Good afternoon, everybody. Thank you all for coming. On behalf of the Economic Policy Institute and the AFL-CIO, we welcome you to the celebration of Nancy Altman's new book on Social Security. I am Thea Lee, president of EPI. And here representing the AFL-CIO is Lauren Rothfarb, who works closely with Nancy as a member of the Federation's retirement security team. We are delighted to have Nancy here with us today. Nancy is a veteran of Social Security wars past and present. As the leader of the Social Security Works and the Strength and Social Security Coalition of which EPI and the AFL-CIO are proud members, Nancy has assembled an impressive team of young activists to defend and expand the program. Just as Nancy pays homage to Social Security's visionaries in her new book, some of which she had the good fortune to work with, she recognizes the work of defending and expanding Social Security is never done. Each generation must inspire and train the next. And part of that is learning from history. In her new book, The Truth About Social Security, The Founder's Words, Revisionist History, Zombie Lies and Common Misunderstandings, Nancy debunks misleading claims about Social Security, including the claim, which has been made since the program's infancy, that Social Security is on the brink of collapse and will not be there for future generations. In fact, Social Security faces a manageable shortfall that can and should be addressed through progressive revenue increases such as scrapping the cap on taxable earnings. This projected shortfall, by the way, is largely due to slow and unequal wage growth, resulting from decades of bad policy decisions, which are very familiar to us here at EPI. Not the result, as some want us to believe, of inexorable demographic trends. Some of the supposed efforts to save Social Security on behalf of young people are often just attempts to close the projected shortfall by cutting benefits or dismantling the program, rather than by raising additional revenue, which is what people, including young people, overwhelmingly prefer. Nancy has long recognized that we need to not only prevent further cuts, but rather expand the program, a policy agenda that she was instrumental in moving from the fringes of polite society a decade ago to a core tenet of the Democratic Party today. And I think it's very fair to say that without Nancy Altman, we would not be looking at next week's launch of a new bicameral, Expand Social Security Congressional Caucus. No one understands the history of social change better than those who have led the struggle. And the most effective activists are those who understand history. Thus, it should come as no surprise that Nancy is both an activist and an historian. She's also a lawyer and a policy wonk who serves on the board of the Social Security Advisory Board. In this book, Nancy debunks the bogus claims made by social security critics by looking to the program's history, and she's gonna talk more about that in a few minutes. She has cleverly positioned herself as an originalist. A popular term in certain political quarters today. As Nancy demonstrates in her book, Roosevelt, Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his team clearly saw social security as a cornerstone on which to build a cradle to grave system of, quote, assurance against the evils of all major economic hazards for workers, their families, and those unable to work due to old age, disability, and unemployment. Roosevelt and his secretary of labor, Francis Perkins, understood the political reality that such a system had to be built incrementally over time. And so today, despite the fact that social security is our nation's most successful and popular government program, the work to fulfill Roosevelt's vision is still arduous. We all know we have our work cut out for us. But I am confident that as long as social security remains the target of anti-government ideologues, we will be able to depend on Nancy Altman for her scholarship, her perseverance, and her passion for economic justice. Without further ado, I'll hand over the podium to Nancy so she can talk to us about her great book. Thank you, Thea, for that wonderful introduction.  All three are really captured in the famous quip. It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't so. That's what my book is about. Having been privileged to have known three founders personally, and having written a book on the history of social security, I wrote this book to set the record straight, but also to shine a spotlight on the founder's bold vision, a vision that still has not yet been fully achieved. I decided to bring out the truth about social security by quoting what the founders themselves said in reports, speeches, oral histories, and elsewhere. Many of the founders are well-known to history, pictured on the cover are Franklin Roosevelt and Francis Perkins. Others are well-known to social security scholars. Also pictured on the cover is Arthur Altmaier, who was nicknamed Mr. Social Security by Franklin Roosevelt, and has a building named after him at the Social Security Administration Headquarters in Baltimore. But many founders weren't even well-known in their own day. A number of the founders were women. Let me describe just a few of them, the ones I mentioned by name in my book. Pictured on the cover of the book and in the center of this slide is Francis Perkins. She was the first woman ever appointed to a presidential cabinet. She still holds the record as the longest serving secretary of labor, having served from 1933 to 1945. When then-president-elect Roosevelt asked her to serve in his cabinet, she said she would only accept if he would agree to push her priorities, which included what today we know as social security. He agreed to do that, and so she accepted his offer. So in 1934, when Roosevelt created the Cabinet-level Committee on Economic Security to develop the social security legislation, she was the obvious choice to chair it. She was a driving force in its success. The committee that was set up had a number of working groups. Another remarkable woman pictured to your immediate left of Perkins on the slide was Barbara and Noctriebe Armstrong. She headed the working group on old age security. Armstrong was the first female tenured law professor in the United States. She was also a PhD economist. She taught at the law school as well as in the economics department at Berkeley. Without Armstrong, there probably would not have been a social security program, certainly not the one we have today. Let me give you just one story from my first book, The Battle for Social Security, to highlight her importance. The big concern about the legislation was whether the Supreme Court would strike it down as unconstitutional. Everyone thought that joint federal state programs had the best chance to survive a constitutional challenge. That, of course, is a structure of what became the unemployment insurance and the various welfare programs that were created in the Social Security Act. But Armstrong was convinced that social security had to be a federal program. The idea of a mobile workforce, having to deal with a number of different states at retirement and all the administrative complexities, convinced her that anything else would be unworkable. But there was a lot of resistance. She engaged in numerous heated discussions with the general counsel and others about the constitutionality of what she wanted to propose. And one of those arguments, which it's important to know, occurred on a Friday afternoon, the general counsel claimed that the leading constitutional scholar of the day, Thomas Reed Powell, who was an esteemed professor at the Harvard Law School, the general counsel said it agreed with him that her approach couldn't be done. Well, it turned out Armstrong was friends with Powell. And this was a Friday afternoon. So that Friday night after work, she took an overnight train to Boston. She did not tell any of her colleagues she was doing this. She spent the weekend with Powell and his wife and returned to work on Monday morning with a letter from Powell stating that he believed the constitution would allow what she wanted. And of course, she prevailed and the court did indeed uphold social security as constitutional. Another founding member, Evelyn Burns, worked on the employment opportunities working group of the committee. I consider her the meek moracy of the early days. She taught economics at Columbia and was a leading social security scholar. She wrote three major books on social security and defended it for decades. To your immediate right of Frances Perkins is Mary Dooson, who was a suffragist and political activist.  Dooson headed the women's division of the Democratic National Committee. She worked successfully to make women a major part of the Democratic constituency. She used social security and other parts of the New Deal to turn out the women's vote in record numbers. She explained her approach this way. We don't make the old fashioned plea to the women that our nominee is charming and all that. We appeal to the intelligence of the country's women. Ours were economic issues and we found the women ready to listen. In 1934, she served on the advisory council of the Committee on Economic Security. After the legislation was enacted, she became a Senate confirmed member of the Three Person Social Security Board which administered social security. And finally, Ellen Woodward, who was considered the second most powerful woman appointee in the Roosevelt administration. She worked closely with Harry Hopkins from 1933 to 1938. Hopkins was one of the five members of the Committee on Economic Security and was closely aligned with Perkins as the most progressive. During Woodward's time at the work progress administration, which is where she worked during that period, she created white collar jobs for destitute Americans, including more than 400,000 women. Woodward succeeded Ducan at the Social Security Board and was there from 1938 until 1946 when the board was replaced with a single commissioner. These women and the other founders had a bold vision. That vision is probably stated best in a 1938 speech by Mary Ducan. The speech entitled This Social Security, What Is It? is repeated in almost its entirety in the first chapter of my book. So what is it? Ducan and the other founders recognized that security, whether physical or economic, is best achieved through cooperative collective action implemented through our government. They understood the phrase social security to be synonymous with economic security. That includes what she describes as, quote, national responsibility for the well-being of children. That national responsibility includes among other things, ensuring that children are educated. Once grown and educated, we must have guaranteed good-paying jobs protected with a minimum wage, maximum hours, and the right to collectively bargain. Our earnings must be protected with insurance against loss in the event of unemployment, short and long-term disability, death, and old age. We must have safe, decent housing. And they recognize that all of us to be economically secure, to have social security in their words, must have guaranteed health insurance and paid medical leave. That bold vision of what social security means is what makes some of the revisionist history so ridiculous. Syndicated columnist Robert Samuelson, for example, and a column entitled, would Roosevelt recognize today's social security? Claims, social security has evolved into something he never intended and actively opposed. In that statement, Samuelson is referring to a narrow question about how the program is financed. But on both the specific point and the general point, his answer is wrong. Roosevelt and the other founders would unquestionably recognize social security. But they would wonder why we hadn't done more to build on what Roosevelt called, quote, a cornerstone of a structure which is being built, but is by no means complete. They thought what we call Medicare for All and paid medical leave, for example, were in Doosan's words, already on the horizon. So with that as a backdrop, let me describe just one example of what I call revisionist history, one zombie lie and one column misunderstanding. It is revisionist history to believe that social security was intended to be part of a three-legged stool, never intended as more than a foundation of support that would be supplemented by employer plans and savings. In fact, there is strong evidence of just the opposite. The founders were visionary, but they were clear-eyed. They recognized the problems with relying on employers and savings for secure and guaranteed retirement income. In fact, activists fighting for social security were hostile to employer pensions, seeing them as employer devices to control workers and believing them to be inherently insecure. The Committee on Economic Security shared the act of a skeptical view of private pensions. A staff report reads, quote, the half-century of experience with voluntary pension plans has shown that they have been inefficient and inadequate as a sound social insurance measure. Viewed as a means of providing security to industrial workers in old age, they are wholly inadequate, nor do they give promise of substantially adequate protection in the future. Social insurance with a far broader coverage is essential to old age security. It's important to know that the three-legged stool metaphor wasn't coined until 1949. The person who coined the image was an executive with the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, which had a stake in selling private sector annuities that supplemented social security. At the time the metaphor was coined, it was an adequate, accurate description. Because of World War II and that a Republican-controlled Congress, social security benefits had not been increased for a decade and so had eroded substantially in value. During that same period, private pensions had become an attractive mechanism to avoid taxes. And during World War II, with its wage and price controls, the permitted deferred compensation, workers had become used to receiving private pensions as substitutes for current wages and unions aggressively bargained for them. So as a simple description of circumstances at that time, it was true that the minimal social security benefits would have to be supplemented for workers that have any hope of receiving adequate retirement income. But it is revisionist history to say that the metaphor reflects the intent of the founders that social security should provide benefits that are minimal and require supplementation. Now on to a zombie lie, that social security's reserves contain nothing but IOUs that Congress had already spent the money. I call it a zombie lie because it has been claimed and refuted regularly over social security's 83-year history. It was first used by Alf Landon in the 1936 presidential campaign. After the election, a social security advisory council was created. It consisted of 23 members, five representing business, five labor and 13 the general public. The advisory council issued its report in December 1938, but felt compelled to issue a unanimous statement about the IOU claim the May before its report stating that the council quote, deems it advisable to make a public statement at this time to allay unwarranted fears. This relates to the method of handling the funds collected for old age insurance purposes. The statement concluded, the members of the council, regardless of differing views on other aspects of the financing of old age insurance, are of the opinion that the present provisions regarding the investment of the monies in the old age reserve account do not involve any misuse of these monies or endanger the safety of these funds. But this was a zombie lie. So another advisory panel in 1948, just 10 years later refuted it again. And then another in much more detail in 1959. And of course, we keep hearing the same zombie lie today. One of the founders was Bob Myers who remains the longest serving chief actuary in the history of the program. He died in 2010. Starting in the 1980s, he became increasingly concerned that young people especially were losing confidence in the future of social security. He fought in numerous ways large and small to correct the misinformation and seek to restore confidence in the program. In the 1990s, when Treasury was changing from the issuance of paper bonds to simply electronic transactions, he convinced Congress to mandate the Treasury continue to produce and issue paper bonds to social security. And Congress did what he asked. He thought that there would be greater confidence if there were actual paper instruments. Here's what they look like. I believe social security is the only entity in the world that still gets a paper record of purchases. These are not casual promises to pay. Every purchase and redemption is carefully tracked and reported in every trustees report. Part values, interest rates, maturity rates are all carefully tracked and reported. These bonds have the same legal status as Treasury bonds issued to the public. If Treasury ever did not repay one of these bonds, that would be a government default. But this is a zombie lie, so not likely to die anytime soon. And here's a common misunderstanding that our aging population has made social security unaffordable. That the wealthiest nation in the world at the wealthiest moment in its history all of a sudden can no longer afford social security. But as the following two slides show, our social security system is unquestionably affordable. The first one shows that at the end of the 21st century, social security will cost as a percent of GDP, not much more than it costs today. The cost is basically a straight horizontal line. And the second slide shows that other industrialized countries spend considerably more today as a percentage of GDP than we will at the end of the century. Despite the common misunderstanding, the issue of whether to expand or cut social security is not a question of affordability. It's a question of values, ones the American people overwhelmingly share. Expanding social security is profoundly wise policy and winning politics, a powerful combination. It's time to expand social security as the founders envisioned. The founders were visionary, but they were also pragmatic. In his message to Congress on January 17, 1935, transmitting the proposed legislation to Congress, President Roosevelt cautioned, it is overwhelmingly important to avoid any danger of permanently discrediting the sound and necessary policy of federal legislation for economic security by attempting to apply it on two ambitious scale before actual experience has provided guidance for the permanently safe direction of such efforts. The place of such a fundamental in our future civilization is too precious to be jeopardized now by extravagant action. 83 years after those words, social security has now stood the test of time. It is time to increase its modest benefits and add more protections, time to improve Medicare and expand it to everyone, time to add paid family leave and medical leave and time to enact other protections as well. As we work to expand social security, we must know where we are headed. We must have a beacon to guide our path and we must be armed with facts to refute the revisionist history, zombie lies and common misunderstandings. To provide that beacon and those facts is why I wrote the truth about social security. I hope those of you who are able to read the book enjoy it as much as I enjoyed reading it. Thank you. I'm Marilyn Park, American Federation of Government Employees. Very much want to see the future that you are hoping we can see and hoping maybe what do you think that some of the, in the middle of everything we're dealing with perhaps some of the renewed interest in working people and the new candidates focusing on that might help refocus where we are in social security again. I don't know if you're feeling hopeful for the same reasons. I actually feel, I actually do believe, it's a trait to say about our crossroads because everything we care about including all the federal workforce and everything's being attacked. And of course, the Republicans are so eager to go after what they social security, Medicare and Medicaid. I couldn't believe that the ink wasn't even dry on the tax bill and Marco Rubio, they all started saying, now okay, we got to go after these. On the other hand, I am feeling hopeful because there was, I think the Democrats really took a detour. I think they lost their way in the 1990s with the era of big government is over and all that and looking at market-based solutions and all that sort of stuff. And I actually have this in my book but it's really worth looking at and you can find it online. To compare the 2012 Democratic and Republican presidential platforms, the Plancon Social Security and the 2016 one. Because the 2012 one was we need a bipartisan solution. We've got to save social security and the main talk was about private savings accounts on both plans. So to the casual reader, it didn't surprise me that you couldn't vote on that issue because they sounded the same. But in 2016, the Democratic Party came out strongly for expand social security. And in fact, there are about a dozen bills in the House and Senate that have been introduced that expand social security and restore it to long-range economic actuarial balance. A leading one was introduced by Congressman John Larson of Connecticut. He, if you can believe it, it's called the 2100 Act because it keeps social security solvent through 2100 and beyond and expands the benefits. If you can believe it, it has 172 co-sponsors. They're only 193 Democrat. Keep trying to get a Republican but so far they're all Democratic co-sponsors. If there is the blue wave, if the Democrats do retain control of, or take control rather of the House, a wishful thinking here, take control of the House. He'll be chairman of the Social Security Subcommittee of the Ways and Means Committee. And he's already said that he'll hold hearings on expanding keys. One of the co-chairs of the expand Social Security Caucus that's having their unveiling on September 13th.  If they don't, I think 2019 is especially Medicare and Medicare gonna be way under attack because they'll know they might not keep the White House and so forth. So I'm hopeful, but it's the message everybody's gotta get a, you have to sort of climb over glass. You gotta vote no matter what. We have to ask questions. Carl Polzer, and I've been working on wealth concentration and inequality issues for several years. I have a website called the Center on Capital and Social Equity. I'm a little concerned. I agree that Social Security should be improved and it's essential. But the politics where it's either or, it's either we don't wanna expand pensions because we'd rather expand Social Security. I think it gets in the way of, you have to do both. I mean, half the people have no retirement savings. It's essential. That's where a lot of the inequality and capital growth is occurring, is in those accounts. I think some of the tax subsidy should be taken out of the system. Employer provided pensions and put into a tax, fundable tax credit for everybody. So I think that, I just like to see kind of work on both. Does that make sense? Yeah, but I think the fundamental problem is if you don't, if you have money to save, that you can't save. I mean, everybody should save. But people don't even have money for short term kinds of things, much less lock up their savings for 40 years. So in the 1920s, when we had this kind of income and wealth inequality, because I agree with you and President Obama said it was the challenge of our times. That what we did was we created the minimum wage. We gave workers the right to collectively bargain and we enacted Social Security, which helped to create the middle class. It's very redistributive. And what we should be doing now, I think, is we should definitely fight for 15 for sure, increase the minimum wage, definitely restore workers' rights to collectively bargain, really strengthen those rights and expand without cut Social Security. And if we make very wealthy pay their fair, what I consider their fair share of a pay more, that will do, that will at least slow the growth. I mean, it's not gonna reverse the growth, but everyone should have, if it's possible to save, everybody should save. But to be able to save, you have to have enough income. Student debt is another issue. If you're coming out of school with this ridiculous amount of debt, we can't expect people to put money away for 40 years for retirement when they have student debt. So I think they all go together and what we've got to do is have a fair distribution of the productivity. The country's quite productive. It's just been unfairly divided. Owen Haga, Jo and Economic Committee. Speaking of the history of Social Security in the larger social insurance world, do you have any thoughts on the expansion that did happen to DI and whether those two programs kind of gain or lose from the fact that we think of them kind of in one breath always? Well, I mean, DI, you know, despite McMoveny, it is the Social Security Disability Insurance. Exactly, yeah, yeah. It's a single formula. And in fact, if you expand, well, yeah, if you expand benefits for one part of it, it's a single formula. So if you expand benefits, it'll be increases for people who get retirement benefits but also survivor and disability benefits. There's actually, and this isn't really exactly what you're asking. So I want to make sure I answer your question, but there's a really interesting thing going on right now with disability insurance that no one really can, the actuaries at least can explain. There are a lot of theories about it, but that is that the number of applications has really fallen off and they keep expecting it to come back. So as you know, there are these two separate trust funds. Actually, the Larson Bill combines the two trust funds into one, which I think is the way it should be done. But they're currently two separate trust funds. The DI trust fund was scheduled to be exhausted, depleted in 2016. There was that fix that was done when Boehner retired that had to go to 2022 without any other change in the law. The next year, the trustees report had it at 2023. The next year, without any change, it was bumped to 2028. This last trustees report that just came out was 2032 and the claims are still off. And there are a lot of theories about it, whether it's office closings that are part because people have more trouble getting to apply or whether it's, even though Congress has mandated an earning statement, there aren't those earning statements so people aren't aware of their benefits or whether it's been kind of the shaming that this program's all full of fraud and it's running amok and all of that has caused people not to, nobody really knows what the answer is, but I think it's a fundamental part of social security. And again, the founders talked about not just long-term disability, but short-term disability because any of us can be struck by an illness or accident and have to have our wages replaced. So I don't know if I'm exactly getting it what you're asking, but okay. Do you realize countries spend on retirement programs with the United States lagging? And I'm wondering if you could talk a bit about why you think Americans are reluctant or less inclined to demand a decent retirement benefit from our government as opposed to say, European. It seemed to be very far behind. It's so interesting. Well, first of all, it's important to recognize that this is just the counterpart benefits for old age security and disability. Those other countries all have universal guaranteed healthcare. They have children's allowances. I mean, they have many more benefits that aren't even captured in that slide because we wanted to make it comparative to our system. You know, it would have been way out of, it would have spent much, much more on GDP. I love that Mary Doosan essay that I talked about social security. What is it? And you don't have to get my book to read it. You can actually find it online if you want. But in it, she has a great line where she says, because the United States, even in 1935, social insurance started in Germany in 1885. And then the other European countries and other countries around the world quickly added programs. So the United States was slow in getting it. And she has a great line which says, it would take a whole book to explain why we were so far behind. And it's the same sorts of things. Some of it is the constitution, at that time the constitution because of limited federal power. But a lot of it is this idea of, it's almost a mythology, limited government, the private sector does everything better. We're on our own. There's a Franklin Roosevelt, another one that I put in the book, I think it was a, I forget exactly the year, one of the State of the Union messages where it's great. He says, the first group to turn to government for protection was business. And he goes through it. And if you think about it, if we didn't have a court system, if we didn't have highways, if we didn't have a military, we'd be in a state of nature. I mean, those are all, they benefit all of us, but they benefit the wealthy more than they benefit the poor. So and he, you know, he, it's really a worth reading. I mean, a lot, what I loved in writing this was reading all of these, in some cases rereading and sometimes reading for the first time, all of these speeches because so many of them just resonated, you know, you say, why doesn't someone give that speech today? It's such a great speech. But I think there is, you know, on the one hand, there is this sense of out, you know, we're all by our own bootstraps and all of that sort of stuff. And it's, you know, you can always call something socialism and that's, and of course social security, that was the claim that it was socialism, but it didn't work for them. But I think that, and the founders all talk about this, that, you know, they really tried to craft a program that had basic American values. So it is that no one gets a benefit unless there's a work record. You know, they're those kinds of things. And so I think they were very clever to create a program that really appeals across the political spectrum. And I think we've got to be creative in what we want to do, but I really do think we're at a moment now because I think people recognize that drug prices are ridiculously high, they're the highest anywhere in the world, that, you know, that we should, that Medicare works extremely efficiently and needs to be improved, but it's much more efficient even though it covers seniors and people with disabilities. And so I think the American people are, I mean, we'll find out in November, we've got a lot of candidates. You know, we've got, some of it is just like the one in Massachusetts yesterday, you know, wanting young energy, but some of it is like Crowley in the Bronx. I mean, that a lot of members are running on Medicare for all. The Sanders bill had basically a who's who of, everybody you can think of who might run for president. It's, they know, they're professional politicians, they get that there's something about that that's resonating for the American people. So this is back to the question of am I optimistic or not? I mean, it would really be the height of irony if the election of Donald Trump issued in a progressive revolution, but it's not out of the question. It is not out of the question. I mean, there's a lot of this room for eight. Anyway, I will stop with that. Hi there, Julie Tiffins also at AFGE. Nancy, we know it's gonna take some political will, that some political victories and then some political will to get rid of the cap and slowly raise the payroll tax, which is what it's gonna take. And we've been talking about this, what used to sound like a far in the future in solvency date that even some learned people in the press sometimes use the word broke in place of insolvency. Do you see a point here? And now it's not very far away. You know, whether it's 2032, 33 or 34, it's not very far away. Do you see a point where Congress needs to understand it's an, oh my God, is that 2025, 2026, that if you don't do this now, there will be disaster in 2032, 33, 34. Yeah, I'm gonna challenge a little bit, the premise. The date, what I think has gone wrong, and it's correct, there's no action-forcing event until 2034, but I do think that what has stood in the way of action before, I mean, there was action in 1977, there was an action in 1983. What I think has prevented the action is this effort to have some kind of plan behind closed doors that is not what the American people want, and it's kind of let's all hold hands and jump off the bridge, except not really jump off the bridge because no one will know who to hold accountable because they'll say, well, I didn't like that part and I didn't like that part. And I should mention on the financing side, eliminating the maximum, which all the bills do. That only turns it into a proportionate tax. That means they're paying the same rate on all their earned income, but most people's income is unearned. It's not progressive. And so I, the late Bob Ball and other founder argued that we should be dedicating the estate tax to Social Security. I mean, there's a lot of wealth out there if we want, depending on how we as a society decide as the fairest way to allocate the cost. But I think that if the Democrats take control, John Larson has already said he'll hold hearings. And I think he's gonna wanna have a vote in committee and if there's a vote on the floor, even if they don't have the Senate, there will be pressure on the Republicans to either vote for an expansion bill, vote against it, which I think would be very unpopular, come up with an alternative, which will be very unpopular. And I think we'll move it along. So I'm not pessimistic that they need something. I think they've been trying to do something the American people don't want, which I think is why expansion is really working. But one other point that I always laugh when I see this, and that is, we gotta act sooner rather than later. It just gets harder if we act later. I do think we should act sooner. And I do hope if the Democrats win the House, they'll be hearings in 2019 for sure. And that will start opening the discussion. And it won't be this, let's save it. It's like, hey, do we wanna expand it? Do we wanna cut it? Let's figure it out and how do we pay for it? Or do we wanna keep it at the same level? But I do laugh because what gets harder is cuts because you have to phase them in. You can't cut some of these benefits right before they're gonna retire. But actually raising taxes you can do next year. I mean, you don't need a lot of land time to increase that. So it gets harder to cut benefits the longer we wait. I do think we should act sooner because one of the things social security historically is provided and should provide as its name suggests is the intangible benefit of security. It's not just cash. It's the sense that I can be an entrepreneur. I can take a risk. I know that this money is there. I know that if something happens to me, I'll get this monthly income that I cannot outlive. And with all the talk of it's not gonna be there. It's going broke. People, you know, there are lots of stories of people against their own economic interest taking benefits as soon as they can because they think the program's going broke. I mean, there should be that sense of security that I think talking about expanding and having an open conversation, not just a Washington speak, let's talk about entitlements, but a public debate, I think. And this again, maybe I'm being optimistic. Well, I guess we'll find out as the years go. What do these bills do? And what is, John Cummings, what are the bills do that you've talked about and what is your position on taxing the social security benefit? Taxing them, oh, that's interesting because you'll be interested in one provision. There are a number of bills. Probably the most prominent are two. One is a bill that was introduced by Senator Sanders that has, I'm across the board, let me say there's a commonality in a lot of them. So virtually all of them that are broad-based, there's some targeted ones like focused on widows or focused in particular based ones. They tend to all have across-the-board benefit increases. They tend to change to a more, what I think is a more accurate consumer price index, the CPIE, for the cost of living adjustment. I think they all raise what is called the special minimum, think of it as the minimum benefit that people get. So the idea is people after a lifetime of work shouldn't retire into poverty. Those are kind of the main, there are others, some restore the student benefit. There are variations in the kinds of benefits increases, but those are the kind of the range of them. And it's interesting given your question that John Larson's bill, this is the only one that does this, is starting in 1983, social security benefits were, if you were over 16,000 or 32,000, your income was, your benefit, a half your benefit was included in taxation for income tax purposes. What Larson's bill does is he increases those thresholds to 50,000 and 100,000. So benefits are taxed now, but he gives tax relief to more beneficiaries. And then there's the other, but then there's the question, those all cost money. And then there's a question, how do you pay for it? And they all, again, they're variations on a theme. Senator Sanders' bill has a threshold of $250,000. So the current cap is at $128,400. It goes up every year. He sort of skips the income between that and 250. And tax is not just earned income, but unearned income. And that extends the, and that ensures the benefits can be paid for about the next 60 years. What John Larson's bill does, he sets, he does the same thing, although it's not unearned income. He taxes just the earned income, starting at $400,000 and above. And he also has a rate increase, the FICA rate, but he phases it in very slowly over 20 years. So it's a 0.05% increase each year. So he talks about it as an average of 50 cents a week. That's what it costs. But so there, again, I think that what the Democrats have coalesced around is that, we're facing a retirement income crisis where too many people aren't gonna be able to retire. So the last thing we wanna do is cut benefits because that's just gonna make the crisis more serious. And that benefits should be expanded. And then, they have different ways of paying for it, although they all seem to be clustering, at least in part, around having those at the very top pay a proportionate rate of their full wages. Oh, well, I think one of the things about salinity, when you start parsing it down and picking favorites and penalizing some people and rewarding others, you lose that universality that is gonna keep it going, that is gonna, in essence, have the support. And so if you could just address, do we have a universal program that applies equally to everyone or not? I agree and there's a fundamental principle in social security and that is the more that you contribute and the more that you earn, the higher your benefit. And all these proposals, the Sanders bill and the Larson bill and all the others, keep that, that is a fundamental principle that makes it what the American people see it as universal and fair. The more you pay in, the more you get out. So the question is, on what level of earnings should you pay the 6.2%? And a lot of people think, I mean, 94% of Americans earn under that. So the question, and most people pay all year long, they get, people have steady jobs, get deductions from their paycheck every pay period. And what this proposal says is, well, at least for the very wealthy, they should get it every all year long, too. So I don't think, I don't see it as affecting, I think you're right, universality is extremely important and what makes it so popular. And I don't think any of these programs, again, it's these benefits go to everyone. They're not means test of benefits at all. They are across the board. All workers would get it and families as well. I think we have time for two more questions up here. Hi, I'm a David Belducci consultant and retired from the US Department of Labor. I have comment and then I have a question in two different areas. I was glad you mentioned non-employment insurance, which is Title III of the Social Security Act. And I wanted to talk about maybe a comment and this understanding about unemployment insurance right now. Many states are reducing the duration of benefits and it has a adverse effect on it as an economic stabilizer. So that's also one of the truths of social security that should be looked at in the next Congress. My question is very simple. What would the Medicare for all program look like?  Well, let me make a point also about, although about the unemployment insurance part two, that was of course part of the Social Security Act of 1935. Harry Hopkins' view was that the government should guarantee employment, should be an employer of last resort. And so unemployment would just be a temporary bridge from one job to another because there would be employment. And there is starting to be talk in progressive circles about, you know, we've got infrastructure, we've got, it's like back in the 30s, there's a lot that can be done. So it'll be interesting if this progressive revolution materializes if that's in there. But I just blocked on your... Medicare, Medicare for all. Oh, Medicare for all. Here's what, how I've seen... I'm a miniature less. Okay. I'm just kidding. Well, here's a little self-promotion. I'm working on a book, I've started another book called the road to Medicare for all, a call to action. And the way that I am my co-author is envision it is first of all, you got to improve Medicare. There should be, you know, maximum out of pocket and so forth. But the way we see it, and let me say one other thing, and that is now that I'm old enough to have Medicare, in fact, I say this at the beginning of the book, it's eye-opening.   No, is there any paperwork? No, we'll file it for you. I go, great, hey, this is nice. So that's the idea that there are, I would have no premiums, no copays, no deductibles that it is a universal cradle-to-grave system that you get your card at birth. And we have a fair mechanism for covering the cost. So it's, it's a, and the thing that I think is so great about the Medicare for All, the reason I think it's caught on is because people love their Medicare and now it's been around long enough that everyone knows someone who's, most people know someone who is on Medicare and a lot of people, 62, 63, 64, sort of holding on to get Medicare. So I think again, the rest of the world has figured this out and we'll see if we join the rest of the world on this. Great. Was there one more? Yeah, right there. I'm Kathleen Roemig from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, going back to history. So the 1935 Act excluded domestic and agricultural workers and I've heard two kind of competing theories for why that is. One is structural racism and the other is administrative challenges because there weren't big payrolls to automatically deduct those payroll taxes. So what have you uncovered in your research? Thank you for that question. And first of all, I feel like it was a planted question. And Kathleen, I'm not just saying this, but when I was thinking about Evelyn Burns and talking about the Monique Morrissey of that period, I was actually thinking kind of Kathleen Roemig too. They were sort of the, because Kathleen does fantastic fact sheets and work on these issues. I'm glad you asked that. I think I have about 30 pages of this book or more. I go through this at length because this is a common misunderstanding really among progressives that social security was born in racism.  There's no question it was a racist time but there is a lot of evidence that this is just wrong, including testimony which I cite in the book from the NAACP that really didn't want any part. They wanted a federal means tested program. They didn't even, because most of them didn't think, you had to have an earnings record and in those kinds of jobs it was very hard to have an earnings record. The history basically is that they went back and forth in the Committee on Economic Security and it wasn't just those two groups. They, your professionals were excluded. There were lots of exclusions. It was this point that I ended the talk with that Roosevelt not wanting to start too extravagantly. They, the staff said no. The committee overruled them and said yes we should have it universal. All of the writings that they eventually wanted it universal. It actually came from Secretary Morgenthau at the Ways and Means Committee hearing with Francis Perkins sitting next to him to her shock because he just, he had been running around and he was concerned about the administrative ability. His people in the IRS had said and it was not that long after prohibition and they were worried about scoff laws and all of that. So I think, and I've got, I really go over, really it's about 30 pages going through all kinds of documents including a very excellent piece by the historian of the Social Security Administration making a very clear case about this because what a lot of people confuse, Title I was means tested old age security and that was state run. That was a state federal program and the states were, the southern states were very concerned that the federal government was gonna come in and force because they had some standard of decency and they thought that was gonna be an entering wedge so there was a lot of racism about that and there's a lot of discussion about the racist feelings about that but Title II, it was clear, it was for administrative reasons and if you look at the progressive testimony you look at the NAACP's testimony and to me the absolute clincher is that those domestic and agricultural workers were added in 1950. It's not like that was all of a sudden we were all enlightened of that. I mean that was after the Dixie Crats in 1948 that was clearly a racist time so if that had been blocking it in 1935 that presumably would have blocked it in 1950 but for those who wanted a war as I say there's like chapter four and there's like 30 or 40 pages on it so thank you for that question. So we're just at five o'clock so I know our time at EPI is up as I was told. And I think Nancy might be able to stay around a little bit and answer some questions. Or sign some books. But here's the most important thing I think you should remember from today and that is if we do in fact see a progressive revolution in your words after the reign of Donald J. Trump remember you heard it here first from Nancy Altman. So I hope your prediction is true. And I hope you all come back and celebrate. So please, the books are still on sale out there if you want to get a copy of the book we encourage you to do that but please join me in giving a very warm round of applause to Nancy Altman.


Hi, I'm Peter Burris and welcome to Wikibon's Action Item. Every week we bring together the Wikibon research team and we present the action items that we believe are most crucial for users to focus on against very important topics. This week I'm joined by George Gilbert, David Floyer, here in the CUBE studios in Palo Alto and on the phone we have Ralph Finos, Dave Vellante and Jim Cabilis. Thank you guys, thank you team for being part of today's conversation. What we're going to talk about today in Action Item is the notion of what we're calling enterprise hyper scale. Now we're going to take a route to get there that touches upon many important issues. But fundamentally the question is at what point should enterprises choose to deploy their own hardware at scale to support applications that will have a consequential business impact on their shareholder, customer and employee value. Now to kick us off here, because this is a very complex topic and involves a lot of different elements, David Floyer, first question to you. What is the core challenge that enterprises face today as they think about build by or rent across this increasingly mushed hardware continuum or system continuum? So the biggest challenge from the traditional way that enterprises have put together systems is that they, the cost and the time to manage these systems is going up and up. And as we go from just systems of record to with analytic systems being mainly in bash mode towards systems of intelligence where the real time analytics are going to combine in with the systems of record. So the complexity of the systems and the software layers are getting more and more complicated and takes more and more time and effort and elapsed time to keep things current. But why is it that not everybody can do this, David? Is there a fundamental economic reason to play here? Well, if you take systems and build them yourself and put them together yourself, you'll always end up with a cheaper system. The issue is that the cost of maintaining those systems and even more the elapsed time cost of maintaining those systems, the time to value of putting in new releases, et cetera has been extending. And there comes a time when that cost of delaying implementing new systems overwhelms the cost that you can save in the hardware itself. So there's some scale efficiencies in thinking about integration from a time standpoint. Now, Dave Vellante, we've been looking at this for quite some time and we think about true private cloud, for example, but if you would kind of give us that core dynamic in simple terms between what is valuable to the business what isn't valuable to the business and the different options between renting and buying yourselves, what is that kind of core dynamic at play? Okay, so as we talked about a lot in our true private cloud research, the hyperconverged systems are an attempt to substantially mimic public cloud environments on-prem. And this creates this bifurcated buying dynamic that I think is worth exploring a little bit. The big cloud players, as everybody talks about, have lots of engineers running around, they have skills and they have time.  In other words, they'll spend time to save money. And this is essentially the hyperscalers of form of their R&D and they have a in-year lead, whatever it's five, six, four years on the enterprise and that's not likely to change that dynamic. The enterprise buyers on the other hand, they don't have the resources, they're stretched in, so they'll spend money to save time. So enterprises, they wanna cut labor costs and shift useless IT labor to so-called vendor R&D to wit our forecast show that about $150 billion is gonna come out of low-value IT operations over the next 10 years and will shift to integrated products. So ultimately we end up seeing the vendors effectively capturing a lot of that spend that otherwise had been internally. Now this raises a new dynamic when we think about this, David Floyer, in that there are still vendors that have to return something to their shareholders. There's this increased recognition that businesses or enterprises want this cloud experience but not everybody is able to offer it and we end up then with some really loosely defined definitions. What's the continuum of where systems are today from traditional all the way out to cloud? What does that look like? So a useful way of looking at it is to see what has happened over time and where we think it's going. We started with separate systems completely. Converged systems then came in where the vendor put them together and reduced the time a little bit to value but really the maintenance was still a responsibility after that. But what was brought together? It was the traditional arrays, it was the servers. Racks, power supplies, cooling, all that stuff. Put together and delivered as a package. The next level up was so-called hyperconverged where certainly some of the hyperconverged vendors went and put in software for each layer, software for the storage layer, software for the networking layer, put in more management. But a lot of vendors really took hyperconverged as being the old stuff with a little bit fewer extra flavors on it. So they literally virtualized those underlying hardware sources, got some new efficiency in the economy. That's right, so they software virtualized each of those components. When you look at the cloud vendors, just skipping one there, they have gone hyperscale and they have put in, as Dave spoke, earlier, they have put in all of their software to make that hyperscale work. What we think in the middle of that is enterprise hyperscale, which is coming in, where you have the, what we call server SAM, we have that storage capability, we have the networking capability and the CPU capabilities all separated, able to be scaled in whatever direction is required and any processor to be able to get it, any data through that network with very, very little overhead. And it's software for the storage, it's software and infirmware for the networking. The processor is relieved all that processing. We think that architecture is going to mimic what the hyperscale have, but the vendors now have an opportunity of putting in the software to emulate that cloud experience and take away from the people who want on-site equipment, take away all of the work that's necessary to keep that software stack up to date. They are going to maintain that, the vendors are going to maintain that software stack as high as they can go. So, David, is this theory or are there practical examples of this happening today? Oh, absolutely. There are practical examples of those happening. There are practical examples at the lower levels with people like micron and solid scale. People like- That's a technology level. Yes, a technology level. We'll talk about hyperscale. But if you're looking at it from a practical point of view, Oracle have put it into the marketplace, Oracle Cloud On-Premise, Oracle Converge Systems, where they are taking the responsibility of maintaining all of the software all the way up to the database stack. And in the future, probably beyond that to towards the Oracle applications as well. So, they're taking that approach, putting it in and arguing persuasively that the customer should focus on time to value as opposed to cost of just the hardware. Well, we can also look at SaaS vendors, right? Sure. Who have, many of them have come off of infrastructure as a service, deployed their own enterprise hyperscale, increasingly starting to utilize some of this hyperscale componentry as a basis for building things out. Now, one of the key reasons why we want to do this and George will turn to you is because as David mentioned earlier, the idea is we want to bring analytics and analytics and operations more closely together to improve automation, augmentation and other types of workloads. What is it about that effort that's encouraging this kind of adoption of these new approaches? Well, databases typically make great leaps forward when we have changes in the underlying trade-offs or relative price performance of compute storage and networking. And what we're talking about with hyperscale, I guess either on-prem or the cloud version, is that we can build, scale out that databases can support without having to be rewritten so that they work just the way they did on sort of tightly coupled symmetric multi-processors, shared memory. And so now they can go from a few nodes to maybe a half a dozen nodes or even say a dozen nodes to thousands. And as David's research has pointed out, they have latency to get to memory in any node from any node in five microseconds. So building up from that, the point is we can now build databases that really do have the horsepower to handle the analytics to inform the transactions in the same database. Or if you do separate them because you don't want to touch a current system of record, you have a very powerful analytic system that can apply more data and do richer analytics to inform a decision in the form of a transaction than you could with traditional architectures. So it's the data that's driving the need for a data-rich system that's architected in the context of data needs that's driving a lot of this train, just changed. Now, David Floyer, we've talked about data tiering. We've talked about the notion of primary, secondary and tertiary data. Without revisiting that entirely, what is it about this notion of enterprise hyperconverge that's going to make it easier to naturally place data where it belongs in the infrastructure? Well, underlying this is that moving data is extremely expensive. So you want to, where possible, move the processing to the data itself. The origin of that data may be at the edge, for example, in IoT. It may be in a large central headquarters. It may be in the cloud. It may be for operational data that end user data for people using their phones which is available from the cloud. So there are multiple sources. So you want to place the processing as close to that data as possible so that you have the least cost of both moving it and you have the lowest latency. And that's particularly important when you've got systems of intelligence when you want to combine the two. So, Jim Kobielus, we've talked, it seems as though there's a compelling case to be made here to focus on time, time to value, time to deploy, on the one hand, as well as another aspect of time, the time associated with latency, the time associated with reducing path length and optimizing for path length, which again, has a scale impact. What are developers thinking? Are developers actually going to move the market to these kinds of solutions or are they going to try to do something different? I think what developers will do is that they will begin to move the market towards hyper-converged systems where most of the development, and what we're saying, much of the development that's going on now is for artificial intelligence, deep learning and so forth, where you're building applications that have an increasing degree of autonomy and being able to take decisions based on system of record data, system of engagement data, system of insight data, in real time. What that increase requires, Peter, is a development platform that combines those different types of data, bases or data stored, also combines the processing for deep learning, machine learning and so forth on devices that are increasingly tinier and tinier and embedded in mobile devices and whatnot. So what I'm talking about here is an architecture for development where developers are going to say, I want to be able to develop it in the cloud. I'm going to need to, because we have teams, huge teams of specialists who are building and training and deploying and iterating these in a cloud environment and a centralized modeling contact, but then deploying their results of their work down to the smallest systems where these models will need to run, if not autonomously, in some coupled fashion, loosely coupled fashion, with tier two and tier three systems which will also be hyperconverged, so each of those systems and each of those tiers will need a self-similar data fabric and an AI processing fabric. So what developers are saying is I want to be able to take it model essentially and deploy it to these increasingly nanoscopic devices at the edge. And I need each of those components at every tier to have the same capabilities in hyperconverged form factors, essentially. Or hyperscale, so here's where we are, guys. Where we are is that there are compelling economic reasons where we're going to see this notion of enterprise hyperscale emerge. It appears that the workloads are encouraging that. The developers seem to be moving towards adopting these technologies, but there's another group that we haven't talked about, Dave Vellante. The computing industry is not a simple go-to-market model. There's a lot of reasons why channels, partnerships, et cetera, it's so complex. How are they going to weigh in on this change? Yeah, well, the cloud clearly is having an impact on the channel. I mean, if you look at sort of the channel guys, you got the sort of box sellers which is still comprised as most of the channel. You got more solution orientation and then increasingly, you know, the developers are becoming a form of a channel. And I think the channel still has a lot of influence over how customers buy. And I think one of the reasons that people buy, roll your own still, and it's somewhat artificial, is that the channel oftentimes prefers it that way. It's more complicated. And as their margins get squeezed, the channel players can maintain services. And on top of that, those roll your own components. So I think buyers got to be careful. And they got to make sure that their service providers motivations align with their desired outcomes. And they're not buying, you know, doing the roll your own bespoke approach for the wrong reasons. Yeah, we've seen that a fair amount as we talked to senior IT folks that there's a clear misalignment often between what's being pushed from a technology standpoint and what the application actually requires. That's one of the reasons why this question is so rich and so important. But Ralph Finos kind of sum up. When you think about some of these issues as they pertain to where to make investments, how to make investments, from our perspective, is there a relatively simple approach to thinking this through and understanding how best to put your money to get the most value out of the technologies that you choose? Oh, I think we've lost Ralph there. So I'll try to answer the question myself. So here's how we would look at it. And David Floyer, help me out and see if you disagree with me. But at the end of the day, what we're looking for is we're suggesting to customers that have a cost orientation should worry a little bit less about risk, a little bit less about flexibility, and they can manage how that cost happens. And the goal is to try to reduce the cost as fast as possible and not worry so much about the future options that they'll face in terms of how to reduce future types of cost out. And so that might push them more towards this public hyperscale approach. But for companies that are thinking in terms of revenue that have to ensure that their systems are able to respond to competitive pressures, customer needs that are increasingly worried about buying future options with today's technologies choices, that there's a scale, but that's the group that's going to start looking more at the enterprise hyperscale. Clearly that's where SaaS players are. And then the question is, what requires further research is where's that break point going to be? So if I'm looking at this from an automation, from a revenue standpoint, then I need a little bit greater visibility and where that break point's going to be between controlling my own destiny with the technology that's crucial to my business versus not having to deal with the near term costs associated with doing the integration myself. But this time to value, I want to return back to this time to value. It's time to value that is the crucial thing here, isn't it? If time to value now and time to future value. And time to future value, yes. What is the consequence of doing everything yourself is that you, the time to put in new releases, the time to put in patches, the time to make your system secure is increasingly high. And the more that you integrate systems of, of into systems of intelligence with the analytics and the systems of record, the more you start to integrate, the more complex the total environment, the more difficult it's going to be for people to manage that themselves. So in that environment, you would be pushing towards getting systems where the vendor is doing as much of that integration as they can. That's where they get the economies from. They get the, the vendors get the economies of scale because they can feed back into the system faster than anybody else. Rather than taking a snowflake approach, you're taking a volume approach and they can feed back, for example, artificial intelligence in operational efficiency, in security. There's many, many opportunities for vendors to push down into the marketplace those findings. And those, those vendors can be cloud vendors as well. If you look at Microsoft, they can push down into there as your stack, what they're finding in terms of artificial intelligence, in terms of capabilities, they can push those down into, into the enterprise themselves. So the more that they can go up the stack into the database layers, maybe even into the application layers, the higher they can go, the lower the cost, the lower the time to value will be for them to deploy applications using that. All right, so we've very quickly got some great observations on this important dynamic. It's time for action items. So Jim Cabela, let me start with you. What's the action item for this whole notion of hyperscale action item? Jim Cabela. Yeah. The action item for hyperscale is to consider the degree of convergence you require at the lowest level of the system, the edge device. How much of that needs to be converged down to a commoditized component that can be flexible enough that you can develop a wide range of applications on top of that. Excellent, okay, hold on, okay, George Gilbert, action item. Really quickly, you have to determine are you going to keep your legacy system of record database and add like an analytic database on hyperscale infrastructure so that you're not doing a heart and lung transplant on an existing system. If you can do that then, and you can manage the latency between the existing database and calling to the analytic database, that's great. Then there's a little disruption. Otherwise, you have to consider integrating the analytics into a hyperscale ready legacy database. David Vellante, action item. Task like lung management and server provisioning and just generally infrastructure management are non-strategic. So as fast as possible, shift your IT labor resources quote unquote up the stack toward more strategic initiatives whether they're digital initiatives, data orientation and other value producing activities. David, floor your action item. Well, I was just about to say exactly what Dave Vellante just said. So let me focus a little bit more on a step in order to get to that position. I think it's- So Dave, floor your action item. So the action item that I would choose would be that you have to know what your costs are and you have to be able to, as senior management, look at those objectively and say, what is my return on spending all of this money and making the system operate? The more that you can reduce the complexity, buy in a converged systems, hyperconverged systems, hyperscale systems that are going to put that responsibility onto the vendors themselves, the better position you're going to be to really add value to the bottom line of applications that really can start to use all of this capability, advanced analytics that's coming into the marketplace. So I'm going to add an action item before I do a quick summary and I'm just going to assert it. My action item, the relationship that you have with your vendors is going to change. It used to be focused on procurement and reducing the cost of acquisition, increasingly for those high value, high performing, revenue producing, differentiating applications. It's going to be strategic vendor management that implies a whole different range of activities and companies that are going to build their business with technology and digital are going to have to move to a new relationship management framework. All right, so let's summarize today's action item meeting. First off, I want to thank very much George Gilbert, David Floyer here in the studio with me, David, Volante, Ralph Finoz, Jim Cabilis on the phone. Today we talked about enterprise hyperscale. This is part of a continuum that we see happening because the economics of technology are continually to assert themselves in the marketplace since having a significant range of impacts on all venues. When we think about scale economies, we typically think about how many chips we're going to stamp out or how many copies of an operating system is going to be produced. And that still obtains and it's very important, but increasingly users have to focus their attention to how we're going to generate economies out of the IT labor that's necessary to keep the digital businesses running. If we can shift some of those labor costs to other players, then we want to support those technology sets that embed those labor costs directly in the form of technology. So over the next few years, we're going to see the emergence of what we're calling enterprise hyperscale that embeds labor costs directly into hyperscale packaging so that companies can focus more on generating revenue out of technology and spend less time on the integration of work. The implications of that is that the traditional buying process of trying to economize on the time to purchase, the time to get access to the piece parts is going to give way to a broader perspective on time to ultimate value of the application or of the outcome that we seek. And that's going to have a number of implications that CIOs have to worry about. From an external standpoint, it's going to mean valuing technology differently, valuing packaging differently. It means less of a focus on the underlying hardware, more of a focus on this common set of capabilities that allow us to converge applications. So whereas converged technology talked about converging hardware, enterprise hyperscale increasingly is about converging applications against common data so that we can run more complex and interesting workloads and revenue producing workloads without scaling the labor and management costs of those workloads. A second key issue is we have to step back and acknowledge that sometimes the way products go to market and our outcomes or our desires do not align, that there is the residual reality in the marketplace that large numbers of channel partners and vendors have an incentive to try to push more complex technologies that require more integration because it creates a greater need for them and creates margin opportunities. So ensure that as you try to achieve this notion of converged applications and not converged infrastructure necessarily, that you are working with a partner who follows that basic program. And the last thing is I noted a second ago that that is going to require a new approach to thinking about strategic vendor management. For the last 30 years, we've done a phenomenal job of taking cost out of technology by focusing on procurement and trying to drive every single dime out of a purchase that we possibly could. Even if we didn't know what that was going to mean from an ongoing maintenance and integration and risk cost standpoint. What we need to think about now is what will be the cost to the outcome. And not only this outcome, but because we're worried about digital business, future outcomes that are predicated on today's decisions. So the whole concept here is from a relationship management standpoint, the idea of what relationship is going to provide us the best time to value today and streams of time to value in the future. And we have to build our relationships around that. So once again, I want to thank the team. This is Peter Burris. Thanks again for participating or listening to the action item from the Cube Studios in Palo Alto, California. See you next week.


Good morning, John. It may have come to your attention that I do too many things and I've been asked, how do you do it? And I gotta say, I'm not sure I do. I haven't had good answers to that question because I haven't really ever spent a lot of time thinking about it. And also, like, I don't know that I'm super healthy about it. I wouldn't necessarily give people my secrets because I think a lot of them aren't good for me. But just say that there's an unpleasantly long list there, right? It's looking at me and I- I love all the things and I want to do them all and I will. It's just, it's a long list. Like, right now we're already working on Project For Awesome 2017, which is gonna happen right after PodCon, which is a thing that we just finished a crowdfunding campaign for and now have put normal tickets on sale for if you're interested in podcasts, if you like those. I'm working on my creator track. You know, for VidCon, I'm trying to relearn how to play my own music because I'm doing a solo set this year for the first time in a long time. And I'm also prepping for VidCon Australia, which is coming up very fast. I'm trying to help build a guild of internet creators so we can support each other and, like, have a voice together. That's intense. And I just got a cheapo microscope and I've been pointing it at everything. This morning I brought in some leaves from my cherry tree, which is currently infested with aphids to look at with the microscope. And if you don't like bug things, like tiny- lots of tiny bugs, you want to skip to this time code because we're gonna look at those right now. All at the same time on this tree right now, we got every stage of ladybugs. We got the eggs. We got the eggs hatching with the tiny, tiny little larva coming out. We got the much bigger larva because they get bigger and bigger at the more aphids. And I saw one adult, seven-spotted ladybug and I put it on the microscope and it frickin ate aphids while I was staring at it in a mic. It was so cool. And I'm very glad that I get to share it with you. Also, other things are happening, like Nathan Zed just launched his merch on dftba.com, which is partially based on a video he made here on Vlogbrothers, and it sold out in, like, in five minutes. It's very good. We should have printed more shirts and I feel bad. Anyway, I've been thinking about all of this stuff about productivity and doing too many things a lot lately. So here are two unhealthy secrets to my productivity and three healthy ones. First, the unhealthy ones. Number one, I have convinced myself that if I am not using all of the tools I have at my disposal to do the maximum amount of good and, like, give people good jobs, then I am less of a good person than I otherwise could be. And that's maybe a little bit too much pressure. Maybe not. But maybe. And the second one, I intentionally put myself in situations where people who I care about and who I respect rely on me to do things, which is very motivating but also very stressful. Now, for the healthy ones. One, I don't get caught up in doing anything perfectly. I'm not here for the idea of the idea. I just want to try stuff. And if it explodes, it exploded. And, like, I learned. Two, I love giving other people responsibility. I love putting them in difficult situations and saying, figure this out, help me do this. And if they do it wrong or they do it differently from how I would have done it, I don't get mad as long as they're learning. Because there's no way to get good at stuff except to do it and fail and learn. And finally, number three, and this is, I think, for everybody, and this is way bigger and broader than just productivity, I follow and cultivate my own curiosity. I think curiosity is one of the top two or three human characteristics. It's something that I really like about myself and something that I don't mind liking about myself. I want to understand stuff. I want to understand people. Following my curiosity so frequently leads me to better life decisions and better business decisions, but also just feeling better. You're never going to feel bad about your whole life if you, like, loved people and you were curious. I mean, that's kind of all I want. I'm going to get, like, 70 to 90 years fingers crossed. That's all I want. I want to do that for 70 to 90 years. John, I'll see you on Tuesday. You can check out Nathan Zed's new merch at dftba.com. It is currently sold out, but you can pre-order it. And if you are into podcasts and recognize any of these podcasts that we're going to have represented at PodCon, check out PodCon.com.


Hello friends. I am Sanjay Gupta. I welcome you on Sanjay Gupta Tech School. In this video, I'm going to demonstrate you how you can convert lookup relationship into master detail relationship. If you want to follow Salesforce training videos, you can search my name Sanjay Gupta on YouTube and you can follow my YouTube channel. Now coming on to the topic. So I have created a lookup relationship in my previous video. In that relationship, I included two objects, student and book. So I created lookup relationship on book and that was linked into student. Now I'm going to convert this lookup relationship into master detail. So first I'm going to open object manager and searching for the book object because lookup field is created on the book object. So if I scroll down, you can see here the student lookup is created here. So now we need to convert this into master detail relationship. Before that I am going to open my university app. So here you can see student and book both apps are available. So if I open book and click on all. So you can see three records are available here. So if we have existing records and we want to convert lookup relationship into master detail relationship. Then you need to make sure that all the lookup fields on each record, like here a student is populated. So it is not blank. If I open another one. So here you will see it is not populated. So this is blank. So now if we try to convert this lookup relationship into master detail relationship. So we will face an error because in case of master detail relationship, the field should be populated because it is mandatory. So let's try to convert and then we'll see what error comes and then we will resolve it. And if you if you have already populated all the lookups, then that error will not occur. Right, so in in two cases that error will not be coming in the first cases if you don't have any record. Second one is if you have records and the lookup field is populated on each record. In these two cases error will not come but in our case we have record but lookup field is not populated on each of the record. So now if I try to convert the type into master detail relationship. So you will notice that it will show an error. So it is asking for the label and name and other things what you want to change. So you can select as per the requirement. So like lookup filters, sharing setting allow re parenting. So these details are related to master detail relationship. So if you want to change you can then I'm clicking on next. So in case of master detail that field will be visible in form of editable mode on all the records on each profile. Because in case of master detail you need to populate that value that is mandatory. Now I'm clicking on save. So here you can see the error message is available. So you can read it. You cannot create a mass new master detail relationship on an existing custom objective records already exist. Right. You must create you must first create a lookup relationship. Populate the lookup field with data in all records and then change the relationship type to master detail. So we need to populate all the lookup fields. Then we can convert this relationship. So let me populate this. So I think now we have all the records populated lookup field. So now if we try same thing again putting on change field type. Selecting master detail clicking on next and clicking on save. So this time you will not face that error and you will see your lookup is converted into master. Here it is and all on the records you will notice that a required indication will be available. Because in case of master detail you need to populate that field. So right now it is required. So if we try to create new book record then that mark will be available. Yeah. Here it is. You can see that stress. So it is indicating that the student is required. So you need to populate it and then you can save the record without populating this you cannot create the record. So I think you understood how we can convert lookup into master detail. So there are three scenarios. First is if you don't have any record then lookup will be converted into master detail normally. If you have records existing reports and all the lookups are populated in each record then also your lookup will be converted into master detail normally. In third case if you have records but lookup field is not populated on all the records then error will come. So you need to first populate them then you can convert lookup into master detail. So I hope you understood how we can convert lookup into master detail and what are the scenarios. If you want to follow salesforce training videos you can search me on YouTube and follow my channel. Thank you for watching this video.


Pulses are not just for adults, but also for kids. Clearly, kids know a lot, and there is a lot to love about pulses. They are healthy, environmentally friendly, affordable, and delicious. So on this World Pulses Day, let's all celebrate what it is that makes pulses so special to each of us. My favorites are chickpeas.


Lieutenant Rice, take one. I packed up my bags, moved across the country from California all the way to Virginia to report to my first ship, which, you know, there's nothing more exciting. I get there, and, you know, you meet the wardroom. You're so exciting, because, you know, I don't have any family out here, so this is your new family. Your ship is your family. You're ready to get totally invested in it. We were going into the dry dock, and the ship's out of the water. You know, you stand watches there. There's a lot of people you don't know coming and going, working on the ship. And at that time, the ship I was on, the cruiser, it was only, it was all male enlisted, so there was only female officers. There were about five of us in total, not that many, right? So when we were standing our watches on the quarter deck, there would be great interest. Oh, it's one of the female officers, you know. I guess it's interesting when, you know, it's kind of a commodity to see a female officer in an area we get noticed. But I would look back on some of my classes and think, like, wow, this is really weird that some of the people that see us are kind of memorizing our, you know, watch, you know, what days we have duty, you know, what, there's a lot of interest in the females on the ship. It's just kind of a weird situation, and this haunts me to this day. I remember saying something to the other girls on the ship, because it just seemed like all the, everything I'd learned in my class, all the pieces were there to put us in a situation where we could be preyed upon. It just, it just didn't feel right. And I didn't say anything to the chain of command, because nothing had actually happened.  And this was seven years ago. But then sure enough, about a week later, I got a call, it was early on a Friday morning, it was about 5 a.m. just before I would have gotten up to go to the ship. And one of my fellow officers on the ship called me and said, hey, Veronica, you need to come outside. And so I'm like, oh, this is weird, so I just, you know, have a sleep outside. And so I go outside like, hey, you know, why are you at my apartment at five in the morning? And then one day, you need to go get some clothes on, because we need to go to the hospital because one of the other female on the ship has been raped. So I guess it was her duty day, and she was doing a tour of the ship right before she was supposed to take the OD watch like they tell you to do.  It was one of the hardest things I've ever gone through. I remember, I can't remember if it was a couple days after that incident, it was probably the next Monday, because this happened on a Friday. I was supposed to, I think I was supposed to have duty that day, and I was supposed to stand officer of the deck watch, where you're on the quarter deck, you have your little nine millimeter, and you kind of monitor people coming and going from the ship. And I remember I was just overcome. I couldn't fathom the idea of standing out there and watching people walk by, knowing that one of the guys walking by was probably the guy that did this to my friend. I was mad because, you know, there wasn't ever going to be justice because they weren't going to find the individual. So I did what I could do for her, I'd go visit her all the time and try to help her through it as much as I could, but she was always still having a lot of difficulty. It did inspire me to be something I'm always thinking about. I did recently go through the Navy's new credentialing program for SAPRA victim advocates, which I would encourage more people, volunteer at the commands to do, only because if it's something I can do to be there and help someone else out, I would be more than happy to because I just can't imagine not wanting to help someone that needs help like that, especially after seeing what my friend went through, you know, they're not thinking, they don't remember stuff, they don't comprehend things anymore, they're just trying to remember why they're waking up every day. And they really need someone to stand there and say, I'm here to support you.