Welcome to KubeCon 2022 in Valencia. This session is about the current state of the Kubernetes cloud provider. I'm Steve Wong of VMware, and I'm joined by Nick Turner of Amazon. We'll quickly cover what the cloud provider does, just in case we have some audience members who are new to Kubernetes. Then move on to general project status, followed by lightning talks from individual cloud provider implementations. Finally, we'll wrap up with futures and coverage of how to join the cloud provider SIGs community. The cloud provider is the mechanism that allows Kubernetes applications to be portable across various public and on-prem clouds. The goal is an experience where any well-written app can run anywhere, and for the most part, can't even tell where it's running. SIG cloud provider works closely with a few other SIGs to make this happen. For example, most of the storage-related abstraction is managed by SIG storage with a little integration activity across the SIGs being monitored by SIG cloud provider. In the early days, Kubernetes was a monolith when it came to cloud providers.  This had a number of suboptimal aspects listed here. For example, a user investigating startup logs on a Google cloud might see entries saying could not find AWS ECB. The old model slowed the time to feature and patch delivery, and we've been moving to out-of-tree code for cloud providers for about two years now. New deployments should be using out-of-tree versions of the cloud providers now, and if you're running a legacy version, you need to be planning for a migration, and Nick is gonna tell you more about that migration status. So Nick, take it away. Yeah, so I'm gonna talk a little bit about just kind of general status of cloud provider migration and what components that involves. It's actually kind of funny, I just ran into Lucas Caldstrom, who was a very early member, or even the genesis of SIG cloud provider a couple hours ago, and we were talking, and he actually started doing this work six years ago, and he was thinking like, how long is this gonna take? And he, in his pessimistic estimate, he was thinking about a year, year and a half, and it ended up not being quite that short. And there's a lot of reasons for that, but it was more complex than people realized, and I think one problem was that there wasn't a lot of motivation for cloud providers to move out of tree because everything works in tree. Why should we go out of tree? But yeah, so the first component that I wanna talk about is the queue controller manager. This is kind of what I think of when I think of the cloud provider in Kubernetes. You have the control loops that act on all of the objects, and they also do things, making API calls to cloud APIs. For example, managing instances, managing load balancers, routes, volumes, et cetera. So when we're talking about migration out of the queue controller manager, the node lifecycle controller, the service controller and the route controllers are the primary controllers that we're referring to, but there's also the volume controllers, which are gonna be replaced by, for example, the CSI drivers. And when you pass cloud provider equals external to the queue controller manager, those all get disabled. And so if you're running a cluster that is HA, for example, and you don't want to have to experience downtime when you do this migration, then you're gonna wanna take advantage of the leader migration that we've built, which basically allows the queue controller manager and the component that replaces those cloud loops, the cloud controller manager, to use an additional leader migration lock so that they can coordinate and you won't have a situation where you have two leaders, two service controllers working at the same time, for example. So that's something you might wanna take advantage of if you have an HA cluster. If you're using a vendor, then the vendor's probably gonna deal with that for you and you're not gonna have to worry about it. And as I said, the cloud controller manager is this vendor-specific component that replaces those control loops in the queue controller manager. But there's other components that are involved with this whole migration effort, the first being the API server. So there's some lesser-known features that are considered part of the cloud provider migration effort, one being SSH tunnels, which was something that really was only used by Google. And it doesn't involve cloud SDK, cloud provider-specific code that's actually used. There's no calls to the SDK there, but because it was specific to one cloud, we're kind of combining it with this effort and we've already extracted that from the API server and it's being replaced by the network proxy. So if you are interested in that effort, take a look at the network proxy. And the second piece in the API server is the persistent volume labeling admission controller. And this is not super common use case, but it's when you need to create persistent volumes and you don't have a PVC for them, but you still want the topology labels to be attached to those volume objects. So this is an effort that's actually still underway. We are replacing that admission controller with a webhook that will be built into the CCM or if your distribution wants, you could run it separately. But idea being that you have a webhook that replaces the admission controller there. And then the next is KubeLit. So KubeLit also has some cloud provider code that needs to get extracted. There is node addressing functionality. So when KubeLit starts up, it needs to figure out what addresses it needs to attach to the node object so that communication can happen between the node and the API server. And so that is being replaced by a brand new controller that's being added to the cloud controller manager, which is the cloud node controller. Not to be confused with the cloud node lifecycle controller or the cloud node IPAM controller, which I'm not even gonna talk about. So node addressing is one piece in KubeLit. That's important and needs to move out. The next is there is actually some volume plug-in specific code in there. So for, I'm only familiar with the AWS stuff, but AWS has some EBS mounting logic in there that needs to get out. And so that volume plug-in code is being replaced by CSI migration. The CSI driver is gonna do all of that work. And finally, the KubeLit when it starts a pod needs to pull the Docker image for that pod. So there is a couple of plugins in there. For example, ECR, GCR, and maybe a few others that has the SDK logic that actually gets the credential so that it can pull the image. And that's being replaced by something that we're calling the KubeLit image credential provider, which is just gonna be a binary that sits next to KubeLit. You have a configuration file. You give to KubeLit and then KubeLit just execs that binary to get the credential that it needs to pull the image. And some random things to know. So for example, if you're doing this migration and you have, and you don't want to use CSI migration, but you do want to, in general, disable the cloud provider. There's this little workaround. You can pass cloud provider equals external and you also need to pass external cloud volume plugin to prevent those volume loops in the KubeController Manager from being disabled. So again, that's only when you want to do this without CSI drivers enabled. I wouldn't really recommend it. I would say just do everything at once and enable CSI at the same time that you do your cloud provider migration or even before. But that's an option if you need it. And another sort of interesting piece is you may or may not be familiar with a feature in KubeLit which is the node IP flag. This is a flag that you can pass to KubeLit to give it a little bit more information about what IP address or address that it needs to use. And what happens is when you pass that flag, KubeLit will use it to filter down the addresses that it gets from the cloud provider when it calls and asks for the node addresses that it should be adding to the node object. And so this introduced a little wrinkle when the CCM is doing the same thing when you have that cloud node controller that's trying to figure out node addresses by calling whatever cloud API it needs to do. And AWS would be like EC2 or something to get those addresses. It didn't have that node IP to do that filtering. So there's actually an annotation that you can use which is the equivalent when you're running CCM versus KubeLit which will allow you to have that same filtering logic. And there is a period of time during upgrade. So there was a bug where KubeLit and the cloud node controller both are trying to reconcile at the same time. And so we have a fix that will basically allow us to, we will always provide this annotation that allows this filtering to happen so that they agree. And there's a slightly better long-term fix that we're considering which is to basically prevent them from ever try to do that reconciliation at the same time. So that would be ideal future fix but currently as long as they agree then reconciliation is not gonna, you're not gonna have a flapping situation where addresses are going back and forth. So here are some slides from cloud providers that kind of go over the status of their migration process, where they are, et cetera. And did you wanna do IBM? I'll give it a try. We've got these slides submitted by people who couldn't be here. You know, obviously Kubernetes runs on a lot of clouds and we invited the people behind the cloud provider implementations for these clouds to give the community updates. You can see the density here. I'm just gonna show these rather than read the slides to you. You could read them a lot quicker than I could pronounce them. And we are publishing this deck so you can download it later at the very end of this deck. You'll get a URL and a QR code where you can download the deck. So in this case, this is so dense. I'm gonna assume you read this. They're covering interfaces, recent work. And this one I can talk about and I'll do it very quickly. This is the vSphere cloud provider. The summary is that the recent releases bumped up the level of support to match recent versions of Kubernetes. And the other big news is that support for dual stack, which means running IPv4 and IPv6 simultaneously, moved into alpha status and we anticipate that it will move to GA pretty soon. Azure, Penfee and the key couldn't be here. They're based in Shanghai. So travel difficulties obviously. But the stuff here, the summary is that it seems to be related to storage and networking, including once again dual stack support, which I think is something that a lot of the cloud providers are either out with or coming out with soon. AWS, I guess I'll give this back to you, Nick. Yeah, yeah, so just really quick update for AWS. We have stable releases of the cloud controller manager going back to 120 up through 124 now. We have a component called the AWS load balancer controller. This is where we're focusing our load balancing support. So we have NLB support and ALB support in the load balancer controller and we recommend moving to use it over the built-in service controller. And that's just because we have a lot of people maintaining it and a lot of effort there. So you get better support and it supports the newer load balancers, ALB and NLB versus the classic load balancer, that's entry. And so update about usage of CCM. EKS has, we've migrated to use the CCM and 122, currently just the service and node life cycle controllers and cops also, I'm not sure if it's by default, but they provide, you can enable the CCM in I believe 122 plus. And then CSI migration is offered as add-ons in EKS and cops to use the EBS CSI driver, Google. I guess I can try to do Google. So focus on Google, well Walter here is bragging about how many features are only tested on Google GCP and entry. So a lot of testing coverage there and that's actually something that makes this whole process difficult. If we disable the cloud provider entry, then all of these tests start failing. So that's something that we need to work on. We need to get these tests out of entry so that we can actually disable cloud providers and finish this process. But yeah, so more GCP specific code in KKA than any other cloud provider. It mentions that the SSH channels have been removed and more stuff to do. Link to the reference implementation for GCP cloud provider status and a little bit about what's left. Okay, so just a couple notes on what is coming for a SIG cloud provider. We have these feature gates that will eventually flip to beta and when they do flip to beta, cloud provider stuff is just gonna not work.  So you can always flip that back for a certain amount of time and re-enable them but it's kind of a very strong message that this will be removed in the future. So that's not gonna be flipped in any of the immediately upcoming releases because we have to finish some of these things like getting the stuff out of the API server as one piece but look for that in the future. So that's eventually gonna happen. And as I mentioned before, testing is something that we're thinking about. So figuring out a plan, this is a proposal, the last known good, which was, I think we sort of, in the last year we discussed this but it's essentially around how do we get those tests out of KK and we want to bring those tests, we don't wanna just get rid of them, we still want that coverage. So we want to move those tests to each cloud provider's CCM repo but we still want those tests to matter. So the question is, are they release blocking or how do we get that signal to the community so that we know that some change that was merged in KK breaks all of the cloud providers? So that's a proposal that is probably worth taking a look at and giving feedback on. And some other random things, there's a cluster directory which Walter has been trying to get rid of for a very long time. So we'll see if he makes any progress on that in the next year. And just in general, making all of the cloud providers work better, right? We all need to increase testing, we all need to put a lot of effort in to make sure this whole migration process goes smoothly. And just some information about our SIG, when we meet, we have a couple bi-weekly meetings, there's the regular SIG meeting, which is Wednesdays at 9 a.m. Pacific time. And we also have an extraction focused meeting, which is bi-weekly at 9.30, and that's on Thursday, and they alternate.  There's the Slack channel and video recordings. And I think that is... Yeah, I think we've got some time for QA, so please raise your hand so we can get it on the audio for the remote audience. And then if you wanna download this deck to get all those links, use the QR code or this URL. Anybody with a question? Oh, let me turn it on, just a minute. There you go. Can we get the hand mic turned on? I think now you can hear me, right? Okay. Yeah, so thank you for the talk. And this is, I think, an underestimated topic that many people don't look at, and it's gonna cause some pain for some organizations. And the question that I have is mostly around the cloud providers themselves, and how does this migration is gonna look like for customers of these cloud providers? Because I know that some of them try to do the lift and shift on their own, and some others try to push this responsibility of running this component to the customer. Which, to me, as a customer, it looks like there was something that was working and it was managed before, and now I need to manage it. And specifically, this is a WSL balance controller. Before it was integrated into the manage control plane, now you need to run it as a component, and you have to maintain it, basically. Yeah. Yeah, ideally, you're right. It should be as easy as possible for the users. So, I'll start with just kind of general. Most things users are not going to see. Distribution is gonna handle a lot of these things for you. Like, the leader migration is gonna be, hopefully, invisible unless something goes wrong, I guess. You, depending on how much control you have over your nodes, you would see, if you are providing, if you build your own node images, machine images, then you might have to do the work to put the Kubelet image credential provider on the image, right? So, there's some things that you might notice, but in general, it should be pretty opaque, I guess. Let's see, so, and then the load balancer controller, yeah, I'd like to have a better story with that, where the, you know, someone who's setting up their own cluster doesn't have to worry quite so much about installing it as a separate component. So, we talked about different things, like combining it with the CCM, that's still an option, kind of turning it into a library or something, adding it to the CCM. I like that idea, but we're not settled on it yet. Or just making, you know, having a really easy installation method that covers that, like, however, whatever it is, you know, like if there's a Helm chart or something, I don't know if Helm's the best option for that, but something like that. So, yeah, I guess I can just say I recognize the problem there. Does that answer your question? Yeah, I want to add on this. And I think the problem is not with the new clusters, because new clusters are gonna have the load balancer managed by a new AWS load balancer controller, it's mostly about the old load balancers, and how do you get them all outside of the entry management. Because for, as far as I know, the EBS CSI driver will provide a smooth migration path with these two feature flags on the control API server, but for the AWS load balancers controller, like, basically you need to migrate to a new load balancer managed by AWS load balancers controller, which might be a pain if you don't have the correct mechanism in the org to be able to do that shift transparently. Right, yeah. I think the idea is that you, at this point, you run both of them, and they both, you know, they shouldn't conflict. But yeah, if and when we do deprecate, I don't know that it would ever really be deprecated because it's kind of tied to classic load balancers, but if and when we did, there would be a migration path for sure. All right, thank you. And another question, sorry. So do you plan, I saw these two flags that you have to completely disable the cloud provider. Do you plan, like, are the cloud providers planning to expose these into their API? So like, as a customer again, we have, say, we have migrated to the new system, we would like to completely get rid of the old one so that we can make sure that our customers do not create load balancers using the old system, for example. I'm not sure if it was clear. You got it. No, they really shouldn't be exposed. And in terms of, I mean, so for load balancers, like, we're really just talking about the entry, you know, service controller that, again, speaking specifically about AWS, but we're just talking about the entry service controller for the migration. And it shouldn't change, right? So like, you're still creating the same load balancers before and after the migration. If you choose to install the AWS specific controller, that's separate, and you can do that whenever you want. Right, thank you. We've got time for one or two more questions if somebody's got one. Okay, I'll take that as no, but you can track down Nick and I, our names are in this deck, so if anything comes up, and you can find us on the Kubernetes Slack in the Cloud for Adder SIG channel. So thank you for coming.


Hey guys, this is Gabby from Brain Education TV. If you're new to this channel, consider subscribing. We make weekly videos on wellness tips for the brain. And if you're already a subscriber, welcome back. In this video, I will talk about letting go of the past and attachments to free your emotional self for a fresh start. You can do this for letting go of the year 2020 and welcoming the new year or other attachments that you've been holding onto. So first, let's talk about 2020 and what a year it's been. There was lots of chaos and hardships, but it did give everyone a chance to breathe and take a step back and really realize what's important in life. But if you're still attached to the stresses, uncertainty and chaos of 2020, let's first see why it's important to get rid of the stresses of the year and move on and start 2021 on a positive note. The first reason is when you hold on to these negative things inside, it's bad not only for your emotional health, but also for your physical health. Anger, resentment and sadness bottle up in your body and it can cause fatigue, autoimmune diseases, depression, high blood pressure and more. Research shows that when you let go, you can improve your blood pressure, improve your breathing to a more normal breathing and also sleep a lot better. Your body will definitely thank you. Founder of brain education, Ilchi Lee even says that all your worries, stresses and diseases are based on what you're holding onto. If you can't let them go, they won't disappear. The second reason why it's important to let go of attachments is because emotional pain prevents you from healing and growth. If you don't move on from something that emotionally hurt you, it will be with you forever and you'll keep experiencing those thoughts and those memories. So now let's get into four ways to let go of negative thoughts, emotions and attachments. Number one, create a positive mantra to counter negative thoughts. You can reframe your thinking with a simple positive mantra that you say in the morning or before you go to sleep or throughout the day when you're feeling these negative thoughts come up. Instead of thinking things like, I can't believe this happened to me, try to reframe your thinking to thinking things like, I am fortunate that I was able to learn and change from this experience. Number two, create physical distance. If you have a person or a situation that is constantly reminding you of an attachment or some stresses, it is good to physically distance yourself at least for a little bit of time. If you can't for forever, that's okay, but at least a little bit of time to refresh your environment and refresh your energy. Number three, don't bottle up your emotions. If you're afraid of expressing emotions like grief, sadness or anger, that's very normal.  Think about your emotional body like a water bottle. If you fill the water bottle with dirt and try to cover it up with water, the dirt will still be there. So you actually have to clean out and take the dirt out of the water bottle to get rid of it altogether. Number four, surround yourself with positivity.  If you're around people who constantly bring you down and constantly are negative, that will make your outlook and perspective negative as well and make it also harder for you to get rid of whatever you need to get rid of. Yes, it's been a lot harder due to the pandemic and more isolation. There's been more depression and anxiety, but if you have those people that really make your day brighter or a positive influence on you, try to keep them around. So try to prioritize who you keep around you that will help you stay more positive and also not get attached to negativity. Okay, that's all for my tips on how to let go of attachments. If 2020 was especially a difficult year for you, I hope this was helpful to learn some ways to kind of let go of that chaos and all that uncertainty and stress that we all had to go through. If you have any comments, questions, concerns, please leave them down in the comment section below. We will try to answer all of them. We look at all of them and thank you for tuning in today and I'll see you in another video.


This weekend, we're departing a bit from our usual topics of money and Austrian economics to welcome a friend of ours, Conor Boyack, who is the author of two very brilliant libertarian books for children. One based on Basjad's famous essay, The Law, and one based on Leonard Reid's great essay on market cooperation, I Pencil. Conor has some great insights about how we can all inoculate our kids against the disease of government propaganda. And from Conor's perspective, even in our state of society, we can raise happy, productive, responsible young people who are knowledgeable about liberty, property, economics, and personal finance. So whether you're a parent now, hope to be a parent someday, or are perfectly happy not having kids, we all have an enormous interest in winning the hearts and minds of younger generations for liberty. So stay tuned for a great interview with Conor Boyack. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back once again to Mises Weekend. I'm your host, Jeff Deist, and as mentioned, I'm very pleased to be joined this weekend by Conor Boyack, the author of both his version, The Tuttle Twins Learn About the Law, and The Tuttle Twins' version of I Pencil by Leonard Reid. So Conor, thanks very much and welcome. Thank you for having me. It's a pleasure to be with you. Well, as I've gone through these books with a couple of my colleagues here at the Mises Institute who also have kids, I guess first and foremost, I'd like to know what was your motivation to write them?  I've got two young children of my own. We, homeschool, and so it was about two years ago where I was beginning the search for resources that would help educate my children, teach them the values and the principles that I believe in. And it was just, it was more just me trying to find something that I could use for them. And there was nothing. I mean, not only was there very little, there was nothing.  You had a little bit of constitution stuff for young kids, like coloring pages and little stories and things. But there was nothing at all that that taught the fundamental principles of liberty, Austrian economics, anything like it to a younger market. And so it was, I run a Libertas Institute in Utah, a libertarian think tank here and we publish a lot of literature and we've had great success educating adults. And so what we finally decided to do is why don't we take those same stories, those same books and works and essays and bring them down to the kids level. And so really it was more an entrepreneurial filling a market void. And clearly there's been a demand. I mean, the books have just been, they've been doing incredibly far better than we thought so soon into doing this. And and so really I wanted it for my kids. The illustrator is a very like-minded guy, Elijah Stanfield. He lives in Washington, good friend of mine. And so we said, you know what, the first book we're going to do, if we only do one book and this doesn't fill a market void, if there's no response, we want this book to exist for our children. And so we didn't care at that point if it's sold or not. We just wanted to bring the first book based on Basti, it's the law into existence and clearly many other parents agreed. So we're going to end up over time with a series of about eight to 10 books total. Well, you talk about this market void in libertarian literature for kids. This amazes me. I mean, here we are trying to convince 30 year olds or 50 year olds to change their hearts and minds about the state or about economics. And it seems a much simpler and easier task to to to instill the values of liberty in young people while they're still in their formative years. I mean, this seems obvious to me. It is. And that's kind of the humorous thing about writing these stories. You know, I've written six books, two of them for children, four of them for, you know, general market adults. And in some ways it's harder to create books for children. You really have to simplify stuff. But the irony in that is that as I work on these stories, I realize I'm not really teaching anything new to these kids that they're not already being taught. I'm simply validating what they're being taught. So, for example, when children are taught, don't hurt people, you know, and don't take things that don't belong to you. These are basic tenants that any good parent is instilling in their child. The problem is that as you get older, the state and society layer on top of that all of the exceptions to the rule, right? Oh, well, you know, it doesn't apply to government. It just applies to you and your siblings. And so we're trying to validate for children that not only are these principles you're already being taught correct, but they do apply to interpersonal relationships and to the government. And here's how. And so it's kind of funny that these children already learned this. It's nothing. It's not a novelty. We're just trying to validate and show some application to the real world that they aren't getting in public school or even in many homeschool families. Well, kind of what I love about your first book, the Tuttle Twins Learn About the Law, a book I shared with my own children several months back, is that your adaptation of this of Bastia's famous essay, it really demystifies government and laws for kids. And I guess in that sense, it does what Bastia's book did for adults, which it takes this mysterious process known as the state and really breaks it down to its fundamentals. The fun thing for us has been that that was what we sought out to do. What we didn't really realize, what was kind of a secondary result from putting that book out there was that it found its way into the hands of a lot of families who've never heard of Frederick Bastia, right? We started doing some aggressive marketing to homeschool families specifically.  She's maybe a little freedom minded, independent thinking by virtue of the fact that she, you know, decided the shoulder, the education of her children on her own shoulders. She's never read Bastia. She's never heard of the guy. And so here she finds this book because she knows freedom is important. She says, I'm going to get this book. My friend recommended it to me. They start reading. And as they start reading, it's opened up all sorts of discussions that we're hearing about. They're just fascinating. So if a child, in one case, we heard is reading a book and they say, well, if it's not OK to take things from other people, then why are taxes OK? And suddenly the parent is on the defensive, trying to figure out a logical response to that question asked by their seven year old. And then at the end of the book, we say, Hey, parents, you know, here's the original source. Here's where you can go find the book. You can read it yourself. And so the secondary response that we've gotten or the reaction has been that adults are getting educated along the way as well. And for us, that's very gratifying. I remember a lot of young kids who came into Ron Paul's office. They were teaching their own parents about Ron Paul and about libertarianism, not the other way around. So that's that's a very happy development from my perspective. Now, the second book in this new series is called The Tuttle Twins and the Miraculous Pencil. Obviously, it's based around Leonard Reid's famous essay I pencil on market cooperation. But what I really interested me in your Lou Rockwell article that's on LRC today that you talk about this book helping dismantle a child's entitlement mentality. And I think as a parent of two young children, that's something I really struggle with, let's say, after Christmas time, the kids just think that houses and clothing and food and toys materialize on their own. And I think that that's something that that you might find a lot of parents struggle with. I fully agree. I experience it myself. One of the things that we tried to do to counter that is not only bring Leonard's essay, the story to kids, which itself tries to kind of dismantle some of that entitlement mentality. But with each book, we also have an activity workbook that we offer. So it's just a PDF download on our website, totaltwins.com and it has all sorts of activities for a wide range of children, age range. And one of the activities is trying the same thought experiment that is in the story in the book. So in the book, it's here's how a pencil is made. Here's this elaborate process. Look how fascinating it is that all these materials come from different countries and people working together. So the story, of course, is about the pencil. But the activity and that the thought experiment is go around your house and do this. And I've done this with my kids. It's provided a very fun activity for them to think about. It creates great conversations for us. And then it begins to help them understand and recognize that the toy we got them for Christmas or the money that they're earning to go buy something is involved in this complex web. And so it turns into a game where you can have these discussions and try and introduce the idea to kids that that iPad they are using or the clothes that they're wearing even don't spontaneously come into existence. I mean, my kids and I, we've watched all sorts of YouTube videos now about how cotton is grown and harvested and weaved into thread and everything else. And it's a fun way to expose them to the education of that process itself. But then they begin to have that foundation in place that the market is just overwhelmingly complex. And yet it all comes together to produce stuff rather than, hey, mom, let's go to the store and buy X, Y or Z. Well, Conor, I know that for myself and for a lot of liberty minded people, they became voracious readers at a very young age. And I think it's a very important antidote to the state and its propaganda. How would you suggest parents go about instilling a love of reading in their children? That's a great question. I, you know, with with my own children, I've tried to ask myself the same thing. I think stories are what's needed, right? So as we've tried to do that, take. And in fact, I was on Tom Wood Show the other week and I joked with them that we're doing eight to 10 books in the series. And perhaps the magnum opus will be if we can ever get human action into child form. I don't know if that's possible, but I think yeah, good luck. But I think stories are important, right? You have praxeology. It's hard to wrap stories around that. It's just so abstract and dry, but but important. But I think stories are important as we so we beta test our books with a lot of families trying to say, is this working? What can we change appealing them? And the fact that that fundamental principles are being taught through a fun and engaging story. The kids that we're seeing, I mean, we get so much feedback from parents. It's really fun. But the feedback that we get is that these kids are just glomming on to this. They're tantalizing ideas. They're not getting it in school. They're not getting it from the parents. But the stories themselves are engaging. And like I said in the Little Rockwell piece, you know, I'm a firm believer in competition, division of labor. Other people should start doing what we're trying to do. I don't, you know, we don't want to monopoly on the children's market for liberty. We'd love to see what other people do. But what we're trying to do is expose them to stories. And there are good stories out there that teach these same concepts in fictional format, but I think as I see with my own kids, it's hard to sit down with them and say, well, let's talk about the non-aggression principle. But if we talk about a playground bully, you know, even if we're reading like Berenstain Bearers or Amelia Macdillia or some of these other characters that they like to read about, the stories are a great delivery mechanism to teach them these principles. The problem that I see is that few parents in the liberty movement are really trying to inculcate in their children or at least expose them to these fundamental ideas. They're just kind of letting them go and focusing on, you know, arithmetic and more general stuff. We really need to have an ambitious program, I think, to expose the rising generation to the ideas that we believe in. Because, yeah, we can go after the 30 year olds and the 50 year olds and we do and we should. But do we have a plan to go after the rising generation? Or are we just going to let them go through the motions and get indoctrinated by the state? I'd rather play offense rather than defense. I agree completely. And I have to say, you know, public schools aside, even if your kids go to a quote unquote good private school or their homeschooled, it's still very hard as parents to keep status influences away from them. I mean, everywhere they go, their friends' houses, television, social media, et cetera, they're bombarded with what I would consider a very false narrative about the state and about the political class. So I think, as you say, it's very important to go on offense, not just with respect to schooling, but with respect to the time outside of school and we are with our children. Yeah, I agree. I mean, first and foremost, I think parents need to recognize that they are getting this. They're getting it in movies. They're getting it in books. It's not just, oh, I took my kids out of public school so we're okay.  It is what's happening. And we all know this. I mean, every listener of this podcast, I'm sure recognizes that as a self-evident truth. But I really do think we need to make concerted effort at pushing back. And our offering is just one. Ron Paul's got his homeschool program with Tom Woods and others that's just gonna be fantastic. I really, really hope that in the years ahead, there's a lot more actors that come into play in this market space to say, you know what, we need to go after the youth and here's how. It needs to be fun. It needs to be engaging. I love Jeff Tucker. How positive Jeff Tucker always is. It is infectious. Too many libertarians are, you know, the pessimists. And we have reason to be for sure, but that's not going to attract people in general, but specifically it's not gonna attract the youth. We need to expose them to the wonders and beauty of liberty and stories, I think, or the delivery method that we need to focus on to do that. Connor, talk a little bit more about your view of homeschooling. You talk about the tremendous market need for this, but homeschooling and unschooling to a lesser extent must be one of the biggest existential threats to the state in modern times. The question becomes, how long will the state permit this and to what degree will the state permit this? And I really see entrepreneurs such as yourself with the books you're writing, creating a market that's a step or two ahead of the regulators. Well, you know, the best thing that the state can do for liberty is to continue being the state, right? Like especially as you see Common Core happening to the degree that more control is exerted and more central planning exists, it's only going to help us wake people up out of that system. It's only going to help expose people to the problems inherent in the system. So I think Common Core, as one example, has been fantastic for the homeschooling community. Here in Utah, where we operate Libertas Institute, we just got homeschooling deregulated this year in the legislature. And we're just seeing a massive amount of people come into homeschool, or at least doing something a little bit more independent, doing a mix of public school and homeschool. People are starting to think about it a lot more. What I'm seeing in curriculum developers and homeschooling organizations is they're scrambling to put together a curriculum to meet this increased market response. And I think if we don't have the right material for them, they're just going to be bringing the public school books into the home setting. To me, that's not homeschool, right? I see a lot of homeschool families that do the same thing, oh, we're going to learn in half an hour or 45 minute increments. And all they know is the public school model, they're just doing it in a home classroom. And I think that's just, it's not advantageous. It's not what homeschool is meant to be. We favor the more unschooling approach. I like to call it child led learning. And as I beta test the Tuttle Twins books with my children, or as we have several other stories we're working on, as I talk to my kids about it and kind of see what's working and what doesn't work for them. It's fascinating to me because they ask the question, well, oh yeah, that's how a pencil is made. How is the chicken made that we just ate? Or how are my shoes made? And then we can go online. Technology is the great disruptor of state control. We can go online to access for free, all of this information. I mean, I really do believe the future is decentralization of the education industry. It is empowering parents to meet the interests and the passions and the abilities of their own children. But again, I think the state is doing exactly what it should to benefit those of us who are trying to expose people to liberty because the greatest thing it can do is to continue exerting more control. It only affirms the position that we have. So I like to be optimistic about the future. There are a lot of problems out there, especially in the education industry. Our organization here in Utah is, we have a lawsuit over the adoption of Common Core. We're very concerned with it. We should fight back, but kind of the net positive thing is it's waking a lot of people up, especially. I mean, we're a homeschooling family. We're in a lot of these communities here locally. It's a good time for us to exist, but if we don't have the resources, like Ron Paul homeschool and other curriculum out there that will expose them to a pro-liberty agenda, I just worry that they're just gonna still get the pro-state agenda, just sitting in their basement at home. And that's not really a benefit, I think, in the end. Connor, I couldn't agree with you more. And everyone at the Mises Institute wishes you and your illustrator best of luck with your series of children's books. Ladies and gentlemen, if you wanna check these books out again, they use the Tuttle Twins, Ethan and Emily to demonstrate two different books so far. First is Frederick Basiat's The Law. The second is Leonard Reed's Eye Pencil. You can find both of these at tuttletwins.com. That's T-U-T-T-L-E, tuttletwins.com. And you can also find The Law, and I think soon Eye Pencil at the Mises.org website. So Connor, thanks again for a great interview and ladies and gentlemen, have a great weekend.


Some of the most iconic Yu-Gi-Oh cards of all time were the God cards. These three monsters were introduced in season two of the Yu-Gi-Oh anime during the Battle City arc. The most powerful of the three monsters is known as the Wing Dragon of Ra. Used by Merrick, this monster devastated its opponents and was extremely memorable for kids back then. In 2020, Konami announced that this card was getting a Ghost Rare printing. Ghost rares are extremely hard to pull and have a very unique look to them. I finally managed to pull one myself in my 50K livestream on the last day of 2020. Oh, we got it! The scratch! Look at the scratch all the way down the side. Oh my goodness. But for this card, the chase doesn't end when you pull the card. The Wing Dragon of Ra Ghost Rare has potentially the worst print quality in Yu-Gi-Oh history. Nearly every copy of the card ended up having large scratches across the foil right out of the pack. We can really see just how bad the card quality was across the board by taking a look at PSA's pop report. And it shows that since Legendary Duelist Rage of Ra was released, there have been 431 Wing Dragon of Ra Ghost Rares graded. Can you guess how many of them graded Gym Mint Tens? Before we do that, let's take a look at another card's pop report. The original Game Boy Advance Secret Rare Wing Dragon of Ra has had 748 cards graded with 410 total Gym Mint Tens. Almost 55% of the total cards graded received a 10. Now back to the Ghost Rare. How many total Tens have been graded? Just four. That is less than 1% of the total cards graded. This is one of the hardest cards to grade in history and it's only a few years old. In today's video, we will be searching for the perfect Wing Dragon of Ra to grade a PSA 10. All right guys, we have 18 blister packs, Legendary Duelist Rage of Ra. There's two packs in each that basically makes a complete box because there's 36 in these Legendary Duelist packs. Hopefully we can pull that Wing Dragon of Ra and hopefully we can get super lucky and pull a nice Ghost Rare. But before that, we have a giveaway. I'll be giving away these two boxes. We have Legendary Duelist season two and then we also have Dragons of Legend in a complete series. All you have to do is like the video, subscribe, turn on notifications. Let me know your experience with Rage of Ra. Did you open any back in 2020? Did you pull the Ghost Rare? And were you one of the four to get a Ghost Rare PSA 10? All right, here we go. We're gonna have 36 chances to pull the Rage of Ra, Wing Dragon of Ra. I have not opened this set in a very long time because as I showed you guys in the intro, I pulled a Ghost Rare back in 2020. So I'd already pulled it. Actually a lot of people missed that pull because it was at the very end of like a really long live stream. So a lot of people didn't even know I ever pulled it, which is pretty funny. So I guess we can like pull it for you guys. We never saw it. Let's see if we can do it. We've got a Mechlord Emperor Wazel. So we are starting off with just a super but that is not guaranteed. So actually not that bad. Pulling supers and this kind of stuff is actually a good thing because some of them are actually pretty decent. Get a Mechlord and then a Reactor Slime. This set is one of those sets that Legendary Duelists usually don't start off too hot and this one certainly didn't. But they do age pretty well. It seems like this set has aged really well as it's gone along. Some of the cards are actually worth a little bit now which is nice because right after they were released like everything normally is or everything floods the market. People are buying and selling in a bunch. A lot of the prices go way down but since then it seems like it's done pretty well. It's a pretty old set. 2020 it came out which is, I know, three years ago guys. Can you believe that? Three years ago. It wasn't a complete three years because obviously we're at the beginning of 2023 but the fact that we're even close to three years away from Rage of Raw is insane to me. And what else is crazy is that there has literally been four of these great. In the age of like 2020 is the age of current grading. So this is when everyone started grading. Everyone wanted to grade all their cards. So any sort of new set with any sort of collectible card. Well, there's an ultra rare. Very nice. Mechlord, Astro Dragon, Triskelion. Everyone was grading it. So it was like, oh Wayne Dragon Rock, go share, I'm definitely grading mine. You know, everyone wanted to grade. Everyone was asking how to grade. How can they send it in? That's when everybody was going crazy with all the hype and everything. So if there was anything to be graded it was getting graded. And the fact that that many got graded and only four got 10s is absolutely amazing. That just shows you how poor the actual print quality was. So if we can actually get lucky and pull a first edition ghost rare, they actually, same ultra rare. We got two of these already. That's pretty strange. They actually did do an unlimited print of the set which is pretty unusual for Yu-Gi-Oh these days. Most sets don't get an unlimited print unless they're like really good. Like power the elements. I always want to say power of the duelist. Power of the elements got one. That was a great set. This on the other hand, not very meta relevant. So usually don't get an unlimited print for that. So this was pretty unique. I think it was, you know, the hype of the wing dragon of raw and stuff actually must have sold a ton of packs. So they ended up making an unlimited. I don't think a lot of people really cared about the unlimited though because I checked the pop report. Only seven unlimited ghost tours have ever been graded, zero 10. So funny how that worked. Like 400 and whatever first heads. Nobody bothered to send the the unlimiteds which is pretty wild. Mine control in there and then a reactor slime. We've only gotten what? Well, three foils isn't too bad. Two ultras, same one. We really want the like the guardian slime. Well, not the guardian slime. What's it called? The slime obelisk basically. I don't remember what his name is. He's pretty good. Mine control, cyber energy shock. Did he ever get a reprint? Trying to remember, did he get a reprint and maybe the structure deck of the guide cards? Honestly, that should have been the giveaway today would have been a structure deck of the guide cards. That would have made sense. But you know, didn't think that far ahead I guess. So far we are total values probably not too good right now. I mean, we're not pulling a whole lot but all we need is one ghost rare to really change it around. I'm not exactly sure. I think it's probably around like 225 for the ghost raw maybe 200, guardian slime. There's the one that I accidentally said. I didn't actually mean this one. That's still a decent card. And then the mock your the destructor. You know, what's the word for that? Arata. I always want to say retrain. It's not a retrain. It's an Arata. It's the same card, but worse. That's just the worst thing that can happen. You know, let's just make, let's just nerf this guy. We got a psychic shock wave, Mechlord army of Wazel, Mechlord army of Grinnell and a Mechlord Astro the eradicator. Yeah, ghost rare. I think, yeah. I think it's around 200. It could be a little bit less. And that of course is for like a regular old near men, but if you could get like a mint, probably no chance. But if you could get a mint, I'm not no chance. A four, four out of 431 chance. We got a Jorgetto. I'm sure there are more that have been pulled that have not been actually revealed or whatever. Like they're not great. And I should say some people pulled it. Maybe they got the mint one and they didn't, they don't like to grade. So they didn't actually grade it. You know, that probably has happened at some point. We got Jinzo Lord. But still the mass majority. I mean, I pulled mine and it was in horrible condition. Like scratch all the way down the surface of it. It was real bad.  It had to be light play. And that was like, even then it's like, wow, that is a big scratch for light play. You know, I don't remember if I swapped mine with a different one or if I kept mine. I'm pretty sure I kept my original one because I wanted to have the one that I specifically pulled. Jinzo Jector, can we get a ghost now holding legs? Merrick, give us the ghost red Merrick. He always had that weird gravelly voice. How many of we go in a Yami Merrick? He's like, Mechloid Ostrich Dragon Ostrich, Dragon O, Psychic Shockwave, Psychic Bounder. It was like that. That hurts my voice. I'm not doing that anymore. Okay, yeah, that was, yeah, that's not a good way to talk.  That is not good for the long-term vocal cords there. I don't think I'm going to continue to do that. Even though honestly, I was pretty impressed. It kind of had a Merrick sound to it. Not exactly like him. I got to work on a little bit, but I really don't want to because then I'm going to not be able to talk in five years. Okay, we got the Boon to the Mechloid Emperor and a Mechloid Emperor Wizzel. Not Rizzel, okay. Got a lot of foils actually. Not too bad. Can we get the, what is that guy called? The guy who looks like Obelisk, but he's a slime. We got Metal Reflex Lime, good card, a Mechloid Fortress and an Everlasting Alloy. Probably about halfway through. This is actually a pretty fast opening. I always forget when you open these five-card packs that they really fly by. Like it's insane how fast they open. So let's see if we can potentially get something now because they're actually running out pretty fast. Can we get it? A nice, minty, ghost rare. Imagine getting like a perfectly minty one. It's like off-centered or something. That would be awful. Holding legs, we got a reboot, mind control and a wild monster of hirs. Not the droid we're looking for. Gonna have to keep looking in this next pack. Boon to the Mechloid Emperor. It feels like every card's a Mechloid card. Like, I know that's a Genzo card in Macchiora, but like, there's supposed to be three archetypes in here, right? And almost every card is a Mechloid, it feels like. Pretty weird. Here we go. I believe Wing Dragon of Ra, Rage of Ra. It's been so long. I have not opened a lot of this set. Like, I mean, really in general, cause we only opened one case and we got it. Boon to the Mechloid Emperor. Literally three of this guy. Three of that ultra rare. That is unfortunate cause I think that's a pretty bad one. Mechloid, see? We're just giving us the Mechloid stuff. It really wants us to pull Mechloids. Genzo, Lord, come on. We got Mechloid Emperor. That's back-to-back of the same card? No, Army and then Emperor. Okay, they look the same. And then a Cyber Energy Shockwave. So more Genzo cards. Can we get a Genzo? Have we pulled a Genzo yet? I think we probably have, but I don't remember. Okay, I said we were halfway earlier. I mean, I'm not sure if we were. We have eight left. So now we have 16 more packs. We've opened 20 total packs. I guess it's not as fast as I thought because seeing eight blisters, you're like, oh, we're almost done. But there's really 16 packs in there. So we're not too fast. Astro Dragon of Jirageto. Psychic Shockwave. Metal Reflex Slime. Mechloid added again, the Astral. All right, here we go. I guess, is slime an archetype? Technically, Genzo return there. It's a regular, you know, kind of a Genzo card. A token stampede and a reactor slime. Has to be, because there's so many slime cards. I guess it's technically the third archetype. Mechlord, Genzo, and Slime. Interesting three archetypes here. Yeah, this guy's the guy we're looking for. Whatever that guy's called. I can't remember what he's called for some reason. Why can't I remember? We have token stampede. We have, I mean, it has been like almost three years. Give him, cut me some slack. Mechlord Assembly. That's a super. Mechlord Deflection, also a nod super. Also a card of Yu-Gi-Oh. This is a card of Yu-Gi-Oh. It's a Ghost Rare. We gotta believe Fortress. We got a Mechanical. We got Psychic Bounder. I did always like that card. I thought it was really cool. And then another Machior. That's insane. That card, unfortunately, is no good with the Arata. So, I mean, it wasn't even really good before. It just had like a really broken effect in certain situations, but like in general, not that great. Two packs in this blister. Will we get the less than 1% chance?  So really like realistically, you gotta do, it's one in two 88. So whatever chance that is, like super tiny, less than 1%. Then you have another 1%. So we got to get some math whizzes on that. We're talking real small. True name, Ultra Rare. Not a good one, but it is an Ultra. We have pulled a lot of Ultras, like four or five already. That's five actually. Cause we've got three of that same one. We got True Name and we got the Slime guy. So five Ultras. Oh, I remember you actually do pull a lot of Ultras out of these, right? This is like five, maybe six a box. So we're at like a full box ratio already.  I really want to know what is the exact number. I need to figure that out. What percent chance you have to actually pull this thing and then grade it. So 1% is like, I mean, that's way higher than what it actually is. It's 1% just to grade it once you have one. We got a token Sunday. We got Jector. We got Monster Reborn. Have we not seen that yet? And then Cyber Energy Shock. I don't remember it at least. Monster Reborn is a short print comment. No, I'm just kidding. Watch that's a Monster Reborn from the Yugi's Legendary Decks just like that time on the live stream. You guys know what I'm talking about. About eight packs to go. Will we get a Ghost Rare Wing Dragon of Ra? Or will we fail miserably? We have Genzo Lord, Jirageto, Amplifier, Psyche Bounder, another super. So we're getting tons and tons of foils, which is cool. Cause they are not guaranteed at all in this. Like you can literally open a pack and get knocking a foil. It's like the old days. Brawl Disciple, Mech Lord Emperor Razzelle and a reboot. Cyber Energy Shock. Three blisters to go. That means six packs. Six more chances at the Wing Dragon of Ra. We haven't even pulled the Ultra Wing Dragon of Ra. I mean, that would be cool too. An Ultra Wing Dragon of Ra would be pretty nice. I'd be happy for that as well. There's also the Ancient Chant card, which is pretty strong. If we could pull that. Genzo, there he is. Mech Lord Arm Emperor, whatever he's called. And then a Nucleus Infinity Core. Cyber Energy Shock. So another super rare. One of many that we have pulled. Mech Lord Emperor. Boon of the Mech Lord Emperor. Mech Lord Astro. Psyche Bounder for like the fourth time. That is insane. We're pulling all the same cards.  Here it is. The time is now. Legendary Duelist Rage of Ra. You've got to believe this. You've got to make it happen. This is the way to do it. Just like Mandalorian, we have Mech Lord. We have Mechanica, we've got Genzo Lord. We've got Mech Lord Emperor Razzelle. Super rare. Another super rare. One of probably 10 at this point. I mean, we have pulled a ton of foils, which is great, but none of them have been the Ghost Rare. We have Mech Lord Astro, Emperor, the Brain Control, and Holding Legs. Okay, Everlasting Alloy. It comes down to this, the Final Blister Pack. We've opened up 34 packs of Legendary Duelist Rage of Ra today. This is number 35 and 36. Will these two contain the Ghost Rare that we're surging for? Not just any Ghost Rare. A Minty Ghost Rare that could be graded the fifth 10 ever at PSA. We'll have to find out. First of the last two, we got Returner. Left Arm Operating. We got the Holding Arms Mech Lord Emperor Scale. I'm really struggling right now, and that's because I can sense it. The Wing Dragon of Ra is inside this pack. It's aura. It's greatness is scaring me. It's making me nervous. Army of the Wazzelle, Brain Control. The next card is what we'll find out if we completed our objective. Pulling the Ghost Rare. So we're gonna do this. We got a Mackie Ra, of course. And the final card. Monster Reborn. It taunts us yet again. So no, we were unable to pull the less than 1% chance. Probably like 0.001% chance. Wing Dragon of Ra Ghost Rare. But if you did enjoy the video, make sure to subscribe to the channel for more epic content like this. Shout out to Tonefo Show, Daxer, JT Show, Puffins of Doom, Ernesto Deanna, Dizzy, Flexi Boy, Hoppus, Choice333, Missycle, James Jance, TCG Chuster Cards, America Deutcher, Supreme, Sage 21, Frankie Martinez, Nenetai Show, Ian Moosa, Junior Barting, Mimic Gecko, Shadowfall, and Thomas McLean. Thank you guys for supporting the channel and I'll see you guys in the next one. Peace.