Okay, so the question is involving cryptocurrency. Okay. I was listening to the CEO of Cardano on Leif Friedman's podcast and recently, and they mentioned something that I had not heard, which is that the country, El Salvador, has officially recognized cryptocurrency as legal tender. And then they were kind of riffing on the idea of, well, is this sort of a foot in the door for getting around these fiat currencies and using crypto because other countries up through the foreign exchange have to recognize the El Salvadorian currency and is this sort of moving in the direction of getting away from these centralized controls of currency. And my thought was that sounds encouraging. I mean, I like the idea of not having governments be able to print money and control the currency, but I also thought, ain't going to happen because, I mean, up to and including, like, there's no way our government's going to let go of that. And I think even if they had to go as far as some kind of a covert operation to overthrow the El Salvadorian government and install a new one that would reverse the decision to recognize crypto, whatever it took that they would do it, but what do you think about this general idea? I mean, do you agree with me that they would just do whatever they had to do to stop it? But if they couldn't and if it were something that became a phenomenon where we could circumvent these fiat currencies, would that be, would that make cryptocurrency more appealing to you as a medium of exchange? So first I appreciate your cynicism about our government. I wish it were, but I think it's realistic. I think that's right. If they have to overthrow the government in El Salvador to protect the dollar, they would do it in a heartbeat. They wouldn't have second thoughts at all. I have no question about that. I mean, it's complicated because what El Salvador has done is illegitimate, right? Because what has El Salvador done? It basically is told business owners that crypto is currency they have to accept. So even if they don't want to accept it, legal tender means they have to accept it. And you take a currency, account, it's not account, you take an asset that sometimes drops in value 10% in one day. Sometimes in an hour, during the day. And I'm a business owner and you want to buy something for me. I don't know how much Bitcoin to charge you. How quickly can you get it to me? How quickly can I sell it? Because I don't know what the price will be in half an hour. It might be higher, it might be lower. So it's what El Salvador has done is very, I think very bad for business owners in El Salvador because it forces them to accept this incredibly volatile asset as a currency when I don't think they would want to. It's one thing to say it's illegal to accept it if you want to. In the United States, anybody can accept cryptocurrency. I mean, Tesla was accepting Bitcoin, right? So changing it to legal tender suddenly forces business owners to accept it, which is a violation of rights and really, really bad. Now, what would it do? It's really hard to tell. I mean, I can see a lot of people who want to transact in Bitcoin would go to El Salvador to buy stuff. So maybe there'd be some increased consumption activity in El Salvador. The business owners, my guess, would sell the Bitcoin immediately on the other side of it. So there's not to take the volatility risk or the value risk. If Americans wanted to buy something from El Salvador, is it easy for them just to use dollars and exchange them into Salvadorian, whatever the local currency is other than or is it easier for them to change it into Bitcoin? My guess is it's much cheaper to buy the local currency to buy the thing that you want to buy. I'm not sure why anybody would, again, take on the exchange rate risk. The exchange rate risk is much greater with Bitcoin because of the volatility, whereas the dollar El Salvadorian currency, the change in value of currency is probably very small, certainly on an inter-day basis. So I don't see how it changes anything. Now, if a big economy did it, and for whatever reason merchants and everybody within that big economy embraced it, then now maybe you'd get some more stability in the value of Bitcoin because now more people would be holding it. There wouldn't be as much trading of it. It wouldn't be as speculative. Let's say China made Bitcoin their currency. Yeah, you would get a stabilizing effect from that, but El Salvador is too small, too small a case. I don't see, you know, if all of Latin America did it, maybe the increased demand for Bitcoin would over time stabilize it. But Bitcoin has to become a lot more efficient, cheap, and people are working on this, but it's not there yet. Now, it's too expensive to transact in Bitcoin. It's too expensive to send money by Bitcoin. As I've said before, much easier to use something like Venmo. And now you've got fintech companies that are doing exchange rates. So they're matching buyers and sellers of dollars. Now I don't know if it applies to euros and things like that. I'm not sure if it'll apply to El Salvador because again, how many people want to hold El Salvador currency, which I should know what it is, but it's one of the few countries I've never been to. So I don't know what the local currency is. So if if we're saying the US government, you know, would go so far as to overthrow El Salvador to thwart crypto, then it certainly seems a lesser step would be to take, you know, 10 billion 50 billion and run a shadow trading desk to keep the price volatile. Yeah, yeah. I know we're half joking about all of this, but so I'm half joking too, but a common criticism is that it's so it's so volatile. And then another one is that the, you know, the mining operations use fossil fuels are bad for the environment then the CIA could totally set up some, you know, some fossil fueled fired data centers and server houses to, you know, sabotage the environment and and then, you know, buy and sell at at a loss to manipulate it the volatility. So I'm half joking, but God, I hope nobody for the Fed. I hope nobody for the Fed is listening and you're giving them all these ideas. Stabilized Bitcoin. I. Oh my God. I'm saying oh my God. There's a socialist I think on the on the chat who's I am. I don't, while I wouldn't put that beyond the government. I don't think it's necessary because I think Bitcoin trainers are doing it themselves and look what's happening in China. I don't know if you've seen what's happening in China, but China is basically kicking out of China. Bitcoin miners. I think because they're consuming so much of the electricity that China is how it is just having to produce electricity for Bitcoin miners. And for whatever reason they decided that's not a good deal for them, or maybe they think Bitcoin is destabilizing things in China, but they're kicking out all the other miners which has caused a drop in the value of Bitcoin but look, I don't think a lot Elon Musk is a CIA plant, but he might be I mean I wouldn't put it beyond Elon Musk or the CIA for that matter. There's a now we should I should tweet that because that could that could really go viral.  There you go. It's still under my control, so you can't get reelected. Yes, it's under my control. There you go. And it's, it's, it's a viral conspiracy. There's 20,000 subscribers right there. That's right. That'd be at 100,000 tomorrow. But it's, somebody's gonna, somebody's gonna transcribe this and put it up. But they don't have so they don't have to right now because of Bitcoin is doing into itself and it's natural look it's a new asset class. It's nobody quite understands it, the number of people who do a very passionate about it and a buying it like crazy. And even if it's legit, which I don't think Bitcoin is going to be money in the end because I just, I don't think it, I don't think it can compete but even if it's legit that until it gets a certain level of probability it's going to be volatile and it's not going to serve as a medium exchange. So, all of this is just a natural evolution. I think much easier than that is going to be what the feds have already started doing right they've already announced that they're doing, that if you do a transaction in Bitcoin that is larger than $10,000, you have to report it, just like if you do a cash transaction, like if you, if you, if you do a cash if you bring $10,000 to the bank in a suitcase, right, the bank has to let the Fed know that you did it right. If you come into the United States, and you have to fill out a little form, your citizens have to fill out the form or you do it on the little computer. One of the questions is, do you have more than $10,000 in cash on you, and they can stop you and search you and confiscate the money if it's more than $10,000 and you haven't let them know. So the government wants to know about any movement of $10,000 cash. Now they want to know, and they've already indicated they want to know movement of $10,000 of Bitcoin. Now that takes away anonymity, which is the biggest value of Bitcoin and it, it, it, now how, how did they match? How did they, how would they check on this? I don't know, but how did they check on cash? They'd have to literally search you. The next steps are regulatory steps and they're just going to regulate the thing so that they keep raising the cost of engaging in it till they wipe it out. That's the, that's going to be the long-term strategy if they view it as a threat. I think right now, they're not yet viewing it as a threat. China is obviously, that's why they're kicking out the miners. And the US might at some point, right? But they're not, they don't view it as a threat yet, otherwise you'd see a lot more regulation coming down the pipe from the Fed. And they can just criminalize, criminalize more and more of it, regulate and criminalize and, and then just raise, you know, the risk factor, right? Most, you know, I don't know on any Bitcoin or any crypto or anything because I, but I have too much to lose.  It's pretty shocking how fascist they are with like monitoring all of the movement of money and everything. It's essentially illegal to have any kind of privacy in terms of financial dealings that have nothing to do with the government. And by the way, one of the reasons that some countries in Europe are trying to ban, they're basically trying to get rid of cash. So they want to make it impossible for you to use cash. They want to basically make everything electronic because they can monitor everything electronic. They can't monitor. If you walk into a store and pay cash, nobody knows you bought what you bought. But every time you pay a credit card, with a credit card, there is a permanent record that you paid, you bought something. If there is no longer any cash, if cash disappears, they have access to every transaction you make and privacy is completely out the window. Now, there are efficiency reasons to get rid of cash. Cash is inefficient if just lug it around and so on. I don't like using cash. But if you want to, if you care about privacy, and the more you care about privacy, the more you want to use cash and certain, like in Scandinavia, certain countries have made a very, have introduced proposals to make it very difficult to use cash. The other issue about privacy is when you pay cash, and this is a big part of their excuse for doing this, that's how you get around tax regulations, right? If you buy stuff with cash, they can't monitor you. So they can't tell if you're living beyond your means in a sense, which is one way they catch tax evaders. No, but if everything is electronic, now they can go after you. Where did you get this money? How could you afford a Porsche? You know, you don't make enough money for a Porsche, so you must be in the black market.  So, you know, this is the state trying to monitor our behavior so that they can control us and they can take our stuff. And they're getting very good at it. And the whole argument about Bitcoin is that it would allow us to avoid state control. And that's exactly why the state won't allow it, right? That's exactly why the state is going to come after them and stop them. So, if, you know, I think the only value that Bitcoin has, right, the only real value Bitcoin has is anonymity. And, you know, right now it's a $30,000 a Bitcoin, right, I think that's the latest $31,000, $32,000, something like that. And that means that that's how much people value anonymity. What they're paying for is anonymity. What they're paying for is the ability to do things that are either illegal or they just don't want tracked. I think mostly illegal because it's very expensive, again, to trade in Bitcoin. So it's people who want to do illegal stuff are the ones who are setting the marginal price of Bitcoin. And I don't see in a free market why anybody, why Bitcoin would have value beyond that. And of course, in a free market, there's very little that's illegal in that sense in terms of buying and selling. So what would be the point? What we need today, what I call the new intellectual would be any man or woman who is willing to think, meaning any man or woman who knows that man's life must be guided by reason, by the intellect, not by feelings, wishes, wins or mystic revelations. Any man or woman who values his life and who does not want to give in to today's cult of despair, cynicism and impotence and does not intend to give up the world to the dark ages and to the role of the collectivist growth. Alright, before we go on, reminder, please like the show. We've got 163 live listeners right now, 30 likes. That should be at least 100. I forget at least 100 of you actually like the show.  But at least the people who are liking it, I want to see a thumbs up. There you go. Start liking it. I want to see that go to 100. All it takes is a click of a thing, whether you're looking at this. And you know the likes matter. It's not an issue of my ego. It's an issue of the algorithm. The more you like something, the more the algorithm likes it. So, you know, and if you don't like the show, give it a thumbs down. Let's see your actual views being reflected in the likes. But if you like it, don't just sit there. Help get the show promoted. Of course, you should also share. And you can support the show at your own book show dot com slash support on Patreon or subscribe star or locals and show your support for all for the work for the value. Hopefully you're receiving from this. And of course, don't forget if you're not a subscriber, even if you even if you just come here to troll, or even if you're here like Matthew to defend Marx, then you should subscribe because that way you'll know when to show up. You'll know what shows are on when they're on. You'll get notified. So, yes, like, share, subscribe, support, like, share, subscribe, support. There you go. Easy. Do one or all of those, please.


building safe you guys can return okay as long as you're a hundred percent accounted for normally doing a true movement or on the road you know how ready one two three left I got one I got one casualty left arm amputation at the elbow he's bleeding pretty good good you got nothing in your chest right no they carry your work you feel this foot you can sit up I will just keep you there now unless you're unless you're uncomfortable like that dust off so there were 30 seconds out a minute ago for that good tell me we're on the Stokes basket right there now over the backboard get c-spine back seat fine it will she's gonna be on the board we slide it from yesterday's Intel okay for a escort outside of the wire I'm not worried they have one person to check so it's all clear so we're do you just we're just doing maintenance you can't go back so if you pass and we get a go no the volume remaining is like the toe and then your zoe friend we give zoe friend sublingual as well what do you guys think I mean we have to adjust that yeah you're the young buck come on baby we need to find basically we got intel if there's individuals running about one kilometer out that way and our mission is to gather intel and figure out what the hell we're doing so we're not going to go out there immediately engage we need to gain positive ID figure out if they have weapons try to figure out what they're doing report back how many small the smallest team you should ever operate in is no lot no smaller than two so you would get that all figured out ahead of time so you're zeroed out on here zero down in here the last step of the process we're gonna take it over we're gonna mount this to the gun up it's just with force so this needs to be locked in there the best way to do it is just sometimes they go sometimes they don't and then you can either mount your gun first or you can mount the teeny place our gun back in so now what you would do I'm saying you have left and right adjustments on here you always have your zero point you start at real world yeah I don't know which group I didn't want you in the shot


Welcome to Free Thoughts. I'm Trevor Burris. Joining me today is Dr. Jeffrey A. Singer, a general surgeon in private practice in metropolitan Phoenix, Arizona and principal and founder of Valley Surgical Clinics Limited. He is also a senior fellow at the Kato Institute. Welcome to Free Thoughts, Jeff. Happy to be here. Is there an opioid crisis?  There's a problem with too many people dying from opioid overdoses and there's also been a change in the mix of the type of opioids that are causing these deaths. And of course, it's always worrisome to see that each year after year there's an increase in the number of people dying from overdose deaths. So it's a problem. I don't like to use the word crisis because every time our policy makers react to a crisis, they usually overreact and they don't think things through and all of their reactions tend to create a whole new set of unintended consequences that eventually make it into a crisis. Yeah, maybe that's all we got. We were talking about opioids, opiates. We use both of those sometimes. I've heard that I think opioids include synthetics. That's right. We're talking about pills that doctors like you prescribe, like OxyContin, for example, and also heroin and everything in between. I don't know if those are the two. Fentanyl, I guess, would be maybe the outlier. Well, Fentanyl is used medically. Most of the time, the type that is used on pain patients is actually a patch. Fentanyl is about 50 times the strength of morphine. It's made in these patches that allow it to be slowly absorbed over about 72 hours. A brand name for that people may have heard of is called diragesic. We prescribe, let's say, a 25 microgram patch of Fentanyl and last somebody for a couple of days. It's also used by anesthesiologists in the operating room intravenously because it gets the person anesthetized. It's that powerful. It's not prescribed in the outpatient setting in any form other than the skin patch. When you hear about reports in the news about people who are dying from fentanyl overdoses, they're not taking these skin patches and somehow figuring out a way to scrape the fentanyl off of the surface of it and convert that into something suitable for injection. This is Fentanyl making its way into the country in the illegal market. What about Oxycontin? What is that? Well, Oxycontin is long-acting control release Oxycodone. Oxycodone actually has been around for many years. It's an oral opioid that was invented in 1916. Then in the mid-90s, a long-acting form was developed so that you could take it and it could last, let's say, 12 hours as control release. In order to do that, the capsule is made in such a way as to have actually more Oxycodone in it so it could release more of it slowly over a period of time. That's what made it very popular for people who wanted to recreationally use opioids because if you can get ahold of an Oxycodone tablet and get the ingredients out of it, you get a lot more Oxycodone out of it than if you just got an Oxycodone tablet or capsule. When Oxycontin came on the scene, that became probably one of the most popular opioids for people who were recreationally using opioids to try to get ahold of because you got more bang for your buck. But you would prescribe that for people with chronic pain? Usually, it's for people who you know are going to be needing a strong opioid for a long period of time. For a short duration, such as a patient who just had, let's say, an outpatient surgery, Oxycodone or hydrocodone, also popularly known as Vicodin, is usually what you need because the person's not going to need it for more than maybe five to 10 days. Is that like getting your wisdom teeth out or something like that? Yeah. Whereas if you're going to give it to somebody who you know is going to be on pain long-term chronically, then if you could give them something that lasts longer so they don't have to take it as frequently and you know they're going to be taking it long-term, it's more practical. Oxycodone is more practical for something like that. So what happened was because, first of all, the narrative that everyone has bought into, and this is why this is very frustrating to us practitioners, is that the opioid over death problem is a direct result of doctors prescribing pain medicine for patients. So the popular notion is that I write a prescription for an opioid for my patient in pain and my patient becomes a drug addict and then starts resorting to all sorts of illegal behavior in search of the drug. It becomes a dope fiend and then eventually overdoses and dies. That is not what's going on. In fact, the data shows even, I'm talking government data, the National Survey on Drug Use and Health, show that a non-medical opioid use, so that's recreational, peaked in the year 2012 and total opioid use actually peaked in 2014. And according to the National Survey on Drug Use, only about a quarter of people who are overdose victims even have obtained any sort of prescription for an opioid. And of course, that doesn't necessarily mean they actually got it directly from the doctor. They could have been a stolen prescription. It could have been that they were doctor shopping and and malingering in order to get pain medicine. But the point is that at least 75% of the people who are overdose patients are people who are using opioids for non-medical purposes in the illicit market. So I've been trying to point out that the source of the opioid overdose death problem is drug prohibition. Because when I go into the supermarket or liquor store to buy a bottle of liquor and I see on the label it says, let's say 80 proof or 15% alcohol, the thought never crosses my mind that it may not be that, that it could be adulterated with all sorts of impurities or laced with something that can kill me. I believe what it says on the label because it's legal and in a legal in a legal market. Number one, they have competitors and number two, I have recourse if I've been defrauded and injured. But when we're dealing with the illegal market, you know, you go to somebody in a subterranean way who says, yeah, I have what you want and you don't know if it's the dose. You don't know if it's pure. That's what's happening. In fact, what we've learned because of the narrative that it's a doctor's prescribing, since about 2010, 2011, all of the policies of both the federal government and the state governments have been aimed at curtailing the amounts of opioids prescribed. So we just heard this past July, the CDC reported that for the seventh consecutive year, prescriptions of opioids by healthcare practitioners have come down. In the meantime, the DEA, Drug Enforcement Administration actually controls the amount of opioids that can be manufactured. So in 2016, they ordered a 25% reduction in opioids manufactured and they've asked for another 20% reduction for this year. So we got the amount of opioids being prescribed is down. The amount of opioids being manufactured is down. In addition, now all 50 states have what they call prescription drug monitoring programs where they're surveilling patients and doctors, doctors prescribing and patients using opioids. And the idea is, and it's successful in doing this is it casts a chilling effect. It makes doctors feel like when they're being watched that they really makes them cut back on their prescribing, even if they have no doubts that they were doing the right thing by prescribing, it's just because they feel that they're being watched and they don't want to get into trouble. So they want to be outliers, as they say. So all of these things have teamed up to cut back on the supply and what's happening, the death rates going up. Isn't that interesting? So that would make most people, I would think, wonder, gee, maybe it's not a matter of doctors prescribing opioids because we're stopping that and deaths are going up. The other thing that has been happening is the mix of the opioid deaths has changed, whereas it used to be the majority were from prescription type opioids. Now the majority is from heroin. And in the last year, the amount in 2015 numbers, over 4,000 of the 32,000 opioid overdose deaths were from fentanyl. The year before was 2000. So that doubled. They're projecting that the 2016 numbers was come out in December. It's going to be even worse, even more heroin, which is now the predominant cause of death, and fentanyl. Now, like I say, fentanyl is super powerful. And here's another irony.  I grew up believing that. I was taught that. But the fact is heroin is nothing other than diacetyl morphine. That's the chemical name. It's just a modified morphine. The generic name is diamorphine. It was invented by the Bayer company in Germany in the 1890s. And they named the brand heroin, which I understand comes from the German word heroish, which has something. I don't speak German, but it has something to do with meaning that it's more powerful, stronger than morphine, which it was. It's about two and a half times the strength of morphine. Delaudid, which is perfectly legal in this country. And in fact, routinely in patients for whom morphine's not doing the job of controlling the pain, then we step it up and go to Delaudid. Delaudid's about five to seven times more powerful on morphine. So it's twice as powerful as heroin, but that's legal. And of course, fentanyl's, like I say, 50 times more, 50, 50 times more powerful. You think that doctors, you're talking about Delaudid is mostly used in hospitals, right? No, it's available in oral form and we prescribe it for patients too as well. You think that there would be people using heroin in hospitals and prescribing maybe a pill form if it were invented, if heroin were not prohibited, that heroin would be available to doctors as one of those things. It is. And the rest of the developed world. Oh, it is, okay. Yeah, so it's not even just fantasy land. It is the real world, yeah. It's called diamorphine. That's the generic name, so they don't use the word heroin. In 1924, that equivalent of the drugs are, the head of the Bureau of Narcotics at the time, became persuaded that heroin corrupted morals, unlike morphine. It was morally corrupt, corrosive. So he asked for Congress to completely ban it. And within about 10 years, the number one opioid to which people were addicted became heroin. Economists would have predicted that because, you know, what would you rather push? Something that is totally banned or something that you could find another way to get it. So meanwhile, that didn't happen in other countries. So, you know, since the 1920s in the UK, diamorphine, as I call it, that's available. It's very controlled. It's, but it's used for controlled pain patients, terminal cancer patients. And in fact, since the 1920s, they have been, they've had heroin maintenance therapy programs for heroin addicts in the UK. They really formally developed as a project in Switzerland in 1994. But on a small level, heroin maintenance therapy had been underway in the UK since the 1920s. So there are many countries, in fact, one of my colleagues in my medical practice is an immigrant from Singapore. And he trained in Singapore. And he was telling me how very strict the drug laws are there. I think he said, you can go to jail for life if you found possession of marijuana. Yeah, marijuana. You can't chew gum there.  So I said to him, yet you guys prescribe heroin for your patients in the hospital. And he, you know, I was teasing him. He didn't, he didn't know that.  And he said, heroin, what are you talking about? I said, oh, maybe I was wrong. I thought, I thought you use diamorphine on your severe pain patients in the hospital. And he said, Oh yeah, we use diamorphine. That's heroin. Yeah, that's heroin is just a brand name. So that's the point. The point is that we just arbitrarily decided because of the totally unsubstantiated suspicion that it corrupts moral character to ban heroin. There's no reason why if one hit of morphine for your post-surgical pain or one hit of the lauded doesn't cause you or a fentanyl patch doesn't cause you to immediately become a drug addict. Why would something that's basically the same is on the same spectrum? Why would it be any different? And of course, you know, there's evidence going back decades of people who are true recreational heroin users lead a perfectly normal, happy, productive life and occasionally engaging heroin use for their own because they want to work for recreational uses and they don't become addicts. And that's been well documented in the medical literature. But these are these are the myths. And unfortunately, these myths are very influencing the policymakers. In terms of recreational use, you don't actually hadn't thought about it that way, but you don't hear much about recreational use of morphine or delotted, even though they give you many of the same effects, if not more of heroin. Fentanyl has been coming in, but mostly in adulterating heroin supplies. But because morphine and delotted are controlled and legal, it seems that that's the reason why heroin is easier to get. Would you agree? Because it's not if it's illegal. According to the CDC, Thomas Frieden back a few years ago, he said that the street price of heroin was about a fifth of the street price of prescription opioids, which is so what's happened is I mean, I'm aware of people. I even know people on a personal level who tell me and have shown me actually that they keep a little stash of Vicodin. And every once in a while, just like I like to have a cocktail at the end of a long stressful day before dinner is to relax, they like to take a Vicodin. I even have told them, you know, I don't think that's an ideal thing if you want to relax. Well, they like it. They take a Vicodin maybe once every week or so, you know, and then they keep it hidden in their drawer because they didn't get that by getting a prescription from a doctor. They got it somewhere. But in any case, that's the way these things are. That's what we see. When we go back to the doctor prescriptions, it kind of, people might be thinking, oh, Dr. Singer is definitely downplaying this, but the numbers are shocking and the maps are shocking. And you look at states like New Hampshire or you have some counties with addiction rates that are unbelievable, never seen the level of overdose deaths. And it definitely was true that starting in the 90s with drugs like OxyContin, doctors were prescribing more opiates than before, correct? Yeah. Well, first of all, I remember, because I'm old enough to remember, when I graduated medical school, that was at the height of the war on drugs. So it was actually drilled into us as medical students, you know, drugs are evil, drugs are bad, narcotics. So most of the prescribing habits of me and my peer group were very restrictive. So we were really stingy with the pain medicine. Then around the end of the 80s, early 90s, a lot of articles started appearing in the medical literature and a lot of people started speaking out about what was then called, came to be called opiophobia, where we were afraid to prescribe opioids irrationally and patients were voicing patients afraid to take it. When I prescribed, they tell me they're in pain, I give them a prescription for an opioid and they, they won't take it because they're afraid to become an addict because of what we've all been indoctrinated into believing. So anyway, in the early 90s, we were basically exhorted to loosen up, be more compassionate, don't be so afraid of the opioid, take care of your patients are in pain needlessly. And so we changed our prescribing habits. So as we changed our prescribing habits, obviously more opioids got into circulation. And if more opioids are in circulation, there are also more opioids that can get what, what they call in the narcotics in the drug enforcement business diverted, you know, prescription, prescription pads could be stolen or just sold by the person who got the prescription medicine cabinets can be raided, whatever doctors. So the fact that more opioids were being prescribed would lead to you to think that more opioids are available to for whatever purposes you want, including recreational purposes. Then when we started to see this increase in the number of people dying from opioid overdoses, the government responded by getting restrictive. There's a lot of other ways. For example, in 2010, Purdue, which is the manufacturer of OxyContin came out with what they call an abuse deterrent formulation because the people who use OxyContin recreationally, like I said, has a higher concentration of OxyCodone. So they'd either crush it and snort it, which was popular, or they'd dissolve it and inject it. So they came out with a formulation that couldn't be crushed. And if you tried to liquefy it, it became this gel that was not suitable for injection. And within, and of course, they patented that. And then within about six months, they replaced all OxyContin that was out there with this abuse deterrent formulation. The FDA encouraged that and they have guidelines and policies where they're encouraging pharmaceutical manufacturers come up with abuse deterrent formulations. Now, a couple of things to keep in mind. Number one, pharmaceutical companies love this because this provides an opportunity for them to evergreen their patents because the abuse deterrent formulation gets a new patent and comes sometimes very conveniently at the time when generics are starting to cut into their profits because their patent on the original OxyContin wore off. Well now, all of the competitors making generics, they can't make the abuse deterrent formulation until that patent wears off. So that's why the pharmaceutical companies are very happy to comply and try to come up with new abuse deterrent formulations. I can't blame them. But we've seen other things occur, which is if you're trying to access this on the first of all, when I prescribe OxyCodone or OxyContin for my patient, I know that they take it with a glass of water. I don't have to say that, by the way, don't crush this and snort this. They never intended to and never even cross their minds because that's the setting that we doctors prescribe it in. So we're talking about people trying to use recreationally. So what happens is when they find that they can't use it that way, they just go on to something else. And that's exactly what's been happening, moving on to more cheaply available and easier to use heroin or heroin laced with fentanyl. In fact, a study came out in June of this year, economists at Notre Dame University, it's a national Bureau of Economic Research working paper, and they studied the substitution of heroin for OxyContin, starting with the appearance on the scene of the abuse deterrent formulation in 2010. And interestingly, they found a one-to-one substitution. Really? Yeah. So as OxyContin became abuse deterrent, then everybody moved over to heroin, and that's all. Meanwhile, some state legislators unwisely are encouraging, actually passing laws requiring insurance companies to cover the abuse deterrent form. And what they're trying to do also is encourage to replace all of the generics that are out there and all of the non-abuse deterrent forms with abuse deterrent forms. Well, like I said, getting back to the ever-greening of patents, that means that people who are paying out of their pocket for pain medication, because they're in pain, suddenly are paying more than they have to because the only product available is this newly-patented abuse deterrent form. They can't buy the cheaper generic. In addition, by requiring health insurance companies to cover, because in many states, the health insurance companies will only cover the generic, not the abuse deterrent form, but by passing laws requiring them to you raising the cost of the insurance company, which of course makes the premiums go up. So I'm clear. Are you against the abuse deterrent form?  Well, yeah. Let me put it this way. Actually, there are several studies, besides this Notre Dame study, showing that it tends to make people just substitute. It's sort of like you push in a balloon at one end and the air comes out at another. I just think that I'm sort of ambivalent about abuse deterrent forms. If you want manufacture abuse deterrent form, make it available on the market, fine. I don't think that the FDA should be promoting it, encouraging it. I think they should take a neutral position. Go ahead and do it if you want. Let the consumer and the prescribing doctor decide, you know, on a case-by-case basis. If he wants to prescribe the abuse deterrent form, maybe the practitioner's got a little concerns about a patient that he's wondering if this patient's really in pain. Maybe the patient's trying a doctor shop to get some drugs for recreational use and the doctor decides. I think I'm going to prescribe the only the abuse deterrent form for this guy. That should be, you know, on a case-by-case basis. I just don't think that we, as a matter of policy, should be encouraging that abuse deterrent forms replace the regular forms and also we shouldn't be forcing insurance companies to cover it because we're just adding to the cost of health insurance. So let's talk about the doctors here. There's a fear. Is there a fear now amongst doctors about prescribing opiates because the DEA might come after you? Oh, absolutely. Yeah. Do you know, I mean, is this so common that everyone knows someone? Are they really going after doctors? Because this idea of doctors as pushers is quite prominent. And it's got to be true, though, that some doctors probably are some bad apples, right? Some doctors are pushers, right? Yeah. I don't think everybody knows someone. I don't know any. We all read stories. There's certain places that were hotbeds of this, like in Florida, and we see these news reports, so we're all aware of it. I can tell you, the overwhelming majority of doctors, just like in every other field, are ethical people who want to do the right thing. There's always going to be some bad apples in every field. You can't have a perfect world, and you shouldn't design policy based upon the exceptions to the rule. We had pill mills. I mean, that was a real thing, or maybe it still is, I'm not sure. They're disappearing because of these guys being arrested for pushing basically without... There were some dishonest doctors who were just writing prescriptions and clearly, basically, were drug dealers using their medical license as drug dealers, but that's the exception. What concerns doctors is, for example, in my state of Arizona, so we have a prescription and drug monitoring program that's been in effect since 2011, and every quarter, I get a report from the state board of pharmacy telling me how many prescriptions I wrote for various categories of narcotics in the last quarter, and placing me on a graph with respect to my colleagues and my specialty, and then it labels me either normal, outlier, or extreme outlier. Now, interestingly, we've all noticed this on my colleagues. It tells you the number of prescriptions written, but it doesn't have it broken down by the number of patients. So if you happen to have a busy practice, you're going to write more prescriptions. That doesn't necessarily mean... Per capita, so to speak. Per capita, yeah. It doesn't have it down that way. It just has my number of prescriptions written. That's weird. Yeah, it is. So, meanwhile, one thing for sure is you don't want to be an outlier because even though technically it says in the report, this is just for your informational use, so you could see where your practicing pattern is with respect to your peers and your specialty, and use it wisely, that sort of thing. But you're always in the back of your mind, they're watching me. One thing I don't want to be is on a list of outliers. So everybody has... We talk at the coffee machine, the water cooler, and the doctor's lounge, everybody's saying that they're very nervous about this. I'm close to an outlier, yeah. Yeah. Let's take a step back to the bigger issues on this because we were talking before we started recording about Jacob Sullivan saying yes, and the sort of positive aspects of drug use. And I think that in order to really look at this crisis, I'm putting that in scare quotes. And think about it the right way. We have to first understand in a way that this seems a lot of people attacking the opiate thing and saying we have to stop this. First, understand that these drugs do a lot of good for people. We have to look at the other side. I guess there might be addiction on a higher level because suddenly people who are in pain, they have access to things that take the pain away or at least mitigate it to some extent, which is the most of the use of this. It's doing a lot of good, correct? Right. And this is not obviously going to be the official party line of the medical profession, but now speaking as a libertarian physician, it's important to bear in mind, number one, addiction is actually on a molecular level, a particular behavioral disease. Not everybody becomes addicted. There's a difference, first of all, between becoming chemically dependent on a drug and addicted to a drug. If you become chemically dependent, obviously you experience withdrawal symptoms when the drug's taken away, but once you overcome that, you're done. Examples, when you have a hangover after having a lot of alcohol the night before, that hangover is actually a form of withdrawal from the alcohol.  So that's one thing, whereas addiction is different. Addiction, you're thinking about the next dose while you're receiving this one. You're craving the substance, even when you're withdrawn and detoxed, you go back to it. That's why you see a high recidivism rate among narcotics addicts or alcoholics who have been, you know, detox from their substance.  They would be chemically dependent. They're chemically dependent, though, because they'll get... Yes, but they're not addicts because they don't have the... I mean, if you took it away, they might rob a convenience store to get it, right? I mean, if you took it away, they'll probably go into insulin addicts. But you know what I'm saying? If you took it away, here's one, benzodiazepine, they're very addictive from what I understand. You get addicted to that, yeah, for sure. And people take those consistently. Is that distinction really? So you seem to be describing addiction as like... No, because one is behavioral disorder and one is more of a physical condition. But you could have the physical condition and then behavioral disorder with it? Absolutely. You could be addicted and dependent, but there's an addictive behavior. So that's why some people, regardless of what substance they're taking, they could have a tendency and it's kind of built into the genetics. They could have a tendency to become addicted to their substance, whereas the majority of the population doesn't, which is why you'll see documented episodes of people using substances like heroin, cocaine, other substances that have a record of getting people addicted. And they use them regularly, recreationally, without any addiction problems, because they don't have that biological condition that gives them this behavioral disorder. But going back on the question of... So if you... Some of these long-term pain suffers, you know what I'm saying? They have benefits from this. Do they become at least chemically dependent? But it seems like if they're really in pain, it could be worth it. Right. And that's the whole idea. That's why we see commonly people are maintained for years on things like oxycontin, long-acting, control-release, morphine pills for their pain. So they are chemically dependent. If they don't get their pill within a certain period of time, they start getting withdrawal symptoms and also their pain gets severe. But that's... That's why it was a trade-off. That's a trade-off. In fact, opioids, as opposed to a lot of other chemicals, are relatively safe. Alcohol, long-term use can kill the liver, the pancreas, the brain, is related to certain cancers. Opioids, aside from causing constipation because it slows down the gut, there's been really no... Demonstrating the long-term effect. Organic damage that it can cause. Which is why we are comfortable having people on methadone maintenance, indefinitely methadone, is about the same strength as heroin. It was invented during... It is? Yeah. It was invented during World War II by Germany. Why are we supposed to be a substitute for heroin? Well, because what's better about it? Well, when you take it orally, it gets absorbed from the gut and levels that bind with your opioid receptors enough so you won't experience withdrawal symptoms. But not enough to give you the high, because the whole idea here is you're not allowed to enjoy it. Okay, yes, of course. So that's the problem. That's the problem. It corrupts the morals, isn't that what they said in 1924? Yeah, exactly. And the idea of methadone maintenance is that you get used to not... It's sort of behavior modification. You're blunting the withdrawal symptoms, but you're getting used to not feeling the high, and then it's hoped that over time you could be tapered off the methadone and now you don't crave the high anymore. And you're over your addiction problem. That's the idea behind medical assisted treatment, whether it's methadone or suboxone or others. But beginning back to your earlier point, I would argue as a libertarian, if a person is getting pleasure out of the mind-altering characteristics of a particular drug, whether it's opioid or mushrooms or LSD, or Xanax, or marijuana or Jim Beam, as long as they're not in any way directly threatening my rights or safety, to each his own. Who am I to say that that person is wrong, that person has a right to... They're obviously deriving a pleasure, so there's a value in it for them. If they have a relationship with a substance that is self-destructive and has become irrational, then you know they're probably suffering from the addictive behavioral disorder. That's a different story. Can you, as a doctor, prescribe an opiate to someone merely to satiate their addiction problems?  That's where I could get into trouble, because I'm being watched by my prescription drug monitoring program. First of all, when I write the prescription for an opioid, there has to be a reason why I'm writing the prescription in my medical records. I have to have a diagnosis, and the diagnosis can't be that he doesn't want to go into withdrawal. But that's an interesting distinction, right? And I'm actually doing work on it right now, because this has been a fight for a very long time since the Harrison-Arcotics Act of 1914 that we're going to make a distinction. First of all, the distinction between medicine and dope and an illicit drug is not exactly clear, obviously, as we talked about with heroin. But also this question of why isn't withdrawal a sort of disease, a medical problem, that you can alleviate as a doctor? I've said that. In fact, when I gave that hill briefing for the Cato Institute back in June, I remarked to the group, it's okay for me to have a person on methadone maintenance. Why can't I have them on oxycontin maintenance? In fact, pain specialists do have people on oxycontin maintenance, but they're doing it... They have special permission? Well, they're treating pain. They're featuring a diagnosis of pain. They're not treating the chemical dependency. It's a fine line, right? Obviously, the patient who's a chronic pain patient, when he starts to withdraw from the oxycontin, he develops worsening pain and withdrawal symptoms. But he's being treated for his pain condition, not for his chemical dependency. Officially, I'm talking about here. Listeners can't see the sarcastic look in my face while we're talking. But I would argue, if it's okay, if the government gives permission to doctors to prescribe suboxone for people who are addicted and don't want to go into withdrawal, or gives permission for methadone maintenance clinics to be established, then there's a rigorous application process and all that that you have to go through. But let's say it does get permission for that. So then it's kind of arbitrary. The only difference between methadone and oxycontin is a couple of molecules. That's it. They're all in the same category of drug. They all have the same long-term lack of deleterious effects on the organs. Now, some are more beneficial than others if you're trying to do a substitution. Just because of the nature, like, for example, studies suggest, the jury's still out on this, but a lot of studies suggest that methadone is more effective than suboxone because it binds to more of the opioid receptors than suboxone does. So it gives a more complete satiation, sense of satiation than does suboxone. So a lot of studies have suggested that more people stay on methadone maintenance than stay on suboxone programs. They tend to have more of a smaller retention rate than does methadone. So each of these opioids has different characteristics that make one be more advantageous than another, but they're all basically the same kind of chemical. And that's why the word is super interesting when you hear people talk about, you know, we have to stop these addicts or something like that. They're using addicts, and so that's a word that makes people think of bad people. Yeah, addicts are vice, isn't it? Yeah, addiction is a vice. And it seems to me that we can ever really deal with this quote-unquote opioid crisis until we accept the fact that it's okay for some people to be addicted to opioids. I mean, in general, we accept that for nicotine to some extent. We accept that for, I mean, I get headaches if I don't have coffee. Yeah, we jokingly say I'm addicted to coffee or I'm addicted to chocolate. These things are actually- Are people- True things. Can people be contributing members of society? Which is, I'm rolling my eyes when I say that because I find that to be a very loaded phrase. But can people be contributing members of society and be opiate addicts? We see it all the time. First of all, we see it with alcohol. Very commonly in the workplace, I'm sure we all know of people that we suspect might have a drinking problem. Maybe they show up for work and they smell from the alcohol or when we do get together socially, they tend to drink a lot. But they show up for work. We don't ask questions. They perform well and we don't see them drinking on the job. So we just keep a- we mind our own business. So we see that all the time. But even with opioids, in fact, my specialty's iconic figure, William Halston. He was considered the father of American surgery. He was a professor of surgery at Johns Hopkins and created the residency program as we know it today. He invented the concept. Many of the earliest major operations were designed by him to this day. There's the Halstead technique of this, the Halstead technique of that.  He was a morphine addict. Originally, he was a cocaine addict, actually. I jokingly say, oh, that explains why we have to start our first surgery a day at 7.30 in the morning and we have to show at 5 a.m. for rounds. Now I get it because he started that on go cap. He was a cocaine addict and there are books written about this. A number of his colleagues had an intervention. They took him on an ocean cruise because they were worried about him. And it was popular in the 19-20s to treat cocaine addiction by substituting your addiction with morphine. It doesn't make sense to me, but that was what they thought back then. So they ended up getting him addicted to morphine. And that was kind of a well-kept secret among his closest associates until he retired. He used to come home from a long day of work and take enough morphine to prevent his withdrawal symptoms and take enough in the morning to again prevent it. And he was a great professor and academic and surgeon and nobody really knew about that until afterwards. So if we accept that addicts... I think I'm going to stop using that word. I want to use a different word, dependence. That's an okay thing. If we can accept that and we can say that maybe just the raw number of opiates being used is not a good indicator of only badness, that people are getting pain treated or getting pleasure from it and they're contributing to society. If we can accept that, then we have to still deal with this death problem. And we taught before we started recording that that really should be the focus is how to stop people from dying. And that's going to... What do you think that ultimately that's going to take? I wish that all of the people in the public policy arena who are passing laws just switched their focus to that. Instead of saying we can't allow people to have... You know, underlying their approaches, we can't allow people to engage in these vices. But if instead they say we need to have less people dying, well, what is the source of people dying? It's drug prohibition. Just like... You don't know what's in it. You buy a Percocet pill or an oxycodone pill on the black market and we see more and more cases of these pills are being imported from, let's say, China and then they're being also laced with fentanyl. You think you're taking an oxycodone, you're taking a fentanyl, you stop breathing because it's so powerful. Actually, just to stop you for a sec. Do we... Do you know, actually, when we make qualify that as an overdose death, do we do enough toxicology to say, okay, it was fentanyl laced oxycodone or do we just look at the jar and say, oh, there's an oxycodone jar he overdosed with oxycodone? Well, in the last several years actually, this is about 2006 or so, they've been getting more specific. There have been a lot of articles written about how, depending on who the medical examiner is, some are more conscientious than others and trying to distinguish. But they've been... Since the attention has focused on this, efforts have been made to get more uniform toxicology when autopsies are performed. So we are starting to be able to differentiate. But that's the cause of the deaths is drug prohibition. And we know from experience in countries that have decriminalized drugs like Portugal, the death rate has gone dramatically. In fact, in 2015, the overdose death rate from opioids in Portugal was 6 per 100,000. In the United States, the same year as 312 per 100,000. So these are all opioids. And apparently the Portuguese equivalent of the drugs are, says they estimate there are 25,000 heroin addicts in Portugal. Today, there were 100,000 when they started decriminalized drugs there. So obviously, that would be the smartest thing to do. In this political environment, that's probably what they would say is a bridge too far. So then, okay, well, at least let's stop killing people. So why don't we focus... All of these efforts that are right now are focused on restricting doctors from helping their patients in pain and restricting the production of legal pharmaceutical-grade opioids. Instead of putting all those efforts into that, why don't we put them into harm reduction programs so that people will be less likely to kill themselves. Harm reduction programs such as, in addition to medical assisted treatment programs like methadone, maintenance or suboxone, there's needle exchange programs so people aren't spreading hepatitis and HIV. Even better, there's safe injection rooms. They've been around for 25 plus years. They're in every country with the United States in the developed world. The idea there is with a clean needle exchange program, which is very prominent in this country. You go in, you're given a clean needle and syringe, but then once you get out of the street, if you're a minority in inner city, you're arrested for possession of paraphernalia. If you're white in the suburbs, you just maybe you sell it or after you use it, you give it to somebody else. So it's not perfect.  The needle is then discarded by the people who run the place. And not only that, but you have the bonus of somebody being around there with Narcan. So if you overdose, because again, you're using an illegally obtained substance, so you don't know really what's in it. So let's say you overdose. Well, there's somebody there to detox to give you the antidote of Narcan, which doesn't happen with needle exchange programs. Actually, the CDC is okay with that. They encourage what they call safe syringe programs. So it's kind of a generic term, whether you do clean needle exchange or safe injection room, it comes under the safe syringe program. They think that's a good idea because it stops the spread of disease and death. But in this country, for example, when the city council of Seattle in the beginning of this year voted to have a pilot program for a safe injection room, a whole bunch of the state legislators have put it, try to stop it because it quote unquote sends the wrong message. So there's resistance on that kind of cultural level here in this country. That's a good harm reduction program. Several countries about half dozen have heroin assisted treatment programs started in Switzerland in 1994. It's still going 23 years later and it's in Germany, the Netherlands, the UK, Canada, Belgium is about to start a program. Spain has had a program. And in this case, what they find is people who have not been able to be retained in methadone maintenance programs because, like I say, it's hard to keep people, there's a lot of dropouts. What they did in Switzerland, they say, if you have failed a methadone maintenance program and you're an addict for at least two years, you're 18 or older and you're willing to surrender your driver's license, we'll let you come in here up to three times a day and inject diamorphine, which is not conscious, it's not the illegal market. This is the pure stuff because it's made there. You know, it's available and we'll give you a clean elixir and you inject yourself, you sign in, you sign out. 23 years later, the 20% of the people who signed up in 1994 are still in the program. It has a very successful retention rate. Average rate is three years and what they found is a 62% reduction is street crime. The sale of heroin on the street has pretty much disappeared because a lot of these people were selling heroin to support their habit. Well, now they don't have to. And interestingly, in Switzerland they reported a teen heroin use has come down because when the kids see these people going in and out of clinic to get their injection, it doesn't look cool. So it's kind of lost its appeal. Also, a lot of these people have gotten to work in Germany. They started a program shortly after Switzerland and they reported 40% of their clients have full-time jobs.  Thanks for listening. This episode of Free Thoughts was produced by Tess Terrible and Evan Banks. To learn more, visit us on the web at www.libertarianism.org.


Ladies and gentlemen, the President of the United States. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. Secretary Dahl, Diane Stede, ladies and gentlemen, it's always a pleasure to share the podium with people like David Stern and Jerry Sacks, Rich Benson, Jim Meducci, Bobby Brown, and Rhonda Leavenworth. Since our administration came to Washington, we've made a special cause of making the future better for young lives. We've worked for lower taxes and fewer regulations so that young people could have futures of hope and opportunity in a growing economy. We've worked to make quality the top priority in education so young people would have the tools to take advantage of those opportunities. We've worked for an America that was so strong that no one would dare challenge us so that our young people and today and in the future can live in a world of peace. With Nancy taking the lead, we've fought drug and alcohol abuse so that they can enjoy that world of peace and opportunity to the fullest. That's why I'm so pleased to be with you today and to sign this proclamation. I can't think of any group of Americans that have done more to save young lives and those mothers and others who have made the battle against drunken drug driving a national crusade. Drunk and drug driving is our nation's number one killer of young people. Last year more than four in every ten teenage deaths in America were caused by car crashes and in more than half of those, someone had been drinking. Yes, alcohol related driving kills more than 3,000 of our young people last year, 3,000 who could have taken advantage of all the opportunities that America has to offer, 3,000 who could have in turn helped build America, and 3,000 who would have been part of the adventure of America's future. Of course, drunken drug driving has taken us toll among people of all ages. Each year, alcohol related crashes injure more than a half a million Americans or one American every minute, every day, day in and day out throughout the year. And what this means is that two out of every five Americans will be involved in an alcohol-related crash at some point in their lives. Well, that's why two years ago I signed a law that put the federal government on the side of a 21-year-old minimum drinking age nationwide. We knew all too well that when it came to saving young lives and all lives, the higher drinking age was not a fad or experiment but a proven success. Almost every state that had raised the drinking age to 21 had seen a significant drop in teenage driving fatalities, drops as high as 25 to 30%. When I signed that bill, fewer than half our states had a 21-year-old minimum drinking age, and I'm happy to tell you that today all but seven do. And I'm happy to tell you also that the new minimum drinking age is working. Last year, the number of drunk drivers killed in crashes was down 26% from 1980. This was more than twice the drop in all driving deaths in the same time. Put another way, the Department of Transportation estimates that because of the drop in drunk driving deaths, 5,000 more Americans lived through this past year. My friends, there's so much more to do, and it's not government that can do it. It's we ourselves, we Americans in our homes with our friends in our communities. The designated driver program is one thing we can do. When a group goes to a party, a ball game, a restaurant, or a bar, one doesn't drink. He or she drives the other home safely. I hope that restaurants, bars, and arenas all over America will sponsor designated driver programs. And designated driver program or not, if you see a friend who's had too much and is heading for the car, be a real friend. Stop him or her and drive them home yourself. We can all save lives if we remember that friends don't let friends drive drunk. And if you ask why you're doing it, just say it's because you care. There are other ways to show we care. I'm announcing today our new The Road to Winning program. The Road to Winning will be a public-private partnership between state governments and communities. It'll bring professional and college athletes into schools to talk about drugs, alcohol, and safe driving. It'll help America's winning athletes show America's young people the road to winning a safe and productive life. Now, I have a special message for America's young people. The holiday season is here. It's a time for getting together with family and friends, for gathering around a tree and exchanging gifts, for remembering our faiths, and for celebrating. There's no happier time of the year, so let's work together to keep it that way. When you go to holiday parties, make sure someone in your group doesn't drink, so he or she can drive everyone else home safely to those who love them. In this festive season, Nancy and I both ask you for yourselves, for your family, for your country. Keep alcohol and cars apart. Just say no to tragedy. Just say yes to happy holidays and a happy new year for everyone that you care about. And I think there's something around here waiting for me to sign, and I'd better get to it.


Hey everybody today. I want to talk about What do you do when you stop too short at the top of the deadlift?  There's still a little bent Normally the only cue that I'm giving to fix this is stand all the way up Okay, that'll usually take care of the issue it might create another issue though Which is you might lean back too much then right in which case I might Go back through you know I've made a bunch of videos on how to finish at the top But I want to make sure that you stand all the way up, but round your back Right, I want you to feel your glutes as you finish this lift So if you're not finishing your lifts, you're missing out on a lot of good glute contraction and low back decompression So I would highly recommend you do this


Yeah, I do have super so it's the 23rd of June. This is Google summer of code office hours. Remember that we abide by the Jenkins contributor code of conduct. So I'm going to turn off my video and if you'd like to share your screen. We can we can talk through whatever you'd like or you can just ask questions. Yeah, I would share my screen just just a minute and let that. Yeah, basically my plugin build. So yeah, if you want to see the logs and that is fine as well. So I hope you can see my screen. Yes, sure can. Okay. Okay, so and how did you get here did you get here by running maven HPI colon run or you're doing something different. Oh yes it's I see it on the command prompt up at the top it says HPI colon run. Okay, yes. Something weird happened just just a moment. You guys can still. You're at your mirror and see the screen. Hello. Hello. Okay, yes. I think it's building this problem. I'm so sorry. I was a mute. I was saying let me just terminate this and restart and walk you through the entire process. So basically this is a branch by a contributor and my task was to actually check whether this is working. If yes, then merge the code. And I came to here and I was, I built, I tried to build this in the HPI run and basically did not build for me. Oh, okay. Up at the top it says the palm for for one of the tools is missing. Okay. So that make okay that now. Could you in a separate window show us your palm that XML file. I thought that that should already be covered by the use of the most recent parent palm. But what that, what I interpret that usually to mean is that there's a global settings.xml file in your dot m two directory that's not configured. You may have more guidance on this than I do but my recollection was that in order to avoid that message at the top we needed to refer to the repose dot Jenkins dash ci dot org in an m two settings dot XML file. So when you build an intelligent does it have the same same error that same message. I really know I remember building on my branch, like the one I was working on, and it did not get me this error. So maybe that that branch needs to be updated to the most recent. Something maybe like if like with something to something. Something different between your branches palm file and that. And the master or main branch yeah. No, because I saw that the contributor only changed the file in the next version. Oh, it's in just conventional comments. So that was the only five things. But if still that's the case then let's change to another time. Well, before you make that change. Could you. That's okay. I'll go back. I don't actually remember the name of the difference. Okay, so now do it get diff domain. Oh, there is a change in the pump. Okay, and so so you, you may want to. I don't know that that change in the palm file should cause the behavior you saw. But I suspect that change in the palm file is a surprise for you. So it may be that the contributor, the person who submitted the poll request was working from a branch that was older than the tip of your master of your main branch. So you could check that by quitting out of the less that's running and doing a get space merge space main. And now do that get diff to, to, to main. Okay, what branch are we on. It's called feature slash breaking change. Okay, and it's no different than main so it's as though it contains no changes now. Could you show us the log of this branch. So if you're surprised that why is that because Garrett merged the code and main writing 14 hours ago. Oh, okay, so this this branch that is feature slash breaking dash change has been merged. Yes, okay, so you were trying to operate on feature slash breaking change without merging it so we need to basically discard the merge that I just had you do. Did I understand correctly or. Yes, I am not sure because isn't feature breaking change that's a pull request that's open right now, right, like the repository and we're just trying to confirm that it actually works. So that was the task but then I think because it was taking time there and that all that and he merged, merged the pull request some hours ago. Okay, so that that is done. Okay. So, Aditya. Could you do you have the GH command install could you do a GH space PR space list. I'm afraid that won't work because it is not there. All right, that's okay. If you can just, I can look at the conventional commits pull requests. Yeah, I'm seeing here. It was merged. Is this basic. Yeah, I guess basically, I'm just going to build master. Do you know how bad the sounds. It sounds like it might be easier to just try to build master and see if it's still broken there. Does that make sense. Yeah, shall I do that. Because. Hello. Yes. Yeah, so you get check out mean, and let's try. Okay, I did not actually hear what Kristen said the last sentence I was like waiting. I think that if it's already merged into main. We need to make sure that main is not broken. Because if the problem is that the branch that you're looking at with that breaking change is different than me. But if this pull request is already been merged into me. It feels like it's already done right like it with the, the, the break is already been merged into the main branch. So what we need to do is make sure that main is not broken. Right. So like, let's. And then try running HP I run on main. And like, Mark was saying like it looks like there have been already changes between the breaking changes thing that you were running locally and main anyway so it might be best just to like restart. Look to see if there's a problem with me. And then go from there. Does that make sense. Yes, got it. So I checked out main and run it in the end. And the warning is still there. Yeah, so and that. And I don't know if that warning is fatal. But it surprises me. And so I, I just worry that we should be able to get rid of that warning for you. Right. Because it's a, yeah. Yeah. Do you have right to that repository. Can you go back up please. Or can you go back up to my error message was. Yeah. It's trying to write to D. Do you have a D directory. Yes, yes. I'm using windows. Well, yeah. So, but, but usually that failed to delete means that something is busy. And, and it may be that that what we've got is, it's got jetty running. It's trying to stop it and restart it. And, and it can't because windows has this behavior with regard to busy file systems. So this could just be an oddity with maven HPI colon run on windows. Could we. Well, so it's anything else running right now. In that space. Did the system not go down properly last time. But then I had reached a bit check down my laptop. So, like, you know, the process should have been like basically killed. And so I think that shouldn't be the case. But yeah, I'll take the process. Yeah, so I did. Yeah, I since, since you and I are both on windows, I'm going to go ahead and clone the conventional commits repository and try the same thing on my windows. I have a suspicion that I may be able to see exactly the same problem. So hang on just or you continue doing what you're doing. And I'm going to try to, to quickly duplicate the same thing. Okay. Part of me is worried that maven HPI colon run may not always be as well behaved on windows as we'd like. Because of windows busy file behaviors. Right. And there, I mean, the workaround for something like this is to just straight up build the plugin and create the HPI file. And then to start a Jenkins. Or you can even at that point have your Jenkins running. Maybe not because I don't, I don't think the tests for this are going to affect that, but you can have your Jenkins and then install the plugin into your Jenkins. Some of the advanced features. And then when that plug is installed in your Jenkins, like it's running. It's clearly running because it's been installed in your Jenkins. And then you can use it. Okay. Just like Jenkins. But yeah, if the HPI. Plug in thing is having issues like. I don't know. I find it sometimes easier just to ignore that and just actually create the object itself. Or like just create the HPI itself. And then install it into Jenkins. It takes longer. But I don't know. So sometimes if you're not trying to make. If you're not trying to do. Like little, little changes if you're, if you want to figure out what's going on with, especially now that we're with main, it may be easier just to do. Like a, like creating the HPI file. And then installing it that way. Do you know how to do that? Actually, I don't know how to do that. Or give me some kind of tutorial if it's long, if it takes something. No, so the actually instead of running. Maven HPI run, what you'll do is just. Maven package. And then it will go through and like create everything for you. And then what will happen to HPI file will be in your target directory. I think it might be in the plugin develop. I don't know if it's on the plugin development pages or not, but if you go to Maven package, it will go and like actually it will generate all the stuff that you need. And then if you go into the target directory of the conventional commits plugin, like it will be on the top level, which would be like conventional commits dot HPI. And that HPI file, you can pull into Jenkins. So on the Jenkins plugin management, like if you go to the plugin management stuff on your Jenkins, if you go to the advanced tab, I don't know if you have a Jenkins running.  I think install available than like things that you have installed. And that last section is like advanced. And that's where you can do a whole bunch of configurations. There's an option option to upload each PI file from your local machine. And then you can just hit that button.  And then I think you might need to know if you need to do it on Windows, but you might need to restart.  And then after it restarts, your plugin will be available and then you can go and like create jobs or do anything else that you need to do. But we'll wait for Mark to see if you've got it. So I did, yeah, I've confirmed that the, I see the exact same failure. When I attempt to do a press enter to do a constant, to cause the thing to restart, it says exactly that failed to delete tempter. And then it does not start. And so I think what we've got is a problem in Maven, HPI, colon run that it's got some file busy. And then trying to delete it. So I think that the work around that Kristen has been describing is the one you'll need to use, which is run a Jenkins separately and load your, load your plugin into it. Now, if you need to do debugging inside that Jenkins, you can attach your IntelliJ debugger to the running Jenkins. Okay. Do you when I go, Mark, do you run into this problem with other plugins that you've had, like the get plugin, or is this something? Oh, yeah. It's, I think this is just a general purpose issue with Maven HPI colon run on windows. Okay. I didn't know if this was something in this repository that we could fix. And I didn't know what it would be. I think I've seen it before. So now I want to see if I can do. If one of the, one of the techniques I'd used in the past was instead of pressing enter to restart Maven HPI colon run, I would just rerun Maven HPI colon run. Let me check that now to see if that's any better behave. I'm going to run Aditya just for your info. When I run Maven HPI colon run, I do not get the warning about cannot resolve dependencies. And so I've got a settings.xml file that I think can, can help you resolve that if you don't mind my just emailing you that settings.xml file to put in your, your home directory.m2. Please, please email me that. Okay. I thought it was not required, but obviously I'm only using what I've got. And I know what I've got is working. So let's, let's let me at least give you what I've got. Okay. Okay. So I'm just going to email it to you, Aditya. That way. And I, I, I, this, this is, you should not consider this the one true approved settings.xml file. This is a settings.xml file that works for me. Okay. And Kristen, your, would you like me to copy you on this, Kristen, just in case you want to give any guidance on. Okay. Sure. Yeah. Yeah, because yeah, I think I understand the whole settings. xml file, but yeah, I, we'll see. I feel like everyone might have their own like special flavor, but it's probably very similar to be fair to be fair. My file, my file, my main file is probably almost exactly the same mark. You might have a little bit more than I do in my, in your file, but. Yeah, I hope mine's pretty simple, but the, I'll, I'll send it that way. You've got it, Aditya. If, okay, it's, it's now been sent to you. So if we're lucky, you'll see it in your email and can copy it into. Yeah. Okay. That's, that's just amazing. Let's see. I just shipped some bits halfway around the world, literally halfway around the world because you're in India, standard time, aren't you, Aditya? Yes. And, and they arrived in, in a matter of milliseconds. That's truly amazing. Technology is really awesome. So in your home directory, there's a dot M to direct. Yeah. At that level, we need a file named settings.xml. Okay. And now if we're lucky and I did things right. And now if you go back to your command line compile, and let's see if it compiles without that warning now. So we are. Yeah, exactly. Maven HPI colon run. The warning's gone. That's good. Okay. I like that much better. I feel better now. Okay. Now, and that was a first time run. So that surprises me because for me, when I do a first time run of your plugin, it works just fine. So that it may mean that. IntelliJ has something busy. It may mean that there's another process running somewhere on your computer that has that busy. We could, if you're willing to, if it's not too heavyweight, stop the process that's running here. And go out and try the same thing from a command prompt window in windows. Okay, definitely. Wait a minute. This was the intelligence. Oh, okay. If you don't mind closing IntelliJ, that's great as well. Yes. Oh, wait, this one was running. Oh, okay. Now we know who kept it busy. I'm so sorry. I should have terminated this one before opening IntelliJ. No, this, this is great. Good for you. Yeah, that was great. So, so do it again. And let's see this, this may prove that we actually don't have a problem in HPI colon run, but let's, let's try it and see. I don't know if you have so many windows open and lose track of where everything is. You do not want to see my, my Chrome, Chrome windows. Multi-tasking is very real and it helps us a bunch except when it doesn't. So open up a web browser to local host colon 8080 slash Jenkins. Okay. Yeah, that one. Exactly. Now some of the, some of the trade-offs you're making here. Oh, very good. Okay. So here it is. Scroll downward just a little bit and we'll see notice in the bottom right-hand corner, you're running Jenkins 2.249.1. And that's because that's the version that your palm dot XML file says is the minimum version that you can, you can support the conventional commits plugin with. If you would prefer to run a newer version, you can change your HPI colon run command to have a minus D Jenkins dot version equals and it will run a different version for you. So now could you go back to the command prompt window? Let's do something. So here, press enter. Let's see if it's able to successfully. No. Okay, there it is. Now you see the same thing I think that I saw. So now if you go back to your web browser, you will probably see that this note, this page no longer refreshes. Yes. Okay, good. So, so the moral of this right now is Maven HPI colon run, you can use once, but it doesn't support on Windows that press return to reload. So, and, and Kristen's point about run your own Jenkins, whatever Jenkins version you want is, is actually a very good one. And with, with skilled use of the Jenkins underscore home command, you can actually have multiple different Jenkins versions that you switch freely between them if you want. So would you like to go through it with us to how you can, how you start your own Jenkins there separately. That would be really helpful if it's okay with you. It's great with me. Kristen, are you okay with that? Yeah, let's do it. I'll stop this one. Okay. So you can exit out of this, out of this when there stopped this process. Great. So now what we need is we probably want a different directory. So go up one level say, and maybe create a new directory. Let's call it, let's use a different version just for fun. Let's call it Jenkins dash two dot two hundred eighty nine nine dot one. That's the most recent LTS now change to that directory. Right now we need to download that version from Jenkins.io. So open your web browser and go to the downloads page. Jenkins.io. Right. And then we'll just, when that page appears on the download page on the left hand side you see stable LTS scroll down a little bit. And we're going to download the generic Java package war. No, no, not for Windows. We do not want to do Windows. Whoops, cancel that. That'll cost you a 70 megabyte download that you want. You really want generic package Java, the very top most line there. Okay, this one. Exactly. That's the one you want. Click that one and save that preferably in that Jenkins dash directory just because then it's easier for us to know where it is. Right. Jenkins two dot two eighty nine dot one. Save it right there. So what this this will give us is this is going to give us a local copy of Jenkins two dot two eighty nine dot one. And we will teach it to run from inside that directory. So while it's downloading switch back to the to the command prompt window and let's in this directory I propose you create a script named go dot bat or something like that. It's up to what you want to call it. Okay. And then the first thing it needs to say is set space Jenkins underscore home all in caps equals and then the the absolute path to this directory. So C colon backslash or D colon backslash whatever it is. So I'm just copy it quickly. Okay. So the file explorer will give you a copy of it or yes that that will give you a copy. Any one of those is great. We just need that string. Exactly. Okay. Now new line and then Java minus jar Jenkins dot war. Okay. And that's that should be all it takes if you save that. Go ahead. It is just my habit that after saving nano it's like my fingers automatically click click control it. So I was like I'm so sorry for closing it. Oh no that's great. You did exactly the right thing. Well you can close it. That was perfect. Okay. Okay. All right. So now if we look at that directory has Jenkins dot war finished downloading. Not yet. So let's see in we're about halfway there. Okay. Good. So somewhere on your computer there is a Jenkins dot war elsewhere. Could you while we're waiting for this download to finish go looking for files named Jenkins dot war and we can do this same technique with other Jenkins versions while we're waiting for the download. That's going to be yours. Yeah when you when you did your initial installation of or have you installed Jenkins on this computer using the Windows installer. No, no, no harm not expected just if if you had that would have been one place to get it. Another place to find it. I have that. It's done much. Okay. Oh very good. Okay. So do go dot bat and let's see. All right. Now you'll want to copy that. You see that that. Yes, you did it exactly. So open up a. A window. Notice that what it's doing here is it's putting everything in ADI GSOC 2021 Jenkins or it's Jenkins dash two dot 289 dot one. So you now have a Jenkins installation that is nicely scoped to exactly that directory. So if you open up your web browser to local host port 8080 and now instead of slash Jenkins, I think it will not even require the slash Jenkins on the end. Yeah, there we go. It it saw your request. Now you just paste that administrator password. And yeah, clear that try again. And install suggested plugins is usually typical. Just click, just click the button. Right. And now what it's going to do is I think it will ask the update center for the list of plugins. Oh, that's interesting. Why would it say unable to connect Jenkins. Any chance you interrupted the command. Did you stop Jenkins. Weird. Refresh the page. I mean, either. Oh, look, look, you can see that it's downloading. It's definitely doing work. I wonder if it's UI. Yeah, maybe just refresh the page. I've never seen that method before. I've never seen this happen before. Okay, it's weird. This is the one we were expecting. Yes. Yeah, I wonder if it was, it's was a timing thing. I guess maybe just. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I've never seen that happen before. Have you, Mark? I have not. No. So I did your while this is running and it will, it will continue running using whatever, but download time it needs. This, this would allow you, this will allow you to. So one of the techniques that, that Kristen was mentioning, we could actually do in parallel to this. So if you want to bring up a command prompt window. Okay. And, and if you go to the place where your conventional commits plugin development is happening. So in this directory, you'll see the target directory. Yeah. And in the target directory, you should say, see conventional dash commits. HPI. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So what, what, what you want to do to the easy thing to do now is copy conventional commits. HPI. Okay. As a file into. That. Jenkins dash two dot two eighty nine dot one. Backslash plugins directory. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So what, what, what you want to do it to the easy thing to do now is copy conventional commits. Okay. Okay. All right. So it'll be easier if I just copy. Yeah. Yeah, that whatever, whatever works best for you is great. So into the plugins directory, if you paste it there. And now the next time you restart Jenkins in that directory, it will have your conventional commits plugin ready. Oh, amazing. So that was, that was what Kristen was describing as the. Hey, just run Jenkins yourself. And by running Jenkins yourself, you don't have to use HPI colon run. You can now use the Jenkins UI to manage it. So we could have also done that same exact operation. By using the managed plugins upload operation. So there's an advanced operation in managed plugins and Jenkins that could have done it as well. And that was what Kristen was referring to my copy technique is just a cheat, right? It's, it's because I know that that plugins directories where those things go. Right. We can look at that page after this finishes too. So. Yeah. Now for fun, if, if you want to go back to the command prompt that we just started, we should see log output from it telling us how it's making progress. Yeah, there we go. So it's downloading the durable task plugin right now. And so at least I find this, this output oftentimes quite helpful to hint to me, oh, something, something happened there and I need to be aware of it. Now, at least for me, I also have to be careful that I don't press control C in this window because that will stop my Jenkins. Mark, you had another meeting, right? Oh, that's a good question. Do I have another meeting? Thank you for asking. That's very kind of you. Let me check. Yes. Yes. And that I, it would be good if I could join that. Aditya, are you okay? Actually, we may be blocking them.  Yeah, definitely. I'll, I'll go to the advanced. Okay. Then I'm going to go ahead and end this session and we'll let you continue your efforts. And then I can drop in on the, the UX sick meeting. Okay. I will stop sharing my screen then. Great. And I will later today upload the recording of this so that it's available to you for reference. Yeah. Thanks everyone. Thank you so much, Mark and Christian for helping me out. That this has been great. Thanks very much.