Bill is a longtime student and teacher of both sociology and psychology. He's written a number of books over the years that have been, I would say, extremely influential in terms of what might be called power elite or elite style analysis of how the political system works in the United States. That's to say we have in this country some people who believe that consensus or there's no veto groups or whatever it is, it's not some belief that rules. Bill's books, Who Rules America, this book, Fact Cats and Democrats, Who Rules, Who Governs New Haven, really governs New Haven and so forth have been very, very central works in this tradition. Professor Rothbard, I think, is generally well known, even I'm going to introduce him as you can see here, so we can just slip him right in, but he's the author most recently of Ethics of Liberty and also obviously of America's Great Depression, Manhattan State and so forth. I'm Bill Edwards, I'm a graduate student of political science in Stanford and I dabble in all sorts of classes, including this one. So I'm going to say a few words later on. Why don't you kick off? Thank you, Bill. Well, it's a pleasure to be here today and it's a pleasure to know I'm on a panel with... Bill, why do you do it here because I think they want to hear the... They want to tape it? Because I know he said that but I was trying to get out of it. Is that okay, my set? Well, thank you very much, Bill. We go back a long way and also with Murray, I'm glad to hear that Murray is going to be on the panel. Most recently, Murray wrote a review of somebody else's book in which he said it was good but that the person should have taken more account of some of my work. So my biases are all in favor of Murray and much like his needless to say. Well, I think to talk to most of you about power brokers in California is like carrying coals to Newcastle or in this day and age like bringing chips to the Silicon Valley. What I will have to say, many of you probably already know and may know more in detail than I do. I will probably say it only in a little different language, language that maybe sounds a little too academic. So hopefully then I'll be fairly brief and then we can get into discussion and questions. There was a day when I knew all these names and as Bill pointed out, we listed them out in the back of the Bohemian Grove hardcover edition but I received so much criticism from my fellow academics who said I was trying to pad the book that I called the publishers and I said I don't need that kind of grief. Take it out of the back of the book. I thought it was fun. I thought it was interesting. It also would be fun to look these people up. But I got a lot, as I say, a lot of criticism so we dropped it out of the paperback edition. The publisher didn't want to but I felt embarrassed that nobody thought it was as fun as I did. At any rate, over the years what has happened then is the names have gradually dropped out for me but the process remains and the general structure remains and I feel that the names are interchangeable and you can fill them in in any given era or epoch. What I'm going to say today is that the powerful exist in networks. Networks to use another fancy term are often nested within each other. The powerful in America we can find them as interlocking overlappers. That is, the people that are on a lot of different boards and in a lot of different organizations are invariably the people who are picked to be the most powerful by a reputational method. That is, by asking people in a position to know who is powerful. Hi, Murray. How are you doing? Good to see you. So they are interlocking overlappers. The people who are power brokers are people who link networks together. They are not necessarily the most powerful people in the given state or in the nation but they are instead the people that are the go-betweens that articulate the needs of the various parts of the network. When we talk about the most powerful, we're talking about, I believe, the people who stand at the center of the corporate networks in the state of California. And if we would look at the boards of directors of the major corporations in this state, as we have at various times over the last two decades, we would find that these corporations are very tightly interlocked in terms of sharing directors. And we would find that at the center of these networks are the major banks in Los Angeles and of San Francisco. And when we look on the boards of these banks, we will then find the representatives of the major growers, the major manufacturers, the major retailers, and so on of the state. This corporate network then creates a corporate community. I like to call it the corporate community. And this community not only consists of these corporations but a variety of think tanks and discussion kind of organizations. The most prominent of which in California right now are its Chamber of Commerce and its California Roundtable, which is the state-level equivalent of the national business roundtable. And this corporate community in turn then relates to government. And it does so in a variety of ways. I think it's important to understand that each one of these ways of linking the government in and itself is a little network or subsystem of the whole larger system. And that's why it's necessary to have these go-betweens or power brokers within it. Each one of these subsystems does a little different kind of a thing. We have, for instance, in California as in the nation or in any other state, a whole complex special interest process by which specific corporations or specific industries relate to government. Wherein they set up their trade association, they hire a set of lobbyists and publicists, and these people then go and work very hard in Sacramento. These trade associations also give money to specific candidates. They work very hard and short to look out for the narrow, short-run interests of their particular sector of the larger corporate community. And that process has been very much studied in the state of California, and the special interests are well-known and very famous. And they work on you day in and day out. I knew in the 60s a man named Bill Stanton who had been an economist at San Jose State and had been elected to the legislature. And Stanton felt that he was going to just change things and he would be this dangerous radical. But as he said, that didn't bother the Sin Lobby, the liquor interests, the racing interests, all other special interests related to them. They would give him money no matter what. He said, but I'm against you on everything. They said, that's okay, Bill. You may come to change your mind. They would give him money to be re-elected, which would then bother him. No end that he couldn't upset them. But their job is to stay in close, to make friends, to say, look, on one issue you might come to be with us eventually.  And this is the network through which the more general interests of the corporate community are developed and articulated. It's at this level that the California Business Roundtable or the Chamber of Commerce in general, that is not its various subcommittees, would try to influence the legislature or more particularly to reach directly to the governor. The kinds of people involved in this process are more likely to be people that have been legitimated as experts, often as academics. People who seem to be above the fray. They're not looking out for lumber. They're not grinding a special axe for the agricultural interests. They're looking out for the economy as a whole. They're looking out for the state as a whole. They are tempted to be seen as nonpartisan or as bipartisan as the case may be. And then thirdly, we have a process, a whole complex network that links into the two political parties, which I call the candidate selection process, which means, which is what we mean by politics, but I use that different term for a very special reason, which is to emphasize that what we do through this process is not really politics in the wider sense, but the narrow sense of just filling the office, that we don't really go through much political education, we don't really go through much policy development, and we certainly don't have much party discipline in our political process. So the political process comes down to filling these offices, finding candidates that will end up serving in government. And that particular process is related to by the corporate community in a way, again, that won't be surprising to you at all, and that is through campaign finance. And so we find that the people who are so central in the corporate networks are the people who are the important moneyraisers for the two political parties and for specific candidates within those parties. And very often even for Northern California candidates, they will go hat in hand to LA to what are called the big taps and ask if they might receive money for their campaigns in Northern California. Those I think are the main ways in which this corporate community relates to a government here in California and as I say in the nation as a whole. Each has a little different function, each has a little different set of people involved, and because it's complex, then there have to be people that serve this brokerage kind of a function. Well, that kind of a static picture is what interests sociologists, people interested in the distribution of power in the United States, but more interesting to you perhaps is what they are doing, and I wanted to just say a brief word about that. I agree with Fran Piven and Richard Cloward who at the national level say that currently the powerful in the United States are involved in a new class war. Their major concern is to undercut the social programs that were developed in the 1960s and the 1970s. They want to undercut those social programs because they provide in effect a social wage to a great many people, which makes them then more resistant to cuts in their individual wage. In short, in order to have workers be willing to work for less to make America then more competitive in the international economy, this new class war has been undertaken.  Well, as a power analyst, I don't know whether they were crazy ideas or not. I'm just concerned about the fact, or I just analyze it in terms of the fact that I think they were not just ideas or adventures by liberals, but rather were the response to the great upheavals of the 60s and the early 70s, and that this was the way of dealing with the disruption that was occurring in the system. Now that that disruption has gone away, meaning that most people are back in their routines, now we can brand all of those as liberal social experiments, wild ideas from the Ford Foundation and so on, when I think they were basically damaged control kinds of programs, which from the side of the poor were won and from the side of the corporate community could be seen as kinds of concessions. This particular, this class war is being fought in the name of ideas that are, I know, dear to your heart, namely the idea that the government should not be big or if it should exist at all, it should do the very bare minimum. In other words, it's a libertarian sounding kind of program, but I do not think that the corporate community is libertarian. I think rather that they are very pragmatic and when there is disruption, they are social democrats and when there's no disruption, then they're libertarians. They do want spending cut in the state of California, but they were not eager and big backers of Proposition 13. It was not their idea, and only some of them got into it rather hesitantly. And I would suggest to you in closing that for them the problem is that the state is needed. They do need the state. They need it to regulate themselves and through regulating them, having regulatory agency, partly legitimating themselves. They need the state for subsidies. They need the state speaking generally, not the state of California, but governmental apparatus and the whole system of government. They needed also to extend and defend their foreign markets and their need for resources that are on other soils. For all those reasons, the state is needed by the corporate community, but the state is also feared by the corporate community. It's feared by the corporate community because states can become, they can get out of hand, they can become over bureaucratic and dangerous to the interest then of the powerful, but the state is also feared in America, I believe because of our specific American heritage and history and ideas, and that is that the basic founding idea of the country is in the idea that power is rooted in the people, and there's always the fear then of the danger that the people may take over the government. And I believe an analysis by a political scientist at Berkeley, David Vogel, wrote an article called Why Businessmen Mistrust Their State in the United States. In terms of this populous kind of analysis, that the state may come into the hands of the people. And so they join in the general denunciation of the state out of that kind of fear, but at the same time caught in the situation where they do need it for a great many of their purposes. So we are in that phase then in closing where the attack is on the social programs that prop up the wages of the working people and the poor, but at the same time they are fearful that that kind of thing would go so far as to lead to a general attack on the government. Let me stop at that point and turn it over to Murray and then we'll go to Bill and have a question. Thank you. I got to give this to Murray. They want to tape you. They want you for posterity. You got to just put it on anywhere. Right there. There. He'll let you know if he's here. Put it on your collar. I don't know where to put it. It's got to be stiff. Collar? Got it? Okay. Let me tell you how I got into this whole movement, so to speak. I started as a libertarian economist and still am, and recorded the record of economic error and sin and so forth and all the increasing government intervention throughout the century. And, of course, the first thing you realize is that when you look at the situation is that how come so many businessmen or big businessmen are favorite government intervention? Now, the standard argument when I was starting out, which was also essentially the Randian argument, is that big businessmen are filled with altruism, inducted into altruism by their instructors or their culture and they're corrupted by left-wing teachers in their prep schools. Somehow it didn't seem to be a satisfying explanation. Okay? And it didn't seem to me that Nelson Rockefeller, for example, when he skyrocketed out the political scene was filled with altruism or guilt. It didn't look like it, right? It didn't seem like a guilty sort of craven type. It seemed out for power. So the explanation wasn't very satisfying. I looked into it and read the works of Professor Domhoff and Koko and others. The whole thing began to be illuminated. Okay? There was an important missing ingredient to the explanation for the growth of statism in the 20th century. Namely, they're getting a lot of money out of it. Okay? Not old businessmen, but those are in on the take, on the boodle. Also, in history, when you confront the sort of when you start dealing in a sort of explanation, there are two smeared terms that people attack you with. One, that you're engaging in a conspiracy view of history, conspiracy theory of history. Two, that you believe in economic determinism. Okay? I don't believe in economic determinism. I just think it's an important influence. As Robert Sharkey, the brilliant historian of the post-Civil War period, said at one time in his book, people are not determined by their economic interest, but they very often act against them. Against their economic interests. They don't very often act against their economic interests. I think that's a useful way of putting it. It doesn't mean it can't happen. It's just not very likely. Okay? And also, the historian that used to me should ask the question, que bono for any particular event. All right? You start saying, okay, something happens in the world, whatever it is. Who benefited from it? It doesn't mean, of course, just because somebody or some group benefits from something, these people are therefore responsible for the action. That's, you see, the error that most conspiracy people have. That's when you go sort of off the rails. If you don't check and find out whether these people are really responsible for the initiation of the action. The most extreme version of this I think was one by the crazed ex-reporter Douglas Reid who, looking at World War II, he used to be a reporter from London Times. Looking at World War II in a series of books, he said, look, who benefited from World War II? Well, the Germans lost. It was shattered. That was, you know, early part of the post-war period. And Israel benefited. Therefore, Hitler must have been a Zionist agent consciously after the story of Germany. That sort of thinking, quote, unquote, gives conspiracy analysis a bad name. All right. So what you have to do is not only figure out who benefited from something, but also did these people, did the beneficiaries actually lobby for the particular action? Okay. If they did, then things begin to check out a little bit. I think it's reasonable to say these people were therefore responsible for the action. Now, most people, almost everybody will agree on things like tariffs, okay? There's a lobby for steel tariff, let's say, or steel import quota. Everybody knows damn well that people behind there's a steel industry. You're not accused of economic determinism or conspiracy theory if you say this, okay? But the tariff, it's crystal clear, all right? It doesn't mean you can't have suckers who will get involved in this because they believe in protectionist philosophy if you want to call it that. It's pretty obvious the initiating force behind the tariff is the particular industry being benefited. Okay. But so if it's true of tariffs, why can't it be true of other things, other acts of status intervention which are not quite as crystal clear as a protective tariff? And sure enough, it works out that it is true and has been true. It continues to be true. Now, it's important, I think, for various reasons to zero in on this because if we keep saying, well, gee, here we have us for educational activities. We're saying that such tariffs are bad and somehow we can't convince everybody. We will never convince the steel industry. We might if the steel industry was really cracking up like the railroads have finally been convinced after pushing for government intervention for 100 years in such bad shape they're now a favor of the free market. So it can happen, okay? But the point is it's very difficult if you have people who are heavily involved in the industry living on protection, it's very difficult to talk them out of it by pure economic reasoning and realize that, okay? Who are the forces behind this particular error? It's not just the error, it's also economic interest. Two examples of this I think are interesting and you might not realize. One is the beloved and revered Marshall Plan, probably the most venerated plan since World War II. Pushed by the establishment as being important for the reconstruction of Europe it really launched the whole foreign aid program. This is really true of foreign aid in general. Marshall Plan was the beginning of the post-war foreign aid program specifically to reconstruct Europe. And most historians and they deal with these things the recorders say foreign aid will just deal with that. Who passed what legislation and what year and et cetera, et cetera. They don't deal with who launched it, who was behind it, and do they benefit from it? The Marshall Plan was put through the Congress, well first of all, many congressmen were against it. There was a period when it was still only my mighty propaganda campaign launched by something called the committee for a thousand or a hundred or ten thousand whatever it was for the Marshall Plan. They took out full page ads all across the country. They looked at the names of the people on the ads, all big shop businessmen, who were they? They weren't just businessmen. Each and every one of them were connected with the export, the American export industry either as presidents of export firm or bankers for export firms. And it is because the essence of foreign aid has nothing to do with reconstructing Europe or Asia or anything like that. The essence of foreign aid is quite simple. It's still true first. Namely, the U.S. taxpayer is socked, is mocked at a huge amount of money. This money then goes to the U.S. government which extracts a handling fee of all bureaucrats that live off the program. The rest of the money is shipped to some foreign dictator, it's almost always a dictator, who then uses it to build up his own power base versus his subjects. This is the oppressed subjects. They then take the dollars, what do you do with dollars? The only thing you do with dollars is buy American products. If you're whatever country you're in, therefore they then use most of the money after deducting their handling fee to buy American products from American export firms. So what you have actually in more detail is that they take the money and then they take the goods that they buy, the government does and it sells it to their own citizens and it pockets the money that way. So we have foreign aid is one gigantic racket by which the American taxpayer pays for the following beneficiaries. The losers of the American taxpayer are also, of course, the foreign country taxpayer because they lose visa of aid to their own government. The losers of the American taxpayer number one, number two, number three citizens whichever country we're dealing with is country X. The gainers are the American bureaucrats, the foreign dictator, and the vast bulk of the American export firms who get the contracts. The Marshall Plan was put through not only by these export interests, the Under Secretary of State, Marshall, of course, was a figurehead, didn't know anything about foreign policy or anything like that. The Under Secretary of State who put through the Marshall Plan, he then resigned from the State Department, rejoined his own private sector. Under Secretary of State, Will Clayton distinguished quote, free market, unquote, businessman. Sponsored all sorts of free market institutes, spoke at free market associations. He put through the Marshall Plan. He then resigned from the Marshall Plan after his deed was done, rejoined his firm, which was Anderson Clayton Inc. which got a huge, multi-million-dollar contract from the Marshall Plan organization. That, to me, is the microcosm of government business relations and government intervention. You talk a free market game and then you engage in subsidies, contracts, monopoly privileges from the government. A friend of mine used to work for years ago, he was an economist, used to work for his writing speeches for businessmen. He said, Jesus, speeches are really great. They sound like Hungarian types, almost every one of them. Of course, the policies are usually completely different. The other thing, I just got through doing a lot of research in the origins of the Federal Reserve System. But, again, we think it was a giant economic error brought about by incorrect banking theory. I'm sure incorrect banking theory is involved here, but the real essence of the Federal Reserve System is the work as a giant cartel scheme by which the Federal Reserve System acts like a cartel organizing the banks so that they can all inflate together. Which, of course, is what the consequence has been. It was sold to the American public as a way by which the banks can banking actually could be stabilized and the government will step in as Big Daddy and iron out the business cycle. Because private banks are too greedy and they tend to inflate too much. This was the general doctrine that was sold to the public. The actual facts is precisely the opposite. Banks on their own can do very little because you have 10,000 banks that don't run back in flights. They're going to be sucked pretty quickly and go out of business by the other 999 banks. So you need a giant cartel organization run by the government called the Central Bank which can pump reserves in and float and wash the whole system up together and inflate uniformly throughout the country, which is, of course, what they did. And the banks of the time who organized the Federal Reserve System put it through New Darn Wella, that's what they wanted. They set it openly to themselves because it didn't go out to the general propaganda media. So they said the money supplies in Elastic were suffering from inelasticity which means the banks can inflate enough. We therefore need some federal mechanism by which the banks can inflate and that was the Federal Reserve System. The Federal Reserve System was written by big bankers, was planned by big bankers and was organized and staffed by big bankers from its very inception. So when you look, when you see that record it becomes pretty clear what the problem is, the enemy, so to speak, of libertarianism and the free market is not just incorrect ideas.  Now this also has a certain dramatic appeal. See, a lot of people tell me Professor Rothbard, how can we carry our message to the public? We're libertarians, how can we encapsulate these things in, it's a complex theory that we're engaged in, moral theory, economic theory, political theory. We inflame the passions of the masses that you even get interested in this theory.  Okay? And we can point out how they do it. I think it's a very effective propaganda weapon as well as being true as well as filling in the picture of why stateism has developed in the 20th century. Thank you. Since I'm not on the program and sort of informally here my remarks are going to be a bit sketchy and perhaps I may engage in some dialogue with our other two panelists here. But several things occurred to me here that I would like to hear some more thoughts on. One is the whole question of the cohesiveness and ability to work together of these people that are essentially ruling the American political system. You know, as Professor Rothbard mentioned in describing the banks, these guys are all in a lot of separate businesses and might look in the first instance as if they're going to automatically be rivals to each other. And yet, here they are a lot of times they're lobbying for the same program or they're working supporting some particular policy institute. How is it that they get the grease, get the they oil the thing so that they're not at each other's throats all the time, they're able to do a certain, some of them, the ones that have the will to dominate are able to work together. What are some of the mechanisms for that? And I know Professor Damhoff has some thoughts on that. Another thing, it seems to me is that Professor Rothbard is making an extremely important point and that is that it's people are interested in naming names. Look at your newspaper. It's full of names.  We can in our political work essentially, we can essentially be described as trying to tell a story.  And here's who they are and how they're doing it. So you need to think about how you can describe this. One way you can do this is by Professor Damhoff's books Professor Rothbard's America's Great Depression has some of this stuff in it also. Gabriel Colco's book on the the Triumph of Conservatism has a certain amount of this in it. Also his book on American foreign policy. A lot of these things are beginning to get a little old. We need essentially a new generation of research. Don't be upset, you know, you're going to find that many of these writers are socialists that you don't agree with. Okay? First of all a part of that is jargon. Okay? And Professor Damhoff doesn't agree with Dan Smoot. Okay? Who, interesting enough, I think went to high school with C. Wright Mills a famous academic sociologist of the same elite school. But anyway and yet I think Professor Damhoff will tell you he can pick up stuff from what Smoot is saying. Sure, he wants to check up on it, you know. You don't automatically check out other people's research and so forth. But Dan Smoot and Bill Damhoff and Murray Rothbard in fact, even though one is a kind of socialist as Professor Damhoff is and one is a libertarian and Smoot I guess is some kind of bircher they're actually dealing with the same empirical reality. Okay? And so it's valid. You have to do this in your own community. If you're running for local office somebody is running your city. Somebody is trying to run your city. Okay? Same at the state level. People like you know Warren Christopher. Remember Warren Christopher who was involved in the negotiations to get the hostages out of Iran? There's a famous article that was written by Warren Hinkle in a now long defunct magazine called Scanlon about Warren Hinkle and the law firm that runs California and he described he said this man is the Cardinal Richelieu of California politics. Okay? And he described how he and the law firm of O'Malvinian Myers strove to influence both the Republican and Democratic policy. How they were in the same law office and they talked about each other and all the sort of thing. Okay, right. The Susan Love Brown edition of the second, the one you've seen no one even knows about the first edition of that book. Anyway the incredible bread machine is in a popular form that's quickly assimilable. Some of the Kolko books and so forth may take some more background and work to get to. Another thing that's interesting is the example of urban renewal. Here is a case of a thing that's constantly sold as benefiting people. This is great. It's reconstruction of our destroyed core cities. Right, slum clearance and so forth. Okay? Now, there's some right wing criticism of this. People are saying, you know, it's really not economically sound. It's if you read Martin Anderson there's even questions raised about property rights. But there isn't that much out there in the conservative and free market literature about really who has put this through. You know, carrying a policy through like urban renewal that involves all sorts of governmental districts incredible bureaucracy elected officials, federal state, local things and so forth. That's complex stuff. People have to put this together. That's what has been studied. And there's a famous book called Who Governs? Okay, about New Haven that says, really there's no organized effort to put through a concerted plugged-in network that's trying to put through policy. It just happens. There are a lot of groups out there that balance each other. Professor Domhoff has actually looked into the reality of this and I think he could share a little with us. The last thought I had is maybe Professor Rothbard or Professor Domhoff or I might have some thoughts about watching the California connection in the Reagan administration. This is a fascinating thing. Take a company like the Beckville Corporation. Okay, here's a company now, you know, it's a company that has a long time interest in government activism. It's a construction company. It builds big things, dams, airports, military airports in Thailand. You know, that's the kind of thing that they have specialized. Yes. In fact, some of you may read in the paper, Ronald Reagan suddenly coming to the conclusion that all his attacks on make-work jobs may have been an exaggeration, but he is responding to what he sees as the reality of power not simply abstract arguments. Okay, so it's important libertarians believe as they do, in many ways because of abstract arguments. But we have to realize there are other things, there are real people that hold abstract ideas or that refuse to accept them and go for meat and potatoes by some other route. And don't forget that the American Revolution, the revolution that created the political culture in which we're and a political culture some of the original ideas of which libertarians certainly admire, was fought by pointing out that there was a conspiracy to take power, that there was, that the government in England was taking away rights of people, naming names. If anybody who goes back and reads those original pamphlets can see that saying who is doing what to whom is an incredibly important ingredient in mobilizing popular sentiment. So I've thrown out a bunch of ideas that could consume 10 hours' worth of stuff but I thought I would raise some of them and perhaps we can hear some more comments. I think we should stay seated here and just think that's the... Yeah, that will have some questions and answers. Yeah, because I don't think I could elaborate much on what Bill has said. I'd find myself nodding and I don't know whether time is exactly right now to get into urban renewal, although if that comes up in questions, that's fine. So maybe Les Murray has something for the thing we could get your ideas in response. Well, I don't know. It's all very new to me and you've channelized me so very much so people are going to take some more investigation. A few quick questions to come out. What about the other power centers, the unions the teachers' organizations? Those aren't companies in that sense and they're not capitalists in that sense. Right. How do these groups how do they see the system? If you see it and then we're going to go some of them, see it and then we're going to consciously working in that and then we're making it more of a conspiracy than just happening the way Jill said. I think the unions see it the same way. You can see the teamsters union or the UAW and they're plugged into different they're each picking some different kind of network and the construction union will pick gets through and the auto workers will pick gets through. They're each trying to plug into what they see the most effective power system for that. There's also a common sharing of interest between Bechtel Corporation and the construction workers, right? Right. So that's where they, yeah. Or the ICC bureaucrat and the teamster versus the independent trucker. Right. How about Craig in the background? Speak up. Speak up. Speak up is a lot of noise here. If your theory is correct, but these powerful corporations make more money by, for example, polishing the corporate income. Instead of getting special subsidies for their industries, why don't they go after that? I think the answer to that is that when we say that there is a dominant, as I do, corporate community in the United States and that it's relatively cohesive and can come together real well when it's highly threatened or on a highly important general issue. After you said all that, you don't deny that you don't say that everyone else is totally powerless if they are organized. For instance, the teachers have been in certain states or in certain cities such as New York for a time, when organized and in a time of expansion of education, they were fairly powerful of certain issues for a while. And I think there have been times and circumstances in which the power of the corporate community has been somewhat circumscribed. But having said all that, it's still the case, the kind of thing that Murray and I have been saying on them having needed money for various kinds of things. And the corporate income tax or the taking of money, corporate tax, not an income tax, they had to fight World War II. And the corporate tax was very important at that time period and then have gradually been whittled away down over the years. But they were certainly fought against being whittled down by the opponents of corporations. I'll put that very generally. But the way that corporations reacted then was to get all sorts of complex special breaks. That is not a general abolishment of the taxes but there's a depletion allowance here and a special privilege here and so on. But that shows the play of power it seems to me within the system. Also I can't prove this for the corporate income tax. In many of these situations which looks like a left wing quote unquote anti-business thing, is really put in by big corporations to screw the small competitors. For example the workman's compensation laws in the progressive period. These add tremendous fixed cost to the small businesses. Large businesses I really can't have an apartment filling out forms and all that. You wind up then by especially burdening small business competitors, especially new ones who are trying to break into this cartelized system. Same way with the income tax. The income tax that Mises planned out many years ago, injures the rising entrepreneur. He wants to make money fast and reinvest it and so forth. Rockefeller doesn't really care much about the income tax. They've got billions already. There's no tax on wealth as it shouldn't be. The point is what you're doing then is with the income tax you're punishing those who are rising up to try to compete with the already existing wealth structures. So a lot of these things work out that way. We have to study it. It's an invariable question. It's not solid. The urban crystal people are talking about the new class, I think also works here too. There's a lot of class pressure, so to speak, from technocrats planners and intellectuals who want to plan the system and there's another group that's in there lobbying for this particular thing. The famous phrase that the only people the only poverty that was cured by Lyndon Johnson's war against poverty was the poverty of the bureaucrats running the organization. Was there any coincidence behind the 1913 being the year of the formation of the Federal Reserve System and the income tax? Yeah. That was the combination of the progressive system. Did that both happen in 1933? Well, the income tax was passed a little bit before that. They both had the actual tax, right? There was a Federal Trade Commission about that time. Clayton Act. The whole damn thing really comes in. Interestingly enough the statement that the phrase often used on was we need the Federal Trade Commission to do for general business what the ICC did for the railroads of the Federal Reserve, the bankers of the agriculture program, the farmers and so forth, consciously integrated into this kind of system. They said at the time, if you were actually doing it, I think it's true. That's why it's so important to study these general policy organizations of the corporate community because you can see them over a long period of time learning how to best deal with their problems. And as Murray said, they learned about regulation through the experience of the Interstate Commerce Commission. They realized regulation could be useful for other things. They thought, sometime, not just that it was useful for them, but it was also a better alternative than, say, the pressure of the socialists at that time. There was a socialist party that was demanding municipal ownership and they would do public regulation instead. So that and then they had various times kinds of money panics and concern. There was a real problem in 1909. When you study a policy organization you can see the strands then coming together and then an opportunity that came with the election of Wilson who had less hostages into the right wing obviously, the Republican of the business community. He had more of the modern business community that were Democrats and Republicans and then there was a possibility of making, culminating this progressive era and creating this set of reforms that then worked for them for a long, long time and dealt with their main problem which was the socialist and disruptive labor force. By the way, the single best thing I know of on the New Deal period was a chapter that Bill wrote in his book, The Higher Circles, on the big business support for the Wagner Act and for the Social Security Act. Fascinating chapter. I would like to raise a practical question for some people who might want to take some notes on this and that is are there some books about who governs, who rules California that people might want to look at to get an idea so when they're like reading their newspaper, they don't like to watch for what kind of things they might want to clip and store up and that sort of thing. I will, I hate to be such a shill for Don Huff here, but this book actually is pretty good, especially if you can find, in my opinion, the hardbound one which you can maybe find in the bookstores. You're very kind, Bill. The only trouble is that the data doesn't have the money on the user. No, but it's not in print. It's 1970 or 1972 and these things keep moving and that's a real problem. What kinds of things to look for? How about there's that Chester Harmon book on the Yerba Buena project in San Francisco and that's an interesting book and that does a lot of this stuff and that was reviewed by Christine Dorphy in Libertarian Review and she, I think did quite a good job. Harmon is not a Libertarian but it's a very good book. It's got a lot of stuff in it and that's a good exploration of San Francisco in some respects. Also, Chester Harmon Hartman, H-A-R-T-M-A-N called Yerba Buena. I told you, Bill, and I went back a long way. Unfortunately, that one's out of print, too. Isn't there something down on the most famous water stuff in Los Angeles? Yes, there's a new book by this guy. What's his name? Yeah, but it's called Water Power. There's a new book. It's Carl. Carl is his name. K-A-R-L He's a water geographer. He did the huge water map for the state of California.  He's led to the American Historical Association panel on the book and there's some weaknesses here and there as academics always buy. That's a profession, but anyway I think it's called Water and Power or something called Water Power and K-A-R-L Last name. I don't know any one good book on the state of California or on power in this particular state and many of the things are out of date because they were done in a time political ferment and there's less now. Less interest, less market. No Ramparts magazine. Robert Felmouth did a book on land and power in California some years ago. He was a Nader's raider and went through the data in great detail. But what I could do, I think the only way I could respond really constructively to Bill's question and maybe go along beyond it in a certain way is that there is a little book called Research for Action put out by this California rural institute in Davis and I cannot I don't have the address with me but what this person has done is a physicist who turned power structure researcher and he's out for the facts he's out for, he's often out for convictions, you know, you're out for politics. He says, I don't want convictions meaning he's looking for illegality and he is a really a fine, fine expert on researching any power structured looking up corporations in relation to government and in this pamphlet he gives a number of examples of, for instance, a public hospital. Why was the local power structure so interesting as a public hospital? Well, in the public hospital is this one little private part where they, you know, do this fancy scan or operation. It turns out that the people, the directors of the hospital were making him fortunate, you know, so he exposed that and helped them to organize politically in Woodland or some such near David and I could, you could leave your, if you're interested in this information, you could give me your name and address and I could mail you a photocopy of the front page of that book just so you see what it was like and you could write to them it has the price on it and so on. But it's the kind of thing that makes it possible then to understand what goes on in your particular town and since Bill mentioned urban renewal and your, and local activity the main thing to understand about local activity in an American city is that it's, that the whole game is around growth to improve land values. A city in America is a growth machine. It is run by those who want to intensify land values and then from there you go to figure out what their strategy is to intensify the use of their land and in Santa Cruz it's to have more amusement and recreation because it's good beach property in somewhere else where you don't have such attractive land then you bring in, you know, smokestack kind of factories and if you don't have anything at all like Nevada then you legalize gambling and prostitution and everything you can or if it's Atlantic City and you're going downhill then you legalize gambling but you do, you have some strategy to maximize the value of your land and the people that are involved in local government are intensively concerned about issues of water and zoning and planning street layouts and so on and this book explains how to research that kind of activity and to see just how they are realizing these goals through their involvement in the city. You might be lucky that some new left group still exists that cares about this stuff you know, you might only just have crazy Marxist groups that read it all out it's all the property relations and we don't need to study any particulars or you may have just conservative groups that say it's all the Jews or it's all the scuzzy poor whatever it is and they're not worried about the details either but you might have some real groups out there that are interested in this for example if you live in the Bay Area there's the Pacific Study Center in Mountain View and they have to do it, books. There's also the no growth movement which often does the same thing in other words keeping out poorer people keeping out apartment houses and that sort of stuff and keeping out subdivisions and that can aid another set of we have to leave here they're having a wedding here and I'm sure you're holding up another panel we're holding up someone's personal celebration so thank you all for coming my name is Ed Clark I've read your speeches I'm sort of a big business representative


AKA buys our 1.9 million diamond ring and proposes to Pearl Luzzi. Words doing the round in Celebville suggest that AKA has made a surprise wedding proposal to his longtime friend of his ex-sinnel and longtime crush, AKA shocked Pearl Luzzi however turned down the proposal with the resounding no. It is an open secret that AKA has a deep crash on Pearl and has often accepted it on radio. Peel however has also openly friend-zoned rapper AKA on numerous occasions. AKA must have thought a marriage proposal would help him win Pearl's heart. He is rumored to have a diamond ring custom made and it is estimated to have set him back a cool our 1.9 million. The efforts did not work though when AKA made a surprise appearance at a function where Pearl was and went on one knee.  AKA immediately left the place in a huff and has had his phone off ever since. Pearl on the other hand continued to party and refused to comment as she said she was just there to have some fun with her new man.


hey guys welcome to the very first video of the let's call it the project swap and today we're going to remove the engine step number one remove the battery that includes disconnecting the battery drain the coolant there's a plug on passenger side right underneath the radiator undo that wait for it to drain or remove the big hose the bottom hose and drain the coolant that way so battery gone remove the obvious hoses here and there remove the radiator plate the two mounts went back in the trunk the filter coolant is still draining always a mess top radiator hose still got to do the bottom radiator hose and unplug the fans which is one guy here and I think there is another yeah there is a harness right on both sides so remove those and this whole thing is ready to be removed this is the radiator plug I was talking about now I actually undid this fully and the coolant did not drain it was just stuck in there which you do you open up any of these plugs and it's gonna start coming down next we're gonna remove the the inner cooler this should be easy enough one bolt 12 mil here another 12 mil on the other side this hose obviously not gonna remove the blowout valve I'm gonna remove this hose the eight mil here I want to save on this gasket I know it's new I think the bolt on this yeah it's right underneath why is this oily huh we got oil that's an interesting it's probably coming out of the intercooler look at this you see this huh I guess good thing we're replacing the engine and there's another hose right there eight mil update all right intercooler out I actually did not remove the hose from the intercooler but from the engine intake and same over here from the turbo so this is how that looks and the bracket well this is custom whatever guy before me did this that did the swap so now that the intake side turbo the cold side turbo is now exposed put something in there I just happened to have a clean bag okay or some kind of paper whatever stick it in there so nothing falls in there and that's how that looks now okay as far as these guys go I'm gonna remove the belt AC belt undo this 12 mil here then you can loosen up this long bolt this will bring the tensioner up and you can remove the belt same thing for this guy you undo or just just loosen this 12 mil and then bring this up this will bring the alternator down and you can take this belt off the alternator is going to go for sure obviously you gotta unplug it unplug the air pump all these little connections over here so we can throw this this harness right on this side along with the ac compressor and I'm not sure yet if the air pump is going to have to get removed or it can stay not sure yet I'm thinking it's going to have to get removed so you have these clamps there's one clamp here there's a plug here there's a plug underneath the pump AC has to go because I don't want to empty the freon so it's just it's going to sit all this time it's just going to sit connected right over here in this area the power steering pump I usually take them out you can do the same thing to the pump because sometimes these bolts that hold the power steering pump they get stuck actually just by removing you know a pump that was never taken out you sometimes strip these threads aluminum threads easy to strip guys so when you tighten anything up just go easy okay so this I may also swing over to this side all right so the front area updates soon all right this is the ac tensioner not good needs to be replaced okay so I forgot to mention you to loosen this one up also so the alternator comes down all right so this harness it's kind of waiting on the compressor to be out so with it with the ac compressor compressor I'm gonna take well I can leave the bracket in because there's this one one nasty bolt that's way up there probably won't even see it all right good news on the air pump two bolts one here one here on the left side of it and this clamp that's it and then there's these resist this plug and that's it and it came out and we have a better look on that bolt that's behind that holds on the bracket the one that's vertical right in the dead center on your screen that's the bolt you need to take out if you want to remove the compressor with the bracket the difficulty of that rear bolt for the compressor bracket it's because on the all force to all sevens the intake is also in the way and this one not so much I guess the intake is a bit slimmer over here so you can actually have once you remove this I guess what is this the evap solenoid I'm guessing then you can on a kind of an extended swivel extension you can get to it it's a 14 mil so that's out right now that the compressor is free along with the bracket which is a plus remember this line stays so I'm going to remove the these fuel lines I believe this is the return this is the evap and this would be the feed this could be the feed I'm not sure but I believe I'm let's say 75 percent sure that this is the return so there are these special kind of tools it's these guys here let's see if this one will fit no this one will not fit because of this but the idea is you put it over the line and just shove it in there same thing with the bottom so I cannot use this actually which sucks but I can still undo these with a with two small flat screwdrivers just find the tabs there's going to be a tab I don't know you're probably not going to see it but there is right now I can see two tabs there's one here and one here just opposite opposite of each other just stick two flat screwdrivers in there light you know go easy on it and just kind of open them up and this should slide out this green clip will either stay or or go with it either way it doesn't matter once you install it is back you want to put the clip back into the line into this guy here and then it kind of clips in when you put it back in what we're going to be doing an e85 install remember so these are going to be different so you can either remove it if you're having a hard time with these remove them from here it's just a small clamp so either or okay I'm going to try it here because I'm going to remove it from here anyways so once these are out of the way then this ac hose will be nice and straight and I can rest this compressor right in here I should probably mention there's pressure in the system still so you can do two things either when you're ready to remove it put a rag whatever over the line so it doesn't fuel doesn't splash in your eyes or right before you start doing anything when it's still all together run the car and remove the ignition fuels or fuel pump fuels or relay what else you can remove maybe the crank sensor which is right here basically what you're trying to do is you're trying to kill the engine while it's still running so the fuel it still it kind of drains the fuel burns the fuel out of the lines that's that's pretty much it couldn't couldn't do it to leave this one on actually had no fuel pressure just a small drip so didn't even need my old shorts and that's what it looks like that's the two tabs that I was talking about moving on now from that corner all the way to the front and this side nothing is connected to the engine anymore moving on to the back we got the two hero hoses pretty self-explanatory two clamps twist them and then remove them and then we got the starter we got you got power here ground remove that and then there's two bolts on the starter yes you we can you know start removing you can remove all the bolts from the black the engine's not gonna move trust me okay then you can raise it whatever the engine or the transmission you know start removing it but you can remove everything every single bolt possible including the mounts everything and then you can attach the cherry picker or whatever you got so starter 14s then the slive cylinder here two 14s that's gonna stay here when I replace that then this pitch mount you can loosen this up remove this one and kind of point it up I loosen this 10 mil up so I can have a little bit more movement on the AC line but probably not necessary don't worry about this twist it's gonna be like that for months okay nothing's gonna happen it's gonna go back to its original shape now start tucking everything over towards the engine whatever you didn't remove vacuum lines harnesses whatever you've got come on to the other side so we can unbolt the damp pipe well you know we're gonna go underneath you're gonna unbolt the damp pipe from the mid pipe unbolt the damp pipe from the turbo and that's that's it all the oil lines and stuff like that stays you know not much on this side obviously you're gonna unplug this this is the power steering line here this this stays and just gotta undo the power steering pump and probably just swing it over here yeah here's the plug for the auto sensor I'm gonna unplug that no or can no it actually never mind it can it can stay okay so it's actually that's cool that's actually less work than the under 06 STI that is cool it might still be in the way see the auto sensor right there right to the right of my light it may hit the frame so we may have to remove that well yeah holy shit which is right here easy hero houses out like a dumbass forgot to put the pan underneath the hero houses and a lot of coolant spilled so to clean that up that took a while anyways the slave is off you don't need to take the slaves from there off because it sits on the transmission but just to have more access to the you know black and transmission I took it off pitch mount off loosen and did this up hero houses right here loose starter out it's gonna set it down for now all the bolts on it well besides two I'm gonna show you and this side we got the nuts and bolts for the turbo out there's one right underneath in this area you can only use a wrench on that which is also a 14 the open end the closed end on the wrench won't even fit but luckily for me that was loose that one that the nut also all but five bolts and the power steering pump were loose I mean one was out this far yeah that's the guy same guy that did the timing belt on the 2.5 the previous engine watch the other the first episode the introduction but yeah anyway so this is loose I already undid the mid pipe to the damp pipe but the guy put some kind of glue like this grayish cement thing whatever you connect or plug up exhaust holes with it or you can apply that on uneven exhaust flanges and whatnot and that's actually stuck together which is surprising so I need to kind of persuade it and the dump pipe will come off all that's left at this point is two nuts and the transmission to the black which are obstructed by both CV axles now you can I'll show you that's why I took the axle nuts off so I can take the axles out but you don't have to the axles go into the transmission I should have mentioned that before let's go down there so this is the exhaust that's that's the glue I'm talking about or some kind of silicone I don't know what the hell so 214 then it holds on on this bracket here that's still on it because that's glued then you gotta unplug this auto sensor from here I need a new creeper so actually undo the bottom bolt on the starter it's going to be easier for you to undo the this while the top mount top one still holds it then there's a bolt down there and this is the nut that I'm talking about I'm going to remove you can if you have a swivel it's easy if you got a swivel universal socket it's actually also easier I think on these the on the L6 STIs I'm going to remove the axles anyways so might as well remove them now same thing and this exactly the same thing on this side on the black and there is the turbo and this is the nut so total five on the turbo downpipe and that's the kind of a difficult one the auto sensor stayed because it's super tight tried the longest extension did not work just unplugged it I'm going to try and get it out if I can I'm going to have to heat it up and take it out and here are the nuts for the mounts there's one here and one on the other side and also accessible because of the sway bar on the L6 again sway bar is straight and you can't get away but it's easier to loosen up the sway bar on this one not necessary I think this guy served its purpose 15 years I think I had this thing I wonder if there's a date probably not fix the creeper all right guys everything is unbolted there's nothing else connecting the engine to the body and that well that it is connected to the transmission still but it's not bolted down anymore remove those axles which again you don't have to I'm going to let this drain overnight and the coolant still dripping making making a mess that's where the coolant is dripping from I'm going to plug it when I'm ready to remove it I'm going to plug it up exhaust is out so now I'm actually thinking I've I did so many engines you know obviously I got I got a check a cherry picker or an engine hoist I'm going to get me one of these hanging things between the engine and the engine hoist so I can tilt and whatnot tomorrow I'm going to call it a day today tomorrow we're going to think about where to mount it I always do find like a threaded hole on this side and across so in this case I would probably mount it there's a bolt hole right there so that's what I would or that there's another one there so I usually what I do is just run a a chain across and grab that chain and yank it out this is a very light engine so you know nothing to even if even if you're mounting to a 12 mil okay on one side it's not going to come out this here guys is a engine removing bracket plate and this mounts on top of the intake manifold once you take the carburetor off so this is nearly all v8 engines on the classic american muscle cars four 12 mil bolts or 12 mil half inch is what I mean that's it that's all that that's how big the studs are half inch which is similar to to a 13 and you know and this and they these guys pull the engine which is cast iron which is which also the the heads can be cast iron the intake itself can be cast iron with the transmission okay that's like 100 and hundreds of pounds and these both don't come out so what I'm saying is a 14 and a 12 that's what I've been always doing that's plenty for the two bolts to hold on to the to the engine via chain but like I said you know once always you pick the engine up you know you'll finally separate it from the transmission then it's all going sideways you know wants to spin and whatnot so that's just gonna I should have bought it bought it a long time ago so see you in a split second which is for me going to be tomorrow and we're back so this is what I bought this was 30 dollars I think by the one and only harbor fray pittsburgh the best so I actually just noticed like an idiot I attached this bolt to the transmission so what I'm going to do I'm going to remove this this line here and just put it there I actually had to chase these holes this one and this one not in use for some reason but they worked out all right so I'm going to switch that bolt that bracket and we'll see how long it's going to take me I can already see signs of separation right here and there you know you know the very first time I took my the engine out of my o6 sti it was uh 2020 was it no 19 beginning one of 19 I think it took me hours hours and hours to separate it I ended up using a snap on air hammer with a a sharp chisel and just just went across on top it was just it what happens is the pins I'll show when it's out they freeze up the guide pins whatever you want to call them that are on the side of the bell housing there's one on each side and they just get corroded and won't give up so once it's out we're gonna lubricate on those pins so so in case next time you want to take your engine out it's gonna be much easier I'm hoping the guy that installed this 2.0 did that so I won't have any trouble let's do it you really want a jack underneath your transmission are we got lift off now I have no separation yet now I'm gonna just kind of drop it see if it's we got separation a 1.8 of an inch gap all right we're good now I should mention since this is a push style clutch I'll show you later when it's out and not a full style I don't need to worry about any pin removal or whatnot from the fork the clutch fork thingy all right so now I'm gonna raise it enough enough so the studs sticking out from the the mounts are just enough to clear the actual cross member okay and now just a matter of pulling I think I may have to remove the turbo what the hell now the driver's side wants to come off but the passenger side not so much okay just making sure the jack is still on the transmission so you know when once they're away the transmission doesn't just drop something is catching on the passenger side yet it is the turbo on the transmission I knew it see if some brute force can fix that I'm gonna loosen up the turbo the three nuts but hold it how was that all right now I'm gonna make sure my clutch the other thing is actually disconnected yes all right out we go mining the auto sensor and the ac line on this side all right as soon as you clear the bumper you want to drop it low it does fall it's got a shorter distance to land this is what I was talking about look at this I mean yeah now it makes me wonder if this transmission is actually the original transmission who knows we can check numbers but whatever so this is the so the man the slave cylinder is this way and it pushes the fork towards the back right so the strut bearing will actually push the pressure plate now on STIs this is the other way around well the slave cylinder is on the other side I believe is it yeah see that so that's going to be a pull since this is pushing this way this guy goes moves back so it's actually pulling on the throat bearing and that's the marks of the throat bearing right over here look at this nice crack all these turbos crack over here now this is fine you can you can you see this you can still run this turbo I actually did mine because it ended up it was maybe a quarter of an inch away from the turbine okay and that's bad news so this is the spot that I couldn't clear but listening the turbo helped obviously and these are the guide pins that I was talking about one here and one here the other one stayed on the block or on the transmission and you can see this guy did grease them up there's still grease on here and here's the other this throat bearing was actually replaced not too long ago I suppose we are going to well I am clean this up maybe get rid of get rid of some rust here and there they always rust over here in this area most likely replace these radiator mounts you can get them cheap from rock auto I think like seven bucks ten bucks maybe each I'm gonna paint them also so they last a little longer and fix a few rust areas like here and there so that's it for the engine removal video now if I want to put this engine on a stand which I'm probably going to I need to remove the the clutch pressure plate and that's gonna give me enough room here I'm gonna probably just reuse these studs here and one bolt here or here whatever and use those to mount it on the engine stand then we can flip it around make more mess at this at this point I don't even know if I'm removing the intake I'm not sure what's going on to the new fully built engine I'm sure some things will get transferred but I don't know it's not up to me really all guys up next is that transmission removal see you then


All right. Thank you very much. Hi, everybody. My name is Dave, Dave Southwell, with Def Computing. This is my co-speaker, Ann. We're going to split the presentation up into two different parts, so that's kind of why we're standing the way that we are, instead of trying to huddle together behind the lectern. So, yeah. What are we going to talk about today? It's a very long title, so I forgive you if you haven't read through it all, but you're probably familiar with all the terms. We're going to talk about resource-aware policy-based scheduling for production GNI with RAG. We've heard a lot of other talks today about different ways to deploy your AI-powered workloads, but I don't think any of them have specifically gone towards how you might do it in production. And the whole idea behind this talk was how we were thinking, how could you develop a reference architecture for implementation for how you could deploy your production AI workloads? And that's what we're proposing here. As you'll see later on, we've tried to use open-source software wherever possible. We've also thrown up a couple of different examples where you might want to use a vendor for some portions of the architecture, but let's get into it, because we don't have too much time and we do have a demo later. All right. Why might you want to use GNI and RAG? Well, RAG with GNI specifically. I think most folks here already know the answer to this question, too, but just in case it bears repeating, layering RAG on top of GNI reduces your LLM hallucination risks, and it also uses, because it's using recent domain-specific information to augment that, it avoids the cost of needing to retrain an LLM as well, and you can also utilize a bunch of other different components on top of it. And on the left side, I don't have a fancy pointer, but on the right side over there, you can see kind of a generic high-level diagram that's going to get more and more annotated as we go through. Okay. You could obviously do a lot of this stuff using paid-for software. However, self-hosting has a lot of advantages. These are kind of the usual advantages that you would see for self-hosting, cost, scaling, performance, control, privacy. Privacy seems to be becoming increasingly more important for folks, but all of the other four components there, too, are quite important. I'm sure you know most of the big names up there at the top, but there's some downsides to self-hosting, complexity being the biggest one. So handling the complexity is resource-intensive. Our reference example that we're going to share with you today combines deploying multiple Kubernetes clusters, sorry, I use cubes in another area, so sometimes I throw that in instead of Kubernetes clusters, along with a cluster scheduler, and that's going to help take away a lot of the administrative overhead of deploying your own. Let's take a look at some of the different components for our reference architecture. Up at the top, we've got our ingestion job to create and update our vector database. The vector database can be a lot of different solutions for that. So towards the middle, we've got our prediction service that's combining the model input and query with rag context. We've got the user interface over here on the left, and then we've got our LLM model serving at the bottom. Each one of these components has different requirements, resource needs. Your vector database can run on pretty generic CPU resources, and it's only needed periodically. This may change over time, and of course you can change that with policy-based scheduler, which we're going to talk about later. Your center section with your LLM and rag serving, and the user part is going to have higher availability requirements, but it can also run on pretty generic hardware, so really just CPUs. Your LLM serving component is where you're going to need something a little bit more exotic in the form of most likely a GPU, although as we've heard earlier today, there's options where you might be able to use an accelerated CPU for this too. But the point with this is that there's different resource needs for each of these different parts and also different availability needs for each of these different parts. So obviously for this, we're going to use a multi-cluster Kubernetes deployment across multiple different clouds. If we use multiple clouds, that means that we can take advantage of all the kinds of benefits that you get from operating in a hyperscaler. We can also, by deploying multiple Kubernetes clusters, we can define each one to have the different kinds of resources that our architecture could benefit from. So with the kinds of workloads that need GPUs get deployed to Kubernetes clusters that have GPUs and those that don't, don't. And we can also efficiently look for the most cost-effective Kubernetes clusters in various different clouds for us to deploy on. And we'll see as we get into it, Nova makes this easy to do. There are a lot of different services that you could use for the various different components here. And we'd be remiss if we didn't mention some of those. So you can automatically deploy your workloads on model rollout. And there's a few different services that you could plug in for the vector database. And you can, there's various different cluster schedulers that you could use. A couple that we've talked about here today, Carmada's one of them, KCP, and Nova. This talk is going to focus on Nova. All right, what is Nova? So Nova is a policy-based cluster scheduler. And some of the benefits and capabilities that it provides is the ability to place workloads based on different spread constraints, label-based, capacity-based, including GPUs. You can migrate your workloads, you can autoscale, and you can do just in time clusters as well. Across all the major Kubernetes service providers, EKS, GKE, and AKS. All right, so here let's put some more specific names to some of the things, the components that we've talked about before. This is what we're actually going to have in the demo. So we have, for the vector database, we've selected FAISS from meta slash Facebook. For the LLM and RAG serving component, we've selected LangChain with Fast API. And for the LLM serving component, we've got OpenLLM with a hugging face LLM model that we downloaded. Again, trying to stick with as much of the open source spirit as possible. We'll kind of skip through this pretty quickly because we don't have a whole lot of time today, and we want to get to the demo part. But if you're curious, all of these things are on GitHub. There's a link to all the different Docker containers that are prepackaged and scripts and tooling that we've used to generate this demo as well. So we talked a little bit before about the availability needs for some of these different components. We are specifying one cluster for the vector database, three clusters across three regions for the LLM and RAG serving components to facilitate higher availability, and two clusters for the LLM serving component. Also to bridge the gap of having decently high availability without spending too much money. All right, we're almost there to the demo. So this shows us the steps that Nova is going to go through when it's rolling out a new model, or a new deployment, actually, not just a new model. So first step is creating a new namespace and then pushing all the images, or at least pushing the image creation secrets to all the different Kubernetes clusters. Then we'll pull in the LLM serving and load balancer and the RAG model down here. And then we'll fire up the vector database on the vector database cluster, and last but not least, we'll place all of the LLM and RAG serving components across the three clusters to serve the API layer. So it's a four-step process to get this all deployed to across all of these different clusters. And you may be wondering, what's the process to take it down? One-step process. Just remove the namespace. Everything lives all in one namespace across all the different cubes. Simple. And if you're thinking, well, maybe we could run multiples of these at the same time across different namespaces, you'd be right. You could. So there's a few different components that we wanted to also call out as options. We mentioned using FAISS as the vector database, but there's alternatives for that as well. AstraDB is one, Pinecone is one, and Weaviate is another. So if you don't want to spend your time learning FAISS or dealing with some of the headaches that comes with that and might talk a little bit about some of those headaches you ran into with that, you could use a SaaS offering for that. You could also spread your clusters across, differently across different clouds than what we have outlined here. And you could have different model operations. So you could trigger a rollout via GitOps and you can run multiple different versions of the model at the same time in a blue-green mode. Okay. I think this is where we're going to get into the example. Right, Ann? Okay. Thanks a lot, Dave. I appreciate it. So, yeah, let's move into the examples. We have two examples of using the basically approach that Dave described for multi-cluster Kubernetes, along with a cluster scheduler, and making sure that all of the components can be managed properly for doing the model in production. So just some choices we made for the examples. We chose to use the AstridDB, vector DB, rather than FAISS. It's not like that FAISS won't work and we have the same examples in backup slides in our talk, but we just thought in production people may want to host a database. And so we've already given you links to all the packaging you need for all of those open-source components we've already looked at. And here's the packaging where we replace FAISS with AstridDB. And you'll see that it's super easy to plug in a different vector database if you have a different one that you want to use. And we chose to only run ingestion at the deployment of the model time, but you could obviously run a continuous ingestion and it wouldn't change too many things about our example. We chose to run our examples on a single cloud, which is EKS. And we chose to enable a feature of the NOVA cluster scheduler, which is cluster suspend-resume standby. This feature is not on by default and you don't have to use this feature if you don't want to. But what this feature does is if a cluster is idle for an extended period of time, it basically spins it down, meaning it cycles all of its non-controlled, plain parts of the cloud to zero resources. So it's basically making things a little greener. If you're already paying for those resources, you might not care if they're powered up or not, but at least you're not burning that power. And finally, we trigger the operations manually for the purposes of the demo. I certainly agree that get-ops would be a great way to go if you were going to do this in production, but just for the presentation. One little disclaimer here. These examples focus on infrastructure management, not on mad ML skills. Like, I'm not a data scientist. So, you know, I chose a respectable embedding model for the VectorDP in a respectable open-source LLM model, but some different model might work better for your workload. And similarly, the resource sizing of the Docker containers that we used that you'll see in our repo was chosen for being able to demonstrate something, but it wasn't tuned heavily to make sure that it could be the optimal efficiency. So with those disclaimers out of the way, our first example is a series of operations that you would do on a modeling production. You would roll out version one of the model. You would roll out version two of the model and make sure it's working as well as version one, and then you would retire version one. And so let's see how this approach that we've been discussing would handle this situation. So basically at the beginning of time, the Nova control plane, which just looks like a Kubernetes cluster you talked to, is itself interacting with six clusters in this example. The first three clusters with the CPU prefix are the clusters that we want to run the user-facing part of our LLM plus RAG serving. So we wanted to locate those in three different regions across the world, but they need to be highly available, and they need to respond to the user, even if they can't talk to other parts of the system. Then we have two clusters that have GPUs available. In this case, each of them only has one A10G GPU, because I wanted to show resource availability and the selection of a cluster based on resources, and I wanted to do that in the simplest way possible. And finally, there's a cluster on which ingestion will run when the ingestion job runs. So after we let those clusters sit for a while, they were all idle, so they all go into standby, so just to kind of show that. All right, so we're ready to roll out version one of the model. What do we do? Well, it's kind of a one-liner basically, and you'll see the script in our repo, but basically the one-liner says, what is the model namespace that I want to deploy the model in? What are the secrets I need all of the clusters to know to be able to pull parts of the images that they need to run their part of the workload? True means I'd like you to populate the vector database when you run, so we're only going to populate it during version one model rollout. We're going to keep that vector database going after version one. The next argument is the type of input. In this case, the next argument is the cluster in which we want to run the ingestion job. So that's ingest US West One. The next two arguments have to do, what is the raw data that I want to ingest? So for our particular example, we're going to ingest a sitemap. That sitemap is going to contain documentation from the little company, and then the final three arguments have to do with the vector DB credentials for to set up the vector DB in terms of populating it and using it. So step one is to... that the script executes is to place the model namespace and the image pull secret on all the clusters that are being managed by the Nova Control Plane. So the first thing is a policy that's applied to the Nova Control Plane, so that tells the Nova Control Plane, here's the policy, and that policy will apply to the namespace, and that's a spread and duplicate policy. The namespace for the model will be duplicated and spread across all the clusters under management by Nova. The next step is to do the same thing for the secrets that are needed to pull the images. Step two is to place the LLM serving layer. That's the layer that needs the GPU. So we're going to create a policy, it's a simple policy to say place the things that this policy pertains to to a cluster that has adequate resources for the things that this needs. And so we then deploy the LLM serving along with its service as well as the service for a front-end for load balancer. And that resource availability policy allows those to be placed on one of the GPU clusters we saw. So we wait for that deployment to finish, and we get an external IP address which will then be used by our customer-facing layer to make calls to the backend GPU model. Third step is to populate our VectorDB with the VectorDB ingester. Here we're using yet another policy. This policy is specified cluster policy. Place one this job on the cluster I specify so that when we run the data ingestion job, the policy applies to that job and the data is ingested and put into the vector database. And the final step is to put those front-ends on the three clusters that we located in different GOs across the world. And in that case, the service needs to be spread and duplicated just like the namespace and image secrets to be spread and duplicated but not across all the clusters. Just across those three CPU clusters we set up in the three GO. So we label those clusters and our policy says apply this policy to the labeled clusters. So spread and duplicate. And since we spread and duplicate, we get back three external IPs for the three entry points to the system in the three GOs. So one step from the user point of view of just running the script and basically all the operations are executed against the Nova control plane Kubernetes cluster so you feel like you're talking to one cluster but these disparate clusters are handling the workloads. And so at this point we execute a call against the model and ask it a question and it responds. So now what's happening with our clusters? Well we see that the three CPU clusters are now active they're ready to take responses so they're no longer in standby they're no longer idle and one of the two GP clusters is also busy ready to serve when requests come in. Okay now we're going to deploy version 2 of the same model. So in version 2 we're going to use a different namespace so that we can separate the two models in terms of the resources they're using. We're not going to populate the vector databases time. We want version 2 to use the same version of the vector database that version 1 did. So very similar multiple steps they're left them out for brevity here but again we get the three addresses this time for version 2 and we execute a command against version 2 of the model and we see that it responds with the answer we expect. So at this point five of the six clusters are active the two GP U clusters are both active each of them having one GP so each of them running a separate copy of the LLM serving model and then the three front ends continue to be active. So now we're ready to let's say we've done a lot of validation we decide that version 2 is really good it's better than version 1 we're willing to now retire version 1 and as we say the simple answer to that is to remove the namespace but behind the scenes there's a lot of work to remove that namespace because basically the Nova control plane has to make sure that all of the workload clusters remove the namespace so a lot of work goes on behind the scenes but from the standpoint of you the person that's administering this system it's a very simple operation so now we're back to one of the GP U clusters being idle and we're done so that's example one of things you would do in production you could imagine you have multiple models they all have multiple versions so you would have scaled up version of what we just saw the second example has to do with what if I sometimes want more resources than I have statically so in the second example we have version 1 and version 2 of the model but what if we wanted version 3 and my artificial setup I can't run a version 3 of the model because I don't have enough GP resources to do that I just have one A10G and one cluster and one A10G and the other cluster so I can't have three copies of my model running at the same time but the NOVA cluster scheduler recognizes if a target cluster that it's managing a target workload cluster has an autoscaler running in it so if the autoscalers that currently recognizes are the Kubernetes autoscaler and the Elodo Luna cluster autoscaler so if it can't find static resources to handle the workload that it wants to deploy it sends the workload to a workload cluster that has an autoscaler with the idea that that autoscaler will be able to handle the workload so here we set up the Luna cluster autoscaler in one of the two GPU clusters and model v1 and model v2 are both done just as you previously saw but when we get ready to run model v3 it just sits there pending because it can't get the resources it needs and so because we care a lot about model v3 and we're willing to pay extra for it we can figure it to let it be placed by the autoscaler and so the autoscaler then scales up one of that cluster the east two cluster and we can now run version 3 so you might be thinking well hey that's pretty cool but what about when I scale down by retiring version 1 or version 2 what should happen with version 3 it just sits there the answer is what do you want to have happen so some people would say I want version 3 where it is on the dynamic resources because I don't want to disrupt anything and that's fine and that would happen by default but if you would like rescheduling because you've now freed up resources in your static area you can engender a change to the configuration and let the nova control plane replace that workload so you can basically set up a system to do that so basically we've shown you an easy and efficient approach to self hosting production LLM RAG models that combines multiple cloud Kubernetes clusters for their aggregated scalable resource management and a policy based resource aware cluster scheduler that is nova to manage multiple cloud Kubernetes clusters nova supports a variety of different policies that provide functionality you need to get this done it can optionally place clusters in standby if they're lightly used and you're interested in that and it can interoperate with the cluster auto scaler if you're interested in that and so we presented LLM plus RAG model roll out and retire using this approach so thank you very much please rate our talk here and give the software a try we have all of the scripts that we used in a repo and we have the ability to freely try both nova and luna if you'd like thanks very much thanks for your time we have time for questions I don't know if there is any I think we've got like a minute or so I think that mic died there we go so question, you've got GPU CPU can you define lots of other spectrums of stuff because Azure just has different stuff to EKS and Google cloud can you define depending on what resources you want which cloud they appear in because they're available including services I've got the service but it needs one of the cloud pacific features like I don't know Neptune or something that's running in Amazon can you define that workload has a lot of requirements so it needs to go to EKS not to AKS a very good question with respect to the things you can define as part of the policy we sort of put in a bunch of stuff built in like you said CPU GPU memory and so on and then we put in the ability to label things so you saw me labeling the three CPU clusters that I wanted in the 3GOs so that those workloads would only go there so I would say you'd have to label at least with the current system you would label some of the clusters that had these specific things and then make sure the policy that used that label was used for the workloads that had that constraint I think that's the basic so we don't have to keep inventing an infinite number of configurations but it kind of lets you label things as you need to any others thank you