All right, shall we begin let's begin. Let's begin All right, well welcome to all who have arrived If you come to one dribble con presentation, this is the one that you should come to Because we're gonna show you some really cool things and the energy that Johnny grubb provides in a presentation cannot be matched By man or woman or beast thought I was the hype man here. Oh Yeah, sorry roll reversal Um Yeah, so my name is Mike. I am the CTO at a company called tandem, which is a digital agency, but I'm also one of the engineers of Lando, which is a Developer tool primarily a local development Environment which is used by many developers particularly in the Drupal space, but it works for all kinds of local development its purpose primarily is to Replace something like vagrant for local development. So that's like sort of the goal in mind And then we also have mr John grubb here as well who I think can introduce himself. I can better than me. I can yeah, so I'm John grubb I'm the director of customer care is so I lead basically the entire post sales team at platform sh so customer success managers who are essentially account managers and take care of Basically, whatever needs taken care of and the technical account managers who largely function as on-boarding engineers so all of our enterprise clientele that come to platform sh it is basically my team that's in charge of of Adapting you technologically and then making sure you stick around and have a good time Ongoing and yeah, thanks for that picture Mike dug that up out of the internet somewhere. That was me in a past life when apparently I had lost my hair clippers and Or it was like 2004 and that's just what we did. Yeah, either one how we looked either one So yeah, and okay, if I can just kind of roll on with the intro It's amazing or what Mike? I think it was 2016 or so that you and I first started talking about hey, wouldn't it be cool if we did this and Then we talked about it again in 2017 and then we talked about it again. I'm pretty sure in 2018 and then for whatever reason The seeds took hold in 2019 and here we are Yeah, this is something I'll also give some credit to Aaron Porter who was involved in in trying to make this this collaboration happen But you know it was principally me and John me and John Grubb Porter minor minor character. I would say I was there making this He was there. He was present. He was present. He was in the room where it happened Yeah, but we've been we've been trying to make this happen for a long time as John mentioned Started talking about this very early on I think even before land. I was the thing back in the back of the Calabas. Yep And Yeah, we just we just basically had the recurring the one-year recurring calendar invite in Google And just kept coming back to it and eventually for whatever reason it changed So we've been working with platform. I guess probably since the beginning ish of the year on doing a a Lando and platform integration Which we're very excited about because if you've used platform before and you've used land land Oh before you you probably recognize that a lot of the things that you can do with with both are are very similar This in tax is very similar. So, you know, we thought it would be Pretty cool thing if you could just pull down your platform site into Lando and start working Yeah, so there's a little description in the slide about that sort of thing so one of the things that's I think super cool about this integration is Like conceptually on a high level the easiest way to think about it is you basically are just gonna be running your platform site locally And by that I mean like you're gonna be using the exact same infrastructure that platform has so you're not using You know sort of Lando approximations of the platform and infrastructure They actually generated images and containers for us to use in Lando. So you're using the same stuff That that's running on platform. So you have you know about as close to parody a production parody as as you can get and So that's that's great and then the other the other main thing is being able to sort of interact with the remote platform site So that includes just like pulling you know pulling down your database and your files and your code In platform land since platform is more than just Drupal that actually means like pulling different kinds of relationships So that might be my SQL database or a Postgres database or some other thing and I'm pulling various mount points You can have more than one sort of like file mount And then all the normal sort of platform magic happens. So basically anything that's in your platform yaml file Should also work in your local Lando installation So if you have like dependencies specified there or build hooks to specified there like all of those things should just work locally as well. So To return to the initial sort of Concepts conceptualization it really is just like running platform on your computer. It's probably the best way to think about it So These are these are some of the things that sort of work right now We cut a Lando release yesterday version three dot zero dot eight which moves Support for this integration into alpha status Which basically means like you can try it out and it might work for you But keep the expectations low But we've been running it internally for some sites for the last few weeks and it's been it's worked pretty well Especially for Drupal and WordPress sites. I think the there's a I think there's a roadmap slide later on in this But I think that the goal is to get to a like a publicly available Or widely available public beta sometime in the end of summer So something you can try now it certainly could work for you But it might not so hence the alpha sort of designation But all this is available if you get the latest version of Lando So you can try out all the things that we will be live demoing live demoing in a little bit So sort of the caveats for features that are not currently available This only works for PHP projects So if you are one of those crazy people out there one of those just intrepid developers who has like a go project On platform you are sort of SOL right now Those are things that we want to support in the future But TBD on when that will actually happen But all this I think I believe all the services the platform services right now Are supported in Lando with the exception of Network storage and I believe the headless Chrome service So if you wanted to like spin up a Drupal site with elastic search Or yeah, no key basics. Sorry Doug Van But a gorilla about bass Easter egg would be great to have in there somehow Yeah, so if you wanted to have a very complex sort of like services topology for your Drupal site With the integration that that is currently possible. So we actually have a testing example that we run right now which I mean John I grew up you can you can you can let me know if this is true or not But it's it's probably one of the only sites on platform that runs every service. That's possibly that that's available to you Certainly the only one run by somebody without a dot platform as a platform as H email address We do some pretty disgusting things just to test things out Right, yeah, so we so we have so we have so all these things do do work All these services do work But in terms of application support only PHP for now node will be happening sometime in the future Then we'll address the sort of other ones So does everyone want to see a live demo to see a live demo? So live demos are fun Because like, you know, obviously like this could not work and that would be very bad and sad for everyone But I feel like it really gets the the crowd energized to know that the presenter could just bomb so hard in front of them So let's do it To add some extra sauce to the mix So i'm going to be doing this live demo using the source version of lando Which you know means that there could be more bugs and I also have an unsupported version of docker desktop edge Which should make this even more exciting And I did hear that github github was reporting some issues this morning as well So so we've got a potentially a nice combination of factors to watch me crash and burn So if you wanted to follow along and basically do What i'm about to demo What you would need is the Latest version of lando, which is 3.0.8 um a platform account in a php site somewhere Um and then just a platform uh api token, which is what we currently use to authenticate against platform So let's slide over to Um my test project So I think what i'm going to do we have a very basic triple eight site that i'll spin up. Um, and then we'll go over some of the um some of the basics and and and look around at some of the files. Um If you've used lando before I think a lot of these things will be familiar to you if you if you've used platform A lot of these things will be familiar to you. Um And then if we if we have time i'll i'll try to pull down a more complicated site and we'll see if that if that breaks or not, so um Too many people who have used uh lando before when you get started with a project. Um Oh, sorry, uh, is i'm sorry molly does the Are is the astrology are the astrology signs good for this live demo or should I stop? Okay, yeah, i'm sorry We you might need to repeat that whole last passage actually because we started having an astrology chat Um, never mind carry carry on we'll pick it up. Okay. I just want to make sure that the stars are aligned for this demo Um, so to start a project any project on lando you run this lando and nick command Um, and now there is this very nice platform sh option that you can pick Um, so I will do that um at this point. This is where you would enter your um, uh Platform api token. I have already entered our like, uh demo Poken and apparently my business partners as well because you know better to commit stuff as him than me um And uh, so i'm going to go ahead and just like pick our sort of demo project And we've got these three different projects. Uh, this kitchen sink example is the one I was just describing That literally has all the platform services not very useful for a demo. Um, so i'm going to pick this basic triple eight site I'll click on it and what it will do is it'll connect up to uh platform authenticate exchange keys with it and then clone down my project So when this is um, when this is done, I should just have my platform code locally available Uh, you can see from the nice now we're cooking with fire message that this has happened successfully Um, and if I go over into my code base, here's like my Here's my site in this test folder here Um, so just I think this was this was forked sometime ago from the normal platform triple eight example um, so it's a fairly straightforward, uh example It's got a maria db Back end and uh and a red as cash Um, and has a couple of like relationships php version, but nothing too exciting happening very basic sort of spin up um, and if you'll notice the uh So oh, I added I added those but those are not those are not required This is what the lando file for a platform project looks like by default Um, this is great. Obviously very simple. Um, you can add your normal lando customizations on top of this if you so wish Uh, but this is all that is required Uh, and that is because lando will basically read in all of your platform configuration and use that to configure What your local environment uh should look like and that's nice because now you don't have sort of competing concerns You know edit this file for local edit this file for production, whatever Um, so at this point we should be able to proceed with the lando start command um and as as we're mentioning before, uh the um Uh Lando lando will basically run platform locally for you So it'll it'll grab platform sh containers and and run them locally and it'll go through and do the platform The necessary platform like build steps and stuff. So I believe Um, this will install the platform cli so you can use that locally Um, but it'll also go through you might even recognize sort of the way this looks it looks pretty much exactly the same um as the uh As the output that you get on platform directly So just going through and running your your composer install um Not a lot of stuff because this is just that normal droplet site. So we'll just like let it proceed Happy to answer any questions as we Let the internet do its magic working. I got one Oh, yeah, because I'll bet kevin calen's curious about it so You're configuring this entire thing with a platform app yaml, which is pretty awesome The platform config files instead of the lando config files straight up so And if this is secret sauce You know, I understand but are you translating directly into like Are you parsing that into a lando config under the hood and then reading that or are you reading this indirectly in Made making magic happen Yeah, so the I think the the the primary thing that that is happening behind the scenes is we've We are trying to replicate some of so lando is replicating some of the necessary parts of the platform infrastructure But since we're using platform images and containers These images and containers as you know, johnny grub do a lot of this setup on their own So if we just basically give them the right instructions, then they're just going to do it um So that's what that that is more or less what lando is doing is just taking the reading the information from the platform config files and then Um Using the platform images to spin up basically what you would have on platform Um, there's a small difference. So there are some lando things that we do. So for example, like, you know, there's no Obviously, like we have our own proxy to handle the nice url. So we'll read your routes yaml file and put that into lando proxie isms Um, you know, we'll we'll we'll mount your directory and set up file sharing and your ssh keys So there's still a lot of the lando secret sauce. It's happening too. It's uh um You know, definitely a nice mix of both of them. Um, So, uh, and so at this point, you know, we have our drupal site running. Um, You can see that I got I got this nice nice helpful error that tells me that I'm an on an unsupported version of docker desktop Uh, so if you're someone who also gets this error Or awarding I would recommend that you don't use an unsupported version of docker desktop. So do as I say not as I do Um, so at this point, we should have our drupal site running. Um, there is also this lando pull command Let me maybe bump the screen up Uh, which will allow me to pull a a platform relationship So this is this is a um a platform relationship is, uh, will look like this Right here. So I have a relationship from my application container to my database called the database So I can pull that relationship from the remote platform instance. Um, and then, uh I can also pull down mounts. So here are some mounts for this, uh site The one that I'm most interested in is my sort of my drupal files If I can give like a really super quicky explanation of what relationships and mounts and all that stuff means We put all these different pieces in different containers So my sequel lives in a container of its own php and the web server live in a container of their own And so they need to be able to speak to each other via tcp, of course So that's the relationship that mic is talking about It's basically you specify these couple of lines of yaml and that tells the two things that they need to be able to speak to each other And so we hide or not really hide but we Stuff the configuration information as far as the address where where php can find The mysql container like what what host and what port etc We put that into a relationship is what we call that it shows up as an environment variable So that's how they know how to speak to each other or where to find each other rather so Cool carry on and if you are if you think that this is a wordpress site, it's not going to work There we go But right now it'll pull my pull that relationship my remote relationship called database and I accidentally tried to pull in my in my My bash remembering thing It remembered that I was trying to grab wordpress files before which is not correct So I switched it to Drupal files, which is correct. Now you can see that it's pulled down So the m the m flag stands for mount and the r flag stands for relationship You can pass in as many as you want. There are some You can definitely have platform configurations with multiple Relationships multiple mount points so you can you could pass in a very long string of things if you have lots of stuff So at this point I should have The um, yes, thank you dug van history bash history So at this point we should actually have the Drupal site running locally Uh, which I will set up And there it is So I've got my snazzy can everyone see the Drupal site there Very nice So I've got my Drupal site running locally pulled the database down and all that so very nice Um now let's explore sort of what's happened a little bit more um, so If you run lando, you'll get a bunch of certain different commands that you can use Including drush We also will provide sort of a cli way to connect to relationships So if I wanted to like directly access that database relationship, I could do lando database And it just drops me into the um, my sequel shell Uh locally so I can like do stuff on that database if I just do like I think use Main it's up the line. Yeah Show tables. There's all my Drupal tables that I just pulled down Um, I can run sort of the drush commands all available So just clearing my cache plan drush Uh, let's see And then I also have access to the uh, we'll install the platform cli so if I just do what is it off Who am I off info? So just knows oh, yeah, this is the this is the lando bot doing its thing um And then if you haven't used lando before a lot of the other commands I think are are fairly straightforward starting and stopping and sshing into um uh, certain certain uh Into any of the containers if you'd like to do that Running php directly running composer directly destroying the application that sort of thing um Yeah, so land Um They do not behave exactly the same as as pantheon dugvan. Um, so I mean pantheon there's there's um, you know, there's uh, you know, a Drupal site has a database And it has um, you know the Drupal files and you're sort of like pushing and pulling those things And then there's the same sort of versions of those for wordpress and And that and that's more or less sort of what it's going to be Um for platform you you basically specify what you want those things to be So I can have a platform site that has three databases one of them is my sequel one of those postgres One of them is mongo db and I could have files mounted in four different locations. So the commands are a little bit different. Um, so for for um Yeah, yeah, thank you johnny grub. You don't actually want to have that set up, but you can't have that set up um so uh The Lando pull command you can specify any number of those databases any number of those mounts that you want to pull down So in a more complicated example, if I if I had another database Uh postgres database, uh that I used for some other information. I could pull that database down as well So you really can access all the sort of services that you're running um So we'll do we'll do a short sort of demo of that happening. I guess which is um So if I wanted to go in and say so the the the default sort of drupal 8 recipe uh, sorry, um repo that i'm using here, which is like the platform template by default Runs a redis cache. So if I do a um Lando info I can see that I actually have a container that is running that platform redis cache But I can't really do anything with it yet because I haven't uh as as john grubb was saying earlier I haven't exposed sort of the cache um my app server to that cache um But you can do that quite easily um The same way that you would do it on platform and that is to uncomment this one line Um until your application. Hey, I want to be able to talk to the the redis cache So let's just do that and then do a lando rebuild which will basically turn that relationship on And after we do that we should be able to uh connect a drupal directly to redis So if you've done this sort of exercise, uh, sort of manually with lando or with platform Sometimes it can be a little bit, uh tricky But we'll show here that it's actually quite simple And it's nice that you basically can edit all the platform files And then rebuild them in lando and see sort of what happens So, you know, if you if you are someone who wants to you like do your sort of do your platform configuration first Before you push it up to platform, you know, you can try it out on lando and then and then push it up Um, and that can save you a lot of time because it's going to be a lot faster doing it locally Then it has to push it directly. Yes. That is the dream So it's going to go through and do the whole build process again um And then when it's done, we should be able to grab the, uh We should be able to set up the redis cache Um, more or less by just turning the drupal module on Um, which I already have installed. However, if you didn't have it installed, you could run this You know lando composed or require a drupal redis, uh, and you would get you would get that Um, so i'm just going to do a lando drush you a lie because I Because mike melano set up the site and he used a real password Instead of one that's easy to remember which is you know good good for him But certainly not what I would have done Uh, so let's just get to our drupal site So here we are in the drupals and I can just go here and I believe redis is in there Click on it We can see that it's been enabled and now if I go to my, uh, drupal status report Um, I can see that redis is on So extremely simple to set that up I just had to remove I had to remove one line do a lando rebuild and turn the redis cache redis module on So very very easy to do things like this um Another cool, so just to give you an example of sort of what a more complicated situation would look like um here is like the, uh Um Just the maria db service, but you could we could pick any of these services I'm just picking this one, uh, because I think you've you've got some interesting configuration options So say I wanted to do a more complicated, uh, sort of setup like this one I could literally just copy and paste this from the platform docks Go to my services dot yaml Maybe give it another name so there's no sort of namespace collision And now if I rebuild the service i'm going to get Exactly this on my lando as well. So Let's just uh, well, okay, so hey just for the crowd here. So what he just dropped in there is um By default a database. So he's specifying a couple of different containers here The db is the mysql container the cache container is the redis container that you just spun up The second db container that he spun up is essentially a totally separate instance of a database container And what he's got defined in there is a bunch of configuration for specifying different databases within that database server container, so i'm pretty impressed along with some rather um What I consider, uh yellow to green belt configuration that um creates different users gives them different permissions And i'm pretty impressed at all this stuff actually works right now. So that's q And that is exactly why i'm showing it johnny. Well done. Um, so that you saw User should understand that if they whatever they put into their services dot yaml It should behave on lando like it behaves on platform. So that's why I have chosen this more complicated example um, so if we can also, um What where did it go? Uh, so another nice thing there too is to like give uh to like let our applications speak to these relationships Um, so let's add that to our Uh add that in here and maybe call this some different make sure you name them correctly Um, and now so this would be the part where the demo would blow up. So everyone hold Hold on so when this finishes, uh Rebuilding we should have like as johnny grab mentioned a separate database service that has multiple endpoints that we can connect to um So That is very cool. Um, so while that's happening that means that we could also go in and say, you know what I need solar Here it is in the docs Uh, like here's some configuration for it. Let me start from here Um, paste it in see what happens and you can do that for for all of the services that are that are in here So you can actually build fairly complicated uh complex, um Uh, sort of like service topologies locally Before you even get to platform which is which is pretty nice So if you wanted to add a memcache thing in there you can do that so You know it made it made writing the docs for lando For this integration very easy because a lot of the docs was just like go over here and read this one instead Um and just do that and it'll work um So let's return to looks like did this finish already? Uh, yes, and you can see here that I have the second database service now And if I do a lando It should give me commands separate commands to access those relationships. So if I wanted to access that second database lando database two here. I am Show databases. I think it gives you like two and here's the two legacy and main Those were the ones that I specified here So you can see it's all very easy to do um, it's beautiful It's very beautiful so And then the I think the coolest thing about all of this is If I wanted to just move on lando destroy Project is gone. So everything I just did I just removed very easily so What I'll do now is pull a more complex site So this is a Uh, a small nonprofit site that that's actually on wordpress. Um, so sorry for the triple people I know this is triple con but the point is to show a more difficult, uh, setup We're off the island now like as of years ago. So this is okay. Yeah for sure for sure um so let's pull this one down and uh Give you a sense of a more complex setup Um, and how that works. So this in this example, I think grunt is installed behind the scenes some build steps are run to compile sass Uh, some wordpress dependencies are installed by a composer Um, including including one. I think that requires some sort of authentication Um, so much more complex, uh, sort of setup um And while that is happening I did I I don't know if I've missed any Well, I think uh, well we've got some interesting chatter about your sense of humor. I think in some of these command line things. Um John Boyer had a question about um about routes and domain names auto-generated domain names Do you look to the routes dot yaml file to set any of that stuff up yet? Is it respected? Yep, so we'll we'll use the information in the routes dot yaml. Um, you can still continue to provide. Um Uh, you can still continue to provide, uh, your own sort of proxy configuration in land. Oh, and it should just do both. So Um, but I would I would say that it makes it makes sense to just continue that if you want to configure different routes Just use the routes dot yaml Um, even even locally because that's going to give you, you know, what you get on on platform Any land. Oh specific configuration that you do is obviously not going to give you those things when you when you push it up to, uh, To platform I think that was another question somebody had that you probably kind of I think I understand the answer is yes But the lando if you have more specific lando configuration than what? You are able to stuff into platform yaml configuration lando yaml is still um Yeah, you can still do all the normal, uh lando things So for example, I see that at kevin asked this question to make a db snap snapshot. So, um Yeah, so lando has a has an events system So if you wanted to automatically do a db export or snapshot before you destroy a site or do something else That's something that you could set up in lando So let's get this site now You can install whatever you want to install Is there any other Questions coming through I mean, I'm just kind of curious how much coffee you drink and These sort of like feedback messages about this app is pay the iron price and such this Like the like the phoenix from the fire or whatever the heck. Where do you get this stuff, man? Um, well making something like this is actually very difficult. So And fairly unrewarding so you have to you have to like sort of get some kicks out of well I get lots of kicks out of every time I play with lando I'm sure a lot of you too And we might have we might have reached the point where the demo has crashed But let's explore a little bit I believe that the hop in situation is like CPU Let's just try to do a refresh really quick and see if we can get this one Get this one going Oh, yeah, google chrome definitely using my CPU by quite a bit Yeah, and I am I am not I am not on linux So Let's see what's going on So dug van we are there's going to be a like plug-in repository available at some point soonish Uh, so people can sort of share things in that in the way that you're describing Um, we do have a lot of these like guides on in the lando docs as well. Um, but I know that people Uh use uh to like talk about very specific Sort of use cases So All right, let's try this all again now One more time There we go. That looks more promising uh, so the right now the um There are a couple of changes that we have to make to make like lando plugins easier to distribute um but once those Once that happens I were we're hoping to find a group of maybe 10 or 15 people Who have either written plugins or are interested in writing plugins? Because at some point like everything cannot go into lando core. So And like we don't have You know our team is a fairly small team and we don't have a hundred percent like domain Knowledge coverage of all possible things that you can do. So We're very excited to get like the sort of plug-in system Rolling That said like most plug-in systems fail Like it's actually very hard to like build a real plug-in ecosystem. So It will definitely require people like you dug van and you are infeliti to like make the dream a reality Okay, so I've got this uh wordpress site now and let's just like look at the code really quickly So this is a little bit special. It's got redis extension installed. It's got database and redis running By default it installs uh by a composer. It also installs like the grunt cli. There's some like authentication required Which please don't like copy that And then there's this these sort of build steps which compile uh sass For us So let's just run a lando start and then we'll do a lando pull and see if we can get this site running with a lot more um With a lot more steps involved Yeah, and I I don't know uh, I actually don't know if that key is sensitive or not kevin Um, I says I suspect that it actually isn't but i'm not super familiar with this Oh actually I also forgot I need to switch The branch here Yeah, so that that's a key you don't want to share obviously Uh, unless you do. I mean there's probably plenty of people out here that would be interested Sorry, we had to switch to a different branch that has the platform stuff set up for this And I made just for this demo And now we'll start to start start our site um So very similar to what we saw for the Drupal site. It's going to pull down the platform services that we need um Based on what's in the sort of platform.yaml file It'll run through all the build steps. So it'll it'll grab It'll globally install the grunt cli which this this project requires It'll globally install some composer dependencies that we need it'll do the uh, it'll install the the Composer the composer jason dependencies. It'll install the platform cli And then it will run the sass build step. So it'll actually compile sass as part of the startup process here um And then we should be able to do the same lando pull command um So we'll pull the database relationship, but since this is a WordPress site, we'll be pulling a different mount, which is the like web Wp content uploads or whatever directory Um, and once those things are done, we should have a fully running WordPress site for this like small nonprofit that we did some some work for um And while we're waiting for all these things to install, uh, is there are there any other questions about the awesomeness that you are witnessing? Drupal 9 migrations with lando and platform Now that might be a that might be a better question for you for you jungler of the well There's a lot of nuance. There's a lot of new ones in my question. Um so I could I would have to of course guess at a whole ton of things and so you can feel free to correct me if I'm if I'm wrong but uh, you're talking about a migration from a currently running drupal 7 site to a to be born drupal 9 site and so presumably you're going to be using The migrate module something from the migrate module ecosystem in drupal 9 to read the database from the drupal 7 site and import the data into the new drupal 9 database so okay cool um So one thing that you can do presumably on on lando, but you can definitely do on platform sh Although it would be a little bit slower and more laborious. So if you could do this in a in a local environment It would definitely save you, you know, at least some network round trips um Because everything is containerized into separate containers you could theoretically um I mean gee whiz this is going to be you know, I mean this I This is a probably an 18 month development effort on your part. I'm just guessing.  Okay um Theoretically, here's the thing you could do If your drupal 7 site is currently running on platform It is theoretically possible for you to bring up your drupal 9 site in the same project with your drupal 7 Website into a different application container Theoretically, I don't think I would advise this but what that would allow you to do Is to have access to both the databases that both of those websites require So your drupal 7 site would have its database sitting here your drupal 9 site would be in the same Project with its own database, but your drupal 9 site you could create a relationship to the drupal 7 database and be able to run your Your migrate scripts and to bring the drupal 7 content into drupal 9 that is a thing you could theoretically do Probably easier would be to have two separate projects And just bring up a separate database in in your drupal 9 like now your drupal 9 project is ready to go And you need to import content. I think the much Easier way to do it with a lot fewer music moving pieces Say your drupal 7 site lives on platform as age right now Take a copy of that database create a new database endpoint for mike's demo a little bit Like you did just a little bit ago and create essentially a new database within the database container that you can copy your drupal 7 database into and then you can Run your migrate scripts against that That would Be way easier to reason about but would require you to have Two separate sites honestly the spend in two different sites. You're probably gonna save In hair and wanting to kill yourself trying to run two different sites in one project Two completely different websites. That sounds like a lot of things to try and not break at the same time So I don't know if that answer your question or gives you any kind of Kind of ideas Yeah, I guess it really kind of depends on as I think I see some stuff scrolling by Yeah, it depends on a bunch of things Database size and how frequently the content is updated.  Um But anyway, it did just really kind of depends on it depends on a whole lot of things. So, um And unfortunately a lot of them fall into the application domain in addition to the infrastructure that's sitting underneath it. So, um That is a really nuanced question to to try and sum up Well, if it makes you feel any better johnny grab now is the time to shut up cool If you want the full, you know hour long interrogation then please get in in touch with us at platform stage and So, uh, so, uh, so while uh while john was discussing the finer points of drupal migrations, um We were able to finish the So the sort of build step there and then we were we ran the that lando pull command to grab our database and our files Which are still downloading currently So I don't know if that's going to make a huge difference, but you can see here. I'm running. Here's the wordpress site running locally So very easy to do, um, you know, if you have a platform site and you have a platform api token And you have lando you can get your entire site running locally Using all the configuration on your in your platform, uh files Using the exact same containers that that platform is running locally in in three easy steps Um, and depending on the size of your site in your internet connection You know that could be anywhere between a few minutes or you know a few minutes more So, uh, we are very excited to do this. Uh, we run most of our our sites at tandem on platform So this has been we've been piloting this integration for The last few weeks and it's really saved us a whole bunch of time So we are very excited about getting it out to the wider public And i'm happy to I don't know what the like room policy is in the virtual space, but i'm happy to stick around and ask answer any other questions But also, uh, thank you everyone for for coming and um Feel free to ask any questions. I guess there's a plot the platform booth is a place where you can Ask questions, but you can also ask questions about this. I think in either the platform or the land of slack channels Which I think are fairly fairly easy to find on the interwebs Um, I don't know if john if you have any Parting now this is awesome. Well done and thanks for making it happen and thanks for your patience while we uh got here And apologies to all those who wanted this demo to crash and burn maybe maybe next maybe next time All right groovy. I guess I'm gonna go to the platform message booth So if anybody has any further questions about this stuff, maybe I could answer some easy ones Otherwise, I'll push you over to mike. Thanks mike All right, bye john Yeah, I'm happy. I'm happy to stick around ten anyone who has any uh anyone has any questions I will leave when the amount of participants gets below Let's say 20 All right, peace My done. Hi. Yes. Thank you, ellic You never disappoint kevin never disappoint If I mean if you can if you can keep more than 20 people here Definitely, then I think I think I think you deserve to trap me in this in this purgatory Oh, thanks for coming bret Yes, dug van. I saw you throw that up a few times. Um to all that are still remaining, uh lando is a free and open source project That is done basically on a volunteer time a lot of people think that making lando is my full-time job It is not it is actually my sort of like extracurricular activity Same with all the other people who um work on lando including some of the very people who are in this uh in this presentation right now So if you use lando and you like lando and you want us or you just want to support open source Uh projects then I would highly encourage you to go to lando dot deb slash sponsor And uh and contribute to the project. Um, so that all the people who's worked on this All their hard work, um is compensated as as much as as can be certainly as a labor of love to some degree, but you know thousands and thousands of hours of development time, um, you know Definitely appreciated so And it looks like it looks like kevin you're doing a good job at keeping this above 20 So that's a long way to go Yes, dug van there have been a I think there there have been three, uh Three agency sponsors um We certainly would love to find some more so if that is you would highly encourage you to do that Um, so last call media, uh, who is at dripple con uh was the first I believe um to sponsor um Ditto for lullabot and uh recently uh site crafting sponsored as well.  I know this is a platform Session, uh, but there's a forthcoming uh integration with lagoon as well Which if you go over to their booth, you might be able to learn Some more about but that's also available for sort of alpha testing too if people are interested in going over there um and uh and pan pantheon has been a They're not they're not actually not on the website yet So we're trying to coordinate some stuff with them, but they've they've been a long sponsor as well So, uh, they're not on the website, but also shout out to them. They've been a sponsor for a very very very long time Um, so we love all of them and all of what they do as well And dug van you are a beautiful man Appreciate all that you do Because we're gonna have to get some more. Uh, so actually dug van um We uh, so alex alex has been working on a a uh lando store recently um And I think we're gonna have some some more interesting items there. So I'm going to send you some more swag Uh In a little bit as well, but we're thinking mugs and hoodies, maybe some of these pink bandanas. I think would be nice um And uh, and maybe maybe some more some more avant-garde, uh, sort of choices And so I always always appreciate the uh, the Cyrillic as well. Um Oh interesting. I hadn't thought about a hawaiian shirt. That could be a that could be a good call. Um But uh, yeah, I think we great have all kinds of all kinds of uh merchandise, obviously And hot pink is such a great color too. So Bye bye dug van at the very least I feel like Erin we can make you a uh A special limited edition hawaiian hawaiian shirt All right, I know that I said I would wait till 20, but apparently I lied and if there's no other questions I am going to close this out And uh, thanks to all thanks to everyone who came. Um, I hope you're as excited about uh, the work that we're doing with platform as we are Um, and more importantly, I hope that it makes your development experience more pleasant in general Uh, once you try it out and uh, thanks to everyone for coming and I hope you enjoy the rest of your Drupal con global experience Bye. Bye


Welcome to Free Thoughts from libertarianism.org and the Cato Institute. I'm Aaron Powell. And I'm Trevor Burrus. Joining us today is Gene Healy. He's a vice president of the Cato Institute and author of the book The Cult of the Presidency, America's Dangerous Devotion to Executive Power. Today we're talking about a new article that he has in the latest issue of Reason Magazine called Good Bye Obama, Assessing Obama's Legacy as he leaves office. In fact, this episode comes out, I believe, on Inauguration Day. So looking back at the president, let's start with the question I've most often wondered. You think that the Nobel committee would like take it back? I actually say in the piece it would have been less embarrassing for all concerned if Obama had just sort of done a Bob Dylan on the committee and just not responded and gone AWOL. I think, you know, it's pretty clear he was embarrassed about it. You know, he came in 2009, he hadn't been president for that long, but during the period between Inauguration and taking the stage at Oslo, he'd launched about the same amount of drone strikes as George W. Bush did in his first two terms. He was in the middle of the beginning parts of the Afghan surge, and the entire speech is an apology and slash defense of the necessity of war in modern times. And it's certainly a necessity he seems to have believed in because one of the striking features of the Obama legacy is how constant and unrelenting U.S. military involvement abroad became. You mentioned the amount of drone strikes that he did just in that one period. And I don't know what the absolute number is, but I'm sure it's quite high and much more than George W. Bush ever did in his presidency. But is it being fair to just look at absolute number of drone strikes and not think about something like whether or not they were needed or justified if the world was more dangerous now than maybe we needed more drone strikes? It's certainly a possibility. It doesn't seem to be exactly what's going on. For example, how great a threat to the United States, to the U.S. homeland is the Somali jihadist group al-Shabaab. In the last months of his presidency, after Donald Trump's election, Obama expanded the list of targets under the 2001 authorization for the use of military force to al-Shabaab. And there's a decent amount of testimony from within the permanent national security bureaucracy that this is becoming, you know, we have the hammer every problem looks like a nail. It's pretty doubtful that we would be talking about, you know, the possibility of expanding the war on terror to include groups like Boko Haram if it was not possible for us technologically to strike from a great distance without putting U.S. airmen and ground troops at risk. But doesn't that make it then a good thing? I mean, if we, these are bad groups, they've done awful things, they've slaughtered civilians, they continue to, and we being the United States and then Obama have this tool that allows us to take out bad people without putting Americans in danger, without putting boots on the ground, without entering into these long and very expensive wars. So maybe this is, going back to his Nobel Peace Prize, like maybe this is an effective way to advance global peace by surgically taking out the bad guys without having to get into horrific conflicts. Well, it depends largely on what you think the U.S. military is for. Is it a tool for the common defense of the United States as the Constitution would have it? Or is it more like, you know, the super friends sitting in the Hall of Justice and scanning the monitors and looking for bad people to strike? Also the Jack Goldsmith and Matthew Waxman have an important article recently about Obama's legacy of light footprint warfare is the term they use. And they point out that the so-called light footprint warfare, drone strikes, air strikes from offshore, minor or minimal involvement of large numbers of ground troops, that it's consequential. The consequences are not as immediate and apparent as invading a Middle Eastern country with 150,000 troops. The body bags don't come home, you know, soon if they come home at all. But it's not the case that expanding the target list of the war on terror and this sort of never-ending mission creep, it's not the case that it doesn't result, well, let me say that positively. It can result in blowback at home. You've seen a number of domestic terror attacks in the United States, usually lone wolf terror attacks where the perpetrators have referenced the drone program. And when this happens, certainly it doesn't mean it's justified, these are marginal and often crazy people, but when you have an increase in domestic terror attacks, if you have somebody who cites the existence of the U.S. drone program as a rationale, it doesn't seem to, the feedback loop doesn't seem to operate such that we rethink whether we actually need to be targeting all these groups. Is there a tension in making that argument because, so we've had John Mueller on the show and his argument is long been look, domestic terror attacks are so rare and so minimal that we shouldn't worry about them really much at all and there's not much we can do about them anyway, but they're not a big deal and stop flipping out. So that says that there's not much to them and they're not a very big deal, but you're using them as an argument against large scale foreign policy interventions. And so how can they be an important factor in our considering whether we should try to promote peace overseas if they're not an important factor in deciding what sorts of security we should have at home? Yeah, there's arguably some tension there, but I think the reason that they're somebody shooting up a nightclub or a mall is something to be considered is, well, it's a terrible event, but it's not because it leads to mass slaughter or on the scale of a nuclear exchange. I think the reason to be concerned about it is precisely because we do overreact to the threat of terrorism and we are prone to adopt measures that crack down on civil liberties as a result of these. You know, if alienated suburban teenagers shoot up a school, we all know that if you look at the statistics, school is still about the safest place for a kid to be and in a big country of 330 million people, bad things happen and we're sort of wired to focus on them. The interesting thing you notice is when there is a school shooting, for the most part on the right, the policy prescription is don't do very much. Maybe more armed officers in school, which is a bad idea, maybe armed the teachers, but there is not a call for mass surveillance for fundamentally rethinking constitutional rights in the United States. Now you take a similar scale incident and if it's somebody who follows ISIS, who has had contact with ISIS figures on Twitter or has been inspired by Anwar al-Alaqi's sermons, then the policy prescription is let's ramp up surveillance, let's shut down immigration. So I think the world being what it is, human nature being what it is and our reaction to these things being what it is, it is something you have to take into account when you're considering whether you want to go abroad and add more monsters to the list of monsters to be destroyed. You mentioned the authorization of the use of military force, what we call the AUMF around here, Cato Ann Washington. I mentioned it a few minutes ago. What is that for our listeners who don't know and then what has Obama done more specifically other than what you mentioned, adding certain groups to it, but what has he done to change or alter its words or expand it? It is the authorization, congressional resolution, passed three days after the 9-11 attacks to use all necessary and appropriate force against essentially the perpetrators of the 9-11 attacks and anyone who ate it or harbored them and that principally Al Qaeda and the Taliban. What would you call it a declaration of war? I don't think international lawyers would consider it a declaration of war. I do think there's this whole debate about we should just go back to declaring war. I think for domestic law purposes in terms of does a particular military engagement meet the constitutional requirement, I don't think magic words are required. I think that early on in American history you had wars that were authorized by formal declaration and you had engagements like the quasi-war with France and the Adams administration that had narrower forms of authorization. I think the important thing is that Congress stand and be counted on the decision to use force before force is used. The 2001 AUMF, as I said, principally to go after the perpetrators of the 9-11 attacks and the people who assisted or harbored them. Over the years, and this did certainly start under the Bush administration, the broad language in that resolution which was not as broad as the Bush administration initially proposed became used to justify an expanding succession of jihadist groups, many of which most did not exist on 9-11 and as time went on, whose connections with the original targets of the resolution became more and more tenuous. In fact, you had in the spring of 2013, there's a front page piece in the Washington Post about national security officials and national security lawyers within the Obama administration being concerned that they'd stretched the language of this resolution too far, that it was becoming instead of a something designed to go after the perpetrators of a particular attack, it becomes an all-purpose delegation of congressional war power to the president to go after bad guys, which is not something that it was intended to be. Well that was the spring of 2013 and it was the following summer that Barack Obama invoked the 2001 AUMF by this point, something that existed longer than the Gulf of Tonkin resolution longer than the Vietnam War had carried out, something that actually was passed by Congress before Steve Jobs unveiled the first iPod, Barack Obama invoked the 2001 AUMF for the war against ISIS. The interesting thing about this was that ISIS was in open dispute and in fact open warfare with al-Qaeda, it could hardly be said to be what they term an associated force of al-Qaeda, al-Qaeda is a force that refused to associate with them other than to fight them. Al-Qaeda had excommunicated them and they in fact had pretty different goals strategically and yeah, no doubt some bad guys, you can make an argument about whether we should have relaunched yet another war in the Middle East to go after them, but what I think can't be supported is the notion that the language of the 2001 AUMF supports going after one, two, three many al-Qaeda's, some of which are engaged in beheading members of the other group. It seems that the global war on terror as we now call it though is so different that maybe this is the kind of power that we would like a president to have in the sense of being able to identify and eliminate threats when he deems it necessary because it's a very different world now in terms of possibility of nuclear attack, the possibility of chemical weapons attack and the kind of things that these groups are planning. Maybe it is within the general idea of the AUMF or should we be reading it really literally? There's nothing in the Constitution that says that the president can't undertake a defensive use of force. There's nothing in the Constitution that says, well, the bad guys have to get the first punch and then we can use military force. At the Philadelphia Convention in Madison's notes, the discussion centered around the phrase, the president has the power to repel sudden attacks. That's how some of the framers interpreted the allocation of war powers that they'd achieved in the Constitution. So, applying that framework that offensive uses of force, the United States throwing the first punch are uses of force that require congressional authorization. But applying that to the modern context, it certainly doesn't mean that the president has news of a chemical weapons attack appending by a group that we're not currently at war with. It doesn't require him to sit on his hands and wait to see if the attack happens. Within the Constitution's allocation of war powers, there's room for defensive uses of force by the president. What there isn't room for is what's turned into a perpetual delegation of congressional war power, what the administration has admitted will be a generational struggle, a delegation of war powers that becomes a blank check that the president doesn't have to go to Congress to expand the theory of war to new countries and new groups. Given his expansion, given his drones, given how many countries he's bombed, and what happened to the anti-war movement?  Because he certainly seems to have killed it or at least put it into hibernation until Trump takes over. There's a very good book on that called Party in the Street by two social scientists who did a huge amount of work, the actual field work attending major anti-war rallies over the last 10, 12 years. And in the book, they talk about how the largest anti-war rallies since the Vietnam War took place during the Bush administration, 100,000 people on the mall at one point. And they track the decline of the anti-war movement. What's interesting is it starts to collapse even before Barack Obama is elected and even before he's won the nomination. The last major anti-war rally that they identify was just after the Democrats took over Congress in the 2006 midterms. And they describe it as the movement leaving the field before a single policy victory had been won. And by the time you're in Barack Obama's first term, it's a handful of diehards that you might see at Meridian Hill Park, places like that. It's not a mass movement. And they explained that partisan Democrats who had swelled the ranks of the anti-war protests during the Bush administration just entirely left the field. It's a phenomenon you see in a lot of areas in American political life, this sort of situational constitutionalism. If I, you know, I'm against the imperial presidency when I don't like the color of the robes that the emperor wears, whether they're red or blue, maybe we'll see a rejuvenation of the anti-war movement during the Trump presidency. If you ask a lot of Americans today, one makes an inauguration day when this episode will be released and looking back on the Obama presidency, if you ask them how many wars has Obama fought, I think a lot of Americans would say none. What would be your answer to the question of how many wars has he fought? It's a bit difficult to count. You know, I thought about this.  They didn't like to use the word war. So like Truman called it a police action. They called it a kinetic military action, which seems like a redundancy because I don't know, you can't really have static military action. But I think one of the difficulties in answering the question, how many wars has Barack Obama been involved in is that, you know, there really, as he's pointed out, there isn't sort of a bright line divide and a, you know, a signing ceremony on a U.S. aircraft carrier anymore. Obama, more so than George W. Bush, has really normalized perpetual presidential war. Example I use in the piece, you know, you've seen the reporting recently over 26,000 airstrikes in 2016 alone. Well, an example I use in the piece that struck me at the time was that over, just over Labor Day weekend this summer, the United States hit six separate countries with some 70 airstrikes and, you know, most of us didn't even look up from the grill. This is, this is the new normal. This is, we are at war in a kinetic fashion, the world over, but it's not, it doesn't rise to the level of news. You know, and certainly Obama is not the first, nor was Bush the first president to occasionally use force in ways that don't comport with the Constitution's allocation of military power, but it used to be in the pre-911 era that, you know, these little frolic and detour operations, you know, a drive by a missile strike on Gaddafi by Reagan, you know, a little quick expedition into Grenada or Panama. But what's the Obama presidency has really ushered in and perfected is perpetual low-level war. He leaves office this week as the first president in United States history, the first two-term president to have been at war every single day of his presidency. How much of a role does the press play in that, in his ability to get away with perpetual war, perpetual bombings? Because I remember, you know, when, like, so the first Iraq war, the kind of famous CNN coverage of bombs raining from the sky, and then the second Iraq war, I can remember watching the footage of bombings bagged at night. But you don't see, so this wasn't, you know, they were covering kinetic military action that looks much like the kinetic military action today. It wasn't troops marching in. It was airstrikes. But they're not, we don't have that footage anymore. It's kind of, it's this distance. I know there were a couple of attacks, but we don't really care about it, and we can't see it, and we can't feel it in any meaningful way. And that seems to, does that play into, or is that part of, there's this sense that the press through Obama's eight years kind of abdicated some degree of its adversarial responsibility, that the press seemed to, I mean, the press loved Obama, and so they give him a break? I also want to add on to that with the idea of past reporting of not just the glory, the quote-unquote glory, I'm putting this in the scare quotes of war, but also famously like Walter Cronkite mentioning that the Vietnam War was lost, or actually the photographs from the Battle of Antietam, as soon as the people realize, and it's reported that their bodies coming home, and this also happened in World War I too, as soon as they realized that, World War II is, I think, an aberration because everyone thought that World War II was going to be very difficult. But Civil War, for example, as soon as people are knowing people who died, then there's an anti-war movement. But, and if the press isn't reporting these people dying or it's not a huge thing, and they're not reporting on the glories of war, then the people just remain unaware. All right. I guess I resist the, you know, the monolithic categories like the press or the media because certainly there's been a lot of good reporting done on this. I think a lot of it has to do with the nature of the light, the character of the light footprint warfare that Obama has embraced. The, which in many ways is this, these techniques, this approach is done to keep it out of the headlines. There is an enormous amount of secrecy surrounding these shadow wars. And there are reporters who've done quite a lot to try to uncover it.  So, I do think that there's a, there's a necessary distance to some of this and a distance that's imposed through a veil of secrecy. In fact, one of the most absurd examples of this, I remember seeing in the last few years, is, you know, PolitiFact, the fact-checking organization. I'm putting that in scare quotes for you right now, the fact-checking organization. They don't always do good work. But New Yorker reporter Ryan Lizza, after the war on ISIS started, tweeted out something about, you know, number of countries Obama has bombed in, you know, number of countries Bush bombed. He lists four and number of countries that Obama bombed. I think he listed six. PolitiFact decided to check this out. They ended up rating it mostly true. But the part that was just bizarre about it was they couldn't get an exact count because the line in the piece is both presidents may have bombed the Philippines. There was an airstrike of some sort reported on in the Bush administration and another one reported but not confirmed in the Obama administration. For a long period of time, the policy of the U.S. government, the Obama administration, was we can't let you know which groups we're at war with. ProPublica, the investigative journalism outlet, asked Pentagon spokesman and they got the answer that it would be dangerous to national security for the Pentagon to provide a list of the groups that we consider ourselves at war with under the 2001 AUMF. Because by being on this list, some of these groups could get a shot in the arm and raise their status if the public knew that we were at war with them and that would be more dangerous for us. In fact, around the same time, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing, I forget what it was, maybe Senator Levin who was asking, can we get a list? And the Pentagon official said, finally, okay, we'll give you a list but I'm not going to answer questions about this in an open session. So here's a, you know, you've got this bizarre, you know, people talk about the death of democracy that's coming up during inauguration. But here you have during the Obama administration, you have a situation where senators, you know, you have to twist arms to get a list of who we're at war with, where senators like Ron Wyden had to warn for years about the existence of a secret patriot act that in the administration's internal policies justified a lot more surveillance than the people, the representatives who voted for that act would have authorized. This is a strange situation where you have secret law and wars that are themselves largely in the dark. But maybe we're sort of begging the question on using the word war here because if the government, if the Pentagon were treating this more like a crime fighting endeavor, that these little groups were kind of like organized crime. And if we, because, you know, and then if we went to the FBI, let's say, we said, give us a list of everyone that you're investigating under every mafia group and every paramilitary group in America that you're investigating and tell us who they are publicly. Well, that would be a silly thing for them to do from a lot, from a crime fighting standpoint. So maybe if we stop using the word war and just say, the military is policing these groups like criminal factions, 100 people in a desert somewhere. And no, we're not at war with them, we're policing them like a criminal faction. So we're not going to tell everyone that we're doing it. Well, I suppose if you announced that we're investigating a particular group, they may change their communications practices. But I would think like the value of keeping it a secret that, you know, we're at war with Al Shabaab or another group is fairly limited because you would think at the time of the first drone strike, they'd get a clue about it. Why can't the rest of us have an open public debate about this? And preferably before we add them to the list. Good point. You mentioned the Patriot Act a little bit, which I think is a good way to get into another legacy of Obama, which is the surveillance state. Related to the surveillance state, because a lot of what we've learned has come from leakers. In the reason article, you have another one of these striking statistics about Obama that I think a lot of his supporters are not as familiar with, which is that Obama has conducted more espionage act prosecutions against leakers than all of his predecessors combined. So his legacy there of snooping on Americans and shutting down attempts to talk about this. Yeah. James Risen recently in The Washington Post, the reporter, I mean sorry in The New York Times, has a piece that if you're worried about Trump's threat to the press, you know, blame Obama, there's quite a bit of... The programs that were revealed by Edward Snowden in the summer of 2013 began in the Bush administration, but they were deliberately continued by the Obama administration under a secret theory of the Patriot Act that does violence to ordinary language by making potentially all Americans call records and other records relevant, quote unquote, relevant to an ongoing investigation of counter-terrorism. And the very word relevant seems to presume the existence of things that are not relevant. And you saw some reform in the wake of the Snowden revelations. In fact, the original articles in The Guardian came out. President Obama famously said, you know, I welcome this debate, while at the same time his Justice Department had filed a secret indictment under seal of the espionage act charges against the guy who made this debate possible, Edward Snowden. You did see some reform, the USA Freedom Act, some executive branch reform as well as a result of the fact that most people did not appreciate what the government was doing in their name and in secret. But again, on the way out of office just this month, President Obama has made it easier to share raw signals intelligence picked up abroad, which can include a large amount of Americans communication content, internet and phone call for the NSA to share that information in raw unfiltered, unminimized form with a larger array of federal intelligence agencies and enforcement agencies, including the Drug Enforcement Administration and the Department of Homeland Security. As I write in the piece, there have been occasions where Obama has publicly and privately worried about the growth of executive power under his administration. And you would think that this worry would be quite a bit heightened given that the person that he's handing the keys over to is someone that Obama himself has said was unfit to be president and couldn't be trusted with the Twitter account, let alone the nuclear launch codes. But yet on his way out the door, he is opening new fronts in the forever war and expanding the executive branch's surveillance powers. Let's talk about that sort of transition power because as you write in the piece, candidate Obama and even I think it was 2002 when he gave his speech on the Iraq war, candidate Obama was heavily critical of executive power, heavily critical of forever war, critical of the Iraq war, critical of the way Bush administration had pretty much done everything regarding the global war on terror. And then he just carries on, if not as we've described, augments it. What do you think explains this? I mean, do you think it's that, it's sort of a tendency in a lot of presidents, like the next president pretty much does in these areas a lot of what the previous president does. But do you think it is that Obama learned things that he didn't know and became scared, or do you think it's that he changed his mind about war, or do you think it's that he did what he thought voters needed or his sense of responsibility as president? I mean, what sort of thing explains this and then maybe we can figure out what Trump might do, although that might itself be a crazy act. But at least for Obama, what might explain this? I think like a lot of bad outcomes in public policy, it's over determined. There are a number of explanations. The one that I find least plausible is that he learned things in the president's daily brief that sobered him up with the sense of the vast responsibility and the threats that are out there and that that's the most charitable explanation. Two other explanations. One is offered by the professor Michael Glennon, who wrote a great book called National Security in Double Government about the influence of the permanent national security bureaucracy on presidents in general and particularly this president. And Glennon says that the end points to quite a bit of evidence that the president is not as much in charge as we might like to think or not like to think, depending on who's president, that for example, early on Obama was pressured by the Joint Chiefs and the military to go even further than he had promised to go in the Afghan surge, that early on the intelligence community made a full court press on Obama that they actually called the aw-shit campaign to induce the president and the people coming in to the White House with him to scare them basically into thinking that surveillance and ramped up drone strikes were necessary. So there's a lot of bureaucratic inertia that drives this to the extent that I think it's actually pretty plausible when Obama, when we all found out that Angela Merkel's cell phone was tapped, the explanation that Obama didn't know that I think is actually quite plausible. The other explanation that I think is very important and particularly in this case is the old Pogo principle, we have met the enemy and he is us. The public's demand for and the political consequences of a terror strike in the United States, you know, the president is, the buck really does stop with the president on those sorts of issues, even if the president has no realistic chance of in a large and open society preventing every type of terrorist attack. So there are multiple accounts, deeply reported accounts of internal decision making in the national security team in the Obama presidency and many of them talk about the failed Christmas bombing, the underwear bomber in 2009 and how that really concentrated the mind wonderfully like the prospect of a hanging for Obama. That David Axelrod, the political guru, started attending the terror team national security meetings as a president, sort of the implication is warning that the whole administration could go down over something like this. Now that doesn't, you can shoehorn that into the explanation that he learned that the world was a more dangerous place than he thought, or you could read that as, you know, my political butt is on the line if, you know, we don't do something about this. I, you know, there's a, there was an argument that Obama would be quote, our first civil libertarian president that was popular back in the days of of new hope around his first inauguration. It's an easy argument to make fun of, but I do think like Obama did present a different sort of profile than you usually get in the presidency, somebody with a high ACLU rating who taught constitutional law, who had shown some commitment to civil liberties issues as a state senator and otherwise. That did not survive its first contact with the national security bureaucracy and the insatiable demands of the public for perfect protection from terrorism. Let's turn to his unilateral use of executive action because this is one of the other things that terrifies about the guy who's going to take over or is taking over on the day that we released this episode is Obama, he has his line about having a pen and a phone. He seemed to grow the presidency as a branch of government that doesn't need to wait for the other branches. And this is part of his legacy that seems to get explained away by his supporters as, well, he had to deal with an obstructionist Congress. He had Republicans controlling Congress and they wouldn't let him get anything done and the country needed things gotten done. And so he had to step up and do it. Is that, is it fair to say, is that a fair explanation for why he had to do these things? Does it let him off the hook a bit? Did he really grow the presidency in that way over, say, where it was when he came into office? In some ways, yes. I mean, there's an old piece of conventional wisdom from presidential political science, which is that we have two presidencies from an article by Aaron Woldowski. There are two presidencies. There's one that operates in the national security foreign affairs arena and there the president can get away with quite a bit. And then there's the domestic presidency where, you know, if the president wants a new campaign finance reform bill or a new healthcare bill, well, he's got to convince Congress. So that thesis, I think, has a lot to it. One complication of it is that foreign affairs national security, particularly in the era of the war on terrorism, is not something that happens over there. It's something that in areas like surveillance and secrecy affects American rule of law right at home. But the president's freedom of action is still more limited. Obama made some significant encroachments on that and ran into some pushback from the courts and to some extent from Congress. The immigration homeland security directive has run into trouble and will likely be undone by Trump. And one of the things that was most striking to me in terms of a domestic increase of executive power with little regard for, with no involvement in national security or any argument like that, was his use of a presidential power of the purse with regard to the implementation of Obamacare where, you know, Congress did not pass the appropriations for cross subsidies to insurers and they just found the money and started spending it. And this is really, I go into it in the article a little bit. There's this really funny shades of David Addington. That's a Chinese legal counsel. Shades of David Addington moment where people at the IRS who were objecting to this finding of money that hadn't been appropriated were taken and shown a secret memo and told they couldn't take notes and they couldn't take the memo with them. And when questioned about this, where do you get the authority to just spend money when questioned about this congressional hearing, nobody from the administration could actually point to a source of statutory or constitutional authority, although one Treasury official said, well, if Congress doesn't want us to spend the money, they could pass a bill that says, specifically, don't spend the money. So the default is we can spend the money and they have to tell us not to. Yeah, it turns it completely upside down. That ran into trouble in the DC district court. It's still up in the air how that's going to be resolved. But in areas like that, he made some significant encroachments not always successful. But I think the growth in the administrative state and the so-called fourth branch of government, which is actually in the executive branch, this isn't something he invented, it's something he enhanced. And it's something that increasingly reaches into more intimate areas of American life. I was thinking about the executive orders that Trump can issue in his first few weeks in office. It struck me that there used to be, it's a common thing in the modern era for new presidents when the presidency changes parties to issue a flurry of executive orders early on in their first term to signal to their constituents that he's got your back and get some things done. But the one that used to be prominent is this thing you may remember called the Mexico City policy. It's about foreign aid for family planning. Reagan issued this policy at a conference in Mexico City saying no foreign aid to any groups that give family planning advice or contraception, abortion, that kind of stuff. Bill Clinton reverses it on his first day in office. George W. Bush puts it back in. Barack Obama turns it off. So there used to be things like this would be significant things but not how much you're going to pay on your electric bill, what's going to be in your insurance, who gets to say in the country legally. More and more the sweeping unilateral directives of the president can issue, you know, make large changes in American life that sure as heck look like law. So let's talk about that wispy-haired demagogue who if you're listening to this afternoon eastern time on January 20th is now the president of the United States. We've just discussed all the things that President Obama who at least as an individual goes, seems like someone I'd like to hang out with. As you said, it seemed like he came in with a huge civil libertarian streak that maybe was squashed by the national security establishment. He knows constitutional law. All around seemingly a pretty good guy. Now we have someone who is not a good guy who is going to take these powers over. What should we expect from if you're either specifically or generally? What should we expect from the presidency of Donald J. Trump? Well, I don't know that you should trust my predictions. I mean, I was as clueless as everybody else in this town about who's going to win the election. You know, I don't know if it will be more like a Berlusconi administration or something quite a bit worse. I do think that one of the things that disturbs me most about the president-elect's behavior, her president, I guess when people are listening to this, is he is sort of the extreme version of a lot of trends that have been happening with the modern presidency for a long time. He is the cult of the presidency and the growth of the modern presidency and the presidential role turned up to 11. I stopped following Barack Obama's, our first Twitter president, Barack Obama. I stopped following his feed sometime back just because it was boring. It was so written by committee and let's celebrate our national parks. Nothing like check out sex tape or Alec Baldwin is a mean-spirited hack. Meryl Streep is overrated. That was my new favorite one. There was a notion that there were the constitutional checks on the presidency, but there were also a whole common law of informal checks around presidential behavior that eroded quite a bit over time. But the founders were very leery of anything that would later be called the bully pulpit. They didn't believe that the president's role was to be the leader of the country or a popular leader. That was a horrifying idea for them. The Federalist papers literally begin and end with passages in Federalist 1 on Demagoguery and Federalist 85, the dangers of a popular leader. Nearly all of their references to popular leadership are negative. The president wasn't supposed to be the tribune of the people. In fact, he had a almost anti-democratic or a Berkian representation role where he would resist these passions and tumults and wait and provide time for public opinion to cool and catch up with the actual common good. Now, that doesn't sound much like the ethic that's surrounded the presidency for all of our lifetimes. But again, Trump is a step or a leap and a bound further in that trend. The use of Twitter to signal displeasure with popular entertainers and negative articles or to announce that you're meeting the president of Taiwan and go on a rant about China when people object to making policy on the fly like this, it's very different. The talk recently that he might want to continue mass rallies while he's in the White House. Now, presidents and presidential candidates weren't even supposed to campaign and to the large extent didn't do it throughout the entire 19th century. So, we have mass rallies with candidates. A few mass rallies for Obama, but he's talking about doing this on a regular basis. It's a different role for the president. Then there is some of the rhetoric, and I think rhetoric matters because it does give you a clue into what behavior might be like. I mean, he's really the apotheosis of the idea of the president as a populist tribune. In the acceptance speech for the Republican nomination, I alone can fix it. I am your voice, which actually in the prepared for delivery version that the that the Trump people released, I am your voice is in all caps like a chain email from a crazy uncle. I guess the upside is it's interesting to be in Washington these days in a way that it hasn't been quite as interesting for some time. Generations from now when we look back and assess President Obama and his presidency alongside his peers, how do you think he's going to look? How do you think he's going to rank? Is he going to be one of the top tier presidents? Is he going to slip down? What are we going to think of him? Well, history's judgment on these things is usually pretty bad is one thing. What the popular and the scholarly view of Obama is going to be is one question and what it should be is another. But if you look at the people who dominate presidential rankings, Woodrow Wilson is still in the top 10. People who dream big, do great things and break a lot of stuff along the way tend to do better. War actually helps you as a president, but it's a couple of studies have shown the number of U.S. combat deaths is a positive predictor for where you end up on the presidential rankings. The particular kind of warfare that Obama has favored, which outside of Afghanistan has been lower casualty at least among American troops may cut against that. But I think he will obviously always have the first black president. The legacy of Obamacare is now in which might have been the second line item in any description. That legacy is now in jeopardy. But I think in terms of what his legacy should be recognized as, I think it's usually important that he, having campaigned on being the candidate who was going to turn the page on the imperial presidency and usher in a new dawn of peace, he has ended up being the first two-term president to be at war every day of his presidency. And he has in significant ways grown and already too powerful presidency. The presidency he inherited from Bush and Cheney grown that presidency and strengthened it. And now he pays it forward to Donald Trump. So to the extent that Donald Trump is going to be able to do, to work a lot of mischief with this powerful presidency, I think Obama should be held to account for that in his legacy. Thanks for listening. This episode of Free Thoughts was produced by Tess Terrible and Evan Banks. To learn more, visit us at www.libertarianism.org.


First of all, I think that the youth is much more well It's very implicated and much more conscious of environments for example I'm sure you'll know of Greta Thunberg Greta Thunberg is a 16 year old 16 year old woman and she took time off out of her school and posted herself outside of the Swedish Embassy to to just Talk about environment just she was there with her sign saying we should do something for environment We should stop Polluting etc. And she was just taking her time off her school to say that at 16 years old and Following that just three weeks ago 1 million students took their Friday off out of school to walk in the streets with their banners saying we should do something We should act time is flying and the world is probably dying and so thanks to this Greta Which is 16 years old things have happened and for example, there's also on social media Yeah, we see some things are changing just like two days ago I was on Instagram just following the feed and I found a publicity of Ecosia a publicity which was telling me to plant trees I mean, I've never seen that before we usually see publicities of you know shampoo Hairdressing etc. And that was a publicity for planting trees and I thought that's amazing I mean people actually paying money to push us to plant trees and so I think this new vision of environments and Feeling that we should help the word etc. Is mostly done through education and because education is Something really important in which the young person Finds what he thinks. I remember when I was at school in primary just a few years ago I would we would try and find solutions in order to consume less use less electricity use less water We were being giving filters to place on our taps so that we would use less water at home And I'm sure at 20 years ago that wasn't be doing that wasn't be done People wouldn't even be thinking of their usage of water of the usage of electricity So I believe that this education and this new trend on social media is at the forefront of this kind of Revolution of seeing environments in a positive way that I think is positively strong in the youth and so Today I will give you an example of what I have done and what the youth are doing in order to Work for development etc. So it's called model United Nations, and it's basically Model United Nations. We're trying to pretend to be the model United to be the United Nations Sorry, and this might seem like a game of pretending Of trying to be a diplomat etc. But actually it's it's completely the contrary. There were 600 students It's a conference we organized with our school 600 students that came from 28 countries here in Geneva To talk about issues to talk about the world talk about environments etc And I think there are three big positive aspects as first of all it means that these students They can learn about the world and see what is going on What are the main issues of the world because one one? Students has to take the role of a diplomat of a diplomat from another country. They have to Research on that country and find a new perspective on the world something they hadn't known about So I think that is how education can come forth in this instance There's also the fact that there are 600 people from 28 countries just like voices where 3,000 participants It's a whole new scale, but it's also the scale of we of finding people from all around the world and realizing that we are all in The same world and all living the same dreams and that we can all work together towards those same dreams And finally, I think that this platform this model United Nations is also a platform for the youth to speak their ideas Because we talk about class extensions we talk about racism we talk about sexism and those barriers which make some people not as Expressive, but I believe in one barrier, which I call the youth barrier, which means that the youth people Don't really Consider the children. I mean it's completely normal. I don't really want to listen to someone which has less experience than me Which has no idea about what's going on It's always kind of hard to go across that barrier, but I believe and we always think, you know, they always want things to change Every year the youth wants things to change. It's normal. It's what they want And but that is normal because a society which doesn't change is a society which is doomed the world is changing technology is changing technology is evolving and If we want our society to survive then we must the society to evolve and to adapt to this new society I would like to finish with an image. I like to think of us as fish in the fish tank If we don't change the water The world becomes dark But if we change this water then everything becomes clearer and we feel alive