I'm happy to be giving my first talk in my own home country of Canada, though I am from the East Coast, so I still get stuck staring at the mountains outside. I don't know if that's just me, but I'm in awe. So today's talk is on Argo CD multi-cluster architectures. And throughout the talk, I'm going to ask some show of hand questions and I appreciate any participation in it because it does help me kind of guide the talk towards the people that have chosen to attend it. Thank you. So to start off with, maybe I should talk a little bit of why you should listen to anything I have to say. So first and foremost, before my current role, I was a platform engineer at a company in Canada called Raithub. Anybody heard of Raithub.ca? Hey, okay, cool. We got a couple. Nice. Normally I get nothing, especially when I do these talks in the States. So as a platform engineer there, where I was running Argo CD, I got to implement it into their Kubernetes environment, which was a dev prod and stage cluster, so fairly basic early in their Kubernetes journey. But I feel the pain. I have had to teach developers how to utilize Argo CD and also learn how to implement it effectively. And then so in my current role, I'm a developer advocate at Acuity, the first logo you'll see on the left there. Acuity is the company created by the founders of the Argo project. Acuity actively maintains the Argo project and provides an Argo CD SaaS offering with some architecture improvements and innovation beyond the open source project, but I'm not here to talk about that. Today it's all open source multi-cluster architectures. So I spent the last about seven months working with the Argo project community, talking to end users such as yourselves and learning about your challenges and the same challenges that I face when I try to implement Argo CD. I'm a member of the Argo project and a contributor to Argo CD. And I'm also the coordinator for the newly found scalability sig for the Argo project. And if anybody actually cares about certs anymore, I have my CKA, but nobody's ever asked about that. So I don't know why I include it. So we already know the topic for today, which is which Argo CD architecture is best. That's the question that I'm going to answer today. And here it is. It depends. It highly depends on the organization that's implementing Argo CD. And each architecture is going to have its pros and its cons and how severe of a pro or a con that it is will once again depend on your organization. So we'll do one of those show of hands that I was asked mentioned earlier, which is who here is currently running Argo CD in some capacity. Okay, that's going to help because I don't really go over a lot of the basics for Argo CD. This is really focused on the cluster administrator perspective of implementing it. So if you're missing some pieces, come talk to me after and I'm happy to explain anything that's missing. But again, the answer is it depends. It really depends on the perspective that you're looking at Argo CD from. So if you're, say, non-technical business leadership, Argo CD is just a software that helps your organization achieve faster time to market by automating the deployment of application features and updates. Pretty high level, pretty basic, but focused on business outcomes. But say you're an application developer, which I typically view as the end user of Argo CD. Argo CD is a tool that automates the deploying, updating and managing of applications using, say, a command line tool, an elegant web UI, or probably more aptly configurations and get, I would hope, given where we are right now. And then finally, from the perspective of a cluster administrator, which, again, is kind of what I'm framing this talk in, since we are talking about implementing Argo CD into multi-cluster environments. So from the perspective of a cluster administrator, Argo CD is a control plane for automating Kubernetes cluster management using continuous delivery and GitOps practices. So kind of getting into the specific details of you're already aware of continuous delivery, already aware of GitOps practices, now you're interested in implementing Argo CD into your multi-cluster environment. So simply put, I describe Argo CD as an extension of Kubernetes. All of Argo CD's workloads and configurations are represented as resources in Kubernetes. And from a broader perspective, Argo CD is a part of the Argo project, which is a suite of tools consisting of workflows, Argo CD events, and rollouts. So here are the two core models that you're probably already aware of to some extent. And I tend to consider them on opposing ends of a spectrum, which is you have the management cluster model, which I've heard often referred to as the hub and spoke model. I'm not old enough to have to have lived through that pain of the hub and spoke networking model. Frankly, IPv6 is older than I am, so I go with the management cluster model. So in this architecture, Argo CD is running in a central cluster, one that is outside of your normal application or service clusters. Then on the other opposing end is the per cluster model, where for every cluster that you have, you have a standalone instance of Argo CD running in it. So let's talk about the advantages of the management cluster model. Primarily, it's that you have a single view for all of your deployment activity across all of your clusters. So you essentially have this single control plane that simplifies the installation and maintenance of Argo CD because you're only setting up things like RBAC and SSO and repo credentials and app projects all in one location. This also means that you have a single server for easy integration of API and CLI because if you've got multiple clusters, you have to then specify which Argo CD instance am I running this Argo CD command against. That also means for your teams that your end users, your application developers, they only have one place they need to go and that when they log in, they can see everything they need to see to do their work. But of course, there are disadvantages to this. So primarily the disadvantage of the management cluster model is that you're going to have to scale the individual components of Argo CD as you add more and more clusters. So you have one instance of Argo CD and that consists of three components, the API server, the repo server and the application controller. And the challenge is that as you add more and more clusters, you're adding more and more pressure onto those components. The API server fairly easy to scale. It's stateless. It's frankly just an interface between you and Kubernetes and you just add more replicas basically. Typically you don't have to worry too much about it. The repo server also fairly easy. You add more replicas, but more importantly, you're going to have to add more resources because the repo server is what's doing the manifest generation. So as you add more clusters, you're probably adding more applications, which means there's more manifest to render, more helm processes, more customization processes and more QCTL processes that need to get run to get the underlying manifest that is going to apply to the cluster. So again, not too challenging to scale at reasonable scales. You just add more replicas and more resources. The challenge is the application controller.  You basically have the option to shard it per cluster. So you can add more resources, but that only gets you so far. Add more memory in CPU. But in reality, you're going to have to add more instances of the application controller. The challenge with that is that the application controller has to have a one-to-one or one-to-many relationship with clusters. You can't have multiple application controllers managing one cluster without going into, frankly, setting up multiple instances of Argo CD at a namespace level. So it also runs as a stable set, which means you have to roll out a new instance of it when you add, say, more clusters if you're going with a one-to-one relationship. And you also have to update this environment variable that tells the application controller how many replicas that it's running of itself. Frankly, it's a challenge to automate that as you add more clusters to continue to scale the application controller. So that's the scaling side of the disadvantage. The other side is that you now have this single point of failure for your deployments. If Argo CD goes away in the management cluster model, you can't do deploys to not only dev, but prod. And you have to understand as an organization, is that something that you can tolerate? And what are your processes for being able to recover that management cluster and that instance of Argo CD when you have this single point of failure? And that's a single point of failure from reliability. The other side is that it's a single point of failure from a security perspective because you have this management cluster that requires direct access to the API server of all of the downstream clusters, and it also needs cluster admin credentials. So if that management cluster gets exposed, so do all of your other clusters with full access to those other clusters from that management cluster. And speaking of the management cluster, you have to maintain another cluster. So depending on how mature your organization is in its Kubernetes journey, that could be a large burden if you're really only expecting to manage dev, stage, and prod adding a fourth cluster. And I've been through this discussion. It can be a lot to justify the management, the cost of it, the resources of like, okay, so what are the processes for managing this third cluster? It doesn't fall into what we're used to. All things to take into consideration. And the last point here is that there can be significant network traffic introduced between the management cluster running Argo CD and the downstream clusters that it's managing because the application controller requires to watch all of the events from the Kube API server because that's what powers the application controller, right? When a deployment gets deleted on a downstream cluster, the management cluster needs to be aware of that so that the application controller can react to it and say run the self-heal policy to redeploy that deployment resource. So streaming all of those API server events from your application cluster to your management cluster can result in some end user testimonies, thousands of dollars a month just in network traffic. So let's go to the other side, which is the per cluster model. So instead of having a dedicated cluster, you run Argo CD in it, you're now saying let's just put an instance of Argo CD into all of our clusters. And so the advantage here innately is that you're, let's say, distributing the load of your clusters across each one or to put it in a better term, you're having a copy of the Argo CD components per cluster so that as you add more and more clusters, you're not adding more load to your central management cluster instance. So this is great because you add more clusters, you get more Argo CD, it works, and then you can even tune Argo CD in that cluster to match it. So if you've got one really big cluster and you say your development environment because you're running a namespace for every developer or something and then you've got prod, which is, you know, simpler, it's only one copy of the application, you can tune Argo CD per cluster to match that. The other advantage is that you no longer need external access to the cluster API server from a management cluster. Each of the clusters with Argo CD running in it can be in a private network and be all self-contained within the cluster network only requiring internet access out to, say, Git. And even you can solve that by running a self-hosted Git. So by doing that, you save on the network traffic costs, you're no longer streaming events out of it up to a management cluster and you also eliminate the security concerns of exposing the API server. And now there's a bit of a debate around that which is exposing the API server isn't inherently a security risk because there are credentials and there are certificates required to access the API server and actually do anything with it. But it is an attack vector that not having to have it open can help in a scenario where, say, a cube config gets leaked. They still have to have access to your internal network to be able to get to your cluster API server. And the other one is that an outage in one cluster is not going to affect the rest of the cluster. So you don't have to worry as much about if dev goes down or if one cluster goes away, you're not preventing production deployments or you're not having a cascading effect to the rest of your clusters preventing you from doing deployments. So there's no longer that kind of single point of failure if Argo CD goes away for whatever reason. And frankly, as platform engineers, this can be an important point because really your application developers are your end users. So even the dev cluster really should be treated as production in terms of reliability in an internal sense because if the dev cluster breaks for whatever reason that can prevent them from doing the work that is important to the business from them being productive. So it's important to take that into account and with the per cluster model you can, say, add a fourth cluster called the lab environment and you can break Argo CD in there without affecting your end users. But frankly, that's a bit of a tangent, so I'll move on. And finally, the credentials that Argo CD is using is scoped to that cluster. So an Argo CD instance exists in that cluster, uses a service account and uses the local cluster network to get to the API server. So you no longer have this central place where you're storing all of your cluster admin credentials just waiting to be compromised. But of course, there are disadvantages to this model as well. And don't let it fool you, there's only two points here, but that first one I should have put in bold because it can really be cumbersome to run multiple instances of Argo CD, especially depending on, remember it depends on how many clusters you're running and how you manage them because for every cluster you're going to be duplicating configuration like the SSO connectivity or the RBAC rules or the repo credentials. For every cluster you have to maintain that. And that also means, I mentioned this is kind of a pro earlier that you get to tune an Argo CD instance to match the cluster that it's running in, but you also have to keep track of that. You have to be aware that this cluster has something different from the other cluster and you're starting to introduce inconsistencies between these environments. So if you've got Argo CD tuned in a specific way for production, but it's not like that in stage and your deployment works in stage but it breaks in prod, that's a result of having these distinctions or these differences between the environments creating that inconsistency. So, you know, the goal is to have as production-like environments as possible, which you can do like this, but you have to be aware of when you have multiple instances, are you going to choose to make them different or is the priority to keep them the same to maintain that consistency? And speaking of consistency, with multiple clusters and an instance in each one, your end-users, your application developers and your API and CLI integrations need to know where to go to get to these Argo CD instances. So if they're deploying apps to multiple clusters and they want to go check how that deployment went by going to that Argo CD instance, they need to have an easy way to know which instance to go to. You want to reduce that cognitive burden of, hey, I want to look at my deployment as much as possible, because nobody's paying them to figure out where Argo CD is. Their job is to produce software for the business. So every minute that they waste searching for Argo CD is time that, frankly, they shouldn't have to spend. So those are the two core models. Now, we can get into kind of a little bit more of an advanced section where we have hybrid models. So you take the two ends of the spectrum and you kind of blur them. And so two, I would say common, let's put it that way, hybrid models is the instance per logical group and the Argo managing more Argos. So each of these are a combination of the previous ones, meaning that they're going to come with all the pros and cons that I've already described, to varying degrees. So in this case, we've got the instance per logical group. So, frankly, the advantages and disadvantages here are just all the ones that were on the previous slides, but now it depends on which group you're in. So for every group, you're getting the advantages and disadvantages of the management cluster model because you're running Argo CD in your management cluster and it's managing some subsection of your downstream clusters. The idea here is that you want to, the logical group in this context is, say, however your organization structures itself. So that could be per business unit is a logical group, per team could be a logical group, any of that.  An outage in one group won't affect the other credentials or scoped per group. Configuration duplication is, in theory, reduced compared to the per cluster model. But still, it's duplicated, right? That's still one of the disadvantages is that you are maintaining multiple instances of Argo CD. You are still running at least one management cluster. But if you choose to run one management cluster and that goes away, all of your Argo CD still goes away. So you still have that disadvantage of the management cluster model. So do you then choose to run a management cluster per logical group? Well, it depends. Is your organization willing to take on those extra costs? Is your organization comfortable running more and more Kubernetes clusters? How mature are you in your ability to stand those up and maintain those? So that's the instance per logical group. Basically, the management cluster model but with a bit of per cluster sprinkled in there. This is kind of the other end of that. It's the management cluster model with an instance per cluster. So you've got your control plane cluster that's running Argo CD, and then it is connected to all of the downstream clusters. But as a part of that connection, it's deploying a new Argo CD instance into each one.  And if you're at a point where you want to give them ownership of their Argo CD configurations to some extent, say like they can create all the applications they want within the app project restrictions that we put in place, this is a good model for that because everyone's getting their own Argo CD instance. But then it depends. Are you comfortable running multiple Argo CD instances? Are you prepared for the burden of we want to upgrade Argo CD from 2.6 to 2.7 because it's been three months and there's a new release? What processes do you have in place to manage that? So this is great for say a cluster per team or maybe edge clusters where you want to do that initial bootstrapping from a central control plane, but in the end you want these clusters to be totally independent and sometimes you might not have direct access to them from a central control plane, but after that initial bootstrapping they can be mostly independent. Now the question you might ask is cool, so I run an instance per team. Is that great for multi-tenancy? Well it can be. If you need a strong sense of isolation to say that every team has a totally different instance of Argo CD, they're not sharing a repo server which could leak potentially secrets because they get access to that namespace because it's doing all the manifest generation or something like that, then it's really good if you need strong isolation between your clusters, but if all you need is rules in place to say that these teams can do this in this cluster, that's what app projects are for. So is it worth taking on the additional burden of running an instance per cluster or should you just use app projects, the functionality built in to do that multi-tenancy when you're not super concerned about serious isolation between the components? And frankly this architecture is what the acuity platform is attempting to solve because you kind of want this central control plane that everybody can go to and access all of the clusters, but you want that scalability of an instance per cluster. So that's where the architecture improvements of the acuity platform are trying to come in to solve that problem. So as a part of this, I'm going to leave you with some questions to ask yourself, like what is the meaning of life or how much Argo CD downtime can you tolerate? Is it okay if Argo CD is gone for three hours while your platform team is attempting to bring the management cluster back up or is that going to cost millions of dollars because you can't do a new deployment and you've missed some sort of deadline and contract that you have with another provider and that breaks an SLO? How disposable are your clusters? So if you want to get rid of and spin up a new cluster, can you do that? Are they ephemeral pieces of infrastructure yet or are they still pets? Do you have dev stage and prod and you treat them nicely and they never go away? How sensitive are you to drift in your environments? So if one Argo CD instance is slightly different from another, is that going to have a substantial impact on your deployments? Are you doing deep integrations with the precinct and post-sync hooks of Argo CD and if that's slightly different between instances, how severe of an impact is that going to have? Will your number of clusters grow over time? Are you prepared to continue tuning the individual components of Argo CD as you add more and more clusters to support that additional burden that you're putting on a central control plane or would you rather take on the burden of managing multiple Argo CD instances in each cluster? And frankly, how crucial is isolation between your teams and tenants? Are your end users different customers because you're a professional services firm and you're consulting and building infrastructure for them and maybe hosting some of it for them? Or are these internal teams where really the only thing that matters is our back because you're comfortable running a central repo server for all of your end users? And how many applications will you manage with Argo CD? Is that a static number or will that grow significantly in the future? It's important to ask these questions because they all affect how Argo CD is going to run and how much of a burden it is to manage Argo CD. So I'm going to leave off with some final thoughts here. If you're interested in more Argo CD content, I recommend checking out the Acuity blog where we write about things like Argo CD architectures, the inspiration for this talk or how to manage Kubernetes secrets with GitOps, our most popular posts, or maybe something fun like best practices using Kiteverno and Argo CD to enforce them for your end users. Speaking of the scalability sig that I mentioned in the beginning, we are looking for end users of Argo CD whether you're running at a small scale and you're struggling to find the right information on how Argo CD is going to scale in the future or you're running 10,000 application sets like one of our members and you want to know how Argo CD is going to handle that or you're actively facing scalability challenges. I recommend coming and joining the scalability sig where you can meet with other end users like AWS and Red Hat and IBM and into it to come and hang out and tell us your stories. Join the Argo Sig Scalability Channel on the CNCF Slack. It's public, post interesting things that you find, bugs that you're running into, an issue that's related to scalability that you want to maintain your attention on. We host bi-weekly meetings on the 2nd and 4th Wednesday of each month and you can request to become a member of the sig by creating a pull request at that URL. In here we do have people running 10,000 application sets in production with one application per application set. It's these weird niche use cases that are super interesting to hear about that people are actually using to solve problems they have. Finally, if you've got teammates or colleagues that didn't get a chance to come to GitOpsCon and you want them to get up to speed with continuous delivery, GitOps and Argo CD, I recommend checking out our free course where you can get certified by the founders of the Argo project on this knowledge. We have, here's some things that people have said about it. That's my talk. I have, I believe, five minutes for some questions. Yes, sir. Yeah. So how app of apps plays into managing multi-cluster architectures? Yeah, yeah, like this distribution of Argo in a one-to-one or multi-to-one relationship. Right. Frankly, in my experience, you want app of apps every time. Every Argo CD instance you have is going to have an app of apps because unless you're doing some edge case anti-patterns, you're going to want to manage your application resources and all of the other Argo CD configurations declaratively. So you're going to have an app of app. Like the pattern is typically install Argo CD, install the app of apps, and then Argo CD does everything else. So there's, I would say, no matter which architecture you choose, you're probably implementing that. And the, let's see if I can go back to it. In the management cluster model, you're probably going to have, like, maybe a top-level app of apps that's going to manage, like, I think in modern Argo CD, you're going to have an app of apps that deploys an application set that then deploys app of apps for every cluster. And then in the per-cluster model, you kind of get rid of that top-level abstraction and just have an app of apps for each instance. Okay, thank you. You're welcome. Any other questions I can answer? It doesn't even have to be talk-related. Frankly, any Argo CD question, I'm happy to answer. If not, you can always catch me out in the hall, and I'm always happy to talk Argo for the red shirt. Okay, cool. Well, thank you, everybody, for joining. I really appreciate it. Yeah.


Every week a group of retirees gets together at Brookside Golf Course in Los Angeles, California. Bill Graham has been a golfer for years and is used to playing with handicaps. But he now plays with a different kind. A severe loss of central vision caused by age-related macular degeneration. The disease has claimed a centered portion of his eyesight where fine details are recognized. The condition affects one out of five Americans over the age of 75. At the first tee, a friend helps line up the shot. Bill has to rely upon his peripheral vision. He sees something like this. Everyday activities like crossing and busy intersection are difficult with macular degeneration. And reading a newspaper is nearly impossible. To date, there is no cure for the disease, just measures to keep it in check. But Dr. Terry Lawton of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California is working on an image-filtering technique that helps people read. It's something people aren't used to doing, looking off to the side to be able to read. But that's where their best vision is now. And these filters make it so that they can read two or four times faster. This is an example of an unfiltered versus a filtered word. Using a closed-circuit viewer, Dr. Lawton measures the number of correct responses given by Mr. Graham during a test that mixes filtered and unfiltered sentences. The dogs swam in the water and played all day. The digitally processed words actually appear less readable for someone with normal sight. The reality is it is more blurred. What Terry Lawton is doing is not creating a crisp, sharp edge. But with her filters, she's creating enhancement of contrast. And even though you don't need that enhancement, so you see the blurring that she's creating, the person who has certain losses needs the contrast more than they need the sharpness of the edge, and they see better with this. I want you to tell me in each one of these circles, standard eye testing until recently never measured an individual's sensitivity to contrast, which is how well various patterns are seen from light to dark. Dr. Lawton has developed a system that very accurately measures this ability. By hitting buttons, Mr. Graham tells a computer whether he sees the pattern on the screen slant to the right or left. The technology pinpoints his best level of contrast sensitivity, which then gets translated into the way words are shaded or filtered. Eventually, closed-circuit viewers will be on the market that magnify and filter words according to an individual's contrast need. As a result of the research, Dr. Lawton sees potential in using this image processing technique for a future Mars rover vision system. It would assist in negotiating boulder fields, such as this photographed by an early Martian probe called Viking. The filtering acts to highlight individual boulders in the same way it uses contrast to emphasize the shape of letters in a word, thus pinpointing obstacles for the rover to avoid. NASA's Human Factors Research and its ties to image processing, helping man and machine extend the ability to see.


Hi everyone, Joe for jaskiescasebreaks.com doing a random number block randomizer for this group of teams Actually, no, we're not doing it because Josh bought all the spots So thanks, Josh. I really appreciate it. So yes, Josh for the purpose of the promo you will get Ten spots in that promo. Hopefully we'll get that done by tomorrow night. So that's the random number block randomizer Thanks everybody jaskiescasebreaks.com


Like to welcome everybody into the dividend growth portfolio. This is a one that I've had since December 20th of 2019. So just had its two-year birthday. So it's fitting I guess to come in and do a review of this. This has just been really surprisingly unbelievable of an opportunity to roll out to would-be investors that may be interested in dividend growth investing, but I think a lot of investors kind of fall short in looking below the surface in what's possible.  I mean, if you had a thousand or $1,500 maybe you buy three or four or five or ten dividend stocks. Maybe two or three of them don't perform the way that you expect and you know, a lot of these dividend growth payers they're slow to grow. They're established businesses. So to expect that you're gonna, you know, pick eight to ten in your portfolio and they're just gonna go up and beat the market every year is probably not realistic at all. This is a little different approach and that I've got just shy of 80 holdings in this portfolio. The way I look at this is if I have a few lemons in this portfolio, it doesn't hurt quite as bad because the those losses are buffered or mitigated by the sheer number of payers in here. Furthermore, it's amazing how often these dividend payouts come through. We'll just click in here and we'll take a look at the different sector payouts here. This is of interest for anybody out there as expected. Utilities would be close to the top and then staples right below it. These are right in line with what I would consider to be, you know, the sectors that pay the most dividends, but nonetheless, 620 and earned dividends in this portfolio. I'm super excited for the prospects of this portfolio as it grows. The capital appreciation in this has just been fabulous. These small lines here is where I've actually strategically funded up the account. Every now and then I'll just throw a little boost in there and just provide that little extra oomph. This isn't for any other reason other than just I earmark a little bit of surplus capital and I earmark this and align the two and boom, there you go. You've got a strategic fund up. This has no bearing at all on my attempt to time the market at any time at all. This is just really, I've got the money, so I invest it and that's just how I choose to roll on this. So how is the two-year checkup doing on this portfolio? We'll roll to the bottom here and I just want to earmark quickly. The allocation here is spread over 10 sectors. I do omit real estate from this. This is a tax account. So these are buy and hold long holdings on this, but as you can see, the performance has just been off the chain. As one of the 10 sectors, the remaining nine are in the green. Telecom is lagging a little bit, but no problem. See, new fundings roll into this and if you guys will recall, when Energy was one of the lagging sectors for a long, long time, those funds flowed in there aggressively, I might add, and now look at it. It swung back. Just like telecom will swing back. This is indicative of secular rotation within the stock market and this happens all the time. You've got outperforming sectors and you've got ones that will lag the market and that's just completely normal. But I'm real excited about the prospects of this portfolio going forward. This is going to be a lot of fun here. I want to chronicle and show you guys all of the holdings within the portfolio. I haven't checked this prior to filming. So if there's a surprise here, I don't know what to tell you. I don't really monitor this very often except for when I chronicle it through the rollout and the channel, there's no reason to. I mean, these are established companies, really Fortune 500 companies that I don't need to monitor them. I don't. I don't do any type of evaluation on these companies outside of, I just want to own them. There's some schools of thought out there that may suggest that I have too many in this. I beg to differ. I don't. I think cumulatively is just as good of a dividend rendering as a dividend rendering of the same amount in fewer stocks. In other words, the bottom line is still about money. And if I can earn that dividend cumulatively rather than singularly or with a batch of a few stocks, then what's the difference? To be honest with you, I've had a number of surprises in this portfolio that I may not have invested in. Had it not been for my approach here in keeping the amount of money devoted to each of these holdings relatively under control and not get overlevered in some of these, and those are the ones that have exploded. They've worked really, really well for me. So as we scroll down the list, I may earmark a few of these. Goldman Sachs is a fantastic example of one that just exploded on me and over a share and a half. That's all I have in this. Not even a $500 bill, a $300 was invested in this on the onset. We're up $132 of appreciation. This is just one holding. Investors would kill for these types of return. I did nothing special to go after that return. Look at a Vago Broadcom AVGO. That's even better. We've got $469. The suckers were up over $226. Total value $766. So just absolutely fantastic performance here. Gosh, Cisco. The list goes on. This is a little bit more. So where the money can buy a little more shares in it. It's great. McDonald's here owning it long and passive. Goodness, the cost basis there, $510. That's over $600 now. Thermo Fisher Scientific. And so as we just scroll through here, you're kind of getting an insight to what I wanted out of this portfolio. I wanted to own a lot of stocks in here. I really did. I don't have this capped. I may look. There's a few others that I'd like to add to this. I don't have Tyson in here. I'd love to have Tyson. I'd love to have Cisco Foods. I'd love to have some of those other tried and true dividend kings in here that I opted not to own in this. But this gives me the opportunity to throw a few hundred bucks in it. And hey, I'm an investor in it, which in my mind is better to be an investor than to not be an investor. Look at Home Depot there. $408 on the cost basis there.  Another nice winner here, up 33%. These are some big wins. And when you chalk up some of these wins there, Disney, I take it on the chin a little bit. It's no problem, right? So we don't lose our shorts because we're down a little bit on Disney. The funds will flow into Disney and we'll buy the base. That's how that works in M1 Finance. Some of these just incrementally up. There's the Traveler's a Dow component and Duke Energy and Utilities. Intel's taken out a little bit on the chin here. No big deal. Look at Eli Lilly. Holy smokes up over 50%. This is less than a two share position. Just silly, quite frankly. Some of these gains are just absolutely baffling. When I talked about becoming over-levered a little bit, I own a $10,000 bill on AT&T and AT&T has just been extremely disappointing. Trading it now, it's recovered a bit at $25 a share, but I'm only down 10% here. I'm down significantly more in the larger position. I would have never thought that would have happened to AT&T. And look what happened. I took a big haircut because I have a larger position and it just speaks to my conviction on this portfolio owning shares less than a share of Costco.  Just shy of 50%. It's insane and you might think, well, why didn't you just invest more? Oh boy, if we had that crystal ball, wouldn't that have been nice? I wouldn't be sharing my story and journey and trying to make sense of the stock market. I will have already have met my goal of financial security and wealth, but we all know that that doesn't exist in nature. So we have to strategically try to take advantage of the market, try to reduce as much risk as we possibly can in the market. I look at lows, 112, my goodness. And these are just buy and own stocks. There's next era, nice 12% appreciation and a nice big utility. Medtronic, that's too bad. Medtronic's one of my faves. And we'll continue to own it. It's my fave whether or not I'm up or down in it. I just so happen to be down at the time of filming this video and sharing it with you guys. AMD has just been on a tear. I mean, that's just silly, 71% on some of those. And again, coming back to my example of people out there that want to end up doing some dividend investing, you know, you may go for the very best out there and only fill your portfolio with 810 stocks.  And it obviously works really well. There's a foreign TD that's Canadian Bank of Canada here, Toronto Dominion, that's one of their biggest. Up 21%. Can't scoff at those results here, Pepsi, small position. I do own this large and long in the Roth IRA as well. Pepsi is one of my conviction, top 10 stocks to buy and own forever without a problem. Conoco Phillips up over 50%. You know, that would have been a name and energy that I wouldn't have thought to put a large position on. Had I put a large position on it, hell, maybe I'd be down 50%. That's usually how it goes. But the stock market doesn't have a conscience. It happens sometimes with single stock down. Little dab in 3M and Verizon, a couple of Dow components there. No big deal. We'll take those into 2022 and go right to war. Charles Schwab, absolutely fantastic holding for me. Right above it there, Caterpillar fractionally up at 6%. Bank of Nova Scotia, that's two out of the three Canadian banks that I own in this wonderful dividend payer. And I can't, gosh, I think TD was up about 21% as well. So it looks like those foreign banks. Yeah, gosh, Bank of Nova Scotia is up the same amount as TD Bank. We'll have to see what the other bank, the Toronto Dominion or excuse me, the other Bank of Canada that I've got in here, we'll get to it here. Coke, Valero, fantastic. I'm just scoping through here. Look at that Nike, nice Dow component, up 16%. Comcast down a little bit. That's indicative of the telecom swoon. We're in here a little bit. Of course, Procter & Gamble has just been on a tear. Staples have been really, really big. And there it is. Royal Bank of Canada up 20%. Look at that. Just by owning all three of the large Canadian banks there, we're cumulatively up there 20% on an aggregate between the three of them. On a dollar per dollar basis, that's not much, but you just can't argue with those results. Just fantastic. They're sure when Williams, my goodness, in materials up 40%, waste management up 40%, APD, which is my top conviction pick for 2022 in materials. Absolutely fantastic company. I'd like to get that up to a whole share. That'd be kind of cool. Up 17%. Look at all this green. Just an insane amount of green in this portfolio, man. You want to invest and you want to win. There's a lot of different ways to go about this gig. This is just one element about what makes sense to me. And I didn't have a chance to count the red, but some of these are fractionally in the red. Exxon Mobile, I can live with that JP Morgan. I can live with that fractionally in the red. But I think for the most part, you guys can all agree that if the verdict was out, whether or not this was worth it or not, you know, it absolutely is just a fantastic way of investing and gives me some options when the market goes down, gives me the ability to fund this up like I have over time, gives me the ability to enjoy this dividend renderings that I share with you guys on occasion through the rollout of the dividend growth portfolio. I'll share this in the comment section for you guys or a version of this to get you started. I can't share much over 50 stocks. So it's a condensed version of this dividend growth portfolio, but it does give you the framework to build upon it. And that way, if you wanted to take it and turn it into something more reflective of what I've shared with you guys today, you're absolutely free to do that. So appreciate you guys tuning into the dividend growth portfolio. We'll kick you back and we'll conclude the video.


taking a road trip in a Model 3. So this was a little bit of an adventure and I tend to overthink things. And this is a new car, so I was like, okay, you know, not worried about it in terms of will it get there in reliability? But of course, this is a electric car, so I have to charge it. So what's it like to go somewhere further than the mileage of the car? Well, I took a road trip from Detroit to Pittsburgh and to go visit my friends and it was pretty cool, had a great time, I'm back. And the first thing I'll say is I didn't have any range anxiety at all once I stopped overthinking it. That was the first key to this. So stopped overthinking and said, all right, how am I gonna do this? And first the car will plan the trip for you. So there's the first thing I learned about Tesla. I was like, oh, I can just tell it a destination. It says, hey, here's a supercharger along the way. So it's roughly 280 miles and the car has a 300 mile range, but because I was at a car show the night before I left, I didn't have a full charge because I was out late goofing off and didn't plug the car back in anyways. So hit the planning right away. It tells me where to stop. So okay, I stopped in the first supercharger. Now, if you're not familiar with the superchargers, they are fast, hence their name superchargers. So when I charged this car at my office, which actually where I'm back right now and charging for every hour parked, I gained 37 miles. So it charges at 37 miles per hour parked, but superchargers can charge at up to like over 500 or 400 miles per hour. So this car can be completely charged in under an hour. And of course, you're usually not rolling in on empty. So you charge up really quick and the supercharging stations are easy to use. You just plug it in, like just pull up, plug in and away you go. And I kind of laughed on my way. There was a charger that pulled up next to me while I was charging. And the guy was really nice. The parking lot was shared. So there was a sign that says, someone can non EV cars, non electric vehicles could park there. He wasn't, as they refer to a phrase I learned is ice jamming or internal combustion engine. Ice is apparently what they call the cars that are non EV cars. And ice jamming is where they try to block in spots to keep people from charging. Apparently that's a thing. An odd thing at that, but either way. But the other interesting thing was before I left, I obviously had to book a hotel. And the hotel, when you go to hotels.com, and I think a few other sites do this as well, I have no particular affiliation with hotels.com that was just, they had a good deal. And you can choose on the amenities, charge points. And the hotel I stayed at was the Holiday Inn. Holiday Inn had a EV charger there. Had a Tesla charger there too. So I thought that was kind of cool. So I could just plug in my Tesla and I was parked next to other Teslas. They had other chargers for other electric vehicles. They had two for like your standard chargers and two Tesla chargers. And the hotel people I said, they use a lot of use. And they said, yeah, they pretty much regularly use. I said, so there could be some good and bad there as this becomes more popular. The problem could be that you may not have the convenience of being able to charge. Cause well, they only had four in the hotels. Well, a lot bigger than four people. So that maybe could be a concern, but not that big of a deal. And the real convenient thing of having it at the hotel though was wake up in the morning and I have a hundred percent charged car because it was charging in about the same 30 something miles per hour. It was a nice, you know, higher wattage charger. So I was able to get there. Now a couple of other things about the road trip. The car with the autopilot. Wow. I don't want to ever drive on a freeway without autopilot again.  And people are aggravating that is the problem of driving. You're doing something very mundane which generally not everyone's good at. So maintaining speed and maintaining lane for a long period of time is boring. And I know cruise control is a thing, but before this car, my other car didn't have what other vehicles may call adaptive cruise control where to adjust the speed of the car based on the cars in front of you. This has that, but then the autopilot in a test that goes a step further to say, hey, we're going to keep you in the lane and as long as you maintain a little bit of pressure on the wheel, it doesn't bug you.  It does that every now and then. But a little tension on the wheel, a good audio book to listen to and you can kind of take in a scenery. Take some of that stress out of driving. Now I will address because this came up and I was very curious because this happened just before my road trip is the barrel video. The barrel video is someone who apparently fell asleep and I guess if you're a sleeper and you can sleep easily and I don't think I really fall asleep in a car but it could happen and you keep your hand on the wheel, the car will just kind of keep doing its thing, staying in lane. Well, this person fell asleep and there was barrels, not a line, but the barrels where making people get over. And obviously this is a good visual cue for you to see and go, hey, I should get over but if you're not paying attention, well, because you're asleep at the wheel, this becomes a challenge. Apparently the car, the radar as I understand is used and these has trouble seeing the plastic that's in the barrels at high speed. I noticed this because while driving and doing the construction here in some of the construction areas, there were barrels that were on the other side of the line and the car will warn you when things get too close to the car, especially other cars when they swerve into your lane which is also something you notice a whole lot more when your car is like locked into the middle lane, you notice how much people kind of wander from one side to the other versus this Tesla locks and once it determines where the lines are it locks you in the middle. But being locked in the middle means I needed to and it's really easy to do. I disengaged the autopilot where there were a lot of barrels because some of the barrels from people bumping into them they would get bumped around and they were on the inside of the line. So the car would have came closer than I think it should have to the barrels. So I did take over in those situations. But other than that, trip there, trip back, no problem. The one thing the supercharger does when you're doing the planning it will tell you to stop at the supercharger and how many minutes to stop there but it's predicting so you'll get there with about a 20% battery. You may want when you get to your destination to drive around so alls you really have to do and this was pretty simple math to figure out it said, hey spend 20 minutes at the supercharger to arrive with a 20% battery in Pittsburgh. I stayed 35 minutes at the supercharger filled the car all the way up and then I had that much more battery when I got there. So a little bit of adjustment so it goes from 20 minutes to 30 minutes stop. So when I got to Pittsburgh, I drove around and hung out with my friends all night and didn't get done doing stuff until almost one in the morning and no worries about the car. The car did get the battery down after all of our driving around Pittsburgh and goofing off and of course everyone wants to know how fast is it? Well, I'm always ready to answer that question. It's really fast and watch the battery go when you're flooring it. Now, the other novel thing about Pittsburgh is the next morning I got a little bit more driving. Pittsburgh is home to some of the steepest streets and so the ups and downs of the streets were really wild to feel. Now, the car has regenerative braking which means you can just let off the pedal and it regens without touching the brake pedal it starts putting all that kinetic energy of moving this 4,000 pound vehicle into turning back into energy and slowing the vehicle down. So you actually can get a battery boost and going through the freeway was interesting because the car will do a trip plan and kind of predict what the battery will be when you get there. Every time I beat the battery's prediction one I wasn't speeding, I set it to the speed limit within a mile or two an hour over. So I was managing to beat the energy predictions of the car but when you go up and down them hills you're actually, because you're recharging the battery some of these hills were like a mile of downhill and so you can really see it going back into the car. And I was curious how it was handled because a lot of people burn up their brakes on these type of things and if you're not familiar driving through any highly mountainous terrain you'll see those emergency exits occasionally when you go through these areas because they are dangerous where people's brakes start failing because well they heat up. That's not an issue in the Tesla at all. Matter of fact you still had to put your foot on the pedal even at the steepest hills that I went down because the regen braking was so the car down slower than the speed limit and I was like wow. And you're actually watching where you can get a bump and percentage in the battery from all these down hills was just really kind of cool to see it in action. Like I knew it about it and it's really cool but seeing that in action was really neat. So another thing about if you road trip somewhere I'm so used to Detroit, it's very, very flat. Our terrain here in Detroit is barely, if you look at a topographical map you're not gonna see much elevation change in Detroit but dramatically different in Pittsburgh which of course made it that much cooler for road trip to the point where I'm going back. I told my wife after I got back to like we're gonna go there for a trip because I was only there to visit some friends for a project, tech project and I should have stayed for a couple of days because there's a lot to see in Pittsburgh. So shout out to Pittsburgh if you live there it's a cool place. But road trip no big deal on the Tesla. I know range, anxiety. Definitely the autopilot made the road trip beautiful because I could see things. Now comment on this glass you see above my head. It was a bright, clear sunny day driving. I didn't get roasted through the glass so this wasn't really a problem. I was worried about that because like even my other car had a sunroof and I liked closing not just a sunroof but like they had a little shade that went over it. It led a lot of light through. This is quite tinted and does not roast me but the big windshield great for visibility like the view in a Tesla is really, I like this wide view they have but having all that sun roasting on you granted we have a nice visor to stop but at some point I just, I don't like that much sun but the AC kicks butt in those things. So I cranked down the AC I was never hot but I think I'd mention it though that it's being in there. My other car is very different, has a very narrow, I had a scion TC very narrow windshield so I feel as though there's more sun and more light coming in but I think it's just bonus of the panoramic view which I think is a better deal but at least I'll note when I was driving directly into the sun visor help but at some point you're just like the sun's roasting. I had the AC cranked down to like 68 to really blowing right on me to keep me nice and cool. That's about it. Nothing bad to report, nothing no problems other than noticing the drivers and the speed thing but I will admit to absolutely no road rage for that person that randomly checks their brakes at the freeway and decides to go anywhere between five over to five under depending on their mood and how many miles we go. You notice that less when the car's taking care of it for you just kind of like, if you look at the speed you're like oh it's going up and down but overall you don't care. But that was it. It's quiet ride, nice smooth ride on a freeway and thanks if you have questions, comments, concerns leave them below and if you just want to argue to see that it's quicker to fill up a petrol for driving straight through, you're right. You win, I'm not debating that, I'm talking about it is practical to go road tripping in a Tesla. Thanks.


Most of this information comes from publication 946, How to Depreciate Property Tax Year 2022. You can find on the IRS website, irs.gov, irs.gov. Looking at the income tax formula focused online, one income, remember in the first half of the income tax formula, in essence, an income statement, although just an outline, other forms and schedules flowing into these line items. One of those, the Schedule C, having business income minus business expenses, giving the business net income flowing from the Schedule C to line one of income on the income tax formula. Looking at the page one of the Form 1040, remember in the Schedule C, we'll flow into the Schedule 1, flowing into page one of Form 1040, line number eight. The Schedule C is a profit or loss from business outlined in an income statement format, having income and expense sections. We're focused on the expense side of things and more precisely on the depreciation side of things. Remembering that even if you're on a cash-based system, you will generally have to deviate to an accrual concept when it comes to property, plant and equipment, depreciable assets. And now we're focusing in on those main categorizations of depreciable assets, generally those makers standards. And we have to layer on top of that the concepts of using say, 179 deductions and the special depreciation which we talked about in prior presentations. Okay, so how is depreciation deduction figured in any case then? To figure your depreciation deduction under makers, which is the standard depreciation kind of method, you first determine the depreciation system, property class, placed in service date, basis amount, recovery period, convention and depreciation method to apply to your property. That sounds quite complex, but it's really if you have some concept of depreciation like a straight line type of method as your baseline of what you're doing and then you alter that to comply with the tax code, it's not too bad really. So you're gonna first determine the depreciation system that you're going to be using. So normally if you're in practice you're usually gonna be saying, okay, here's this item, can I just expense it at this point in time as supplies or something? Or do I have to put it on the books as a depreciable asset? If you have to put it on the books as a depreciable asset, then you gotta think about what kind of depreciation system you're going to be using. Oftentimes most types of equipment are gonna be like a maker's depreciation system. Oftentimes the property class, because remember that you do not have as much leeway as you would under a bookkeeping kind of system or even generally accepted accounting principles from the accounting side to choose the life span that you're gonna depreciate over or the method that you're going to use, you have to fall into the categories of the tax code and that in part is due to the incentives being different for taxes than financial reporting purposes. Our goal is to lower our taxes as much as possible which means we wanna depreciate as much upfront as we can as a general rule. So we gotta find what class our property falls into. Placed in service dates, so we need to know when we put it in service close to when we bought it oftentimes but when we put the thing in service, the basis amount, in essence the cost of it basically because that's the cost that we're gonna be allocating over that's the more simplified term for basis but it could be a little bit more complex in certain cases but the general idea. And then the recovery period which is going to be determined in part by the property type, the property class because that's gonna be dictated to us in terms of the system we used and the property class that we're gonna have. So how long, how many years are we gonna depreciate this over? And then the convention which also is basically gonna be dictated by the conditions in place that we've chosen before meaning is it half year, is it mid month, is it mid quarter and depreciation method that will apply to double declining 150% or the straight line oftentimes we're gonna choose the default which will be the highest depreciation method that we can take which would be the double declining if we have access to that usually and then there's 179 special that kind of tops on top of that. All right, so then you are ready to figure your depreciation deduction. All right, tax software helps with this of course. You can figure it using percentage tables provided by IRS or you can figure it yourself without using the tables. Again, software is usually gonna be necessary when we get depreciable items because they'll help us to track those depreciable items on a fixed assets worksheet depreciation schedules. So using makers percentage table to help you figure your depreciation under makers the IRS has established percentage tables that incorporate the applicable convention. And depreciation method, these percentage tables are in appendage A near the end of this publication. Sometimes that's useful to kind of project out into the future if you're trying to think about whether you're gonna use say double declining or whether you're gonna use a straight line if you wanna change the convention or something like that as opposed to just picking the default of double declining and hopefully helping the software helping you to calculate it because the tables help you to kind of see out into the future possibly a little bit more clearly than software unless you have software designed specifically for projections. All right, which table to use? Appendix A contains the makers percentage table guide which is designed to help you locate the correct percentage table to use for depreciating your property. The percentage tables immediately follow the guide. So rules covering the use of the tables the following rules cover the use of the percentage tables. Number one, you must apply the rates and the percentage tables to your property on an adjusted basis. Number two, you cannot use the percentage tables for a short tax year. See figure in the deduction for a short tax year later for information on the short tax year rules. Number three, once you start using the percentage tables for any item of property, you must generally continue to use them for the entire recovery period of the property consistency. Once again, being a standard rule for tax as well as accounting in general. Four, you must stop using the tables if you adjust the basis of the property for any reason other than A, depreciation allowed or allowable or B, an addition or improvement to that property that is depreciated as a separate item of property. All right, basis adjustments other than those made due to the items listed in four include an increase in basis for the recapture of a clean fuel deduction or credit and a reduction in basis for a casualty loss. So those are kind of more unusual type of situations where you might have some other benefit that is happening and you might have some interplay like we saw in prior presentations between the basis, the adjusted cost that you're allocating the basis being something that you're gonna get a deduction for hopefully at some point in the future. And then if they give you some other benefit like a credit or something, that could adjust the basis. Otherwise you'd kind of be double dipping, getting an expense and a credit. All right, so basis adjustments due to recapture of clean fuel vehicle deduction or credit. I'm not gonna go into that in detail because it's somewhat of an unusual situation. Depreciation methods. So you got the GDS, the methods using 200% double declining. So notice this is gonna be a maker's depreciation. The GDS under makers, 200% DB is that double declining, that accelerated method. The one by default we would typically be using generally. So types of property, non-form, three, five, seven and 10 year property. So that's some of the more common ones right there. And then the form, three, five, seven and 10 year property there. Benefit provides a greater deduction during the earlier years, which is what we want. That's why we're gonna do it for the default on our side for the taxpayer. Usually that's the benefit. Changes to straight line when that method provides an equal or greater deduction. Meaning if you calculate the double declining balance, it's kind of a funny calculation because you're kind of taking the straight line method and doubling it and then using a double declining percent instead of a straight line percent, which doesn't work out to be perfect. So then you kind of at the tail end of the depreciation system, you kind of convert, you might convert back to straight line to get it to fully depreciate exactly evenly by the end point, which is a little strange, but it works.


For the first time, the Scottish Parliament will host a summit to mark International Day of Persons with Disabilities. It will take place on Saturday 25th November in the debating chamber where members of the Scottish Parliament usually meet. We would like to invite disabled people from all over Scotland to join us here in Edinburgh and also online. This event is for you.  I hope you can join us. The cross-party group on disability brings together members of the Scottish Parliament, disabled people and organisations working to support disabled people. We are pleased to be able to partner with the Parliament on this event. By coming along, people can share experiences, learn from each other and ensure the rights of disabled people are given the priority they deserve. I hope you can join us. Too often, disabled people are shut out of decisions that affect them. There should be nothing about us without us. And that's why I'm so excited we're opening the Parliament to bring disabled people right into the room where it happens. I can't wait to look across the chamber for the first time and see all the glorious diversity and talent of the disabled people of Scotland looking right back at us. I hope you can join us.


Welcome to the Hawaii Food and Farmer Series. We are here every other Thursday. I am your co-host, Justine Espritu. My co-host is Matthew Johnson. We are the Hawaii Food and Farmer Series and every other week we bring farmers and other individuals and organizations that have a role and are participating in our food system, whether they are growing food, distributing food or making different connections to bring that food to the consumers of our community. So who do we have on today, Matt? Awesome. Thanks, Justine. So yeah, as Justine said, we are trying to get Movers and Chakers in Hawaii's local food community and today we have a big-time Mover and Chaker all the way from Maui. So that's why you might notice that no one is here on screen with us, but we have on the phone Danya Novak Katz with Edible Hawaiian Islands Magazine. Danya, thank you so much for being with us today. Yeah, aloha. It's great to be here. Yeah. So today is kind of a two-prong approach. I guess we got a lot to talk about. So first, Danya, we're going to be talking about your background and Edible Hawaiian Islands Magazine and the Edible Community Magazines and then also talking about Farm Day, which is going to be coming up on May 20th. So why don't we go ahead and get started with just hearing a little bit about your background and how you became to be such the foodie that you are. I think I became a foodie because I'm always hungry and I'm always in search of the next great meal, whether it be at a fine dining establishment or pulling a carrot out of the ground on a farm. We're just always hungry. We're always curious about food and drink. So the magazine started about 11 years ago and it started with a publisher on Kauai. I've worked for the magazine for 10 years. Edible Hawaiian Islands is a licensing agreement with Edible Communities. Edible Communities is the largest publisher of local food and local drink in the world. We've published a little over 7 million magazines annually. And there are over 100 other Edible titles across North America. There's Edible Boston, Edible Manhattan, Edible Seattle, and so forth. And I own Edible Hawaiian Islands, which is the entire state. So that's why I'm on Maui today. In two days, I was just on Oahu this weekend and then I'm going to the big island. We travel around eating and looking for stories and talking to people that are growing and ranching, fishing, cooking our food. Okay. So Daniel, what were you doing before? So you said you got started over on Kauai. What were you doing before other than have you always been in publishing? Is that kind of your background or what were you doing before that? Yeah, I was actually a pub. Well, before Edible Hawaiian Islands, I've had the magazine for starting 11 years now. But before that, I stayed home for about 10 years raising two incredible kids. My son is Noa, she's 20, and I have a daughter that's 16. And then before that, I owned a couple fine art galleries here on Maui. And actually we had galleries on Oahu and the big island. And I published art. So I find that by publishing the magazine, it really, it satisfies a lot of different things. It's food, drink, farming, gardening, cooking, but it's creative as well. So I was in the publishing business for quite a while for about 20 years before I've done the magazine.  And happy Mother's Day to all the moms out there and all the dads too. But yeah, I've always been in the publishing side of the business, very creative, but also has a business side to it component as well. Okay. Well, let's talk a little bit about the magazine itself. So this is a worldwide publication, at least with the Edible communities and then Hawaiian Islands is obviously focused here in Hawaii. Talk a little bit about the magazine. Who is the readership? Where can people find it? What's the content like? We have a picture of, I believe it's the latest publication that just came out. But yeah, talk a little bit about that. Yeah. Okay. Well, Edible Hawaiian Islands, I think that if people know the magazine, they absolutely love it. We are a quarterly season by season. We're distributed mainly with our advertisers and then a few other key locations. But Edible Hawaiian Islands is the only James Beard awarded food and drink magazine in the state. And we hold that distinction. I don't believe that there is another publication that's strictly just food and drink. I think right now I'm the only one. Hopefully, somebody's listening out there and takes that as a challenge. But we publish season by season. And what we do is we share stories, really incredible editorial content, along with mouthwatering photography. And we share stories about people that are cooking, not necessarily chefs, although we do feature some chefs in the magazine. But we just share stories about things that are kind of cutting edge, things that are unique and different. Like on the cover of our spring issue right now, I can't tell you when we released that issue, I had so many phone calls, emails, tweets, Instagram questions. We found a cashew farm on Kauai. And I actually went there to look at Vanilla. And I was looking out and I saw all these other trees and I couldn't figure out what looked like a mountain apple, but it wasn't a mountain apple. And sure enough, it was the state's largest cashew farm. So you can read that story online on our website right now. But the magazine, I think, is unique. And it has some great stories. It has great photography. And I think that it's it's special because we really focus just on food and drink in Hawaii. We also have the support of edible communities, which is a wonderful support system of publishers all over the U.S. And we share magazines with each other. So I can see trends that are happening in from Boston, New York, the Midwest, Texas, California, all, you know, headed over this way. And along with our James Beard connections, we can really keep an eye on the prize and we can really see what's happening. So the magazine just shares all that information. So I'm kind of curious of your transition from publishing in the arts to publishing on this food community. What kind of struck your interest in kind of really diving deep into this this topic? And how did that help you kind of learn about the community? I know for me and Matt, when we were like, we want to interview farmers, and then kind of exploring that, we started to get such a diversity of guests and stories. And I feel like it's probably a similar evolution for a magazine like yours. So I'm kind of curious to hear that story. Yeah, Justin. That's correct. I, you know, I've always had, I've always had an aesthetic. I always like beautiful things. I like my house and my office to look a certain way. I like, I like to, you know, I love art. I love going to museums. I love looking at a plate of beautiful food or a field of something growing. There's just a real sense of satisfaction. And so I think that that was with me all the time. And I think I got, I got into the art business because it was really profitable, you know, back in the 70s and the 80s. And then staying home, raising a family, I think it was the same thing. I would make beautiful food. I would take my kids to see art and music. And I would introduce them to the nature. So I think that there was always that aesthetic there. I don't think it was a big transition. One thing I will say is that the very first time I saw an edible publication and it happened to be, I was on vacation in Portland and I saw edible Portland and I picked up the magazine. It was a moment that I'll never forget because the magazine is printed on uncoated stock and we print with natural organic ink. So we take that recycling to another level. Yeah. And I think that there's a certain way that the magazine is laid out and it's a, it's a business plan. I think that is very smart. We always have more editorial and photography content than advertising. And so when you look at the magazine, you read stories, it's just not a sea of advertising. It's, it's about beautiful photography, really well written stories, meaningful stories that teach and educate and inspire. Plus, we always have at least a dozen recipes in each issue. And I was just on Oahu this weekend and ran into a reader and she said, Hey, I had a problem making one of the recipes. And I stood there, got on my phone, we got connected with a chef. We all started talking and we found out what happened and what went wrong. And it was so satisfying to see and hear somebody made something, had some issues, but we solved it. It was a great publisher's moment. So again, you saw your first issue of Edibles you saw in Portland and then did you take the initiative to start it here in Hawaii? Yeah, somebody had just bought it like a month before. And it was during the recession that, you know, a really difficult time in the economy. So I just reached out and I decided to learn as much as I could from her. She was fabulous. Her name was Gloria Cohen. And she published the magazine for seven years and I worked for her the entire time learning as much as I could, selling advertising, honing my social media skills, building my clientele. And then about three and a half years, almost four years ago, she decided to sell the magazine and offered it to me and I jumped at the chance. So I've been owner publisher now for, we're starting our fourth year. Oh, awesome. Congratulations. Were there any personal kind of initiatives you spearheaded when you kind of took over as the publisher owner? That's kind of, you can kind of claim as your owner? We did a few things and I think that the first, the first thing was that I grew the magazine. We added pages, we added distribution, and we fine tuned our social media skills. And the reason is, is that, you know, I print 20,000 copies and that's statewide.  So, you know, if you see them at one of our advertisers, like at a town restaurant or Mahinan Sands or Cocoa Head Cafe, you know, it's, it's limited. And once the magazine's gone, you can't get it there. You can subscribe. So we really, I really wanted to work on our subscription base because that can really carry the whole cost of the magazine through subscribers. And that's what we've done too. We've increased our advertisers. And then when the magazine is, you know, you can't find it anywhere, you can always jump on to our website or engage with us on social media. And we have statewide food events, we talk about recipes, we engage with other chefs and farmers. So we try to make the magazine, I mean, I love print and I think print is forever, but there's also that social media side that really adds another dimension to what we're doing. Because, you know, some people love to print and love to read, other people like the digital copy or their, or they're just visiting and they're on Twitter and they find us and they ask us for recommendations. So it's really a, it's just a really well-rounded family, the edible family. Cool. Daniel, let's transition and talk a little bit about Farm Day, which is, this is going to be the fourth annual Farm Day coming up on Saturday, yeah? Yeah, it's Saturday, May 20th. And Farm Day is always on the third Saturday of each May. And what we did, we, one of the most popular pages in the magazine was our Farmers' Market Guide, not only in the magazine, but also on our website. And what we decided to do was turn that attention into an event. And then I thought to myself, it's really hard for me to be in four islands at once or seven islands at once. So we decided to use social media as a vehicle to connect people and farms, farm tours, and not only here in Hawaii, but it's all across the nation, actually in the world. Last year we had about three and a half million impressions on social media. And we had about engaged users here in Hawaii. Plus we had some really loyal readers that were on vacation in Japan and Israel and Brazil and Paris. They were all going to Farmers' Markets in those countries and taking pictures and sharing what was fresh and local in their area and using the hashtag EHIFarmDay16. And it was really incredible to see all this food being grown all over the world. So it's a day where we just ask people to turn off the TV, grab their family, go out, shop at a farmer's market, take a farm tour, or visit a farm and thank a farmer. And it's really grown into this really wonderful, wonderful event. That's awesome. It's great because I know a lot of people there's more and more interest in supporting local, buying local, and you guys are really providing a detailed list on here's how you can do it and then having a specific day to really encourage people to go out and do it. Who else are you partnering with for this event? Well, in the magazine, in the spring issue, and anybody can get a copy of the spring issue, they can email or tweet or call us. But what we want to do is it's expensive to print, it's expensive to ship. We all know that in Hawaii. We have three really incredible sponsors and helpers with this event. Number one is the Kohala Village Hub in Havi. And if you've never been there, it's the old Jack's Inn. And it's a really, really wonderful place. You can spend the night, you can take a hula class, you can read books in their library, you can pound paeae, you can eat in their restaurant. There's an incredible farmers market right across the street on Saturday, the Havi farmers market. And they're on the big island. And then on Oahu, we partnered with Farm Lovers Markets. And you know, it's the one at Pearl Ridge and Award Center. They have four markets and Pamela and Annie do a phenomenal job with their strict rules. It has to be local. It has to be fresh. You can't come in and sell something that you bought at a big box store. And I appreciate everything that they've done to grow their business. I think they have five markets now. And then on Maui, we have Ocean Vodka. And Ocean Vodka is the only organic vodka in the state. And they have a beautiful farm. And not only do they grow sugarcane, but they grow taro and sweet potato. And they do tours like every 20 minutes, they have a tour and a tasting. And they do an incredible job. It's centrally located. This year, we didn't have a partner, a sponsor on Kauai. But just in the last couple of days, I spoke to Marta Lane, who owns Tasting Kauai, which are incredible local farm tours. She's a farmer's market tour. She'll take you to a farm. You could pick fruits and vegetables, go to a restaurant that she designates in that area, and then they make lunch. And then they talk about education and growing food. So we're going to do a little something with her just on Farm Day. But it's a great day for everybody to come together. You can even not be on social media.  Awesome. So is this the big event you guys do every year? Or do you guys have another series or different things you do out in the community? Or this is kind of the big one every year? This is the big one that we do every year. And we've also partnered, I've partnered with Amanda Corby and Gooch from Peely Group. They're incredible, incredible. And she's been helping me get the word out. We've been working together with the media to try to share the information about Farm Day. And I have phone interviews, radio interviews, every day on each island. I guess that makes us part of the media because that's how we got connected. I love radio. I love radio because it's sustainable. And a lot of people are driving and it's just a great vehicle to get the message out. So we only have a couple minutes left. Is there anything, what's your long-term vision with the publication? It sounds like we've got a lot going on. It's successful. A lot of people are reading it and interested in it. What's kind of next or new coming up for the magazine? Any new initiatives? Oh, great question. Okay. So you're going to hear it first. Exclusive. On Think Tech Hawaii. Several years ago, I started a pop-up restaurant called Kupu Maui. And it was because the magazine was quarterly. And I wanted something to do on those months where, you know, we upload to the printer and we kind of take a few weeks off. I started doing pop-up dinners. And we were doing dinner for 50 people on a different farm. And then after about three years, I decided to sell the business and focus on a few other things in my life. And now I'm coming back. And I've just started a company. Actually, my website is not ready today. Hopefully by farm day it'll be up. But the new business is called Lave Lave Hawaii. It's L-A-W-E, L-A-W-E. And we're going to be doing social events related to each issue when we announce and we release each issue. So it's season by season. We're going to try to do something on each island.  We're going to make food that the recipes that are going to be in that issue and drinks that are going to be in that issue will probably do it as an advertiser to support them. And then after towards the end of the year, we're going to start doing dinners that are going to be a little bit different. But I think that the marijuana laws are going to relax here. In December, I went to a marijuana dinner in Los Angeles, and it was a really incredible experience. I personally don't drink or do drugs or smoke pot, but the food was delicious at this table with 20 other people that were engaging in THC and things like that in their food. It was just an incredible experience. And I'd love to bring that to Hawaii, of course, when it becomes legal. We should definitely host that event at the Food Hub Warehouse over here on Oahu. So we have a space for that. Yeah, so we have the Oahu Food Hub and Amanda and Gooch work out of there as well. So it's like a shared use food community processing space. So next time you're on Oahu, come visit us, and we'd love to host one of your pop-up dinners there. Wonderful. Well, I'll be there next weekend. So we'll connect when we get offline. And thank you, Matt. That's great. I've heard about it, but I've never been there. Yeah, it's kind of been under construction for the past year. And yeah, it does a lot of interesting things happening. Okay. Is it open to the public? I mean, it is. Right now, it's kind of like cold storage and a shared use kitchen and warehouse space. So it's not exactly set up for public activities, but we've done like a yoga night there. Cocoa foundation, different groups that kind of need space. We've let in and used the kitchen. So Cocoa Foundation has done a class there. So good space. Nice. Well, you know, it doesn't have to be fancy with Edible and our readers. We just need to be together, and we need to have good food around us, and everything else just kind of works out. So that sounds great. Yeah. So remember, the magazine comes out each season. So our summer issue, which I'm working on right now, will be out on June 20th. And it'll be in subscribers mailboxes. It'll be in your email inbox. And it's a beautiful, beautiful issue. I'm really proud of it. Right on. Congratulations. Well, that's exciting to hear about your new venture. Excited to hear more about that. And just so before we sign off here, what's the hashtag again for Farm Day? E-H-I Farm Day 17. Okay. So for anyone who's participating in Farm Day, hopefully everybody is, make sure you use that hashtag with all of your social media. You're not really, well, guess you do Instagram.  Daniel, thank you so much. It was great having you. Yeah. Real quickly, they can go to the website and download the Farm Guide as well. And if they, you know, they don't want to search for a magazine or buy it, they can always find it online. Yeah. I did that today. I did that today with all the farmers markets and stuff. That was great. Cool. Awesome. Thank you so much. Thanks, Daniel. All right. I'm hungry. So I'm going to get going. Yeah, yeah. Time to start getting ready for dinner. All right. Okay. Thank you. Aloha.


get info. If you do get info on a photograph, especially when they've taken with a, well, any photograph, really, unless you strip the information out, but it will give you the dimensions, the make of the camera, the model. I'm looking at one of my older pictures right now. The latitude and longitude. Oh, so it has. So get info. We'll show you GPS coordinates. Interesting. If the camera, if they're there. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Huh. Yeah, I think on iOS, I think you can disable it if you turn off location services for the camera. I believe that's right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, because you may not want people to know where you've been. Yeah, my uncle every now and then sends me pictures from places where he is visiting and then says, guess where I am? And of course, the first thing I do is open them in preview, which will not only show you the longitude and latitude, but it will parse it and then overlay it on a map so you can really easily see. But he's, I mean, he's a superstar here. You're about four feet to the right of the mean entrance of. Yeah.


The COVID vaccines made by Moderna and Pfizer were developed and brought to market at a blistering pace. The fastest vaccine development in Western history. But their distribution has been hobbled by poor planning and rigid eligibility rules. Vaccine distribution is going very, very badly. Nationwide, the initial vaccine rollout has been rocky. Doses are being thawed and they're not being administered. Because the vaccine ships in batches and expires quickly once thawed, precious doses have been pitched when eligible recipients weren't readily available or missed their appointments. New York Governor Andrew Cuomo threatened fines of a million dollars for healthcare providers who vaccinate people out of turn. The most recent CDC data shows that of the more than 30 million doses shipped, only about 11 million have been used. And those are mostly first doses. The Pfizer and Moderna vaccines are both given as two identical shots, three and four weeks apart respectively. Although the Trump administration has since reversed course, it initially stockpiled one dose for everyone shipped. Doctors and epidemiologists worry that we're losing the race against surging infections and new strains that spread more easily and may be more likely to cause reinfection. The problem with the vaccine rollout is that it was centrally planned in a way that didn't give local officials and healthcare workers enough flexibility to adjust to the realities on the ground. And to make trade-offs between treating as many people as possible and strictly adhering to the rules. The idea of keeping the second doses in reserve was really nuts. We ought to trust the supply chain, give out as many first doses as you can, even if you're still going to try and give out the second dose at 21 or 28 days, just trust the supply chain to do that. Alex Taberock is an economist at George Mason University who consulted with the Trump administration, the World Bank, and foreign governments on optimal ways to incentivize rapid development of a COVID vaccine. He says that the decision to hold half the vaccine supply in reserve is an example of a failure to think in terms of trade-offs. The first dose's first approach, which the UK recently adopted, would allocate all available vaccines to be used as first doses while pushing off second doses for weeks or even months until production can catch up. That means you can give twice as many first doses.  But there are additional advantages. When you push out the first dose as faster, you get to herd immunity faster. You push down R, so the more you spread out the first doses, the slower the transmission rate of the virus is, because now fewer people are getting the disease, and it looks like then fewer people will be transmitting the disease. The current approach of giving boosters at three and four weeks is based on what Pfizer and Moderna evaluated in their clinical trials. But waiting longer likely won't significantly reduce the vaccine's effectiveness. At 21 or 28 days, that is not a magical number. That is not a number which is set in stone by, you know, the vaccine gods. A lot of vaccines, you get the booster months later, even years later. It's still good. One of the reasons the companies chose that, very short time, they wanted quite rightly to get the clinical trials done. So for the AstraZeneca vaccine, we actually know the longer booster is more effective, and that could be true for some of these other vaccines as well. From the UK, this more contagious version of the virus. The new variant of coronavirus is out of control. Critics of this approach argue that partial immunity from a single dose might create dangerous strains under a process known as selection pressure, where random mutations create new strains that can evade the antibodies generated by the current vaccines. I am a little bit puzzled when some of the vaccine people make this argument, because the FDA was willing to accept a vaccine with a efficacy rate of 50 percent, much lower than we're getting now. Nobody at that time was saying, oh, no, no, no, no, we can't do that. If we have a vaccine with 50 percent efficacy will get viral mutation. It'll be worse than having no vaccine at all. Nobody made that argument back then. Proponents of first doses first say that dangerous strains have already emerged in the absence of selection pressure, and that the priority right now should be ending the pandemic as quickly as possible, even if that means trying an untested, low risk gamble. If you switch to first doses first, you have the option of switching back. You learn whether it works or not. If it does work, you've made the right decision. If it doesn't work, you can go back to second doses. If you stick with second doses, you never learn whether you might have been wrong. We will learn something from the British trials. We'll learn something from what's happening in Quebec. We will learn something in the United States if we go to first doses first. United States is in a relatively good position because of Operation Warp Speed. The rest of the world is going to have a much bigger shortage than the United States. So the world really needs to maximize the value of these vaccines. The vaccines are extremely valuable. The UK is also running trials on fractional dosing, which would extend supply by giving doses as small as one half the prescribed amount. In the past, with yellow fever and with polio in an emergency situation where supplies were really scarce, the WHO went to fractional dosing. And that can also work extremely well. So what we learned from the Moderna trials is that at least for adults between 20 and 55, a half dose appears to work just as well as a full dose. We just heard from the UK that they're just trying to hit as many people at once. Why not do something like that and space out the time between doses? But there are no plans to follow the UK's approach of vaccinating more widely by pushing off the second dose. For the Moderna vaccine, two doses, half the dose, immunizing double the number of people with the doses we have. We know it induces identical immune response.  Of course, ultimately it will be an FDA decision. And what's been extremely frustrating is that the FDA has a medical mindset and not a public health mindset. What economists are good at is making decisions under uncertainty and scarcity. And it's being hard-nosed and thinking about probabilities, thinking about risk, expected value. Economists are very good at saying, let's do the thing which saves the most lives. In Israel, they're just pulling people off the street and giving them a vaccination right there on the spot. In New York, that will get you arrested and that will get you fined. It might be better, particularly at this stage, just to say go, go, go and vaccinate as many people as you can. And certainly it's a terrible idea to penalize people when they take actions which are in favor of the public health.