Hello there, my name is Denise Cooper and I'm here today to talk to you about inner source. This isn't the first time I've talked about inner source at OSSF. In fact, one of my very first inner source speeches was done at the first OSSF. But this is becoming a very hot trend among FinTech people and so we have some things to tell you about that and hopefully will pique your interest if you've never heard of this before or if you've been on the fence maybe we'll convince you. So let's get started. First of all, in the simplest form, inner source is just the use of open source methods inside firewalls to fix engineering problems that may have crept in over years of practice. It doesn't mean that your code will eventually be open source, although a lot of people that undertake this work that have things that need to be fixed in their engineering practice are also trying to figure out how to get to open source and that is the reason that I initially instituted this at PayPal because they were in that situation. They very much wanted to do open source but they didn't really understand how and they likewise had very little collaboration across the company and that was a goal internally. So we used inner source to build that internal collaboration and it yielded more understanding of how to do open source. This picture is Tim O'Reilly and he actually coined this term in 2000. So this is not a new idea but it took a while for it to actually land as an idea that could be actionably implemented and that's because it took a while for open source to win in the market and I don't know if you guys remember but 20 years ago, 15 years ago, there was not a lot of certainty that open source was actually going to prevail. There were a lot of very deep pockets pushing against it and a lot of people didn't think that it could possibly survive and then we won. So five years ago, it was clear to everyone that open source had won in its goal of becoming absolutely essential to the tech industry. There had been lots of successes along the way but about five years ago we started hearing some very conservative sources saying that open source was the way to go including Microsoft which was of course the big shift and that paved the way for inner source to really do well inside of companies that had not yet achieved understanding of how to do proper open source and the reason that it worked so well was what the change was was before open source won it was really easy for middle managers to block inner source by saying yeah well that open source thing is a crock it's never going to happen but now they can't. It's well understood that it's a more efficient way in some important vectors to get your engineering cleared up so that's why I started talking about it at PayPal and now I can't go forward anywhere there we go. So my motivation for getting interested in inner source again was that I've had a long and successful career in open source but I still think that five or ten percent of the total engineering workforce is allowed to work in the open source way even though we know it's more efficient even though there's lots of evidence that says that more people should work that way and so I think of those poor eighty five percent of the engineers as still being stuck in the salt lines and I feel like we should work as an industry to upgrade our skill sets for across all of our engineers if only so that we have a wider work pool that we can workforce that we can hire into it's just so much nicer to work this way but it's also faster and better and better for the company and it buys you out of a lot of technical debt alleys that people fall into so for instance silos raise your hands if you have a silo in your company I'm sure you all do so the problem is that at some point ownership excessive ownership culture feels like a good idea and the reason it feels like a good idea is because it creates some pride in that work it rewards people without giving them a lot more money it it does a lot of good things right up until they become a cult and they're not sharing information with the outside world anymore because they think they've got job security or they're so overworked that they don't have any time to do that which is also very common and there's technical debt that has entered into the picture and they are loathe to clear it out because they understand how everything works and they don't have time or the heart to destabilize it enough to say cut it up in in Institute microservices in some of the companies that I've worked with all of those initiatives have been tried as individual initiatives usually as part of a digital transformation around something like agile or microservices and the engineers just they they they can't decide how to do it documents prints are also something that I've seen fail in these organizations where there's a lot of siloing because they they haven't had to explain it to anybody that wasn't one of them like new employees they probably have a process for doing that but it probably over a period of many weeks as circumstances arise where that person has to be told another piece of puzzle it's not a comprehensive this is how it works and it's straightforward and self-evident from the architecture which is what you're supposed to get out of microservices so in this picture that amount of craft is represented by the rust on the silos right and so intersource one of the main reason that intersource gets adopted these days is by companies that have excessive ownership culture and are having trouble with it either they can't get the top people in the company to share what they know effectively or there is no cross-company collaboration or they've got that you know craft code that the silo people can't clear out because they can't distinguish between the craft and the normal stuff or there's a lot of executive escalation going into how how decisions are made about what to do the first project that we did at PayPal which is written up in a book called getting started with intersource that was a very important pivotal piece of code it was the checkout stack and 90 percent of PayPal's business was touched by that checkout stack and the manager that took on intersource as a change idea was so tired of the fact that they would plan a sprint of work two weeks of work every single time they were supposed to and they'd never get through it because 65 percent of their time was being spent on executive escalation you know where the one executive calls the other one and says why isn't my feature happening yet and they they barter or they or they intimidate each other whatever it is that happens but eventually a directive comes down to the silo saying drop everything and do this thing they were giving 65 percent of that and they would have done almost anything to get out of it so there's lots of reasons why silos are something that you want to bust if you can another reason and this is sort of a consequence of silos although that's not the only way you can have this problem is bottlenecks complexity and bottlenecks that make it hard for people to get stuff done because they have to wait through a traffic jam or they have to wait on a feature request until a silo gets around to prioritizing it or until somebody's boss calls somebody's boss which we've already identified as an anti pattern but it still happens a lot so clearing up bottlenecks so that everything can flow more freely you get better utilization of your resources because everybody can stay busy because nobody's sitting around waiting is another main reason why intersource is attractive to all companies not just fintech companies and then there are some companies that have shown have proven to themselves and to us that intersource can be effective to create opportunities for innovation so the reason this picture is is of the chinese army doing a formal drill is because there are companies where most of the engineers follow the rules even especially really large companies where there are lots of engineers it's really common for the bulk of the engineers to be pretty good citizens because they've been rewarded for playing the game as scripted but they get stuck and they can't they can't step out of that line in order to innovate it's too scary and there are some companies that have figured out that intersource can break up that pattern and i would name drop a couple of them but i don't want to embarrass them there is writing about this the last book that i did is called adopting intersource and it's got a fair amount of information about how that works and then one that people don't think about very often but it's a real thing if you think about it the people that you're going to be able to hire in another five years are all going to be people who are digital natives they've grown up with open source as a normal course of business they understand that they want transparency they understand that as individuals they want agency probably more agency than most traditional engineering organizations are prepared to give them and this intersource as a method to work inside companies is going to become a recruiting tool we're already seeing it in some places when everybody wanted to work for google partly it was because they worked this way when they started out so this is going to be a thing and if you think it's expensive to recruit and then lose your new recruits because they think nothing of changing jobs on a dime if they see something better you know that's going to be an expense and a problem going forward for companies that haven't ingested this and then of course there are companies that go out and get github enterprise which is a fine tool we're very happy that it exists but they think that they they don't even maybe realize that they want the intersource effect that's why they went and did it and it turns out that that github alone is insufficient to get the intersource effect to happen there are few reasons why that's true some of it is there's a little bit of tooling missing and we'll talk more about that in subsequent slides they're working on some of that and we spent a lot of time talking to them about these missing pieces but the other bit is most companies that go get github are not actually comfortable with all the code being available to all the people and the most common scenario is whatever you had before be it clear case or something else the people that implement github will put in all those same walls between departments or divisions or areas thinking that if those existed before they must be there for a reason so we better maintain them intersource requires that everybody be able to read all the code or almost all the code i mean there are examples of things that you don't host wikipedia hosts literally every line of code except the admin keys there's always something but if you're finding that most of your code is still fenced then you're not going to get the intersource effect you might get it between division or within a division but you won't get it across the company and if cross company knowledge full stack knowledge is something that you need and you do whether you understand that you need it or not you definitely need it this will be difficult to achieve even with a great tool like github without some understanding some force applied to making sure that it happens and definitely more transparency than you're probably automatically comfortable with so welcome to intersource this is the intersource logo notice that it both connotes an i for intersource and like maybe there's a party going on in that room that's because it's really fun to do intersource just like it's really fun to do open source the idea that an engineer could send a pull request instead of a feature request read somebody else's code figure out what they need to get done and express that in code and then learn through an interaction with a trusted committer on the silo side what they haven't done properly how they could change it so that it will be mergeable they they gain knowledge they get their thing done faster and they have more influence about how it turns out but also they get to take their career into their own hands a little bit because if they're clever and they're able to learn this stuff becoming a person who is well known for having broader knowledge of how everything works automatically makes you more valuable and it's more valuable to the organization to figure out who those people are so intersource is a is a virtuous circle that can really help everybody and as i've said before at the end of the day it can also help you understand how or come to understand about how to actually behave in an open source context if you have concerns that your brand is at risk because you're going to get it wrong before you get it right why not get it wrong first inside the company figure out how to collaborate properly and then come outside and try to do it there are many companies not so much in fintech but it's starting to be something that happens in fintech that require open source projects where you're going to be opening new code for the first time that you've developed inside they require them to develop an intersource following for that code before they allow them to open source it to see that they know how to build community with people who aren't themselves right all right so intersource is an all boats will rise kind of experience inside your company but it's also part of a larger experience of the open source effect which is where there are unintended consequences coming out of the connections that are made so some of those consequences that happened in our original project at PayPal that when I talked about what that was the checkout stack their original goal was to cut down on the amount of escalation work that they were getting that was keeping them from doing their planned work but they got some stuff for free one of the things they got the first day the guy that as I was explaining to the manager how it was all going to work and I did a version of this talk but with a whiteboard where I drew some pictures to he ingested it very quickly surprisingly quickly and he turned to me and said okay so you want me to put a trusted committer in place as a gatekeeper for pull requests that are coming from people that don't work on my team and I understand why you want me to do that but you want me to give that person only that job for the duration of a sprint and that person is going to be pretty bored unless some pull requests come in from the outside it's going to take a while to create that engine so in the meantime can I just send all of my own teams pull requests through that person to kind of rehearse them on the code review thing and I said yeah of course you can do that and then he sighed this big sigh like huge relief and I said okay what's going on over there and he said we hire engineers and we give them commit access because we've hired them to be engineers but it's not always a good idea even the new we know they're new some of them some of them are really senior we hire them away from other groups in all cases they get commit access and then we say we're going to do code review but we don't really do it because velocity and the imperative for velocity always gets in the way people rubber stamp each other you know friends rubber stamp each other's code the more senior you are the more likely it is that you're never going to get a real code reading but if I can make them do it but through this means of training this person up I'm going to definitely have better quality coming out of that now at PayPal they know exactly how much quality costs because there's this they pay for a lost opportunity cost when the system is down and merchants are unable to complete business because PayPal isn't working so they know exactly how much it costs anytime that happens and he knew what his number was and the amazing thing was that he got a 25 bump in quality just in that first week and and that persisted because real code review was suddenly happening so that alone was a huge help but then the other thing that happened that was interesting was as the trusted committers and we suggest cycling through your engineering resources he had 35 employees and he put the the most senior of his employees into a pool and every sprint the trusted committer changed so they work for two weeks as a trusted committer and then they go back to coding until it was their turn again and they you do that because people who have been their whole career evaluated on how they code and they've gotten to top coder they don't want to stop coding they're afraid to because yeah this is the whole dilemma of do I want to be a manager or do I want to keep coding they've gotten pretty good at it they like it they don't want to give that up so so he was doing a rotation right but after a couple of rotations they started realizing that maybe some of those people that they thought were lesser engineers because they worked on the edges or they were they were working on localization or they were working on front end stuff maybe they were better engineers than they thought they were they found several people that they really thought were very good some of them became so adept at writing code against this silo that was not really theirs that they became trusted committers in their own right and so they had an opportunity to spread that work across this community they were building around their code they also found people that they wanted to hire away from other groups so that's one of the things that happened so it's an unintended consequence but it isn't necessarily a bad thing because it helps with that problem of needing to build full stack developers okay so transparency is a non-negotiable part of both open source and inner source and at first it's going to feel really uncomfortable especially for you guys and I have a slide later to talk about regulated industries and how that all works but I want to say initially that's the fintech companies that have been talking to us and we have quite a few of them that have come and spoken at our events for the broader community have said that it was surprisingly natural once they made a commitment to inner source to become more transparent at least within likely pairings of of people you know and when I say pairings we talk about a host being the people that own the silo and guests being the people that are going to be contributing into that silo and finding pairs where both sides are motivated to get it right at least initially as you're doing your first experiments that's a really good idea because you don't have any problem you know making the code transparent between those two sides I will tell you that I've talked to a fair number of companies as a consultant where some part of the stack is pretty sure that they're the secret sauce of the company and therefore they need to stay secret because the company doesn't trust its employees not to inappropriately share that information but when we actually have gone in and looked and done a code review the truth is that code is pretty crafty and not very well maintained and they don't want it to be public for that reason not even public inside the company so that's not a good reason to keep it private right it is a reason to clean it up before you open it so you don't cause problems for those those engineers because there's lots of extenuating reasons why that happens like under staffing and too much workload or you know change of employee base and and not enough knowledge transfers so people will rewrite and leave the craft sitting there because they don't know what what's going to happen if it goes away there's lots of reasons why this happens but the reasons why people push back on transparency should be carefully examined because they are not always apparently as presented it not everything that gets written should be considered secret sauce and if if obscurity is the only way that you can keep your employees from knowing the full stack I mean that's not what you're trying to do you're keeping you're keeping secrets safe I'm here to tell you that security through obscurity is actually not a real thing anymore most malicious code is written by or insertions of malicious code happen through disgruntled employees and whatever checks and balances system you have in place now is not as good as a guy who is senior reviewing foreign merges or all the merges ideally and really reviewing them because it's on him if that if something gets through that shouldn't be there so all right I have been thinking a lot about the future and I already showed you a slide with the next workforce this is the one after that these guys are are going to be interested in a level of collaboration that you've seen if you have kids but I want to help each other my kids got in trouble for helping that they reversed cheated the the smart kids were helping the slower kids get better grades because they couldn't stand to see their little hearts break right and it's it'll make you uncomfortable if you are a lawyer or a doctor or from one of those professions where being at the top of your class is really important but the truth is most work in the world isn't like that most work in the world this is the most valuable thing that you can teach and it's not easily learned so intersource will be a way to teach it to the adults that you have around you now but I invite you to think about other ways that intersource can be useful one of the famous stories from PayPal is we you guys have probably seen stories about the Silicon Valley buses and how Silicon Valley companies that are physically located down in the valley found that their cool employees all wanted to live in San Francisco which is 45 minutes away on a good day so they started running buses big buses like the tour buses in Ireland you know with a big window big mirrors facing back that look like arms so 75 people at a time bust between San Francisco and their Silicon Valley office and then physically bust back at night with Wi-Fi on the bus and music and you could start working as soon as you sat down because you could log in right but that process of getting people on the bus was administered by admins who were down in Silicon Valley and had not spent much time up in San Francisco and so the bus schedules were wrong just flat out wrong they didn't know how to say exactly where the bus was going to stop you know they didn't they there were lots of things they didn't understand so intersourcing the bus schedule so that people could make their own pull requests against the bus schedule turned out to be really really a good idea because it got the idea across to non coders to the marketing people about why it was important and you might think about ways to touch your culture with intersource that are not the standard ways and think as well about you know like bring your kid to workday think about inoculating them with some sharing ideas and the extent to which that is a valued skill in your company because we got to do something about the education system and getting getting this to be a more common thing to know because at the end of the day open source is people this is people at a Drupal con this is a normal open source conference and this is just a tiny piece of that large audience I used to show pictures of the various years of Drupal because it started out with like 10 people Apaches like this too started out with 13 people and then all of a sudden there were a few thousand 10,000 25,000 right this is the open source effect so the reason that you want to think about those sort of rules of kindergarten and within the implications of transparency and also celebrating wins celebrating people for their wins the same way that happens in kindergarten is because that is how you build the stickiness that makes people want to keep doing the thing if you just blitz them with it as a campaign the way that you do in well so many failed transformation campaigns in corporations you know if your employees roll their eyes when you throw out that first announcement from the CTO that this is a new thing we're going to try that tells you that you've already kind of burnt those bridges you're going to have to find another way to do it one of the things that we heard in a recent fintech session that we did at intersource summit was just admit yourself this is a multi-year commitment I'm not going to tell you this is going to immediately change everything in your company it takes a while to get this right but you need to do it for the same reason that you need to clean the cruft out of your the back of your fridge or they frankly your code base or the way that you do things right so remember that that the people aspect cannot be underestimated in this you have to come up with both intrinsic and extrinsic rewards that make this work we talk about this endlessly at intersource summit and intersource commons we've got a whole bunch of patterns where different kinds of extrinsic rewards have been introduced we tell people not to get attached to measuring immediately do not apply OKRs to this at first do experiments first do a cultural inventory try to figure out what's going on in your culture why isn't this happening without you intervening and then secondly do some little experiments that will validate your hypothesis about why it's not happening and what dials you have available to turn and remember that helping people feel like they've done a good thing overcoming their natural reticence or abhorrence of change is also on your plate in doing this kind of a transformation OK here's that regulation slide so we talked we had a panel with seven members of the fintech community talking about their recent intersource experiences and how it went for them and we got some really surprising quotes which i'm just going to tell you about so the advice that you focus on celebrating the culture focus on your your extrinsic rewards on celebration right and remember that again this is going to take some time but there are some things you can do i would i was going to say to gamify it but it's not that trivial it's it's about motivation so there are several companies that we heard from who used the idea of a marketplace that showed where a given person could could contribute now it's easy to understand why the guests want to contribute to the host stack it's harder to see why the hosts would ever look outside of their silo to do some contributing and yet there's some of the most senior engineers in the company usually so you want them to do that how can you make them do that well at PayPal we had a disused fellow track and we got the idea from some of these senior engineers that if we could figure out how to get them on the fellow track or or signal that they should be considered for this fellow track this gave them an opportunity to influence the outcome of their own careers again in a way that they didn't have before so if every single project every single code base in your whole space if they're if they're participating in intersource has a list of things that they would like to see get done that they're not getting to that gives those senior engineers a target for where they could show up and do a little good and in so doing they can rack up successful merges in other people's code bases even advocacy that they're doing in those other code bases and if they rack up enough of them they can signal that they're interested in going to the next place becoming an architect becoming a fellow doing more for the organization than they can do from within their silo so there's an example of a really good hack okay other stuff we heard we heard that when picking your projects you need to be sure to focus on what's unique to your org but also don't compete with something that should be open source remember I said before that intersource can be a way to make sure that your open source is going to be successful but you don't want to keep stuff in the intersource pen if it makes sense for it to be open source how you make those choices we can talk about another time since this talk is about intersource but it is possible to identify key strategic moves to open source there's a paper that my former colleague Dwayne O'Brien wrote and also a talk that he gave about something called the four questions which is a good place to start if you're trying to think about how to get to open source but just remember that there are things that will always stay intersource and there are things that will start intersource and then manifest as open source projects here it's really helpful to do intersource if you're trying to work on frameworks or common reference platforms or common tools one of the most fruitful places to start is if you're implementing continuous integration and and deployment you have a couple of options there but what you don't want is for every single group in the company to do their own version of that and yet most of them will rebel against a version that has been built to be you know one size fits no one so what works better we've noticed is if you let them figure out their deployment on their own and you come up with an integration framework that's extensible give them an API and let them make it fit for their case or vice versa let them figure out the integration but give them a consistent deployment with some hooks that they can localize to but this is one of the main ways that people get intersource established in their company is by pointing out that that code reuse is the strategy for implementing continuous integration and deployment and then reward that right um there are definitely places where the risk of the regulation problem is mitigated by what you get out of the program so at PayPal they got velocity now they didn't throw the regulation stuff under the bus but they definitely relaxed it in some places where it had grown teeth if you know what i'm saying and you know not to put too fine a point on it but we all know people who work as you know policemen or or security guards that have authority things going on and they want them they want to grab more and more and more a lot of times your internal company regulators fall prey to that same problem because it makes them feel important so looking with a critical eye and how close you can shave that is probably worth doing if it means a big savings or a big change in the way you can deliver for your customers um and then be making working on discoverability both of documentation and of code is a huge benefit that doesn't hurt anybody's regulation regulatory framework just making people able to find things is enormous finding a block of code so that you don't have to write it again or as a starting point can be a huge help to engineers and what you don't want them to do is start copying and pasting but you do want them to be able to reuse things that are you know hardened and useful and they can find out everything they need to know about it if you also make documentation discoverable so these are some of the reasons that many fintech companies are overcoming their extreme fear of regulation and looking again and how how close they can shave it to get to the inner source place and we're seeing it blossom literally all over the world all over Europe all over the US all over Asia we do inner source summits we've just did number 11 everyone is bigger in attendance bigger in the kinds of speakers that we're getting and bigger in the stories that we're getting i'm getting ready to do another version of adopting inner source of volume two with more case studies because we found so many more interesting stories to tell it's just exploding and i think if you're not looking at it you're missing a trick because your competitors definitely are looking at it so here's a bunch of them these are obviously not all fintech but you're going to be surprised how many of them are and there are some interesting companies in this list so i'm just going to call out a couple of them microsoft up there in the upper left hand corner of course famously was not a friend to open source for most of the history of open source but they've recently turned a corner and they did it because their new business azure was needing that kind of transparency in order to compete with a ws and some of the other clouds out there so they recruited some people from apache initially into the open source office and then transfer them into the azure office and they got a great outcome out of that they felt like that was a really fruitful outcome so now they are actively pushing inner source throughout the company to all the rest of their employees because they want those same benefits they're basically admitting that the way they've engineered for all these years needs to change which i find really interesting because they want to understand more about this collaboration thing capital one i'm sorry comcast which is sitting sort of next to um microsoft there comcast is doing something interesting they're the ones i was telling you about earlier that that started this idea of you have to inner source before you can open source which i think is really interesting they've been doing open source for a long time too but they find that they get better outcomes from their open source efforts if they're certain that everybody can collaborate first and then i i will say something about damler who's over in right here damler of course a car company we heard recently is starting from a talk that we had at inner source summit is starting to use inner source across its supply chain so that third parties that write software for them are working with them directly in an inner source way with transparency across the code base and they're finding that it really saves them time and makes them more competitive against a company like say tesla which is delivering so much through software in cars but the rest of the industry is having to catch up i've got stories behind all of these names but i'm going to leave you with those three if you'd like to see your your logo up here come talk to us we're at inner source commas dot org here is our home page of our humble little 501c3 that we set up it's been in existence for five or six years now but it was under the auspices of paypal and we recently pulled it out to become its own thing it has a board that is made up of contributors it is run like a patchy in that you can become a member as an individual you can be nominated for membership and it is an individual membership it's not your company that's a member because you might change jobs but we like the work that you're doing if you demonstrate that you're not only fixing things in your own backyard but you're working to make the foundation better and make it more available to more people um we work under chatham house rules which makes it relatively safe to talk to us and ask us questions however we're finding that some fintech companies are still not comfortable with that they they'd rather have a negotiated nda laden um you know cone of silence or cone of trust and for that reason um we have an announcement which is that we are looking at putting together a special interest group at phenos for fintech companies that are inner-source curious we will make uh inner-source commons the upstream to what's happening at phenos because it will be a special interest group in the sense that the the issues that are facing fintech are different than many of the other kinds of companies that you saw in that big slide so we'll do our very best to make sure that um we stick to the fintech stuff but if anything fruitful comes out of it especially if there are patterns identified that mitigate risk or or enhance yield or if there are tools that come out of this special interest group they will be delivered upstream to inner-source commons so that the entire inner-source community can benefit so this is really exciting news um we have some partners in this and uh I'm looking forward to getting this started with many of the companies that I was talking about earlier including Morgan Stanley um Royal Bank of Canada, Deutsche Bank, inner-source commons and phenos who are the initial members of this but of course everyone that's a member of phenos will be able to come so we hope that that's exciting to people and welcome to the party I hope that this is enough to make you interested make you want to come in and be part of it it's it's a great community I can honestly say that they're a very nice people and smart people and you are going to find a lot of value if you get involved in this and thank you so much for listening to me if you're interested in my company Nirform we do consult on inner-source and if you follow that particular URL or you can just do nirform.com forward slash inner-source I think also works you'll find a little video by me you'll find some testimonials from customers and the way to get a hold of us there and there's also my email address and thank you so much for your time thank you to phenos for um letting me speak again at OSSF and I hope that you guys have a great conference thanks so much bye


So I'm gonna start with a video, right? Of a rational national, well, really irrational national. Irrational national talking about the minimum wage. And he calls it, this is the title of the video, Democrats Introduce Embarrassing Minimum Wage Bill. Why is it embarrassing? We'll find out. Ah, wrong button, there we go. Unmuted. I've introduced an inadequate and frankly embarrassing minimum wage. I agree. Inadequate and embarrassing. Yeah. Now, in this video, I'm going to break down what is in this bill, what has been passed already, what Joe Biden has done, and also where the minimum wage would be if it were tied to productivity. But before I get to all that, let me first start with what Joe Biden has done. So this is an executive order that he pushed a few days ago, signing an executive order to pass a $15 minimum wage for federal workers. Now this is to our news rights here. Justin House and Senate Democrats introduced legislation to raise the federal minimum wage from $725 to $15 by 2020. Doubling the minimum wage. Now there are a couple things here. Let me start with how Democrats already are coming to the table with the compromise. I wrote this on Twitter. This is essentially my notes here on this piece, so I'll just read this out. But I say here, putting aside how inadequate this is, if Democrats actually wanted to pass this, they wouldn't come to the table with the compromise. They'd come with $15 an hour by the summer and have Republicans water it down to $15 an hour by 2025. So note, the problem is that the bill introduces the minimum wage over a few years. And they want it out. And of course, if you're going to get it, why not negotiate with the Republicans? Because the Republicans are going to give in, right? Probably. So the Republicans are off of the 2025. And that way Democrats can look good, right? Because they try to fight for. So he's giving them a little bit of political recommendations on how to get a higher and better minimum wage noted. No equivocation about the fact that raising the minimum wage is a good, important, crucial thing to do. And of course, $15 is just the beginning. That should be coming to the table with 20 bucks an hour. So this is just how you negotiate. And I always wonder, why 20? How do we get to 20? Like, what's the calculation behind 20 and not 1950 or 2750? I mean, if raising the minimum wage is cost less, if raising the minimum wage doesn't hurt anybody, it only helps the people who use the minimum wage and are not earning much high minimum wage, then why, why not raise it to 50 or 100 or 500? All right, let's, let's keep going. I keep pressing the one button. I apologize. Come to the table with a watered down bill. Now part of the issue here is that this is the exact same bill that was passed in 2019 through the democratically controlled house. The Senate, of course, did not take it out, but they are simply reintroducing the same bill that was passed in the house two years ago to try and get it through with the now democratically controlled Senate with Kamala Harris being the tie breaking vote. Now the other issue, of course, is that they need 60 votes unless they pass it through budget reconciliation, which is something they will try and do if they don't get those 60 votes. This gets back to the issue. Of course, Democrats are not going to get discussion, negotiate and negotiate down to whatever your position is. Yeah, yeah. But to come to the table with this very conservative compromise already, notice $15 an hour is conservative and $15 an hour by 2025, four years, conservative, conservative. I mean, it's doubling the minimum wage. And by the way, if the minimum wage was, I wrote this down somewhere, let me just find this. The minimum wage had been adjusted from its highest rate ever in terms of to the PCE, which is the consumer expenditure deflator. So it's the most recognized inflation deflator that you want to use. The 725 today would be 920. 920. By the way, one of the tricks that economists play on all of us when they throw numbers at you, oh, wages haven't gone up or down or sideways or whatever, inflation adjusted, is the measure they use to adjust inflation. There are a lot of different measures you can use. And they'll give you different results because they're different measures. And of course, each side uses the measures that will give them the best outcome. Now the PCE is most economist accepted as the best measure, the most accurate measure. But no inflation measure is accurate. No inflation measure is good because every one of our inflations is different in terms of prices because your basket of goods is different than my basket of goods. So if your basket of goods have gone up in price faster than mine, you have more inflation. Price inflation I do. For example, if you consume primarily education and healthcare, prices have gone through the roof for you. If you primarily consume computers and food, prices have gone down dramatically. So inflation is a very tricky number. And it's one that economists use often to lie to you, to deceive you. So beware, whenever quoting inflation adjusted numbers, what inflation? What deflator are you using? What if I use the different deflator? How much does it change? But according to the PCE, 920 should be the minimum wage today, right, 920. And they want to raise it not to 920 from 725, they want to double it to $15 an hour. They want to completely utter free lunch. They've invented a free lunch. All right, let's listen to, it's inadequate, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, we know it's inadequate. Let's go. I want to get into some of his other arguments. Let's see what he's, what is he arguing here? Now this isn't the only issue with this bill. As if you look through it here, after the first four years, so once it raises to $15 an hour, it is then tied to the median hourly wage increase. So instead of tying it to inflation or tying it to productivity, which I would prefer, I'm going to show you later how much you would be making right now if it were tied to productivity, they're tying it to median hourly wage. So now why is this an issue? Well, looking at EPI.org here, again, I'll link to all this below the video. You can read through all the state of yourself. They write here, the 95th percentile continues to pull away from middle and low wage workers, cumulative change in real hourly wages of workers by a wage percentile, 1979 to 2019. Now notice here, first, all this is inflation adjusted and we don't know what the deflator is, but put that aside. Notice also that here he's separating out the 10th, 15th, and 95th percentiles. This is going to be important when we get to productivity. And he's showing here that real wages, again, what real means, what real means depends on what you use as the inflation adjusted. Real wages of low income workers have basically remained flat. They've grown 3.3 percent. The higher wage workers, it goes up by 63 percent. So people who earned a lot at the top 95th percentile in 1980 earned 63 percent more today. And the people in the 95th percentile, remember, it's not the same jobs. The people who are in the 95th percentile in 1980 are not the same people. Not the same jobs as the people in the jobs that today. But this is what economists do. They aggregate everything up, they mush it all together, and then they give you statistics as if it's meaningful. Now what is true though is it's likely that a lot of the jobs at the lower 10th percent of income are the same as they were 40 years ago. And it is likely that the kind of job that earned you a minimum wage or just above a minimum wage, that is the bottom 10 percent in 1980, is about the same kind of job as today. What kind of job would that be? I don't know, a fast food restaurant worker, a textile worker, the kind of manual labor that is relatively simple that does not require a lot of training, does not require a lot of skill, does not require any education. That kind of job is the bottom 10 percent. So why do wages go up over time? Why would you expect wages to be higher in the future than they are today? Well, because your productivity goes up in the future. How does productivity go up? Well, because you either get better skilled, you get better educated, or you have better machines, better robots, better computers, better equipment to work. So capital is being invested to make you more productive. So the way your productivity goes up is either through education, acquiring skills, training, all of these things, or capital investment. Now notice that where have we seen a lot of improvements that would lead to growth in productivity? We've seen that in the higher end jobs, jobs that relate to manufacturing, jobs that relate to services, but high-end services like programming. In fast food chains, flipping burgers, you haven't gotten more productive. So why should you get paid more? Let me say that again. You haven't gotten more productive. Do people today flip more burgers than they did 40 years ago? Does the cashier, the person at the cash register, collect more money, handle more people in line than he or she could 40 years ago? Probably not. I mean, maybe at the margin, wages have gone up 3.3% according to this, which I don't really trust, but let's assume these numbers are true. Whereas in any higher-skill job, your productivity because of technology has gone up significantly since 1980, and therefore your wages have gone up significantly since 1980. And again, this is not your wages. This is average wages of the top 95, which could be completely different people today, completely different jobs. What has happened over the last 40 years is we have dramatically automatized. We have dramatically increased the use of computers where in some jobs, those jobs are getting much more rewarded because their productivity has gone up. And McDonald's, it hasn't. But so linking it to the median is giving the minimum wage employees that increases based on the productivity of somebody else. The productivity of the median worker, which is significantly higher than the minimum wage worker. The fact is the minimum wage workers, how many people work in year 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 for a minimum wage? Almost zero, almost nobody. Minimum wage is something you pay somebody when they first start, when their productivity is the minimum wage. Less than a minimum wage, right? Sorry, just slightly more than the minimum wage. That's why you pay them the minimum wage. But as they get trained on the job, their productivity rises and their wages rise. But there's always a group of people, teenagers, ex-cons, ex-drug addicts, just people hot up, people who got through a lousy, horrific educational system. They don't know anything. They're not productive. They're always a group of people that enters at the minimum wage. And their minimum wage should only increase if their, not productivity, if their productivity has gone up. So I mean, the way they present it, the way they report statistics and the way they imply the statistics have meaning to what they're talking about, is just ignorant of economics in such a fundamental way. It really is quite shocking. All right, so if you look at this graph, the top increase here is from the 95th percentile. This right here is the median. So now at 15.1%, this is the median wage increase, the 50th percentile. Now, explaining this further, to put this growth and inequality in perspective, consider that the 10th percentile wage grew from 9.75 to 10.07 an hour. Over this 40-year period, wages for this group increased only 32 cents in real inflation-adjusted terms. How are they adjusting? The median wage grew... I bet you they're using the inflation adjuster that will give them the best outcome, not the one that most reflects actual inflation. It looks like I'm going to get, I'm barely going to get through any voodoo economics today, just because I've got so much to say, it turns out. All right. From 16.79 to 19.33, an increase of only $2.54. At the top, the 95th percentile wage grew from 41.15 to 67.14, an increase of 25.99 an hour. Why is that? This is the major difference here. You have a, over, by tying the increase after four years to the median wage, over the last 40 years, you've only seen an increase here of $2.54 in the median wage. Yeah.  Here's productivity, guys. Now, this... Wait, wait, wait. Now, remember, I did a whole show on this graph. I did a whole show on this graph. This graph is a manufactured lie. It is an unmitigated lie. If you don't remember my discussion about this graph, and I had a number of different points why this is complete distortion, go back and watch that show. Just put your own book, Productivity, and maybe Action Jackson can release that video again as an adjunct to this video. But this shows hourly competition flattening out and productivity going through the roof.  Now, I want to go back. Wait, I want to go back to, where's the graph? I want to say, I want to say, I want to go back to this graph a second, because I forgot to say something about this graph. One of the things that this graph does not recognize is what has grown since 1980 that is not captured on this graph that affects the compensation of workers. And this drives me nuts because, again, this is so dishonest of these people that I purposefully using these people. These leftists who don't know any economics have no conception of what it means to think economically, have no understanding of how economics works, and who pretend to throw graphs and numbers and pretend that they're conveying information all for some fantasy, some illusion that they live under, that basically there's a free lunch, and all driven really by the hatred of this group, the group at the top, right? What is missing from the graph? Well, it's quite a bit missing, but one of the important things that are missing are benefits. Benefits. Benefits have become a bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger part of compensation every decade. Health insurance, all the other coverages, all the other stuff that employers are required to provide to you. That whole laundry list, if you're an employer that you know that you have to provide your employees, but healthcare is certainly a big one. Now, as a percentage, as that is massive, all these are acquired by law. As a percentage, this is huge for low-income employees because the benefits might be 25% of their wages. They might be more than 25% of their wages. So as benefits increase, yes, employers have less and less money to give them cash in salary. So what you see is, you see that salary only go up 3.3%, but if you included benefits, their wages would be going up far, far higher, significantly higher as to start catching up to the median and to the high income people. And if you look at the high income people's increase, they have benefits there as well. But their benefits are much smaller percentage of their compensation. So if you add benefit to their compensation, yes, it will increase the amount of their wages, but not by much. Whereas for the low income, it would be huge. So if you wanted to fix this graph, just include benefits in it. That would be one way to fix it. The deflator is another way to fix it, but there are other ways and so on. Somebody's asking what the solution is? The solution is to have a zero minimum wage, but I'll get to that. I have a lot more sense. Again, this is a completely false graph. The hourly compensation, they use a different deflate on that than on productivity. So they're using two different deflators to maximize the difference. That's one thing. In hourly compensation, they're not including benefits. That's another thing. Who's hourly compensation are they using? Hourly compensation of whom? Is this the top people? Is this the bottom people? Is this the average? Is this the median? What is it? Is it of a particular worker as he goes through his life cycle? I mean, they are so dishonest. And the reason they have to be dishonest is a reason they have to be dishonest. The reason they have to be dishonest is because their ideas are so detached from reality. The solutions are so illogical from an economic perspective that they have to invent data. They have to lie through the teeth about the data in order to try to convince anybody because there's no logic. There's no economics. There's no reason behind what they're proposing. Now, he wants to link increases in the minimum wage to increases in productivity. You see right here. Now, what's the problem with that? Because wages should be linked to productivity. And I'm going to shift away from this because it pisses me off. What's the problem with that? The problem with it is wages are supposed to be linked to productivity. Your wages are supposed to be linked to your productivity. His wages are supposed to be linked to his productivity.  And if they don't, you should change jobs. His wages should go up when his productivity goes up.  So if Rational National wants to link a specific individual's wage to that individual's increase in productivity, that's exactly how the market works. That's what happens in a proper marketplace, in a free market. But he wants to link unproductive people, people, minimal wage people, people who have never had a job before, people just entering the job market. He wants to link their wages to my productivity, to my productivity. Not to that person's productivity, but to mine. How does that make sense? Why should the fact that Stephanie has got a brand new computer and therefore can produce at a far, far higher rate than she used to and therefore is earning a lot more money than she used to? What does that have to do with a low wage, with a minimum wage employee? Why is his wage linked to Stephanie's productivity? His wage should be linked to his productivity. That's the other fallacy that is very prevalent in economics. And that is the aggregation fallacy or the collectivist fallacy. Economics is fundamentally about you and me. It's about individuals. How we produce, how we get compensated, how we consume the incentives we have, why we switch jobs, who becomes entrepreneurs, what entrepreneurs do. It's about individual action in a marketplace. That's what economics should study. But what economists today like to do is they like to aggregate all these individuals and just have numbers, the bottom quartile, the top quartile, the median, the average, who cares? What matters is your wage. What matters is your productivity. What matters is that firm's profitability, that firm's profit, whether you're consuming their product or their product. This is not, economics is not rocket science. It's not easy, particularly when you get into the real deep end. But this is just what rational, national, and what so many of the leftist economists do is just a con job. And this is Paul Krugman and this is Robert Reich and this is the whole slew of them, the whole slew of them. What we need today, what I call the new intellectual would be any man or woman who is willing to think. Meaning any man or woman who knows that man's life must be guided by reason, by the intellect, not by feelings, wishes, wins, or mystic revelations. Any man or woman who values his life and who does not want to give in to today's cult of despair, cynicism, and impotence, and does not intend to give up the world to the dark ages and to the role of the collectivist brought. All right. Before we go on, reminder, please like the show. We've got 163 live listeners right now, 30 likes. That should be at least 100. I figure at least 100 of you actually like the show.  But at least the people who are liking it, you know, I want to see a thumbs up. There you go. Start liking it. I want to see that go to 100. All it takes is a click of a thing, whether you're looking at this. And you know the likes matter. It's not an issue of my ego. It's an issue of the algorithm. The more you like something, the more the algorithm likes it. So, you know, and if you don't like the show, give it a thumbs down. Let's see your actual views being reflected in the likes. But if you like it, don't just sit there, help get the show promoted. Of course, you should also share and you can support the show at your own book show dot com slash support on Patreon or subscribe star or locals and show you support for all for the work for the value. Hopefully you're receiving from this. And and of course, don't forget if you're not a subscriber, even if you even if you just come here to troll or even if you're here like Matthew to defend marks, then you should subscribe because that way you'll know when to show up. You'll know what shows are on when they're on. You'll get notified, right? So, yes, like share, subscribe, support, like share subscribe support. There you go. Easy. Do one, all of those please.


What's up everybody, Jason here for JaspysCaseBricks.com. 2022 Bowman Draft Jumbo Baseball just sold out. Eight box case break, packaging number six. Remember, all cards shipped. Find three prospecting autographs per box. There we go. Let's open up this case. Bowman Draft Jumbo. Let's rip open a couple boxes at a time. All right, let's open one more box and then we'll go through the first four. See it right there? This pack's supposed to go with that box. Or that part of the pack, so we can keep this similar. And this one will go here. So there we go. Let's go with the first four boxes here. And we'll probably skip all these paper base here towards the end of every box. And we'll quickly go through it. Elijah Green. There's only a couple of top-loaded players that we're looking out for. First auto is Nate Furman, Raffella, Trey Sweeney, and then Hunter Patterson to 75. Kavanaugh for the Giants. Paper, Mickey Romero, Mikey Romero. A nice little Elijah Green, just a base, but we'll take that Nationals, Peter Elias. All right, let's quickly skim through this paper base. All right, next box. Again, we'll do the same thing. We'll pour about the paper base later. Paul Young, paper, Harrington for Pittsburgh. And Brooks Lee, it's like one to two per case. That's a nice one there. Steven Zovac to 199. Whatever, Rex. I did, Rex. It was fun, man. Hope you had a good Christmas. Chase De Lauder to 499 for the Guardians. Duthorpe Green, Jay Allen, and then Christopher. Paciola, Tres Gonzalez to skim through the paper base. Just pull out any of those three prospects we're looking for. Jackson Holiday and Elijah Green are usually right next to each other. Landon Sims, Justin Boyd, and nice David McCabe to 99 Green for the Braves. Fourth rounder, Nick Bittison, Michael Kennedy, and then Cutter Coffee. Kamar Rocker for Texas, Karen with that one. And we had a Eli de la Cruz to 75. There we go. Let's go through this paper base again. Pull out those three. All right, next box. Hanson, and then Henry Mendez. Yesir, Mercedes, Tray Lipscomb, and Hunter Pattinson to 499 for the Royals. Color Match Paper Green of Oakland A's, Henry Bolts, and nice Jackson Holiday refractor, Jonathan Mejia. Mead and Drake Baldwin, gold first for Atlanta. Going to Jason Kaye, third round pick, and then a Curtis Mead Green for the Rays. Go through this paper base. All right guys, so there you go. Here's the first auto's there from the first case, or first half of the case I should say. There. All right, let's continue on then. Next four. All right, then I have a little bit of orders. Looks like for Bowman Draft it looks like, from 30, already 18 left, nice. So let's keep it coming. So again guys, after this break, nothing else is sold out, but I have time for another five star. I have time for a Super Jumbo two box break, hip parade, flawless, or even some soccer. But like I said, depending on what you guys are feeling tonight. And we got an Eliza Green, look at that. Tonighty-nine for the Washington Nationals. That's going to Peter Elias. Very nice hair right there, buddy. All right, then we got Jonathan Mejia there. Pintar, Guardians, this is all the base right here. This is the last stack here to go through for the first box. So put more base there. Savino, Jolape, and a purple Nate Furman for the Cleveland Guardians, going to Ryan Al. The 250, fourth round pick. All right, sweet, three more boxes to go guys. We got Chandler Simpson. We got Shelley and Polanco. And we got Blake Berkhalter for the Atlanta Braves, Jason Kay. And there we go, how about a little Jackson Holiday? So so far we've gotten two of the top three prospects. But just been base, but who cares, right? Still Jackson Holiday. Your number one overall pick there. Ordos is Matthew. Los Santos and Jud Fabian to 71. And we got Eric Brown. All right, two more boxes left. Dalton Rushing and Tyler Locklear, class of 2022 for the Mariners, going to Peter. Number to 250. Jimmy Crooks, Victor Acosta. Cutter Coffee, second round pick. Melendez, Orm Sweeney and McCabe. All right guys, I'm gonna quickly just top all these last couple autos. And then we're at the final box guys. All right guys, last box here. Zovac, Bittison, number to 250. Green Speckle, and then Henry Williams to the Padres, peoples of that one. Third rounder, Salas, that's Khalil Watson from Miami to Adam Laszvalmojo. Shalyn Polanco, Jacob Miller. And Liza Green, redemption. And Noah Schultz to 4.99 for Chicago, where Johnson. Let's go through the, let's go through the paper before we show the last auto. Just in case it's a nicer one. All right, here we go, last hit of the break. Prospect Autograph of Brooks Lee for the Minnesota Twins. Spina Peter. All right guys, just like that, there it is. Brooks Lee, Schultz, Williams, Elijah Green Casey, Elijah Green, Auto. Zovac, DeLotter, Bicola, McCabe, Kennedy, Coffee, Lipscomb, Pattinson, Gold Baldwin, Furman, Pattinson Black, Elijah Green Auto, or two Elijah Green autographs, looks like. Campbell, Furman, Perkhalter, Jackson Holiday, Fabian, Locklear, Coffee, and McCabe. So there you go, guys. And of course, a ton of numbered cards as well. Right here, right? And then Lex4, and then there's some more from the first four, including all the first of those three bigger prospects. So I appreciate it, guys. JaspysCaseBricks.com, next one's in the store.


Hi, my name is Barry Green. I'm from the company named Neometrics and I had a privilege of moderating a session on the wearable computing and where wearable computing has taken us in the future. It was a session where we had a mix of a vendor, a security expert, and then a designer. Through the session we were able to explore what are the future of wearable devices and the possibilities that's going to happen, the intersection between the fashion industry and the material science industry with telekinications, and what was going to be the mix of disciplines we're going to need to actually gain the benefits of wearable computing. We also explored what was going to happen as wearable computing actually gets integrated into the body and this is kind of like very futuristic and in line with the theme of exploring the future which is the theme of this ITU telecom. And some of our speakers were exploring the possibility where computing is actually integrated biologically into this your own body. We're already seeing some of that with healthcare and wearable computing that's not really wearable but actually embedded devices like insulin regulators and devices for regulating the heart. And then we also explored the security implications of all this wearable computing in the future as your clothes, your jewelry, you know, you know beyond the watches that we see today starts being talking and being part of the Internet of Things that you yourself as a wearable computing device is interacting with the Internet of Things around you. Finally we kind of looked at some of the possibilities are today we had Samsung come and bring several of their wearable computing devices, the watch, the headsets, and some of the other devices and how they integrated so we had our audience be able to come up and everybody try out these different devices and participate with it. So overall it was a very good session. It was a good exploration and it was a good exploration where we looked at the future of wearable computing where you have design and the technology all come together with this interest and possibilities in the future.


Life, life is, life is just more or less common sense, you know what I mean? Oh, okay. The thing I always say, the vast majority of people don't get it or have a clue whatsoever do they? The vast majority of people in the general public do not, do not have, do not have any clue whatsoever and they just don't get it. Do they? Do they. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yes, yes, it's true. Yeah, it's a green.  Let me ask you. Here you go. Name God? I mean, that's main God, blue-eyed. The vast majority of people just don't get it. Do they? Right into a big no. My dad was right, wasn't he? You can't get through the people, can you? Look at that, all the way. They? Where's your girlfriend at? You mean, you mean the one that is inferior to a blow-up doll? She loves you, remember? She, she, she can't match a blow-up doll. She loves you, though. Nausea? No, no, no. Nausea? Yeah, she simulates nausea. So our friend and or acquaintance from here at McDonald's, Eileen, is very unattractive. Does she love Jimmy? The amulet could say anything it wants. You don't know what she feels? I don't, but I don't really care. Well, I'd say you did. Yeah, okay. So what does she love Jimmy? Oh, okay. Does she love me? Borschek. Thank God you're all yours, buddy. Borsch. Oh, yeah, right. The average color, the average humanoid out there, the average mainstream American today, are they more or less like lemmings very easily influenced? Well, that's obvious. Yeah, look, look, that's how that's how Donald Trump got elected. Well, actually he got elected, but 63% didn't bother to vote. Now, this November, 2018, this November, will there be a landslide turnout in the voting this November's election? Yeah. Now they're out of town. Will the bigger turnout be Democratic voters? Will this huge turnout for this November, 2018, would it be in the favor of the Democrat voters? Not a favor, but a bigger turnout. Would it be a bigger turnout for the Democrat or progressive voter? Yes. So what you're trying to tell me is that many Republicans will lose their seats this November? Oh, thank heavens for that. Oh my God. Will, in the near future, will there be even more dirt exposed about Donald Trump? That's your investigation. This thing with Scott Druitt is more on... Yes. Now, I saw a banner where it says, as a photo of Vladimir Putin, and it says something about, like, if it wasn't for me, in other words, I have a puppet in Washington, more or less. I have a puppet... You know what they show? I place the puppet in Washington. In fact, it was your Putin sitting on a chair, with a little Trump doll as if it was religious, with a little string saying it up. A little Trump doll was made. Did you know there are some hilarious... Meaning you're my dummy. There are some really hilarious Donald Trump dolls that are out already. Oh, yeah. Some of them are naked. Can you be something like that? Sitting on his Putin's lap? They're just sitting there. No, it's a cartoon, so he can't move it. Just to show that he's a puppet. He's a dummy. He's a dummy. I think he's Putin's puppet. That's why you said it. Yeah. Well, it rhymes when you say Putin's puppet.  A murderer. A little bit. Kim Jong-un. Kim Jong-un.  Assad, Duterte and Erdogan. These five should all be together again. Where's our buddy Joe's? Oh, gee.  Wait, wait, wait. Let me try to stop. Oh, okay. Okay.  Easy, yes.  Well, it's... Sometimes it has to think over things. No, not really. I got something interesting. I noticed that there are people that have a lot of honest things to say in private, but publicly they would not dare give their opinion. Are these spineless sycophants? Oh, yeah. I know one guy. He has a lot to say in private, but he'll totally trash somebody privately that he knows and then publicly he'll say, oh, what a wonderful guy. I miss him so much. There was a trainer, a famous trainer from New Jersey, I think, or New York, named Vince Guy Ronda, who's deceased, bodybuilder, bodybuilding trainer, like Joe Guider.  In other words, you could ask Vince Guy Ronda only one question. As soon as you ask him a second question, he yells at you in public. He berates you. I guess he's like Trump.   Right into a yes. Yeah, and you know what? It's not just one individual he yelled at. He yells at everybody. He yelled at everybody. But he became like an icon in bodybuilding. I've heard most of them. Well, he's the one that popularized the flies, the dumbbell flies. You know how many people in fitness take credit for things? Like Joe Guider was never the master blaster. You know who trained him? Bob Hoffman, York Barbell Company. My old town where I live, York. And York Barbell used to be, I read it. Let me just ask it. The York Barbell Company originally made furnaces for homes. Is that true? Yeah. Which is amazing how they made the switch. Actually, Frank Perdue made the switch for Maryland. He originally had Aiglain Hens, his family. Were they from Maryland? Not everywhere I've lived. They were all the famous people. Yeah, no, the producer from Maryland. Think about it. Were they from Baltimore? No, no, no. Of course, they had a big farm. But I'm born in Baltimore? Yeah. You lived in York? My aunt and uncle are from Baltimore. You lived in York? Severny. You ever hear of a town called Severna Park? Anne Arundel County. It's right outside Glenburnie. Well, these are suburbs of Baltimore. Yeah. Route 2, the Ritchie Highway, I think it was called. They spent many of youth fishing and crabbing on the Chesapeake Bay. My friend, when I went down there with Gary to see his uncle, he supposedly had the fastest speedboat over Chesapeake Bay area.  Man, where we flying. I bet he went to show you Annapolis on that boat and the Bay Bridge. No, Jimmy and I went to Annapolis by car. Yeah. But his uncle had us out. Yeah. That was skimming. You've heard of Chesapeake Bay Bridge connecting East-Eastern Shore to West-Eastern Shore. Now, there's a town on the East-Eastern Shore called St. Michael's. It's a famous seaport. They have the biggest crabfish, commercial crabfish. Well, that whole Maryland- Tilman Island. Phillips is a famous restaurant. Tilman Island. Oh, Phillips is originally. Maryland. Oh, I thought they were from like the Carolinas of Virginia. Oh, they're Maryland. No, you can buy them in the grocery stores. Frozen Phillips, this and that. Crab cakes, I bet. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, people don't realize a real Maryland crab cake has no breadcrumbs in it. It's like pure crab meat with seasoning. One of the greatest former head coaches for the Colts when they were in Baltimore was Don Shula. He's one of the greatest Steak Houses in the world. Really? His chain is phenomenal. Don Shula's Steak House. Don Shula also... Yes. Don Shula's Steak House is one of the best in the world. His coach, former football NFL football coach, legend Don Shula. Is this chain of Steak Houses... Rated as one of the best... Rated as one of the finest in the world. Yes. I bet he has... You've got a good swing though. You've got a back and forth more. No, it's going up. I bet he has the age black Angus Steak Set. No, he's got everything but they say it's absolutely phenomenal. Let me try it. He was also with the Miami Dolphins when they won Larry Zanka. Don Shula's friend. Same as Steak House chain, one of the greatest and highest ranked in the world. There you go, Jimmy C. Well, mine went clockwise. It goes back and forth a little bit. Well, you've got that honor and knocky energy in you. Something. Honor and knocky or honor and nooky? No, honor and knocky. Honor and knocky. Knocky, yeah. I just... Now supposedly it's going to get much drier and cooler about a weekend. It's going to rain heavy tomorrow. We'll see. Let's hope. I don't know. Nobody feels good. I had my treatment the day at the hospital. So I'm done for three more weeks. Oh, really? Yeah. Oh, so you've got a three week break from that? That's only once a day. Then the next one will be in three weeks. Yeah. I feel bad. Like... No more chemo. No more chemo. Oh, God. Heaven forbid. What happened to your mom last night? Well, yesterday was her birthday. We have her birthday. No, 86. We have the birthday. Small get together. Just me, my sister, my mother. She didn't even... She acted like she didn't even care, but then again she's getting up in years, you know. So everybody leaves that night. She got so... Yesterday. Yesterday. She got so weak. She had trouble getting up out of bed, trouble walking, trouble with the walker. I had to help her to the bathroom.  She called my name and she was struggling to get up.  And she was just standing there staring. Like she was... No, like at me, she looked at me and then she looked somewhere else and I said, What's the matter, you confused? She looked confused. Finally, before I got her to sit on the toilet, she crapped all over the toilet seat, the poor thing in the floor. 2 a.m. about 2 a.m. She had to clean for what, a good hour, half hour? It took me... It's a good thing I had pine saw, mystic clean. I had everything. But did I really want to do that at 2 a.m.? I don't think so. So what I did with... No. So what happened was my sister took the day off and she says, That's it. She's still coughing. She's going to the hospital. Oh, she's going to the hospital? No, no. No. The paramedics came. Oh, you did call them? And her nurse came. Everybody tested her, checked her out. They said there's nothing wrong with her vitals. She's fine. She's clear. Her blood pressure is good. Her oxygen is good. I go, well, why is she so weak? They said it might be the damn Xanax that she was prescribed to take, to calm her anxiety, Xanax with interaction. My sister's over there now. You never leave her alone. No, no. Well, she has a caregiver, but my sister told the caregiver not to come because she figured she was going into Hackensack Hospital. She didn't know the paramedics were going to say, your mom's not a candidate to go into this. Oh, it was earlier today, too? This was today, you know. Oh, it was last night? Yeah. So they feel that it could be the Xanax, which you should quit. So what are you going to do? Call the doctor? Well, her doctor or nurse practitioner, the other one, she has two of them. She's going to come tomorrow. Going to test her out. And I'm going to say, if you want to run a blood test, a special blood test for her, be my guest, because they come to the house. Is that going to suck? Watching them decline and watching them, yes, yes. And I was all ready to watch a movie on Netflix at 2 a.m. You can't do anything. Or I was ready to go to sleep, actually. So what I did, Billy, what I did, Billy, I gave her some flaxseed meal for extra fiber. Extra fiber, because she was like... Is that in here? No, I'm going to follow her. Because it was... I don't want to say it too loud. They say, K, kiss the Blarney Stone. I said, people, don't worry here about you. You had five stitches and you did this. You go on. It's always problem. People that kiss the Blarney Stone are usually very long-winded. Who cares? I've lost all patience. Cut to the chase. You cut to the chase. They had... I felt bad, but I was watching Anthony Bourdain reruns on CNN. People, the vast majority are incredibly long-winded. Just like their Lemmings. They call them sheeple, too. People don't really know how to just simply communicate much anymore, do they? They... I tell people, I try to teach them anything. Anthony... Get an outside proxy to show me. No, I'm saying... He interviewed a rock group from Seattle, Washington.  It's saturated with geeks. That's Silicon Valley. Amazon. Silicon Valley's up there. Yeah. But they said they're very dull people. They all look the same. All those corporate geeks. They all look the same. Yeah. Those people, and I've known them. You can call them corporate people, company people. They go by the book, and that's it. The book. You know, if it's not in the book, that's... Stephen Johnson, we fired... The number of PhDs we hire, we usually fire within two weeks. They're good with the book, but outside they can't get along with others. Or maybe they're not creative enough. That's my point. Communicate. And he said we fire most of them within two weeks. Yeah, just because you can memorize facts from a textbook... We'll get somebody else. That doesn't mean anything.  You know, creativity. Artists. Kids. Oh, he's like Slim Whitley. The Yardling Cowboy. He's just like Slim Whitley. Wow, he looks good. He's old. Oh, for his age, yeah. He was a little revered. Make up like football. You're the model. The clock's ticking. You've only got 35 seconds. Throw your play. Get up in the hall. Get out of the hall.  Make your point. Get out. You think about that. Yeah, well, a football play is like pro wrestling. It's like a sprint. A sprinter. Pro wrestling is not a sprint. Those are like sprints, too, you know. It's not a sport at all. Yeah, I know. How many pro football players, like I said, tried off our teams, not one every month? Yeah. They all didn't just get cut. They quit. They couldn't have. Yeah. What you said is the play... I still don't know.  What do they do in football baseball? You get to yell at people. What do you think they do in football baseball? They yell. If you're in a slump, they yell. They boo you. They all do. So it's not just wrestling. You see? Well, New York fans are tough. Well, they are not. They're no different than fans anywhere else. If you want to talk of the toughest, Philadelphia is the dirtiest.  Really? I mean, really. If you want New York fans are tough. In what way are New York fans tough? In what way? Well, maybe I should have said the New York press. The press. The New York press, it isn't tough. They all rip their tears to shreds and praise you when you win this New York press. And then when you lose, they want to know why you lost. What does it mean? Because the other team scored extra points. Is there any other city that doesn't do the same thing? They scored more points than we did. Is there any other city that doesn't do the same thing? I do not know. If your team fails, they can win. They do the same thing. I know the Red Sox, the Boston press ticked off one of their star players and asked them, why did you commit the error in the outfield? Because it happens.  What happened? I'm talking to a buckner. How did that ball, which you took so far, get under your hands you could have handled a bear head? It just happened. But you have to ask a question.  You better ask all the questions when things happen, you're dissecting the game.  I'm sure even with the triple crown, they probably asked the owner and the jockey, well, why'd your horse... Especially the poor. Well, good. Finally, it's more than about six, eight months too late. That's what they asked. He resigned. Big surprise. They had to.  True it. Oh. No, but all the pirate arts, now people don't think it's all the prep. The city's prices are the same. New York's not tough. Or they are tough. L.A. is not tough. Or they are tough. So when you lose, they antagonize you. Well, what are they going to do? They've got to ask. You all see the cartoons, hero, goat, blah, blah, blah. The only difference is, somebody like Bill Parcell is used to giving it right back to him.  Well, that gives an honest answer. Yeah, he wasn't approachable. That's what were you thinking? What do you think I was thinking? Yeah. He was a smart. But I heard he wasn't approachable. No, he's not. He wasn't. You know, most normal guys just say, well, I wasn't happy to be honest with him. I was like, he owed his help. It sucks when those kinds of plays occur. Give an honest answer to me. Yeah. It's that simple. Be a class act.   He doesn't take talent.  I would not believe Ruffin. Why do you think some guys who have class in the act and others that are jerks? You see, you never saw a painting man and cut you off and say, what do you think I was thinking blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And you see somebody like Bill Bo, Bill Shaq. He is what it is. Well, you better prepare for next week's game. What about, what about some of the legendary actors at Charlton, Heston, Burt Lancaster? There was never dirt on them. They were clean their whole entire careers. Well, yeah, I think. Kirk Douglas. You don't have the same thing today. Yeah, what? You're talking about like real, trained actors that were like legends. Clint Eastwood, those spaghetti westerns. As funny as they were, people enjoyed it. Well, you know, some of the actors were in the comic. But they were just good basic western stories. Yeah. It was good. Yeah, like when Clint Eastwood walked into the barbershop, how much for a bath and a shave? That'll be 75 cents. The west is a classic. And to me, it's a little bit better than the godfather of a mob movie. It's what's called a time in America. A phenomenal film. Now, everybody I've told you to watch this, you're not kidding me. Now, that one where he asked for the bath and a shave for 75 cents, was that good, bad, and the ugly, or was that fistful of dollars? Or High Plains Drifter? You see the High Plains Drifter or Hang on the Pie? Hang on the Pie. Remember the beginning? Lee Van Cleef was in a lot of those movies. Not all of them, but he wasn't in that one. And the midget was always Mordecai, the guy that went and filled the bathtub up.  He painted the whole town in one certain color. It's always Mordecai. Poor Mordecai. Hey, talk about something that's not class act. Banquet. I tried their pot pies, the new one. Sausage and gravy. It's supposed to be like the Southern, you know, with the biscuit. It says deep dish, and it was only like one inch high. And it says, guess what it says? The crust was made from scratch. What does that mean?  A lot of wine is good. It doesn't taste good. Yeah, but you saw people's intelligence. How was it? It was good. That was mediocre. It wasn't the worst pot pie I've ever had. It wasn't the best. The point is it wasn't deep dish. And it wasn't, it didn't taste like it was made from scratch. You know. But it was a dollar, so who might have complained? That's what I did. That's what I did. That's what I do with some of this stuff. I'm the guy that says this will not be enough. Because mom likes the banquet Salisbury steak with mac and cheese.  It's made with real cream. It's made with real cream. All these have a huge box of Salisbury steaks for even less than that. Well, but you know, it's only a dollar or so more maybe. When I ask them, where's my shepherd's pie? They laugh, the managers. They laugh? Yeah, they say it's out of season. Season? Well, what is it, a lobster? A live lobster? A lobster's around all year. Come on Jimmy, what do you mean out of season? Well, when you look at the menu in a seafood restaurant, it always says lobster's price according to here, but it's available all year long. Well, there's a season we can't get in the summer or the winter. Well, they're still in the ocean. I mean, they're still there. So what did you ask them? Maybe you ought to go on the web to check and contact out his headquarters. What is this all about?  But look, if you contact out his headquarters, they might send you free coupons anyway. In Illinois, yeah. I should do that, I should do that.  Why don't you do that? Why don't you? Why? I don't know, Billy. Well, tell them.  You have a blah blah blah? They look at me funny and tell me it's seasonal. Everything's seasonal in here. How can this be seasonal blah blah blah? I'd like to know. Hey, even the stuff clams can't be seasonal because the clams never lead the ocean. Notice the sea queen.  Where? Oh, he's on reality still. I didn't know what you were talking about. Well, Stop and Shop has both, I think. I don't know, they have main laws. I know the one with shrimp. That's all that you were good at. Very famous stuff. I remember that. They're very popular. They can't be Mrs. Balls and Bois. Now, they use the cheap pollock. It's minced pollock. Stop. I get solid cod scrubs. It's good. Everybody except you because you're picky. Everybody I know loves it. They love it. It is great. The broth of the sea. I agree with the Warren Buffet.  Warren Buffet is really sad. It's like a couple of years ago when I said I liked that seafood salad. Or cheese whiz to me. That stuff is garbage. It's toxic. It's toxic. I don't care.  I don't care.  Can I see you first? My friend my friend Julie Madonna will be overly picky about his food. That one ended up being yes fast, didn't it? That's because the yes is you're dead. Am I right when you say that? I like frozen seafoods. Mrs. Balls and Gordon's seafood. Pollock is... Is there anything wrong with the seafood product or fish called pollock? Not really. There's something wrong with a lot of breading. You don't want to drink it. Again, Warren Buffet.  What I usually get is the beer battered cod fillets. Eat it all. It's all good. Stop it. It's all good. That statement. You shouldn't make that statement. It's all good. How could man god moral say it's all good? You're going by flavor. Yes. It is good. You're so anti-pollock. When I had seafood salad at the deli and stopped the shop years ago, I forgot where you and I were. You know, at that time, we had a lobster.  Well, I don't know. Did I say that? Yes, it's pollocky now. I said, I don't care. It tastes good and I like it.  There you go. And I just asked about pollock. I have eaten the imitation crab meat. But you know what's you know what's wrong is the time the crow's nest said they advertised lobster bisque and it was imitation crab meat. Didn't I just ask, is Jimmy overly picky? You know what I mean is it's the principle of false advertising. Didn't I just say are Jimmy Madonna overly picky about food? Yes. You want to ask it again to three of you again? Does the same thing apply to different types of Donna joints or that's or there are different varieties. Back when we all used to smoke grass a lot it wasn't the least chemical. That's what's hurting the kids today. It's not pure grass. It's junk. They even spiked the cigarettes. It's not good. Pure real grass Jimmy. Oh yeah. In the bar you want real grass. You want chemicals. We smoked grass. Pure Hawaiian. Pure this. What's the other one? That was one there. But it was grass. It wasn't covered with anything Jimmy. It didn't have chemicals. It wasn't genetically modified Monsanto. Grown grass. It was just grass.  You laugh a lot and you got the munchies later. People who used to grow it with the plant light in the basement I hear that was strong. That was potent. No, no, no. People that grew it in the basement with the fertilized it and with the lamp over it. You just smoked a lot of grass. No my sister. My sister did. Okay, your sister did. Oh, that's for everybody? No, 1980s. Smoked grass. We all did. We still do a lot of that though. It's been a long time for me. Was that song Rock Lobster from the 80s? The B-52s. How'd you go? Da, da, da, da, da, da, da. Da, da, da, da, da. Yeah, with that guy? Yeah, that's it. Rock Lobster. I never knew what I had to do with Rock Lobster. It was called Rock Lobster. I never knew that. No, the music video was funny as hell. I was watching. They had the big roof on hairdos. No, the way they were dancing. Yeah, I mean the Go-Go's did some. They were great. Vacation. Bankage was great. Walked like a 90s movie. But then there was Judy Torres. Judy Torres, the dance club hits. Who? George Lamont Torres. Who's that? Lisette Melendez. Who are you talking about? I've never heard about these. I think they call it freestyle. No, they call it stupidity. Today's music. Did you like old house music? What's old house? Snap, I got the power. I got the power. Oh, Boom Bada, Planet Rock. I know what you're talking about. Planet Rock is party equals party people tell you the truth. I have no clue what you're talking about. Well, they were dance club music. EDM's electronic dance music.  Which is not really musically to say. I don't think it is. You know Don Cornelius says I'm sorry. I'm tired. I don't get hip hop. He actually says I don't get it.  I don't want to get it. You can shove it. That's not music. I like good old Motown. Which is not R&B. It was just soul music. Yeah. It wasn't R&B train. It was soul train. That's what it was. It was a theme song to shaft. We wrote the whole entire tour. The whole movie. We wrote the whole movie. Isaac A's. I saw him three times. Richard Roundtree was the actor. Three times I saw Isaac A's. Phenomenal. The whole album was great. It was phenomenal. Between him and Barry White. And I told you Barry White pulled me out of my seat. And I told you Barry White pulled me out of my seat. You had that aura. He had that aura about you. He must have heard your voice. He was singing. How many of you have heard my voice? He didn't tell the girls in the background. Hey, pipe down. I want to hear this gentleman. He saw something good of me. I'm a knocking. He did. Why me? I was the only one at the entire concert. He did that. He didn't think about that. When Barry White pulled over and shook the hand. Back in the 70s, when Billy went to see Barry White live in concert? Back in the 70s. In the 1970s. As opposed to the 1870s. When William H. Morel III went to see Barry White in concert and Barry White stopped to shake his hand. Did he see something or sense something in William Morel that he did not sense in anyone else in that stadium? Yes. Oh my God. I know when we were kids we weren't like this. No, we weren't. When we were kids. Oh, okay. The millennials. Yeah. Remember when Mo you know, Mo used two fingers when Mo went like this. Is that a naked gun? They were so funny. But you know what? He started out with a serious act. He planned it, all that stuff. Remember how he and what's your name? They practice safe sacks and the football. When they're going at the ladder he goes, nice beaver. Did she pull a beaver out? It's a corny but good human. I mean funny. He's talking to the one girl with a nice chest. She goes, is this a bus? Yes, but you're still under arrest, man. You know what? When Seinfeld took out Don Rickles for coffee before he died. Well, it couldn't have been after he died. Yeah, he's not going to take a corpse off a corpse. He says, you know what?  All you do is you're not even doing shtick. You're not doing jokes. And they start laughing at the way I said, who was a friend of mine?  I mean, he's so funny to look at. Yeah. Well, Gilbert Gottry. Oh, he's great. I like it. If Pee Wee, if Pee Wee if Pee Wee laughing was called playing on the shelf. If what Pee Wee it is illegal I should be on death row. I should be on death row. That's hilarious. It is. And it's short. Right to the point. Not a long story. Then the other one was Yogi Barrow who didn't try to be funny. He said, I'm serious about what I say. It just comes out funny. Hey, even when Jack Benny played The Landlord, that didn't want to fix anything. One episode, I think, it was played by Jack Benny. Well, there was more than one Landlord. This time was Jack Benny. I don't remember seeing any of those crabs as Landlords. Yeah, I did. They were usually... They were like Abbott and Costello as Landlords. Sydney Fields. Mr. Fields didn't want to fix much. You know, I saw the three stooges in person. We are a steel pier in Atlantic City? Yes. Was that Curly Joe Besser? Or was that the original? I think I might have to know. The original died in 52. I was only one year old. So I was about 10, 11. So it had to be Shep, maybe? It could have been Shep.  He didn't want to get slapped. He wouldn't let Mo slap him around. And he played Stinky on... Oh, no, that wasn't Curly Joe. That was Joe Besser. Joe Besser? It was Joe Besser and then there was Marita. Joe Marita? Yeah, Besser was... Joe Besser was on both Abbott and Costello and... Yes, yes. They always wore those little kids outfits. Come on, what are you so mad over here?  Oh, like Rip Taylor. Oh, they were all... Oh, man. You know, it was amazing how Liberace just... and Merv Griffin, everybody pretended that there were straight guys back there. Nobody pretended Liberace was straight. Jim, you stop her right now. No, nobody pretended that. Nobody ever called him out in public and said... Jimmy, he didn't hide it. My Merv Griffin... He used to go, ooh... He did. Liberace was obviously through this boyfriend, Jimmy. Oh, that's right. Merv had that fake map. He was with that Denny Terry or Dance Fever. Dance Fever. All right, all right.