Think Tech Hawaii, civil engagement lives here. I welcome to Seymour's World on Think Tech Hawaii. Today is going to be my last show of Seymour's World on Think Tech Hawaii. The reason is I am going to have my own YouTube channel. Do I know what that means? No. I'm going to have my own blog. Do I know what that means? No. But I know that that's where I'm going with it, because our audience has been so good here at Think Tech. And thanks to Jay Fidel and the staff here, I've found that I'm really enjoying reaching an audience that I don't even know, people that send me notes and emails and messages from all over the world. So I wanted to invite the man that put this all together for me, Jay. Thank you for coming. Seymour.  Thank you for having me. It's been four years, Jay, that we put this together. You invited me to come here as a guest, and of course that fishing line that you put out of the hook was there, and you got me to come in, and I have become a host. And you know, we've done over 150 shows. We've done over 100 commentaries. And it really has been a pleasure. And for me, eye-opening to see what you have done for Think Tech Hawaii. Thank you, Seymour. You've done a terrific job. You are able to reach an audience that is really, you're unbiased. You tell people exactly what people need to hear rather than what the media wants them to hear. And I like that about Think Tech Hawaii.  I'm not a Republican. I'm not a Democrat. I believe in what I think is right for the people. And I think that what I've seen at Think Tech Hawaii is the ability for people to judge for themselves based on merit rather than on spin. And that's thanks to you. Thank you, Seymour. So you've done a super job. Thank you. So you're my guest today, but you're welcome to grill me on anything. I call this show The Good, The Bad, and The Future. All right. So let's talk a little bit. What would you like to discuss? Let's talk about The Good. In this current news cycle, if you will, especially with the elections a couple of days away, a lot of people are, they're blue. And I don't mean blue, liberal or blue Democrat. They're blue. They're depressed over how this country is doing. Find me some good in all of that, will you? There is, Jay. The first thing we have to realize is that if we watch too much press, listen to too much press, look at our phones and our iPads and try to absorb everything that's there, it's going to be negative from both sides. Because we have become a society, obviously, that believes in attack. If you attack the other side, you're going to win. And that's really not true. You know what really is good today? We have a beautiful life in America, especially. We are able to choose. We're able to, we may not like neo-Nazis. I don't like neo-Nazis by any way, shape or form, but yet they have the right to speak. And that is so important because in my travels around the world, I go to many societies that don't. So the good right now for me is that we live in the best society in the world. No matter what Mr. Trump says, no matter what the liberal press says or Fox News says, it doesn't matter. We have the greatest, greatest, greatest country in the world. From your lips to God's ears, Seymour. But you talked to me before the show about business. You talked about visiting China. You talked about the fact that business globally seems to be doing pretty well. Can you talk about that now? Sure. Because in Italy, working with a client in Italy, we're moving their factory over to China. So I've been going back and forth a lot, and I don't know if you know, but I've been going to China since the Nixon days in 1980. And I was there when we first brought toilet paper with us. That was the only way that you really could live in China. And of course, today it's much different. China has become the economic powerhouse in the world. We are not. We have become a consumer society in the U.S. and therefore we have to rely on countries to make goods for us less expensive than we can make. And China in itself is the place where that is happening. I have to tell you, though, the innovation that China is starting to bring forth is amazing. Every time I go to China, I see something new. An example, normally I go from Hong Kong to Guangzhou, which is an industrialized area in China. And that would take a three and a half hour trip. I went on a high-speed train in 37 minutes. How long did it take to build that train? Three years. Not much. We've been working on the rail here for 20 miles for a long time, and we're stuck. And we're going to still be stuck for another four or five years. But in the U.S., we have not learned the lesson or don't want to take the hard road that is necessary to get things done quickly. We're mired in regulation. Can't help it. That's just the way it is. So we can't go forward. We're mired by the union's wishes to help their people as much as possible, which has led to, unfortunately, the unwillingness to work hard. This is the opposite in China. So an example. I had a product that had to be made in China. This is 10, 15 years ago. I went to U.S. manufacturers. This was for the military. When it was a model airplane, then it had to be done out of a plastic extrusion. And I went to three plastic extrusion makers here in the U.S. And the quote was as follows, we need three months to give you full quotation, to give you what's called a die-cast mold, to do everything necessary to go forward. I said, that's impossible. It's not going to be ready on the timeline that I need. I flew over to China. I went to Hong Kong city toy, Melvin Shui, a very good friend of mine. And I said, Mel, is it possible to make this thing? He said, where are you staying? And I said, I'm at the Hyatt Hotel. He said, we'll bring you a model tomorrow morning. They worked all night, all their engineers, everybody. And the next morning, they came to me with a complete quote sheet with MOQs, minimum order quantities, delivery dates, everything, all the specs required, all done overnight in 24 hours. Does that tell you? That's not an isolated circumstance, too. That's really all over China. I was in Tianjin in the tech park there. And somebody wanted to order a circuit board for some device in the U.S. And he gave the specs to the guys who were putting these things together, designing them and building them. And it was the following day they were ready with a pro forma circuit board, an example circuit board that did exactly what was requested. So I think it's a cultural thing in a funny way. It's a patriotic thing for China to meet these goals, to meet these expectations, to be a world leader. Don't you feel that? A hundred percent, Che. What we see in China and what we see in India, what we see in other countries as we go further east, Vietnam has become a new source also for us. I'm building a complete product line for some NBA basketball players. So they need clothes and shoes and wristbands and et cetera. And I mentioned we're bringing this product from Italy called Acope, which is a special infrared weave in the clothing for muscle strain. So it'll be inside leggings and inside shirts and things like that, cuffs, armed cuffs. And the NBA guys in the foot, the NFL guys are all waiting for this to come out. If I tried to make this in Italy, it would be a two-and-a-half year project, two-and-a-half years. And bringing the machinery from Italy to China, we're delivering in January in three months. That's the way it is. Not even three months. That's amazing the way that works. But good for you for understanding it, good for you for picking up on it and making the comparison and taking the business arbitrage aspect, you bring the machinery from Italy, you have them do it in China, everything works well. Not everybody would have thought of that, Seymour. But we do it for many products. If you look at your cell phones, for instance, you have to realize that there are towers all over the world. Those towers receive the signals, right? You know where those came from? They came from a place called Mannheim in Germany. We moved the production facility in the 80s to China. And China is making all of those for the world. You look at solar panels today, they originally did not come from China, by the way. Solar panels came from Europe, Germany, Austria, Norway, Sweden, etc. We moved the production facilities to China because it's my place. China is the leader. And they do 89% of all of the solar panels in the world. Whether we like it or not, that's the way business works. Those are the good things. Now let's talk about the bad things. I just want to do balance on this. It's called a journalistic balance here today. It's hard for me, Jane. I know it is. I want to stress you out, yeah. Well the bad things in China, unfortunately, is the inability for the people to really speak out. And we've seen that happen, of course, from Tiananmen Square all the way through to Hong Kong, where they had the umbrella movement, you probably remember. So that's one of the worst things that I see, the reticence of the people to be able to express their opinions, really. Only my good friends, and they have to be very, very good friends in China that I've known for 20 or 30 years, will even express a negative opinion on what's happening in China. And that is not good. I don't think that's healthy. I love that in a democracy, we can express our opinion. And some of the stuff we hear and we read about is nuts. But it's an opinion. It's somebody's opinion. Do you think an attack in a series of murders, as we saw in Pittsburgh last weekend, would happen in China given the way the government works and the way it controls the conduct of the people? It does happen. It does happen in China. Rarely. It usually happens when people get mentally deranged or there's something really, really bad. As a matter of fact, two weeks ago when I was in Hong Kong, there was an attack by a retired school teacher. He went after a family and some people. It does happen. But nowhere near as often as it has here. And there's no guns in China. So we don't see any of the issues of the violent deaths that we have here in the U.S. As a matter of fact, if you ask me about a negative in the U.S., I would say that's probably one of our biggest negatives. Homelessness here in Hawaii. We know obviously how bad that is. Guns, I think, are a negative here in the U.S. I wish we had much tougher rules on that. Look what happened in Pittsburgh. I mean, whether you believe or not that people should be armed or have armed guards at the door, that's a whole different situation. But this guy was able to get an AR-15, that's an assault rifle. The word assault. What do you need that for? Assault. It's an assault rifle. You don't need that. And unfortunately, we have a society that allows it because of some type of political gain that's there. The other negative in my mind, and this contradicts my business world, by the way, is the size of our military. We spend much, much too much money on our military. And that, of course, is business, right? And I represent Army Air Force Exchange System. If we had to cut half of the stores down that I sell to around the world with AFIS, I would lose half my business. But you still maintain it's too big. Yes. And I would be happy, happy to lose half of my business if I knew that the money we spend on the military is going towards social, social type program, education, helping the poor people. That to me is an issue that we are going to be facing more and more because the homelessness situation is right on our doorstep. But wait. On the way in and out, you met Julian Gorbac, a professor at the School of Journalism in the Communications Department, UH Manoa. And his feeling, as he has expressed to me a number of times, is that the most important issue in our world for our species is climate change. And I think you'll find it very interesting, the Chinese, you know, who have had to wrestle with climate change and their own industrial revolution, they're actually more conscious of it, doing more about it. Correct me if I'm wrong than we are these days. You're absolutely right today. I'll give you an example. Two years ago in 2016, they said by 2018, there will be none, zero gas-powered motorbikes. And you know how many motorbikes there were in China? Guess what? On this last trip, and I was out there for eight days, there was not one gas-powered motorbike. I had a schedule. Way ahead of schedule. Guess what? By 2020, a year and a half now from now, there will be no gas-powered vehicles. No cars on the road will be allowed to have gas. They will use hydrogen and they will use lithium-ion. And they're already replacing lithium-ion. They're two car companies that are working on it right now to get longer distances. So they are actually one of the leaders, although the smog was horrible, Jay.  It was so bad in Guangzhou and in Dongguan. On this recent trip. Yeah, just on this recent trip. But the smog was really bad because the industries are still pumping a lot of stuff. But they're trying to do a lot more for it. They're doing something called carbon diversification. I don't know if you've heard what that is, but that's taking the stuff out of the air. It's almost like a filter on top of technology. Yeah. Yeah. And it really is working well, Jay. That is really good. Now, that doesn't say we don't have good things here in the U.S., obviously. My feeling is besides living in a democracy, allowing us to have free travel wherever we want to go, we have a wonderful society that wants to help others. No matter what you're reading about Trump and this caravan and all that sort of stuff, I see people helping other people all over the place. And to me, that is, that's something that you can't buy. You can't buy the feeling of being able to help others. I hope we can get back to that and avoid the kind of hostility we've seen in the newspapers lately. Because that hostility deteriorates the society and it distracts us from good constructive relationships and for that matter, business. Jay, we do not have—we don't have good leaders. If the leaders were people that everybody would look up to, we would get rid of the far right, we would get rid of the far left, and we would have a good society. Unfortunately, we have a lot of issues with medical care. We have a lot of issues that are—you know, there are polarizing people. And it's a lack of good leadership. That's the biggest issue that we have, and we need good leaders on both sides of the aisle. Well, we'll see what happens on Tuesday, coming soon. Oh, yes. Do you have anything you want to say about the election? I will, but we have to do it right after the break. So we will be back in one minute. I'm here with Jay Fiedel on Seymour's World. That's our last show on Think Tech, Hawaii. And we will also talk about all the wonderful shows we've had in the past and what it's all about. Be back in a minute. Aloha. My name is Mark Shklav. I am the host of Think Tech, Hawaii's Law Across the Sea. Law Across the Sea is on Think Tech, Hawaii every other Monday at 11 a.m. Please join me, where my guests talk about law topics, and ideas, and music, and Hawaii Ana, all across the sea, from Hawaii and back again. Aloha. Hi. I'm Bill Sharp, host of Asian Review here on Think Tech, Hawaii. Join me every Monday afternoon from 5 to 5.30 Hawaii Standard Time for an insightful discussion of contemporary Asian affairs. There's so much to discuss, and the guests that we have are very, very well-informed. Just think, we have the upcoming negotiation between President Trump and Kim Jong-un. The possibility of Xi Jinping, the leader of China, remaining in power forever. We'll see you then. Hi. Welcome back to Seymour's World on Think Tech, Hawaii. I'm here with Jay Fiedel, who is my guest and co-host for our last show on Seymour's World. Jay, we ended up the last session talking about the good. The bad, both in China, overseas, and here in the U.S. Let's talk about the future before we talk about the end of Seymour's World. So where do you see the future? Where do you see, forget politics for a second. What about our own personal lives? Do you see it as a good thing, where we're going with our lives? I do, but you first. Well, I think our lives are affected by the community we live in, by the country we live in, by the world we live in. Climate change is a very negative thing. It's happening, and nobody in this country seems to do much about it. We're pulling the wings out of EPA, we're no longer a world leader when dealing with climate change. And it's coming for us, even in the city and county of Honolulu, which requires the beach for its industry. We're not doing anything about it. So I think people get distracted. For some reason it's not interesting to government, but government is not aware of it. This is a big problem, and I think it's going to affect our economy, it's going to affect our lives. What affects our economy, what affects our community ultimately affects our lives. Likewise, the Mishigosh, that's Yiddish for craziness, that is going on in Washington is going to affect our lives. Even if, you know, Tuesday's election turns out to be on the left side of the equation, even if Democrats take the house, and a lot of people hope they will, we have a problem in government. We have, we're in a bad time with government. It's a football game, everybody's so hostile and angry at the other side, and not really aware of the common good, not dealing in the future, not doing good government. And I think our government is ineffective now in dealing with the future, and the result is we will have a tougher time dealing with it, and I'm very concerned about that. So I'm happy, I love doing think tech, I love having conversations like this, but I worry about the future and I worry about how that will affect me. From my point of view, I think the future is bright. I know there's always going to be the ups and downs, you can't help it, because if you don't have ups and downs, you really have a stalemate, and it doesn't happen. Every time we have an up in the stock market, every time we have an up in our, when we see the joblessness going down, that's an up, obviously. Whatever that happens, we all smile a little bit. The country is doing better. The reality is, climate change is not on people's minds. You are correct. And it will be on people's minds when, I don't think it will be ever too late, people have ways to be able to work on climate change. I don't think 99% of the people care, Jay. They care about how much money they have to spend. They care about their kids going to a good school, for instance. They care about how much is the car going to cost them, what the price of gas is. So to expect them to look at something ethereal in their minds like climate change, not going to happen. It's just not going to happen until it becomes something that's going to affect them directly. Here in Hawaii, my God, climate change could ruin our economy entirely. Without beaches, where do we go? And you know, it doesn't take much than a few inches of sea rise. And all of a sudden, it's, and if you go out to areas, or temperature, or the chemical composition of the ocean. And we see it, by the way. My wife and I are going to Norway, to the Fjords. And we now know that there's a certain time there's no use going because the ice is gone. So you're not going to see polar bears up there in the Arctic? We went to Iceland a few months ago. Same thing. Same. You know, the great glaciers are shrunk, there's no more ice in Iceland in many places. It's really strange. And so, you know, they're very philosophical about it, but the reality is this is very threatening to everyone. Now, again, that's the negative aspect of what we have to deal with. And we have to deal with politics the way it is. But I believe that if everybody starts giving back a little bit more to society, doing something for others, stop being such a consumer society, that'll help us in many, many different ways. If we learn, as a matter of fact, I'm doing a commentary with this show, right after the show, about counting your blessings, about being thankful for what you have, being mindful of all of the wonderful things that God has given us, or that we're able to help other people with, that is really what life is all about. Because in my mind, you know I have cancer, and I don't know how long I'm going to be around to be able to keep this treatment going that I have now. But I'm very mindful that in one or two years, I might not be here. Therefore, I want to do as much as I can with the programs that I have to really make this world a better place. It's a bucket list. That is on my bucket list. Let's show some of the pictures of the Seymour's world stuff that has happened around. So let's talk about the first one. This one was great. This was a group of 12 children that we brought from Israel and from Palestine. So there are 12 Jewish kids, 12 Arab kids. And this was one of the highlights of Seymour's world, because we had these kids together showing the world that the Palestinians and the Jewish kids can play together. It's called Ukuleles for Peace. We had thousands of people that looked at them all over. We had them here for two weeks, and they appeared here on this show, and they appeared in many other different places. The next one is, oh my god, this is Make Him Smile. This is the program I have on my foundation for helping kids in the hospital. As you can see, the patient is there. Her mom is there, and some of our musicians are there. And I think Make Him Smile is probably my legacy, Jay. I think that's what's going to make people remember what I've done, because we play for 4,000 kids a year. We're up to, I think it was 22,000 was the last count that have enjoyed getting a button, Make Him Smile button, a wristband, and a stuffed animal. And we're expanding it. We're in eight hospitals now. We have 48 musicians that volunteer their time just to play for the kids. That's great, Seymour. Yeah, it's a good program. Let's see the next one. Oh my god, this is very special to me. This is a young girl who unfortunately is no longer with us. She's passed, and she's in her bed, and she cannot move. And she's wearing a shirt that has, I can't remember the name of the group that's there, but it's a shirt. And our musician, her name is Taylor Krantz, played the music from the shirt, which means whatever the music was. And this girl could not smile, couldn't move her hands or her feet, but a tear came down her face. And that was the most expressive moment I will ever remember, because I knew that she was just so happy enjoying hearing the music of her favorite band, which was on her shirt. Let's see the next one. Oh, this is at Rehab Hospital of the Pacific. You can see the patients are there for lunch, and our musicians are at the far end. It's hard to tell what they are. But you know what the doctors do, Jay? They have the patients come and eat their lunch while we're playing, because they've suffered from strokes and heart attacks, and they're there basically to eat. But at the same time, they're getting treatment, because music is a healing tool. And what they do is they make the patients take their forks or their knives and beat to the music so they get to feel what's going on. Let's see the next one. Well, this is another one of my projects. You know, I speak on the Holocaust. And here I'm speaking to a group of soldiers at, this is at Schofield Barracks on the Holocaust. I speak about 22 times a year. And I teach on it at UH in the psychology classes. I teach also in the political science classes. And I find it very rewarding to be able to bring the awareness of the Holocaust in today's world, rather than speak of it as what happened during the Holocaust. So we bring bullying into the conversation. We bring the thought process of making sure that you do good to others, rather than try to just take care of yourself all the time. Yeah, we made a movie of you giving a speech on the Holocaust at a church, just near Pearl Harbor. Yeah, that was very good. And we put that on a cable. Yeah, that was amazing. That was terrific. Let's see, do we have any more? Is that the last one? I guess that's our last one.  Well, here's another one of my foundations. This is called You Are In Charge. This is a foundation for foster youth. You can see the picture at the bottom. And we take foster youth after they're aged out, which means after 18, the state considers a foster youth unable to get the benefits of the state's foster program. So that's ridiculous.  Me, I was not aware at 18. I'm still not aware of what the world is all about. And I take these kids through an eight-week program called You Are In Charge.  And we teach them how to take the bag, throw it over their shoulder. They'll never lose it, obviously. But then they're open in the front, and they can see the light at the end of the tunnel. And that's what the You Are In Charge program. That's very nice of you. So Seymour, 150 shows, 100 commentaries. They're all on the basic takeaway that life is good. And over four years, let's see if this is 2018, would have been 2014, who was back when? You were first started, sure. Think Tank was much smaller then. I wonder if you can tell us the dynamic of how things have changed for you, for your shows, for your charitable works. I think for me, Jay, Think Tech Hawaii has been a medium. It's been a platform. It has taught me that I can do more than just my business and my foundations, which we just saw in those pictures. Think Tech Hawaii has allowed me to reach out to so many people around the world that come back to me and say, hey, I watched your show, and this was terrific. And thank you for helping me understand how to make better choices. And Jay, I wanted to present this check to you as a donation because I feel very, very thankful. And I wanted to help Think Tech Hawaii in just going forward because I don't want you to stop. Even though I'm going to have my own YouTube channel and my blog, whatever all that means, I just wanted to say thank you, Jay. It has been such a pleasure to work with you. And I want to thank you for what you've done for me. It's been very, very rewarding. Well, thank you, Seymour. It's lovely for you to give us this check and to have supported us through these years. And let me say that you've been a bright light to us in terms of giving to the community. Not everybody feels this way.  Increasingly so over the years. So you've made great contribution, not only to our operation at Think Tech, but to the community.  Seymour, thank you so much. Thank you.  It is such a pleasure to have been a part of Think Tech Hawaii on Seymour's world. I guess my producer is going to find a way to reach you on my YouTube channel and from my blog. And I hope you'll continue to watch Think Tech because Think Tech is really a very, very open system for you to understand what's going on in the world. Aloha from Seymour's world.


Basa fills are the least abundant of my fills and they are super, super unbelievably obvious if you find one, if you find one. The ultimate challenge is if you find one because they're so filled with giant, like bluish, really dark granules.  And I'm going to tell you what those granules are because it's related to their function. They are basically inflammation makers. Like they make inflammation happen. And inflammation is when you get an infection and you get red, hot, swollen, and painful. That's inflammation.  And I'm going to tell you the name of two of the substances that they are found in the granules. One of them is heparin. And maybe heparin sounds familiar to you. It's an anticoagulant. I better write that down. Anticoagulant. Anticoagulants prevent clot formation. Heparin being produced during an inflammatory response is going to increase blood flow through an area which makes things red and swollen and hot and painful, but also can flush a system out if you've been infected by a bad guy. In addition to heparin, there's a pretty powerful inflammatory mediator produced called histamine. And hopefully histamine actually sounds familiar to you too. Histamine is an inflammatory agent also, but it's also a vasodilator. Vasodilation is also going to increase blood flow. So we're bringing in a lot of blood when we're having an inflammatory reaction. Antihistamines are produced because when you do have vasodilation and inflammatory stuff, you start snotting and tearing and itching, and you have all these terrible symptoms that arise as a response to that, but it's actually your body. There's a strategy behind why you would be reactive to something. Basophils. I couldn't find out how long they live, which I thought was kind of interesting. And rather than go find that and hunt that down, I decided I would show you a basophil instead. Which one of these cells is a basophil? Dude, please say that you're like, holy, like, wow, those really are super granularly. You can kind of see the nucleus in here, but yeah, there's no question that this is full of granules as opposed to this guy, which might be a neutrophil, probably is a neutrophil, but might be somebody else as well. Always when you're looking at your slides, you don't have to have a reference, who's most abundant? Those are going to be your neutrophils. Then look at those guys and go, okay, this is what a neutrophil looks like, and then compare everybody else to that, and that will help you make your decisions about what something looks like. But basophils are pretty obvious. All right, two left. We've got our monocytes and our lymphocytes left, and you'll notice that we are no longer in fill land. Who are my fills? All fills are filled with granules, and that's why we put them together this way. You could sort, if you were given all of them and asked to sort them, you could sort them based on their filliness. Okay, so now let's talk about the, it looks like monocytes are next.


Think back to when you were first given a camera. You were past this magical box and you held it up to your eye and you turned to the person who'd given it to you and you asked the age old question, what should I photograph? It is a question that was probably confounding you then and it's probably confounding you now. Fortunately, there is a answer to this conundrum. How's it, how's it? There is, I think that a fairly obvious thing about asking this question is that we are not sure about what to do with something that is new. So we turn to people who have more experience with whatever it is that we're using, in this case it's a camera. And I think fairly naturally we say to somebody, okay, what am I supposed to do? Just as much when you learn any other thing you say to somebody, how do I drive the car? Or how do I use the chainsaw? Things of that nature. And the problem with this is that those are all very mechanical things. But with photography because it is a visual art form that beyond the technical, this is how you switch camera and stuff, that everything is very open to interpretation. And to really the phrase that you should be asking, and I'm sorry to use the word should there because I don't like it, but the phrase that we really want to be asking is what do I want to photograph? What do I want to photograph? Not do what do you think I should photograph? Because the two are not the same thing. How do we answer this problem? What should we photograph? There are a number of ways to go about it. And one in this day and age would be to Google what should I photograph? And that will give you a nice kind of very compact, neat list of something that somebody else has decided that you should photograph. So that's kind of okay, but it's not really addressing the real issue. Because once you've worked your way through that list, you're kind of like, well, what should I photograph now? So how do you go about getting rid of these issues? Well, the first thing that you really want to start doing is to stop thinking of yourself as a specific kind of photographer. If you are like me, right?  The same probably goes true for a lot of you. You may be into street, or you may define yourself as being a landscape photographer. So all these labels have restricted what you think is suitable material for a subject. So as soon as you take this label off of you, as soon as you stop thinking yourself as a still life photographer, just merely a photographer who was interested in all of the stuff around us, then the options for you to photograph are so opened up. They just become absolutely infinite because everything can be interpreted in a different way. And that's the beauty of photography is that your vision, the way that you see the world is what we're looking to do here.  I'm gonna share with you a piece of practical advice about how you can start seeing the options, seeing the possibilities in subjects all around you. And I mentioned earlier that you need to photograph things that interest you. So for this exercise, you really do need to be interested in this. I would like you to take an object, right? So it could be just this simple camera that we have here and photograph it in 36 unique ways. It's gonna say unique and different, but you know what I mean, right? That is one of the best exercises you can do is because you're gonna train your eye to see an object for all the potential that it has.  And that's the point, right? If all of these photographs are easy, and this is why I say 36 exposures rather than just like five, that you are training yourself. It's a bit like doing physical exercise. Five press ups is no big deal, but 15, 20, 100, depending on your abilities, it's those last few that really make the difference. And it's the same with the photography. When you start challenging the things that are holding your back and you're pushing against them, then you can start seeing that you can see things so different. If you just have exercised yourself, if you trained your eye to see the wonder that's in all these images. So try that out the next time that you have, you know, an hour or so spare, take an object that interests you, photograph it in 36 different ways, different, completely different ways, and see what you can come up with. See what potential you can untap. And I know that you'll be surprised about how much potential you can actually untap in what could be considered just a simply mundane object. If there are things that you are desperate to photograph, then photograph them. It doesn't matter if you think there are things you should photograph. Just go with your instinct. Harry Callaghan, who is a very famous photographer, not a cop in San Francisco, would photograph anything that caught his eye. Now he used a term for this. He called them clues, photographic clues, because he would photograph them and see what came from them. Not for any specific purpose, but just because something about it intrigued him. And this is best illustrated in this photograph of a flower head or like a weed or something. Now he photographed that and was interested in its shape and its form. He was also embarked, or he was embarking on a 10-year project, a photographing Eleanor, who, and it's a very famous series of photographs. And he photographed her in masses of different ways, right? And you see that there's an overlap between these two photographs. And that would never have happened if Harry Callaghan had said, I am photographing a person, so I need to photograph them in a way that makes sense for being a person. I am a people photographer, so I'm gonna just photograph people things. He looked beyond what was accepted. And I want you to do the same thing as well. Look for those clues. See where they are hiding, because they hide in plain sight. They're chicksy little things. And if you are not open to seeing them, if you're not open to exploring their possibilities, then you will miss out on them. Please don't miss out on them. I thought it would be handy. I thought it would be really good to look at and doing this exercise. I thought it would be really interesting for me rather than just tell you about this exercise to do it myself. And I'm extremely glad that I did because it was actually quite hard going, but extremely rewarding. And initially, as I mentioned, the first five or six were fairly easy to produce and there wasn't too many issues there. But when I got to around about frame 20, that's where we started getting tricky and I was beginning to run out of ideas. These are the sequences that I was going through. So this is the first shot and that's the second shot and that's the third and so on. Now you can see I'm sort of playing with apertures here and these are all straight out of camera, right? So I haven't done anything to these because that's not the point of this exercise. You could, of course, if you wish, use different ways of processing an image to change things up, but I prefer to just kind of work on what I had available to me in camera and here you can see I'm playing with some exposures, trying some different things out. Now these are not the world's greatest photographs by any means or stretch of the imagination, but think of these as a warm-up exercise. Obviously, the more confident and capable you become of experimenting with various ideas, then these photographs can be more considered, if you will. This is just a good quick example. I like to use the very quick and dirty of me just testing things out. Like here's dropping the lime into the fruit bowl and then there's the lime smacked into the fruit bowl. What I found from this was that I really had to kind of start thinking quite outside my comfort zone for what could be considered to be something new to try. I'm extremely glad that I went outside because this particular photograph here, which I think is absolutely wonderful. I love the cut, not the colors, but the way that the patterns are created by the spinning of the wire in there. It's just absolutely beautiful. Some of these obviously didn't work and some of them, like the spinning one that I talked about, I really enjoy. But that's the whole point of this. It's just to try things out, to see what is out there. And you could do this with anything. Even you could do this even with a person or a landscape or whatever that you wanted to. So go off and shoot these photographs.  If you're interested, I will put a link to this contact sheet in the description box below so you can go download it and have a look for yourself.  If you're an amateur or if you're a professional, the question that you should be asking yourself every time you trip the shutter is who is this photograph for? Is it for somebody else or is it for you? Is this what you want to photograph or is it what you think that you should be photographing? If you are looking to learn more about how to express yourselves through your photography, then I would highly recommend that you check out this video here because that will give you a really great insight into expressing yourself with more freedom. Anyway, thanks for watching and I'll see you again soon.


Hi everyone. In this video I'd like to talk to you about the concept of reception analysis as a portion of critical media studies. And with this video if you're following along the progression of these videos we've we're taking a little bit of a turn away from some the perspective of individual groups or the organizational creation of these things and really focusing in on the audience and their role in this whole avenue of critical media studies. So reception analysis is starting our look down that avenue of things in the audience in this whole crazy game of critical media studies. So let's take a look at reception analysis. First of all reception analysis examines the role of the audience in the process of meaning making in the media. Remember that all of this is really interpretive and that's where we start to focus on the audience that when we study any kind of media or when we take in any kind of media that it's really an interpretive process dependent on especially looking at reception analysis here the the role of the audience in interpreting and then making meaning out of that media examining exactly what that means. There are a variety of related theories to reception analysis that we're going to take a quick look at some of these and then spend a little more time on others but in the early days reception analysis really focused on centered around what's called the hypodermic needle approach. A hypodermic needle approach meaning that media really is just injected into our brains essentially and that you know really doesn't take into account the complexity of the human mind and the various interpretations of that media but we're really just saying that the that media is kind of pushed into our consciousness and we just accept it mindlessly that's sort of the hypodermic needle approach that media serves to relay that information and then we take it in and that's really to just kind of like a needle just kind of shoots that directly into our brain. We very quickly progress kind of past this approach with the idea of there's really more to it than that in what's called the two-step flow approach the two-step flow approach. So where the hypodermic needle approach said you know media is just pushed directly into the individual and that's it the two-step flow approach added an additional layer of what to call opinion leaders. So it says that media really goes to these opinion leaders who are prominent people in the society who are the people that other individuals kind of follow along with to a certain extent they take their cue from them. Now this could be you know in our modern day it could be celebrities and things like that we think of those people as opinion leaders but there's also a lot of other opinion leaders or what we would call significant others in the development of our ideas and things. So when you're a child for example your parents would be very strong opinion leaders or community leaders people that you really look up to would be opinion leaders. So when they see something in the media or take this in their stance really does affect yours it doesn't mean that the individual automatically just goes along with that again we're not mindless zombies just doing whatever people tell us necessarily but but we are more inclined to follow the lead of those opinion leaders and so two-step flow approach inserts that additional layer between people and the media the individuals and the media. Let's get into what we call cultivation analysis which really emphasized and focused initially on the idea of violence in the media that you know the kind of most common example of cultivation analysis is that the belief was that when children watch violence in the media it causes them to be violent that that was sort of the cause or the identified as the reason for why there was an increasing amount what they considered an increasing amount of violence in young people was that because they were watching more violence on tv and that gave them the idea that well the world is a violent place so you know it also goes to the idea of when we see on the news media constantly stories about break-ins or you know hold-ups and things on the street people being mugged on the street then we start to behave in a more fearful manner because it cultivates that fear in us from seeing that on the media whether it's in the news or whether it's on these violent tv shows or just tv shows in general when we watch shows that feature people being robbed and murdered that we start to believe that's kind of the norm of the world it cultivates that belief in us but so cultivation analysis was a factor in studying the impact of media on the audience or the audience's role in how we interpret these things that that if we see that constantly in the media then we start to believe that's the reality of the world another really kind of more modern thinking about reception analysis or theory that informs reception analysis i should say is what we call gender setting theory and this is you know to broadly categorize it it's the idea that the media does not tell us what to think like it does in the hypodermic needle approach right then in the hypodermic needle approach the the media is really telling us what to think it's it's providing those thoughts and putting them in our head agenda setting theory says that the media doesn't tell us what to think it tells us what to think about or it informs heavily what we think about which is interesting and there is sort of this triangular aspect to it as you can see here that we have our own perception of reality that's based on our reality what we see in the world what we experience those types of things but then we also have and and the media is informed by what they choose to put in front of us we'll get into this and a little more but but the media makes choices they can't tell us about everything that happens all over the world and can't tell us about what happens every day in our own personal lives right so they have to pick and choose and they set the agenda what are they going to talk about and then that kind of informs us about well this must be important if they're talking about it on the news or if this is what's being featured in movies and television shows and things then it must be important so it sets that agenda for what are we going to think about and what's going to occupy that that you know space in our mind that we reserve for processing information right so we not only have the reality that comes to us through our own world but the reality that then is filtered through the media who chooses then what to talk about again selection omission and framing of stories we'll talk about this in just a second a little more detail but but it goes through those processes and then kind of tells us you know oh these are the things that we should be focusing on so we have these dual influences not only the reality itself but then the reality of what the media is telling us is important and what we should be focusing on next you have uses and gratification theory and this is this posits that people will pursue media that that provides them a pleasure that gives them pleasure right that things that we enjoy or things that we feel like are important to us things that we feel like will have a strong impact on our lives and have you know the ability to influence our lives in in whatever way so the uses and gratification theory says that people will use and seek out media that performs those functions and kind of exclude others right that will that will focus in on on certain media whether that's media platform or media channel like a specific tv show or television channel that that we feel is especially important to us in terms of either providing us with enjoyment or with functional information that we can use to better our lives and that the people will naturally gravitate toward those things and exclude others these are all just i went through these pretty quickly because they're kind of hodgepodge of different theories that will provide the foundation for reception analysis and inform some of these other theories but really want to focus and spend a little more time on some of these other areas more specifically so the first one we're going to take a look at is was developed by steward hall in in some work that he published in 1973 that focuses on kind of the encoding and decoding process and the impact that the audience has on that process and and that the way that the audience influences those things so it starts with you know on the on the kind of the creator side the organizational or creator side of things and says okay the organizations or the people who are creating this media have a specific framework of knowledge meaning their experiences their beliefs their values their cultures so forth that create kind of who they are then also their relations of production so what kind of media is this that will influence the type of thing that they're sharing with us and then the technical infrastructure that they have through which they provide that media so the the the organization or the creator of this media this artifact has those specific things going on then they engage in a process of what's called encoding they have to decide how to share that information with us right so um so they're they're creating meaning in the way that they choose to to share this again through technological aspects is this going to be a video is it going to be a written article is it going to be a book is it you know long form short form so they're making choices about encoding there what kind of language are they going to use in in presenting this material and sharing this information and or or what kind of visual choices will they make what kind of symbols are they going to use that's what we call encoding right so they're they're making all these choices as to how they're going to convey this information and those choices have meanings they're they're choosing some things and excluding others and and doing so in a conscious or subconscious way that that provides that that meaning in how they choose to encode this information at the same time on the other side of the world here you have the audience right you have the audience who is has their own framework of knowledge they have their own things going on their own experiences their own uh cultures their own backgrounds their own beliefs values attitudes those types of things then they also have a a relation uh of production how are they how are they taking this in and how are they processing it right and their own technical infrastructure and we know that different people have access to different types of technology so those are important things that are happening on the audience side of things then the audience is going through what we call the decoding process the the content creator chose ways to convey this information the symbology right the language and the the images that they choose and the technology that they choose to use to convey this information on the other side the audience is decoding trying to understand first of all what's the language being used here what are these symbols and then what do they mean and is there some deeper meaning right so what do they mean on the surface you know what is that is that a cow is that a dog is it a car is it whatever and then what does that mean why did the audience why did the creator choose that particular thing how does that all work together why did they choose this word instead of some others and uh how does that influence my thinking so the audience themselves is creating meaning or have that meaning structures the second type of meaning structure right so we have the encoding creating meaning structure on the creator side and the decoding creating structure on the audience side and then those combine to create that that program as meaningful discourse right the program is meaningful discourse though so the the combined efforts there between the encoding the decoding and all the various frameworks of knowledge at play for the creator in the audience combined to create that program is meaningful discourse and then it comes back again that creates it's kind of cyclical that creates a new framework of knowledge for both the audience and the creator and and they're influenced by that for the next round of encoding and decoding and so forth right so this is steward hall's idea of encoding and decoding moment this creates a really important foundation for some of the work that's to follow for example uh then you have a gentleman named john fisk who kind of expanded on hall's work and said okay yeah great we have i agree we have the framework of knowledge from the the organizer and the creator side right and they encode they make choices that encode that information we also have this idea of program is meaningful discourse the fisk is following along with all this and yep yep yep check check check i love all this stuff and the audience is in fact decoding and creating that second type of meaning structure but then he diverges from hall and says that but there's more to this decoding than just you know it's not as simple as the audience as a whole has one framework of knowledge in truth the audience has multiple meanings because the audience also has multiple frameworks of knowledge and different things so each person or group that is receiving this information has their own framework of knowledge and that as a result creates these various meanings so that on the audience side of things you have multiple meanings being created from a single artifact because everyone's going to interpret it differently right that's interesting that makes sense i think that logically that follows along we know that each person their framework of knowledge is very individualized and so that that does you know that that tracks i think that makes sense then you have this idea of the you know um celeste condit who's another researcher came along after fisk and said okay you know i'm sort of buying this i i understand this and i agree with what fisk is saying here however the structure in this model still really implies and really is applicable to what we would call a dominant culture base right that people this is this is being created by a specific you know there's that dominant culture we've talked about that before that you know really media historically has been created by heterosexual white men because they have the power in the structure and they're they have the ownership of the media organizations and so forth so the the vast majority of media that comes to us comes from that that that culture group right the dominant power group of heterosexual white men and is influenced by that and so it has meaning in particular for that same group or especially you know it is particularly heterosexual white men but then you can get into you know that would have one meaning probably one meaning group and then another meaning group is probably dominantly white women because they can at least relate to the the a lot of the aspects of the the the of white people being the dominant power group and and having the the power to create that media and so forth so they they're going to have more meaning and more understanding it's going to relate more to them than it would for what what what conduct called the marginalized audience right so what about minorities you know what about what about african-americans and hispanics who again when the predominance of media is created by heterosexual white men that's who's going to be featured in the media that's the viewpoint you know and you add in the idea of culture and for example um you know the um the the prominent values of christianity in the creation of the united states and and that dominate the united states historically that that's going to come through but what about people of what about people of color what about people of different religious beliefs who can't necessarily relate to the values that are being conveyed because of that dominant power group she calls this the marginalized audience and they will have meaning but they won't you know if they watch it at all they will have a separate meaning of course but they may not be watching it at all so that that audience is really separate in in decoding they may not be decoding it at all because they it's not really intended for them doesn't relate to them doesn't appeal to them in that way so so kind of points out that that while you have all this other stuff this is really still predominantly describing um the the predominant group i think i failed to mention this is what we call polysomy and polysomy just means multiple meanings right this this idea that fist came up with this polysomy meaning there's multiple meanings literally polysomy means multiple meanings poly multiple uh semi meanings right so um so uh that's really what we're describing here is the fact that that the encoding and decoding process really results in multiple meanings even more so condit says when you factor in this marginalized audience who have a completely different interpretation if they're interpreting at all so this is the basic ideas of polysomy and discussion around polysomy um and and um so condit goes on to talk about what we call um polyvalence polyvalence valence meaning meaning but uh interpretation valence it would be you know kind of interpretation of of things so polyvalence has to do with how are the different audiences interpreting it um uh just in terms of uh you know good or bad or or the intensity with which they're doing so and so forth so these different ideas of polysomy that come into to play here another you know extension of this kind of discussion of polysomy came from a researcher named liya uh seturelli seturelli i think is how you pronounce her name liya seturelli who said that okay great all of that is is uh is well and good it's also really not indicative enough of what's happening it's a little too too focused on the audience as the primary uh interpreter of meaning and and the only variances of meaning um coming from the audience so the you know she said that really this polysomy is not broad enough it's it's really uh polysomy itself is uh polysomus meaning there's multiple meanings behind those multiple meanings uh in in that whole process so she uh really described this process in in breaking it down into three different um uh factors here uh the first is what she called resistive reading resistive reading where polysomy exists as a quality of the audience so kind of what we've been talking about right where fisk and and kind of came from this this idea of of the audience providing multiple meanings and multiple interpretations based on their own frameworks of understanding is what seturelli called resistive reading but there's also she said different um avenues here one being strategic ambiguity which is what she called polysomy as a quality of the artifact creator so the person or the people responsible for creating this also have their own multiple meanings coming through here right and that's what she called strategic ambiguity so the that the creator on the on the other side so we have those branches as well coming out not just on the audience side but the multiple frameworks of the people who are touching this most uh most artifacts come through multiple or you know have have been touched by multiple people who are involved when you make a film it's not just the director it's the the producers that are impacting it's the editors it's the actors it's so forth all these people that have you know their fingers in the process excuse me i create that what we call strategic ambiguity that multiple meanings that come through uh as as a quality of the the artifact creator creators then then you also have the the idea of what she called hermeneutic depth hermeneutic hermeneutic depth which has to do with the polysomy as a quality of the critic or the analysts so so we for example who are engaging in critical media studies have our own interpretations have our own frameworks of understanding and and things so um so we add to that polysomy through our hermeneutic death whether that's uh through critical media studies or through uh critics you know film critics tv critics so forth have their own hermeneutic depth or look or depth not death hermeneutic depth are looking at it through a specific type of lens and coming with their own individual frameworks of understanding as well so just really really divides us out and says you know that we don't have just these branches on the audience side the multiple means those branches exist across the board as we look at things another idea surrounding reception analysis or no theory connected to this it comes to us from stanley fish what he what he calls interpretive communities interpretive communities so fish starts by saying that the words have no meaning until they're red all right the words as you know we're just symbolic we've talked about this before we're just symbolic they really have no meaning until they are red so they don't really mean anything until the person is uh what we would call decoding what hall would call decoding right that's where the provide meaning and then that meaning comes only through interpretation right so that those words don't really have any meaning until they come through the individual who's receiving it or the group that's receiving it and then we provide that meaning it's kind of this idea of is just kind of always reminds me of schrodinger's cat if you're familiar with that is the cat alive is the cat dead well really it's neither until we open the box and find out right it exists in this kind of ether and the same idea of if a tree falls in the forest and nobody's there to hear it does it make a sound yeah i mean this kind of you know intellectual thoughts it's kind of interesting but the idea that none of this really matters none of these words none of these symbols matter at all until somebody's there to interpret them and that then he fish goes on to say stanley fish goes on to interpolate that groups will uh will interpret things similarly when they share a culture so groups that have a shared culture will interpret artifacts similarly right because if they have nobody has the exact same um frame of reference or or framework of understanding and because we haven't all had the exact same experiences and we don't share the exact same beliefs and and values and and culture you know that's that doesn't all line up 100 precisely for any per any two people right but some groups are more similar than others right so these groups that have a similar culture a similar shared background a similar framework of of understanding will probably come to interpret artifacts in a similar way then right so um this always makes me think then of you know as example as an example that this news media especially in our current age right this news media and how it creates kind of this echo chamber right so if you are a cnn person then and you hear um former president trump make a statement or you know you hear president biden give a statement make a speech or you hear somebody you know in one political party if you're watching cnn you are a a um a regular cnn viewer that's you that's your preferred area then you will probably interpret it in a particular way and you will probably have a similar interpretation then to other people who regularly watch cnn and the same is true for fox news people who are regular fox news viewers will probably have a different interpretation of this uh the the speech uh for me they're of those people and president trump president biden they will have a different view of that speech then people who watch cnn or msnbc regularly but probably a similar interpretation and and decoding process to other people who watch fox news regularly right it does kind of create these these echo chambers and it kind of goes to uses and gratification too we're going to go to the media that really speaks to us and tends to follow along with our own frame of reference in our own value system and so anyway the groups with these shared cultures will interpret artifacts similarly not not terribly surprising in that regard either but then fish extends this to say that the people creating this medium are typically not typically they are products of a of a group they are typically born of one of these groups so that people who are you know going into create the the news that you see on fox news are on cnn or on msc probably msnbc probably come from a group that that adheres to those values and follows those values right so um so what that does then in fish's mind is then collapse that distinguish collapse the distinction between creators and audiences it's saying that that that these creators are part or part of that audience they come from that audience they extend from that audience right and so of course they're going to create this news or create this viewpoint that aligns with what this audience believes because they are part of that audience so there's really no distinction between in many ways creators and the audience right and that so that the audience plays a role in that as well in that they are really creating the creators that create their media then right it's all kind of cyclical okay all of that really interesting in terms of cultural analysis but we can also look at a very different type of call of reception analysis sorry than than all that which is ethnography ethnography ethnography is is a qualitative research um where we go we can look at ethnography ethnography is a a type of research it's a qualitative research methods focused on understanding a cultural phenomenon from the perspective of the members of that culture so what really happens is that um that a person becomes embedded they embed themselves a researcher or an analyst would embed themselves so to speak in that culture spend a really great amount of time in that culture understanding who that culture is what's their language what are their values really getting to know them and again just immersing themselves in that in that culture in that the group the audience in which they want to study right so um so it's a qualitative research method meaning that they're going based on personal observations more so than you know statistical data or empirical data so ethnography is when somebody does it a researcher would embed themselves and spend a great deal of time getting to know them so that they can understand okay what are the what's the predominant language here what's what would they call coding the dominant coding as opposed to the oppositional coding how do people frame things how do people use language how do people do things in this culture so we look at ethnography and one of one of the initial one of the more famous ethnographical studies that took place related to media was from a person named Dave a man named David Morley and David Morley was is a British researcher who studied um the perform what they call a nationwide study nationwide nationwide is a program that aired on the on the BBC back in the uh I believe the 70s 80s in that era so it was a while ago but when the study took place but he Morley embedded himself in a particular community and then examined how that community perceived the nationwide programming or really had different audiences than would perceive the nationwide study program so he looked at this you know it's a news program so he looked at this news program with different audiences and he developed what he called three kinds of codes um three ways of coding first there was the dominant coding structure right the dominant coding where people had agreed with that the program or whatever was airing in ethnography the dominant coding would be you know this aligns with my values that I agree with this and that's on one extreme end of this continuum at the extreme end of the opposite end of that continuum would be oppositional coding people who disagree with what's being put forth people who disagree with that notion and then in the middle though for the most part you have what's called negotiated and this is where most people will fall either closer to or further closer to dominant or closer to oppositional but somewhere usually in the middle this negotiated thing where they you know agree with some of it and and and disagree with other parts of it but and so fall somewhere in the middle there between dominant and oppositional where pieces of it will fall in their dominant coding and others will fall in the oppositional coding so they create what's called this negotiated coding and that's what ethnographer study they study how people are looking at this and how people are coding things and and how they relate to that as an audience then relate to that artifact based on that coding we talked about a lot a lot of things related to to reception analysis and really all of those things do play a role at reception analysis a very broad approach to critical media studies and so you really are kind of picking and choosing and but they really build upon one of them each other really each of these theories that we talked about do and understanding the audience as a role and the the the factor that the reception and the interpretation of that audience plays in the understanding of this artifact if you have questions about reception analysis or anything else related to critical media studies please feel free to shoot me an email I'd love to chat about that with you and provide any more information that I can in the meantime I hope you do give greater consideration in your study in your looking at the media to the role of the audience and the fact that each of us does have a role and specifically to play with a given artifact so I get out there do some more critical media studies and really consider the role and the factor of the that the audience plays in interpreting these artifacts


Alright, hello everyone and welcome to the first talk of the beginner track for the day Thank you all for for coming and to learn about policy as code and readable rego Quick show of hands who here is doing some sort of policy as code already in there in their stacks All right, cool. And how many of you are are using open policy agent? We got a couple it's pretty good. All right. Well, this is the beginner track So this is going to be a very like introductory a Talk on how to use open policy agent what it is why it came about and then we're trying to go over some quick examples of how to how to write Regal policies and how to clean up the code so starting off My name is Peter O'Neill. I am a senior DevOps engineer and evangelist for a company called WebRite We helped do digital transformations and helping companies Move their legacy technologies to the cloud Cool so today's agenda talk a little bit about why Open policy agent came about the difference between off then and off Z But about what it means for something to be policy as code then we'll dive into the open policy agent project And then we'll get into writing rego and doing some unit testing. So Let's get started. So you've probably already seen something similar to this where right? We've been moving to the cloud We've taken these monoliths that we had and we break them down into these Microservices right and like breaking them into their smallest components. And so when this happens, right? There are a Lot of points now that you have to make decisions, right? Now that we have all these different services all these services have API endpoints all of and then you have more users using These services and all these services have more components. So now you can see the complexity here of all these points now You have thousands of interactions that need some sort of authorization check when they happen, right? And so this is now why we move into the space why we need a more fine-grained access control system or authorization tool and so The reasons that a coarse-grained system, right? We're talking very simple like our back policies or just users Where you can just have one simple rule around what a user can or can't do won't work Right it kind of lacks a lot of the complexities that our cloud native systems need, right? And so when we talk about this, right like these these policies end up being Right like hard-coded directly into the application then it being very air-prone, right? There's a lot of things that just don't work very well for the complexities of the systems that we want to create and so With that right like we we want to now Extend extend and expand what we're doing to be more dynamic and to be more inclusive of The systems that we're creating right and so this is kind of the model that we want to move into So with that we'll move into Authent versus Authz and this ends up being a Question that comes up quite a bit when People are trying to adopt an authorization system because they think I already have an SSO provider I already know right already have something that Identifies my users, but right this is the off-end side of the problem and when we have But we need both sides of this coin right that only do we need to identify the user But we need to grant permissions in a way that is very modular, right? So you you need to solve both sides of this coin in order to have it through Authorization system right and so when we're on the off-end side that is our SSO provider That could be LDAP that could be active directory right and then on the other side of that is when we're actually setting up Our authorization system right and this could be as simple as our back right once again with that very coarse-grain just Understanding what users belong to what groups and giving them and giving them permissions based on that and then you have right? You move into a little bit more complexity where you have like an aback system or Attribute-based access controls where you start defining more attributes around each specific user and each Interaction that they're doing and it gives you a little bit more of that fine-grained nature or something like I am like directly in your cloud Where you can control right individual components with it within the cloud right and so it's giving you more and more Control over the interactions that need to happen right and so when we think about this right we can think about Right all the different places that that these interactions are happening right you can have things at the Infrastructure layer, you know directly on Kubernetes or Docker or right you can think of this as like inside Kubernetes You have your admission controller. This is when Kubernetes is actually going to create resources, right? We are admitting those resources into Kubernetes right so we need to have that that modularity to say hey I Want specific users or specific service accounts or specific x to be able to create Some type of resource in this cluster and you want to be able to control what that looks like right same thing with Terraform You want to be able to say When I run my Terraform plan, I know what is in scope and what is out of scope right? I know that when users are creating resources VMs Maybe entire clusters right you want to know exactly How they should be created not just saying Because you are an admin you can create whatever you want right this ends up happening a lot in CICD pipelines where those permissions end up getting like the star value admin and those those Those CICD pipelines end up being overpowered for what they need to do right and then on the on the application side of this right you can think of this as When you are defining your applications when you are building these services What exactly are you going to allow your users to actually do when they're interacting with the system right? And so these are all different types of authorization decisions that need to happen both on the infrastructure side and on the application side and so What's needed right like and so this is kind of where we start getting into this policy as code Mindset right where now that we're looking for this dynamic find-grain authorization right we start wanting to Standardize this by using some sort of framework right by having a framework now We know for all these different components from the infrastructure all the way up to the application right? We can start defining what these policies look like in one language Right and we want to be able to say a little how do we do this in one place right? How do we actually get these policies to apply to all of these different areas? And we do this by decoupling the policy logic from the tools that we're using Right and so this is where we start actually doing policy as code because now that we have decoupled what? Authorization checks need to happen now. We can start defining these and Putting them into our policy or start checking these into git as if like we will with the rest of our code base right and so now we know a little bit About policies code or sorry Sorry, one more one more slide here right and so the evolution of policy right and so this is kind of Where we started to how we got to policy as code and so right? Once upon a time right like I remember my first job my first Systems job where they gave me access to all the systems when I started right they created all my accounts And it's basically just root access to everything right it was basically them saying hey When you're working with our systems make sure you don't do this and everything was written in a wiki and Who really reads the wiki every time they go to do something right like you sound something that you're going and manually checking to Make sure you're doing the right thing every time and so it's very error prone and then so right as things kind of moved along We started saying well, okay Well now I can just kind of put some guard rails up and just kind of say let the system block a few things here and there Right and make sure the system stops you from doing anything. That's like crucially bad and Then right and then this worked fairly well But we ended up defining things like who is my admin group in a dozen different places right and so we had that we had this hard-coded Policies that needed to be rewritten time and time again right and so this is where we've now moved into right like okay Well, then how do we define this in one place and Spread it out everywhere right giving us this more of a policy as code mindset Right and so when we're doing this what we're doing is we are extracting that policy Writing it in some sort of policy language and then having a policy engine and force this for that service right and so now we have Whatever that service is being able to call out to that policy engine right maybe it's running directly on the service Maybe it's running next to the service, but that service now is able to make that call to say hey I don't know what to do In this scenario and you don't want it to know right you want your policy system to be able to make those decisions for it Right, so this ends up taking away complexity from the service and speeding up Speeding up that check every time it needs to happen right and so as we're doing this right what we're doing is We are applying the same principles that we use for software development for our policy Right, and so when we typically think about The how we've come to build applications We have this very standard idea of what the software development lifecycle is and those same practices work for your policy development Life cycle right you want to be able to define things up front you want to be able to Author and create things and check them in to get Before you're actually deploying them so that you can run your unit tests your integration tests right you can verify Everything that's happening before it goes into your systems because right like you don't want to check in a policy That's very restrictive and have it you know Block access that you need or turn off access that's already there Causing things to happen that are unintended right and so you're able to use that same CICD pipeline to deploy policies that create the security guardrails But you're able to use this with the same Tools and mindset that you're used to for when you're doing your software development Right, and then it gives you additional things like monitoring and logging all the other additions to the life cycle that you want to see and so with that Right, we have this tool called open policy agent right and open policy agent has been around for quite a while It is a graduated project in the CNCF and right it came about to solve this problem of How do we enable authorization? Across the the tech stack or across specifically your tech stack that you're using right and it Does this by creating that standardized policy framework that we talked about earlier, right and so Opa or opa for open policy agent is a general-purpose policy engine right that general purpose meaning that it's able to be used for all those tools and services right and so This tool right by by decoupling We'll get to the next slide right is gonna allow you to really optimize your policy performance Your policy performance for the rest of your your stack right, and so how exactly Does this work right and so As I mentioned you we are decoupling here So the service at the top here is going to make right maybe this is gonna be an HTTP call Maybe this is gonna be running as like a sidecar right, but you're gonna have these various options so that your service Right can ask a question and what is a question a question is going to be all of the input and data that your service has and it's going to ship that as a JSON object to open policy agent right and So we are calling this a question but realistically this is just understanding the data in and returning a data block back right and so at It's simplest level which you might be returning back is like a Boolean like a true or false But this could be much more complex than that as well, right? You might be you might want to send some sort of JWT token that you want to encrypt or decrypt You might want to hash these values or create certificates on the fly right so opa being this Being being the decision engine Just understands how to take in this JSON and then you're going to define with your policies What needs to be sent back right and so The magic happens inside of the policy itself because the policy is going to transform this data into what you need right and so Right like as I mentioned right there's a bunch this is going to work with pretty much any of the tools in your tool stack because as a cloud native tool Everything basically speaks on the HTTP protocols you're able to send these requests and then opa will be able to Compare the question coming in with the policies that are defined in any external data that you want to give it as well Right that external data might be user data. It might be Right just just situational data. It could just be right like anything that's going to augment that policy to allow To allow opa to make the correct decision for what needs to happen and so right like we Typically are going to start at one place inside of your tech stack But right these decisions once again happen throughout the entirety of your application. So you're going to Insert where these policies happen at all of these different components, right? You're going to check when right things are being created in your CI CD pipeline The policies are going to be applied there so that you know things are created in the right way You're going to include policies in between your services, right? like so if you're using some sort of service mesh or Something that that is giving you that telemetry between all of your services You want to know that what's happening when those calls go from one from service a to service b that Everything is happening as you expect it to right and then down on the infrastructure layer You want to make sure that things are always in the form and fashion That they should be right understanding what this state of your system looks like and How? Yeah, and how it should look right and how you're going to want it to be right? So you can see how very quickly all these different components are requiring some sort of policy That you're going to want to put in place and so you also want to Define what those look like And be able to reuse them right you want to keep your policy infrastructure as simple as possible and once again We're doing this by decoupling Where that policy enforcement happens right and we're handing it off to open policy agent So that all the tools you see here on the screen can speak one language when they want to make this decision Right and here's some some very common use cases and patterns. I've kind of touched on these already right but Right kubernetes with the admission controller is a very popular one If you've seen if you if you've if you've been involved with the open policy and project you've probably heard of gatekeeper and gatekeeper is essentially a Framework on top of open policy agent which turns your regular policies into crd so that you can apply them in the cluster Right and then there's tools like terraform Which you can run either directly in like terraform cloud where they have an open policy agent Run task or you can do this on your own in your cacd pipeline by introducing opa as like an action or Just a component within your cacd Kind of process and then with envoy right we Interact directly with envoy through their api so that we can understand what's happening and make decisions From service to service very quickly so we can implement those policies without introducing a distant additional legacy or latency right or right Open policy agent is a very small go binary so you can actually run or you can create things that are very performant for your specific use cases, right? we have a We have a go wrapper around open policy agent, which is very performant. We've seen some very interesting deployments of this one of the one very recent one that I saw was a mirror basically Understanding all the interactions on a mirror board and then shoving them through a data pipeline to Understand what the permissions are on the mirror board in real time, which is Very impressive when you think about it because there may be dozens or you know hundred users interacting with the board with 1,000 components so the complexity there of who's allowed to mess with which components at which time Ends up, you know scaling into the thousands of decisions a second very quickly So you need to be able to create something that or create a pipeline of authorization decisions. That's very robust right and so when we're doing this right like this was the kind of kind of This was this was what I showed earlier right and we're basically just replacing a Policy engine with open policy agents specifically right opa is the tool that we want to use and rego is the Purpose-built policy language that we want to write things in and so Now we're gonna dig into Now we're gonna dig into open policy or sorry rego, which is as I mentioned the purpose-built policy language right and so when I say purpose-built what I mean is that it was created alongside open policy agent to Define what our policies look like right and so there were There was large discussions in the beginning around what should a policy language look like should we just Repurpose Python or JavaScript or Golang or just try to write things in a language that people already understand the problem with that was that You're bringing in all of the baggage of that language that people want to write things in a specific way and so trying to stick to a cloud native mindset is Having a declarative language ended up feeling much more natural to solve this problem right and so now we have this declarative language where we want to Define what our policy is going to do And you're able to you state this state this in a clear fashion that now open policy agent figures out what it needs to do and so Since most most people in this room haven't Written any regal before what we're going to do is we're going to write a simple policy here Which is just around our back and controlling our defining what? What a specific user can do right and so here on the screen? I'm showing some data in these pink boxes at the bottom I'm going to abstract a lot of this away, but that's kind of just like the small data block that we're working with here and so With that right on the left-hand side here We have a package name right and this package name is a naming convention right the naming convention We are is just a logical boundary between your policies right so this is a full-featured Coding language and so we have this logical boundary in order to say like oh I have a package of policies for My aws features. I have a package of policies for my Microsoft or Azure resources right so you just want to be able to have that Logical boundary so that you can call policies from one side and reuse them maybe between teams or just between policies Right and then next up we have these this word called import and so With import what we're doing is we are protecting backwards compatibility Right and so this is very important when you're dealing with policies and you want to know that what you're doing Is not going to break what already exists right because breaking things that exist in the with a policy could have catastrophic effects and so what we end up doing is as we Advance the language we wrap all of these all these features into this future keywords import and so this ends up Allowing us to read the policy and a much more and in a language or make it seem much more like English as you're reading the policies And then so next up is right We have a declarative language and declarative languages don't really like when things are undefined and so you end up wanting to set a baseline for for what each of your rules is going to be at the beginning right and so very typically you're gonna have like and Allow equals false as a default and this kind of just says right fail closed don't allow things to happen that aren't intended and then Now that we have our defaults and we're starting to abstract more of the policy way at the top, but it's all still there right so now Right this very simple rule of like allow admins. What we're doing here is Right we have one rule, which is that allow rule, but we are now calling out to a helper function This helper function is going to be what actually Runs the logic and so in here we can see User is an admin if admin is in data user roles and we're checking for that specific input dot user right and so that Input user on the right hand side there in the white box, right? This is going to be what is shipped from What is shipped from the service asking the question so in this case? We're thinking about like an API request for a user trying to perform some sort of action On a specific object with that idea and the type dog, right? And so what we're doing now is we are basically looking up that user that we see is Alice in the box and Trying to and understand seeing what role Alice has assigned and so in here we can see that Alice is an admin So this rule would become true right and so but what if Alice isn't an admin right and so Now we end up having to be a little bit more granular around What this rule is going to do and so this is right so now we're breaking this down a little bit further And we're actually checking for these specific grants that are tied to this user, right? And so remember all of the information coming in is JSON So we're able to navigate this JSON tree just by doing this like dot notation, right? And so we can see in this allow if statements, right? We are checking for a grant In this user is granted Kind of rules are in this rule called user is granted, right? And so at the second part of this rule We could see that we are We are kind of going through going through the list of roles and Through in that list of roles. We are checking for grants, right? And so What's we are looking for here in the input box, right? We see Bob is trying to do an action called update on object ID four five six with type cat, right? And so we are looking through We're looking through this data set on the right-hand side and we're seeing that it doesn't quite match up, right? Bob doesn't have this type cat assigned to him, right? So as we are cycling through the rules and grants that Bob has assigned to him We are seeing that doesn't quite have the permissions that he needs and so as Rego is going through this list, right? And when these things don't match these rules become right defaults back to that Default equals allow equals false, right? And so With that right like that is just a very simple policy that we've written, right? And so this is typically what we end up telling people to do is like start really small find one very small Rule or around what you want to define or protect with this policy and then expand from there And so now that we have our first rule written, right like with any good Coding practice we're going to write our unit tests around the rule So with with these unit tests We the language makes it very simple, right? And we normally recommend that you separate out your unit tests Into a separate folder so this one is just our back dot tests, right? and you're doing to define these tests with this test underscore keyword at the front and What I'm doing here is Supplying it with like a mock data, right? So before we had the input that was coming in and that json object here. We are just essentially saying Imagine that this is the input and we're saying what we're expecting to happen, right? And we're expecting this allow to be true when the input input shows Alice update and then type cat right and so You if you're doing any sort of good test or driven development, right? You're going to have to be able to define all of your unit tests up front to do this and so With the inverse of that right being able to see that this negative test not allow is also going to to Right not allow being true because we're expecting it to be false and so With that the very last section here is kind of just improving your rego, right? So these are just common things that we see Right so on the left-hand side is as people are kind of learning the language It ends up not being super clear, right? The left and right hand side here both do the exact same thing but you're gonna see as You progress in your learning of the language, right? You start using more of the features you start using Annotations instead of just comments you're now also like using rule names that make more sense, right? It ends up being Very common that When you write your first rules you write something that sounds very easy to remember But then maybe isn't super clear when you're looking at it and reviewing it, right? So having a super user rule may not be the clearest thing when you're trying to review the audit logs, right? But using rule names like allow lets you know that okay, so this rule was trying to Allow something to happen right and so The second thing here is reusing expensive computations, right? And so from the left-hand side here are in the red box, right? We're gonna see that in both of them We're doing the same check instead of using a helper function, right? This helper function is what's actually going to When you're scaling out and you're doing things at a At a much bigger scale you're gonna want to be able to use these helper functions to reduce the number of Iterations and calls that you're making right and so these Reusing expensive computations isn't just for iteration But also when you're making like HTTP calls or using external data to pull that information in and then My last one here is just nested iteration right and this is something that also very common when you write your first rules Is it ends up being very simple to just loop through your loops when you're checking for things? but right then you end up with these coding problems where Things take much longer than you expected and you end up trying to solve performance problems later down the line instead of defining Defining a list that you are a set that you can reach out to right and so making making information reusable is a big part of writing code that is very performance and And so with that I just want to say thanks. This is a quick primer on opa and rego and yeah, thanks for attending And I think we have one minute if there's any any questions Yes Cool. All right. So the question was how would you measure? performance right if as you are introducing these policies right how do you how do you see what's happening? And so there are two things there right one is on the On the opa side of things as you are defining them you can run what we have a Policy benchmarking performance tool built into the CLI so you can actually see like how much time down to like the nanosecond that each policy Takes to run and this is where you can very easily see spikes when you have like nested iteration These become very apparent that certain rules take much longer than expected and then on the other side of that is what you Wanting to kind of measure just end-to-end latency to see if anything has changed with these policies or kind of to Two places that you could look when you are trying to measure what the performance impact is like What do you mean by export? Got it. Yes, and so with dashboarding Yeah, you can you can you can set it up to export information right like opa has management API So you can pull all this information out of Okay, not with that. I think I'm actually at time. So thank you everyone You


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