a combination of a two up to a n. Well, this means we can drop a one from the collection of generators, which means that a number of generators wasn't minimal, which is a contradiction. So the number of generators must actually be zero. So this is the end of the proof. That may be why Nakayama didn't like having a lemma named after him since the proof is kind of almost trivial. It's just a couple of lines long. And I suppose it's a subtle way of insulting someone to name something completely trivial after them. Anyway, we noticed by the way that all we need for this to work is that one minus anything in this ideal is a unit. So it also works for m being the Jacobson radical of the ring R. So the Jacobson radical is just the intersection of all maximal ideals. And the intersection of all maximal ideals is the property that if you add one to anything in it, the result is a unit. So the same proof goes through.  And again, for the proof of this is almost trivial. What we do is we just put n to be m divided by the submodule generated by m1 up to mn. And then we notice that n is finitely generated because m is, and furthermore, n is equal to m times n, as you can easily check from this property here. So n is equal to zero. And n equals zero says that m is generated by m1 up to mn. So that's the end of the proof. By the way, there's a sort of traditional mistake people make here. We say that if m is finitely generated and m over the maximal ideal times m is generated by these, then it's generated by these elements here. It's not true that if m, a module over a local ring, has the property that m1 up to mn, generates m over m times n, then m1 up to mn generates m. So here we've dropped the condition that m is finitely generated. And if we do this, there are lots of counter examples. For instance, we could take the ring r to be z localized at two, and we could take m to be the rationals. And here the maximal ideal is just the ideal generated by two.  So this is certainly generated by the empty set of generators and this one obviously isn't. So we notice that this is of course, not finitely generated. So I think Lang's algebra book, I think the second edition actually claimed this was true as part of the theorem, but it just isn't. So we're now given application of Nakayama's lemma. So we want to say suppose s contains r and its integral over it. So suppose r contains s r rings and s is integral over r. Now, last time we talked about the geometric meaning of an extension being finitely or integrally closed, but we didn't quite say what the geometric meaning of being integral was. And well, here's one possible interpretation. The application we want to show is that the spectrum of s mapping to the spectrum of r is on to. So in order to do this, so let's prove this, what we do is we just pick some prime r, some prime p in the spectrum of r. And we want to find a prime of s whose intersection with r is equal to p. And first of all, we can localize at p. This means invert all elements of r, not in p. And we do the same in s, we invert all elements of s that are not in p. And by doing this, we can assume p is maximal. You remember localizing at a prime is just a way of kind of turning that prime into a maximal ideal. So the next step is we're going to check that p s is not equal to s. Well, if p s is equal to s, then we can write one is equal to sum of p i s i for some p i and p s i in s. And we're going to let m be the sub-algebra of s generated by the s i, sub-algebra over r. Then one is contained in p m. So p m is equal to m. We also notice that m is finitely generated as an r module. I mean, it's obviously finitely generated as an r algebra because we wrote down a finite set of generators. Now we want the stronger condition that's generated as an r module. And this is because s is integral over r. And you remember that if you've got an algebra generated by finite number of integral elements, then it's finitely generated as a module. So this is where we're using the fact that s is integral. So now we've found that m is finitely generated and it has this property here. And if we take these two properties, then Nakayama's lemma applies m, that m equals zero, which is a contradiction. So if we assume that if p s is equal to s, then by applying Nakayama's lemma, we get a contradiction. So we know p s is not equal to s. And now we can just pick the prime of s containing the image of p rather a maximum. I guess we could pick a maximum idea of s rather than the prime. We can do that because p doesn't generate the whole of s. And if you call this q, then q intersection r must be equal to p because it can't be the whole of r and p is a maximum ideal in r. So p in the spectrum of r is the image of q in the spectrum of s. So this shows that the spectrum of s mapping to the spectrum of r is on two. Okay, so next lecture, we're going to prove the art and Reese's lemma and then combine that with Nakayama's lemma to prove that the intersection of all powers of a maximum ideal and notary in local ring is zero.


Hello welcome to the session functions in C. The learning outcome at the end of this session the student will be able to implement a C program using the basic concepts of a function. A function is nothing but a block of code which is used to perform a specific task. A small task it may be average addition like this. It can be written in one program and used by another program without having to rewrite the piece of code ok. So we are using this program in different other program also they can call this program so that it promotes the usability. This can be put in the library if the program is called by another program ok so that it can be include in the appropriate header file in the beginning of the program and link to the correct library while compiling it. There are two types of the functions. Function can be divided into two categories that is one is standard function which are already in the C program and the user defined functions which are defined by the user as per their requirement. So in the standard function or predefined function or we can also say this is a library functions these are the functions they are predefined by C and put into the standard C library like printf, scanf, strcpo. Here when we need to use that we have to include that into the appropriate header files that is if we want to use printf and scanf then we can include stdio.h then some mathematical functions are there sine, cos and all this that time you can include max.h and when you are using like this strcpy or string compare strcmp type you have to include string.h. Now in this user function what will be there? In the user functions they are written by the programmer or user themselves to carry out the various individual tasks and that tasks are reusable and therefore the programmer can use the instead of rewriting that he can use the same code. Now for that we need to follow some rules that is create a function prototype that means you have to declare that function which you are going to create it. Then after that for the implementation you have to define that function somewhere in the program you can define it at the start or somewhere other place then call the function whenever it is needed in the program. Now how that function definition is there that is the just we have seen that part is the function definition. Now in this function definition is that actual code where we are writing which can be going to be used again and again. So this code will be determined that function what it is doing when it will be called. So there are also some parts in that particular function definition that is a function returns data type ok. After completing that function execution of that function it will return some data ok. So that data type we should know so that is the return value. Then what is the function name we have to give some name to the function then some list of the parameters which in the parenthesis ok. Then you are having the statements that is what are the additions if statements are there or whatever other average statements are there. So that will be called as a function body. Now we will see one example for this this is the example that is we are having function name is calculate and it is returning the integer type. And here we are having two parameters number one and number two and what we are doing in the function we are calculating the sum of number one and number two and then that sum we are going to return. So here first we do not know what is the sum so this is a locally we are using. So here we will declare integer sum. As I said that is the above code is function name with the calculate it is calculating number one and number two with the addition and we are returning that addition. Whatever the function calls are there in the main program they are of two types either you can call the function with the whatever the value we are working on or you can call with the address of that particular value. Now in this method it will be copy one of the copy of that variable value we are providing to the function and it will be passed to the function and any modification of that values will be passed inside the function and that will not be affect the actual value. But in this case that is called by reference in this method the reference we are giving the actual memory address where we are storing that values. So it will be approaching inside the memory and then if we are adding or modifying something in that values then it will be reflecting into the memory and here of course as we are showing memory location it will be affect the actual value and for this we need the knowledge of pointers and array to handling this call by reference. Now here we will see how the functions are actual having the prototype or a skeleton we can say this here. So this is the main program here we are having some two functions function one and function two. So arrow you can see this so it will be go to the start of that function whatever the function will do that will be calculations or manipulation will be done and then it will be return the value to the same place where the function one is there. I need some another function so here function two is called here again it will be go to the start of that function where it is declared defined and then whatever the inside the statements will run and after completion of that it will return the value and it will be reaching to the function two. Now here you can see this the same thing we are having here that is when we are having actual values here we are putting that scan number one and number two here we are using asking user to put the numbers number one and number two and then using that number one and number two we are calling here function that is calculation of sum then here actual my function calling has happened so it will move immediately it will move to the function here and here it will be having this values okay so this will be replace this value one and value two by number one num one and num two then it will go inside here we are having local variable that is int sum so it is declared and then sum is equal to whatever this value one and value two is there they will do the addition and that sum whatever the two plus three or whatever the number we have passed that will be phi u will be return here to this sum so this is the flow of the data how actually the data is flowing in now find out the answer for this what does the following function print for n is equal to 25 okay if I am having n is equal to 25 after running this function what output will be there so here void function integer n the n value is 25 here so I am calling this function with the 25 u number so n is not not zero then it will be going to print this value so what will be the output just stop the video and try to answer it there are four values it is given okay so this function is returning this value one zero zero one one okay so this is the function mainly prints the binary representation in the reverse order whatever the number is there the binary representation of that number is the 25 divided by 2 there will be one then you are having n by 2 that is 12 divided by 2 that will be 6 we are not having any remainder here again 6 divided by 2 that we do not have any remainder 3 then 3 divided by 2 we are having remainder 1 and 1 divided by 2 again it is remainder 1 so accordingly the value is there by this function it is a binary representation as I said that is in the reverse order thank you