One day in 1975, Bob Randall came home to find that his house had been ransacked. On his kitchen table there was a search warrant and a note from the police demanding that he turn himself in. And the crime Randall was guilty of was growing a couple of marijuana plants for personal use. His plants, of course, had already been confiscated. But Bob Randall was no recreational user. In 1973, Bob Randall was hanging out with some friends and one of his friends rolled a joint and they started passing it around. Randall had never smoked marijuana before, but he decided to try it. Why shouldn't he? His life was already going downhill. Two years ago, at the age of 23, he was diagnosed with glaucoma and he was told he would be blind before he turned 30. He had already had to stop driving a taxi because his vision was deteriorating so quickly and neither surgeries nor prescription medications had been able to help him. But Randall decided to smoke some marijuana with his friends and not long after he took his first puff he looked up and he noticed something different about the streetlight above him. Normally, all he would see is a halo around the light. This time, though, the halo was gone and he was actually able to see the lamp itself clearly for the first time in years. He started self-medicating and his checkups with his doctor confirmed that the marijuana use was successfully treating his glaucoma. Randall's decision to grow his own marijuana was based on his need to have a consistent supply, which he really couldn't get reliably from the black market. Bob Randall made himself a criminal because his other option was to gradually go blind. In 1975, when Randall got busted, he was only guilty of a misdemeanor. He would not have served jail time. He simply had to pay a fine and move on. But Randall decided that was still an injustice. So he got the support of Normal, the national organization for the reform of marijuana laws, and he sued the federal government for the right to use marijuana as a medical treatment. And in the hearings, the Schaefer Commission was cited as demonstrating that there was no medical foundation for marijuana prohibition and that any sane person would violate the law if it meant treating a condition like glaucoma. And the judge agreed. Following his acquittal, Randall petitioned the government for a supply of legal cannabis from the government-controlled marijuana farm in the University of Mississippi. The federal bureaucrats resisted, of course. They first said he could use marijuana but only in a hospital while a doctor supervised. This wasn't good enough, said Randall. Next, they told him that he could have marijuana but only if he kept it in a 750-pound safe. Still not good enough. But Randall was getting a lot of press attention during the case and was making the feds look bad. So finally, they agreed to send him 300 marijuana cigarettes every month and until his death in 2001, Bob Randall legally smoked 10 government-provided joints every day. I'm Chris Cowton and this is the Mises Institute podcast, Historical Controversies. And today, we're going to be looking at the drug war between the Nixon and the Reagan years. These are the years in which marijuana finally became as much of a concern to the American public as the government had been trying to make it. But it only did this after activists like Bob Randall nearly got marijuana rescheduled and the events that took place that led to this rise and fall of the pro-pot movement are important to understanding the Reagan war on drugs that came after it. One important player in this study is Keith Stroop in the organization he founded, which I've already mentioned. In 1970, Stroop founded NORMAL, which originally stood for the national organization for the repeal of marijuana loss and it was only after a friend urged him to soften the tone that he changed the R to stand for the more modest reform. With the founding of NORMAL, Keith Stroop established himself as Mr. Marijuana. For most of the 70s, NORMAL was the go-to organization for pro-cannabis information, but the federal government did its best to ignore them. When the Schaefer Commission was formed, Stroop was furious. It was clearly being formed with an anti-marijuana bias, stacking the study with conservative drug hawks picked by Nixon himself, including Raymond Schaefer, who, if you remember, was the governor of Pennsylvania, and he was a well-known drug hawk, and Stroop wrote the commission pleading to be allowed to testify, and he was refused. Of course, this ultimately went matters. The Schaefer Commission came to the conclusions that supported NORMAL's agenda, and of course the federal government ignored its own commission once this happened. But during the Nixon years, the government mostly ignored NORMAL. This was just part of the anti-war hippie crowd. They weren't worth the government's time. Then Jimmy Carter came into office and he made Peter Bourne his drug czar. Kind of like Jerome Jaff, the first drug czar. Bourne was a fan of the methadone treatments, and he wasn't really sure why there was so much hostility toward marijuana. In the first meeting, Bourne and President Carter had, they even discussed marijuana decriminalization. So Carter was nervous about complete decriminalization. It might look too much like the government was condoning marijuana use, but Bourne introduced what would later be classified as the harm reduction approach to the drug policy. He took this from the Netherlands strategy when they decriminalized marijuana. And he said that even if marijuana is harmful, it's clearly not as harmful as prison. So the prohibition is senseless. And even Bob DuPont, Nixon's second drug czar who replaced Jerome Jaff, even he agreed with Bourne at this point. If you remember, Jerome Jaff also thought that marijuana was something that didn't need to be criminalized. So all three of the first drug czars didn't understand why marijuana was criminalized. I think that's an interesting point. So Bourne finally got Carter to compromise. And instead of recommending full decriminalization, the president would recommend reducing the penalty of marijuana possession to a mere civil fine instead of actual criminal penalties. So by the late 1970s, it was looking like normal would achieve its goal of marijuana reform. Bourne even struck up a friendship with Keith Stroop. When Carter was going to make a speech offering his recommendation about marijuana, Stroop was invited over to the apartment of Griffin Smith, Jr. who was assigned to write Carter's speech on the matter. And the two actually worked on the speech together. It's possible that Stroop overplayed his hand here. Carter's domestic policy advisor, Stu Eisenstadt, read the speech and decided he needed to jump in on this. He wrote to Carter saying that the speech actually presented a case for marijuana that can be construed as lauding cannabis use. And he cited excerpts from the speech, each one of which had been crafted by Stroop himself. And they significantly softened the message after Carter agreed with him. But Carter did give a speech to Congress that advocated effectively decriminalizing marijuana through extreme reforms to the law. And I'll read an excerpt from the speech. Carter said, quote, penalties against possession of a drug should not be more damaging to an individual than the use of the drug itself. And where they are, they should be changed. Nowhere is this more clear than in the laws against possession of marijuana in private for personal use. Therefore, I support legislation amending federal law to eliminate all federal criminal penalties for this possession of up to one ounce of marijuana. So things were looking good for the reform movement. So why did everything go wrong? Well, several years before this in 1973, Time Magazine ran an article entitled, Teranical King of Coke. This article depicted cocaine as a high class drug taken exclusively by wealthy socialites.  And mostly among the wealthy, Time said, Coke was in fashion. So by the late 70s, cocaine use was much more common and this meant that it was being used at parties hosted by normal, including Keith Stroop himself. In 1978, Normal was hosting a Christmas party and Peter Born decided to make an appearance to visit his friend Keith Stroop. And upon walking into the party, he was very pleasant and he shook hands with the activists and he politely rejected offers of joints that were being presented to him. And then somebody offered him a vial of cocaine. And at the time, Born ignored it. As far as I know, he didn't use the cocaine, but this episode would come back to haunt him. Stroop's relationship with Born would also quickly sour but not because of the cocaine at the party. Instead, their relationship soured because of the efforts by the Carter administration to spray the herbicide periquad with the assistance of the Mexican government on Mexican marijuana farms and the policy and furiated Stroop. And he later acknowledged that a lot of his behavior on the issue was driven by his cocaine use at the time and Stroop took his fury out on Peter Born. So Stroop felt betrayed. Stroop told Born that the administration's periquad policy was putting American pot smokers in danger. Periquad soaked marijuana was making it into the US and poisoning drug users. And Born defended the policy by reminding Stroop that marijuana was illegal, but this only made Stroop matter. Yeah, it was illegal, but that doesn't mean that it's right to poison people. Now in Stroop's defense, if I can offer a small aside, the periquad policy was terrible, but not for the reasons that Stroop was focusing on. How much periquad was affecting marijuana in the United States is questionable, but it seems like it wasn't nearly the problem that Stroop was making it out to be if it was even an issue at all. The real problem was that the periquad policies were destroying the livelihoods of subsistence farmers in Mexico. These were people who lived at a level of poverty that Americans can hardly imagine and growing cannabis was a way for them to actually survive. So by destroying their crops, the government was destroying their lives. And it's not like they could just jump to another crop and move on. So this was a devastating policy and the government would continue similar policies in South America in later years, not only destroying the economic livelihoods of poor coca growers in South America, but even contaminating their water supplies and effectively poisoning South American farmers directly with their herbicide spraying. And if you read Martin Lee's very popular book, Smoke Signals, he claims that Stroop took revenge on Born over the periquad issue by leaking the story about the cocaine in the Christmas party to the press. But it seems to be a distortion of the full story. What actually happened was more the fault of Peter Born himself and another member of Normal, Gary Cohn. So one of Born's employees, a woman named Ellen Metzge confided to him that she was having a great deal of difficulty sleeping and she asked him for a prescription. Born was a psychiatrist and he could write prescriptions. But she said, since he works for the White House, she wanted to keep the fact that she was taking sleeping pills on the down low. So she asked if he could make the prescription out under a fake name. Born agreed and he wrote Metzge a prescription for Kweilud under the pseudonym Sarah Brown. Metzge actually got her friend named Tabby Long to fill the prescription for her and as a matter of sheer bad luck, when Long went to fill the prescription, there was a state pharmacy inspector on the grounds and he overheard her filling a prescription for Kweilud which he knew as a drug popularly abused as a sex enhancer. So Long, of course, was unable to identify herself as Sarah Brown. So the inspector called the police and had her arrested. Then the police tracked down the doctor who wrote the prescription and Born tried to explain everything. He was a doctor. He's allowed to write prescriptions for Kweilud. He admitted that it was wrong to use a false name but that was just a misdemeanor. He said, not a criminal felony. And the issue really wasn't turning out to be much of a scandal. But then, Born decided to do an interview on the Dick Cavett show. And the interview itself was unnoteworthy but after the show, Ronna Barrett who hosted a Hollywood gossip show, she reported that on the Cavett show, Born advocated the use of cocaine. Now, Barrett was lying. Born never advocated the use of cocaine on the show that was completely made up. And when Born called her up, Barrett refused to speak with him but a staffer said that she heard the story from a member of her staff. So that's essentially the level of journalism that Barrett was doing at the time. So then the New York Post ran a story about some drug arrests involving a man who by coincidence had received treatment at one of Born's addiction clinics in Georgia several years earlier. And in this story, the Post tried to capitalize on the gossip by saying that, quote, questions remain about Born's other connections to the drug ring. As far as anybody can tell, the answer to those questions was that there was no connection but the yellow journalists at the Post had papers to sell. Born was in the news and a scandal was constantly accompanied by reminders that he had been a longtime advocate of marijuana decriminalization. So then Gary Cohn, who was an active member of Normal and a friend of Keith Strube, he called Strube up. He said, we have to talk. We have to talk about the Christmas party. And Cohen had been sitting on the story of Born and the cocaine for eight months. Now he just heard this as rumors. So he didn't actually see Born get offered the cocaine, but he knew about it. So now with the prescription drug scandal, Cohen said he had to release the story before somebody else did. So again, he hadn't been in the room at the time and Strube knew that Cohen hadn't been in the room when Born was presented with the cocaine. But Cohen wanted confirmation from Strube that Born had snorted cocaine before he released the story. And even though Strube and Born were not on good terms at this point, Strube refused to confirm anything. So Cohen kept pushing. Everybody was doing Coke in the room, he said. Did Born snort any? Strube still refused to answer. Finally, Cohen said that he was going to release the story whether Strube confirmed it or not. He just wanted to know if he was going to get sued for printing it. Off the record, Strube said that no, Cohen would not get sued for running the story saying that Strube snorted cocaine at the Normal Christmas party. And later, Strube would say that this was the biggest mistake of his life. So the story ran in the very next morning at 7 a.m., Good Morning America told the world that the drug czar Peter Born had snorted cocaine at a party of pro-pot activists. Born denied it. He admitted that he had been in the room, but he said that he did not partake. And as far as we can tell, this is probably true, but it didn't matter. Senator Orrin Hatch claimed that Born, quote, has done more harm than any public official in the history of the government, which is among the most laughable exaggerations I have ever heard. So he wrote a resignation letter, Born did, and in the end of his resignation letter, his last sentence, he wrote that, quote, I fear for the future of the nation far more than I do for the future of your friend, Peter G. Born. Shortly before the Born scandal, there was also an Atlanta woman who was starting a grassroots movement against marijuana. Her name was Marcia Keith-Schuchard, and she always went by her middle name, Keith, which makes it really confusing when you read about her. And she caught her daughter and some friends smoking marijuana at her daughter's 12th birthday party in the mid-70s. This was at the height of marijuana consumption in the United States. The reason why this Schuchard thought little of marijuana and had even used it herself in college, but finding that her 12-year-old daughter was smoking marijuana absolutely horrified her. So she called the parents of every child there and let them know what she found. She was surprised to see how little most parents cared. It's just marijuana, they said. Some were angry that she was snooping behind their kids in the first place and others accused her of being a hypocrite since she drank alcohol. So despite all of Nixon and Ann Slinger's efforts, most people still weren't that concerned about the marijuana in the 1970s. So Schuchard organized a meeting of about 30 parents and even at the meeting many of the parents were against her, but she plowed forward anyway. Weren't these kids going downhill? They were rebellious, they were withdrawn. Basically they were acting like adolescents but such logic escaped Schuchard and other parents started conceding that their kids were also acting surprisingly like teenagers and so now they started blaming each other, accusing other people's kids of being responsible for leading their own children astray. So Schuchard then went on to go talk to the school guidance counselor and she was appalled to find that the counselor told her not to worry, marijuana isn't addictive, he said and it was normal for kids to experiment. When she talked to a therapist, he told her she should be glad her kid was using marijuana rather than alcohol. And she looked at the school's book on drug abuse and she was horrified to see that the books called marijuana less harmful than tobacco and wouldn't even advise children to use a water pipe to cool the smoke and to avoid burning their clothes if you can believe that. Now of course marijuana is less harmful than tobacco but I remember when I was going through elementary school we were taught that seven joints equaled the harm of one cigarette and I believed it for years. I mean it seems plausible when you're in fifth grade and you don't think critically about things like that but back in the 70s, the government acknowledged that marijuana wasn't as harmful as tobacco at least some people in government did. So then Shusher decided that she better go watch this Cheech and Chong movie that she kept seeing everywhere. She came out of the movie determined that marijuana was a major problem.  So she decided to start an organization which she called the Nosey Parents Association. After a couple years of her anti-marijuana crusade Shusher met Buddy Gleaton. Buddy Gleaton taught anti-drug courses and he had never used any drugs himself but he was appalled when he was looking for information on them to find that when he asked the National Institute on Drug Abuse for information on marijuana they actually referred him to normal. So in 1978 he and Shusher got together and Shusher was telling him everything she knew about marijuana. THC reduces testosterone she said it damages your immune system it causes a motivational syndrome. It causes the growth of breast tissue in teenage boys none of this was true but Shusher probably genuinely believed it. So she and Gleaton started a new organization called Parents Resource Institute for Drug Education or PRIDE. Carter's new drug czar Lee Dogaloff agreed to meet with Shusher and Gleaton and the pair came into his office and Shusher immediately started telling him all the horrible effects of marijuana. Her lecture was really uninteresting to Dola Goff so Gleaton took a different approach. He pointed to a picture on Dola Goff's desk and he asked are these your kids? Think about your daughter Gleaton tells him and he takes the duffel bag that he and Shusher brought with him and he up turns the contents on his desk and out comes copies of the magazine High Times and marijuana paraphernalia like pipes and bongs. Marijuana is a billion dollar industry Gleaton tells him then he goes on to talk about all the products people are advertising to kids one of them that he gave as an example was 17 magazine advertising eye drops to get red out of a girl's eye and of course the red comes from marijuana use. This is the drug culture that Dola Goff's daughter was immersed in. So Shusher jumps in and says to him that the problem is that people are still making distinctions between hard drugs and soft drugs. Now this was actually kind of laughable since we know from the previous episode that the government and the media had been spending the last decade trying to eliminate this distinction but this was a new administration and Dola Goff wasn't part of that narrative. So finally Gleaton says to Dola Goff we're not afraid of our kids, we love them too much and Dola Goff jumps out of his chair and he says that's it, that's drug prevention. The tough love campaign was born. The same year, Shusher was given a contract to write a handbook for parents about the dangers of marijuana and of course Shusher had absolutely zero qualifications to write such a book so naturally she accepted the contract without hesitation and the book was entitled Parents, Peers and Pot and it was 80 pages of poorly researched information about the many, many dangers of smoking marijuana and she published it under her maiden name, Marcia Manette and she used this name because her daughter Ashley was already being bullied for having the supreme nosy mom as a parent. So it made no mention of the Schaefer commission but it spent more than a fourth of the book citing studies about all the problems marijuana caused. Caused heart disease, it caused cancer, it caused sterility and on and on and it claimed that marijuana smoking was an epidemic and conveniently ignored the fact that despite the marijuana epidemic, none of the problems marijuana smoking supposedly caused were actually apparent in teenagers at all. The book also classified behaviors for parents to look for to identify if their child was smoking pot. If they drop out of sports, if they use foul language, if their grades drop, basically things that are common for teenagers in general became symptoms upon which to conclude that your child is a pothead. Shusher's circular reasoning would stay with her for the rest of her crusade and by the way, Parents, Peers and Pot is still available for free download on government websites. When Reagan came into office, Shusher's activism and other grassroots movements that followed her had already essentially paved the way for Reagan's war on drugs and throughout the 80s, Shusher had continued her campaign and she was a big name at this point. Through her organization Pride, she was traveling all across the country and speaking to high school classes and just to give you an idea of the kind of person she was. One of her strategies for convincing kids not to use drugs and she talked about this in an interview, she would pick out a scrawny boy in class, especially if you might have something like grateful dead stickers on his notebook or other things that might link him to marijuana culture. And she would explain that using marijuana reduces testosterone levels and if you wanted to be manly and muscular, you should avoid pot. So she would point to the scrawny kid in the class and ask him to stand up and then she would make him take off his shirt. Do you see what smoking pot can do to you? She'd say as the class stared at the poor kid, she decided to humiliate despite having no actual knowledge of whether or not he smoked marijuana. So by the time Reagan came into office, much of the country would finally believe the narrative that Nixon and Ann Slinger had been trying to craft for years. Marijuana was addictive, dangerous, and it deserved to be classified with all the hard drugs people were actually dying from. So when Reagan decided to wage his renewed war on drugs, he would enjoy bipartisan, country-wide support and this would allow him and the rest of the government to pass some of the most anti-liberty and genuinely destructive policies the country has ever seen. And that's what I'm gonna start talking about in the next episode. So you're definitely gonna wanna pay attention to that one. This is where we see the establishment and the evolution of some of the most horrendous laws that libertarians love to rail against. And probably some horror stories that even libertarians themselves aren't aware of. Some very crazy things. You definitely wanna listen to this. So if you have not already subscribed to the podcast and thank you for listening. For more content like this, visit mesis.org.


I have officially fallen down the TikTok rabbit hole. When I say that, I have found so many fun Amazon finds from watching TikTok and I wanted to bring them to you today because they're really fun things. Some things are kind of frivolous and not necessary. Other things are very useful and very handy to have. One of the things that I'm going to start off with right now is something that I found. I'll buy Malonesum so I can show that to you. And then by the way, if you're interested the shirt can be linked. I did get it off of Amazon. It is the cutest shirt. I'll put a full size look of it right here so that you can see. It has this lap over or you know wrap around type effect that really helps you show that you kind of have a waist and helps the girls look a little bit more lifted and a little bit more full which is helpful as you age. Let me pan you in and you can see the earrings. And then the earrings, they're way cute. They're just a hoop and they have little dangles off of them and then the jewelry. I forgot to put that on as I was talking into the into the very beginning of the video. So I'm really excited about those that I can link those. Oh by the way, the footage that I'm recording right now, it got corrupted on the original video. So about like five minutes in you're going to actually see me change. I'm going to have different hair done and different clothes on. That's because that was the past me. This is future me. And I had to record this intro for you and a couple of products that I completely spaced off. So let's get into all these super fun Amazon finds that I got sucked in by TikTok by. All right, first of all is this little plastic thing that looks like a crystal bottle of perfume. It's not crystal. It's plastic and it's really not a bottle of perfume. It's a fan and I just thought this was so cute. It has three speeds and hopefully you'll be able to hear that. I'm sure you will. It has three speeds and I use this. I set it on my dresser or my nightstand and I use it to dry my setting spray. Now they have a lot of different fans that they have used forever for this, but I just thought this one was so cute and so much fun. And this little middle piece is a little medallion that will pop off if I try to right now. I'm going to ruin a fingernail, but you just take it and you pop that off and you could put a drop of essential oil in there. You can put a little spray of your favorite perfume in there if you want to, whatever you want to. I just, this is totally frivolous. It's one of those things that I really didn't need, but I wanted to have it because I just thought it was so dang cute and they are everywhere.  I thought it was just adorable. Something fun that I can put in my purse if I want to or just have it on my dresser too. So it's so cute. Another one is this silicone holder for your makeup sponges. Now, I don't know about you, but when I use my makeup sponges, they still have makeup on them. They're still a little bit wet. This has saved everything else that I have in my makeup bag from getting that extra foundation on it. So you just put it down in there. It's pretty big. This has still got a lot of room and that has fully inflated from having the water in it. So you just put it in there, you cover it up or you put the top on and it is ventilated and then it's not getting all over your other makeup. I really have enjoyed that one. Another one that I was super excited about, including, I do have another mirror in here, but this one goes on your visor in your car. I do my makeup in the car constantly because my husband and I are constantly on the go somewhere and the mirror that I have right now is this big. It's tiny. So when I saw this one, I was super excited about it. I have my charger on here that I'm going to show you in just a second. So I have to show you that is so bright and when I got it, I'm like, that's going to be way too bright. It does have other settings that you can put it on, kind of a warmer setting and I was like, dang it. This is too bright and it's just going to absolutely blind me as I'm putting my makeup on. But if you hold the on off button, it will dim quite a bit. It will dim down to hardly anything. So it's bright, bright if you need it to be or it will dim down and I just think that that is absolutely fantastic. Hopefully you're being able to see what I'm talking about, that it will dim. This is a great mirror. It's a huge mirror. It completely covers your visor and you can charge it and that's what's going on right now. You can charge it in your car and there are different settings on it. So I'm super excited about that. Now let's go over and look at that fun new thing that I have right there that I just barely got and I cannot wait to show you how I'm storing my palette. Alright so as I pan away you can see that it's a little ladder shelf which I am so excited about. Look how many pallets are in that thing. So many. I went from the smallest on the top and then I just went down and did the bigger ones and then on the very bottom I put all of my face pallets and then on the second to the bottom. There's the very bottom right there. On the second to the bottom I took my tiny pallets, my Elf Bite size, some of my Natasha Denona, a few of those and I put those into a little acrylic organizer which I love those things. I will link those for you too. Any drawer needs those. I love them. So this has been so much fun and it has held all of my pallets. I have a lot of pallets and I have not been able to see them because some of them have been in a drawer but this is so much fun. I am so excited that I got it and really happy that I found it. Another thing that I got is this. Now I don't have this full because I wanted to show it to you empty first. This is a bag organizer for your purse that you put down in your purse and have all of your stuff organized. This is obviously a larger one. I think actually this is the medium one. They have one that is even bigger and they have some that are slimmer as well. So I wanted to show you this empty so that you can see what it also does. You can also take that middle part out and just carry this around if you need to. Maybe you need to run into the restroom and powder your nose or whatever. So it has a zipper on it and it can hold a lot in there and then it has a pouch on one side and then three compartments that way and then it will just Velcro right back in to there. So it's very easy to take in and out and you can just load this with whatever you need to have in there. If you have a phone it can go in there. If you want to use this for makeup organization you can put big pellets in there. You can just do just about anything you want to and put it in there. This would be great for a makeup organizer. If you wanted to use a regular purse instead of just a makeup bag you could absolutely put this together as a makeup organizer and do it that way. And I am just so excited to have this because I used to have one a long time ago and it wasn't as sturdy as this one. The felt was a lot more flimsy and it just seemed to get dirty really quick and it ripped really quickly. But this one has just been so nice for me to be able to and I don't have my purse stuff over here. I'd be putting all my purse stuff in it so you could see it. But this one is great to be able to organize everything and then when you're ready you just to switch purses you just lift this out instead of dumping your purse out and having to reorganize you just do that. So so much fun. Two more pockets on the front right here. Just a great way to organize your purse and keep it organized. These have been around for years but I loved how heavy duty and how durable this one seemed. So in there I shoved this little product right here which now that we have cell phones we are always looking to charge them. They always seem to be running out at the most inconvenient times. But this thing right here is a portable charger and I know that in our cars we usually have you know the portable plugs with us or it does seem really common place to go into a doctor's office or anywhere and see people plugging in their phone and just sitting there letting their phone charge. But this is a portable one which I really love because it has the actual plugs already with it. So you get a USB and a USC on this side and then on the other side you actually have the Apple iPhone one which I think is so cool that they put that in there. Also on the bottom you do have the port so that you can put it in and plug if you have a specialty plug. I do on one of my skincare devices I have a specialty plug that I have to use so it's nice to be able to put that in there. And then right here on this side it also has another plug that you can put in there. And then if you touch this right here it's going to light up and tell you how much battery life the portable charger itself has. So I think that's great. And then on the other side it has the flip down outlet port or outlet plug-in that you can plug that in anywhere instead of having to plug it in itself with its own cord or its own charger which I think is a great thing. And then it just flips up and it's flat. It's the size of a cell phone. I think that is absolutely great. And so you're not taking up a bunch of space and it's a lot lighter than my previous chargers were. And I think that's great about it too because I mean it still has some weight to it. It's still a little bit heavy but it's nowhere near as heavy. It's heavier than a cell phone but it's nowhere near as heavy as the old chargers were. So I'm really glad to have that. The last time that I was at an airport when I went in everybody had those plugs being used so there was no way for me to charge my phone anyway. So this was really great to be able to have. And then I found this which I'm so excited about. This is a kitchen gadget that you can fill up with your favorite oil or your favorite liquid I guess if you wanted to. But this for me is going to be for olive oil and it does have the plunger down there and it also has this removable silicone top with a glass receptacle right here on the top that when you put it on to that dispenser you squeeze in and you're going to get the olive oil up here into this dispenser. And on there it has little measurements on there so that you can dispense however much you actually need to. So now instead of just pouring the bottle into your pan you know exactly how much is on here. So this has 0.26 ounces six milliliters and nine milliliters. So six milliliters is about a teaspoon so nine would be about a tablespoon. And then you have this silicone little brush heads right here that you can dispense that with and you know you can coat your vegetables with it. You can coat the bottom of your pan because this can go on anything hot too. So I'm really excited I just got this a couple of days ago and I'm excited about using it and employing it in my kitchen because we do use a lot of olive oil and this just seems really handy to have around. Oh and they do have it in a couple other colors. I think they had a green and orange that I looked at. But I liked this color because my kitchen has kind of got red accents in it. And so this was kind of more of a neutral color that would kind of blend in with that. So I'm really excited to be able to use that. And then I wanted to show you this. This is cool. This is for any of you that have grandbabies at your house that maybe you're worried about you know when they start to crawl they're right on the level of where the outlets are. So their eyes catch that outlet and they go over to it and that's what ends up getting them in trouble. Why we have to have those covered with the little plastic covers. Well this is a cover that will go all the way over your outlet and then it has an 8 foot cord on it that has the outlets on the other side. So this is just like an extension cord which I'm super happy to have because I have a bunch of appliances on my counter and when I have to either unplug or plug in or the fact that they're sticking out away from the counter the plug is sticking out away from the counter and it just looks kind of ugly to have that on there. So this completely covers your outlet. So it's a protection for any of those babies that are going around crawling or walking on that level.  Some protection for that too. Now I can plug that in pull that cord down and just have one cord on my countertop and hide all those cords away. So I'm really excited to have this. I think it's a genius thing to use that you don't have to have your cords all sitting there waiting to be plugged in. You can use three of them instead of two. I just thought this was a really great way to hide that outlet that is unsightly and also to keep those little ones protected. I'm pretty sure that I showed this on a very recent video but every time I pull this out during a video to do something I get asked what mirror is that. This is a great mirror. It's called Lamsey. I found this mirror because I wanted a mirror that not only had the regular magnification I wanted the five times magnification but I wanted it to be able to light up on both sides and this one does. Both sides light up and I am so happy about that because when I'm on the five times magnification I was always having a hard time because I couldn't see without that light there as good. So I'm really happy to be able to get this one because it does do the lighting up on both sides and it is a five inch which is almost as big as your face is.  So that's it for today's video of the fun Amazon finds that I found off of TikTok. I hope that you did enjoy it. Do you have anything that you went down the TikTok rabbit hole and found that you'd like to share with us? I'd love to hear about those down below in the comment section. Thank you all so much for tuning in today and spending a few minutes with me. I hope everybody is doing well. Let's all meet back here really soon in my next video and I love you very much. Take care. Goodbye my friends.


Okay, very good morning folks. Hope you're all doing well and have had a good week two points Just to kick things off with this morning. First is it's the end and last day for some of our summer analysts So I just wanted to say well done and good luck on your final day and for the future Always stay in touch, of course, and I'll speak to you guys later on Otherwise the second point is the weekly podcast Myself and the head of trading peers will be having a chat a bit later on this morning and that recording for the latest Podcast episode will go out today So don't forget to just search for the market watch by Amphi live on the likes of Apple podcast Spotify Google podcast and so on. All right, let's get straight into it then in terms of the briefing for this morning and Gonna kick things off then with a bit of review of how we finished on Wall Street Which was positive and we finished up point six percent in the S&P about percent in the down and six tenths of one percent in the NASDAQ 100 and as you can see here in terms of the stock indices in overnight trade We have now thrashed out brand new all-time highs So it definitely didn't feel like that this time last week because we were seeing a Pretty synchronized sell-off on the back of a hawkish tilt from the Fed midweek and then bullard coming in With those comments this time last week and since that point We've just put in a really strong recovery Particularly on Monday, and then those previous all-time highs which stood at 4258 in the court in the S&P were broken yesterday We actually have now topped out at 64 and a quarter in overnight trade before Europe now I've just stepped in and we've seen a bit of a pullback those previous points of the low that defined the bottom of the range in Asia pack session will now be the next area of support and To see equities here just come off their initial highs from the overnight extension of Asia trade from the higher US close I don't think is particularly Unusual to see at all and I wouldn't be that surprised to see equities just fade a little bit through the morning Waiting for the US to come in and so the Dax has kind of followed suit initially bid And then it's just dipped a little bit here more recently It's just some of the fatigue in that extension of that move comes in why does that move happen? Well, a lot of people are pinning it on the fact that finally Joe Biden's managed to get a bipartisan agreement on a 579 billion dollars. That's the new spending part of an infrastructure bill This still needs though to be passed through Congress It's one of the key things and the difficulty will come as the bill moves in tandem with a much larger package of spending and Tax increases that the Republicans generally oppose. So although they've made an agreement Biden said he's gonna veto things if it's not bolted on to a bigger broader package with this new proposal So for me, I don't know that I mean a lot of the financial media is pinning that the rise yesterday Was on this I think equities were already moving higher sure it might have been a contributing component to that rally yesterday But I don't really see this as it stands at the moment having that smoother sailing via Congress And in fact overnight to set it minority leader McConnell suggested He is now more pessimistic than optimistic of the passage of the bipartisan bill for the very reasons that Biden said he'll veto It's not plugged into a bigger broader package. And so for me, it's almost almost dead on arrival here So, I mean if the equity rise yesterday was down to this very reason of this deal Well, then it should come off But the point I think I'm saying is that I don't think yesterday's rally necessarily was completely On the back of just that in isolation. So yeah, a little bit of a faded equities Perhaps then just to come off that initial push higher going into the end of the week But a book squaring perhaps going into the the last trading session of the week could be could well be seen Otherwise in the other asset classes, it's really been a Quite quiet week overall. I mean if I was just going to look at gold and tea notes They're just step out of some of the the initial kind of day-to-day Fluctuations and if you actually go back to the week as a whole I mean if I just put a rectangle just so it's as clear as clear as possible This is basically the week's price activity in gold and now that is range bound And the bottom end of that range still being held at around 17 74 and so keeping an eye on that still today because we're not too far from there Just hugging the pivot level in the futures at the moment then the upside 87 88 is really the more definitive near-term high from yesterday They'd be keeping an eye on if we were to move off up and beyond the R1 And then up 10 to the weekly range high at around the 1795 area But you know considering the general scope and range of gold that is a pretty tight range overall And then the US 10 year other than the Monday move that we saw Where yields did push on up higher then since that point again respecting a relative range And actually we've kind of been just narrowing that range as The week has gone on and it's almost felt like the market's getting a little bit fed comms fatigue to a certain extent because It you know this this movement here in a fairly tight fashion of really just seven eight tick ranges in the last 24 hours Is irrespective of the fact that you're getting you know multiple fed speakers coming out There are quite a few make hawkish noises, but of course these are coming from the hawkish candidates of the Of the FMC and so they're not really that surprising at this point and the markets I think have readjusted to the idea of The fact that you know that is the current stance But the center ground held by Powell and Williams this week has remained un Unmoved at this point in the terms of their view on the transitory side of things Otherwise elsewhere the FX markets obviously had the Bank of England yesterday did see a bit of a down tick It explains this larger red candlestick here and not so much. I think the Bank of England being Dovish I just think it was a bit of a disappointment for those looking for something more hawkish And we saw a bit of an unwind of those outside bets in combination with a technical breach You can see here of what was quite a key level of technical short-term support That just added some downside weight momentum to that move and sell-off and so we've just settled now At the moment flat on the day not too much going on the Dixie right now 139 28 it trades Again, this comes irrespective of the fact that the Bank of England do foresee further Quite substantial upticks inflation for it to go above 3% in the coming months, but it's almost like the That situation has been normalized by the Fed and the US Circumstances because there's just so much higher than that in terms of those pressures and the Bank of England as well still sees these pressures as being temporary in nature i.e. transitory and Outgoing hawks like Haldane dissenting from the pack and once again voting for the ceasing of the Asset Purchase Facility came as no surprise and no one actually joined him Which was again a slight disappointment for those looking for a more hawkish outcome explaining that fall in the pound the euro Yeah pretty range bound again the bottom end of that range I'll be keeping an eye on today really is do for the week in fact has been around the one nineteen thirty eight and a half in the Futures you can see here I'm just keeping an eye on a trend line coming down towards The current price action where we're trading at the moment so we just need to see how that reacts a bit later on That will probably coincide with the previous high that was seen in the overnight Asia pack session So again just keeping an eye kind of around that level here But ultimately this type of price activity does tend to lead to a break out in either way perhaps we need to really wait for the US session to commence and see any movement led by the dollar rather than the euro with a lack of real European calendar events and of course with US core PCE coming out later All right quick look at a few other things One thing to mention was US stress tests. They did come out last night And in fact US bank stocks did trade higher in aftermarket trade Despite the fact that this pretty much came out as expected, but it's kind of a confirmation if you like of those expectations Because in reality what this this is going to lead to is more greater flexibility now for banks to resume buybacks and dividends But overall the Federal Reserve now releasing its annual stress test said that all 23 institutions Remain well above minimum capital levels in a hypothetical economic downturn now for those who are not familiar with stress tests This is a regular occurrence that happens now part of the main Area of which a central bank covers in the Western developed world like in the US or the UK for example at the Bank of England is Regulation and supervision and a big part of that is safeguarding the economic system and stress tests are quite integral to that Given what happened on the back of the GFC 11 12 years ago, and so these are fairly frequent They very rarely carry and yield any surprises and in fact all these banks passed Very easily in these stressed scenarios. So what basically happens is The researchers at the bank will run these banks based on different levels of Their capital that they hold through adverse economic conditions and ultimately the most sizeable shock that they were running in their model was that unemployment would peak at ten point eight percent and Under a situation of the fifty-five percent drop in the stock market as a scenario and even in that case where there'd be close to half a trillion dollars of losses Lost cushioning capital would still be more than double the minimum required levels even in that situation. So as such then Generally, what this means is that analysts are at the expectation now that the industry can hike buybacks and Dividends by tens of billions of dollars probably starting as soon as next month This is called to stress stress capital buffer framework of which that operates under the Fed though has Instructed lenders to wait until Monday afternoon to start disclosing their plans according to people familiar with the situation as Reported by CNBC. So you might get some more color on that as they chew over. What's the best course of action this weekend on? Monday Not not particularly a big deal Just something to be aware of I would say on the COVID front Something we were mentioning at the very beginning of the week and it continues to be a developing kind of store at the moment Which isn't having too much if any definitive impact at the moment on financial markets, but I Still think it does warrant being quite vigilant and that is now that the Delta variant which had been identified in pockets of some of the major Economic areas within the Eurozone like Germany France Spain and Italy in Italy up to 25% of total cases now In Italian regions are being linked to the Delta variant up from just 1% which was registered About a month ago or so the country currently is delivering around 500,000 shots per day Then in terms of a timeline to give it a bit of context, they're now targeting 80% vaccination levels by the end of September On the back of this as well a few other things more than 500,000 residents of Sydney and Australia are going into lockdown after an Outbreak now identified of the Delta variant as well. And if you're interested, I did do a couple of tweets Yesterday, if you just go on my Twitter account my handles obviously here There was quite an interesting piece out of JP Morgan They were talking about running Basically, they were modeling What the situation could look like with the Delta variant as we know Kind of contributing to around a third of all cases now in the US Using a benchmark reference then as the UK and how that Delta variant Developed to model what the US could look like and their assumptions are suggesting that We might not see the peak of the Delta variant in the US for another five weeks Obviously, we've got a seasonal holiday in regards to the 4th of July as well coming out which we've seen previously on Thanksgiving Christmas New Year's spikes in case rates And so generally their conclusions are and I'll leave you to digest the thread that I posted yesterday But that given the fact that we yet to see the peak It's gonna go the numbers are gonna get higher in the US And that means then when overlaying this with the current speed of vaccinations Which has decelerated from initially how fast it was picking up a few weeks months ago Means then that basically the spread is gonna outweigh the vaccinations meaning we're gonna have another wave in the US So just something to be aware of and to continue to monitor again the markets not freaking out at this point in time but as per with all of these geographic areas the transmissibility the Immunity invasiveness as well as some of these new Delta plus variants is something we're just mindful of at this present point in time Otherwise the final thing was Iran Just one of the quick word on that Nothing really too surprising to be honest But the US State Department official has said the US still has serious differences with Iran And at this point in time then they have not yet tabled or scheduled a seventh round of talks For the time being so that's kind of ongoing But I think as you would expect will be interesting though Just given the newly appointed president elect and his inauguration inauguration happening in August I still think we could see as what some Domestic sources have reported in Iran that perhaps more movement on this not right now But in the coming weeks ahead of that inauguration in order to then blame any concessions on any potential deal Of which the new president has already said he wants to cut on a return to the nuclear agreement of the 2015 Accord on the previous president Rahani, so nothing happening quite yet. I don't think that's particularly surprising We are anticipating their movements and more dialogue as we can continue to go forward in time terms of the calendar for today this morning You've just had out the latest German JFK consumer confidence figure Let me just refresh my New scroll and I can bring that to you right now So that came in at minus zero point three versus expected minus four So negative but a little bit better expected, but it's never really that much of a market mover to be quite honest So moving further into the day nothing really coming out of interest for the UK European morning So very much US centric session and all eyes are going to be on the latest core PCE price index this is for the month of May and the reason for that is that in April as you can see here the measure jumped Two point seven percent for the previous month and delivered its biggest year-in-year jump since the 1990s Going up to three spot one percent and again It's expected to increase further to three point four percent first things first I'm sure there's at least one or two people thinking what on earth is PCE PCE stands for personal consumption Expenditure price in Essentially, and it measures the prices paid by people for domestic purchases of goods and services Excluding the prices of food and energy and the core PCE is the feds seen as the feds preferred measure So as such then quite a lot of people will be watching this figure For the moment as you will know the market's been relatively content to kind of look through Upside surprises on the inflation front now. We've kind of a climatized to the new norm And this kind of belief of of transitory temporary factors lifting these price pressures that doesn't mean though, I don't think today's number could create a degree of Intra-day volatility certainly the top-end the range of three spots six if we jump up from three spot one having that already Being the highest and we're having seen last month the biggest leap since the early 90s if it does another monumental leap Definitely sure you'll probably have a negative initial reaction Whether or not the markets then can kind of see through that will be the question So I definitely think today's number will be Definitely interesting definitely could be and probably will be the main catalyst for market direction to see off the rest of the day So really it's at 130 again How much does that make on a broader out of the Intra-day picture perspective again? I don't think a great deal Not unless it's a Really strong number. I think you'll still get the hawk saying they should be reacting at this point and you'll get Powell and the rest Who are a little bit more Measures in just continuing the current Fed stance would be my interpretation speaker wise Yeah, more Fed speakers, of course this time we get the uber dove Kashkari speaking first at three hawk Mester at 435 Rosengren Center neutral at six and then feds Williams comes back out at eight So just to be aware of all right gonna leave it at that let you guys get on don't forget to check out the podcast Later this episode coming out later today Take care. Have an amazing weekend and I'll see you Monday


This paper proposes two new deep learning, DL, techniques for decoding EMG signals for use in MoMAs. These techniques, temporal multi-channel transformers and vision transformers were compared against traditional random forest, RF, models and convolutional neural networks, CNNs, which are commonly used in MoMAs. The proposed DL techniques outperformed both RF and CNN models in terms of accuracy and speed of decoding the motion. Additionally, the proposed DL techniques were able to generalize across different motion-object combinations, while the other models could not. This article was authored by Ricardo V. Godoy, Ananita Vetti, and mine is Liero copies.


Welcome to the tea of the day today. I've got fresh Spear a mint. Hmm This is the first time I've ever had fresh spearmint the bad peppermint and some other mints, but this is the first one for this hmm, oh Yeah, that's good. I can see why it's good for stress relief because the second I take a sip. I'm like, oh Oh, that's good But amongst other things spearmint is also supposed to be good for breath, of course, because it's mint and Hormonal, hormonal balancing. So it's supposed to be good for things around Minstrel problems and it's also supposed to be good oddly enough for reducing facial hair in women It's also an antibacterial antifungal. So spearmint really good stuff. Give it a shot


All right. Welcome everybody to the Rook presentation on storage for Kubernetes. We're happy to be with you here today. I am Travis Nielsen, Rook maintainer, one of the original creators of Rook. I work for Red Hat. I'm happy to be here with you today with Alexander. Hi everyone. I'm Alexander working for Co-TechnologySync. I'm also maintainer of the Rook project and yeah, we're going to start diving into what Rook is, storage for Kubernetes. And yeah, I think we don't necessarily want our customers data stored on like floppy disk anymore. So why don't we go a step further to the future? Yeah. We have hard drives. We have SSDs either by fancy PCI connections or even then NVMe SSDs, flash-based memory, like it's all much, much faster than it was some time ago. And it's not just faster, but it's also so much more capacity that we have with these new storage types and quotes that we have nowadays. And because of that, on how we already started rethinking how we deploy applications with containers, with Kubernetes and all the cool new projects around, especially at the CNCF, we have to kind of also move this storage aspect into the new cloud-native dimension. And as what you already kind of like the typical Kubernetes setup have with like at your shipping boat, you know, that's kind of the analogy here. And you have your well, small kind of management boat, let's call it a management boat, which just takes care of all everything related to Kubernetes from setting up like the basic monitoring stack or to even just deploy your application in the end, like the automation, CI CD, and that's all great and all. But for example, for storage, if you're, especially if you're not in the cloud or in like a, where you can just say, hey, give me storage, give me a storage while you inform my application. So basically a persistence layer of some sorts for your application. You're kind of having a bad time with having storage for your applications. That's where Rook is coming in. So if we kind of see as like we have our applications, our containers running in well, Kubernetes, keeping it open there, like there's other like just also a bunch of distributions of the Kubernetes out there and you have your storage. So far, even if we did not look at SAF, I know I'm already mentioning some dropping some names here, but even if you just take SAF here as an example, there's always kind of like this gap between how do you plug your storage into Kubernetes. That's one of the great things that we have to mention before we further dive into what Rook is and all, because it's one of the key aspects in the end for you to be able to use storage in form of Kubernetes native objects, like persistent volume claims and like storage classes and so on. So what we have, thanks to the community around Kubernetes, the great ecosystem with Kubernetes, the container storage interface also called CSI and a nutshell CSI is basically one interface for the storage backend. So for example, SAF and like the container orchestrator, especially again, container orchestrators to implement that a user can easily get a volume of storage for the application. Like if I'm deploying, I know we can argue if that's the best case, but if you want to deploy a MySQL database or like a WordPress as well, for example, you need some storage, you need some storage depending on how you deploy it for like, for example, well, the database files or like the PHP files for the WordPress block. For all that, this CSI interface makes it quite easy for applications containers to at least from Kubernetes. I just say, Hey, I need 50 gigs of persistent of storage of a volume. It's basically you're claiming from Kubernetes perspective, you're creating a persistent volume claim. And that part then talks with the storage in this case, in this example, we still go on SAF to say, Hey, please create a volume and with this and this amount of storage. And that is also one of the points where Rook is coming into. Rook is basically a SAF operator for Kubernetes. It takes care of automating the deployment, bootstrapping, configuration and upgrading of a SAF cluster. And the other components of such a SAF cluster will be going into what a SAF cluster is in a second. So right now, just bear with me. And your operator will also take care of creating everything needed for storage for PVC is for persistent volume claims to be consumed or like to be able to be even provisioned. If we take a look at SAF itself there as a storage platform, we don't just have one type of storage, we have several types that kind of like the three most common types of storage, which is, which are block storage, shared file system, and object storage as free and like the most common commonly used API to talk with object storage. So SAF can do all three. And thanks to what SAF can do, taking that to the Rook project with one of the latest releases of 1.10, latest minor releases, 1.10, with over 10,000 GitHub stars, so many container image downloads, so many more contributors on the GitHub project and the project itself being CNCF graduated. We are happy to help there with the operator for SAF, for anyone that doesn't know about what an operator does. So like an operator basically starts at the top there at observing the operator watches, either like a custom resource, a custom object or something. Like if there are changes, it's analyzes those changes and acts upon that. We can kind of draw like a line with like a conductor for like an operator or an orchestra, where a conductor will on the one hand say you need to play quiet or something, but the conductor will also, if it's still too loud, again, observe or well hear it in that case, analyze or slash understand it and react by hey, quieter, quieter please or even louder, louder basically. And it observes a state and makes sure that it's always applied. It is always this desired state. Let's talk about a bit like how Rook accomplishes this in its architecture, how it looks for example when it's run on a Kubernetes cluster. This diagram is probably going to look quite overwhelming for anyone that hasn't worked with SAF, but the main takeaways here are that with these three different types of storage and that's again block storage, file system, files and people just call it file, I prefer calling file system storage and object storage is all in one SAF cluster. It's all possible with just one SAF cluster. The main point is that this complex system from, again, deployment, configuration, upgrading, management, and even the components for example like an object storage, if you even want to use objects that you don't have to, if you want to have file system or block storage, that that is what Rook, the Rook SAF operator is taking care of, observing the state that you want, and taking care to ensure that it's achieved. Again, with CSI being mentioned so much already, we have ways to easily consume the storage from for block storage using the SAF CSI RBD driver, Rados block device. Let's just keep it at that. That's for block storage, for file system storage, which is the SAF CSI self-FS driver basically, which is, well, taking care of managing the volumes for file system storage and provisioning them so you don't have to do really too much. It's not with CSI, but it's worth that it's mentioned here for object storage, for applications to easily go, oh, hey, Kubernetes API, or just in general for, you know, thinking about like everything kind of a service, like, hey, I need one object storage bucket, and through also the bucket provision now, there's some logic which is implemented also from Rook side, that it's easy for an application to get an object storage bucket with a correct, with a pair of credentials for the application to already immediately start talking with an S3 storage with the bucket and storage data there. Going into a bit more detail than the first diagram we've just seen of like the architecture structure of how it would look if you have a SAF slash Rook SAF cluster running, all these components in the end are taken care of by the Rook operator through the means of the Kubernetes API so that if anything happens, all the operator does in the end is use the Kubernetes API to make sure that the end state is achieved. And the Rook operator then, for example, also talking obviously with the SAF API and create certain resources, pools, block storage pools, file systems, and configure them there accordingly. As an example for like this desired state that we are some examples for that, we have a custom object. I've hopefully previously mentioned it already a bit. Custom objects is also one of the things an operator in Kubernetes can watch on. And for example, the Rook SAF operator brings a custom resource called SAF cluster. It's not all of them, it's just one that we take as an example here. Even with this small example, we have just a block of YAML basically, which says, hey, I want a SAF cluster with this and this version, this and this certain configuration for like their data is stored and so on. And there's even more options that can be set to, for example, say, which disks should be used in which server, or even if all servers should be used, all devices, all disks in the servers. And this is exactly the desired state, which we are talking about in the end. We have the operator watching these resources. And when you create such a resource, or even if it's updated in any way, the operator sees them for example, oh, there's no Rook SAF cluster yet. So it would go ahead and start creating everything needed to run a SAF cluster in Kubernetes and takes care of starting the monitor pods, the monpods, SAF mons, the SAF manager, SAF OSD. And if you wanted to have like option services as the RJW component for file system, there's the MDS component and all those things, this is what the operator takes care of, takes care of talking with SAF, configuring everything, setting the correct setting parameters and making sure that that is all in sync based on the YAML block we applied to the Kubernetes API as an object. With that said, Kubernetes and SAF in the end is great. It's even without Kubernetes, it's great, wrong set folks. But even combined with Kubernetes, it's making everything even greater because with Kubernetes kind of being this abstraction to some degree of a hardware or even your cloud, this whole API ecosystem that Kubernetes has enables the Rook operator to easily run a complex storage system like SAF. And now Travis will walk you through some more SAF storage related features and what features we have worked on in the latest releases. Thanks Alexander for taking us through the introduction to Rook, what it is, why we're doing it, and how it's useful to you. We love Rook, we love providing this platform so you can have storage in your Kubernetes clusters. So let's talk in more details now, dive into where is Rook more useful, what features do we have, why would you use it? First of all, how do you deploy it? So you've seen with Alexander's examples already that there are some YAML files, you can go create those, specify your desired state. I'll also point out that there are two Helen charts that we have, one chart will install the operator and all the related resources. And the second chart will install all the Rook's CRs. So you can create a Rook cluster, you can create the block pools, the SAF file systems, the SAF object storage. All of those types of resources for SAF have these different custom resources. So that's how you basically deploy the cluster. Now there's lots of ways to configure Rook, Alexander showed just a few of those different options, but really I want to point out you can deploy across multiple cluster topologies. You can deploy it where there's only hosts or multiple hosts, you can deploy in a zone topology or there's a number of other topologies where you can define racks or data centers or however your topology is laid out. And then SAF will make sure that the data is replicated across the cluster in a way that keeps the data safe, reduces the risk of data loss. As one zone goes down, the other zones, for example, would still hold the data even if one zone goes down. And this helps SAF keep the data highly available. And again, you can customize it whatever your topology may be. Now most people do run SAF, I would say, in a bare metal environment, or that's where the main scenario was when we started on the Rook project because there was no other solution for on-prem storage to really interact or be installed with Kubernetes. There are also scenarios that are common for running SAF in a cloud environment where, first of all, you want a consistent storage platform wherever Kubernetes runs. Why should you have to use one platform in one cloud environment or in bare metal? Like let's just have one storage platform that works consistently. Second, there are shortcomings that cloud providers have had from the beginning and they still have, like being able to access storage across AZs or they have slow fail-over times because you want seconds of fail-over time instead of minutes. You want to be able to have a large number of PVs, perhaps, if you have many small volumes or need small volumes for applications. Some storage providers may have a limit of 30 per node where with Rook, basically there is no limit. You can have, say, 1,000 PVs per node, but there is no real limit. It just comes down to resources. There are also any characteristics of large volumes that you want, where you provision large volumes in the cloud provider and then SAF allows you to have smaller volumes on top of those larger volumes and your applications don't know the difference. Finally, SAF monitors and OSDs, they will run in a cloud environment backed by PVCs, but there's no need for direct access to local devices. It just works seamlessly in those cloud environments. Next scenario, commonly used. Some people have SAF clusters that are already running outside of Kubernetes and they want to connect their Kubernetes applications to that SAF cluster. That's a perfectly common and valid scenario where you take the SAF information from that existing SAF cluster, the SAF monns, the SAF key ring, the cluster FSID, a few other items and then you import those into the Rook cluster and Rook will then configure, basically Rook configures a CSI driver to connect to that SAF storage to just make it seamlessly work with your Kubernetes applications. That CSI driver, I already mentioned, again, it has many features of standard CSI drivers that you're familiar with. It is very flexible and has many features, so you can support Read-Write once volumes with SFRDB, RBD, SFFS supports Read-Write many volumes. It does snapshots and clones, volume encryption, volume expansion, ephemeral volumes, and all of the features that you would really expect from a storage platform. This is just a few of the features that it has. Next feature, Alexander has already touched on this. If you want object storage with an S3 endpoint, SAF provides that with SFRDW. The way you do this is you define a storage class for your object storage and you say, wait, storage class is usually just for volumes that you touched your pot. Well, the way Rook has implemented this, the storage class allows you to provision a bucket with an object bucket claim. The operator creates this bucket when you create this claim, which is a very similar pattern to PBCs, but it's for object storage that lets you have access to a bucket.  We support multiple back ends for storing the encrypted keys. KMS hash decor, IBM key protect, KMIP. We're working on adding support for others so that you can ensure that your data is secure and encrypted at rest. Stretch cluster. In some scenarios, you really only have two different data centers or two zones where you have storage available. In this configuration, SAF still needs a third node or a SAF monitor that acts as a tiebreaker between the two. So this third node is needed somewhere else to work with the other two zones, but ultimately, the storage is only found in two of the zones. You've got replicas in each of the two zones to provide greater resiliency. Data mirroring. For any real application that needs to replicate its data, it needs to ensure that that data is also available for applications that need to fail over when some cluster goes down. Say a whole Kubernetes cluster goes down. If you've mirrored your data to another Kubernetes cluster with SAF, as long as you've implemented DR for your application, at that level, you can switch it over. You can make your application switch over its active configuration and run completely from the other cluster because the data is mirrored over between the clusters. All three types of data can be mirrored with SAF. You've got the block and the file system and object with RGW multi-site. All of those can be mirrored using asynchronous application, then it's for enabling DR scenarios. You really want resiliency in your applications for disaster recovery. So let's talk about some of the recent features that we've added, really in the last few months, 1.9 and 1.10. So we've put some effort into our crew plugin. So this is a tool that runs outside the operator. You may be familiar with other crew plugins that are available in the community. So this is one that will help you administer these one-off scenarios in Rook that the operator just doesn't handle directly. So you can do things like print out the status of your cluster. You can show the health of the cluster. If you need to perform really advanced operations on the SAF monz and OSDs, you can start what's called a debug pod. If you need to get rid of an OSD, you can purge it and then other simple things like just restart the operator. So we're continuing to improve upon this plugin and add new features. It's really going to help with disaster recovery scenarios again and things where the operator really just doesn't cover. The operator covers scenarios where it's constantly running and monitoring desired state, but sometimes disaster is happening. You need to be able to just run these one-off actions to get the cluster back into a good state when the operator isn't even capable of running, perhaps. We're excited about that. I hope you can try it out. Give us feedback on what features you'd like to see in the crew plugin. A few months ago, we did a documentation facelift. So we're just happy to have an updated framework with MakeDocs. You can feel it's searchable. We'll continue to add content and if you have any feedback, we'd love to hear your feedback on the documentation as well. As always, Cep is making updates to the data layer and our goal is to continually add support for what Cep is doing. So we've added support this year for Cep Quincy. This came out earlier this year. And then support for Cep Octopus was also dropped by Cep. It reached the end of life and so now we dropped support for that. So the latest releases of Cep Pacific and Quincy are supported in the latest work releases. Some of the CSI improvements that we've made in the 1.10 release with the latest CSI driver. There's cave-in integration for encrypting your volumes, RBD volumes for block storage. There's NFS support for snapshots, restore and clone and volume expansion. There's PV and snapshot metadata. So if you want to know more about your PVs, that the metadata is attached to the PVs, there is shallow read-only support without cloning the underlying snapshot. NFS has been an area of focus for the team as well, adding more support for enterprise NFS features so you can connect generally from the outside of the Kubernetes cluster to the Cep storage inside Kubernetes. For example, adding client ID management via SSSD with LDAP, Kerberos client authentication support. Again, really supported for external clients for now. This is an area of active development. We're looking forward to feedback on how you'd like to use NFS. So a brief thought on road map and where we're going with Rook. Again, our goals are always to really support new Kubernetes features when they come out to make sure Cep is always managed in a very robust and thorough way. So we need to support Cep features when new Cep features come out. We make sure they're exposed and configurable through Rook in a simple way with CRDs. Finally, it's always a goal of ours to respond to community inputs. We want to know what storage needs you have and how we can improve and just make sure your needs are heard. Or as a CNCF graduated project, we really want to make sure we're doing what the community needs to be done. We're here to respond and hope you feel that response as you come to our Slack and GitHub issues and other places for feedback. Some of the features areas we're working on, you may have heard of COSI, the object storage interface for containers. It's going to kind of take the place of OBCs eventually. It'll be a while out because COSI is still so new. It's just an alpha in Kubernetes 1.25. So we'll have an implementation of that soon for Rook. Other areas, encryption. So we do have encryption across the wire, for example, but also other types of encryption and other places to store the encryption keys, depending on the KMS. We've got disaster recovery scenarios and lots more. There's always more to do in the storage realm. So I have to get involved. We hope you can visit the Rook booth at KubeCon while you're here and visit our Rook GitHub, visit our Rook Slack, Twitter, follow us on Twitter. And if you'd like to talk to us and don't find us at the Rook booth, you can join us in our community meetings on a bi-weekly basis. We've got a link to that on the main Rook GitHub. So we hope to meet you, hope to hear from you. And thank you. It's been good to be with you today and thanks, Alexander, for all the info on Rook. Thanks as well. And yeah, as Travis already said, we're going to be at the Rook booth. It should be located at the CNCF open-source pavilion. So if you're at KubeCon and seeing this, be sure to check out the booth. And thanks for listening.


Hello everybody and welcome back to this special episode of um Steph is obsessed with jelly paint. I got sent this new I always say it wrong himmy meagosh paints by Mia arts and This is a set that's now available in the UK, which previously wasn't so I'm pretty excited It's in the UK store now for people Who live here in this country with me. I don't know why I said it in that weird way Don't know don't care probably some people like yourselves if you're from the US have already Had this set for a while, but this is pretty new for us. So I'm excited to check it out But before we get into it, I would really like to talk about my Kickstarter Which has eight days left and it's currently running and I'm really excited and I really hope that you guys can Check it out because I think it's going to be a pretty swell comic. Um, it's a horror comic And it stars a young woman who goes frifting and she spots a picture of Someone who looks like she could be a relative. So she just Is intrigued and she buys it, but maybe it was a mistake And uh, that's what I'll say about the story But it's all hand drawn by me and written by me and everything So I'm just really excited because it's definitely is past a goal. So it's definitely going to be printed And just yeah, I can't wait to share it all with the world But I just really really be appreciative of you if you could just check it out You don't even have to no pressure. You don't have to back it or anything But maybe you could share it with someone you think would like it And uh, that's it.  That's the new thing And brushes what? Okay, this changes everything. Um the previous sets I had Didn't come with brushes in the set which you can just keep here, which is very nice I uh, I always don't understand this like bird figure that they have as their like Little friend here You know bird man do as you can but I do love this cap Very cute pink cap. Um, it's a cool style. Um, anyway, let's open these paint brushes He's got a cold and he keeps sneezing. He's so cute He's so cute. You can't see him, but just imagine a cat there Uh, here are the brushes. I'll just pop them in there. Oh Very nice. And here's the palette Quite sturdy not too flimsy, but just it is still quite thin, but I guess that's because it has to fit in. Oh, no I hate peeling these off so much. They're the bane of my existence But what is inside is a sweet nugget of jelly paint. So Let's get on with it And there we have it finally open and ready to go. All right. So what I want to do today is paint over Or fix this painting. Actually, it's not looking as bad as I thought because I Already had a bit of a shot at this and I will show the footage now whilst I'm talking But then uh mere arts reached out and said do I want this set and I was like, okay, I'll finish I'll finish this painting when that set comes along with these So I really want to fix this image. She was looking a bit weird I don't know. I think I just I could spend more time on it This was based off an idea I had for A haunted water park, which is going to be my next comic after picture this And uh, yeah, just exploring styles just having fun This is a bit of a concept image for that. So Let's get going and seeing what else we can do with it whilst uh You watch me. Okay I bet you're cold without me. It's always shining. You always used to love the rain, but LA changed. Nothing's growing where your heart is fire, but baby I bet you're cold without me. And that's it. That's the final product I think it looks much better than it did before. It definitely has a bit more Of my personality in it, I would say and I really like the way that it turned out. It's really flowy And just impressionistic, I guess I much prefer that and uh, yeah, that's it I really love these jelly paints as usual. They're amazing. Um, I think there'll be a link down below You can go check it out. Please also go check out my horror comic if you're interested and uh, yeah This will be the next horror comic coming up. So let's see how it goes. Thanks watching and I hope to see you guys next time Bye