Okay, so this will be a rough interview and introduction on what happened in the last year and a little bit more even in the past in the Italian community. Now it will be a brief introduction about myself just to give a brief idea of it. The state of the Italian fedora community one year ago and then my initial goals for the last year and what problems we have encountered and what is currently the state of the Italian community and obviously my plans for at least the next year. Now first of all I would like to point out that the fedora online.it that we will mention sometimes it's actually the Italian fedora community official fedora community so you know I sometimes use the fedora online name but it's just the same thing. So a brief introduction of myself I'm a fedora user on and off since fedora 11 and I have been a consistent fedora user since fedora 19 and I'm now ambassador and I also am part of other communities but not very active at least not as active as I would like it to be. Now I'm also administrator of fedora online since August 2015. Now what happened in August 2015?  And many user many very active user of fedora online actually have left recently and even more in August 2015 all administrators stepped down there was like this kind of you know change of generational change and that happened about one year ago. In the general fedora community there are a huge amount of Italians participating in it and this is great but the big part of it is that the majority of those people actually do not identify themselves in you know Italian speaking groups. So we actually have like four people in G11M that have contributed in the last two or three release cycles so pretty much no one I would say. And also since in the fedora 14 to fedora 18 kind of cycles there were a huge amount of translators we have a huge amount of pages and you know strings translated but the problem is that they have not been updated since that age. So we have a lot of stuff that is still you know fedora 11 fedora 12 guides that have not been updated after that. So we have this huge amount of documents that should be updated because has been translated in the first time in the first place but we don't have any more people to actually keep those content translated. So what were my goals one year ago in for in fedora online that is the Italian fedora official fedora community updated all the pieces because we had very very old stuff so it was not very safe to keep that way. To move to private slash private and virtual server because we had performance issues we've seen before and to keep at least the same number of user and posts because you know you don't want to lose even more people than you have already lost in the previous years. And to create a new administrative team because the previous one has just stepped down so we need that one. And also I wanted to to have the inactive stuff people to decade because we actually had some stuff people still around but actually have not been active for like four or five cycles. So the the admins the inactive admins I think it's like not having admins so I think we should have had a way to let admin to decade after you know couple of cycles that they don't perform any administrative actions. So in the general fedora community my personal goals were first of all create a list of Italian users you know just to know that they are there. So the main idea here was that if you have a list of Italian users and by Italians I mean people in Italy actually living in Italy. If they do some kind of event you can actually invite those people to come in. I would say personally in the sense that you send them an email or a message or whatever instead of the more general I write a page on the wiki and probably no one will write about it. And also I am advocating I was planning to advocate more heavily but at least a little bit on a simpler and more consistent g11 and tools that is translation and localization tools because the current state it's not the best one I would say. And also to reduce the number of pages that have been localized in the previous cycles but are not updated anymore because we don't have enough people. Now this is necessary because you know you don't want to have very old information out there and maybe people thinking that are updated while they are not and you know it would not be nice. So obviously as usual things are not straight so you have a plan but the reality it's a little bit different I would say. So in federal line the first problem was that all the software we had we had a website a wiki a planet mainly so four pieces of software that actually were very cooped up together. So we had a huge amount of custom code and both were hooking those pieces up because we don't have a federated user but we have the same user across all the platforms and how it was implemented was implementing in each one of those software a piece of code to actually be able to share the password together. But the problem is that this piece of code is not a model or a plugin but it was just a patch on the core of the product so makes update pretty much impossible to do. And even more the real problem is that the forum that is actually the database base of the whole thing is mainly written in PHP 4 and it has some kind of hooks to work on PHP 5. PHP 4 has been deprecated three or four years ago now so it's very very old kind of code infrastructure and even more the real problem is that the upstream of the forum is dead. So we don't have any more updates we have some patches like security patches some of them has been developed inside some of them outside the federal line but still they are not really upgrades. We have a huge amount of bugs and for instance also the planet is that upstream that too that did not help and so another problem we are now having with the forum is that all those PHP 4 and PHP 5 hooking stuff actually broke the email. So we don't have the emails sent to the users when the forum thread is updated. So we are kind of also losing traction and that kind of stuff because engagement because people do not know when they are not notified when there are new stuff. I apologize this is a specific reference to the Italian community's localized word. Yes because that's what I walked in late at my own fault. No problem. This is about the Italian one but I have spoken a lot with other localized communities and they have the same problems. So you know because in the end the Fedora approach core product has a very strong infrastructure team and development team so that's easier there but all the local communities are usually very small as province said before. He intervened in the Matt question and answer part and he said that there were just 50 people translating Fedora 24 so it's like in all the languages total of 50 people so it's kind of a general problem. And also updating media Wiki it's a nightmare if you have a custom team. In fact I was speaking with Patrick because in the Fedora project we also have media Wiki and I asked him how do you upgrade with a custom team and he said we don't have a custom team because we don't want to deal with custom team upgrading. So yeah probably not very wise to have a custom team if you want to upgrade and also very big problem out there. Time is limited you know and I am not paid to work on this so I have to do it in my spare time so obviously it's very very difficult. Also in the general Fedora community obviously Italian side we were speaking before about you know removing all the translated stuff that is not any more updated but it's still removing content and when you remove content you usually end up with a huge flame in the main list. So this is what happened actually and we saw this like two days ago actually in the meeting on Friday and you know after six months probably that we are talking about this it's not so bad. Also G11N seems to be a second class citizen because you know packaging it's a big thing and also other groups like ambassadors are very very active. G11N is you know a little bit second class citizen or at least that's how it feels maybe it's not but it still feels that way and also again time is limited. So the current state it's first of all we are on a private machine with the city nooks enabled so all the security concerns are limited at least now. We don't still have all the software updated but at least now if someone hacks our planet it's only our planet that has security problems not the rest of the website that is not good but at least it's better. And Media Weekend has been updated we managed to do it also with the custom team that was a user that one of our user in the community actually effort a lot of time to update the team. And also we are ready to move from Bilbo planet that is the one that upstream to the Venus planet which is also that upstream but it's okay because it's a static site generator. So even if you know it's maybe not perfect we still do not have any security problem while the Bilbo planet it's a dynamic website. We have not yet been targeted by any serious attack this is good probably we are not good big enough you know the like the project has been a major target of spam because the project is big but we are not that big so that's good in this sense at least. Also the for me now is completely broken it over the over the months every time it was like a little bit worse now it's completely broken so I'm going to work on this as soon as the the planet part is ended. But it will be probably the only way it will be to move to a different platform because the current one is dead upstream so you know you don't get any update. And the the full migration tool it's actually under QA I'm testing it I have to some kind of script from the web and make it work for us. It's not yet perfect we still the main problem we have is that we have a few users that in the migration lose their name that is kind of a problem you know but out of that it seems to be very good. So we probably would be able to move before the end of August or September maximum. And also we have a couple of new moderators which is good because you know starting from zero or one me that I was new at that point was yeah. And also a lot of parts of our infrastructure use Ansible which is also the standard for the Fedora project infrastructure. We are trying to like copy the Fedora project infrastructure team because I mean if it was for them it was for us and also it makes easier for someone you know in one group to help in the other one and help each other. The two groups so in this is a graph of the post the post is probably our main matrix we can gather because it's easier to gather. This is created by release we started actually at Fedora 3 so it's we have a huge amount of history and as you can see we have had some releases like from 10 I would say to 18 mainly which we had a huge amount of activity and then a downward trend. Now I would say the very good part is that this is Fedora 23 is the first up peak from you know this general trend so I think we are doing something right here and this is good. We are still probably not good enough because if you look down peak it's like you know the down peak here was huge the up peak here it's not so big but still it's a beginning of a trend so I see it in a good way. And probably the fact of having new moderators that wrote new ideas new ways to engage people because the point is we can have the best technical solution ever but if we don't have any ideas to engage people we will not engage people. And also I am a little bit concerned about this data about the actualness of this data mainly because our form is mainly on support this is a fact probably 90% of those posts are about support. So one of the problems of Fedora that I think we have is that Fedora is too good you know in Fedora 10 I remember you had a huge problems with the VGAs and monitors and whatever else. Now we don't have those problems so people do not reach Fedora Italian community but also the other communities because they don't have problems. So if they don't have problems they don't engage well they don't reach us and if they don't reach us in the first place they don't engage. So I think that as a general community and not only Italian and not only localised communities as Fedora general community we should try to find different ways to engage with our users. Because we end up with like Windows user or Mac users they don't engage with the company behind it you know they just are users. But that is not the way we want to have users because we are a community so if they use Fedora but they are not part of the community you know we don't have any advantage I would say from you know the presence of these people. So I think we should really try to find new ways. In the Fedora Italian community we had a couple of ideas over the years. One was a magazine that was actually mainly done by MAGA and it was a PDF kind of magazine so that you know you kind of have a different way to communicate to people.  But you know it's still the same problem because you have a very small amount of people that have a lot of knowledge and then a huge amount of people that just come by, ask a question, get an answer and disappear. So I think we should try to find new ways to you know to share new ways to engage people. So in the general Fedora community we actually reached a consensus on what policy to keep to keep pages and not. Now we have partially copied the French community. The French community was pretty strict on this because we do not want to have to translate anymore with the pages. So we delete them all.  So we decided to keep between 20 and 30 pages because that is the amount of pages that we expect to be able to manage. Now we have at the moment about 300 pages. So it will be very long now to choose which 30 pages out of 300. But I think it will be you know few months and we'll be there. Could you give an example of some of the pages you're talking about? Yeah, well I have actually a post, a mailing list message that I was going to prepare during the flight, my flight here. Let's see if I can move it here. Okay, so for instance this is my list personally so it's really my point of view. Pages that I would keep, it's like the Anaconda. This is like a page where it describes how to do all the steps of Anaconda. So it's like a user page, so it makes sense I think. Or like stuff about documentation of the product, the distribution, the design. Well Fedora live CDs, how to make a CD or USB drives, the foundations for foundations, a little bit of FAQs, releases, roadmaps. So it's like user part. And then those are the pages that, well we have some pages that are actually in Italian, full Italian users and historical pages like released party Fedora 17 and 21 release party. So these are historical pages, we can keep them because they are not ongoing, they don't require ongoing maintenance. And then we have a huge amount of pages that are actually in Italian, not translated but just in Italian. And we probably will need to rework those a little bit because I would say the majority of those are just old content, double content. And probably we will need to update those and see a little bit about those. And then we have those two pages that are actually in Italian but are guides. So probably we should have those in English and then maybe translated but keep them in English also not only in Italian because they are how to create live CDs and live USB. Maybe there is already a page there but we have to check if we have more material, merge the two pages in English and then maybe translate those. But it doesn't have no sense to have a different Italian way. And then we have those are the pages that I would suggest you delete and are by categories. I'm sorry that it's in Italian, my comment because it would be sent in Italian mainly so it makes sense. But the idea is like all the ambassadors stuff it does not make any sense to translate because you want your ambassador to actually know English. If they don't know English how can they will be able to engage with your upstream community, with your federal community. I mean they will be maybe very good going to people and speaking in Italian with them but if they don't know anything about English how can they bring information from the federal project. So I think all those ambassador pages can just be dropped. But zappers, it's like but zappers are people that take care of bugs. If they don't know English how can they take care of bugs, come on. And then while we have few categories that probably we can drop. Also RPM packages, how to create RPM packages if you actually know English how can you create an RPM package. Because also a huge process to create packages and it is like a confrontation process with other people in the community. And it's done in English so it's like pointless to translate those kind of thing I think. And also translation, we have translated documentation for translating stuff. Now I would say that if you are translating stuff you should know English at least. So you probably don't need an Italian version of how to translate English content. And infra, same thing, it's like yeah it's okay to translate stuff but if you are kind of in infrastructure side, you should know English because you know. And then we have a bunch of stuff about helping in Fesco or contributing that kind of stuff still. So if you are going to contribute in the Fedora project, you know core Fedora project, you need to know English. So I think those pages are not very useful. Then test cases, same thing, if you are performing a test case the goal is find bugs and then open bugs on bugzilla. If you don't know any English you will have problems opening bugs. And you know dealing with the people in the other side saying okay what exactly is the bug, can we repeat those and that kind of stuff. And then very advanced topic like virtualization, ARM architecture, that kind of stuff. I would say the majority of people trying to do that kind of stuff knows English because you know virtualization is pretty advanced topic.  Also because in the late 90s, beginning of 2000, we had a huge amount of books that were actually translated in Italian, you know, system administrator books. So in the last few years, not even the big corporation like Coralea or Erplie or whatever, they don't even translate anymore. They just import the English version and sell those because I mean Italy is only 50 million people and people speaking Italian it's like 50 million people. I mean like Spanish, you have a lot of Spanish speakers out in Spain so that makes sense for them to... Actually there are more Spanish speakers outside Spain than in South America. Yeah because you have South America. But in Italy it's not like that. It's like only Italians in Italy speak Italian so it's a very small sector. And then we have a bunch of pages that are actually to be archived because it's like Fedora 12, 13 kind of stuff. So that's mainly the criteria I'm using. It's like if it's something that you need, some pages that you need to contribute to the Fedora project and your contribution will be in English, it's going to translate the process. Is that important? Yeah. Yes? Can I ask about a nuance of that which would be could this community help determine if an English language page should be simplified in some way? Yes. Because a lot of the writers of the English language material are native speakers in English and they may reach for idioms or specific adjectives and adverbs that don't work well on the central language. We have had this kind of debate in our huge debate about keeping on deleting stuff. And the general idea is that a lot of pages are already written in 30 plain English, I would say. Some of them are not. And the idea is to help, you know, making it more plain. Because I would not say simplified English, but at least plain English, not some idioms or kind of stuff. Because it's kind of a problem for non-native English speakers because we learn English in schools. And in schools they do not teach you idioms. So it's kind of a problem. And a lot of people, at least in Italy, have scholastic English because they have never used English outside school. So at least we should keep, I think, I would say one B2 level kind of thing. It's Cambridge levels, but still it's simply not very weird phrases, not very weird constructions and not very weird idioms. But keeping it not... Yeah, the other time is that I live in a non-English community. And a lot of English speakers use specific definitions of words. And in some cases it's the last or arcane definition, which is in American English. So point those things out because the majority of contributors write it in American English. But the problem I would say in the Wiki pages is that Wiki is like a powerst. Everyone can go there, create a Wiki page or edit a Wiki page or whatever. And it's as official as all the other Wiki pages there. And so it's probably something that is to be dealt with from a technical perspective. It's like probably Media Week is not the best tool for that kind of job, I think. But we will see in the next few years if something changed from that side at least. And also we have a huge amount in the list. If you look there is already a huge amount of pages that are already archived. And we have something like a couple hundred pages that have already been archived because old stuff if you want to archive those. So something has already been done. And so my plans for next year from Fedora online, so Italian Fedora community. First of all replace Media Wiki because updating Media Wiki is a nightmare because you got an update every month. And since Media Wiki is the same software that is used by the Wiki Media Foundation for all the Wikipedia's, there are a huge amount of people trying to look for security vulnerabilities in those softwares and you don't want to have an old Media Wiki round. Migrate the forum to SMF which is a simple machine forum, a different platform, way more stable, way more secure, way more updated. Good choice I would say. And then some more people to the staff who are actually three people active in the staff. I would like to see five to six people because you know.  I'm the only administrator. I am the only one with the keys of the server. And if I am hit by a bus, well, the Fedora Italian community will die in one month because the service paid monthly. But I think we should solve this problem with the second administration. But with big communities you don't have this problem. In the Fedora general community, if someone in the infra team has some kind of issue and has to go outside the Fedora project, it's okay. We have plenty of those people. So it's okay. But in small communities, kind of a big problem. And I know that there is at least a couple of localized communities that disappear from the web, you know, overnight just because the administrator did not pay the following month of service. So it's kind of a big problem I think. And in the general Fedora community, push for more, you know, we have this thing where every single community, localized community, has its own rules, its own best practices, its own everything. Maybe we should share those a little bit more. It's like, this is also the intent of my talk. It's like, let's try to speak with each other and say, we are doing this, what you are doing. You know, let's try to find a way to communicate more so that we have more, you know, consensus there. Also, simpler G11 end tools, we actually have some kind of meeting on Friday. And I told them, guys, I will be on the floor next week. So if someone has some kind of, you know, complaints or would see some kind of feature on G11 tools, please tell me so that I can report to people that are actually developing those tools. And I have had a huge amount of, you know, points there. So people are not very happy probably with the actual tools and also the fact that, for instance, we do not actually use Xanata. We don't use Xanata for everything. We have seen some stuff on Transpex. It's like a little bit of a mess there. So maybe if we would be able to simplify things, people would be happy. Also because I tried to, I registered in Xanata at DevConf this year. And I actually had to do it in two days and with Patrick held in between because I was not able to, you know, register to Xanata properly on the first time. And I am actually, I think, a pretty savvy user. It's like, if I have some problems there, what will be, you know, the average standard user or even a low skill, low IT skills user. It's like probably we need simpler tools and with simpler GDIs, you know, more straightforward stuff. And then, as I said before, most standardized best practices are more different teams because it's true that we have different problems. You know, German people are huge teams. We are not so big. There are teams that are even smaller than us. So obviously we have kind of different problems, but we still have the same goal. So if we have the same goal, I think we should be able to find, you know, best practices that fits all of them or all of us or at least partially. So this is my review of the last year if anyone has some questions that has not been asked before. Yeah? No, go for it. We have time. So if infrastructure, and I'm not making any promises on infrastructure as part of it, I'm not saying this is ever going to happen. This is my particular delusional view of the world. If infrastructure were capable of providing, say, A4, AWIC, A hyper-pedia install, that you could then either run the localization that is provided by that upstream or help work with that upstream to get a localization to the Italian. So that you, in essence, didn't have to do as much of the infra work that you do, the admin work. Is that something that you feel like the Italian community would be responsive to or is the act of doing the infra an integral part of being in that community? Well, I would say the Italian community would be happy. But I'm speaking, I have an ongoing conversation with Patrick about this, because I mean, in one hand, the infra team does not want to have an overload of different platforms, different stuff, and I obviously see their point. And on the other hand, we need something different from what Fedora has, because Fedora does not have a forum anymore. We move to ask. No, and what I'm saying is that it needs to be a white software platform. But in essence, we could cook it first. Yes, it would be perfect. You guys, the French, the Greeks, the Dumavres, everybody got the same pieces. That would be perfect. It's also my perfect perspective, but I think we are very far from there. Because first of all, I was speaking with Patrick about ask, specifically ask. And there are some translated version of ask. But if you look at those, they are not really translated. They are like half big kind of solution, because the way we are doing it now is we have one installation of ask. And then when you go to different localized version, you have a different template, and that is why you have different strings there. And you have a different query in database that will only query, in theory, your language. Now, the query is probably not perfect, or ask is not perfect, or somewhere in between. So you don't actually get consistent results, I would say. So, yeah, that is one thing that we are working on. Also, as a Fedora online, so Italian Fedora community, we have a problem. That is, we studied in Fedora 3. So we kind of have a very strong name, at least in the Italian community. So it, for us, is okay to be more closer to the infra and general Fedora project. But we still want to have a little bit of naming there. Consistent names, or consistent domain names. That kind of stuff, because we are known locally with that name. I would say I don't want a radical implementation, but what I'm hearing is it would need to be something that the community, the Italian community, could still brand for themselves, and could still say, our region really prefers wikis instead of asks, or emails instead of forums. And so that it's not, you must take these three pieces and use these brands. Exactly. Because, I mean, obviously from an infra's point of view, this means more work. But I think that a good deal would be like, I am actually the only one-half people working on an Italian infra. And we are okay joining the infra team. So it would be, yeah, you have a little bit more work, but also one-and-a-half person more. So it could be some kind of deal this way. We are trying to find a deal with them, too, so that it works nicely. And also here, I think that from the other localized community, should be some kind of reach there. Because if it's just Italian one, okay, we are one-and-a-half people. But if it's like maybe the French one, the German one, and other communities as well, it may be enough people to have this whole infrastructure up and running and working. When you say that there are very little group of power users and a lot of just people who make a question and disappear, maybe attracting users that... I don't know, maybe they use the computer for designing or doing child's kind of things. Maybe they won't just... Oh, my driver is not working. Ah, thank you. I mean, something in the middle, not in the middle between just user and power users. Yeah. Well, I would say that if we are able to integrate more with the Fedora infrastructure, this will arrive because, as I said in the beginning, we have a huge amount of Italian speakers actually working on the Fedora project, but not in the Italian side, I would say, but just in general one. So if we are able to get closer to them being more integrated with FAS, for instance, the Fedora account system and other stuff like that, probably it would be easier also to get some of those people to also help out a little bit here and there. And some of people in marketing and websites and packaging and so forth are actually Italian. But we never see those in the Italian side of the project, so in the IOC or forum or whatever. Could it happen that they don't know the forum? I think they know. This is my perspective, I think they know, but they prefer to stay in the international side of it. Yes? Not into question. Okay. At first, you may have this in your first slide, and I apologize for being late. Is there a rough estimate of the size of the community? The Italian one? We have an estimate in post. I saw your post slide. Yeah. I wanted to ask about that. I didn't know for you how many people that was, even if it's transients, how large is that? Well, we have on our forum, there is a little bit of statistics in the... Okay. In the end, it's 8,300 users. But this is the total amount, you know, because they created 235,000... Some of the people who, after Fedora 10, you made the number 10. Yeah. Exactly. So my second question was, does this community roll up through ambassadors or conversations successfully with Fedora and the Council or the core, or does this community not feel like it's got a great path to get into conversations centrally? Well, yeah. Now this is kind of, you know, weird situation because in Italy, we have 19, I think, or 18 or 19 ambassadors actually written in the Wiki. Now the active one are like three people. I am one. He's one. And there is another guy that is actually active in this project. So it's like... And all the others are disappeared. So all the people that could be there to bridge out are there. But, you know, we are still very small... So in practice it could work. Yeah. Today there are challenges. Exactly. Okay. Thank you. Thank you.


Okay, James P. Madonna from the Facebook group everything is food. I'm here with World Record power lifter Jeff Zanbello. I already got my duck, right? I'm gonna get some Jeff Zanbello is here world record Power lifter and circular strength athlete. He is returning back to Canada tomorrow And this is his last day down here, New Jersey, and we're back at the Royal Hibachi buffet. Okay, in Saddlebrook, New Jersey And here we got the Mongolian barbecue. That's if it really is Mongolian, I have no idea No, you take it you take yourself with the tongs Yeah, no you take with the tongs not not with somebody's tongue. I mean the tongs I Don't know if this is lamb or beef I have no idea. I'm just taking a shot at it There's some whiting I can do a little surf and turf here, man Was that tilapia? Royal Hibachi grill buffet 46 West Saddlebrook, New Jersey some whiting I'll get some tilapia. It looks pretty good giving a shout out to my near-dea in Italia Rodriguez and the king of moots Jeff Zanbello the creator Mario Petrus Anthony Laura Think this is all I have room for this is the real Atkins ketogenic Plot again, man. Hey, they got whiting. They just put out tilapia and the whiting Like whitey Ford. Yeah This is all nutrition. This is the best. Oh, oh, that's a white tuna. That's delicious. Yeah, that's octopus Popo Beautiful. And look over there. Look how beautiful this is. Alright, white tuna. What is that? I have no idea. It looks interesting. This is the octopus plush popo. This is the unagi, roasted eel, tabadou. Oh, yeah Oh, yeah. She tried it. It's cooked. That. Yeah, roasted eel. Roasted eel called unagi. And uh, what's this? I had some kind of um, it's not hardcore sushi. It's not pork. Yeah, yeah, something fried there. I have no idea, man. Anyways, I'm gonna take this back and come back. Yeah, but that's definitely that white tuna. Piece of unagi, man. Handheld. It's gonna have to be, see, I can get more detail with the handheld video than I could with the tripod. But don't mind me. I'm not talking to myself. I'm talking for you two. We had a show here the other day. Oh, I forgot the lemons for my water. I gotta go get lemons now. But anyway, I digress. I digress. Now, take a look at the picturesque flatters of uh, Jeff Sambello. Powerlifting. He holds world records in powerlifting. Thank you, dear. Nice meeting you, Bill. Enjoy. Thank you, dear. You guys, you guys have a heart of gold. Let me tell you. You know what? I love smoked whitefish salad. You have a beautiful, beautiful heart. I can eat a whole tub of that. Smoked whitefish salad. Enjoying good health. Thank you. Isn't that great? Okay, here we go. There he is. See, now I can get detail because I'm not using a tripod. Okay, this is it. This is Jeff's last day and hopefully he will... I'll be back in December. And he don't have to worry about getting to the airport at 4 a.m. because he can take his time and he can sleep in various hotels when he drives back up north into the Arctic Circle, Arctic Circle. Oh, you know what? They got steak knives there too if you need them. Actually, I'll get a couple. I gotta get lemons anyway. I'm eating fish. Now, Jeff, the workout you had today at New Breed Fitness on Garibaldi Avenue in Lord Island, New Jersey. And it's nice, cool, this time, cool, breezy weather. It was very well, right? I wasn't running outside, too. Right. And the owner was very, very nice of him to assist you. Daniel Ramsey. His name is Daniel Ramsey. Okay, good. All right, so I... And the co-owner is Lily. Daniel and Lily own the business. Oh, okay. Okay, so they're partners. Yep. Okay, all right. They're beautiful people. Oh yeah, so that was great. They're very kind people. Now, you know... Well, you know what? I'm glad you were able to get in one last workout. And it's a great thing, you know. And Daniel invited me back for December with my son, Mike, and me. So we're gonna work out at New Breed Fitness a couple of days before and then a couple of days after on our way back to Canada. Yeah, that's great. That's great. There's a... I'll tell you later off camera. We're gonna stay in New Jersey in Lodi and spend much time with James P. Madonna. Oh, also check out the rates of where all the European tourists stay. The Holiday Inn in Hasbrook Heights. It might be... There's a comedy club in there. They got a swimming pool. It might be more reasonable. And we're gonna go... At night time, I don't say a hair, but we're gonna go to a restaurant that you suggested. The Crosnes. Yeah, that's not... That's a sit-down meal, but... We're not gonna go to any franchise one. No. This is owner. Oh, like BJ Steakhouse? Yeah, we don't want anyone to mention that. It makes me sick. You know what? The people heard enough during last night's live YouTube show. They heard all about it. So let's not get upset. Yeah, we're gonna get upset. I wanna enjoy my last day here. Yes, you will. Okay, here we go again. A world-class powerlifter. Record holo, drug-free record holo. Jeff St. Bell's last day. That's actual Russians. Right. Look at those wide... Look at that billboard of a back with the wide lats. Look at the lats. Look at he's getting. He's getting dessert already? Wow, are you full already, Jeff? Yeah. Roya Hibachi Buffet here in Route 46 West out of New Jersey. His last day down here for this... For the post-seminar cool-down. I would call this these videos at the post. Lodi, New Jersey, Mr. Mace Man, cool-down... New breed fitness. Yeah, that's right. New breed fitness. Garibaldi Avenue, Lodi, New Jersey. These are the cool-down videos after the seminar. And, literally, it is cool-down. Not because it's a hard ice cream, but because it is, like, really cool and breezy in the 60s. In the 60s. And, unfortunately, you know, it was, like, 87 degrees. Not counting humidity for the seminar, but... I'm gonna put some pudding as a topping. You're gonna put pudding as a topping? Tapioca, tapioca. Yeah, that looks like, uh... Looks like a little bit of spunk. Yeah, a little bit of spunk. I'll put some Asian spunk. Spunk. Wow, look at that combo.  Good Goobity Goo. Good Goobity Goo. There you go. I know where that's coming from. That Grady Wilson used to say. Oh, I love Grady. Yeah, Shady Grady. Now I'm gonna go get some sushi. Tadah, bop, bop, bop. Got a different stuff today, no? Oh, yeah. Oh, you see, I put the ice cream on your page. Yeah, yeah. The, uh, chocolate chip mint. Uh, last... last... Oh, yeah, I try... yeah, I tried that. That's very good. I took a close-up of the chocolate chip mint. The white tuna here. Whee, whee, whee.  So what the difference is? Wait, are these both white tuna? No, the... This one? The one that's tilapia. Oh, oh, tilapia. That's white tuna. That's white tuna, yes. Oh, I understand. And this is bunagi. Here. Yeah. Bunagi, sir. Very good. You know how you grow a pineapple plant? No. It's very easy. You see the top? Right. You cut the top off? Right. You cut the top off?  Right. You put that in water. The roots come out. And then you pot it and you have pineapple plant. Wow. I learned that in our YouTube video. Yeah, then you have... Everybody made the little... The children sleep with Michael Jackson in the bed, right? Uh-huh.  Yeah. All right. Little pillow ginger. And then the bean. Little wasabi. A friend of Jeff consumed. I hardly doubted he ate that much wasabi. I don't think so. But this is powerful stuff. Cheese. You know, it's a good program. Lucha Underground. Yeah. Lucha Libre from California. Oh, yeah. It's on Wednesday, Wednesday night. Oh. Yeah, they're over there. Oh, this is very good. Not too many. That's some zucchini there. Let me take this big grilled zucchini. Let's put it right on top of the urnagi. I mean, that the urnagi is already cooked. Here's the yellow squash. Put that on top of the urnagi. That's about it. Fried shrimp. Fried shrimp today. Oh, there we go. There's the fried shrimp. I got no room for it, though. All right. Let me return to Jeff Sambello. The great Jeff Sambello. Okay, here I got... I got tilapia. Raw tilapia. White tuna. Let me move the grilled yellow squash and zucchini for a second. And here I have, of course, urnagi. Roasted eel. Gabbadun, as we say in Italian. Gabbatoni.  Unguilie. Now, I'm going to have squash flavor. Squish squash. On the eel. Holy mackerel, you done already? Oh, that was sabi. That was powerful, right? Oh, yeah, it was good. Yeah.


there once again with another edition of Pacious on the News. And I have to say my favorite interviewee because he knows how to do this. I'll interview you now. All right. Senator Angus King. He's a pro at this. He's a pro at many things.  I spent many, many years in Washington. I was a congressional liaison for the Peace Corps when it first started spending many of my days on Capitol Hill. So I observed the House and the Senate and there's some people that look like senators, behave like senators, think like senators, and Angus King is one of them. So I'm very pleased that you could be here, Angus. Well, you know, we like to be topical here and a lot's going on and we're going to get into some of the gridlock in Congress. And I know that you read and you read history and you might be able to put some of this gridlock in context. It's not the first time in American history and much like, frankly, what led up to the Civil War in the 1850s and the way members of Congress were at each other's throats practically. Well, I'm going to, I want to talk about that. You want to get into that now or you want to do. Let's get into it now. Well, the first thing is we don't hate each other. I mean, people think that. You know, you read about the toxic Congress. It's very partisan institutionally, you know, Mitch McConnell and Chuck Schumer and that. But personally, I mean, the best evidence of this is to watch a Senate vote where the senators come in and sort of wander around and they vote, they walk by, it takes 15 or 20 minutes or actually it usually takes longer. Harold, if Saint Peter comes to you and says, you have 10 minutes to live, you should say, could it please be during a 10 minute Senate vote because you have at least an hour? But anyway, what you'll see if you watch C-Span 2 is a lot of chit chatting on the floor. It looks like the dump on Saturday morning. And it's almost always bipartisan.  I mean, it's, and so the idea that we that we're at each other's throats that it's bitter. I don't think this is, I don't think that so much the senators, that's the most exclusive club in America. Well, I think the house, it may be more, more personal. I think so. But the other piece is that conflict sells newspapers or cable TV shows. And the truth is we, the last Congress was one of the most productive in the last 10 or 20 years. There were seven major bills passed, five of them were bipartisan. Two of them were Democrats only, but five of them were strongly bipartisan. The PACT Act, the infrastructure bill, a lot of these major bills that, that, you know, people don't think that we can do anything together. And the answer is we can. But some issues are still really hard. Immigration, for example, it's hard to get agreement on that. There's so much politics. Why is it hard on immigration? Well, you mean you had your senator from Florida, what's his name? Rubio. Rubio was all about let's have reform of the system and let's fix it. Well, we got very close. In fact, in, in 13, the first year I was there, we passed a major comprehensive immigration reform in the Senate with 67 votes. It went to the house and John Boehner, the speaker at the time, wouldn't bring it up. If he'd have brought it up, it would have passed and we'd be way beyond a lot of the fights that we're having now. So that was a, that was a real missed opportunity. To me, and I'm talking with some of my colleagues quietly about it, Republican and Democratic colleagues, there's an obvious deal. And the deal is border security and something to, to give the dreamers a pathway to citizenship and workforce. Harold, the biggest issue after inflation in Maine and everywhere else right now is workforce. Every group that comes to my office from Maine, whether it, I've had the loggers, the, the medical association, the nurses association, teachers, principals, school superintendents, there are shortages of people everywhere. And it's the major thing that's holding our economy back right now. So one of the possible fixes is immigration because this country's been built, was built on legal immigration. And so that's, I think there's an opportunity. The question is whether the majority in the house wants a solution or the issue. You see what I mean? I do see what you mean. Do they want to get, do they really want to fix it? Or do they want a solution? Well, that's the question or do they just want an issue that they can hammer the Democrats over the head with? Of course they don't want a solution. I say you can't say that. But I, of course, the Republicans in the house do not want a solution to the problem. They want to use it as a sledgehammer. But anyway, that's, I, you know, it's one that just mystifies me. And why don't they want a solution in the house?  Human beings are afraid of strangers. They're suspicious historically true. You go back to the 1840s, there was a whole political party called the know nothings. And their whole platform was no Catholics and no foreigners. Exactly. And the thing in human nature is unchanged. In 1924, my, my father came in 1914, along with grandpa, my grandparents. In 1924, 10 years later, all immigration of Greeks was essentially shut down the quota system based on the number of Greeks that had come to this country in 1850. Well, the country, the country was pretty much totally open until the like the 1880s. And the first immigration law had an interesting title, the Chinese exclusion law. So this is part of our history. On the other hand, immigrants are also who we are. I mean, I, I speak to large groups, and I say, Okay, how many of you here are either an immigrant or a descendant of immigrant?  I mean, that's who we all are. And we've got to fix this because we're, we're, we're aging. And if we don't have new people coming in, and they can, you know, they don't, they don't have to be from foreign countries, they can be from Ohio. I mean, we can bring in people in domain from wherever. But, but immigration is part of our history. Here's one of the problems, Harold, and I haven't seen anybody writing about this. This is an observation I've made. We now have these heavily gerrymandered congressional districts, they're either all Democrat or all Republican, and our states have become heavily red or heavily blue, main as they say, purple, it's, you know, we can vote for people of either party. But here's the problem. In, in many states and congressional districts today, the primary is the election. In other words, if you, if you're in Oklahoma, and you win the Republican primary, you're going to be the senator. The Democrat has no chance. That's just the way that state is set up, or, or Alabama. And if you're in a district in Brooklyn, if you're the demo, you get a Democratic thing, you're going to, you're going to win. So here's what's happening. You can lose that primary, not because of your position on immigration or abortion or gun control, but because you're viewed as a person who's willing to listen to the other side and try to solve the problem. You can lose, in other words, if you're seen as someone who's willing to compromise. If you think about that, that's really dangerous because our system is, you can't solve tough problems without compromise. But do you see what I mean?  A rhino. Republican in name only. What that really means is a Republican who's willing to talk to Democrats and try to solve the problem. And, and think for themselves. Yeah, but, but it, but I think this is one of the most dangerous things, because it, it, it goes a long way toward explaining the, the, the, the paralyzed nature of our politics. I've had good friends in the Senate who we worked together for three or four years and then it comes time for their reelection and they stopped talking. They're, they're almost afraid to be seen with somebody from the other side. And that's, that's just not a democracy, a, you know, a Democratic Republic can't function that way if the people are afraid to talk to people who have differing views and try to find solutions. The voters demand it. Their voters demand it. Their voters want them to behave that way. And that's how they get ahead in politics behaving. Well, one, one problem is that primaries tend, the voters in primaries tend to be the activists on either side. 100% of the Democrats or 100% of the Republicans don't turn out for a, for a primary election. Here in Maine, for example, let's take up just a typical example, you can have, take a Republican primary that about 30% of the people of Maine are Republicans. Okay. So you start with 30% of the people of Maine. In a typical primary, Democrat or Republican, about 25, 20% will show up. So 20% of 30% to 6%. The person that wins that primary wins with 35%, three or four candidates running, 30% of 6%, 2%. 2% of the people of Maine are selecting the party candidates for US Senate or governor or whatever.  And that's why we have these, you know, people with their more extreme and afraid to compromise. Yeah. Yeah. It's, it's, it's not an easy place to work. It is not an easy place to work. You know, I was the Democratic chairman at one time and I was totally against open primaries. Totally. As I said, no, these primaries had to build party loyalty. I was totally wrong. Totally wrong. Open primaries are very important. You've got to force politicians to worry about other views, not just the mainstream party view. Right. And so there are things that can be done, but I don't, it's, you know, it's all about power. Well, people talk about the Congress being polarized, but the country's polarized. Absolutely. I mean, the, the Congress reflects the population to a large extent. And that goes, we can spend a lot of time, that goes in my view to the fact that we've got, we're living in different factual universes. In my experience in public policy, going back to being governor and even before, if you can get everyone around the table and have a common understanding of the facts, it's fairly easy to get to a solution. The solution is usually sort of self-evident. But if the people around the table have totally different views of the facts, it's practically impossible to get to a solution. Do you think of, of immigration as MS-13 and gang, gangs and rapists? Or do you think of immigration as, as Harold's family coming over here in 1914 and building a successful career in the United States? If you have these radically different views of what, what the facts are, it's very hard to solve problems. And we, people are getting their news from places they, they agree with. And we have politicians, leaders, political leaders who stoke that anger, who actually live off of it, stoking it. And so if you don't... Well then the problem is what happens when they, when it gets beyond them and they can't, can't stop it. Donald Trump was booed in Alabama when he talked about being vaccinated. Yes. By his people. Right. Yeah. Yeah. It, it, it gets out of hand. Of course, I think he likes to get out of hand. He, he, he, he, it's a source of his power and influence. But Donald Trump, it seems to me, is, owns the Republican Party. Now, I do think so. They're afraid of him. They know that if they anger, if they say anything bad about Trump, his voters, who he owns, are going to turn on these votes. Well the truest thing he ever said was back in 2016 when he said he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and it wouldn't cost him any votes. Absolutely. He knows that. And it is true. And look what's happening now. I mean, they're... His polls are going to go up because of this indictment. His polls will go up because of the indictment. You know, I don't understand this, why this is a party of, of law and order, supposedly, wasn't my day, the law and order party. Now it's... Let's, let's investigate the DA. Yeah, let's investigate the DA. It's totally changed. Let's, let's eliminate the FBI. Let's do all of these crazy things. Nobody's going to do any of those things, but they talk about it. And Bill Clinton was about to be indicted when he was president, finishing his presidency. The special counsel had told people he was going to seek an indictment. And so, Clinton made a deal. He admitted he lied. He made a public statement.  He was fined. He was disbarred. Humiliating thing for a lawyer. He was disbarred. They made the deal in order not to be indicted. This guy says, I don't make any deal not to be indicted. This helps me. Sure. The public, so many people in the public will admire me for being... John Gotti was admired by many people. The murderer. John Gotti. People like that. They like celebrity fighters. Fighters and criminals. Well, part of the, part of the issue these days is the so-called weaponization of the government. And I'm not sure how that's really defined. And it should work both ways. I mean, if the House Judiciary Committee investigating the DA in New York, that's the kind of weaponization of the Congress. But it's a, you know, it is where we are. And it's it's, it's, the problem is that we're devaluing our institutions. People don't, I don't think we realize how much we take for granted. How much we assume trust. For example, elections.  And you say that's the, okay, that's the vote. But you trust it. You see what I mean? And if that trust is eroded, which is what really worries me, then it all breaks down. And, and, you know, I didn't agree with much that Donald Trump did. But I thought the worst thing was the undermining of confidence in the election process itself. But you have nearly half your colleagues that don't agree with you, that don't worry about it apparently.  Maybe they do privately worry about it. Do they? I don't want to talk about what my colleagues say privately, but I would say that there's a more skeptic, skepticism of Donald Trump privately than publicly. Yeah. Publicly. Because they're responsive to their voters. Of course. The disaster for them politically, if they were to be very critical of him. It is amazing that this guy who's a con artist, you know, is a sale, snake oil salesman, is probably in my lifetime by far the most powerful Republican ever. And he wasn't, he wasn't even a Republican before he decided this is the root. Well, I'm not a psychologist. I mean, he obviously tapped into something that I think he's, he tapped into a frustration in the in the society of change, fast change, changes in the world and he just, he channeled it. And I don't think it was so much, you could have a long discussion about whether he was doing this consciously or whether it was just him. I think a lot of it was just him. Instinct. His instinct going back, you know, long before politics. And I think he just, he hit a current that's there, that's probably always been there. But he's, he's enabled it and has that, that kind of, that kind of power. I don't think he has majority support in the country, by any means. Thankfully. So, you know, the question will be who, who the Democrat who runs against him and I think it's pretty certain you'll get the Republican nomination. I know Mayor Curley was elected Mayor of Boston while in jail. Right. So I don't think the indictment will affect his ability to get the Republican nomination. But then, you know, then Joe, Joe Biden will, looks like is going to run, but we don't know that's almost two years away. Yeah. No, I agree that Trump is shooing for the Republican nomination. I mean, because his opponents are afraid to disagree with them. Yeah, they're trying to do this dance of having some level of disagreement, but still in poor Ron DeSantis. I agree. Let's talk a little bit about prescription drugs. The Senate and the House passed this Inflation Reduction Act and tell us what it did with respect to prescription drugs. Well, for the first time, it allowed Medicare to negotiate with the pharmaceutical companies for lower drug prices. Basically, it's a volume discount. And the funny thing about this is that the VA and Medicaid, which is healthcare for lower income people, have had this power forever. From, you know, I don't know how long, but 30, 40, 50 years it's been assumed. The reason Medicare, which buys, as you can imagine, drugs by the gazillions, because it represents so many million seniors, the reason they can't is that when the Medicare drug benefit was passed under George W. Bush, I think it was 2005, the Congress put a specific provision in that new benefit, saying Medicare can't negotiate drug prices. Period. So that's been the, if that's the President, you can take it. But that's been the law for, you know, 20 years, 15 years. Finally, this past year, we changed it.  I think it was the very first bill I introduced when I came into the Senate with J. Rockefeller in 2013 was for Medicare negotiation of drug prices. And it, you know, and I'm not taking credit for it. A lot of other people worked on it over the years, but it finally happened 10 years later. The stars align. You know how the Congress works. You never can tell. You work on something for years and years, nothing happens. Then all of a sudden, things come into place. So basically, it allows Medicare to negotiate a volume discount on the drugs that they buy. And it will lower prices for the government. It'll save the government, the Medicare program billions of dollars and ultimately drive down prices for everybody else. So here's what I think I understand, but I want everybody to think about this. So none of us know people, particularly older people like me, who don't want lower prescription drug prices. And so back when this Medicare drug act passed and they made sure that you could not negotiate a lower price, probably one of too many Americans that said, I'm for that. I don't want to have that. Right. Heaven forbid we should have lower drug prices. Heaven forbid, yeah. So it pleased only one group of people, drug manufacturers. So it had to be their lobbyists were pleased, but the public wasn't pleased. So the lobbyists have some influence. Well, we have a system, Harold, that there's too much money in politics. There's too much money and it comes from all over the place. I have an idea for election finance reform that totally unconstitutional. So I'm going to think I'm going to try to put it in the form of a constitutional amendment. I want to get your reaction. The rule would be no one can contribute to your election campaign except people, people who are eligible to vote for you. In other words, if you're running for the U.S. Senate in Maine, only Maine people can contribute in a limited amount of three or $4,000, whatever it is. But then no outside money, no, you know, billionaires from Arizona coming into the main Senate race. The amount of money that's in these races today, Susan Collins and Sarah Gideon, it was like $130 million. I mean, you and I remember campaigns where it was a million or two was huge, huge money. Bill Hathaway's campaign in 1972 was $212,000 and it was the most expensive Senate campaign in Maine history. But the idea, to me, the idea, we ought to get back to the idea that your supporters, your finances should come from the people you're representing. And it would utterly change the landscape because right now there's just so much.  Oh, yeah. When George Mitchell first got to the Senate, he called me up and he said, I want to put together a committee to study campaign finance reform, and I want you to chair it. So we did, we got all these people on the committee, and we came up some very good suggestions, but of course we ran up against one thing, free speech. Free speech. Yeah, the Supreme Court has defined money as speech. Money as speech, yep. Yeah. So that's why it has to be a constitutional amendment. It has to be a constitutional amendment. Back to one. By the way, I threw this idea out with some of my colleagues at dinner the other night. They all loved it. I don't know if they'll vote for it, but the idea of not having to spend so much time making fundraising phone calls and drug going all over the country. Miss McConnell won't be for that. No, I don't think Mitchell will. No, he will not be for that. So, same thing with the Inflation Reduction Act. It passed. You can negotiate lower prices for drugs. It will help us all. But then immediately, a bunch of Republican senators got together and put in a bill to reverse that, which I don't understand. I don't understand what the possible argument is. And they won't tell you, I'm sure, what their argument is, except it's clear. It's the lobbyist wanted them to do it. Well, one of my problems with drug prices is that we're paying the highest in the world for the same drugs. Yeah. And I remember I was approached, and this was when I was governor. I can't remember where I was, but a lobbyist or a representative on the pharmaceutical company said, why don't you like us? And I said, I feel like the only guy on the airplane paying full fare. Right. And so, you can get the same drug in Canada, the same drug for half of what it costs here. And they always say, well, we need the money for research. Yeah, that's their argument. My problem with that is that they spend more money on those TV ads we see. Every night on the news. And we're one of only, I think, two or three countries in the world that allows those ads. Yeah. I have fun. When I watch one of those ads, I write down the name of the drug, and then I go online and find out what it costs.  Yeah. And again, why are we advertising to you and me when it's only doctors that these are prescription drugs? But do you know the answer to your question? I suppose it's because people will go to their doctor and say, I want this new thing that I saw on TV. Yeah. But the other answer is that there is no good reason why we have to pay the highest drug prices, double other countries. There is no reason except the lobbyists have the influence on Congress, and the public doesn't put fire to the feet of the politicians. The public, you know, it's self-government. We can have an influence. The public can have an influence. I haven't seen any polling, but I suspect that the negotiation for drug and the Inflation Reduction Act probably has 80% approval rating. Yes. But when those Republican senators put that bill in, there was no pushback. They didn't take any risk. Well, the other thing that I can't understand, frankly, and I don't want to sound too partisan on this, but they urge to take health insurance away from people. I don't get. I mean, to me, there's a not trivial statistical relationship between health insurance and living longer. And what is the reason? Well, you and I remember the message of Medicare and it was a big deal at the time. Socialized medicine, remember? It was socialized medicine and the end of the country and very gold water and everything. And yet it's a godsend. I was there. I was there at the signing. I worked for Lynda Johnson. I was there in Independence, Missouri at Harry Truman's library when Johnson signed the bill. No question about it. Socialized medicine is going to bring the country down, finish the country. So flash forward 50 years and we're having the same fight about the Affordable Care Act, which is nothing more than helping people buy health insurance. But I don't understand how the people get convinced that these guys who are against expanding health insurance, I don't understand how they get away with it. One of the interesting things is if you look at a map, you'll see that the highest percentage of people who are getting the Affordable Care Act are often in the red states. So how do they get away from being against it? They're apologists. I don't understand why. It can only please a group of people who don't want to expand it. You're assuming that people vote and make decisions on policy and often it's different than that. It's deeply mysterious and emotional and it's how you feel about somebody. The famous thing about George W. Bush is that somebody you want to have a beer with. So those kinds of things are very much a part of this. I've run in a bunch of elections and when I went to college the major was we called it government because I remember the head of the department said we have a government department because there's no science in politics. There's no such thing as political science. But like I say, it's mysterious. That's a good point. I think that guy made a good point. There's no science in it. It's emotion. That may not be entirely bad. I don't think we should say because people are making decisions that are distinct of what they see for character and honesty and that's not a bad thing. We don't want our representatives to be just mechanical of the poll says this so therefore they're going to do that. Why do we need the representative then? You can do it with a switch. Edmund Burke's letter to the electors of Bristol about am I just a representative or am I supposed to use my best judgment and knowledge on your behalf and Muskie used to say I can't remember what the issue was but somebody said that's not polling very well or something and Muskie said the polls can change from day to day. I'm supposed to do what I think is right and that's what I'm trying to do. But if you're in the United States Senate you have all of that information that I don't have ordinarily. I mean I read a lot but the fact is you have more information and that's valuable. And that's my job. And that's your job. So yeah there's a balance. You don't want to be arrogant and say I know best and I don't have to listen to my constituents. You absolutely have to listen to your constituents. I like coming back here believe me they tell me what they think in the airport or in Millinocket or Skowhegan where I was a couple of weeks ago so you absolutely have to listen but I think your constituents also expect you to as you say weigh the information that you have and do what you think is best for Maine and for the country. You alluded to something earlier in this program about facts and truth and how everything can crumble in this country very very quickly if we pay no attention to facts we don't care about what's true. It's very very dangerous. Well here's one of the problems there's a phenomenon called confirmation bias and confirmation bias is the human tendency to seek out sources of information that you already agree with. You read the columnist first that you like and you don't read the one that you disagree with. Everybody does that and so what we have the best example is Fox News and MSNBC you're conservative you watch Fox News and you get a steady diet of conservative information. If you're liberal you watch MSNBC Rachel Maddow and Lawrence O'Donnell you're getting your own biases confirmed. Obama once said if he watched Fox News for a week he'd hate himself. But the problem is that that and then you compound that with the internet and the algorithm on the internet where if you click on a story a negative story about Hillary Clinton one for the next month you're going to get a steady diet of you'll never guess what Hillary did next. It happens to me on online when I go shopping for a product Wayfair has decided I need a wall sconce.  I get it all the time because I do this program and I'm kind of curious guy and so I'm always I watch Fox News not steadily but I watch it I want to know what they're saying and I even look at the New York Post all the time I want to see what they're saying. But that means you see how this algorithm thing works. I get emails all the time but that's one of the things that divides us when you and I were kids in America got their facts from one guy who? Walter Cronkite and now the facts are coming from all over and they're coming from sources they're tending to push us apart but here there's another step and you didn't ask me what keeps me up at night these days artificial intelligence the power of this new technology is unbelievable I would urge your viewers to go to chat chat G-B-T the word chat G-B-T 4 number 4 G-B-T 4 and it says try it out and you can try it out and you write a sentence I could write in in fact I did it over the weekend I said write me a poem about the Penobscot River in the style of Robert W. and within 15 seconds a 20 stands a poem came out that would have taken you or I a month to write I mean it was unbelievable that the Penobscot River and the Falls and the beauty and the trees and all in the style of Robert W. I mean the power of this is unbelievable the dark side of it is that it can be used to create false films called a deep fake where a professor I saw in eight minutes put in about 30 seconds of his voice a picture of himself and then had it write a narrative about how he kicked dogs or something and it created a film of him moving his eyes his mouth moved his own voice saying stuff he never said I mean it's terrifying it's terrifying and yesterday in the New York Times there's a big long interview with the inventor with the guy who started the company he was very worried about it very very worried he said it's like developing the atomic bomb something useful could come of it but it could be a disaster for the human race just what he said I've been playing with it over the weekend and it's shocking it's pretty cool it's fun to write a poem or an essay but where it goes I sent a copy to two of my friends down in the senate and said this is something we gotta talk about and nobody knows and we're in a free country and those kinds of things but this is an incredibly powerful technology and again democracy is based on information but what if the information is made up what if it's not information and in the old days you could here I'm sounding in the old days but in the old days if somebody put a negative tv add up about you you could put on your own or if it was really gross you could ask the tv station to take it down if it was just a lie but if one of these fake videos goes up how do you it goes online you can't catch up with it you don't know who's seen it where it's gone so this is this is a new frontier that is something that we really gotta think about I should say to the audience when I was talking the other day to senator king's communications director he said oh I didn't I'm sorry I didn't call you right back I had to take a call from senator king he is really worried about artificial intelligence and here I am so while we're on facts you're a member of probably the most interesting committee in the senate the senate intelligence committee you know a lot and you'd have to kill me if you told me it was funny because I get interviewed and I have to consciously think where did I learn this did I learn it from reading in the newspaper or did I learn it in a classified hearing but one of the things about facts that what we hear a lot is the word hoax and his followers do too all the time this is a hoax that's a hoax so your bipartisan committee did a review and an investigation of Russian meddling in the 2016 collection and Trump said and I think it's a narrative that kind of took with the public Trump said it's a hoax they're Russia hoax now look you're a member of the senate intelligence committee that wrote this a republican led committee that wrote this report is it a hoax that they interfered in the 2016 election? absolutely not no it's a couple things about our committee it's one of the more nonpartisan committees in the congress in fact if you watch one of our hearings most of our hearings are classified but we have open hearings periodically if you watch the hearing you couldn't tell who was which party because that's just the nature of our committee and yet it's ideologically diverse I mean we have John Cornyn and Tom Cotton and Diane Feinstein and Ron Wyden it's not like it's all you know middle people it's pretty diverse but during the Russian investigation the committee was led by Richard Burr a republican staunch republican from North Carolina who came in he came as part of the Newt Gingrich Revolution in the house but yeah the simplest answer to that is that on August 2nd 2016 Paul Manafort who was then Donald Trump's campaign manager had dinner in New York with a guy named Konstantin Klemnik who was an agent of Russian intelligence and gave him Trump's internal polling data campaign manager gave a Russian intelligence agent the internal polling data now you know you know about polling data for a candidate it tells you where you're vulnerable where you're not which states you're strong in where the battleground states are and what are the issues that will move the needle that's right and I mean that's the simplest answer to me and there's no doubt about that and the republicans on your committee agreed with that yes our report was pretty much unanimous all the way down the line and I have it on my desk the report for the the final part of the study was whether there was a connection between the Trump campaign and Russia and the volume is this thick I mean it was a deeply researched we went to the CIA building in Langley Virginia and looked at cables I mean live intelligence about what was going on during that period and there's no question that the first there's no question that the Russians were trying to interfere in the campaign I mean they've been doing things like this for a long time but this was really systematic and then the question was whether there were connections to the to the Trump campaign and there were I mean the one I just outlined so the word hoax just doesn't fit doesn't fit so there is impending a major crisis in the congress the debt ceiling crisis and so you're going to have to be in the middle of that dealing with it and the way I look at it and you can correct me if I'm wrong whether or not to approve an increase in the debt ceiling is not about spending whether we should spend more it's whether we should pay our debts that's I'm so I'm glad that's where you started because there's a lot of confusion the debt ceiling sounds like something that you can't yeah to increase spending you want to increase spending to hit it in reality it's allowing the government to pay the bills that it's already incurred it's as if you it's exactly like going out to dinner 10 times in a month on your credit card and then deciding not to pay the credit card bill that's what it is and that's really an important point and it's an archaic law it goes back to World War I nobody really knows why we have it it doesn't but if it doesn't get increased what happens we're in default we can't pay our bills and if we can't pay our bills the economic disaster could be worldwide because the dollar is the unit of value around the world the dollar would decline the immediate effect on American taxpayers is that it would significantly increase the price of borrowing which would result in us having to pay more to borrow money now is there a debt problem? absolutely should we be working on it in some kind of thoughtful way? yes but this isn't this blunt instrument is not the way to do it of course the problem is it was increased three times during the Trump years when Republicans controlled the congress without much of a peep all of a sudden it's World War III it's only when it's a democratic president the debt really matters except when it doesn't yeah so many of the key supporters for the speaker when he was having trouble getting elected speaker made this a point we do not want to approve right we're going to use the debt ceiling as a weapon use the debt ceiling as a weapon either we bring down the country and our economy in America or do what we say the problem is I don't understand what to do what we say is they don't say what they want well it's varied what worries me Harold is that some of these people well I divide the congress now into legislators and performers and some of these people I think wouldn't care if we brought the country down I don't think they you know I don't think they're too worried about that or they think that will prove their point or something like that Tim Cain my friend from Virginia he said look we can negotiate about budgets spending budgets that's what we do but not not the debt ceiling we've got a budget coming out I don't know if we're going to be able to get a budget or not whatever on a budget but the debt ceiling is an artificial rule it may be unconstitutional there's an interesting question because the 14th amendment says the public debt of the United States shall never be questioned and there's an argument that makes the debt ceiling which is a statute it's not in the constitution anywhere it's just a statute that was passed in 1921 I don't know the date but anyway so that constitutional provision I don't think it's ever been tested if I were the president now I would have somebody bring an action and see whether whether it's a constitutional provision but the problem goes deeper than that because those people like Marjorie Taylor agreeing and totally I'll say it you're involved in a ticket totally irresponsible dangerous people who have a lot of influence with the Speaker of the House a lot of influence yeah he's going to have a hard time making the deal although remember the margin in the House is only five votes right so you could have you could have a dozen Republicans vote with the Democrats and do it in a more rational and responsible way but what's interesting is they say we want to reduce spending and they absolutely refused to say how they talked about two things foreign aid let's get rid of foreign aid that's one percent of the budget that's one percent of the budget get rid of foreign aid and let's not be sending money to support the resistance to the Russian invasion that's what they want folks those are the two things what else have you heard you hear these Republicans talk about anything else well it's interesting there was a poll the other day that said how many people should we reduce the debt and the answer was you know 85% yes and then they started asking giving options and it was 85% no on all the options it's hard and they've already taken off the table social security Medicare which is good and defense and so that leaves only domestic spending and that's not enough to fill the gap they've and then you start saying okay well does that mean the VA no no we don't want to cut the VA how about you know health insurance for seniors well no that's so isn't that a reason why we need at least a few statesmen in Washington statesmen people you know what a statesman is a dead politician come on musky's a statesman you know I know what you're saying well I'm saying that you know when I read about Madison and all the negotiations they had to go through to come up with a constitution that people would vote for and get adopted by the states and these people were well Madison's a good example he was educated moral philosophy you read the Federalist Papers and all these references to Roman history and early British history and Greek history and they the other thing though I've thought for years they were geniuses when it came to understanding human nature they understood there's a wonderful I think it's the 51st Federalist where Madison says if and you have to excuse it it was gender only at the time but he said if men were angels no government would be necessary absolutely and if angels were to govern men no checks and balances would be necessary but in a government of men over men there must be constraints and that's what our whole constitution is Angus I'm 87 years old you don't look a day over 86 I haven't there's a lot of things I haven't learned but I think and that's why I like reading about Madison and the other founders they were keyed into human nature and they understood just what you said I'm glad you gave us those quotes because it was all about human nature we would not need but for human nature we would not need government by the way they hated political parties the Federalist Papers and Washington's Farewell Address are all about factions and they could have been written yesterday could have been written yesterday because while things have changed dramatically in human existence just think of medical science how that's it watch the NBA and basketball and see the difference between how they've evolved now to what basketball was 50 years ago everything's evolved but not human nature and it's all about fear and it makes us do a rational thing but it's also about the human tendency toward the concentration of power the old saying from Lord Acton power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely that's what they understood I give a talk about the constitution look with me a vegematic remember vegematics I carry I have a thing and I have a cucumber and I said this is George III here's all the power right here in one person the constitution you put the cucumber in the vegematic and it comes out in about 20 pieces it is a vegematic of power it divides it between the house the senate the president the courts vetoes two thirds all of these elaborate steps to make it hard for the majority to run roughshod over the minority because that very limited powers and federalism the states have a role and that is based upon their understanding that you have to be careful with people getting too much power in our society and I think we have to be pretty worried about the presidency the presidency has evolved into a much stronger they used to call it the central magistrate and the presidencies the old term was the imperial presidency for example we just took a big step last week we repealed the authorization for the iraq war because congress ought to be responsible for whether this country goes to war not the president the constitution is very clear on that congress shall have the power to declare war you know when the last time congress declared war 1942 and why? not because the president grabbed the power but congress gave it up so we took a big step last week tim cane led it bipartisan to repeal the authorization for iraq so no future administration can use that as an excuse for sending troops anywhere and everywhere the graduate said that because I think people need to understand that the division of power the separation of powers is critical to the functioning of this country even though it's clumsy and slow and difficult they wanted it to be that way I worked for a president who was imbued with a lot of power and liked power and wanted the presidency to have much more power than he then had and interesting about him Lyndon Johnson his Achilles heel was the vietnam war he couldn't find a way out he couldn't figure out how to get out of it and the people that brought Lyndon Johnson down were senators from his own party who criticized him who had hearings Fulbright church said this isn't they brought him down and the people who ultimately brought Richard Nixon down were senators from his own party correct I have a question for you if Richard Nixon had had Fox News do you think he would have resigned? no I don't think so either he had Fox News he wouldn't have resigned but Bill Barr I think Bill Barr is a very intelligent man I met with him and he is very intelligent but he is a smart guy and he believes that presidency should have more power he believes in imperial power George Washington 8 years as the first president one of the great things he did was to make sure he was not an imperial figure he was offered to be the king and he turned it down I think it was George III that said if he leaves after 8 years he will be the greatest man in history to take away and establish the precedent and no it's a real concern in a modern complex society you need to be able to do things but every time you give away the power more power to the executive that's a real concern I think you will find this interesting I'm reading Meacham's new book about Lincoln during the Civil War Lincoln almost lost the election of 1864 everybody thought he was going to lose Sherman taking Atlanta probably is the only reason he won but the troops were all for him but in those days there was no such thing as absentee voting and so some states that were pro-lincoln passed absentee voting laws to allow the soldiers to vote other states didn't and those states didn't want Lincoln to win do you see what I mean the idea of states manipulating the electorate is not new I was fascinated you have to come back again so we can talk about electoral reform and elections we could spend a whole hour you and I on just that and states rights and the Civil War what you just talked about is the best example of states rights we do it this way we states rights say we can treat people this way well we have to wrap it up but believe it or not we're just getting started exactly we could do this for a long time and our readers would go to sleep our viewers rather thank you very much for coming here today as always I enjoy it because it's unique to have a politician sit here with no scripted questions no scripted answers and have a discussion I thank you for that


My name is Sam Baknin and I am the author of Malignov self-love, Narcissism Revisible. Narcissists cannot delay gratification. They want it all and they want it now. They are creatures of the here and now because they feel boundlessly entitled. When forced to specialize or persist, Narcissists feel stagnation and death. It is not a matter of choice, but a structural constraint. This is the way a Narcissist is built. This is his models of Randaik and his vacillating style of life and dizzying array of activities are written into his operations manual and his operating system. As a direct result, the Narcissists cannot form a stable marital relationship or reasonably devote himself to his family, or maintain an ongoing business, or reside in one place for long, or dedicate himself to a single profession, or to one career, or complete his academic studies, or accumulate material wealth. Notice that I'm using OR, not END. Some Narcissists maintain an island of stability in their life, but all the rest is chaotic. So they may have a stable marriage, but a very chaotic work life, exchanging careers, kaleidoscopically. Or they may have a single job throughout their life, but get married five times. So there's always an island of stability surrounded by an ocean of riding, foaming chaos. Narcissists are often described as indolent, labile, unstable, unreliable, unable and unwilling to undertake long-term commitments and obligations, or to maintain a job, or a career path. The Narcissist's life is characterized by jerky, episodic careers, relationships, marriages, and domiciles. The Narcissist is volatile, erratic, flexible, and ethereal. Either to we've touched upon the less malignant dimensions, but there is worse to come, as always there is with Narcissists. The Narcissist is possessed of a low self-esteem. In public, the Narcissist presents himself as the quintessential winner. But deep inside, the Narcissist judges himself to be a good for nothing, a loser, a bad object, a permanent, irreversible failure. He hates himself for being so, and he constantly envies everyone around him for a variety of reasons, ever-changing reasons. The Narcissist's discontent is often transformed into depression. Unable to love himself, the Narcissist is unable to love another. He regards and treats people as though they were objects. He exploits and then discards them. The Narcissist mistreats people around him by asserting his superiority at all times, by being emotionally cold or absent, by constantly vickering, verbally humiliating, incessantly, mostly unjustly, criticizing, and by actively rejecting or ignoring people around him, including his nearest and nearest, thus provoking constantly uncertainty and unpredictability. The Narcissist's interpersonal relationships are deformed and sick. The longer the relationship, the more it is tainted by the pathological hue of narcissism. In his marriage, the Narcissist recreates the conflicts with his primary objects, parents or caregivers, during his childhood.  He tends to select the wrong partners or spouse. He does everything to bring about his greatest horror, abandonment. Even his tortuous supporters and lovers ultimately desert him. In the wake of such abandonment, the Narcissist experiences a horrifying and complete breakdown of his defenses. He feels lonely, but his loneliness is of the existential, almost solipsistic type. The whole world seems unreal to him, possessed of a nightmarish quality. He either feels disproportionately guilty and assumes all the burden of blame, allocating none to his partner, or he blames her for everything, denying any personal responsibility, which is the more common response. These moments may be the only occasions in which the Narcissist is in touch with his emotions, an experience he has been trying to avoid on his life and at all costs to his mental health. Learning the truth about his emotion and eternity, the Narcissist often entertains suicidal ideation. He cannot countenance deforming his body, so he is inclined to use sleeping pills, if at all. But soon enough, the Narcissist recovers and escapes into a new psychosexual liaison. Another toy, another object of gratification, enters his world. His emotional wounds are shallow and they heal fast. Only his ego is scarred and memory repressed successfully by all Narcissists, wherever they may be.


So we did Coachella. So we're a food vendor in the VIP section there and we did super well. We set a record in their section and part of it was probably there's different food than burgers and fries there. Part of it was we had our operations super efficient since we could you know scale up or down. We had our soup dumplings and skewers there and basically it was just like okay here's our line bam bam bam we have it ready right when you order and so that did really well and we're kind of looking at other festivals as well.


Welcome traders to another Tick Mail Chartout with me, Patrick Munley, taking a look today at the Aussie cabs, one of the four hour time frame. On the daily time frame we have completed a sequence, let's just quickly check in with that so I can show you what we're looking at, into this support area at $92.58 in a declining wedge pattern. We have now broken out of that wedge pattern, nice momentum divergence, a little impulsive move here. I'm looking for a pullback now into the 93-20 area to 93. Watch for bullish reversal patterns in this zone to set long positions, initially targeting weekly range resistance 94-69. If we can get through there, look for monthly range resistance 95-18. As always traders, plan the trade, trade the plan, most importantly manage your risk. Until next time, thanks very much.


name is Kenny Ramos. I love skateboarding and the reason why I keep on doing this is because it never gets boring to me and you're always learning. Right now we're at a parking lot around the corner from my house. I like this lot because well it's usually pretty empty, the ground's really smooth and it's just super close and it's in the shade so you know you don't really have to get burned in the heat. I'm trying to work on I guess skating transition better like getting bowls or ramps. Well I'm working because it's a lot of fun like pools things like that. Well I mean this lot doesn't have any of it but it's still just nice to come out here anyway. Right now it's a little before noon so this is probably my favorite time to come out here because I'm the only one in this parking lot and it's just quiet so I have you know this whole area to myself for a little while.


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