Good morning, I'm so glad to see you. My name is Mariette DiCristina and I'm the Editor-in-Chief of Scientific American, also the Director of Editorial and Publishing for Nature Research Group. I'm just delighted, absolutely delighted to say that today we're going to have a discussion, an idea and insight with Duncan Haldane who is this past year's winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics with David Thouless and J. Michael Kosterlitz and we're going to talk a little bit about that, we're going to talk a little bit about science, about inspiration and I'm going to have a little fun while we're doing it I think. So Professor Haldane, let's start back a little bit because not everybody's maybe quite as familiar with physics as you are. I don't think many people are familiar with physics. I think you're probably right, but let's start with, you know, why science for you, you know, think about, go back to think about when you were when you were younger and what drew you to the physics in the first place? Well, I guess I always had my parents were medical people and they had a kind of great belief and science was the answer to the world's problems and the future. So it was a kind of propaganda for science in my house, but I didn't end up going into medicine like my brother and I was at school, I guess I liked science, geology and rocks and things chemistry. I didn't particularly like physics until it was only the there was a well, the physics teacher also doubled as the sports teacher in in the early part. But the last year I had a very good physics teacher and before that, I'd I'd loved chemistry and doing all the kind of things in in school labs that are completely ruled out by health and safety officers today. You cooked all these things and interesting orange chemicals came turned into green ash and came out of tubes and things. But my kind of chemistry. Yeah, but actually, there's something about physics. So it's got a simplicity in it and underlying it. And it's I guess I probably it was the enthusiasm of a teacher that communicated it to me, which I hadn't really even thought about physics before then. I actually remember having a physics teacher who really got me interested in the topic as well. So I can I can see how that would get you started. But then you you from there decided that that was interesting thing to pursue. So how did you? And then I went to college and did it was a Cambridge and did a general science called natural sciences. So I did a bit of physics, chemistry, biology, math. But then I had to go in the lab and the biology lab. I remember having an experience where I were having to put some nasty chemicals on some nice, nice looking mold to mutate it. And you did it in those days with a mouth pipette. Oh, so I sucked this stuff up and swallowed it. I decided I'm quite clumsy. So I decided maybe I don't want to be involved in any kind of experiments with with chemicals or anything with radioactive materials, because I get contaminated. So I went into nice, clean theoretical physics after. So I like the idea that since you had a lot of medical people in the family and you want to avoid chemistry, that you you almost chose physics as a star as almost a rebellion in a certain way. Did you did you always know that it would be science? Probably some years probably there was a general kind of encouragement that science was really a great future for mankind. We solve all the world's problems. I don't know if that's true, but it's doing it's both creating problems and solving problems. Yeah. Yeah, I think that's an interesting, interesting nature of science in general, isn't it? So so physics and then a particular branch of physics. Can you tell us how you you study quantum mechanics, which is a couple of pretty powerful sounding words. Let's tell people what what does it what does it mean? Quantum mechanics in the area. So physics is a fundamental science and you're in theoretical, which is described with the maths and so on. Quantum mechanics is the real I mean, it seems to be very different. It describes the world in a very different way from the way we understood, with the way you experience it. But because generally it works, it completely control things on the atomic scale of things. But it's the fundamental. It's actually the correct description of the world around us. You would say that. And but it's something we've known the laws of quantum mechanics for nearly 90 years now. It's all found around 1928, 30. And it's just because we've known the laws of quantum mechanics for so long doesn't actually mean we really understand it, right? Many people have tried to come up with experiments to invalidate quantum mechanics, and it's always triumphed. And but it's it's it's something that we understand formally by we know the equations are there. But it's it's been coming up with tremendous surprises in the last few years. So you've mentioned a couple of things here that I just want to pick apart for the audience. So mechanics, obviously, we can think about generically as how things work. And quantum is a very, very small scales. Yes. And there's been a difference in in in science brought by quantum physics, you know, quantum mechanics, because in the past, we'd studied things at larger scales. And the reason I'm introducing this concept is we're going to talk a little bit about the the interfaces. So the way the physics works or looks like it works at larger scales and at smaller scales, sometimes looks a little different. Yeah, the you don't look well, if you can't understand atoms or molecules or chemistry without quantum mechanics, that's why it was it was the big problem of the time at the beginning of the last century to and that's what and basically, we don't we don't experience it because we don't see it the atomic scale. But you can't understand you can't understand why you quantum mechanics is explains why you don't fall through the floor when you stand on it, even though the atoms are made of ninety nine point nine nine percent empty space. And, you know, the but of course, we think we don't fall through the floor because the floor is solid and it exerts a force on our shoe. But that force comes from the fact that the electrons don't to electrons don't like to be in the same place for an important quantum mechanical principle, the Pauli exclusion principle. And that's what really stabilizes. So we can't really understand matter at all without quantum mechanics. So when I put my hand on this table, the tables, electrons don't want my hand in their business. They they exclude they exclude you. They say they've got they've they've taken the space over and too bad for your bad for you. Can't put too bad for the other electrons in your hand. They can't come in. So you study a particular area of quantum mechanics, and I want to I want to talk a little bit about the topological areas and what led you to your Nobel Prize. So how how did that adventure begin in theoretical physics? Well, I think these things always come about through accidents, basically. I think there's lots of things, as we said, we haven't really fully understood what quantum mechanics allows to happen. And initially, I was investigating a very kind of toy model system in the late in the in fact, even as far back as the 30s, people started trying to make models for for matter, for solid matter and things like magnetism. And initially, they started making very sort of toy models quite complicated to understand a full magnetic structure. So they looked at just a little little line of atoms along one direction, one dimension. And this was spot to be in that period. These were kind of toy models. You did homework problems before you went up to the the full the full problem of three dimensional crystals and things. And but it turns out that the quantum mechanics effects actually much become much more important in in in things which are confined either to two dimensional surfaces or lines. So in fact, these these low dimensional systems are kind of even in some sense, more more interesting because. So in two dimensions, let's let's look back at some. So if I think of it like a sheet of paper in two dimensions, we're able to see effects a little differently than we are when you're looking at it in other ways. Yeah, because the fluctuations due to quantum mechanics are stronger and so in the seventies, people started to actually look at organic chain molecules and they started to make materials which could be described by these kind of things which had been regarded purely as mathematical exercises. So so they started to be much more interested in this in this problem. And basically what I was in looking at a different a slightly different language to to look at these problems in that gave you a different perspective from the standard one and found out just by by a tremendous surprise that what people had sort of concluded about these systems was basically wrong. So there's the insight, right? So you take a different perspective on a problem everybody is working on around this single plane and use a single line in the first one. Yeah, and yeah, basically it was an interesting kind of sociological thing. There was a long, a very old mathematical solution of one of these toy models had been around, but it was actually no one really understood it. It was actually a guest by Hans Bethe who was who went on after that to do tremendous things in nuclear physics and explain why the sun shines. But he actually started off with these kind of toy models and Bethe's solution took about 60 or 70 years to be understood because it was a kind of luck that he lucked onto this thing too. And it is superficially confirmed. It the answers from his mathematical solution looked like the looked like the kind of more more hand waving and but understandable kind of theory that people had applied before. So they they had an incorrect theory and there was that there was apparent evidence that looked as if it supported it and it turned out to be a complete accident. Just just so people's opinions can be. I'm sure there's plenty of things that we know about that we assume that we understand and, you know, then we may have quite the wrong idea. And so it's quite but it's a very great surprise when you when you find that what everyone believes just isn't correct, right? Yeah, that is a surprise. So let's talk just a little bit more about this is an area eventually became known as have I got this right? Topological phase transition. Well, where does that where does that topological matter? I guess topological matter. So can we can we explain to people what topological matter is and maybe give them an example or two? I think you brought a couple of things here to share. Well, topology is a branch of pure mathematics, OK? And it hadn't had any role in quantum mechanics before this thing. Before you were. Yeah.  There's a there's a famous thing in topology, which is tells you that a that a coffee cup and I guess a bagel. Now, I've got a better bagel here because this is very small. But the big example in topology is that that this object and the bagel with both the same topologically because they basically have a kind of hole in the middle. The hole in the middle of the bagel is now the handle of the cup here. And there's a famous film that everyone takes off YouTube or the people working in topological materials now. And they they show a coffee cup continuously changing into a bagel and back again. So it's like that. But the bagel has a hole in it. And the interesting thing about this is that holes are kind of they come in units. You can have one hole, two holes, no holes, but you can't have one point two holes or six holes. And it turns out that there's some properties which just depend on on on on whether you have a hole or not, or two holes. OK, up till then, most most things in physics required things to be very perfect. You know, if Intel makes a computer chip on a silicon wafer, the a speck of dust on the wafer will kind of ruin it. Right. Well, it turned out some measurements showed up in the in around 1980 that something called the fractional in the integer quantum Hall effect where you measured some resistance and it was exactly a fundamental number, which turned out to be 25,000 ohms, which is a ratio of the charge of the electron squared and Planck's constant times a whole number. And it was unprecedented that some measurement was always the same number to about six or seven digits. And it turned out to be a topological property. The quantum state can be classified in a similar way to the shape of these cups. It's not really, of course, it's not the physical surface. The big breakthrough in topology in mathematics comes from Carl Friedrich Gauss, who who discovered an amazing formula that you could actually work out the number of holes in an object by doing a complicated integral. So there's so there's a way to calculate. Yeah, you do an integral of the curvature over the surface of the and then you can figure it out. And then this gives you and he was just amazed. This always give you a whole number, which told you how many holes were on the surface. And and an analogous thing, it's not a physical surface that you're integrating a curvature over. And it's not not the not the actual curvature of of of the surface. I mean, this is a surface with has approximately a spherical curvature, but it's a mathematical analogy of Gauss's formula. OK, so let's back up a bit. Yeah. So you got us to wear that mathematically. Yeah. The donut and the cup are the same because well, they have a they both have a hole, right? And they and they're different and they're different from that. That's correct. Because there's no hole in that. And the regular the the normal matter, the non topological matter is basically got no holes in it. Now, the stability of the thing is that if you if I squeeze this a little bit, I'm going to change its shape, but I'm not going to put a hole in it. I have to do a lot of violence to to put a hole in it. Similarly, if I squeeze the bagel, it's not going to remove the hole. So the properties that depend on topology are much, much more stable. They're not affected by dirt, right? Or by by by that. Things are rough. Was affected by a grain of dust. So that turned out to be a remarkable property. So it's a different kind of matter. And it had just different properties, which were why it was unexpected in the first place. So and so you've you spent a bit of time studying these this topological matter. We didn't know it was topological at the time. It turned out it was just different. And the the interesting thing that emerges that the difference the boundary between normal matter and this topological matter has to be kind of interesting stuff happening on the boundary. And no one had noticed that before and this has emerged. And all kinds of strange things can happen. For example, in a two dimensional system, you can have signals that propagate one way around the edge with like one way, one way like light, or certain signals could move in one way only, like a one way street. And that has amazing implications for there's a lot of hope that one can harness that technologically, because if you put a kink in the pathway, the signal can't get reflected backwards. It just finds its way around. So for example, traffic flows in a road nicely because you have the cars moving in one direction on one side and the other direction on the other side. If everyone was moving without a rule of the road, there'd be a big mess. Well, in a usual piece of wire, the electrons can move in both directions. So to actually have something where you physically, where the signal gets separated spatially, which is something that happens in these topological materials is quite amazing. So there's all kinds of extremely unexpected properties that no one would have dreamed of turned up to be manifested by these strange topological matter. So I mean, I can understand, first of all, I know it takes a long time to understand at a fundamental level like what you're looking at. And you said there are a lot of strange properties of these. Is there anything that, I know it takes a long time. I mean, for instance, when Einstein was working on relativity, we didn't know that that would be used in the GPS in our phones 100 years ago, right? So can you speak to us a little bit about, I mean, are we still at the entirely fundamental understanding part of the Nobel work that you've done? Or is there, are we seeing some ways that it can be used in the everyday world yet? Well, this stuff has been growing tremendously.  And it, other ones- I mean, it's just interesting in the first place. Right, but it's really fueled, there was a very interesting proposal. That it could be used for quantum computers. So this is the bill, one of the big problem with a quantum computer is it's very fragile. The information that you try to store in a quantum state is very fragile against being a decoherence, which means it interacts with the environment and the information is kind of lost. But if you can encode the information in this topologically stable way, that it's unaffected by- So let's back up quantum computer. Let's say what it's good at doing or maybe good at doing because of the unique properties at the quantum scale and you just mentioned it can be fragile, which is called decoherence because it can be disturbed easily. But what would it be good at doing, different from- Well, a quantum computer in principle does a whole lot of calculations at the same time. Well, a classical computer just does one calculation then another calculation- So this has been a large area of interest for quite a while. That's right. Of course, one can find and propose this originally as a way to simulate quantum matter, which is a kind of circular argument, but it would be very useful. But if one could get a quantum computer to work, it would, for example, be able to factor large numbers very easily and the NSA, the National Security Agency, is investing in this because they want to know if people can make a quantum computer, it's going to break all the codes, for example. So I'm not sure that's that interesting as a scientific idea. It's why you want to break the codes, but I find it more interesting to simulate- Of course, you want to know- Scientific calculations rather than the acting, but yes, one could do it. It's not really clear what one, what one, all the things one can do with it, but anyway, it's viewed as the future of computing. So understanding now, I'm going to say this incorrectly, but the area that you're studying, that's more stable in certain ways at those interfaces between classical and quantum, have I got that right? Well, the- You explain it. You have interesting extra degrees of freedom at the interfaces, and also you can have little vortices. And in fact, Alexey Kiteyev, who's now at Santa Barbara proposed around 2000, that you could make a stable quantum computer out of topological matter. And then, which is very, still it was at a theoretical level then, but a lot of topological matter suddenly got discovered around 2007, 2008. So some of these old toy models that I and others had worked on, they'd been very theoretically interesting, but and some examples have been found in extremely high magnetic fields that weren't practical for much, but suddenly it was realized that extensions of the art of my ideas by others to three-dimensional systems also worked, and then people realized, my gosh, there's all these materials around that we never looked at closely enough, and they turned out to be topological matter. And once you've got fancy mathematics, you've got little kind of toy models that you can do calculations with and actually show that something's possible, and then real materials, those things come together, it's fueled a huge explosion of this. And in fact, Microsoft are now putting quite a lot of effort into funding.  And you can make, and there's a very interesting proposal for that you can do this quantum stuff with it. So let's get us, I mean, I'm always interested in how long it takes. I mean, obviously, even if, like me, we're not all quantum physicists here, we're getting the sense of how complicated it is to tease out the different properties. When did you begin the work that led to your Nobel Prize? So how long has the arc so far? And you said it was the tip of an iceberg and it's begun to explode. There were only two pieces of work which I didn't understand were connected in any way, in fact. They're just two different kinds of topological matter, one in one dimension in around 1980 and the other one around 1988. And I didn't even see the connection. It's just that later, people have realized, brought this to a, realized as a whole general kind of framework for thinking about it. It's just like the blind men with the elephant, you're getting different pieces of how the... Well, just so that it takes time to see the generality of the principle, right? And it's just really changed the way, it's actually changed completely the way we tend to look at quantum effects in matter and there's been a huge extra impetus coming from people with ideas in so-called quantum information. So there's been coming together of different strands which have led to rather a very exciting way. It's difficult to explain how excited people have become. I mean, it's obviously quantum mechanics is something incredibly difficult to explain to people because it doesn't seem to agree with the way we see the world around it, right? But it's just amazing how excited young people have become and it's just such a thing that's become big.  So obviously a complicated problem, set of problems, a long journey to find things out. How do you know, so for people in the audience, how did you think about what would be an interesting problem to solve? You found something and you pursued it, how did you know? Well, I think you come across something, if you see you can understand something in some simpler way then, see some underlying principle to understand it, then some blinkers come down from your eyes and you actually see that you can understand things before you were just describing something, right? And the more one gets to a, physicists believe that the true explanation of the world is simple. At least if you could, of course, if you could reduce it down to something that looks beautiful mathematically and simple, you feel that's most likely the right answer, right? And so what's happened with this is that a whole lot of apparently unrelated and different sorts of things have got, one could now see a common framework that you understand these all as different examples of a general principle. And so that's what's really excited people about this topological matter is, it's got a, it's conceptually very simple in some sense, because mathematics of course is simple, in the end looks for simplicity, right? And to actually understand you can understand some physical reality and see that mathematics, topology is a very well-developed subject mathematically, right? So suddenly it was a surprise that you could take a piece of mathematics which was developed for completely other reasons and apply it to understanding basic properties of quantum matter basically. So I'd like to also ask you about this insight. You mentioned that you found one kind of properties at one time in the 80s and then another. You didn't realize they were connected until later. How did you come to understand that? Probably other people understood that. They understand that there were the general, that these both were systems which had interesting things going on at the edge, right? And there were some topological ideas were floating around in both of these two things. And it was probably only when the three-dimensional extensions happened, when it was generalized and a lot more topological matter was found that then people started making a systematic classification. And it turns out what I found in 1980 is somehow the simplest, something like the hydrogen atom of topological matter. It's the simplest, the most basic example. And then the later thing turns out to be a generalization of something called the quantum Hall effect which is a system which has signals that go around one way around the edge. Right, like we were talking about before. And this is now being demonstrated. Similar, it's been done first with electrons, but then there was the same principle applied to some materials used for light, so-called photonic crystals. People have been trying to manipulate the flow of light using kind of periodic structures like electrons in crystals. And so it's surprising how the same basic kind of principle gets extended to very different things. It's been seen in gases of cold atoms. It's been seen in light. So if I could generalize a little, if you don't mind, just for the people who are listening. So it sounds like you found something interesting. You followed that interest. You shared your findings, the way people in science do. Other people built on that eventually found the framework. So it sounds to me like, I mean, on the one hand, you have to be kind of willing to be wrong, going forward and exploring something. And science, it seems like a lot of times you're trying something and you might be wrong, but you try it anyway. That's one of the points of working on it. But then it seems like collaboration is really important ultimately, too, to find the broader picture. Yeah, I think one needs to, you know, theoretical physics is a very social subject. Really, I mean, there's this view of Einstein was sitting in his Peyton office desk in Zurich working out things by himself. Well, a few times that happens, but really we spend our time kind of fighting with each other or chatting, discussing. I think through getting together and discussing and trying to say, my theory is better than your theory or whatever, or explaining it. It's a, there's both competition and collaboration, but I don't think it, you know, it's a very kind of, it's a very cool subject, really. And obviously there's a barrier to getting into it. Well, you need a little math. Need a little math. But there's something for everyone there, there's experimentalists, there's people who do very fancy math, there's model builders. Yes. So I think, I love hearing what you're talking about. I think we're just about out of time, but I just like to say just in terms of some concluding thoughts, I'm really always kind of struck by how things that are very, very small can have very, very large impacts and how, you know, very large impacts. So we're looking at quantum mechanics, but also it could be ultimately potentially used for solving very large problem sets with quantum computing, perhaps, but maybe, maybe it will lead us down even many other trails because it's just really interesting to understand how the world works. And I think that's one of the great, wonderful things about science. I'm also struck by the competition and collaboration aspects. So I guess, I guess the thing I'd like to leave everybody with is, you know, to draw inspiration from kind of wild ideas sometime, to be willing to share them and you might have to wrestle with people a little bit to get them through, but I really enjoyed learning about your work. Thank you very much. Thank you. Dr. Halding. Thank you.


Yeah, hello everyone, as Marisa was saying, welcome to the Abbotcom, and as Mark was saying as well, it's very nice to see all developer faces here. We are developers ourselves, so it's a pleasure to be here and share experiences with you. And yeah, I would like to ask two more questions on top of the ones that Mark said in the beginning, which is, out of all the developers that are here, how many have to deal with Kubernetes, or YAML, or Docker Compose, or Docker files every day? There you go. Raise your hands. Come on. Nice. You're in the right session. I'm in the right session. And how many of you consider YAML developers? I mean, we forgot the most popular language out there, right? Woo! So many hands. YAML developers. Yeah, so just like, I mean, chill, enjoy the session, we want this to be very friendly and open. So let's... Do you have any jokes? Do you want to start with any jokes? I mean, I don't have any jokes myself, I'm not a joker, pretty much, but I do have some stories. Let's start with that. So we see this beautiful picture of Paris on a sunny day, but we are not coming from this beautiful place. We actually had to go through some nightmares to be here, you know? And it wasn't easy for us to actually get to the state. I mean, Mauricio and myself, I grew up, we have around 15 years in the industry, so we've seen it all.  So, you know, what I like, and if you brought some kids, please don't lose them, because, you know, otherwise some bad things can happen. And ultimately, well, you know that the Kubernetes was supposed to be the promised land and then we landed on these things. Yeah, but jokes aside, the reason why we are here is because we've been through all this, like, cloud-native movement, I mean, it's like, we all agree that it's very useful and it allows us to, like, basically create more complex and scalable applications, but the reality is that we have been working on a Kubernetes-based declarative model on the past, I don't know, eight, nine years already, and a lot of the things that we have built around it are basically scoped to only that model, which basically limits us on the amount of things that we can actually do. So, why don't you tell these people Mauricio, why are we here today? Okay, yeah, so it's really important to clarify this, because I think that we come both from companies building tools, but here we wanted to talk a little bit more about solutions and concepts, right? Like, we will show some tools in action, but what we want you to take away from this is, like, conceptually how we can approach different problems. We know that companies are going into that platform engineering space. I wrote a book about it, so that's fine, but the whole idea here is that you don't really need to do a big bang approach where you said, tomorrow I will do platform engineering, right? Like, we wanted to show you some solutions that will organically take you there. That's the main point. So for that, we would like you to, like, stick to a core idea. I mean, as I said before, we've been doing software for a while, and I still remember the early days when I was like a Java developer maybe 15 years ago. I had, like, my Eclipse editor with my Tomcat thing, and the good thing that I liked about that is that I could reason pretty much about the whole system by only looking at the code, right? So I could jump from my functions, my classes, and then I could just produce a wire file and then send it to someone, and that wire file would go to production pretty much the same way that I would develop locally, right? So we would like you to, like, maybe try to go to that, you know, like, friendly or, like, that nice space during this presentation, because part of this presentation is going to be trying to take you there, but also admitting that all the complexity that we have around is something that we have to, like, basically embrace and use in a better, effective way. Yeah, so remember that, like, safe place where you have full control of all the things that you are doing, and you know how things will behave. That's, for me, it's pretty far, far away. So having said that, my name is Marcos Ilyeda. You can find me in X at Marcos Nils, software engineer at Dagger. I've been working on this, like, for a while already. Distributed systems, developer tools, platform engineering. And I do like open source a lot. I think that open source is the things that just connect us, right? Yeah. Right. So yeah, my name is Mauricio Salatino. I'm working for Diagrid with Mark. And yeah, I'm just working on the Dapper project, KNAT, captain, and a bunch of other things. I wrote a book about platform engineering on Kubernetes that it's not for operation people. It's not for, you know, it's just for developers to understand how the tools in the CNCF space and the clouding space can be combined to produce something that will help teams to go faster. I'm doing a book signing tomorrow if you're interested, but, you know, you will find it out. So let's get started, right? Yeah, having said that, we didn't do, like, a demo sacrifice, like a demo God sacrifice this week. I mean, I'm writing a Linux machine, mirroring my screen on Wayland and, you know, anything that happened here. Yeah. But I had a croissant before. Maybe that also works. That helps. Let's do it. So let's start with a simple application. What about that? And this is like, we took the application from Docker samples. This is a very well-known application. How many people knows this application? It's the voting app from Docker. OK, so I see some hands. But if you started with Kubernetes, maybe you haven't seen this. So it's a very simple application where you can cast boats and then see the results. But with the distributed architecture, so you have three services and Redis and PostgreSQL just to show that you can connect different languages with different infrastructure and everything works fantastically, right? But, you know, you want to say that? There is one important thing, which is we actually went to this application repository and then we counted the number of modifications in the files that have been changed since 2019 until 2023. And as you can see on the top right, the most amount of files that were changed are YAML files, which is basically Docker compose, Kubernetes manifest, and all that. And can anyone guess which is the second most changed file in this repository? Any guess? Bash? Any other ideas? No. YAML, of course, right? Yeah, and then you have C-sharp and, of course, Docker files with the number fourth. But yeah, basically, this reflects a little bit of what we were speaking, like joking in the beginning. The past years have been mostly around this experience. And I mean, we are developers. We like writing code, not writing YAML. So hopefully, we can show you a different way of doing this. Yeah, exactly. And no matter what you think about this, it's like when you look into this very, very simple application, you will see that you will need to learn about containers. As Marcos mentioned, if you go to that repository, there is YAML files for how do you start the application locally using Docker Compose, how do you deploy these to Kubernetes, how do you start different services, depending if you want to run some tests, how do you start infrastructure. So it gets quite complicated. For new people, that's kind of like a lot. Another thing that I've noticed into this very simple application is that it's bounded to the infrastructure that it's using. Like you have PostgreSQL and Redis. So different applications written in different languages will need to connect to these things by injecting kind of like having clients inside the code. Like the Redis client or the PostgreSQL driver. And that brings some complexity. But finally, because the applications are written in different languages, you need to make sure that if you start creating best practices internally, like between different teams, you can share those. And if you are coming from different communities, so for example, from Java to C sharp, sharing those best practices, it's pretty hard. And it's kind of complicated. And sometimes those mismatches in best practices are the things that cause the biggest issues. So if you look into the application, and if you look a little bit deeper into what happens when you deploy this application into Kubernetes, what you will see is that inside Kubernetes, you need way much more like load balancers and you need containers and you need to get things done. But let's talk a little bit about like what the application is doing. Can you show me the application, Marcos? Before going into the code because I want to show the application running. So the application looks like that. It's pretty simple. You cast the vote, the worker will process the votes and just expose the results in the other side of the screen, right? So you can see that Marcos is casting a vote and the application is reacting. Again, it takes a little bit of time because there is an asynchronous thing there processing the data and arranging it for the results.  Like you want to see how this is done. And I don't want to see that right now. Which one do you want to see? I think that we need to go to the slides, yeah. There you go. So what happens here is that again, if you go to different languages and if you start looking into the code, there is complexity in there. So the question is how can we improve this? Like if we know that the application, even if it's simple, you need to understand how to deploy to Kubernetes, how to route traffic to it, how to connect to infrastructure depending where that infrastructure is running. It might be running inside the cluster or it might be running outside. How can we improve this? I think that my answer as a developer are always like APIs, right? So APIs is the answer. And that's why I wanted to talk a little bit about the Dapper project, right? Again, because we want to show kind of like a case where APIs will help you to abstract away complexity that is related to the environment. And in this case, basically Dapper stands for distributed application runtime. And it basically does that. It provides you some APIs for developers to basically build and code applications, distributed applications. The APIs that are exposed, again, are developer friendly for developers to do the things that they are trying to do without worrying about the complexity, about how the infrastructure is being set up. And we can see that in the Dapper building blocks that are basically different APIs that are provided by the Dapper project to abstract complexity on things that you want to do like state management or exchanging events between different applications. If you see in the other side, you can see workflows that are more complex behaviors that you can build using the basic building blocks. But again, as a developer, let's take a look at now at the code in GitHub. What I wanted to show here is that, as a developer, again, you are interested in storing your votes into a persistent storage. You are not very interested in knowing that that's going to Redis and how you are connecting to Redis. So what I'm showing here is that the result service, for example, here, it's using the Dapper APIs, GetState, to get the votes that are being already stored in a persistent storage. This application code is using Dapper, but that means that we are delegating, we are delegating the responsibility of connecting to PostgresQL or to Redis to Dapper, and it's not inside the application. So the application doesn't have any driver or any client. If you take a look at the Java application, which is pretty much the previous one was Go, and this is Java, it's using the same APIs to save the state into a persistent storage, like we don't know where. From an application point of view, we just want to store the votes somewhere. As you can see here, down there, we are also using publish event to emit events if we want to do that too. So simple APIs to perform things that you want to do in distributed applications. And from the operation point of view, so that's from the application developer. You can use APIs. From the operation point of view, what Dapper does, how Dapper works, is basically you install Dapper into your Kubernetes clusters, and then you annotate some of your application to say this application wants to use the Dapper APIs. Dapper will recognize that, and it will inject the Dapper side guard that will expose those APIs to the applications. On the bottom, you can see that we are using some Jamel files now to configure how to connect to the infrastructure that is provided. So if you want to connect to Redis, you define a Jamel component that says, my APIs will be implemented by Redis, and Dapper will connect to Redis and store the information there. The same with PostgreSQL. If you show quickly the cluster from an operation point of view, I just want to do like get namespaces. Yeah, get namespaces. You can see that Dapper is installed in my cluster. And if you do like get bots, like where we are seeing on top. Yeah, where we are seeing on top is that Dapper is injecting the second container there inside my pod. That's the Dapper side guard that is being injected. Finally, you can describe the components. If you can, like get described components just to see the simple configuration. And here I just want to highlight here, a state Redis is basically saying, okay, my implementation for the state store APIs is Redis, and I'm connecting to the Redis host that is listed there with the Redis password empty because I'm using a safe Redis instance. Cool, awesome. So this is one of the ways that you can abstract, connecting to different services, right? By using Dapper and leveraging on Dapper APIs which are programmable, right? It's like basically code that you can use.   So that's a very good question. It's running locally, but it took us quite some time, right? Yeah, like it's like a foreign Redis cluster, like a kind cluster and all that.  It usually starts like this, right? I have my like fast cycle loop. I just got, I have my IDE. I can compile the app and run it locally. And then all of a sudden someone comes to you and says, hey, we are using containers now. So we need to like do a little bit of like a band-aid thing where maybe you have to write like a Docker file and maybe you have to have like a little script here and there to actually start a Docker container and maybe connect to it. And you as a developer, you're fine with it because you know that it's gonna simplify the work for deploying the application to production. So it's not that bad. But then someone else comes and tells you, hey, now you need to like lift up like a more complex setup in your machine. I'm pretty sure that most of us been through this situation. And then that that a band-aid starts becoming like a bit more like a glue, right? So it's something that you can get rid of right now. You can like hack around it that much because you need to like basically follow specific steps to start all this locally. Until of course, we go to corneries and please don't even get me started on how you even test this on CI, right? Because it's like impossible. I mean, there's, I would assume that most of you are probably have two different approaches. So you have like your own local setup where you probably run, I don't know, uncivil, whatever tool you're using today to provision this locally. And then on CI, it's probably a completely different specification of probably YAML or maybe Jenkins or Gluby or something, where you basically spin up all these things in a different way through a different workflow, which actually never works. And now you have Kubernetes, right? So this makes the glue like even bigger and then you can't escape it. And then you enter into this like sad world of actually having to deal with this even if you are application developers. It's funny because we were in a meetup yesterday.  And then he told me, oh, we just give them a Kubernetes cluster, it's in place. They have to learn QCTL, they have to learn Kubernetes and they need to like know the insights to actually make their application work. Not everybody can do that, right? Like it's cost-efficient, right? There's a lot of like cognitive knowledge to actually get all that thing.  Yep. But anyhow, if my slides continue, and now Mauricio comes to us and tells us, hey, not only that, but then you need to add sidecars to all these things, which is this new dapper thing that's gonna allow you to basically make the service communication better. I mean, we want to embrace this complexity, but we need a way to handle it, right? Exactly. So this is the point where I tell Mauricio, I mean, that's it, man. I'm done with that.  That's like fun. But wait, wait, we are here to tell this audience that there are some solutions, right? There are some solutions that are more like developer friendly and will allow you to actually make this better. So entering Dagger, how many people know about Dagger? Can you raise hands pretty quick? Okay. Cool. Not many, which is great because you're here to actually learn this. So basically, Dagger is CI as code and a lot more things. And you're gonna know why it's a lot more things in this presentation. But basically what Dagger allows you is to transform your messy scripts, like even if you run them locally or in CI, into clean code pipelines that you can run the same way locally and in CI. So the idea behind Dagger is that you forget about the push and pray, what we call the push and pray drama, which is around like, oh, I basically hug my code locally and then I push it and then I wait for the CI to run and then it fails and I need to go back to my code and then I'd say, okay, get commit, fix me and then try again. But the important thing here, which generally gets not enough attention, it's the word code, right? So the fact that you can encode all these pipelines by using like a programming language, it actually opens the door and solves a lot of issues, which is, okay, how do you share, like the functionality that you're doing? As you share any other collaboration, right? How do you distribute that? Your programming language already has like a distribution method, right? You have a package manager, you have a registry in maybe a lot of places. How do you even test your pipeline? Your programming language already has a testing framework, so a lot of things are basically for free the moment that you start embracing this code paradigm. And who is Dagger 4? Well, actually, Dagger is for developers, right? So you can be like a platform developer, you can be like an SRE, you can be also like a developer advocate that is also like trying to show solutions to customers. The good thing about Dagger is because you can encode all these logic in order to like spin up your environments or maybe test them in CI as well. The good thing is that you can encode them by code and run them the same everywhere. It's basically a tool that is very friendly for anyone to actually grab and use. So before jumping into the API side of Dagger, I would like to show you how we are gonna change this vote application that Mauricio was showing us that only running Kubernetes by mostly leveraging Dagger. So let's go to the voting app. So I'm gonna go to the repository. I'm gonna show you the worker component that Mauricio was showing.  The Dagger.json basically defines what a Dagger module is. Dagger is presented as a solution that allows you to encode these pipelines in modules and functions. So the first thing that you're gonna notice in this example is that I have a Dagger module that actually has other dependencies. I'm gonna get into that in a minute. But the important thing for you is to understand is that this is a Dagger module that is written in TypeScript and uses this Dagger version and basically loads the Dagger source code from this source folder, which is in the parent that you can see here. If I go into the Dagger pipeline itself, in this case you're gonna see that it's written in TypeScript and the most important thing, like the basic construct of Dagger is that you can encode all these logic in functions. So for this worker component particularly, I have the serve function, which basically starts my worker service. And then I have the build function that as you can see, receives a directory where my source code lives. And then it also receives optionally, because I have these optional syntax here, optionally it receives a service, a ready service and a post-release service, which if you remember the architecture diagram, like basically this worker depends on both services. So I can optionally specify them here. And if I don't specify them, this is where the Dagger specific API comes into place, where I can actually define a container from this particular image, I can expose a port and then I can start and inject this service into my application, right? The most important part of this build pipeline is that my application is written in C-sharp. And instead of like having a Docker file and having a compose file that actually stitches all that together, I have a single place which is defined as code using the Dagger APIs, right? Where I can like define these containers the same way that I was doing before, but with real code. And then I can also attach these services that this container needs in the same place. Yeah, and if you ask me as a developer, right? I like the idea of being able to codify how do I work with my applications. I don't think that I like that much the idea of writing pipelines for like the CI space because that's probably managed by a different team. But in this case, I believe that what Marcos is showing here will allow you to define the developer experience for developers working with these complex applications. Yeah, so now I can show you if I go to the terminal and then I go to the worker.net directory. Since I'm in this module and in a Dagger module I can do Dagger functions. And this is gonna basically show all the available functions that I have for this app. And then I can, I need to stop Mauricio's application. First, and then I can do Dagger serve, which is the function that I showed before. I need to specify a directory, which is where my source code live, which is dot and then up, Dagger call, sorry. Dagger call serve up. What this is gonna do, this is gonna basically pull the containers that I showed you before. This is gonna start the application locally using the Postgres and various services that I've shown before. And this is already fetching boats, even though it says it fails, it's not failing, it's some internal things. But this is actually working, right? So I didn't have to like touch any Docker files or anything at all, I just called the Dagger functions. So jumping quickly into the other module, I want to show you really quickly the result module, which is this one. In this case, this is the result application where we see the voting results. This is also a Dagger module, but in this case, you're gonna see that the module is defined in Go and has like two different dependencies, the Dapper dependency and the Go dependency. So if I go to the code really quick here, and this is the module concept that I wanted to show you. Again, same API as you saw before, containers with n-barrel, but in this case in written in Go. And the most important thing here is that we are using the Dapper Dagger module, which basically is a function that I'm pulling from a different place, right? It doesn't matter in which language this function is written on because it's gonna work in the Dagger ecosystem. And then I can call functions on this module that allow me to basically extend my application in some sort of way. In this case, I'm bringing the Dapper module that is gonna automatically launch this container and then this Dapper container and inject it into the next of my application. So I define this by code basically. As you can see, same structure as the previous component. I have a build and a serve. And what I want to show you here is that I can do, where I'm in the dot net. So I'm gonna go back to the result. Go result and I'm gonna do Dagger functions. In this case, this module provides me with three functions. I can build, I can serve and I can test. So I can show you how I can test this application really fast. Yeah. Dagger call, test. I'm calling the app. And the last thing that I'm gonna show you is that I can do Dagger call, the local and then serve. Yeah. Serve up. So what this is gonna do is gonna basically start the voting application. It's gonna expose a port in my local machine. So this is basically running Redis. It's running Dapper. It's running all the dependencies that I need. It's already exposing a port in my machine so I can do localhost 3000. And then I have the application running locally, right? Yeah. No YAML, no Docker files. No Kubernetes. No Kubernetes. Yeah, that's local. Like I have the same setup that Maurice was showing in Kubernetes, but running locally. Yeah. Go slides. We closed it up. Yeah, we need to speed it up a little bit. Yeah. So the important thing here is that Dagger gives you APIs. As you saw in the code, like briefly in the code that I showed you, you have the container API, director API, file API, secrets. These are like the building blocks, right? We like to say internally that Dagger is a tool that allows you to like gives you like some sort of like DevOps operating system where you have like the core APIs. But the important thing here is that you can start building your personal experiences on top of this API by extending this with your personal APIs. So you can like define APIs like, I don't know, application or maybe whatever you need internally in your company. So you can use Dagger to extend this and basically build your own developer experience. How does it look in CI? The same way that I did in the terminal, I basically did like Dagger call test. You basically take this to like whatever CI you have and then you can just like running in the same way. This is the power of Dagger, right? You can run it locally and in CI using the same experience. Yeah. So, and this is basically the final diagram. The way that we switch this application is we basically modularize everything and now you have like a Dagger module for all the things. And I can quickly show you. Just need to finish here. Yeah. And wrapping up the presentation. Yeah, we need to wrap up. Just to close. So I can do like, I have like the top level module which basically uses all the modules that I showed you before and I'm gonna do Dagger call. Yeah. The Dagger call vote up. So what this is gonna do, this is basically gonna start everything. So it's gonna start the... So up. So the vote up returns a service and the service requires like a sub command which is like basically start a service. And this is gonna run everything. It's gonna run the front end, the worker, the result service. And it's gonna wire everything together and just like allow me to like run it locally in the same way. Yeah. So I can open this up, local host CD80. Boom. And you have this running. Yeah. There you go. So this is really good. I think that like, we have worked on this like together. The main idea here is again, just to bring Dapper like the Dapper experience that it's pretty polished when you run in Kubernetes clusters, closer to developers and the local development loop lifecycle, right? Like the idea that you can start Dapper applications locally. It's just one example of the things that you can achieve by using these tools. What Marco showed about the APIs, I think it's the same message. Like on the Kubernetes side, we're trying to obstruct away infrastructure from applications. What Marco's is showing here is that we can create like more complex developer experiences for local development that can match like more like complex environments like running inside the Kubernetes cluster. I think that, yeah. I think that, yeah. Again, it's like we are just bringing the complexity closer to the developer, but in a way that it's obstructed away. So they don't need to worry about it. You have a question for me. I have a question. Yeah, well, so I send you, what was the question? You send me a PR? Well, that's not a question. I send you a PR. Can you check it out? That's the question. If I can check it out. Can you check it out? Well, he sent me a PR. So I have like with some changes to my application. The thing is that I need to check out the code. You know, that's very messy, but I'm gonna leverage the power of Dagger to actually show you something very cool. So I show you before that my application as part of its API requires a directory, right? In this case, where the source code is gonna be like brought in. But I never told you what that directory could be, right? That directory could be like, I don't know, maybe a Git sort of repo. Maybe like a branch in my Git repo, right? Yeah, exactly. And because the Dagger modules are already published in GitHub, I can actually pull from those modules directly and use them regardless of the environment that I have in my local machine, right? So the only thing that I need is Dagger. And in this case, I'm gonna be calling the same function that I showed you before. But in this particular example, the function is being pulled from GitHub directly, not from my local machine. Then I'm gonna call the same voteup function. And the directory is gonna be like a full qualified GitHub URL with the branch name that Mauricio told me. So let's see if this works. Yeah, and I think that that's... I don't need to have the source code of my application for this example. This is basically pulling everything dynamically and on demand. And if the demo gods are with us. Yeah, and I think that the main thing that he's trying to show here is that we can create changes for our application in branches and then we can just quickly create preview environments with very, very complex setups by reusing all these module definitions. And this is quick because Dagger has like a caching system. If you want to learn more about that, you can go to the site. So to wrap it up. There you go. Let's see what the new options we have now. There you go. So do we vote for code? So what should we vote? What do you say? Do you prefer doing code or YAML? Do I go with YAML? Code, code, let's do code. Nice, okay, and now we can code. So yeah, with Dagger you can have like immediate preview environments with just like a single function code. There you go. And you can have that for local development. So that's great. That also like starts the whole dapper thing.  APIs are the answers if you are developers, right? Like try to find the right APIs for abstracting your complexity in your companies, no matter which tools you are using. Building experiences for your team is becoming more and more important if you want to reduce complexity and cognitive load for people working with all these tools. And yeah, again, like just try to help teams to be more productive. And as Mark was saying in the beginning, this is about developers and software developers. So thank you very much.


Demonic Presence at Up Safe Levels. Lockdown anytime. Demonic Presence at Up Safe Levels is eliminated. Lockdown, disengaged. Demonic Presence at Up Safe Levels. Demonic Presence eliminated. Lockdown. Demonic Presence at Up Safe Levels.


The opportunities that there are on campus to be involved and get into student organizations that interest you and have a well-rounded academic experience in the classroom with your professors and classmates is really just something you're not going to find anywhere else. Being able to take advantage of all those opportunities and as a national merit scholar it's not something that you'd be paying for and definitely worth looking into and checking out because there's a lot to get involved in. There's a lot of resources that are being put specifically in terms of the universities prioritizing that and they're prioritizing research and good professors and opportunities for students to get involved on campus and then even beyond campus and so definitely worth looking into.


We are going to talk about gas prices today. We're going to talk about refineries. We're going to talk about the Biden administration's panic. We're going to talk about windfall taxes. We're talking government policy around oil today, oil, gasoline. God, in some places, premium gas is $7 a barrel, $6.99, $7 a barrel. I don't know what it is in Puerto Rico. Puerto Rico is funny because Puerto Rico like they started going metric, but they didn't finish it. So some things are metric and some things are not. And really, maybe the only thing that really is metric is gas prices. So gases are quoted in not in gallons, but in liters. So the price is per liter. So to figure out, but everything's in miles, everything else is in gallons. The car is in gallons. So you have to do the calculation. So I don't know what the price is in Puerto Rico because I haven't done the math. So anyway, gas prices through the roof, $6 to $7 for premium gasoline. That is amazing. That is stunning. Inflation generally, as we've talked about on the show before, has been through the roof and it seems to keep surprising the Biden administration. They keep being like, oh my God, what's happening? It was supposed to be transitory. Inflation is supposed to be over. What's going on? And they have no idea what's going on. And they really are panicking and they're struggling to figure it out and they don't know what to do. The better economists on the left are telling them, well, it's all an issue of for the Fed, you can't do anything.  So it really is. I mean, I can understand the Biden administration. I mean, that's good. They're going to have the worst economy since, I don't know, since the 1970s. They're going to have inflation. They're likely to have stagflation. We might get a deep recession. They've got a midterms coming up where they're going to be wiped out because Americans are not going to vote for Democrats given the circumstances.  But then on top of that, you've got a floundering economy, you've got inflation, the cost of living is going up, gasoline at seven bucks. Nobody can win under those circumstances that they're losing. And it's just spiraling out of control with poor Democrats not knowing what to do. And they're just frantic. So Biden, when the initially inflation started, the story out of the administration of Janet Yellen and Biden, Janet Yellen is a decent economist. I mean, she knows better, but I don't think she has any real control there. Janet Yellen and Biden was, oh, it's transitory. It's just supply chains. They'll get fixed. No problem. Once the supply chains get going again, and any day now, that's going to happen. We know that. And there's nothing we can do about it, the government. But supply chains are going to get going. We just need to spend more money. If we spend more money, supply chains get going, inflation will go away. And then they went, whoops, inflation didn't go away. Oh, but it's the Russians. It's a war in Ukraine. It's the evil Putin years, but it's evil. Putin's responsible for American inflation. That's the problem. It's Putin. If only we can defeat Putin quickly, inflation will go away. Well, we're not going to defeat Putin quickly. And inflation is not going away. And inflation has nothing to do with Russia. It's interesting that they haven't really blamed China yet. I think, I think that it's because China is like Trump's gig. Like Trump blamed China for everything. It's like the Democrats are like, you know, if we blame China, we sound like Trump. We can't do that. So they're not blaming China. They're blaming everybody else, but not China. So they blamed Russia. They blamed, they said it's transitory, just supply chain stuff that is going to get fixed like that because it's easy to fix supply chain stuff. And none of that has worked. American people are now buying it. And people are struggling. People are clamoring for the government to do something because we've trained the American people that whenever you have a problem, the solution is government. And the Biden administration doesn't know what to do. So they've picked up lately the Elizabeth Warren line. Inflation is not supply chains. It's not Russia. It's not China. You know, the lockdowns in China reducing supply. And it's certainly definitely unequivocally not the stimulus, the gazillions of dollars that the federal government and the Fed poured into the economy during COVID. It can't be that, right? Because that's good because that's government spending. That's, that's MMT. That's always a positive. Then what could it be? Well, this is obvious. They should have thought of this in the beginning. It's greed. It's always greed. It's always the greed of corporations responsible for all the evils in the world. I mean, COVID is only because the greed of the pharmaceutical companies or at least certainly, you know, because COVID made the pharmaceutical companies a lot of money. So it's always greed. And the financial crisis was caused by greed on Wall Street. And so it's greed. Companies are raising prices for no reason. How dare they? They're raising prices for no reason.  And they're doing it on purpose. So this is where the Democrats almost always go. This goes back to the 70s. And, you know, to be fair, this is what Republicans do as well. When Republican administration is in charge in times like this, like the Nixon administration, which basically puts price controls on the economy because of those greedy corporations daring to raise prices and making money. So they're blaming business. They're blaming corporations. Today, Biden sent a letter to executives at Mavathon Petroleum, Valero Energy and Exxon Mobile. The letter was also sent to Phillips, Chevron, British Petroleum, well, they don't call themselves British Petroleum. That's not politically correct, BP and Shell. And in the letter, the White House Biden, President Biden, President Biden sent a letter to all these other company executives saying, how dare you? Why aren't you producing more gasoline? Why are gas prices so high in America? You've got to produce more gasoline. Do you understand me? You've got to produce more gasoline. And how dare you make so much money? Profits in all these companies is way up.  You've got to produce more gasoline. You've got to increase the finding capacity immediately. Now, I want more refineries working now, today, and more gasoline will reduce prices and maybe I've got a chance in 2022. The problem Biden is going to face is that there is no more refining capacity. You know, refineries are working day and night. Now, you know, they're all kind of problems with refining, like the fact that in the summer, California switched an ethanol gasoline oil blend, which requires particular refining processes and capabilities. And when they do that, for a while, things slow down and there are refineries. And then when they, you know, they pick up, but the gasoline produced by refineries that are producing gasoline from California is legally cannot be sold in any other state because other states have different blends. They don't have the California blend.  But the fact is capacity right now in the United States is over 90%, 94% last I looked. So maybe there's a 6% increase they can maybe squeeze out somehow, but you have to shut down certain plans for maintenance sometimes. And the fact is we're running at full capacity. This is it. What's Biden going to do next? And he knows this. It's not like the Biden administration doesn't know that refineries are running at full capacity. And it's not just that they're running at full capacity. Capacity has shrunk. Why? Why is capacity shrunk? Why are refineries in the United States and really all over the world producing less gasoline have the capacity to produce less gasoline today than they could three years ago? Why over COVID over the last three years have over refineries reduced capacity to produce? Why would they do that? Well, let's think about that, huh? Over the last three years and certainly during the Biden administration and during the Biden campaign and Biden was running for president, I just have a quote on this. Where's my quote? Let's see if I can find my quote. Yeah, yeah, yeah. There's a quote here. This is Biden during one of the presidential debates in 2020 in a primary debate. He was outraged by the suggestion his climate plan wasn't ambitious enough. So he said quote number one, no more subsidies for fossil fuel industry, no more drilling on federal lands, no more drilling, including offshore, no ability for the oil industry to continue to drill period ends number one. All right. Well, if the Biden administration is going to come in and stop drilling and prevent people from drilling and generally shift, you know, heavily subsidize other forms of energy, then why would any rational oil company, why would any rational refiner expand refining capabilities? If the Biden administration was to do everything in its power to reduce and to eviscerate the internal combustion engine in favor of electric cars, why, why? And this is true globally, not just in the United States. If Europe was going to now shift everything to electric cars and disincentivize the internal combustion engine, why would I increase refining capacity? I would shut down. I would start shrinking my refining capacity to adjust a new world in which people didn't want gasoline, didn't want oil. What oil was the enemy? So here we are in a situation where the left and the left globally, so this includes Europe, is basically declared war on oil. The right is quiet and impotent as Cook says in the chat. They're too busy going after Disney. They're too busy arguing about who or what a woman is. They're too busy in the cultural wars. They're too busy with that. You know, who has time for refiners and oil and economics and inflation. That's boring stuff American people don't care. And then the right, American people don't care. What American people care about is CRT and transgender stuff. And that's what seems to consume the entire energy of everybody. It's the cultural wars. It's the cultural wars. Yes, abortion. We got to get rid of abortion. Who has time? Who has time for economics and economic policy? And so there's no opposition, but the world basically is declared war on oil, on oil refining, on oil discovery, on oil drilling. So guess what happens? Capital flows away from the industry. Less money gets invested in new drilling. Less money gets invested in new refining capacity. More money goes to alternative energy. More money goes to where the government is subsidizing, where the government is promoting, I don't know, anything that's quote alternative. And then you get a crisis. And suddenly people discover, oh, but we still drive cars. Oh, but we still need oil and gasoline and we need, we still need these things. And it's too late. It's too late because to build a refinery, God, if you had the environmental permissions to build, it's the 10-year process. And it's probably 10 years to get the environmental permission. It's anyway from five to 20 years to build a new refining refining. You can expand an existing one, but again, expand it to where?  What about the pollution? What about this? What about that? And you could have built a pipeline, but no, no pipeline, not a lot of pipe, not a lot of big pipelines. So not allowed to expand. And the left has been at the forefront of stomping any kind of expansion, any building of pipelines, any drilling, any new refiners. They don't want refining. They want to shut down fossil fuels. Now, I don't think Biden wants to shut it down. He's just playing to his constituency, but his constituency is what matters. So now we're in a position where it's too late, guys. It's just too late. Seven, eight dollars a gallon. Who knows where it'll end. It's a large extent depends on opaque and what the Saudis decide to do. Because here in America, we basically crippled ourselves. We crippled our own ability to produce, our own ability to ramp up production. Banks won't lend. Why? Because then our ESG rating will plummet. BlackRock won't invest in them. And Republicans, no way to be seen.  I don't remember the name of it. Something shipping, something, something supply chains make the world a better place. So it's a bipartisan bill that has been approved by both the House and the Senate. It's going to be signed by Biden, I think tomorrow. It's supposed to save supply chains. It's supposed to make supply chains more efficient. Ooh, you're on. How are they going to do that? Well, you think, for example, maybe the bill will eliminate the Jones Act. Do you know that California imports oil, light oil, for it's some fuel blend from Asia? Because it can't get it from Texas and other places because of the Jones Act. You know, I've already told you that place of Massachusetts and other places in the past have imported natural gas from Russia when they could import it from Pennsylvania, but they can't because of the Jones Act. So you think if you were going to improve supply chains in America, you do it with the Jones Act? Oh, no. No, that's not included in the bill. All right. So maybe, maybe you're going to deregulate shipping, maybe you're going to deregulate the harbors. Oh, no. No, no. Can't do that. Can deregulate. Here is a bill that's supposed to improve supply chains, supposed to improve shipping. And the bill is basically more regulation, more control. It's giving whatever the, I had this, but I don't have it with me. Whatever the regulatory agency that controls shipping and harbors and all of that is gaining more power, new power, they're going to make it less effective. They claim that this will improve exports. But if you want to reduce inflation, what you want to improve is imports. No, it's going to make imports more cumbersome, more bureaucratic. So the one thing that can be done at the federal level, at the government level, at the federal government level, non-fed level to deal with inflation, which is deregulate, increase trade, eliminate tariffs, do away with the Jones Act. These are just a few things that, like that, would lower prices in the United States. No. Can't do that. Can't do that. Don't trust markets. Gotta give more power to the central planners. Gotta, you know, I think the next step is to have Elizabeth Warren set gasoline prices. I think that's her next job. She's going to be in charge of setting the price of oil globally. Central planners, that's what the Democrats have. That's the tool that they have. They have nothing else. So we go after the refiners. So how does refining cost in the U.S. get set? What goes into the cost of gasoline that you get? Well, 60% of gasoline prices, 60%, is crude oil, crude oil. So who determines crude oil prices? Well, it's the market, remember? It's supply and demand. And yeah, Russia, the fact that Russia, Iran, Venezuela, you know, are crippled to some extent or another, reduces the supply from them. Yeah, that reduces the price. But generally, why is crude oil so expensive? It's expensive because there's no new drilling in the United States. It's expensive because OPEC, who, Donald Trump, lavished praise on, was schmoozed with, danced with the princess, sucked up to, has enormous power. And as a consequence of all the sucking up is not afraid of the United States. It's funny because Biden tried to be tough with Saudi Arabia at the beginning. And now, now he's regretting it. So now he's going to fly to Saudi Arabia and he's going to do a Trump. He's going to dance with the princess. And who knows what else he does with the princess, but he's going to dance with the princess and get them to like America again. Instead of fearing America. But anyway, that's another story. So OPEC, OPEC has basically said, we love high prices. We are not going to increase production. Not interested. And of course, Russia, not completely coming offline because they're still selling to India and other places, but at a much higher price. Because at a much higher cost, put it that way, because the shipping problems, so the quantity coming out of Russia has gone down significantly. But the other flip side of this is of course, economies have exploded after COVID. Economies have grown after COVID. Maybe you don't see it in GDP, but people are starting driving again. So people have shifted during COVID. We still bought stuff, but we bought stuff off of Amazon. We bought stuff at the grocery store. We bought physical stuff. But now people are driving. They're flying. They're moving. They're expending accidentally. The world is going back to normal and supply just can't keep up. Supply of oil can't keep up. So crude prices have gone up through the roof. 17% of the price of gasoline is refining costs and profits. So that's where you can go after the refiners. But of course, gasoline prices are up more than double, maybe triple in some places. That's not from refining costs and profits. That's all, almost all crude oil. 11% is distribution and marketing. Again, distribution is very expensive because of regulations, gas stations, getting into gas stations, all kind of environmental regulations around that. And finally, 12%, more than distribution and marketing. So 12% of the cost of gasoline is federal and state taxes. So we could do a permanent tax holiday for federal and state gasoline taxes. That'd be cool. That'd be cool. That would reduce prices of the pump. But even there, not that much. When crude oil prices have gone up three times, then gasoline prices are going to go up three times. Now, are refiners making a lot of money? Are oil companies making a lot of money?  They're making a fortune right now. All these companies are making a fortune. That's evil. That's evil. Now imagine, imagine Exxon decided tomorrow to become a non-profit, zero profits. It's going to take profits to zero. Would that change the price of oil on the markets? No. Exxon maybe has two to three percent of the oil market, global oil market. Exxon taking zero profits would not change the price of oil. Maybe it would change the price of gasoline a little bit because it probably has a some impact on the oil they give away to the refiners in the United States, but it would be trivial. It would be trivial. And it would be violating its fiduciary duty, its legal obligation to its shareholders. The way the system works, whether Elizabeth Wan and Joe Biden like it or not, is that companies are supposed to maximize their profits long term for the sake of their shareholders. So you want to penalize companies for making money? Remember that during COVID, I think it was Exxon Mobile lost something like 22 billion dollars. Did the government subsidize them then? I mean they're going to bail out some companies, but about 100 oil companies went bankrupt during COVID. Did anybody? Clamor, was there clamor among Elizabeth Wan's pals to bail out those 100 oil companies? Of course not. There was celebration on the left. CSO companies are making a lot of money today. Good for them. And are they reinvesting their money into increased capacity? Not as much. Why? Because oil and gas has been demonized. There's no future in oil and gas. So what are they doing with the profits? Well, they're giving them to their owners. Who are the owners? Shareholders. So they've been demonized now for doing stock buybacks. But stock buybacks is giving the money to the stockholders. That's the owners of the business. It's their money. How can you demonize giving the money to the people whose money it is? And by the way, who are the stockholders of Exxon Mobile? It's California's pension plan. It's all of the California pension plans. It's the Georgia pension plan. It's pension plans. It's Americans. It's our pensions. All of our pensions. It's 401Ks. It's mutual funds. So it's returning the money to us as shareholders. But no. Oh no. Elizabeth Wan now wants them to invest in more drilling. Really? So that tomorrow she can shut them down because she doesn't like drilling for oil and she wants to subsidize alternatives? So the left demonizes an industry where wouldn't they really, really need them? They're going to force them to produce? Well, force doesn't work. We still live in a semi-free country and you can't force these companies. Now I'm sure that some of the money is going into investment. I'm sure it's a smart investment into investment in areas and in all products where they think they can make a profit in the future. But if they don't think these investments are going to be smart investments, if they don't think these investments can produce a good return for their investors, they should make them. They should just give the money back to investors. That's what stock buybacks are. I love stock buybacks. I think stock buybacks are amazing. All right. So what's the next step for the Democrats to take in this panicked state of trying, trying to bring down inflation, which they caused, well, them and Trump caused? What are they going to do? How are they going to do? Well, the latest proposals is to have a windfall profit tax, a tax on the excess profits above the quote, normal profits company stuff. Now, of course, a government bureaucrat is going to find what normal is. I think you define what excess is and then you get a tax, the excess profit. And I think they want to do this across the entire economy, but for now they're going to do it, they want to do it on oil. I don't think they can get it past the Senate, but they'd like to. We had an excess profits tax on oil from 1980 to 1988. Funnily enough, Ronald Reagan never repealed it, or if he did, he repealed it right at the end of his administration. What were the consequences? The consequences was less drilling in the United States, a decrease in oil production in the US and an increase in imports. It's funny because when you tax something like oil, the price doesn't go down. Why would it go down? But what happens is all companies start being very creative in spending the money, expensing it so that it turns out as an expense and shrinks their profits. So what encourages all companies to do is waste the money, throw it away, invest in things they wouldn't invest otherwise, do things that they wouldn't otherwise do all in order to shrink their tax bill. It's just a way of manipulating behavior. But again, economists understand incentives, at least good economists understand incentives, and what windfall profit tax does not provide incentives to all producers to reduce prices, increase production, or any of those things. She basically got a situation in which we're in today where inflation is increasing and I expect it to increase even more through the summer. Prices are going up.  I mean, think about it, they raised interest rates by 75 basis points today, so 0.75%. Inflation is at 8.6% annualized over the last 12 months, but 12 months looking forward, it's higher than that. It's higher than that. If the monthly numbers come in at the rate that they've been coming in, we're looking at double-digit inflation, and the Fed is putzing around with three quarters of a percent. Now they promised to raise another three quarters of a percent next month and another three quarters of a percent in September, maybe, if things look bad, maybe. And the Fed is taking out about $30 billion of, 30 or three, anyway, some significant amount of money out of the economy through shrinking its balance sheet, okay? It's a little slow, it's a little weak, and it's very late. It's very late. Yeah, Rob, the Fed rate is 1.75 with inflation at 8.75, pretty much.  That's inflationary. A negative 7% real short-term interest rate is inflationary. I'll just note that this Fed chairman was appointed by Trump. I don't know, just thought that might be useful information to have. Powell is, he strikes me as a nothing, and that's why Trump appointed him. Trump appointed him because he's a nothing, and because he's a nothing, Trump thought he could control him, and he did. He basically had him under his thumb. The alternative at the time they were discussing was to appoint John Taylor, the economist from Stanford University, who's a decent free market economist, and Trump didn't appoint John Taylor because he knew John Taylor couldn't be put under the thumb. And of course, Biden reappointed Powell because he knew Powell could be put under the thumb, so much for Fed independence. So we have a situation where inflation is high. It's probably not going to go down significantly soon, although next month's number will be down because it's 12 months looking backwards. But that just means that they're taking the current inflation monthly and they're dropping, you know, last June's number, right? They'll add July's number, or June's number, and they'll drop last June's number. Last June number was very high. They'll drop a high number. They'll add a number that's not as high, and inflation will go down next month. But it's meaningless because forward-looking inflation, inflation for the rest of the year is clearly up, clearly an uptick. So inflation's rising. The Fed's doing its slow methodological, no risk-taking. Don't want to spook the markets. Don't want to create a possibility of a massive recession. So we're going to take it very, very easily. The Biden administration is freaking out because Democrats are going to lose massively in the midterm election. And Biden is going to get blamed for this rotten economy. He is already super unpopular in the polls because of it. And they're freaking out. They're looking for things to do. The only things that would actually have an impact on inflation are things like eliminating tariffs, deregulating. That's it. Deregulation and eliminating tariffs are two big things that would have an impact on inflation. Neither one of those are going to happen. Oh, the other one would be shrinking government spending would have a make a dent in inflation. Those three things not going to happen. The only hope that we have is Republicans win the House and Senate and then negotiate something with Biden that results in maybe, because Biden doesn't necessarily believe in anything, results in maybe some deregulation, some elimination of tariffs and some reduction of spending. But that assumes that Republicans care. It assumes the Republicans have solutions. It assumes the Republicans want to deregulate, want to eliminate tariffs. After all, these are tariffs that Trump put on. Why would you want to get rid of them? It's assumes the Republicans care about this stuff. They don't show any indication that they care about it. Any indication in it. So in the meantime, the government is floundering. The Fed, I think, is floundering, although with less panic, the Fed is floundering with a cool scientific demeanor to them. But that's not floundering. The federal government with Biden is panicked. And we, the people, are screwed. I think that's a technical term. We're screwed. Higher prices, lower standard of living, low quality of life. Soon you're going to see unemployment start ticking upwards, fewer jobs, a floating economy. I think we're at stagflation. I've been predicting stagflation forever. And yeah, I was predicting stagflation during COVID because I said all this money coming in has to have a negative impact. The negative impact is going to be stagflation and slow economic growth. So stagnation and inflation, not a good combination. Not a good combination. And where is our Ronald Reagan or anything approaching a Ronald Reagan? I don't know. the Iran book show grow. Please consider sharing our content and of course subscribe. Press that little bell button right down there on YouTube so that you get an announcement when we go live. And for those of you who are already subscribers and those of you who are already supporters of the show, thank you. I very much appreciate it.