By the way, if anybody has any questions. So I just figured I would test it. Why not just test it and figure out? I had a few servers and so a lot of storage. So I was wondering like, how many targets can I really do? Maybe I could do 1,000. 1,000 would be interesting. I also wanted to test what happens when you have a massive number of targets in the air handling system kicks in, because that seems to happen naturally sometimes when the system gets busy. You have lots of I.O. going on. Things get slower and slower, and then pretty soon timeouts and retries, and you have out of order I.O. And so if there are any bugs, they get found. And also the startup and shutdown, as I mentioned, scanning SysFS and disconnecting from thousands of sessions in ice guzzly terms, how are you gonna do that? So I used target CLI to create my targets. That's the kernel target subsystem. And I kind of created a simplistic script to do that. It didn't work out at first. I had a couple servers and one I put 2,000 targets on, and the other one I put 4,000 targets on. So I had 6,000 targets. I should be able to test massive numbers. I wanted to test the initiator and the targets to find where the bottlenecks are. I didn't really want to test I.O., although that does need to be tested, but that wasn't the focus of this. I was trying to find the order n squared stuff. I did find some as I kind of alluded to a moment ago. I found some issues with kernel when the I.O., not the I.O. itself, but the communication that happens when you attach to new targets, it became, the load became so high that the system got behind and things started getting retried. And I found some kernel oopses, especially in older kernels, so I moved to a newer kernel. It was a little better. But there are some bugs in there. So I created a script, just a simple shell script to create targets, you know, create target one, create target two from I to 2,000. But the problem is that it ran really, really slow. It ended up taking about 30 hours to create 2,000 targets. And so I thought, well, that's really not usable. And so I ended up plotting the data. And sure enough, it's order n squared.  And each time you call target CLI, it has to build state and then throw it away and then build state and throw it away. So I decided to try the target CLI demon. That's a demon that runs in the background that we don't actually, in our distribution, we don't use because it's logistically a little harder. But if you're doing thousands of targets, it really helps to just have the state maintained. So I did that and much better response time. Now I could create 2,000 targets in a, I mean 4,000 targets in an hour. So it really matters when you're doing this, like how you approach it. Convenience of target CLI is great, but it builds a state every time you start it up. So as you can, let me back up there. You can see that line isn't exactly straight. The purple line, so there is a little bit of order and squared in there somewhere, but it's much better. I bet if I got to 10,000 targets, you'd see a little curve in it. But still that's much better. So there's a date about like 4,000 targets in one hour. But now I have to actually use them. So the first thing I did is going from my laptop, this laptop, which is running Leap 15.3, which has the 5.3 kernel, it's not exactly new. And this is where I started running into some issues in the kernel. At the beginning, I just did a simple loop. Log into all 2,000 targets at once. So you can tell I opened iSCSI to do that. Log into all targets and let me know when you're done. That ran into some IO issues in the kernel. So in order to work around that, I would log out of one, log into one target at a time. Okay, so that's probably not gonna be good, because again, I'm building state each time I start up the command. So some things that surprised me, in iSCSI, there's a sequence you have to go through to use a target. First you have to do discovery. You have to say, tell me what targets you have. Then you get a list of targets. Then you can say, I wanna log into all of them or some of them. So it surprised me that discovery of 4,000 targets only took like three quarters of a second. And I guess the reason is it's like, it's a long list, but there's not a lot of back and forth. It's not like you have to talk to it once for each target. Yeah, because essentially just doing very few IOs to get that to a list. So it's really the size of the list which is transferred, but this is just normal IO. Yeah, so that was very pleasing. So I went to Tumbleweed, which is our rolling release that has a newer kernel. This had a 517 kernel. And I know recently, Mike Christie has been working on a bunch of fixes in this area of the kernel too that aren't in this version. So I thought about patching it, but instead I wanted a non-moving target for my tests. But I think the next step would be after I've identified some areas to try some of the patches that we've been working on. And the timing on this is order n squared. So again, it's probably due to the, I'm guessing it's due to the fact that my OpenISCSI command is scanning CISFS twice for each target. And CISFS is getting bigger and bigger and bigger as you log into more targets. So there's your order n squared. But again, it took a long time. And as I kind of just said, I'm pretty sure that this graph, the problem is the initiator, not the target, because the target's already pretty much order n at this point. What's that? Is this again the ISCSI knob thing? That the did transport, it failed fast means that some transport error happened. And that typically only happens if you get around into a knob timeout. Right. Because that's what triggered the transport failure. And by the way, I had initiator no ops off too. So, but the target might have had them. So yeah, and fail fast, it retries indefinitely too. So that kind of keeps the kernel pretty busy. But have you figured out why you get a fail first? No, I mean, no, I didn't get to track this down. I only discovered this like a couple of days ago. It would be interesting to see what was going on in your target when your initiator is running this slow, whether the timeouts or something like this are because the target has so much data structure or state on it that it's taking longer to respond when you do all these logins. And the last thing I tried to measure was logging out of targets, but I did not get a very good data on this. It was just logistically hard to do. And I did not want to like go through the list one at a time like I'd done earlier, so. So is this order in squared or order in? I don't know. I have to do more data here. And so really I've kind of had more questions than answers here, I'm sorry about that. But there's still a lot to do. I want to, I'm only scratching the surface. I need to test the data you just saw there that logouts I need to try to figure out the order in problems in the initiator. And I need to track down the kernel issues. That's perhaps the most important. And this makes me think, this is kind of off subject, but why don't we have better tests for this? We have ice-cozzy tests by the way, but they're just not very good. Oh yeah, and then what about multi-path? How do I test this with multi-path because a lot of our customers, especially if they have thousands of disks, they use multi-path. So just to figure, just for clarification, so you really created 4,000 targets, how many loons did each target have? I'm sorry, what? How many loons did each target have? How many what? Loons, meaning devices. I'm sorry, I can't understand you. Right, so you create targets, which is fine, but the target needs to provide disks, meaning loons. What's that? So how many disk devices did each target have? Devices? Yeah, disk devices. You have to export some data. Yes, well, they all had one. Just one, so you have one to one, right? Yeah, each one had a one gigabyte file back end. Oh, just a single one then. All right, good, that was the question. Yeah, but they were sparse, so they really didn't. No, no, that's not the point. The point is that what really matters is it's not so much the number of target, but really the number of disks because when you log in, first log into the target and then you do the scuzzy inquiry thing and try to figure out how many devices are really there. Right. So that only, once you did that, then you have the disk device and only then the login is complete. So it really depends on how many disks you have, how long the actual login will take. Right, well, and the system is scanning for the partition table to figure that out each time it opens a disk, right? Yeah, sure. That was one thing that surprised me too. What I passed by kind of quickly is how much I owe occurs when you get a new disk. It's fine for a single disk, but when you get a thousand new disks, it's overwhelming because it has to like read the partition table, has to turn enable caching, it has to check to see if certain scuzzy commands are supported. One thing that kind of surprised me too is that about a year ago, I hooked up some code in OpenEye scuzzy that Mike Christie originally created but didn't use for no wait. So it allows you to log into a target but not wait for the response. And I thought that would be faster and it wasn't. So I wanna find out why. Any other questions? Thank you. So, I'm just curious, if you can go back to when you were trying to do the login data there and were surprised by that? Yeah, so, okay, this, so it ended up taking much longer than you thought. What's the actual scale of, I mean, was this eventually successful and I can't quite tell for you. It's second, so what, about 3,600 seconds is an hour? Okay, that's... Yeah, so this is... Does seem surprising because I do know we looked at this at one point, so yeah, I'm wondering if there's some sort of regression in here. I know in the past, the SysFS scanning from user space was an absolute disaster and we had some, there were some old attempts at caching attributes to not need to do the read SysCalls in the code that just generated an enormous list that was scanned repeatedly without ever any effective cache hits. But it looks like we pulled that out a few years ago and that was the last time I remember explicitly looking at logging into thousands of targets. So, yeah, I just kind of wanted to check with that because... Yeah, and Mike, oops, excuse me. Mike Christie suggested a couple areas to look to in the SysFS code to try to figure out why it's order in squared. But the time is coming when we're gonna have this many targets and can you imagine like a thousand targets how long is it gonna take the system to boot?


Trapeno-Somertid protozoa are responsible for three deadly human diseases, Lishmaniasis, African sleeping sickness and childless disease. These parasites possess unique mechanisms for gene expression, including polycystronic transcription of protein-coding genes and transpicing. Genomic analysis has identified a few proteins involved in transcription initiation and termination, but further research has shown that many more exist. Post-translational histone modifications, histone variants and chromatin-modifying enzymes have also been found in trapanosomertids, suggesting that epigenetics may be an important factor in their gene expression. Recent studies have focused on understanding how these parasites control transcription initiation and termination, which could lead to new treatments for these devastating diseases. This article was authored by Santiago Martinez-Calvio, Juan C. Visuiteriada, Luis E. Florencio Martinez, and others.


Good morning, everybody. Welcome to Tuesday. Today's the 7th of September. I want to welcome everybody here today. We've got a really exciting week. I am going to be live all week long, a little sip here, and I'm going to be talking about building killer e-commerce sites for four days straight. That's all we're going to talk about. I'm going to go through 20 different things you can do so that by Friday you will know everything you need to know about building really killer million-dollar sites. This is not something that I'm guessing about. I've done it. We've done millions of dollars of sales online, and I want to share these things with you. I want you to know how to do these things, too. So for this entire week, I'm going to be sharing stuff with you, and you want to stay to the end today, because at the end today, I'm also going to give you a list of platforms that you need to use to build these sites. So stick around for that. Thank you so much, Paul, for letting me know that I can be heard out there. I do appreciate it. And guys, everybody is welcome to post in that chat section. I was not live yesterday. I was doing some honeydew stuff. I had to work on our garage and get it ready. We've built this garage area for some pets, and we're having more work done on it today. It's quite elaborate. Actually, my wife will be doing a video on what all she's put out there, but it's a home for cats that you can't believe. So it's going to be really cool. And on Saturday, let me announce this now so everybody knows, on Saturday, I'm doing a tribute to 9-Eleven, but it's really cool. I think you'd want to attend because I'm going to share with you a lot of things you probably didn't know about 9-Eleven, some facts. These are all facts, so there's no fiction to it. But these are all documented facts about 9-Eleven that a lot of us never knew. And don't know to this day, and some things are still happening that are related to 9-Eleven that are not in the news every day that they don't tell you about. And I want to share all those things with you. So 9-Eleven is a tribute this Saturday. That'll be at 10 a.m. And I toyed with doing it at 9-Eleven. And I thought, no, that's just overkill, overkill too much. So I'm just going to do it at 10 a.m. You guys are used to 10 a.m. on Saturdays. So Saturday, I will be doing a 9-Eleven tribute. So I think that's going to be pretty cool. I think you'll enjoy that. Like I said, guys, make use of the chat. Don't forget to subscribe if you haven't already subscribed. Make sure you ring the bell. Turn on all bell notifications so you're notified each and every time I go live.  I think going hunting for stuff just waste so much time. It's like you're like, oh, there's nothing new yet. You won't have to worry about that because I'll notify you. Now, I want to talk about really an overall first on e-commerce websites. I started my e-commerce website in the very first one in 2009. And it's hard to believe that that was 12 years ago, but it was. And and I want to share with you some of the insights, you know, major marketplaces like Amazon and eBay are what, you know, I started with back then. And I got to tell you, it's changed a lot. I mean, they're really, really restrictive now. And if I was telling somebody back then what to do, I would have said, man, open an eBay store, you know, do that. Nowadays, I wouldn't say that. I would say stay away from eBay and Amazon. I would say that's not the way to go. But there's a whole lot more available to you today. And like I said, I'm going to give you some of the sites I think you should use. And I'll give you the pros and cons also before we end today. So you're going to know exactly what to do.  Like I say, there's 20 of these steps, I'm going to cover five each day, five today, tomorrow, the next day and the next day. And then Saturday will cap it off with, of course, the 9-11 tribute sellers with their own online store. So if you have your own online store, it's a whole different game. They have to complete control over the customer's experiences where you don't want to get eBay and Amazon, any of these other selling sites. And I know the selling catch or tool or, you know, I guess, advantage they tell you is that they drive traffic and they drive a lot of traffic. That's true. But there's so many sellers there that you still don't end up with more traffic. When with your own store, whether it's, you know, rearranging product placement or highlighting a store sale, a merchant can actually use their website to directly connect with the customer and encourage purchases. And you cannot do that on eBay and Amazon. You just can't do it, guys. And I'm not saying don't use those sites, but I wouldn't use those sites as a primary, plus they can shut you down. I know when I had my products on eBay, I had hundreds of listings. And one day I woke up and they cancelled all my listings. And that's a whole story I could go into, partially my fault. But the point is they can wipe you out in a single day. So if you depend on those sites for your living, you could be wiped out in a single day. So with so much freedom, online store owners may know where to begin and start curating their own shop. OK, to start attracting buyers and retaining loyal customers. I'm going to go through all these steps. These strategies cover how buyers experience each element of your online store and explain how each aspect could be crafted to attract new buyers and drive up sales. And guys, make use of this chat thing. I see Paul's doing it and I appreciate it. The world definitely changed that day. Oh, my gosh, it did change. And I'm going to talk about where I was in 9-11 and where I am now and exactly what happened that day, because my experience was probably very different from anything that you can imagine because of where I was geographically and what was going on. It was very different. Paul says I like that Shopify offers a lot of support and video. Have you ever thought of going to the Canton Fair to look for products? The Canton Fair is over in China, and I thought about it. You know, I'm not really that fond of going to China to be honest with you. And without doing that trip, I can find a lot of products in the US. And I don't mean products in the US. In other words, I could be in the US and find products in China if I want. There's never really, you know, a lot of people think the whole key is finding a cool new product. And while that's great, while it's cool to have a new product, that is not the key to making it online. The key to making it online is knowing how to market. If you know how to market, you could you could give me any product on a Friday and by Monday morning, I would be making money on it. You know, as long as I had decent profit margins and all that stuff because it's really all about marketing. It's not about the product. It's great to have cool products. I'm not saying it on me. We have a really cool product in our canned meats. We had a sale yesterday for right at $69,000. One sale, one sale for $69,000. You know, I kind of pinched myself on a C stuff like that. So I'm like, wow, that's a crazy amount of money for one person to spend. But it was a single sale for $69,000. It was actually $68,000 in some change, but that's really nice. And that's because I guess I have a cool product, but more more so because I did marketing and how I got that customer. So what we're going to do is start walking through the steps. And I think the very first one I need to talk about is your web design. Number one is an engaging web design. And keep in mind, there's going to be 20 of these steps. Without an engaging web design, you're kind of lost. So it doesn't even matter what platform you use. If you don't have this really cool web design, you're going to be hurt. You really are. So it doesn't really matter, like what Paul was saying, if you have the coolest products in the world and you put them on a crappy design site, you're not going to do well. And even if you have the best customer service, it won't matter if you have a crappy web design. You know, if your web design store is lousy, your online business presence is doomed. You're not going to do well because even if you attract people, even if you drive traffic, even if you run ads, when they get there, they're just going to bounce and leave. They're going to bounce and leave. So web design, guys, if you if you want to put anything at the top of the list, it's going to be your web design. It doesn't matter what platform you got. If you've got the best platform in the world, you get the best products in the world, the best advertising in the world, tons of traffic. If your web design sucks, then you're not going to do very well. According to Kiss Metrics study, there was 93 percent of buyers consider visual appearance to be the most important factor when making a purchase. Can you imagine that? So they're not going there going, oh, gosh, this is the best price. Oh, gosh, this is the best product. They're looking at your web design. How well did you design this? So this is that's why it's really crucial at the end of this training today. I'm going to give you a list of the top platforms to design your actual e-commerce site. And in all of these platforms, you can do a really engaging web design, which is what we're talking about right now. So to have a really profitable online store, you can either pay a lot of money to some web designer or you can take it upon yourself to learn code or you can go to one of the list of web designs. I'm going to give you at the end of this web platforms and you can design your own and they're really pretty easy. They really are. They have a lot of ready made templates. You can customize them for your own needs. And fortunately, there's a lot of templates out there. I mean, I'm going to give you a group of platforms, but there's thousands of different templates within those platforms that you can use. Three of them I currently use now, three out of about I think six. I'm going to give you six or seven, something like that. I can't remember exactly the number count. I was just going through that before I started my training today.  You can also, what are some other things you can do? You can use sites like template master. You can use Tony templates, Apollo, maybe I'll put some of those in here. Check, check these out. And now this is if you want templates. The only TES. OK, so the first one I'm going to give you is template monster. Template monster. So you can check that one out. That is a very good one. And I would totally suggest that. The other one I would tell you is Tony templates. Tony templates is a very good one. You can check that one out right there. The other one I was thinking about, Apollo theme, Apollo theme, I forget about that. So Apollo, am I spelling that right? No, I'm not. No, I'm not. Let me get this right. Apollo theme. You can certainly use that one. That's a great one. And there's a lot of others out there. You know, they have clean designs, intuitive layouts and follow the latest web trends. One thing I would tell you also when you're designing, make sure you understand that people are going to be viewing your site on mobile. I see so many sites I go to a mobile and it's all jumbled up and the words are on top of each other and images don't load right. Make sure that it is responsive, mobile responsive, we call that. So design elements should really captivate visitors. You should have full with images, avoiding distractions and really minimal text. You don't need a whole lot of text anymore. So, you know, that that type of stuff is really made for your store. OK, your online store can be designed by a professional, like I said, it can be designed yourself if you want to know how to do that. You want to know how to code or with an e-commerce store template. And I would say, especially if you're starting out using the e-commerce store template, as far as hiring professionals to do that, you know, I would say that's not that's not until you really understand what you're doing. If you don't know how to design a store, you don't want to hire somebody. I know that sounds backwards. It's like, well, J.R., if I don't know how to design a store, isn't that when I should hire somebody? The answer is no. The answer is no because you don't know what to expect. You don't know what to pay. You don't know what they're doing. You have to get your hands dirty in the beginning. You've got to design your own store. I know I designed my own store in the beginning and it was an offshoot for eBay. I'm trying to think of the platform. It was actually owned by eBay. I can't even think of it now, but I use their templates and it was not a pretty site. It was not beautiful. But I got through it and I made it work. Web design, once again, should captivate your visitor's attention, engage customers with full width images and minimal text, like what I just said. And not to go too long, which I probably already have, but that is number one, number one out of 20. Number two, an awesome about us page. This is where a lot of people fall down. They think they should put a sentence or two, and that's just not the case. People are really reading these about us pages now more than they ever have before. They really want to know who they're dealing with. If a visitor goes to your about us page, this means they are already interested in you, right? If they go there and they're reading this page, think about it. They've got interest in you and they're giving you a chance to prove to them that your product is the best product, that your company is the best company, that they should trust you, that they should be loyal to you. This is your opportunity. Don't blow it. Don't blow it with a lousy about us page. What you need to do is clearly spell out what you are, what you do, and most importantly, what you offer to the clients, all testimonials, achievements, and any kind of social proof is welcome there. So don't don't say, well, I saw somebody else's about us page. He was like two paragraphs, so that's what I need to do. Now, you could overload this page. You could put all kinds of testimonials on it. You could put all kinds of good stuff on it. Really fill up your about us page. I think it's super important. Make sure you don't waste this opportunity as it could lead to gaining a customer. Your contact information should be clear. It should be easy to find on your about page and throughout your website as well. Be sure to mention things like your contact email, your address, your social media channels, all these things bring credibility to your company. All these things are going to help you out. All these things are going to get sales, but you've got to do it. Now, packing your about page with too much information could be overwhelming for site visitors. Some online stores, like, you know, some of them I've seen, opt for a minimalist design and keep information clear and easy to comprehend. But I would say, you know, if you were going to lean in one direction or the other, I would say I would lean towards too much information and not enough information because if they go there, they want information, OK? They want that stuff. Super important. So include your basic information about your business on your page, such as your contact information, address, social media accounts and avoid cluttering the about page with too much information. But you want to keep them engaged and have enough. Yeah, it's a it's a tough balancing thing, right? To have exactly what you need. That's kind of what you need. You need to have exactly what you need. Now, the next thing you can do, number three, and this is something I did early on, because I got to tell you, I built my site and I thought that as soon as I built my site and it went live, that the money would just come rolling in. The money would just come flooding in, but it didn't happen that way. It didn't happen that way at all. So giving your harder money, little loan company isn't easy for most buyers. OK, establish your reputation by showing which companies are working with you. They don't need to necessarily be on the scale of Coca-Cola or Apple or something like that, but even small companies can add a degree of trustworthiness to your enterprise. So like when I was selling my survival cave food, I didn't have any sales. Nobody was coming to my site. So what I did is I partnered with a lot of other sites and I said, hey, put my product on your site and I will ship it out. You don't have to buy anything. Sell the product. And when you sell it, collect the money, pay me what my wholesale cost is and I'll ship it out. Now, this was a win-win for them and us because I just got extra sales. My products were now listed on a lot of other sites and they didn't have to invest in inventory and they had extra profit. Now, the cool thing was when you googled survival cave food, now you've got a whole lot of results because you not only got the results from my page, you got the results from all the other pages that were listing my products. So it gave me a tremendous hike in SEO. It really did. It helped our site so, so very much. And just a second, I'm going to tell you some of the platforms you can build it on, too. So hang in there with me for just a second. That was number three and we're still kind of going over number three. But some actionable tips for partnering with other brands and influencers are highlight partner companies on your homepage to immediately showcase your reputation to site visitors. Now, at one point, we actually do a lot of gun shows around the country. We physically did gun shows and I had tons of retailers that were doing gun shows and obviously that stuff died down because of the illness, so we couldn't do those. But we actually had the locations in the U.S. where you could go and buy our product at a gun show and I would keep that updated and I don't have that on our site and work. We really don't do that that much anymore. However, we may go back to that. That may be a big thing. I know the illness woke up a lot of people to our survival products and a lot of people are searching that kind of product now. So it could be another opportunity for us. Number four, we're up to number four. And I think we're going to do a five today, right? Five, yeah. So number four is offer excellent online support. Your customers need to know they will have support after they make a purchase. That's when they're going to worry, right? If they need it, guaranteeing troubleshooting after the purchase and consulting before the purchase. So if somebody can call our company and say, you know, I got four kids and two adults, how much food do we need for three months? And we can give them that information. We actually have a calculator on the site they can use to. So that can convert potential customers into loyal, returning customers. The most comprehensive, helpful type of support is a live chat feature that works 24 seven. Now, we do have a chat feature. It's not live 24 seven, but if you can pull that off and you want to do that, do that. There are companies that you can put on your site that will do this for you. This tool can increase your site wide conversion by about 10 percent or more. If you don't have the resources to offer round the clock support, you should still provide some type of service to help your people during working hours. You want to do something like that. The company that keeps this chat feature easily accessible, yet unobtrusive. You don't want to block everything to the buyers of the bottom left hand corner, right hand corner, wherever you want to do it. So here's some actionable tips for offering excellent online support. Offer support at all stages of the shopping experience to encourage new buyers to make their first purchase and returning customers to continue making purchases. OK, that's what it's there for. Make your customer support features, whether it's like a phone line or a chat box, you know, we have a support ticket thing you can go through, make it visible on the homepage that buyers are aware of those services. OK, ours is aware. Ours is there on the homepage. OK, so we're down to number five. Now, after number five, guys, I'm going to give you the top sites that you should use for your e-commerce store. It is not exhausted. It's not every single platform that's out there. OK, matter of fact, it doesn't even include one of the ones that I originally, two of the ones I originally started with. But I think they're the best ones for this market right now. OK, so the next thing I'm going to tell you, number five is provide popular payment options. I don't always like doing this. I don't like PayPal. I'm not a fan of PayPal. I do offer it, though, because a lot of people are fans of PayPal. And I've got to do what they want. No online store can exist without payments. All right, so you've got to be able to take payments, which I want you to keep in mind. You want to keep your people happy because if you lose your merchant account, you are out of business. That's the only way you can collect money. So you want to offer a wide variety of popular payment options for your customers so they can always make a purchase. OK, because it all changes for every single site. And guys, don't forget, I'm still taking your questions, your comments, your suggestions in that chat box. So feel free to put it in there. So a few actionable tips for this. Allow sellers to create an account on your store and save their payment information to make future purchases more seamless.  We do not save their payment information because they're so worried about people getting their information that we actually erase it. But you can do that. You can save it on your site. Make sure you have a secure site. You're doing all the protocols that you need to do. But you also want to offer a wide variety of payment options. I got to tell you, PayPal reigns as the go-to payment solution. But there are other popular options for your business to consider. If you want to Google Entrepreneur's List of 15 other widely used payment methods, check that out. And you can see that. But you want to offer a Mastercard Visa, American Express, Diners, whatever the heck's out there, and of course, PayPal. All of those things are super, super important. Guys, I want to also now at this point, and I promised you this, and we're nearing the end here, but I promised you I would do this, I want to give you what I think are some of the top platforms. Because this week, if you follow through all these videos, Tuesday through Friday, you're going to have a real good game plan for starting an e-commerce store. So let's go ahead and go, and I've got my list here on another tab, to some of the platforms you can use to build your online store. Now, I would say one of the easiest and simplest to get started is Wix. Wix is a really top-rated e-commerce platform. It's not what I would use, because my situation is different. But if you want a simpler alternative to some of the full-on web store building solutions, then you'd check out Wix, OK? It's highly user-friendly. There's still plenty of e-commerce power available to create a suitably impressive site. And let's just look at it. I'm going to look at some of the benefits to it. It's easy to use.  Now, it is easy to use. However, it does not have a lot of the tools that a lot of the other platforms I'm going to tell you about have. Now, other platforms are known for their complexity and being able to deliver an e-commerce platform for all needs. Wix offers a much simpler solution for small businesses who don't need all the bells and whistles of an online megastore. So if you're planning on growing to a big, big store, Wix would not be the way to go. If you just want a little small thing and you try to make some money on the side, it wouldn't be bad. Does Cartra track payments? 100%. Not only that, Paul, is they will, you can click on a customer and you can see a customer's lifetime value. You can see everything they bought. You can target customers based on their lifetime value or what they bought. So if you want to do like a whale email for all the people that spend big money and you know you've got a big, expensive offering, you could definitely do that in Cartra. Thoughts on marketing on Facebook Marketplace. I don't personally use Facebook Marketplace. As a matter of fact, over the years, I have distanced myself more and more from Facebook. And Paul, you can appreciate this because I know the other day, I think they put you in Facebook jail. It's just too restrictive. I don't like it. So I've sold some stuff in the Marketplace personally. My wife has too, but for our business, we don't use it for that. We just don't, it's not, it's not thing, it's not something that I think it's good for us. Website building tools through Wex, setting up an e-commerce platform. There's really simple and easy to do. It's just as easy to manage. There's no coding skills required. The results is a platform that anyone should be able to use without too much difficulty, okay? There's about 500 templates there too, if you're asking about that. Next thing I would recommend is Bluehost, which I will have a link in the description of Bluehost. Bluehost is hosting, it's done through WordPress and then coupling that with WooCommerce, okay? It's pretty easy to use. It's already installed, okay? So it has lots of features. It's really simple to start.  So if you've already got a WordPress website, WooCommerce is a great way to go. The basic WooCommerce plugin is easy to install through WordPress, and even better is that the plugin is free to download and use. However, however, okay, there's always a however, right? To get the most from WooCommerce, you'll need to install a number of third-party plugins. I'm gonna be totally honest with you. This is to add features such as payment processing, inventory management, stock control, all that. Now, Bluehost simplifies the process and Bluehost is the preferred hosting company for WordPress, okay? And WordPress is one of the biggest platforms in the world. But Bluehost simplifies the process for providing read-made WooCommerce platform with everything you need already installed. And it also includes a shopping theme and all the plugins that you'll also need. Although two different plans are offered, even the standard plan almost offers everything you're gonna possibly need. And I would get with the standard in the beginning. Features include not just the online store, but the store front theme installed, but also a blog along with Jetpack Free, payment processing, email marketing, discount codes. The premium plan adds online bookings and appointments, subscriptions, product customizations, as well as local and tax manager. Of course, there's web hosting underlying everything as well, meaning that you have a fully functional e-commerce platform already on. So as soon as you sign into Bluehost, you're good to go. All that's left for you to do is add your products and set up your marketing and you're in business. All in all, WooCommerce is one of the best e-commerce platforms for those looking for ease and for themselves starting an online retail business, whether it's for physical products or even digital products if you're selling that. And the web hosting platform deal with provided with Bluehost makes it incredibly simply to get started. Now, my next one here for e-commerce is my favorite. This is by far my favorite. Pluses, can you transfer from Wix to another site? Absolutely not. And they do that on purpose because they don't want you to leave the site. If you build a site in Wix, you're gonna have to go build it someplace else. It is, you're gonna have to do the whole thing over again. So don't ever think, well, I can build it here and I'll just upload it to another site. Not gonna work, not gonna happen. And none of them that I know of, you can really do that. Now you can probably download your products or list of the products or something like that. But as far as the site design and all that, it's gonna be entirely different. Next one, number three is Shopify. Shopify is only like 29 bucks a month for the basic. And I think it's 79 bucks a month for the picked up version and the highest is like 299. It's really easy to use. It's got loads of features, powerful analytics. And if you're doing e-commerce, it's probably one of the best ones. It is definitely the most well-known e-commerce platform available. It was set up in 2006 by the founders were actually Tobias Lucte and Daniel Wienwin and Scott Lay, who as the story goes, felt that there wasn't a simple and easy to use e-commerce platform available. So they built their own. The company claims that you don't need to have any technical or design experience to easily create a beautiful online store. And that's very true. According to Shopify, it's possible to get one of its online stores up and running within minutes. That's pretty quick, guys. Users, and I actually have a course called Ecom Road. Ecom Road will walk you through building your entire Shopify store. So check out Ecom Road. You can Google it and you'll probably find it. Users choose from a wide range of templates or they can design the look and feel of the store themselves. It accepts a comprehensive range of cards, has different levels on it, different levels of support. The support is really good at Shopify, so I do highly recommend them. It's a good company. Next one I would tell you about is Magento. Now, Magento is not for everybody. Matter of fact, I would probably not recommend Magento for most people. However, if you're experienced, if you are a big merchant, if you're doing like into the million dollars, I would recommend Magento. Our site, Survival K Food, is built on Magento. Magento allows us the ability to have different levels of memberships, different levels of logins.  You're gonna log in and see the prices that I sell my products for. But let's say you're one of our retailers.  That's what Magento allows us to do. So I can have different logins for retailers, different logins for retail customers. And within the retailers that sell my products, they can have different price structures depending on what level they're at and buying products from us. And what it allows us to do is have this automation going on.  You can upload them to our site. You can actually upload a thousand orders to our site. It will take all that information. You can then take those orders and send them to our warehouse and they get shipped out. So everything is automated. So you don't have to talk to us. We don't have to talk to you. And you can also physically put in the order. So if you've got like 10 orders, you wanna type those into our site, you can do that. And as soon as we see those orders, you're gonna pay for them when you put the orders in. We're gonna go ahead and process them. We'll ship it out to your customer. We'll send your customer tracking information to get all that stuff and you don't even have to worry about it. That's Magento, not for everybody. This is a site that's gonna cost you thousands and thousands of dollars a year just to have the site. But it does have open source coding.  But I like Magento a lot, not for everybody. But if you're a big guy and you wanna start selling some stuff and getting into the millions of dollars, Magento is a great site for that. You can do a lot with it. And there's a lot of people out there that know about Magento. They can help you with it. And that's another thing, guys. When you're getting into some of these e-commerce sites, you may need some help on down the road. And if you don't have it, man, you're gonna be screwed. Now, the last thing I wanna tell you is Cartra. And I probably mentioned Cartra in 90% of my videos because I know what it will do for you. I understand what it'll do for you. In the description, after this video, you're gonna see a link for Cartra. That link is not something where you have to put in information or a credit card or email or anything. It is a link to watch a video. When you watch the video, it will show you everything that Cartra does. It is your online marketing software that you're gonna need. It's the best. Forget about every other email provider. Forget about every page builder. Forget about every customer, CRM, whatever you wanna call it. It's all built into Cartra. Check out Cartra. This is my plug for it. I am an affiliate for it. I don't make hardly any money off it. However, I do recommend it because I know it's gonna help you guys. I want you to get the best software. What else do I got? Well, I guess I wanna recap things. So this week, Tuesday through Friday, each day I'm giving you five things you need to build your e-commerce store, five things. And then on Saturday, we are doing a tribute to 9-Eleven. It won't be telling you how to make money, but it will kinda be telling you how to make money because it changed us, my company, what we did, changed me, and I wanna explain to you where I was, what happened, where I went from on 9-Eleven to where I am now, 20 years later, which sounds insane that it's 20 years later for me. I don't feel 20 years older, but apparently I am because I have a calendar and I know how to read it. Let's see here. What platform did you start out with before you went to Magento? Paul, you're not gonna believe this, but outside of that one that was hooked into eBay, the eBay website thing, I went directly to Magento. I went to Magento way before I needed it, and the only reason I went to it is I hired this guy in India and he says, oh, you're e-commerce. I'm making fun of our Indian accent, shouldn't do that. He says, hello, you're e-commerce, and the best platform is Magento. So he built my site on Magento. I knew nothing about Magento. I'm so glad he did that because I've kept that same type of platform. Now, I've had different iterations of it, and that's the one thing I will also warn you about Magento every two or three years, they upgrade it, and you have to upgrade to the newest version for security purposes and all that, and that's gonna cost you thousands of dollars every few years, it just is. Unless you can do it on your own, which I can't, I pay somebody and it takes them about a month or two to actually upgrade to the newest version. But I had it from the beginning. I just did, I got lucky. I got somebody who gave me good, you know, information of what, wait a second, the screen blinked out. They gave me good information about what I should do, and I just did it. No, I didn't do it. I allowed them to do it. I didn't know what I was doing. And Magento was it. Now, guys, if you haven't subscribed yet, what the heck? Come on, man, make sure you subscribe. Let's see here, what's the best site for books and courses, books and courses? Well, my site's pretty darn good. I gotta tell you, I have a lot of courses there. But, you know, depending on what you're studying, mine is all about making money online. I think ClickBank is pretty good for finding a lot of different courses, and there's a lot of good ones. And you can look at them based on the number of sales they get and all that. I think that's pretty good. Doing POD, print on demand with products. What sites do you recommend? Well, you know, POD is a way of selling. I do have a video, I have several videos on this channel that will tell you how to do POD and it recommends a bunch of sites. I don't really want to do it right now. But, you know, Printify or Printful, there's a whole bunch of different ones that I recommend. And if you just search my site for Print on Demand or POD, you're gonna find those videos on that particular thing. That's a great question. I do appreciate you doing that, Paul. I'll give you some questions there. Other sites for books. Well, books, I think is a tough one. I think books probably, Amazon, as much as I hate to say it, it's a really good site to find books. And I like Audible. I like Audible because I had a hard time sitting down reading a book. But when I drive, I have a very easy time just putting a book in or if I'm working out and I've got a headset or something like that, I can listen to a book. I've got to get back to, I have the book for Elon Musk and I was listening to that for some reason. I got sidetracked, so I got to get back to that. So that's what I got for you today, guys. If you haven't subscribed, please do so. Don't forget, ring the bell. Turn on all bell notifications so you're notified each and every single time I go live. Don't forget, this week is how to build a killer million dollar e-commerce site. I'm gonna give you all the steps to do that. All you gotta do is follow through Tuesday through Friday and then Saturday we're doing the tribute to 9-11, which you're not gonna wanna miss. I'm gonna give you facts you did not know about 9-11 that are factual. No BS, no conspiracy theories, none of that stuff, but just real facts and things that have happened and are still happening because of 9-11. I'm gonna go over all of that on Saturday. I love your story and I think that is what attracted me to the site, the fact that you're the every guy who's doing it. Oh, I'm the every guy, if the every guy knows nothing because I knew nothing. And I feel like I know quite a bit now, but I only know quite a bit now because I just studied this stuff, okay? I'm not smart, don't believe me, but I have been incredibly lucky. I've made millions of dollars online and continue to do so. And once again, I wanna brag because I got a $69,000 single order yesterday and we're gonna be processing that today, which is nice, it's nice. It's nice when you get an order and I keep my expenses down, guys. I don't spend a lot of money a month. I'm not trying to impress you with me spending a hundred grand a month because I just don't, you know, I don't buy cars very often because I was in the car business and I know they're wasting money. I do have a deposit on the Tesla truck, but God knows when that's gonna come out. I don't know, so I'll keep driving my car and putting miles on it. But I do like to make a lot of money. I like to have the security of money. I like to have money in the bank. I like to have stocks. I like to have real estate. I like to have all these things because I also want, you know, my wife taking care of it when I'm not here. One day I'm gonna be gone or maybe she'll be gone first. I don't know, one of us will be, we wanna have a lot of money in the bank with whoever's left. I have a blessed weekend, a week ahead gang. Remember, fortune favors the bold. And the other side of fear is freedom, 100%. Guys, thanks so much for being here. I really appreciate being here. If you're not watching this live, you can still ask me questions. Just put it in the comment section below.  Paul says who dares wins. That's very, very true. I was talking to a family member. This is the last thing I'm gonna say I'm getting out of here. I was talking to a family member yesterday on the phone and this family member does not have enough money. And I tried to tell this family member what they could do and they said, I'll keep that in the back of my mind. The back of your mind, I said, no, put it in the front of your mind. Do something about it. Putting it in the back of the mind is like, well, I'm just gonna trash that idea. I'm just gonna keep complaining that I don't have enough money. I said, you know, I teach people how to make money on my mind, right? You know, that's what I do. And I'm related to you. And you could learn this stuff and you wouldn't have these problems. You wouldn't have these issues. Oh, well, I don't have time for that. But you're retired. Oh, well, I got other things I'm doing. Well, then you don't care. That's the truth. That's the truth. That's in the back of your mind. If you ever say I'm putting something in the back of your mind, that means you're trashing it. That's what you're doing. Guys, you have a great day, great week. Don't forget, I'll be here tomorrow at 9 a.m. and Thursday at 9 a.m. and Friday at 9 a.m. And then Saturday, I'm gonna flip it all upside down and come to you at 10 a.m. Guys, thank you so much for being here. Don't forget to give me a thumbs up. Do that right now. If you haven't done it, if you're watching, give me a thumbs up. If you're watching this right now, stop. Give me a thumbs up, click, click it. Go ahead, do it, do it, do it. When you do that, it makes the video more viral, more people see it. You get to help more people out. So think of it this way. You are helping people out by giving me a thumbs up. You are helping people out by subscribing. You are helping people out by ringing the bell, turning on notifications. That helps other people because it gets more distribution. Guys, thanks for being here. I'll see you tomorrow morning, 9 a.m.


I've said since this election that if Donald Trump offers up a 1 trillion dollar moonshot to cure cancer, we tell him to shove it where the sun don't shine, and I'm not talking about Seattle, Washington. Do a recount, fight Trump every step of the way, nip him in the bud before he even swears on the Bible. Stop any person or party that uses racism and xenophobia and misogyny to seize power, really seizing power for the sole purpose of enriching his loyalists, his thuggish loyalists. There's a piece in the week entitled, It's Time for the Democrats to Fight Dirty. It's upsetting a lot of conservatives, including the National Review. The National Review was appalled by what our guest, Professor David Farris, has to say. In Professor Farris' opinion piece for the week, he says that Democrats must take a page from the GOP playbook and say no to everything, and that means everything. He says that Democrats need to understand that the American voter respects and rewards parties that demonstrate oppositional behavior. That defiance is not what weakens the GOP but makes it stronger, which is why the Republican Party has more power now than at any other time since the Great Depression. Professor David Farris teaches political science at Roosevelt University. He's the author of Descent and Revolution in a Digital Age, Social Media, Blogging and Activism in Egypt. That's the title of the book. Descent and Revolution in a Digital Age, Social Media, Blogging and Activism in Egypt. He's a frequent contributor to informed comment and his work has appeared in the Chicago Sun Times, the Christian Science Monitor, and Indie Wiki joins us today from Chicago. Thank you for being here. Thank you for having me. There's a potential gambit to get Merrick Garland on the Supreme Court if the Democrats displayed a pair of Cajonas. Who is Merrick Garland? Why is that outrageous that he's not even being considered for the Supreme Court? And what could the Democrats in the Senate do before Trump gets inaugurated? Merrick Garland, of course, is President Obama's nominee to fill the vacant Supreme Court seats that was left open when Scalia died earlier this year. And before Scalia's body was even cold, the Republicans said that they would not even hold hearings for anyone that Obama nominated. The line was that, you know, we want to make sure that the American people have a chance to choose the next Supreme Court justice. That's a novel reading of a constitutional doctrine. And it's really unprecedented because never before in modern history has a Supreme Court nominee been blocked like this in the sense that the opposition party won't even bother to hold hearings on him. And that was really, I think, an outrageous escalation of the kind of procedural warfare we've been seeing in the Senate and the House of Representatives over the last 20 or 30 years. It was a very serious escalation because what it allowed the Republicans to do is to effectively steal the swing seat on the Supreme Court, that is, and all likelihood Donald Trump will be able to fill that seat with one of his nominees, and they're likely to be kind of an arch-conservative like Scalia was. So it's a tragedy from the perspective of progressive governance, but it's also outrageous. You know, there's no law that says presidents only get X number of Supreme Court nominees per term, right, that's not in the Constitution. So how many you get to fill is dependent on, you know, how many vacancies there are during your presidency. And Obama was lucky enough to have three, and he only got to fill two. If the Democrats took a page from the GOP playbook, as you suggest, what could they do before the inauguration? I've read a piece by David Waldman who says before the incoming senators are sworn in on January 3rd, the actual composition of the U.S. Senate, that is, the people whose terms have not expired, is 67 senators, 34 of them Democrats, or 32 of them Democrats and two independents. So what could conceivably be done is that the remaining members of the Senate, the Democratic Senate, could gavel in a session on January 3rd before the new senators are sworn in and confirm Merrick Garland with their 34 seat majority, and they would have a quorum. And so that's a pretty, that would also be an escalation of the kind of constitutional hardball we've been seeing. Give me this again. So how does this work? So how many United States senators would there be at the time of this vote? At the time of this vote, there would be 67 U.S. senators, because the Senate reelects about a third of its membership every two years. Yeah, it just so happens that the Republicans were defending more seats this year. That's why we thought, that's why we thought we had a very chance of taking the Senate. There are 33 senators missing, because there aren't 33 new senators about to be sworn in, are there? No, but even if you're reelected, you have to be re-sworn in, like your term expires, and then you have to be sworn in to take your seat in the U.S. Senate. So for instance, Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, his term will expire. And so before he's sworn back into the Senate, there's technically nobody in that seat, if that makes sense. Oh, I see, I see. And has this ever been done before? Absolutely not, no. Okay, so this is never going to happen. And it would, in all likelihood, it would probably cause a constitutional crisis of some sort. Obviously this is never going to happen. Would the Republicans do that, though? That's the question. I mean, if the shoe were on the other tiny foot, would the Republicans do it? Yeah, I'm at the point where I'm, you know, I'm not sure that there's anything that the Republican Party would not do to take advantage of some of the procedural quirks of the Constitution to get their way. A larger question, maybe for another show, would be if it would precipitate a constitutional crisis, maybe that's a good thing, right?  Yeah, there's a lot of things that are deeply wrong with our Constitution. I mean, but the overarching problem to me is that we're, you know, we're using an operating system for a huge complex 320 million person modern society that was designed in the 18th century before the Industrial Revolution. And many of the elements of our Constitution are not spelled out. You know, the Constitution has a set of formal rules. One of them is, of course, that the Senate gets to provide advice and consent on the President's nominees. But it doesn't do anything else to guide us about what are their obligations, just to have to happen in a timely fashion. Is it possible for the Senate to just say we will not consider this person? These are normative rules, right? These are expectations rather than obligations. And the fact that so many of the procedures that we use to pass legislation in this country and to appoint people to particular offices, the fact that those are norms rather than rules makes them very vulnerable to exploitation and obstruction, which is precisely the process we've been seeing over the past 30 years. And it's not exclusively a Republican phenomenon. The Democrats did escalate things between 2007 and 2009. But the Republicans think it's just a completely different level. Yeah, are you optimistic? I have so many questions I want to ask you, and this is not what I wanted to ask you, but there's a part of me that is optimistic that this creaky old Constitution that doesn't work might actually thwart Donald Trump. Well, there is an extent to which, unless the Republicans are willing to completely eliminate the filibuster in the U.S. Senate, that the Democrats will have some power to obstruct his legislative agenda. The filibuster isn't part of the Constitution, right? No, it's not. The filibuster is just a Senate rule. And Senate rules can be discarded by just the majority. And it's the filibuster is, of course, one of those norms that throughout most of the modern history of the United States, the filibuster was used only in very extraordinary circumstances and generally to make a point about for a piece of legislation that the senator thought was outrageous or really wanted to draw attention to something. And often the use of the filibuster was often used by people like Strom Thurmond to obstruct progressive goals. And it wasn't until really the 1990s that the filibuster started getting used to obstruct what used to be really routine stuff. And I'm thinking of nominations to the federal judiciary, to the district courts. That's the lowest level of the federal court system. And Republicans started holding these nominations up under President Clinton. And, of course, they've just really escalated that under President Obama. So that processes that used to take a few days now take weeks or months even. The average waiting time for a judicial vacancy under Obama was 120 days. And that's just absurd. That's not at all what the framers of the Constitution intended. It's not in keeping, I think, with the functional democratic society to have your legislators holding up nominations for no reason, right? Just the purpose is to slow things down. So with the Senate... It doesn't need any ideological goal. The filibuster only works on certain bills that require 60 or more votes, right? If it's a majority vote, then the filibuster has no power. Well, the filibuster can be used for anything, really. You could threaten a filibuster on a certain bill. If that bill only needs a majority in the Senate, that threat has no power. No, I mean, actually, the way things have developed is that you no longer need to go out onto the Senate floor and read from war and peace for 15 hours to filibuster. What you do is you notify the Senate leadership and writing through what's called a hold in the Senate that you intend to filibuster a bill. And then it really places the onus on the majority to produce the 60 votes, that is, to produce enough votes to invoke clouture rather than on the minority to hold the floor with 41 or more votes. And so this practice has really metastasized in recent years where senators will just place a hold on almost every bill and almost every nomination that goes to the Senate. Somebody puts a hold on it, you know, and that really slows down the business of the Senate, I think, in a deeply unnecessary way. In spite of the article that I wrote, I am deeply in favor, generally, of getting the leadership of the parties together and really doing some deep reform of how the U.S. Senate works. I just don't want that to be right now. When the Democrats are in charge. Right, or I mean, if the kind of thing it's like I'd be willing to do, really pervasive reform of Senate rules to make things easier for this majority even if there was some kind of compromise candidate put through the Supreme Court, right? Absent that I'm in favor of pretty, pretty obstructive partisan warfare for at least the next two years. For the next two years, you write, do nothing. You write, the Democrats must not give the imprimatur of legitimacy to the hands the Info Wars Acolyte who's about to take the oath of office, not to get some highways built, not to renegotiate NAFTA, not to do anything. So you're saying what I believe, which is no, no, no, no, just nothing. Give them nothing. Absolutely, yeah. I mean, it helps to me that I don't think that there's going to be much of anything worthwhile to say, to say yes to. I think that there was some hope that maybe Trump would put forward some sort of an infrastructure bill that Democrats have wanted for a long time. But stories that have leaked out suggest that any Trump infrastructure bill would be heavily structured around public private partnerships of the kind that have been so destructive here in my city of Chicago where previous mayors of this town sold off pieces of public infrastructure to private investors, you know, to fill like a one-time hole in the budget. But these things are not generally speaking in the public interest. So I do think that in almost every case, the democratic obstructionism will in fact be in keeping with the values of the party. Like nobody's going to be putting a serious progressive or humane immigration bill before Congress right now. So it's not like Democrats are going to be tempted to work with Trump, but I think his cabinet appointments suggest that he is in the process of putting together one of the most right-wing administrations in the history of this country. Yeah. In 2009, President Obama passed a $900 billion stimulus bill. And a lot of those projects had to be shovel-ready. And Joe Biden was in charge to make sure there was no corruption. Right. Cylindra, notwithstanding, that was a pretty successful stimulus bill, right? There was very little corruption that they were able to prove. Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, the Obama administration was very sensitive to the perception of corruption. And I do think that they worked very hard to keep graft to the absolute minimum, I think, that's possible in our system. And I think most economists, most mainstream economists, look at the stimulus and they argue that it was one of the factors that prevented us from falling into either an even deeper recession or perhaps another great depression. So I think all things considered that that stimulus bill was very successful. But that's because money was being spent, right? I mean, if the player needs to have private companies investing in infrastructure, you're really just empowering a set of rent seekers who will be profiting off of public money, but over whom we will have very little control over how these things get built and where they get built. And I just think it's really it's the wrong way to go about infrastructure spending. You know, it doesn't it doesn't keep me up at night. The thought of saying no to that doesn't keep me up at night. We have desperate infrastructure needs in this country. But I don't think that the people running the country as of January are at all interested in making those investments where they really need to be made. They want to do what George W. Bush did after Katrina, which was reward Halliburton. Absolutely. Yeah. And it's particularly troubling because the president elected the United States has so many ties into different sectors of the economy. I don't know if you saw this this morning, but he went on a Twitter rant against Boeing of all companies saying that the contract for the next Air Force One set of aircraft was too expensive. And of course, the facts that he used were wrong, but he also affected the stock price of Boeing. And because we don't really have any real insight into Donald Trump's internal financial universe, we have no idea whether he has an interest in other airplane construction companies or if you have a beef with Boeing. And this is the kind of conflict of interest that we're just going to be dealing with constantly over the next four years. And it's almost impossible for me to see him overseeing an infrastructure bill that doesn't explicitly and purposefully benefit his allies in some way. His nominee for defense sits on the board of directors of General Dynamics. So I would assume General Dynamics will profit from defense spending the same way Halliburton profited from Dick Cheney's eight years as president. Absolutely. Absolutely. You know, I think that the next four years are going to make the Bush years look like a model of clean governance. You know, I think that the problems are about to get so much worse. They're going to get so much. At another moment. Yeah, they're going to get so much worse because one of the things we've learned from Clinton was to a paper dump on a Friday, you know, give them everything. If the special prosecutor wants information, give them so much stuff they can't even process or deliver 10,000 cardboard boxes. Yeah, the office, right? And sort through it. And what Trump is doing right now, and it's just pure evil, is Rex Tillerson, the CEO of Exxon, is now being considered for state. I know, it's absurd, like through the looking glass stuff, you know. And the fact that the evil genius of that is it just makes our heads spin so much that we can't really pay attention to what he's really doing, that he's just throwing. We're all, yeah, we're all sitting through an episode of The Apprentice right now, you know, the Secretary of State stuff is just it's absurd. You know, we're heading towards mid December here. And I think he's using this process, particularly the state process as a kind of subterfuge to keep us distracted in as many directions as possible. Yeah, I don't think we have institutions anymore that are equipped to deal with this. This is what's so terrifying about it, is you really cannot trust the institutions. The same way you couldn't trust Rince Priebus and the Republican Party to stop Trump. Everybody said, oh, don't worry, don't worry. There are levers, control in place at the Republican Party to stop Trump. There's no there there. No, absolutely not. And the Republican Party, at least its elected leaders, they folded like cheap beach chairs, you know, one by one. Once it became clear that he was going to be the nominee, then since he's been elected, of course, even more have come on board. What about Elizabeth Warren? You write in your piece that Elizabeth Warren is willing to work with Trump. I found that disappointing. Well, you know, the same thing happens after every election, right? Is that the people who were just elected or the leaders of the parties, they got up and they, you know, they pay lip service to bipartisanship. I don't remember Mitch McConnell speech after after 2012, I think it was. He got up and he gave this beautiful speech about, you know, how he was willing to work with the other party and ready to get to work. And of course, none of that was true. And I do think there's an extent to which, you know, Chuck Schumer and Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders and this is sort of the institutional leadership of the Democratic Party, they do have to get up in front of the cameras and say, like, you know, of course, we're willing to work with President Trump when the opportunity arises. Like I don't think that they can get up and explicitly say that we're going to sit on our hands for years and do nothing. I don't think that they will sign off. Like I don't think that the party is going to sign off on a set of really bad bills to make them slightly worse. I think that there is sort of an emerging realization in the party that Republican obstructionism worked under Obama, and particularly because Democrats are in the minority in both the Senate and the house. You know, on a lot of stuff, the Republicans aren't going to need any of our votes to make things happen. So I don't see the at least while we're in the minority in both chambers, I don't really see the cost of kind of sticking together, offering the American people a very clear alternative and making Trump look as hapless as possible. Of course, he's going to do a lot of that on his own. But I think that we can we can do a lot to make him look worse by slowing things down and making it look ugly and imprecise it the way that the Republicans just, it does. One of the reasons I called you this article was just amazing. But this is the. But this is something that I've never read before. And it's something that infuriates me whenever I talk to my liberal friends, and that is my liberal friends constantly say, you know, if we give George W. Bush enough rope, he'll hang himself. If we give Trump enough rope, he'll hang himself. And you write that the Democrats have learned the wrong lessons from the government shutdown in 95 and the impeachment of Bill Clinton because that seems to be the Rosetta Stone of give them enough rope and they'll hang themselves that that all my liberal friends point to Newt Gingrich and then the impeachment as an example of what happens when you give the Republicans enough rope. You write that's not what happened. Right. And, you know, I think this is the danger of drawing really firm conclusions about American politics from one or two examples. You know, if you if you look at the government shutdown in 95, there's really absolutely no evidence whatsoever that the voters cared about this at all, or that they they marched to the polls in 96 a year later to punish the House Republicans for their misbehavior. I think the the the data suggests, in fact, the opposite, that voters were were really just endorsing a growing economy under President Clinton. That's the reason that he was popular. That's the reason he won the election by eight and a half points. I don't think voters even remembered by the time they voted in 96. I very seriously doubt that there was more than a handful of voters in the entire country who got out of bed that day on election day 96 and said, I'm going to go vote for Bill Clinton to punish Newt Gingrich. I just don't think that that's what happened. If you look at 98, you know, it was unusual in the sense that the president's party did not lose seats that year. In fact, gained a few seats. And the lesson was, you know, the voters are punishing the Republicans for impeachment. Well, OK, maybe they were. Then you could say that the impeachment of Clinton was unnecessary. It went too far. It was suicidal because Clinton was popular at the time. But that doesn't say anything about all of the other sort of routine ways that parties can obstruct legislation that's making its way through Congress without actually impeaching the president, you know. And I think if you look at the 2000s, all of this sweep for the last 16 years, I don't think that you get any confirmation of the idea that voters punish obstructionist behavior in Congress. In fact, the opposite, if you look at the first few years of Bush's presidency, Democrats were very cooperative in the first couple of years of the Bush presidency. You know, not in the sense that they were endorsing every single thing that was coming down the pike, right? But I think that there was, particularly in the wake of 9-11, more cooperation than usual between the two parties. And the reward that they got for that was they got slammed in the 2002 midterms. And then they lost the 2004 election and they saw all of these sort of vulnerable blue dog Democrats, people like Max Cleland, lose their seats in spite of sort of maintaining the centrist position of being willing to work with the Republicans and so on and so forth. And so once the Democrats really kind of woke up in my mind and started acting like a parliamentary minority, that is sort of unified opposition to Bush after the 2004 elections, that's when they started to win. You know, that's when they won in 2006. There was no economic crisis in 2006 that could explain the Democrats sweeping into power in Congress. It was the unpopular to the Iraq war, primarily. And the fact that the Democratic caucus in the Senate and the House was able to maintain unity against the war and against Bush's policies, I think is what brought them to power. What role did Dennis Hastert turning a blind eye to Mark Foley's pedophilia in 2006? What role did that play to the Republicans losing the House? I think, you know, I don't think that I don't think that they lost the election because of Foley. I think that they I think they lost the election primarily because of the Iraq war. I think that the perceived corruption of the House Republicans at the time was definitely a factor. You know, this was during the Abramoff years. You know, there's all these stories about the various financial scandals from the House majority. And I do think that that costs them. And certainly one of the things the Democrats want to be very careful about as they they head to the minority for the foreseeable future is to stay as clean as possible. And then that's easier because they're not running anything. But I think corruption is a different issue than obstruction, right? That is, can use the procedural quirks of our Constitution to slow things down for Trump. You can offer the American people a very clear alternative in terms of the set of policies to pursue. But if you're seen as corrupt, right, that's that's a different issue. And I do think that the Democrats should be ruthlessly publicizing any instance of perceived corruption, either in the president himself or in the ways that the House and Senate majorities are are implementing his agenda. That needs to be one of the primary things that they highlight.  And the good thing is, I think that all three of those things will actually be true. Yes. Jason, I always have a block on pronouncing his name. Jason Chaffetz, he's the chairman of the House Oversight Committee. Right. Yeah. Yeah. And I don't think he's going to be doing much overseeing of anything over the next couple of years. Chaffetz is really, you know, the ringleader in my mind of a group of House Republicans who simply did not take their oversight, roll very seriously after they took the majority in 2010. The obsessive focus on, you know, what I think is a very minor tragedy in Benghazi, not to say it wasn't a tragedy, but it certainly did not need to take up, you know, four years and counting of House oversight time. They didn't take it seriously. There were things to oversee in the Obama administration, right? I think the drone warfare policy desperately needed to be to be ran down or overseen by Congress and they simply did not want to do that. They wanted to harp on these these quote unquote scandals until such time as they did, they did actual damage to Hillary Clinton and damage to the the Democrats reputation. What is the Freedom Caucus before Trump's I guess his election, if you want to believe the want to believe what you're reading, the Freedom Caucus was losing all its power in the lead up to the presidential election. What is the Freedom Caucus and is it going to have power? The Freedom Caucus is a is a group of we're not going to know how many people exactly are in it until the new Congress takes its seats. But a group of about 40 House Republicans who are sort of extreme hardliners about the budget. The Freedom Caucus was the driving force behind the sort of brinkmanship around the debt ceiling. They were the driving force behind shutting down the federal government in 2011, sorry, 2013. And there they seem to be a set of folks who are who are willing to shoot the hostage. You know, I mean, they got Baynor pretty much quit show business because of the Freedom Caucus. Right. And there's a there's some irony there, right? I mean, John Baynor was one of the the Gingrich radicals. And by by 2012, he was one of the more moderate people in the House unbelievably. So it's the Freedom Caucus folks have really outflanked what remains of the of the moderate wing of the Republican Party. How old is the Freedom Caucus? You know, I don't I don't know that off the top of my head. But it's it's a new there. It's a relatively new phenomenon. Yeah, it's it's an outgrowth of the Tea Party. So that is post post 2010. You know, there's a history of more radical groups forming in the House and then eventually attaining leadership, you know, Gingrich was was originally part of a small group of sort of more radical Republicans in the House during Reagan, who deeply resented the way that the Republican minority leadership was working with Tip O'Neill and the Democrats and wanted to take the Republican strategy in a different direction. Right. Gingrich had his vision was always that you had to make you had to make Congress look as bad as possible in order to get people to turn against their own representatives because there's a there's a kind of a central paradox of American politics, which is, you know, the approval rating of Congress is like what 10%, 9%, 11% has been drifting around in the teams for years. That is, you know, those are like stalling levels of approval. And yet, and yet incumbents in the House win election at rates exceeding 90%. Right.  And Gingrich, who was like really like a dark genius in his time before he became super corrupt, was one of the first people to intuit that if you wanted to sweep some of these people out of power, you had to make Congress look corrupt, you had to turn the American people against it. And then finally they'd be willing to take a chance on somebody else. And that's I think exactly what happened in 94. Growing up Kissinger to me was, you know, a war criminal, my parents, you couldn't even say the name Kissinger in our house. And yet for Donald Rumsfeld and Cheney, when when Kissinger was national security advisor, I think state under Gerald Ford, he was too liberal for Donald Rumsfeld. And then when Reagan took office, there were these neoconservatives who were Reagan Democrats who felt that Reagan was too liberal. The Republican Party just keeps getting further and further to the right. Just it gets hijacked each election cycle, it seems hijacked by more extreme politicians. And the more extreme they get, the more popular they seem to be. But are they really that popular? I mean, if you look at the votes, but for gerrymandering, there would be a democratic house. Well, I think it's, you know, you're right to a certain extent. I don't think it's just gerrymandering. We do have a huge gerrymandering problem. But we also have a problem called partisan sorting, which is the sort of increasingly likelihood that you're that you're going to live around people who think exactly the same as you do. This is the the infamous bubble that we're all getting scolded about right now. But there's some truth to that and the extent that if 80% of the Democrats in Illinois live in Chicago, there's almost no way to draw the district lines in such a way that you'd have partisan balance in each one of those districts. But if you added up the number of Americans who voted for a Democratic congressman, maybe a couple million more votes for a Democratic House than a Republican House. Yeah, and they're still counting, but that seems likely to be true this year was true in 2012. Is that always true? I mean, do we know going back? Is that always seem to be the case that more people prefer a Democratic House? But because of gerrymandering, we don't have one? Well, it's not that frequent. No, it's this year. It's 2012. But in fact, in 2014 and 2010, Republican House candidates got far more votes than Democrats. So it's something that happens sometimes, but not always. So are we going to take the wrong lessons is our side? The Democrats are conducting a postmortem. You say that we shouldn't be talking about identity politics, that that's not what destroyed the Democratic Party. How do you do a postmortem on a body that's still very much alive? I mean, Hillary has two and a half million more votes than Trump. More people voted for a Democratic House than a Republican one. Maybe we did everything right, but we're not pulling the proper, we're not fighting, as you say in your article, dirty enough. Yeah, I mean, I think there's definitely, there's a real danger here of over learning the lessons of this election.  And our Senate candidates are gonna end up with more votes. And one of the reasons that progressives and Democrats have such a challenge in front of them is that many of the institutional features of our Constitution give more power to people in rural areas than they do in cities. And they give more power to small states than they do to big states. Nowhere is that more true than in the US Senate, where the 39 million people of California have the same representation as like the 500,000 people of Nebraska, right? And that's a structural challenge. And I do think it's worthwhile for Democrats to think really hard about how we can get people in places like Nebraska to vote for us. And that doesn't mean, in my mind, abandoning our core commitment to minorities and women and LGBTQ folks. I think it's it's incredibly important that we maintain our commitment to those groups in order to keep our coalition together. But in my mind, there's nothing preventing us from doing rural outreach and and coming up with some economic ideas that might appeal to people in these areas to convince them that a more interventionist state is actually in their in their interest. But it's a challenge. It's extremely frustrating, as I'm sure you know, to win more votes in an election and to come in second to democracy on the face of the earth that does this. That's why I defend the electoral college because I think there's something wrong with our side. I think that we've been hijacked by people who truly are out of touch. I think the Hollywood liberals, the Goldman Sachs, Wall Street types have taken over the Democratic Party.   That's to me is the genius of the electoral college, because the people in Nebraska know that about our party and our side. You say that identity politics isn't what we need to focus on. I think even though we won, I think maybe it's time to take the lesson from Bernie Sanders, you know, when when the Black Lives Matters people took the microphone from them and said you're not concerned about us, they were right. But he was right to and maybe more right in that if you want to win an election, you got to lump all 99% of us together in one basket. That's that to me is how you win a national election, not with the identity politics. I mean, I don't disagree with you. I mean, I think there can be a question of emphasis, you know, there can be a question of how do we speak to people? I do think that we need to maintain our commitment to say systemic criminal justice reform. But there are real questions of strategy about how you emphasize that to different audiences. I think one thing to keep in mind is that one of the big mysteries of American politics is, you know, there were roughly 85 or 90 million eligible voters who chose not to vote in this election.  The truth is, you know, we don't know who these people are that are not voting. We don't know what kind of message might reach them. Certainly true that Bernie may very well have been right, that a politics that's broadly committed to clean governance to a vision of joining together and addressing some of our most deeply rooted economic issues. Maybe that would have brought more people out to vote. Maybe they would have voted for us. I think he would have won. And here's my apocalyptic hellscape that I envisioned for the next four years. That, you know, we never see the disaster coming. We think we see it, but we don't we don't understand what causes the end of a republic. I think all of us, including the people who are suffering, don't understand the depths of the despair that 99% of Americans feel. There are people who are in severe debt, who are $500 away from losing everything. And when we look back, and we're sitting in a just as I said, some kind of bleak, post democratic, post republic society four years from now, we'll all be saying we never really grasped the desperation of the American people because we were all lying to each other and ourselves about our economic frailty, because pride got in the way. Well, I don't think we're going to be able to die that much longer. I mean, particularly as the as the baby boomer generation retires, there's going to be enormous economic stress placed on on their children who who have to support them. There's not that many people that have things like long term care insurance. And that's why they're comfortable are not actually comfortable. If the parents get sick, or they get sick, that is why Trump is so dangerous. Because we think that there are institutions in place to protect us. We think that there are professors, there are journalists, there are bureaucrats. Well, everybody is in debt, is in trouble, and is looking out for themselves. And when you have a country where everybody is afraid of losing their job, everybody is compliant, everybody will have faith that somebody else will fix this. And we'll go along and say, Well, give it two more years. And that's why Trump is so dangerous.  Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I'm not going to bring it up. But when everybody is broke, when hyperinflation destroys your pension, when everybody is insecure, they give lip service to the rule of law, but they're concerned about themselves and their family. That's why this is a very dangerous point in American history. Very absolutely, I agree. And I agree with what Andrew Sullivan, who called this potentially an extinction level event, you know, I think Americans are very complacent about their democracy. You know, I think there's an assumption that authoritarianism couldn't happen here because our institutions are too robust. And I think that that's a huge mistake to be complacent about the overall health of our democracy. And I think it's why the Democrats really need to use their time in the minority to come up with a set of ideas that really addresses the overarching crisis of our time, which is the inability of ordinary human beings to share in broader economic prosperity that seems to be going on the top, you know, the kind of Uber, Uber application of everything.  And then you have this broad swath of people who seem to be just like unnecessary, right? And what do we have to say to those people? And what was the message of our campaign this year to those kind of people? I think we really need to think hard about that. You right. And when this moment finally presents itself, you're talking about the Democratic Party finding its roots, you say in 2022 or 2024, 2028, you say that the Democrats must have an extraordinarily radical agenda ready to roll. You say a massive amnesty that would be for undocumented workers. Yes, yeah, a new Voting Rights Act, sweeping criminal justice reform, Medicare for all, higher education whose cost is truly nominal, a Marshall plan for climate change, basic income for all Americans. Is that didn't Nixon talk about something like that? I do think Nixon kicked the idea around remarkable in retrospect, what a liberal Nixon wasn't in comparison to the Republicans. What do you mean a basic income for all Americans? What does that mean?  But the idea is that the state provides a sort of assistance level income to everyone in society as a way of fighting things like homelessness and poverty. It remains radical, and it remains largely an untested idea. But there are economists who think it's a good idea. And it's about to, it's about to get a tryout in Finland, starting next year. So we should have some evidence about how this will actually work from our friends in Scandinavia, who have been pioneers now have so many different kinds of progressive policies. And I think it would be an extraordinarily difficult sell. But I also think people who say that we need to start off with extremely bold proposals before we compromise on them really have a point. You know, I think a basic income is one of those ideas, something like a Robin Hood tax is also another idea that I think the Democrats really need to get behind and push that the tax, you know, a tiny little tax on every financial transaction as a way of redistributing wealth away from the sort of Wall Street crowd to ordinary human beings that we can use that money to spend on things like infrastructure. I agree with you on compulsory voting. Why not a draft? Why not everybody has to serve in the military for two years? Yeah, I'm not opposed to some kind of national service. You know, my fear from a draft is, I personally want to make the military apparatus in this country any larger, I'd rather see, I'd rather see people drafted into, you know, some people drafted into the military and some people have to perform a couple years of service to the country in other capacities after they turn 18.  No, no, with all due respect, Professor, if you want to make the military smaller, and if you want to stop adventurism overseas, everybody has to serve in the military for two years. Everybody has to see how incompetent our generals are. Everybody has to learn that the military can't keep its promises. Because of World War Two, we had an entire generation of men and women who knew how dangerous the people in charge were because they served under them. Sure. That's that's the benefit of a mandatory draft. Well, I can go on and on and I often have. Professor David Ferris has a great article in the week about saying no to everything Donald Trump wants. And I agree with you 100%. He's a professor of political science at Roosevelt University. And his latest book is Descent and Revolution in a Digital Age, Social Media, Blogging and Activism in Egypt. How can people buy that book? You can just proceed straight to Amazon. There's a paperback version of that book out. It's still obscenely upset, expensive by by ordinary standards. But the scholarly publishing industry is what it is. But yeah, it's on Amazon. It's still available, as far as I know. Great. And if people want to follow you on Twitter, on Twitter, yeah, I'm at David M. as in Michael David M. Ferris. Yeah, I encourage everybody to follow me on Twitter. It's either a fun space or the darkest place on the face of the earth. Thank you for you were very generous with your time. Thank you. Thanks so much for having me on the show, David.


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