So welcome to another episode of China is not our enemy. And this time we're gonna talk about this existential threat that doesn't seem to be mentioned as the US is aggressing on China and spreading lies and using China as an excuse to increase the military budget even after they are pulling out of Iraq and Afghanistan the military budget three times what it was when Bush used lies to take us into the Iraq war. That's why we're our coup pink. He used the color coded alerts, orange, red and yellow to frighten the American people into voting for war on an innocent country. And we could pink as we look out at what's happening now it feels very familiar. It feels like a lot of lies, a lot of fear mongering to increase the military budget, to increase the money that goes to these weapons manufacturers that continue to pay off members of Congress so they'll vote for more war. And yet when we're talking about China we're talking about two nuclear powers we're talking about an existential threat to life on the planet. And today our guest is Daniel Hirsch. He's the former director of the program on environmental and nuclear policy at the University of California, Santa Cruz and he's president of the committee to bridge the cap a nuclear policy organization. But I know Dan from his brilliant work back in the 90s that stopped nuclear waste from being disposed of in the Colorado River at the time I was on the board of Americans for a Safe Future and I got to watch not only his brilliance but his ferocity on this issue. So Dan, before we move forward tell us a little more about your work at committee to bridge the gap and these many decades of work that you've spent making us smarter about nuclear weapons, nuclear waste thank you for joining. Thank you for having me. Bridge the gap last year celebrated its 50th anniversary half a century of work and I've been involved with it since its inception. So we were founded at the time that Nixon invaded Cambodia and students around the country demonstrated and the National Guard fired on and killed students at Kent State and then shortly thereafter which we often forget at a historically black college, Jackson State killing people as well. So campuses shut down and the whole purpose was to get students and young people into the community to quote unquote bridge the generation gap to be able to change people's minds about what the war in Vietnam was about in order to try to stop the war. And I worked with bridge the gap on that until the war finally ended in 1975.  And I've been involved in that fight and bridge the gap has been ever since and a few of the fights that we were involved in just to give you a couple of examples. I was teaching at UCLA in 1979 when a reactor in Pennsylvania called the Three Mile Island reactor melted down. And students working with us wanted to investigate nuclear activity in Los Angeles. And I said, sure, and figuring they wouldn't find anything of importance. And within a few weeks they discovered that there'd been a partial nuclear meltdown in the LA area at a place that is just overlooking the West San Fernando Valley and CME Valley kept secret for 20 years till we discovered it. That there was a radioactive waste dump off the ocean at Point Barneamy, 50 other dump sites around the country leaking. And to really embarrass me, they discovered that there was a nuclear reactor operating in the classroom building next to mine, leaking radioactive gas into our building at hundreds of times the legal limit. And to make matters very much worse that they were storing five nuclear bombs worth of weapons grade uranium in a filing cabinet. Security no better than the campus bowling alley. And so each of those fights has taken a long time.  We were able to get bomb grade uranium banned from use in most research reactors around the country and the export of it prohibited to a large degree internationally. We were able to help shut down permanently ban internationally the dumping of radioactive waste into the ocean. And as you say, some years later, we helped fight a proposal to build a nuclear waste dump for long-lived radioactive waste from reactors in online trenches close to the Colorado River that could have polluted the main water source for the Southwest for thousands of generations. And you played a really major role in that extraordinary victory. So my life has been spent fighting this nuclear risk. And although we've been able to have some victories and diminish the risk, the risk remains absolutely huge. Thank you. And wow, 50 years.  Well, I have not noticed any of your brain cells getting any less. I've just watched you become more brilliant and more effective. And, you know, it's interesting that bridging the gap because we're still trying to bridge a gap, you know, we're working on that a good pink because we've got, you know, young people coming of age that have just lived, you know, in war. You know, we think back to, you know, when we were into our activists, it was, you know, beyond imagination, what was happening. And here it's what the only thing they've known. So I believe we still have gaps to bridge. And also, you know, we remember getting, you know, sent under our desks in fear. And that's not something also this generation experienced. I was growing up initially in St. Louis, the United States and the Soviet Union. We're blowing up nuclear bombs in the atmosphere. For the U.S., some were in the Pacific and some in Nevada.  And in St. Louis, you may recall, a group of scientists decided to challenge the claims made by the Atomic Energy Commission that there was no risk from this fallout. It was the strontium 90 from what they called sunshine units. And so these scientists created a project whereby parents around the country would collect their children's baby teeth.  And so the parents would collect the teeth and send them to these scientists who had monitored them for strontium 90 and finding huge amounts concentrating in the teeth. If they concentrated in the teeth, they concentrated in the bone, causing bone cancer, leukemia, and those revelations helped contribute to the partial test ban treaty in the early 60s banning atmospheric tests. So it's a long history and young folks don't know some of it, but the risks that we face today are as great or greater than the risks at the height of the Cold War. The addiction to weapons of destruction, particularly weapons of mass destruction and the game playing in which one tries to show how much testosterone one has basically by rattling nuclear sabers leads us always to the potential for miscalculation and for those weapons going off. There are roughly 10,000 give or take nuclear weapons in the world, large fraction of those being American. And if just a hundred, quote, just a hundred of them were used in a war if India and Pakistan miscalculated and the war was created in Israel with its several hundred ended up using them. If a conflict between the United States and Russia or a conflict between the United States and China were to evolve with the mistakes that always occur in the lead up to war, just about a hundred of those weapons going off anywhere in the world could end up essentially ending most life on the planet because of producing nuclear winter, tossing so much dirt into the atmosphere that the sun has blocked out and we freeze and agriculture stops and people starve. And because we don't think about it doesn't mean that that risk isn't there. Well, and I thank you for spending your life raising us and making us aware of that risk. You didn't mention the number of warheads out there. And what's interesting is the US is afraid of China but the US has 5,800 warheads as of last August with China only at 320. I've actually seen figures that they were in the low 200s but in terms of nuclear weapons, it makes no difference. The United States has something on the order of 20 times than any nuclear weapons in China. And I don't think it's, I mean, I happen to believe that we should abolish nuclear weapons. I don't think it's right for any nation to have them. I'm also particularly concerned about any subnational group. If someone had walked into the UCLA reactor and wheeled off that filing cabinet, they would have the ability to build five of them. And that stuff is just all over the place. Every commercial nuclear power plant produces enough plutonium each year for something on the order of 100 nuclear bombs. And plutonium has a half-life of 24,000 years. It's gonna be round and dangerous for an extraordinary long period of time. So I don't think anybody should have them. There was a Catholic Bishop many years ago who said that having a nuclear weapon is a mortal sin. And I think that's true individually. It's true collectively. So yes, at the same time that we're saber-rattling about countries like China that have far fewer than we, we aren't willing to look at ourselves. It's the old business of pointing to the splinter in someone else's eye and refusing to notice the beam that's in our own. The first, and fortunately so far, only nuclear weapons that have been used were used by our country against civilian populations that were purposely kept from regular bombing because we wanted to study the effects of a nuclear weapon on large civilian population. Now that has all sorts of specific reasons to it associated with the Second World War, but the reality remains that we have to a very large extent driven the arms race and that arms race continues to be driven as we quote unquote modernized nuclear weapons making them much more likely to be used. Yeah, I mean, the other thing that we've learned in the process of this campaign is that a million people have died in the testing of nuclear weapons. And I was raised in Las Vegas, Nevada. Oh no. And I was born in the early 50s and my grandmother, my mother, both had thyroid cancer. I had thyroid cancer and my dear friend, Terry Tempest Williams, her family lived up the north of where we were which is where the wind was blowing and all her family, many, many members of her family died from cancer, from the fallout of that testing where my family can tell you they were told it was so safe that they could sit on a hill and have a picnic and watch. And the thing is, it's not that the people who said that simply didn't know and we now know more. One of the things Bridge the Gap did some years ago, many years ago is that we investigated the third US nuclear weapons laboratory. People only know about two publicly, Los Alamos and Livermore, which had been operated initially entirely by the University of California now still partially by the University of California since their inception. But there was a third laboratory that was based at UCLA in Westwood that no one knew about. It was involved in the monitoring and studying of radiation effects from the tests and in particular the Nevada tests. And one of the amazing documents that we uncovered was that UCLA in one of its own reports for the Atomic Energy Commission said that they could reduce the number of cancers in places like St. George, Utah which were downwind of the Nevada tests we call the people who were hurt downwinders could dramatically reduce the risk of cancer for them if when simply informed them in advance of a nuclear weapons test so that they could put cattle, for example, on stored grain rather than eating the grass that would have gotten the fallout. And they were told to shut up by the Atomic Energy Commission and these people who were based at the medical school by the way decided to keep quiet about something that they knew was going to kill innocent Americans. Ouch. Well, okay, so here we are talking about the double standard. We have our good friends at the Chow Collective had a tweet recently where they said US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken revived the G7s call to protect US hegemony and take an aggressive stance on China under the guide protecting a rules-based order. But this begs the question, who's rules-based order? The US is quiet ascent to Japan's plans to release nuclear contaminated wastewater from Fukushima into the Pacific amidst criticism from Korea, China, Fiji and beyond speaks to who this rules-based system works for. What is it? What are we talking about when Japan's allowed to release into the ocean this waste? Well, you call it wastewater, but it's vastly worse than that. So let's talk about it for a moment. The three Fukushima reactors that melted down and each of them then blown apart by a hydrogen explosion. You may remember this extraordinary thing that we all were watching on television when one reactor would then blow up and then a while later the second one would blow up and the third one would blow up. You don't want nuclear fuel to melt. The reason for that is because it's intensely radioactive. Each nuclear power plant, Fukushima or Diablo Canyon in California contains within it when it's operating about a thousand times the long live radioactivity of the Hiroshima bomb. And the only way that radioactivity doesn't get out to people is if the fuel remains solid. If the fuel melts, many of those radionuclides, iodine, you mentioned thyroid cancer, iodine goes to the thyroid produces thyroid cancer. Strontium 90, which we discussed goes to the bone causing bone cancer and leukemia. Cesium 137 can irradiate at any part of the body. Those radionuclides and many others are what are called volatile, meaning that at high temperatures they move from being a solid into a gas. They're just released out. They recondensed and then they fall out over very large areas where they can concentrate in the food chain and then in people. So that fuel melted, that radioactivity is no longer contained within that fuel. And to try to control it, they have to keep running water over it to try to cool it. The problem about that is that the water then picks up the radioactivity and they've been storing, quote unquote, temporarily immense quantities of very, very radioactive water in these storage tanks. And rather than build more or find some way of trying to recycle it or facing the fact that what they're about to do could cause great deal damage, the same company, TEPCO, that brought us the meltdowns now wants to release that very radioactive water into the ocean. And they say it'll be safe. They say, don't worry, trust us. Same people who told us trust them and ended up having three reactors meltdown because they were designed with safety corners cut. They didn't have large containment structures. They weren't designed to withstand the large earthquake, let alone the tsunami. So the same people who brought us the meltdown are now saying trust us, we can dump this into the ocean safely. And it's a little bit technical, but I would like to explain that they claim that they will have filtered all the radioactivity out of the water with the exception of tritium. Tritium is radioactive hydrogen. So it becomes radioactive water and you can't filter water out of water. So they're gonna dump the radioactive water into the ocean, but the problem is several years ago they had promised that they had already cleaned that water and removed everything but the tritium. And it turned out they had lied about that just as they had lied about the earlier problems that led to the meltdown. There was lots of other stuff still in that water, the strontium, the cesium, the plutonium. And so I spent years trying to ban the practice of dumping radioactive waste in the ocean. As I said, there are 50 dump sites around the United States in off the Atlantic, Pacific and the Gulf Coast where we simply went out with boats and dumped barrels and subsequent studies found, of course the barrels get breached fairly quickly, the radioactivity gets out and it concentrates in the food chain. Small organisms will ingest the radioactivity, larger fish will then eat those, others will eat those. Then of course at the end of the chain is us. So what we dump in the ocean comes back to us. The oceans connect all of us, right? The continents are tied together by the seas and it's not like a place where you dump it and it goes away. You're dumping it into water, which is first of all one of the things you're trying to avoid, and into a living ecosystem where the radioactivity tends to concentrate. So it's a grossly responsible thing on the part of the Japanese government and industry to want to dump that in the ocean. And although we were able to ban the practice of dumping radioactive waste in containers into the ocean, they're about to now dump it without containers into the ocean. One other factor is that Fukushima was built next to the ocean because they wanted the cooling water and in back of it there are hills. So the groundwater comes from behind the reactors through the melted cores towards the ocean. So it's not just the cooling water got contaminated but the groundwater is constantly getting contaminated. They tried to do some Rube Goldberg technology of trying to freeze the water in the ground above the Fukushima reactor to make a barrier which is not working very well. So look, it is horribly ironic that the first nation on earth to suffer from the nuclear fixation that we got into is now a country suffering terribly from results of other parts of that nuclear technology. But what we need to do, not just the Japanese but all countries is to recognize this was a completely foolhardy enterprise. The idea of tapping the atom sounds great. As a child, love the idea. Einstein was discovering the secrets of the universe and harnessing them to help humankind. But in reality, the only safe nuclear source needs to have a very large exclusion zone, the distance between it and people for safety. And that distance is approximately 93 million miles. The only safe nuclear device is God which gives us the good and the bad every day free, far more energy than we could possibly use. And it's just hubris. And Joey, one of the main reasons for all of this, as you know, is that in the early 1950s, Eisenhower, President Eisenhower needed to calm the public down about their fears about nuclear weapons. So he created a program called Atoms for Peace. I mean, George Orwell must have been hired as a scriptwriter for this. And we gave to scores of countries around the world, sensitive nuclear technology, how to reprocess to get plutonium out, how to enrich, to get weapons grade uranium. And reactors were built all over, in part as a PR stunt to try to get people to not be as frightened about the bomb. And this was just an immense, immense mistake. It produces radioactive waste that's dangerous for half a million years, future generations, if there are any, given what we're doing, are gonna curse us. How could we have been so irresponsible to produce waste that is dangerous for thousands and thousands of generations? It proliferates nuclear weapons. And if they are used, not only will massive numbers of people be killed instantaneously, but as I indicated from nuclear winter and also from fallout, you could end the vast proportion of life on this planet. And it was a sign of, you know that old Star Trek joke, you know, Kirk beams down to earth and calls up to the ship saying, beam me up, Scotty, there's no intelligent life down here. We behave as though there's no intelligent life down here. We've been given a gorgeous planet. All that's expected of us as human beings is to protect it. Instead, we seem to be constantly trying to blow it up or pollute it. Yes, unfortunately, but I mean, the fact that the US is allowing Japan to dump this waste so that they'll be their partners in a really, you know, legal insane March to War on China is beyond shameful, just beyond shameful. The US State Department issued a statement, very carefully crafted, saying that the Japanese dumping of this radioactive water into the ocean seemed to meet international standards. Now, anyone who read that knew exactly what was being said. A, we all know those standards are ridiculously not protected, but most important, we were kind of giving a pass to the Japanese so they would do various favors for us. You point out to what we're trying to maneuver between us and Japan related to China. Part of this also has to do with a desire to try to have Japan on board on some of the climate change stuff that Biden wants, which is good stuff in part, but you don't do bad things to get it. And it reminds me again of Orwell. You'll remember in 1984, there were three massive world powers always at war and just every once in a while, it was time to change partners or to change enemies again. We have an economy that's built on war. We have massive companies that manufacture these weapons of destruction and they can't make that profit unless there's somebody and to potentially have to use them against and some tension. Now, that doesn't mean there aren't real disagreements between countries and that doesn't mean that our adversaries are angels. It does mean that we aren't angels and that we need to be behaving in a way that doesn't keep dancing close to the edge of massive destruction. Or the extinction of a planet. That's what this is really close to. I mean, and also in what you're saying, I mean, China is leading on a commitment to become carbon neutral, I think by like 2060. Their commitments and what they're doing to protect the planet has capitalists and Bloomberg freaked out. It's part of why they wanna undermine them because China's making the rest of the world look bad and once it turns around and puts its efforts at something it can actually make it happen like eradicating all poverty. So if China sees a problem and it's like the planet wants them to deal with it they put their intelligence and their energy towards it and they don't need to dump nuclear waste in the ocean to pollute, to get there. But I mean, when you talk about that and you look at the countries that are saying no Korea, China, Fiji and all those islands it's also again, like we were doing around Word Valley it's the indigenous people it's the people whose voices aren't listened to who are screaming no. And it's the US that continues to just write over them. I mean, we have one of the things we're trying to do is stop this face they're trying to build in Okinawa and 85% of Okinawa has said no and the US doesn't care. So like you say, yeah, it's the industry that drives the engine of the US is the war industry. But also one of the things is that China has a no first use policy that the US won't adopt. What do you think about that? I mean, we should have no policy use but that you won't even adopt and no first use policy shameful too. Right, let me respond to a couple of things and then deal with first use if I can. You're absolutely right that the Chinese have been doing magnificent things in renewables and one of the ironies right now with the Biden administration proposals is that the administration views China's head start on matters related to electric cars and windmills and batteries as a potential threat because they want those devices built here to produce jobs here. And in some sense, what happens to the planet ought to come first. I do have to say that China also is doing things that I think if you and I were there we would be critical of as well which is heavy reliance on coal building more and more coal plants. So- He made a commitment with the last gathering to pull an end to that. And if you watch the conversations in China right now it's a commitment to figure out how to get off coal which is- I think it's admirable but at the same time they are still building new plants and I think we need to be able to say when a country is doing really great things which they are doing in renewables and when they need to be faster about trying to move away from carbon. On the issue of first use and first strike to explain that for your audience one of the difficulties of nuclear weapons is that it creates a tremendous pressure to use them or lose them. If your adversary either has a spoken policy or a unspoken policy of targeting your adversaries weapons so that you hit them first so they are disarmed and therefore can't retaliate then the other country has to move to a hair trigger alert. A submarine launch nuclear weapon off the east or west coast of the United States would arrive within minutes and ICBM would arrive from Russia for example in less than half an hour. So you have very little time in the middle of the night let us say for a president to be able to decide whether or not to launch weapons first because they could be destroyed if he or she doesn't or to write it out and potentially get disarmed. And it's exceedingly dangerous. We've had numerous instances where our radars pick up what we think is an incoming set of missiles. They turn out to be geese. They turn out to be that someone had put a training tape into for an exercise and people thought it was real. The world has gotten awfully close to nuclear war based on those kinds of miscalculations. So many of us have pushed for the United States to publicly take a first and no first use and no first strike policy. The first use the distinction is first use means we would use nuclear weapons first in certain circumstances let's say in Europe if there were a Russian conventional attack because in at least earlier years we didn't have sufficient forces that were conventional to beat them. So whether the Russians had used nuclear weapons against us or not we were gonna use nuclear weapons against them. I had a very dear friend died some years ago Ted Taylor who had been a nuclear weapons designer in his early years and then became an amazingly strong critic of our policies and Ted had designed in the 1950s what was then the physically smallest nuclear weapon in the U.S. arsenal called the Davy Crockett. It was small enough that it was a backpack bomb. It could be fired from a howitzer and we had hundreds of these things to be used in Europe to blow up supposedly bridges or small masses of massing troops. And the idea that you would use nuclear weapons not to retaliate against a nuclear attack which is supposedly the only rationale that we're given that was deterrence but we actually had as our policy for decades and not merely to use them in retaliation but to use them first if we felt we were losing a conventional war. So it's very important not merely that the United States take a public policy of no first strike we won't launch ours first to try to kill their weapons and no first use we won't use nuclear weapons when nuclear weapons haven't been used against us. But the problem is you can say anything publicly as a policy you would still probably have the very great risk that the secret policies to do first strike and first use.  And that would be to take our weapons off of alert. We have plenty of weapons that would survive a first strike that you can't hit nuclear submarines. It's ridiculous to have a land-based stationary missiles which we have large numbers of the ICBMs they're sitting ducks. So the many things we can do the things that the Chinese can do to provide greater assurance that the policy that they have is actually being carried out. And what most is important is for all countries with nuclear weapons to start moving aggressively towards dismantling them converting these nuclear swords into plushies. Well, yes, I mean, we think back to the 80s and we were pretty successful then. What do you think is missing right now? I mean, this weekend mass peace action one of our partners is having a conference about prohibiting first use of nuclear weapons and some of the things you're talking about right now actually Carly and Medea from our team are speaking there. And I think Madison will link in the chat how people can attend. But, you know, what I remembered in the 80s when we were super active and it was part of how we thought and we've lost something in our thinking that I wish I could understand. What do you think about that? Well, we coexisted over the same periods of time and have very much the same experience in the early 1980s when Reagan was getting as closer and closer to a real nuclear war. There was a national movement for a nuclear weapons freeze and I was the press officer for the California freeze. And we did press conference after press conference bringing in significant moral leaders, you know, religious leaders, Nobel Prize winning physicists to warn the public about what this really means. And in some sense, Reagan's nuclear saber rattling also provided a wake-up call for people who were worried about that. We've gone through so many years now where we've gotten used to it. You know, Khrushchev supposedly said it during the Cuban Missile Crisis about the missiles he'd put into Cuba that the United States is like a farmer who initially doesn't like having the pigs in the house but eventually gets used to the smell. We've gotten used to the smell of nuclear weapons. We are, you know, submarine sailors sleep in cots next to these nuclear warheads that can single one of which can take out a city. We somehow are sleeping next to these weapons of mass destruction and are sleeping through this great risk. And, you know, until you get to the point where there's a miscalculation, you don't fear it, but the problem is a miscalculation doesn't end up always as people pulling back. During the Cuban Missile Crisis, I don't know if you know this, it's an amazing figure. President Kennedy, let me back up. You remember that what happened is the United States had helped invade Cuba within the Bay of Pigs. And a year later, the Soviets provided or started to provide nuclear weapons to Cuba to try to prevent a subsequent invasion.  We didn't think nuclear weapons had actually gotten to Cuba so we thought we could try to block it without creating the risk that they could be used. And McNamara, the Secretary of Defense, said it didn't matter whether they were in Cuba or in a submarine off of Washington, it was the same risk. But Kennedy was having his manhood challenge in this in front of the public shortly before a midterm election. So there were two famous telegrams that were sent cables by Khrushchev in the midst of the crisis. First one said, I offered to withdraw weapons from Cuba if you will promise to never invade Cuba again. And then a few hours later, a second cable came in which added a second condition, which is, and if you will withdraw your missiles from Turkey, which are right up against our border, you don't like them 90 miles away in Cuba, we don't like them so close to us in Turkey, let's mutually pull back. Kennedy was furious for two reasons. One was because he thought the entire world would think it was a very reasonable proposal and it was, he knew. And secondly, he had repeatedly ordered in the previous year that the missiles we removed from Turkey because they were obsolete and provocative. But the military didn't do it. And so Kennedy felt, and this is the amazing part of it, he estimated that the Cuban missile crisis at his peak that there was a between a one in three and a 50-50 chance of all-out nuclear war. We were gonna stop Soviet ships on the open sea in active war. And they might fight back and leading to the use of nuclear weapons on both sides. He thought there was a one in three to 50-50 chance of all-out nuclear war, but he felt he could not publicly accept Khrushchev's offer because it would make him look weak before the midterm elections. He said, if we do this, we'll get killed in the elections. Think about it, 50-50 chance of all-out nuclear war, real deaths, tens, hundreds of millions of people versus getting killed in a midterm election. And in the end, and I don't think most people know this, and I'm not a fan of Khrushchev's, but this is an amazing thing that he did. Khrushchev agreed to a secret deal in which they would in fact remove the weapons from Turkey a year or two later so that Kennedy would maintain face. And the conflict ended and Khrushchev was then removed from office by the polar period. He saved Khrushchev of all people, saved the planet by being willing to back down and be humiliated. But think about it, 50-50 chance of all-out nuclear war and he couldn't go with a solution he knew was reasonable for something he had already ordered before because his manhood would be questioned in the election. Yeah, which is just what you've said is our concerns right now, that the decisions that the US continues to make are about imperialism, are about, I mean, even you hear Biden and Blinken speaking, like we wanna be head of the table. Head of the table, like that's hegemony, like talking about democracy while talking about authoritarianism, they're double speak, they're double standards are frightening because of what choices they would make. And we look at a country where China they're trying to do the right thing for the people and we're spending all this money on weapons, the same amount of money, I think it's spent on, less money than was spent on one airplane in the US military budget was spent to take 100 million people out of poverty in China. It's where are the values is quite scary and I see we've gone on way farther longer than I'd expected, but I just wanna say if you have any closing remarks, this has been so helpful and so useful as we recognize the seriousness of this aggression on China that China, we don't want China to be, the China is not our enemy, they need to be cooperated with. And I mean, I think that's what's missing and what you said earlier that the use of weapons is insane and immoral. And what we need to all be learning is how do you be in relationship and make the right decisions for all the people on the planet? So some closing remarks. Well, during the midst of the Vietnam War I was a student in college and while the bombers were dropping bombs on peasants in Vietnam and dropping napalm on children, we would go to a large football stadium called Soldiers Field, ironically, and we would shout, kill them, kill them, smash them, break their bones. We're taught from a very early age to hate the other and that violence is almost holy. And all I could think of during those football games is the bombers dropping the bombs and the napalm on the kid's skin. Lincoln said in one speech he had given regarding Senator Douglas, you know, that they had these famous debates and in one of his speeches, he said that Senator Judge Douglas, he called them, I guess he hadn't become Senator yet. Judge Douglas is quite sensitive enough to the lash on his own back, but curiously insensitive to the lash on the back of another. But we as people have to do is to be able to feel that lash on the back of a slave, feel the hunger of someone in another country, feel the right of another country and the pride of another country to have risen out of poverty at great, great cost and with great difficulty. And rather than viewing some other nation's success as a threat to us, find a way realistically knowing that there are people everywhere who are trouble as well as people everywhere who are helpful. But find a way where these ideas that we as human beings are somehow separate from each other by the nature of the color of our skin, the amount of melanin in the skin, the language that we speak and understand that not only are we all one people, but we're on a very tiny planet as was said long ago. It's we're traveling in a tiny spaceship called Earth and we can't afford to blow it up. So I wanna be realistic. There are troubles everywhere. There are things to resist everywhere, but the world if it's gonna survive has got to survive by cooperation and the most important thing has got to do is eliminate these existential threats, threats to the existence of us and other species. And the two primary existential threats are nuclear and carbon, greenhouse gases, climate change. And we can't solve either of those problems on our own. We have to do that as a planet and we have to stop putting the planet at risk by our own actions. Thank you for reminding us that. And then I just wanna take us back to home. And one of the things that we've already seen from this aggression and lies and fear mongering towards China is lives lost at home here in the United States. It's increases that culture of violence you talk about the xenophobia here, the loss of life in Atlanta, the over 3,000 acts of violence against Asians in our own country. So it's ironic that even some of the, many of these figures who are making relatively decent statements about gun control don't seem to understand the connection between their desires that people not wander down a street with a military weapon attached to their belt when they want to walk down the street with a hydrogen bomb. They're behaving in a very similar fashion by placing a very much larger number of people at risk. You remember Eisenhower in that famous speech says something to the fact that every bomber built, every missile fabricated is a theft in a real way from the people who hunger and don't have food from the people who are homeless and don't have housing. And we forget that there are multiple costs to this addiction that we have to weapons. We create a culture of killing. So people, kids are getting shot in schools, it permeates the entire society, but it also diverts money that's absolutely essential to feeding the hungry, housing the homeless and violating every principle that we claim to have, those of us who are religious and those of us who aren't. We won't put a mirror up to our face and see that these things are contrary to fundamental principles of a decent society. So yes, someone wandering around with assault rifle is really troubling, but we as a nation are wandering around with assault weapons to the nth power in terms of nuclear weapons. And as a society, we and the rest of the world are killing vast numbers of people in the future because of all the carbon we're putting out. Someday, you and I, our work hopefully will have diminished this in everyone who's listening, but we can't sit idly by because it will not stop unless people work hard. Thank you. I mean, so beautifully said. We will be clipping those into tweets tomorrow. I just wanna thank the team, the Kudping team, Mary and Madison who have had our backs through this. Thank you, Mary. Thank you, Madison. There's Mary, yay, Mary. And Madison who runs this campaign that China is not our enemy campaign. And I see we have a lot of our team, Alice Slater from New York City who's I think a big Dan fan is also there making comments. But just to the engagement part, Madison's been putting things in the chat. As Dan said, we've gotta be acting to stop this budget, this Biden budget that is an increase in the military and 30 billion of it for nuclear weapons. And that doesn't even include the 20 that's hidden for more nuclear weapons. So that's in the chat. You can follow us at China's Not Our Enemy on Twitter. There's a conference this weekend that Kudpingers are speaking at. And then we've gotta back Congress down on the Strategic Competition Act because we need strategic cooperation, not aggressive competition that calls out China as an enemy. It's that violence starts at home and it's already started. And you can join our next webinar where Madison will be talking to doctors soon to a professor here in the United States who's Chinese to talk about his experience of being an educator in the US. So deepest gratitude, Dan, for being with us today, for all you do, for the, see, I told you that, the ferociousness and the brilliance of your voice. Please, everyone, we have a lot of work to do. Thank you for being with us. Share this, Dan's words are succinct and let's get them to go further. We need to go back to like, this is not okay. We just cannot allow this, not okay. Immoral, illegal, unconstitutional wrong. Thank you, Dan. Thank you. Thanks team, onward to peace.


from our studios in the heart of Silicon Valley, Palo Alto, California, this is a CUBE Conversation. Okay, welcome back everyone. We're here in Palo Alto, California at the CUBE Studios. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE for a special CUBE Conversation, a preview of the upcoming CUBECon cloud native con in San Diego where the CUBE will be there, as well as a bunch of other folks. The new stack will be there. A lot of other media produces as well as the big conference CUBECon in its fourth or fiftieth year, depending on what year you count. It's a super exciting conference. This is where the Kubernetes and the cloud native communities come together to set the agenda to talk about all the great things that are going on in the industry and how it's changing tech for good. We're here with Vicky Chung, who is the co-chair and also a software engineer manager at Lyft. Vicky, great to see you. Thanks for coming in. Thanks for having me. So I'm so proud of CUBECon and the community because when we were there at the early days when it was kind of forming and created, there was a big vision that it would play a critical role. A lot of people haven't really kind of seen how big it's become. It's really become so important that the big companies are now moving towards open source. The CNC has been very successful, both on getting vendors in and user projects. You're setting the agenda. You're setting the table for this year's CUBECon. Yeah. Tell us what's going on. Yeah, I think we're seeing the maturity of the community coming together and sort of continuing on this trend where as you said, the adoption is sort of growing exponentially. I think two years ago, if you survey the room and ask people who is using Kubernetes and Docker in production, you maybe get like a hand. I think you're seeing this thing where this trend where this year, I think if you survey the room, it'd be like maybe half the room or like raising their hand. And the acceleration is interesting. I mean, huge acceleration of the adoption of Kubernetes and other projects. And I think what's interesting to me and I think the commentary that we've been reporting on is that Kubernetes can be that unifying point. You're seeing this de facto standard emerging. And a lot of people are talking about that de facto and that has accelerated the production use cases. So the end user projects are increasing. Is that going to be a focus, main focus of this year's CUBECon? Oh yeah, definitely. I think we're seeing maybe even like last year, we've had a lot of end user talks from early adopters startups, maybe like tech giants. But this year, we're seeing a lot more sort of like enterprise use cases and that's driving a lot of the content as well. So I think when it comes to enterprise use cases, we're seeing a lot of talks around security and governance. We're seeing a lot of developer productivity talks and we're also seeing a lot more focus on how to scale operations. So take me through the focus this year. Just let's get this out on the table because this is a big event. What can people expect this year when you guys sat in the room with the teams and said, okay, here's going to be the content agenda. We have a format that's not broken. Let's not fix what's not broken. So the format's good. What was the focus? What was this year's focus? Why is, what's going to be the focus of this year's CUBECon? Yeah, I think, so Brian and I, when we sit together, we have all the tracks that we've been using for the last couple of years and generally we sort of like stick to them because they're like pretty, pretty good. But the way we, I think the interesting thing is we sort of see over the years how the distribution across the tracks have changed. So for example, I think this year, operations is like a super big track and it's like very competitive to get into. And that's because we're seeing a lot more adoption at scale in different use cases, different types of companies and yeah, in production. So I think sort of that track has been like a main focus and also I think customizing Kubernetes is another one as people's use cases got more sophisticated. And in the sort of use case track, I think we see a lot more enterprise, like even banks adopting Kubernetes. So essentially the same game as before, but weighting them differently based upon adoption? Exactly, yeah. I think it's sort of a shift like earlier, it would be like maybe a more earlier adopter and sort of like experimental use cases. And now it's like, okay, people are actually going into production now. So the shift has been into like, how do we get this running reliably at scale? So yeah, that's what we're seeing. On terms of the industry, if you look back and again, you guys went public at Lyft and you guys are growing and you guys have a great open source product with Envoy. I'm sure you guys are going to do the day zero thing again this year, last year was a big success. Is there any projects that you see coming out of the woodwork that are going to evolve up and what can people expect in terms of project growth or emerging projects? Is there any indication from your standpoint of what's going to come out of the community? Yeah, I think there's a lot of projects that are growing like your home continues to grow. I think one thing that I'm seeing from this year's content is there's a lot of focus on like OPA. Yeah, like I said, the security is sort of like a growing focus and OPA is certainly like one of the things I think people should expect at this year's conference. Another area that I'm like personally very interested in and I see I'm happy to see it popping up more this year is developer experience and developer productivity as we're even just personally witnessing at Lyft adopting cloud native architecture and microservices and Kubernetes comes with a lot of benefits but also a lot of new challenges into like how people should develop in this ecosystem. So there are projects like telepresidents and tilt that are coming up more and there's a few talks around that in application development as well. How about the developer side? What's the general sentiment in the community these days? If you had to kind of put up a rumor out there, what's the general vibe in the community from a developer standpoint around cloud native and Kubernetes? I think it depends on who you ask. Generally people are very, very excited to be sort of moving in this direction and I think it allows people to be a lot more flexible in how they develop their applications but I also think that there's a lot of open questions that we still have to answer and this is where I guess some of these new projects come in to help fill the gap. Well, first of all, you guys always have a great conference. theCUBE will be there as well as other media producers so it'll be a lot on digital. So folks not going to the event, they should go and see the face to face. I want to get the take on some of the submissions. You guys have an interesting dynamic in CNCF and KubeCon and cloud native con is you have a ton of end user projects, a lot of end user focus obviously, it's an end user focus show but you also have a lot of vendors, suppliers that are also in the community. So you have an interesting balance going on. Talk about some of the numbers in terms of submissions because I know everyone's got submissions. Not everyone gets accepted. Like the operations you mentioned is a hot track. What's some of the numbers? Can you share any kind of statistics around number of submissions versus acceptance? Yeah, I think typically CNCF will publish sort of like some of the numbers in a blog post. So I don't know all the numbers off the top of my head but for example in operations, I think the acceptance rate was maybe less than 10%. I think it wasn't that competitive maybe two years ago but certainly as everyone moves to deploying Kubernetes on their own that's sort of a hot topic. What's the relationship in the community with the big vendors? Obviously you see Amazon, Google, Microsoft are big players in there and they're investing heavily in Kubernetes and VMware as well is also investing. Is that good, bad? Is it just balancing? What's the community's view on the participation of the big guys? Yeah, I think it's actually been really great to the community and I mean I personally would not have expected Microsoft, AWS to be as active in the community as they are now if you asked me five years ago. So I think it's this interesting thing that Kubernetes and CNCF has managed to do is instead of having the tech giants suck out the energy and the technology into their sort of private ecosystem it's sort of been the other way around where Microsoft and AWS and Google have been contributing a lot of the integrations and like other tooling and projects that they've built on top of the projects in CNCF and just enriching the community. So you're saying that they've been pushing more towards open source, not pulling out of it? Yeah, I think that's, I mean obviously I'm like super happy to see that but I think like that was not obvious at all from the beginning. Yeah, it's super exciting. You know we've been traveling the business model evolution and open source is more popular than ever before now and it's growing so fast and changing. Let's talk about the enterprises now because I think you're seeing adoption on the classic IT enterprise moving in. I've, we've interviewed many CISOs, CIOs and practitioners they all have the same kind of reaction. Oh my God, this is so good for our business. Kubernetes and what containers are doing will allow us to manage the lifecycle of our applications at the same time bring in cloud native without a lot of disruption. What's your reaction to that? Are you guys seeing that same dynamic and if so what are some of the use cases of enterprises within KubeCon? Yeah, I think one thing is sort of the earlier pitch is of course it allows you to have that flexibility to move from your data center into hybrid cloud and maybe to like different cloud vendors. So I think that's super appealing but another thing that we're seeing this year is as people adopt it at scale they're also seeing a lot of cost savings from adopting Kubernetes just because it allows them to be a lot more flexible in how they deploy things. I think that, yeah, in general you know, as you move to sort of like a community standard and open source platform it does help your developers a lot because now they don't need to build their own in-house thing which is, you know, for example what Lyft had before Kubernetes. So yeah, I think it's generally a productivity win. Talking about Envoy real quick, while I got you here, Lyft has been involved in donating that project and driving it last year and one of the most notable news at least from our observation was is that the Envoy did that event that day before and it was really popular. Yeah. Is it going to happen again? What's some of the views on that? Yeah, so EnvoyCon is happening again this year right before Kubernetes. Yeah, I think it's even more popular than last year. So there's going to be a lot of talks around, I think running Envoy in, I guess, at scale and also like on top of Kubernetes as people sort of integrate the two technologies more. Okay, so I've got to ask you the personal observations. You can take your co-chair hat off and put your KubeCon community hat on.  What do you think might happen? Because there's always something that goes on that just is a surprise that dark horse if you will comes out of the woodwork. What do you think might happen? Well, I think there's, of course, going to be a few new open source projects that are launched there. And I also think there will be a lot of, maybe more than usual interesting people that people can meet at the conference, so. I heard there's a rumor that the original gangsters or the OGs or the original members, the seven original members are going to be there. Yeah, I don't know. Confirm or deny? I don't know if I can confirm or deny. Okay, that's possibly, we'll be tracking that. All right, final question for you. What do you think will be the most important story for people to pay attention to this year? What do you think is going to be evolving out on the stage, out on the tracks, out on digital? What do you expect to see this year? What are some of the top stories and top notable points that you think is going to happen this year? Yeah, I think one thing that maybe for me and for a lot of people is sort of this message that like Kubernetes is ready. I think it's been sort of building up in this hype for the last few years. And yeah, we've seen adoption, but I think this is truly the year that I see a lot of like enterprise and user use cases. And I can really say that like Kubernetes is ready. So the new criteria is proof points. Scale, operationally seeing some operations, real proof points, customer adoption, enterprise and hyperscalers. Yeah. Vicky, thanks for coming in and sharing this preview on KubeCon, CloudNativeCon. This is theCUBE covering the KubeCon, CloudNativeCon preview with Kichang Co-Chair, who set the agenda with her fellow Co-Chair, Brian Lyles as well. Great to have her on and share upcoming conversation around KubeCon. I'm John Furrier. Thanks for watching.