Too much of an introduction. He's been a sustainable farmer for, he says, for more years than he cares to admit. He's the author of A Guide to Raising Pigs, Dirt Hog, Talking Chicken, and is the small acreage management columnist in Small Farm Today. He's active in promoting and participating in the River Hills Farmers Market of Silex. Okay, Joel, take it away. Good afternoon. I want to thank you all for coming out and being with us, and I want to thank the Mokker family for inviting me out. I'm supposed to make an announcement, is in the tradition of the political season, Ron Mokker does not improve everything I'm going to say. He did set me down, he said this. He said, Kelly, he said this is an election year. He said no politics, no picking on the university, leave the USDA alone, be politically correct. So thank you all for coming and have a safe drive home. So actually I didn't let him bother me because I counted. I said, well then, Ron, you're going to let me give a talk called 50 Shades of Farming. And he backed away from that. But we're going to talk about marketing, the hard job on the family farm, especially getting paid for what you grow and what you know. We're going to start this way. I've got something in my hand. I brought it here today from my farm. It has historical value, it has tradition, it has lore. Many, many people want it. It is highly valued. And I only want a dollar and a quarter for it. And the first one up here for a dollar and a quarter will get what I have to sell in my right hand. Come right on up here, young man. Let's see your dollar and a quarter. Okay. Here's your dollar. No, it's a deal. Talk to me after the talk.  But ladies and gentlemen, if I had grown a pound of tomatoes and it cost me a dollar to grow them, and I asked three dollars for them, what's the difference? Everything I told him was the truth. That was a Sacajawea dollar. It has value. It has tradition. It has heft in the economy and people want it. And they want what you and I as small farmers produce. Trust me, they've seen enough episodes of 60 minutes that very few people in the United States really feel comfortable with what they buy in the supermarket right now. And they're looking more and more to people like us to supply what they need to grow. I'm sorry, I need to eat. And they're looking to us to provide it because they believe we have the good stuff and we know what we're doing out here. Well, most of us do. And we're all trying to do a better job of our farming. And that's what we want to talk about today is in the product should go what you know. And some of us have been a lifetime putting this together. I started out many, many, many years ago as the kid with the good red hogs. Then I became the man with the red hogs that would work in the dirt. Now I'm the old guy that knows a little bit about chickens. Back home in our farmers market, which is the second Saturday of every month, February through December, will be their next Saturday. Y'all come or go back there where we're at today. But the point is, I'm positioned as the fellow with the heirloom chickens. The Bergen family is in there with their pigeons. Helen Lemon is the waterfowl lady. Everybody in that market has something of which they're knowledgeable, and something that sets them apart and makes them distinct as a producer. And that is the key. Right now, today, we are in a process of moving into a new age of agriculture. Some are calling it artisanal. Some of it are calling it local foods based. But essentially, it's after a product that can be depended upon both consistently in quality and consistently in presence in the market. And that's the role we're going to have to come to fill, the supplier.  And that's hard. Very, very hard. I'm like every one of you in here. I'd just as soon be left alone to go home and farm. I like to work outside. I like to work with my birds and eat something I enjoy. I feel I almost earn it, but I know I can't do that anymore. I've got to get off the farm and away from the farm. And I have to go where the people are with the money. And that's the crucial part. We have to get outside of our comfort zones. And that's hard to do. And folks, we have to put on a little bit of an edge. And that's very hard for most of us. We grew up in a tradition of going into the marketplace once, twice, three times a year, selling a crop, selling some finished livestock. You take a whole growing season to grow a grain crop, haul it in. Last day of harvest, you'd go to the elevator, plop down on the seat, buy a soda and wait for them to write you the check. Well, in a good year, you made a little money. In a bad year, you didn't make any money. In a year like this one, you owed a lot of money. And we've said, how do we get away from doing that? Well, we get away from doing that when we start doing what the big boys do. We take control of our production. We've got to realize that agriculture for the last two centuries has functioned as a wholesale marketing operation. The money was made far, far away from where we live as farmers. It's in the meat counter. It's across the shelves that the groceries store. It's at the cash register. We don't have a presence there until now. And we're starting to have that presence. But it's not coming easy. It's demanding a lot of us. And we've got to start thinking very, very differently. A few years ago, up at our farmer's market, a lady came in, fancy big Cadillac. And she walked up to me and she said, I want to buy a pig. I thought, okay, where are we going to go with this? And she said, I want to buy a pig for my stable. And I thought, I don't know how to go there. But what she was doing, folks, was she had a high end performance horse stable in St. Louis County. She had a hog there that was a companion animal. It kept the horses calm. It moved back and forth. It was a big pet and they wanted another pig. Well, I sent him to the family on our market that day. I knew he had some shoals at home. Well, she went up to the man and said, I'd like to buy a pig. Well, he was a 30 year hog farmer. Well, what do you want to buy? You want to buy a boar pig? You want to buy a butcher hoe? I said, no, I want to buy a pet for my horses. Well, he just walked away from that woman. I don't do this kind of business. It's not hog business. Well, I can tell you what his thinking was, was a large pile of male bovine excrement. But he was married to a good country woman and she followed that lady out to the parking lot. And she said, we've got a pen full of pigs back home. And I've got two growing boys. I'd like to buy some groceries next week. The lady came with the new Cadillac the next day and gave a hundred dollar bill for a 40 pound pig. And I hope to the day that that man dies, she stands there and reminds him of that pig story as a regular as clockwork. And don't worry, my wife, Phyllis has some stories about me I can be reminded of too. But she's not here and that man's not here and I can talk about people back home. They'll learn to come to the farm show. See, the farm show is a lot like Las Vegas. What happens here stays here unless your neighbors are with you. And I see that camera back there and I was supposed to make an announcement and did is anybody here that's not with anyone they're not supposed to be, you need to know we're taking pictures. But the point was that was a hundred dollar pig. And you're going to have all kinds of these opportunities now. We're selling $45 trios of chickens back home. Now what makes two pullets in a rooster worth $45? Well, I'd like to think it's the good looks of their owner but I'm not that good a salesman.  They have performance behind them and I am behind them. On the Friday night before the farmers market people can call me. What are you bringing? How's it bread? That Saturday morning I'm in the market. I'm standing right there with it. And on Monday night they can call me again if they want to make another purchase or if they need more information. I said we've gone through two centuries of wholesale agriculture. We've gone through two centuries of faceless, soulless agriculture. Anyone here know what Don Tyson looks like? The Purdue man? The dean of the school of agriculture at the University of Missouri? Are you getting my point folks? This is faceless, blind, empty agriculture and people are scared of it. They're scared of it for what it's doing to their health. It's what it's doing to their environment. It's what it's doing to God's creatures which we were told to be stewards of. So now we have to take it back. And it's going to be slow and it's going to be hard. You're going to take the hog market back one pig at a time, one pound of pork sausage at a time, one day at a time in a farmer's market or a CSA or in an ad in the local paper. And it's not going to work the same everywhere you go. I'm from a pretty rural area. And no, we don't all play banjos, but it's pretty rural up there in Lincoln County. So we're far enough away that we don't always get St. Louis prices. But I can know this is each 10 miles from Silex to St. Louis, you move closer, you can add 35 to 40 cents a dozen to brown eggs. But you have to have better traffic skills. You have to be willing to put in the time and you have to make the commitment. We found our niche with live animals. I thought we had the most unique farmers market in the world. You can come to Silex and you can buy rabbits and chickens and lambs and calves and firewood until I found out something. You know where there's two major farmers markets in the United States where you can buy lambs and calves and pigs and goats and chickens. Chicago, Illinois and Miami, Florida. They're going right in there where the people are where the people have the money. And they're taking it in there and they're having the presence. And it's a different situation. You're going to encounter people that some of them don't really know a lot about what you're doing. Some of them are from very different cultures than you are. I've dealt with Bosnians. People are still practicing their Indian culture. Some Pakistani folks. And they don't always buy exactly like I would. There's a beautiful Pakistani family back home.  And I can remember when we had them in a boy, the best thing we did with them was kick them off the front porch. But if you don't learn anything else today, I learned something that corrected me after 50 years. There's no such thing as a Muscovy duck. They're Muscovy, Muscovy ducks. So that's the last time you'll hear me call them anything but Muscovy ducks, but I did correct you today. But it values to these people. And it matters. And they don't always get what they want. And a lot of these ethnic people have been abused very, very badly. We conducted a farm tour a few years ago for some folks that were Muslims. They'd been buying a lot of goats, a lot of rough calves. We took them out on the farms. And we're just average farm folk up there. But they saw the first time they saw boar cross goats. The first time they saw some good cows with a lot of beef breeding in them. And they saw some grass. They didn't see the inside of a rundown sale barn. And they were appreciative of it. And that appreciation translates to money. And they do have the money. That's when we come back to selling this young man a dollar for a five dollar bill, which by the way, I hope you'll follow me back to Silas because son, I've got a bridge on the Quiver River. You really need to buy my folks. That's that's the essence of it. What we know makes what we grow better. And it does. Every one of you in here has talents, skills and expertise. I've done it at many of these others and I'll do it a little bit again. But you older folks, you convey wisdom. There's a growing number of women involved in production agriculture. Something like 38% of the small farms United States now today are managed and operated by women. In the marketplace, it gives your production a little bit greater value because housewives and homemakers respect your opinion. This young man is valued because he's trying and he's bringing energy and that's crucial. We can't all be the same. We can't all sell the same things, but we can market ourselves. We are the farm people. And that's what I want you to start thinking about today. As you move to develop your farming program, think about what you can do. Think about where you're at and what you can best convey. I said a little bit earlier about the problem with some very rural markets and there are some in Missouri, way up in the north and all. And the thing is, as you get into a real rural farmers market and you can divide the buyers into three groups. There's the ones like me who are old enough to remember when you can buy everything for pennies on the dollar. There's a third of the community that isn't economic hard times. They can't afford to spend a lot of prices. And there's a third of them that have a brother-in-law back home that can grow what you're growing. So I just wiped out your market if you're a long, long way away, unless you are coming up with something new and something different, something unique and something special. Real quick, how many of you live in a county that doesn't have a Walmart store? Not as many as I thought. But here's the thing. Go into that Walmart store next time and go back and look in that egg counter. Walmart will sell you a dozen brown cage-free eggs. I checked the other day for $2.79. They will sell you a dozen brown organic eggs for $3.28. If they weren't getting them sold and in goodly numbers, trust me, they wouldn't be in that Walmart store. Also trust this, time after time surveys have shown that consumers, even in rural areas, are willing to pay a three to 10% premium to buy locally, buy from people they trust, and buy a product that they perceive to be better. Now folks, you're not going to sell a lot of a lot of these things. I'd like to tell you you could go out of here tomorrow and sell 10,000 dozen eggs at $3.28. But it ain't gonna happen. But if you sell 50, that's $150 a week gross, $7,500 off of one farm venture. And that's a part of it. We have got to start thinking along those lines. There is a process called stacking of enterprises. I don't like to say you're competing against Walmart, but I do say they've got some good ideas in there. You go into a Walmart store and you can buy tires and bicycles and goldfish. Okay. All right, on your farm back home, let's forget about all this specialization and this high techy crud. If it's so good, why aren't the university professors that are teaching it out doing it? Yeah, I got my shot in, Ron. But the point is, folks, on your farm, and I don't care how small your farm is, you can start stacking ventures, eight, 10, and 12 of each of them earning you two to three to $4,000. As long as they do not compete directly for your time and your resources, you can make them fly and you can extend your earning period. You might have 100 laying hens. You might produce 500 broilers. But don't get too swept away on poultry. I mean, your eggs and broilers don't think you can do turkeys, geese, ducks, pigeons, and everything else. But you can market garden. You can produce a little grass-fed beef, some natural pork. Don't get arrogant with it.  We've got a bad thing going on in alternative agriculture. Because we're broke up in these little camps, each of us thinking, I'm doing the best and the only and the right thing. I believe organic food is a good thing. But I don't believe any of us in here can sell enough organic corn at $20 a bushel to make it fly. If you can, only very few of you can. But local, natural, additive-free, all kinds of good things are available to us to sell. And we've got to think about that. Quit getting off in coiners and pointing fingers at each other. I'm from Lincoln County, Missouri. And as they like to say back home, if the last three people on earth were from Lincoln County, two of them would get off in a corner and talk about the third one. So don't be divisive. If you found a niche with organic production, God bless you. But if your neighbor does that, you can find something else that will work for you. Look at some new things. Get involved. The thing that you're going to have to, and all of you are going to have to emphasize quality, that's where they can't come against you. Because they're making their money by producing cheaply. Cutting corners, cutting corners, cutting corners. And they will leave this country to get what they want. In the typical shopping cart today, there are food items from at least five different countries. The state of Illinois imports 95% of the food that the people in Illinois eat. There are farmers in the state of Missouri tonight that if they had to eat what they grew would starve to death.  You say, Kelly, well, I haven't got any choices. The heck you don't. The state of California leads the nation in the production of 85 different crops. If it were a standalone country, it would have the eighth largest agriculture in the world. Well, we're not going to grow a lot of avocados or papayas in Missouri. Do you know at one time we had 35,000 acres of apple trees in the state of Missouri? Do you know at one time that up where I'm from in the northeast Missouri, we were the milk shed, the produce shed, the egg shed, and the poultry meat shed for a little place called the city of St. Louis? Look at all this growth out here in Columbia. I think all of us as taxpayers, we'd like to get a little at university professor money back in our pockets. And they do come to these farmers markets and they do get all excited about some of this produce. But you know what? They need other things. We got a boy back home that sells hickory nuts by the five gallon bucket. Now he's not selling tons of them, but he didn't know he could sell any until he tried. Ernie Bonner out here. Imagine what he did the first time he grew a crop of blueberries in southeast and southwest Missouri. That's flying against logic if there ever was. Tremendous success story. So you've got to be looking for those little niches and opportunities. The bad thing about niche markets is they pay well, but they never get very big. And you can bust them. You can do more good and make more money with three sows right now than probably you can with 300. If you're selling pork and not pork as a commodity, you can make more money with grass fed beef than you can with feed dot beef. The same is true of chickens and on and on and on. And you have to get involved in it. You have to take it above the first run. We talk about value added production and we probably don't make enough of that. Now back home, we tried to do as much as we can. Jams, jellies, things of that sort. Gotta be a little bit careful. The people want it. The bureaucrats don't understand it. You've got to be subtle and you've got to be careful and you've got to ask a lot of questions. But the thing I learned a long time ago is you ask your bureaucratic question, he's got to come up with an answer. And if he sees that you're the one and he's going to come and find out why you asked the question. Well go back home and ask it through a market master or an extension agent or someone like that. Get to find out just what is involved. And each and every county puts a different spin on it. Up where I'm from in our farmers market, you can sell jams and jellies, but you can't sell canned tomatoes. You can sell watermelon, but you can't plug a watermelon and it's going to vary from place to place. And as I said before, you've got to be a little bit practical. We in the chicken industry have seen something in about the last 18 months. This economy has jerked us back to earth. You're not selling a lot of high dollar eggs or broilers anymore. It's not a bad thing. It's a good thing because we were just kind of sailing along on good luck and good looks. Some of us had more of that than the others. We'll argue about that. But I tell you what I did do. Talk to a man up in New Hampshire that's still getting $25 a piece for five pound broiler chickens. Everybody looked up $25 for broiler chickens. How many thousand can I get to New Hampshire tomorrow? Well, thanks to that hurricane, I don't even think you could get to New Hampshire tomorrow, but he's not selling thousands. But what he has done is he's made a connection up in the Northeast to the Italian American communities. And he's going after that special market. He has breeds of chickens that go back hundreds of years with traditions in Italy. He's got Encona laying hens and dorking meat birds. And he gets $25 for a dorking broiler. But he does it this way. It takes a lot of time. And he goes into it and he says, here is this broiler. Let me show you how to get three meals out of this one chicken. And he tells them how to take the more meaty parts for an entree.  Then you take the bones and the bony parts and you make soup. Well, you know, we don't think that way too much. We don't realize this is how most of the people on earth think about food. One meal at a time, one bite at a time. Remember the most profitable beef marketing organization in the United States sells beef four ounces at a time. McDonald's. Four ounces at a time.  Well, I'll tell you what, if you've got 200 cows in the state of Missouri, you're in one very high priced game today because you're buying $11 a bale hay. And you ain't found a banker that'll talk to you for the last 90 days. So what's the difference? They got to the consumers. They did the marketing. Well, I don't think you need to build golden arches. And I think you need to get busy about keeping more of the gold back home. And that's where you have to get involved in this. This guy with the $25 chickens. Now, he's as hammy as they come. Some of you've probably seen him on public television. He got on a couple of those Itay and cooking shows, bought a lady out on PBS. And he did a smart thing. He got a little chicken manure on. But oh, this is what my great, great grandparents had in Italy. He didn't know. He said if they were from Italy and then from where these chickens come from, they could have. So he'd found that link. He'd found that connection. He'd put a face on stuff that is pretty basic. Eggs and chicken meat. We don't know what Ty and Tyson looks like. But there are a lot of people up in New Hampshire now that know what that old boy looks like. And they're not turned off by his $25 chickens. And like I said, it's not going to be easy. And it's not going to be for everyone exactly. But more and more, you have to think about how am I going to get off the farm and get out to the people? And there is a concept. And we don't play it quite as much as we are to, but it's called cooperation. No, I'm not going to say your membership in the MFA. I'm not going to tell you to start an elevator that we're going to close down someday because you're not selling enough fertilizer. But I'm saying back home, you boys with lambs probably got a neighbor with beef cattle and another neighbor with chickens and another neighbor that's a pretty fair gardener. And by golly, I just put together a CSA for you people, didn't I? And you go back home and you get involved, you start saying, well, how do I reach out to these people? Not going to be easy. A couple of three years ago, I was bopping through the farm show and just ended up one day. And two extension people grabbed me and said, Kelly, we need you in a meeting. I thought, okay, got to be a free meal at the extension. So they took me upstairs back here over the restaurant. I thought, wow, they may even buy something in the restaurant. Plumped me down. I was between two extension agents, there was an extension agent over here and another one over here. Boy, before I was busy out there, people going back and forth. And extension agent on this side was probably 60 years old and the other one's a young lady and they said, Kelly, what do you think we need to be doing more? We know extensions into trouble in Missouri. And I said, well, quite simply, I said, you need to be helping people market. He said, oh, we'll never do that. And there's nothing round up ready. We can sell you to help with marketing. There's nothing that Cargill or Pioneer or anything has to do with marketing. And they said, well, it'll never happen. And I turned to that old gentleman, because I knew by then there wasn't going to be anything to eat. And I said, you see all them people down here on that floor? And he said, yes, I do. He said, we want to reach out to them people. I said, well, I'm going to tell you something about them people. I said, at least half of them pretty well are convinced that someday they're going to have to shoot people like you to stay in production. And it got real quiet. And I was left alone with nothing to eat. And I haven't been invited back to any of those meetings either. But the point is, folks, you've got to come together. You've got to do it yourselves. They don't grasp what's happening. And there's some very good extension people here today. Debbie Kelly and Bud Rieber are lots of good people. I pick on them maybe a little more than I should, but they're kind of an easy target. Rather like the senator candidates for the state of Missouri this year. But as I look over this Senate race, I'm reminded of what Will Rogers said many, many years ago. We in Missouri are proud. We've got the best politicians money can buy. But the thing is, folks, we're coming to a time when we're going to have two agricultures emerge, like it or not. The corporations are going their way. They're selling products that make them some money. But it's not good production. It's not trusted production. And more and more, it's nothing we can eat. Ethanol is probably the cruelest joke that's ever been played on the American farmer. Because all they did is tie the corn market to the oil market. And folks, there was a cartoon that made it into the New York papers a few years ago. And we didn't see it very much because we don't think about New York. We think about Columbia and Jefferson. But there was a picture of a man in a Cadillac driving through a sub-Saharan African city. And he's grabbing up little bowls of grain from starving children and dumping them in the gas tank of his car. And the point has to be made. We've been beat down because we're small farmers. Well, they hide behind our image really well. Yes, they do. But the point is they need us. The people believe in us. And we're the ones that are going to endure and last. We're coming to the end of this. They're calling this the post-agricultural age. And there's something to that. You have 300,000 full-time farmers in the United States. Each one of them is said to feed 123 people. Do the math people. They're not even feeding all of the people in the United States. How are we going to feed the world? And I'm going to tell you who it's your job to feed. It's your own family. You don't have to farm to look good for the big slick magazines. I never will forget Dad telling me. He said, Kelly, every time you see something on one of the covers of those magazines you think you'd like to have at home, he said, wait 18 months. And he said, you'll be able to buy it in that guy's bankruptcy sale. And he's pretty much right. So we're going to have to come off the farms. And we're going to have to come out in the public. There are 112,000 farmers in the state of Missouri, full and part-time. Best studies say three times that many have a hands-on at-risk investment in production agriculture, mostly livestock. But you go into Sulaard Market, the oldest farmer's market east of the Mississippi River on Saturday morning, and they're selling live chickens. They're talking to people with funny accents. It's kind of ironic that people that come from foreign countries and listen to me speak Missouri, they think I'm the one with the funny accent. And they're probably right. But they come in there with those green pictures of dead presidents. And that's what we've got to be about. Not making lots of money, but keeping as much of the money as we make it possible. I talked about stacking ventures on your farm. 12 ventures on your farm earning $3,000 net each, that's $36,000. Play a little game with me here real fast. Consistently, a high profit margin on a feeder calf is $80. How many cows does it take to make $16,000? $200. Actually, you figure 90% cow calf, you're up to 215. Anybody bought a cow lately? We've got over a quarter of a million dollars in the game and we ain't got a calf on the ground. Then we've bought bulls. Then we've bought ground. Two and a half acres per cow calf unit. Then we've got to go buy tractors. Then we've got to go buy balers. Then we've got to go buy pickups. I mean, Lord knows you can't farm unless you've got a brand new four-wheel drive pickup, but we'll let that go. The thing is, folks, those 200 cows, you've got an investment of over $2 million to make $16,000. Let me tell you something a little bit confident here and I feel sure about telling you that. I know you ain't getting a lot of money on a money market now, but you walk into any bank in rural Missouri and you tell them you've got $2 million to put in there and I guarantee you make a whole lot more interest in $16,000 and you'll never find yourself on a cold January morning strip to the waist with your arm to your shoulder inside a bulky heifer trying to pull a calf or paying a veterinarian $200 for the same service. Now, I'm not saying let's not get in the cattle business, but let's grow out five or six grass-fed bees. Let's venture in a little closer to the city. Let's sell some of that $6 hamburger and back home if they balk a little bit. Well, I look at it this way. Oh, buddy, if I just gave you $300 for a new tractor tire, I think you ought to buy 10 pounds of the $9 hamburger.  Two years ago, I had an old gentleman stop me. He said, Kelly, he said, I'd like to buy a few chickens for my granddaughter's 4-H project. I said, okay, I shot him a price and he stepped back like I'd Bernie. Another one of them real quiet moments that seemed to befall me when I get out in public. He said, Kelly, he said, I haven't paid that price ever. And I said, when was the last time you bought any chickens? He said, 25 years ago. Well, I looked out the window there, the senior citizen center, and he'd pulled up in a brand new Dodge pickup and he had just bought 80 acres of ground. I said, I'll tell you what I'll do. He said, what's that? I said, I'll say you're my chickens for what you'd have paid 25 years ago, but you've got to sell me that pickup and that 80 acres for what you'd have paid for him 25 years ago. Got real quiet again. I was all alone again, and no one bought me dinner that day either. But as you can tell, I haven't missed too many meals already. But the point is folks, the point is folks, we've got to stand up a little bit. We know this. We've hung on hard. We've earned this gray hair. We've earned these calluses. We're here when people thought we wouldn't be here. I did 35 years in the Duroc-Hulk business. I saw a hundred thousand dollar boar sold and I saw eight dollar butcher hogs. I saw a good friend as I ever had, won into a mental institution when she fell. There's another boy back home that won't even talk to his father when they had to let the hogs go, but they're coming back small, tight, and hard. They're doing it three, five, and 10 cells at a time and they're selling pork. Lady called me by the arm up here last year at the farm show and we were talking about whole hog pork sausage. She said, well, he said, I'm in the Chicago farmers market and I get six dollars a pound. Do a little math on that real fast. She's getting 150, 160 pounds pork sausage at six dollars a pound. Anybody else in here sold any $900 butcher hogs lately? All right, let me ask you this much. Let's go a little bit further. If you're making five dollars a head profit, which would be real good in a high confinement unit, you got to sell 180. She made as much money on one as her neighbor down the road made with 180. She doesn't have to sell a lot of them. So she sells five or 10. Then she sells some of those five dollar a pound tomatoes. She sells some of those 25, 35, 40 dollar trios of chickens. She goes that distance and she gets three and a half dollars for a dozen eggs. She's selling green beans. This corn looks real good right now at seven something a bushel. What's a 40 pound bag of deer corn cost at the Walmart store, boys? 15. What's a 10 pound bag of bird seed cost at the Walmart store? Well, I got to tell you a true story. I worked in the water industry for a number of years. DNR took us up to a big meeting in St. Louis County.  They had a big glass wall there. We're standing there and they had a feeding station. They had chipmunks and they had squirrels and everything's running around. And here comes this touring group of St. Louis people through there.  I did get fed that day. Little dark colored squirrel ran by and the woman said, what did they call that? And I heard the old boy behind me clear his throat and I knew where he was going with that. He said, ma'am, he said, back where I come from, we call that breakfast. That's the gap we have to bridge. And they want it bridged. They want to be appreciated and respected. When they give you two dollars or three dollars for that pound of tomatoes, it's not really the cost of the tomatoes that matters.  My wife is in the food industry. She has one standard for buying tomatoes.   You've got to combine the good with the practical. The artisanal with the real world dynamic of it. And that's where what you know has value and you have to tell these people why it's worth that. The consumer is always right because they have the money. They're not always sharp. They don't always know. The average American now is 10 generations removed from farming experience. You hand people a live chicken in the event of a national crisis and they'll starve to death holding that chicken wondering what they're supposed to do with it. That's the truth. Folks, they won't buy a turkey unless it has a little thing in the breast that pops up and tells them when it's done. Now let alone hand them an axe and point them out the door and say take him now, but that's what we've come to. We've got to be there to do that. You've got to make them understand. And you've got to cooperate. We're blessed back home. We have several small little meatpacking operations and they're real good. We take a hog up there into our one and he makes bulk pork sausage. Take the whole hog, turns into pork sausage. The only thing that comes back on the farm are the ribs. So we don't have to worry about marketing anything high end. We can sell one pound or two pound sticks of pork sausage. Put them in a dedicated deep freeze, bring them out, take them to the farmer's market in the Coleman cooler. And the first time or two, you're only going to sell one stick. American people are cautious. First hog, I only bought, I bought, I only bought one. That's all the money I had. That's the point people are slow. But if you've done your job, then you're going to come back and they're going to buy more because they're starting to put your face with it. They're starting to trust you. They're starting to say, you know there's something out here other than farmland. There's John Smith or there's Kelly Klober or there's Garrett over here. And they're going to go looking for these people. And folks are going to come more and more. They're going to come out of those cities. And I'm going to tell you this, the thing you want to have to start farming now is the sprawl. Get serious about going where the people in the money are. You're going to have to reach beyond just down the road. You're going to have to go into places. You're going to have to take things that you didn't believe you could sell. But you will find a market. Pick on Walmart one more time. Big target. Went through the Walmart store not too long ago. Got over into the gardening section. They were selling soil. Rotted sheet manure and tree bark. Went back into the electronics and they were selling compressed air to clean electronic material. Went over into groceries and they were selling water. Folks there selling manure, water, dirt, sticks in the craft department and sand and being paid very, very well for it. Why aren't we being paid well for good pork and good vegetables and good beef and good chickens? Because we didn't think enough to ask for it. We got to get a little bit tougher. They tell a story about the northern counties up in Iowa. A few years ago the winter went out, came to a crossroads up there. Lo and behold, there were two pickups across the road from each other's stop signs had been covered over by a blizzard. They looked inside and there was an old farmer frozen to death in each one of the pickups. Near as they can tell, they'd both come to the intersection at the same time and they'd frozen to death waiting for each other to go first through the intersection. Now, I know one should go against your raisins but I do want you to get a little bolder. I want you to stand up to be proud of what you are. I was walking through the farm show a couple years ago and there was a nice man back there looking at some of those cattle and he said, I can't do that. I only have five acres.  I said, you've only got five acres? I said, how many people on the face of this earth would give their right arm to have five acres of farmland in the United States of America? The only problem you've got, my friend, is no imagination, no creativity, and not very much grit. What can you put on that five acres?  I said, well, I'm going to tell you something old buddy. I did 35 years in the hog business. Never made a dime with a hog house. I made my money with hogs. You're not going to make a dime in the cattle business with Baylor's and John and their tractors. You're going to make your money with good cattle. You've got to get serious about the products you sell. My wife's dietary magazines come in and I read them and they've been an eye-opening experience. You read Farm Journal and they say, boys, you've got to figure out how to do this to grow 10,000 bushels of this. You know what they worry about in the retailing of the food industry? How much money they can make off of a slice of pie? A slice of pie. We've got a lady back home. She kind of put two and two together. She's got some blackberries. She's got some other kinds of fruit. She gets $12 a piece for pies at the farmer's market. She's got to get a little closer to the city. She's not going to sell hundreds of them, but she's going to make a little bit of money. And folks, you don't think things can't be done. Anyone been to Lancaster, Pennsylvania? You want to see an 11 acre farmer's market under one roof? You want to see boys paying six and $7,000 an acre for farm ground and making a good living at it? Watch what they're doing there. The Lancaster farmer is a weekly farm paper of 150 to 200 pages, week in, week out, for Lancaster County. Those boys can't farm big. A lot of them are farming with horses. They're farming for the people in Philadelphia, in New York City. They're not farming for the global village. They're farming for the big white houses on the hills above the global village. Folks, forget about the global village. In the global village, you have to work 10 years to buy a bicycle. In the global village, it doesn't matter to them if we grew 500 bushel corn in Indiana tomorrow because they're eating rice. What has to matter is what we do right here right now with what we know, what we have, and what's in our own hands. And we've got to be about that kind of farming. Are we running over on time? They haven't drugged me off. Garrett's going now. Man, you want a lot for $5. Got eight minutes? Oh, I've got time enough to take up an offering. I show you how to make a little money here real fast. Folks, I am going to make one last point. I thank you for being patient and I thank you for listening. But I hope you realize what I'm doing up here too is I'm marketing. I'm selling what I grow and I'm selling what I know. I don't have the best chickens in the world. I didn't raise the best hogs, but I was there and I tried and I listened. And that's very important now. I was raised on a stretch of Blacktop Road in Montgomery County. There were eight purebred hog farms on nine miles of Blacktop Road. On one end was Yorkshire Reader. About halfway up we were with our Derox and on the far end was a man named Ruben Edwards. And I'm sure a lot of you know that name today. Well, Mr. Edwards was a master of marketing.  I said, we're going to Ruben Edwards' fall hog sale.  Well, this was October sale so the pig wasn't very big. They ran him through the ring and Danny Baker was working hard on the microphone. And the pig brought $15,500 back when $15,500 was a lot of money.  She turned to me and she said out loud, she said, Kelly, they can die, can't they? An old gentleman sitting behind her, wretched over any pageant on his shoulder. He said, sweetheart, they can and they do. But the thing was, I was between the Yorkshire Park and I was back the road from Ruben Edwards. I had my Derox sign out on the road. And that kind of had a little joke he liked to tell. They'd pull in, they'd see the sign and they'd come in and they'd say, they're looking kind of glassy eyed. They've been to Rubes. You'll get one sold today if you keep your brains about you.  We sold boars one and two at a time. And that's how we prospered. That's where we found our niche. And we only cranked out 25 to 35 a year. But it was enough. We did other things. And that was the key to it. You can't put all your eggs in one basket. Because what's going to happen, I guarantee the bottom's going to fall out of that basket. And there's just no way around it, folks. It will happen sooner or later. We get a little bit greedy and we overproduce. But I remind you of something about big business, an agribusiness. Big business responds to two emotions and two emotions only, greed and fear. Well, right now, their greed won't let them cake us over in local foods. That's our niche. Fear is that they're losing ground. And folks, there's some pretty nasty threats being made right now. But I'll tell you something I've told you today about quality. And I'm going to talk to you more about it in a session ahead. But the importance of pure bread livestock. Anyone see what the Black Angus Association started doing this month? They rolled up their sleeves and they looked them right straight in the eye. And they said, you don't need to cross breed. You don't need hybrid vigor. You need good black cows that are bred to be good. Folks, you can breed good black cows out of five head as well as 500. We kicked out 35 Duroc boars a year from five Duroc sows. We learned our lesson pretty fast. You went and paid the price it took to buy a good sow. And if she raised you five good boars a year, she paid for herself no matter what she cost. And you make your opportunities. And that's what it's about now. You make your opportunities. You go into the market. They believe you've got the good stuff. I know you're smart enough to take advantage of it. God puts you down on the best place on earth to farm. And I'll leave you with a little bit of encouragement. John F. Kennedy hosted a celebration and a dinner one time for the prize winners, the Nobel Prize winners. They sat around the table and he said, this is the greatest assembly of intellect to dine in the White House since Thomas Jefferson dined here alone. You know what Thomas Jefferson said about America's farmers? He called you the chosen of God in whom rest he has made to burn the sacred flame. All right. Don't hide that lie. Stand out there and tell them, here I am. This is what I grew. I'm proud of it. Here's what it's worth. And I'll be here next Saturday again with more of it because I'm going to be at Silic's next Saturday, the farmers market. I'm going to be back there this afternoon. You all are welcome. Thank you very much and bid them up, boys.


CHAPTER 1 LEVELS OF PERCEPTION Trees are poems that the earth writes upon the sky, Khaleel Gibran. All our wisdom is stored in the trees, Santosh Kalwar. Low-level perception, LLP, sees just a tree. Medium-level perception, MLP, begins to see interconnected detail. High-level perception, HLP, knows the profound interdependence. Sonder, the realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own, John Koenig. LLP low-level perception sees just a person, a dangerously desacralizing perspective. MLP begins to know more detail, like life history and goals. HLP sees a whole suite of nuance fused into a soul. Analogy has the core of cognition, Douglas Hofstadter. Analogy, comparing chunks. A tree without nutrients cannot produce fruit. A human without basic needs cannot unleash gifts.


Chess. A game of intellect. A game of skill. A game with really neat game pieces. Now wouldn't it be nice to make your own pieces and put your own creative spin on it? Copy that. The first thing you're going to want to do is make a box slightly larger than your object. In this case, we'll use foam core to build the box. Simply map out the size of your box and cut the material accordingly. If you're making your own frame out of foam core, it is important to seal the inside with tape so the box becomes waterproof. We use packing tape to seal our boxes and to cover the surface of the box so the mold will easily pull away from it later. Hold all of your sides up and you're ready for the chess pieces. Coat the bottom of your pieces with glue and place them evenly within your box to hold them firmly in place. Now it's time for the mold making material. You'll want to measure equal amounts of part A and part B, then grab a stir stick and mix it all together. Mold making material conveniently comes in two colors so that you'll know when you thoroughly mix the solution when the color is consistent. Next, pour the mixture into your container and over your chess pieces. You'll want to completely submerge each piece and then sit back and let the mold cure. Three hours at room temperature will do the trick. Feel free to poke the top of the silicone to make sure it's not sticky anymore. Cut the box open and pull the whole mold out before removing the object. If you're careful, you can reuse your box for other molds. Now it's time to remove each chess piece from the mold. Carefully wiggle the pieces out, but sometimes the little devils need a little extra muscle to pop loose, and that's OK. The pattern you formed inside the mold making material is set in place. Congratulations, you are now ready to make exact replicas of your chess pieces. You can use many different substances to fill the mold, but we recommend Art Resin. When combined with our colorful line of resin tints, Art Resin produces a strong, perfect copy of whatever object you've selected. Just like mold making material, Art Resin is a simple one-to-one ratio. Measure out equal parts of resin and hardener and mix thoroughly for three minutes. Once mixed, you'll have approximately 45 minutes of working time with the resin. Grab any color of resin tint and pour a few drops into the Art Resin. In this case, we've selected black and metallic white to create our army of chess pieces. Pour your tinted resin into the mold right to the top and let it sit for at least 24 hours. Art Resin is hard to the touch after 24 hours, but a full hardened cure will take 72. Remove the pieces one at a time and voila. Your very own set of chess pieces to wow your opponents with. Check and mate. As you can imagine, you can pretty much clone anything. The possibilities are endless. And as you can imagine, you can pretty much clone anything. The possibilities are endless. Yes, I did that on purpose. So that's it. Please check out our other how-to videos in this series and keep making stuff. Mold making material is available now on ArtResin.com. Mold making material. Do you copy?


All right guys, I am extremely white, but one workout is done and I am not taking my glasses off right now because my eyes Look so tired.  I Don't know if I like it. I Don't know if I like clean shaven.  I don't know why I did it I'm not gonna do it again. That's for sure every time I do it I say I'm never doing it again, and then I forget what it looks like and then I really don't like it, but Anyways I'll see you guys tomorrow. I am feeling better. I am feeling better guys You know truth be told that workout helped.  I sort of Am Getting tired again, and I can't even string a sentence together But with that said I'm gonna have two meals at least before I go to sleep. We're gonna have one called holy meatballs and We're gonna have another one called Deep South Chili, so we're going we're going red meat tonight.  Oh my god. That was how like food Supplements not but a food company to To provide like free food or really discounted food would be so sick But anyways, these are the guys that I like because they're sold at the local gym out back gym and fitness So this one is beef meatballs Oh my god, I'm so tired.  I Don't know how much it is exactly. What is it? It's definitely under 400. It's like 350 and holy meatballs, which is probably my favorite 1660 kilojoules, so that's probably around, you know, 380 calories 41 grams of protein 9 grams of fat 30 grams of carbs in that one 40 grams of protein 3.8 grams of fat 39.8 grams of carbs in this one. So, you know great options all around and as well as that We've got another major key when whilst dining guys if you want carbs if you're having carbs and you want something like sandwich like bread toast a sandwich a Bagel a waffle anything like that. I would have to recommend these man They're so good sandwich things by tip top 99 calories per serve. They come out like a like a really nice soft waffle No, it's not like a waffle actually no way, but it is nice and soft And they're already split in half 99 calories per serve you put it in the toaster It comes out like two pieces of toast for now 99 calories obviously quite thin But I love like the texture of these things Untoasted just fresh is really nice nice and soft and yeah, 99 calories per serve man You put in you put like a really high protein low fat low carb something inside of one of these and It's only an extra 18 carbs on top of your Macros there that you put inside it so Anyways, I'm gonna stop talking right now. I'm really rambling.   I've got 12 hours work tomorrow. So I Will talk to you guys once I finish work Peace thanks for all the support one and all This day this few days man. There's been hectic Not even that hectic to be honest. It's been it's just been like Inevitable and so it's just sucks really you just gotta Just got to push through and do it. Don't know all right guys, so It's It's it's now Saturday night, and I've done a 12 hour shift today.   I'm gonna end the vlog here guys I'm taking I'm taking a queen mattress from my sister's place too.  I I'm pretty much homeless honestly That's what it comes down to for two weeks, and then I've got six weeks worth of Living space in a one bedroom apartment and then after that I have to get something permanent For this two weeks I'm like in someone's lounge Which I thought would be okay, but after one night.   This cut is is killing me man. I'm I'm killing myself like today I've had like 800 calories the whole day and now I'm at the gym You know it's a it's days like that. I made a post on Instagram last night It's it's days like that that I feel like I actually make the most progress and it's because you know I feel I'm so hungry sometimes. I feel sick yet I push through and And and you know still go and train and still do cardio and shit and it's like Most people aren't prepared aren't prepared to do that and you know I could I Could have slowed the weight loss down, but the fact is is I've lost like seven kg in Six weeks, so you know I've sped it up. I wanted it to be a mini-cut. I wanted it to be four weeks I've kept it going and you know it looks like it's gonna be 12 weeks. I don't know if I can last that long But you know I'm definitely in some good shape, and I'll show you guys Next video how I'm looking all right, so I'm gonna call it a night here. I'm heading back to my sister's place I don't know what happened there. I think I got cut off, but That was a good back session, you know, I surprised myself sometimes with the quality of weight sessions I can achieve whilst in such a caloric deficit like It's yeah, it is surprising what you can do mentally. It's it really is a mental game when you are In a heavy caloric deficit. It's not easy to train intensely.  So, you know, I'm I'm looking forward to Introducing some more food and you know what I think going forward like It's Sunday tomorrow that marks six weeks. I've been dieting. So I reckon I'll probably weigh in in the morning under nine just under 96 kg and That's seven kgs in six weeks and You know, I think I I definitely can't continue that. It's you know, I'm I'm really feeling the pinch right now. So what I'm gonna do is introduce some more calories. I really like I mean I've been eating probably on average like 2800 calories per day, but it's still not enough. It really isn't especially with, you know My weight lifting and stuff Unfortunately, I haven't been going to CrossFit, which is you know, my own fault. I Just haven't been able to make it. I've Rathered laying bed and get more sleep. I mean I'm working You know Four or five 12 hour shifts per week plus trying to CrossFit and lifting in the gym It's just it's really catching up plus trying to diet at the same time It's really caught up to me and plus trying to move this like this weekend like Obviously you guys, you know, you can appreciate it's a bit of a stressful time So, you know for me to continue my regime is actually a you know, I give myself a big pat on the back for that and Yeah, anyways guys, I'm rambling now. I'm gonna cut the vlog here.  I'm not so I probably should get a lease. I'm gonna start looking for properties Pretty much straight away I'll let you guys know how we go but come Monday. I'm gonna make a six-week diet breakdown video I'm gonna show you guys all my calories all my macros All my way in for the last six weeks, you know, tell you guys how it's been going. I'm so tired right now What a week what a weekend I'm feeling good.  So with that said, I'm looking blue on the screen right now.  Good night


Hello, my name is Duyong Kim, and in this video I will talk about how to efficiently compute the comparison operation in homophic encryption. This is the joint work with Professor Jeong-hee Chan and Dr. Dong-ok Kim. Okay, so let me start with some brief introduction of homophic encryption and the motivation of our work. In this work, we propose complexity-optimal homophic comparison methods for worldwide homophic encryption schemes. This is the follow-up study of our previous work presented at the last year at Asia Crypt. In the previous work, we only achieved quasi-optimal solution for homophic comparison, and it was even quite impractical. But in this work, we overcome these kinds of weaknesses. Firstly, we finally achieved the optimal complexity, which means the number of homophic multiplications. And now it shows quite nice performance in practice that it is not comparable to bitwise homophic comparison, which has been the most natural and efficient way. Of course, in amortized running time sense. And also in mathematical perspective, our work can be also viewed as a new framework called composite polynomial approximation for sine function. And it has a potential to be applied to more general functions. So the homophic encryption is a crypto system which allows computation on encrypted data without any decryption process. So theoretically, when we encrypt the data with homophic encryption, then we can do any computation and any analysis in real world, even without knowing the data itself, which ensures the data privacy. So for example, one of the most recognized application of homophic encryption is machine learning. At a high level, the machine learning is to generate a model from the training data and use the model for the inference or prediction phase. But without any privacy preserving method, an attacker can invade in any procedure of the machine learning and take the data, which can be very sensitive and private such as genome health or finance data. However, when we encrypt the training data with morph encryption, since we can do any computation in encrypted state, we can still learn the model and go on the prediction phase. But the attacker would not be able to learn any partial information of the data because the data is encrypted. So in this perspective, one may think homophic encryption is a perfect solution for the privacy concern in real world applications and might say, oh, let's encrypt everything with homophic encryption, then we are done. We hope so, but there always exists a gap between the theory and practice. We may think of various limitations of current morph encryption based on different perspectives, but one of the most troublesome points is the computational inefficiency due to the restricted basic operations. There are two big encryption approaches in morph encryption. One is worldwide approach and the other is bitwise approach. The worldwide approach is to encrypt the message by itself, but in bitwise approach, the message is decomposed and then each bit is encrypted separately. So in worldwide approach, it basically supports addition and multiplication, so it is good at polynomial evaluation, but they are not good at logical operations, including comparison. On the other hand, the bitwise approach basically support logical operations, but they are not good at polynomial evaluation because they have to express the polynomials as a set of logical operations. So in this talk, we will focus on making up for the weakness of worldwide approach with the goal that the worldwide approach is still efficient even when both polynomial variations and logical operations are required, which usually happen in real world computations. Okay, now let's imagine that we only have two tools addition and multiplication, which means the polynomial evaluation. Then how can we evaluate non polynomial functions, including comparison. Since only we can do is polynomial evaluation. It is quite natural to think of polynomial approximation on the non polynomial functions. In terms of polynomial approximation. Actually, we already know a number of general methods from the literature of numerical analysis, such as Taylor approximation, this square approximation, minimax approximation and championship approximation, and so on. So what may think that it would be enough to apply this well known masses. So theoretically, yes, but this methods do not satisfy us in efficiency and practicality. So, in detail what are the exact limitations of this general polynomial approximation methods. These methods commonly aim to find the relation between the degree and the error bound. In other words, they output the minimal degree polynomials within a certain error bound under some predetermined error measure. However, the number of multiplications, which we call complexity in this talk is also very important factor and it is actually more critical in more encryption. Since there is a large computational overhead in more encryption compared to the plain state computation. So, from this perspective, we came to the following natural question. Can we find a new polynomial approximation methods for the sign function with minimal complexity rather than the degree. And this was the starting point of our work. Now, let me talk about the high level idea of our work. Actually, we share the same high level idea up to our previous work to use some structured polynomial for the polynomial approximation. So, what it means is, okay, when we want to compute an unstructured polynomial, which means we do not know any information other than its degree, then it requires at least square root degree multiplications. And this lower bound derives an exponential computational complexity with respect to the output precision bits. However, when we use a structured polynomial, for example, the composite polynomial, then we may expect it requires only log-degree multiplications. That means, if we can approximate non-polynomial function through the structured polynomial instead of some unstructured polynomial, then even if the degree gets somewhat larger, we may expect much smaller complexity. The main difference of the previous work and this work is the previous work finds such structured polynomial from the existing algorithms in numerical analysis, while we design such structured polynomial ourselves by capturing some core properties in mathematical perspective. Now, let's go into some more details of our work. The core idea of our work actually came out from the observation and reinterpretation on the previous work. By capturing that the composite polynomial can be interpreted as an iterative algorithm in algorithmic perspective. The main idea of the previous work was to express the comparison function as a rational function approximation and then apply the well-known iterative algorithms for division. More precisely, the rational function in the red box was evaluated by iterative computations of a square over a square plus b square, which we call kind of scaring and normalization process. So, in this work, we tried to reinterpret the iterative algorithm in the previous work into the perspective of the polynomial composition rather than iterative algorithm itself. That is, the scaring and normalization process can be regarded as an evaluation of the rational function f0, which is defined as x square over x square plus 1 minus x square. Then, the algorithm is actually the composition of f0 and we could rephrase the goal of this approach as to compose the function f0 to make it get close to the step function. So, here is the graph of the f0 composition. Firstly, the red line is f0, which looks like somewhat symmetric and is kind of wavy function, which has some concavity and convexity in each interval. And the green line is 2 times the composition of f0 and the purple line is 3 times the composition of f0. So, you can see that the function gets close to the step function as the number of composition increases. And here, after looking into the graph, we realize that there is no reason for the basic function of the composition to be this kind of rational function f0, which requires very expensive division operation. Instead of the specific formula for f0, we may need some other properties, for example, symmetry and convexity and some other things may be enough. So, now we came to the following question. What are the core properties of f, which makes its composition get close to the sign function? Here, we simply think of the sign function because the step function described before and the sign function and comparison function are actually computationally equivalent. So, what it means is that if we compute one, then we can also compute another one. So, we simply thought of the sign function. From this observation, we try to find the core properties of the basic function f as following. Here, I would like to note that since we are dealing with polynomial approximation, we must set the domain for the approximation, which is actually inevitable. And for the simplicity, we set the domain to be minus one comma one interval. So, we are looking for the polynomial approximation over minus one comma one interval. The first core property is for the symmetry, which is quite natural because the sign function also has this kind of property. And the second one is necessary to ensure the point-wise convergence to the sign function, which means that if f1 is not equal to one, then the composition of f will not converge to the sign function in point-wise sense. And the third one is actually the optional one. And this property is to accelerate the convergence by making the function f as flat as possible at plus minus one. So, with these properties, the basic function f is uniquely determined for each degree n, sorry, in 2n plus one as the given formula, which is denoted by fn. So, this is the graph of the composition of fn. As you can see in the left side graph, for example, since f3 has a larger degree than f1, the f3 polynomial is more flat than f1 at plus minus one point, which means the composition of f3 would converge much faster than that of f1. And in the right side graph, we can check that the function gets close to the sign function as the number of composition increase. And you can see that this graph looks very similar to the previous graph on the previous slide for the composition of f0. But the main difference is our fn polynomial is actually polynomial, which are carefully devised by several core properties. While the f0 of the previous work is a rational function, which just came out from existing formula and algorithm, and its computation is quite expensive because of the division process. This is the theory for the convergence of the composition of fn to the sign function. That is, if it's at the number of compositions larger than some value, then we can theoretically guarantee that the composition of fn is very close to the sign function with this kind of measure with parameter epsilon and alpha. In terms of epsilon and alpha, we can express the goal of the fn composition as to make an input which is very small as epsilon to be very close to plus minus one with alphabet precision. One interesting point is that we can actually separate the goal into two different goals. So the first goal is to raise an epsilon size input to just the constant level rather than put it very close to plus minus one just to a constant level. And the first goal actually corresponds to the first red box. And the second goal is to make the constant to be very close to plus minus one with alphabet precision. And this second goal actually corresponds to the second red box. So after splitting the goal, we observe that several core properties of fn fits very well for the second goal, but not for the first goal. For example, the core property of two is for the point wise convergence to plus minus one and the core property of three was to accelerate the convergence. However, the first goal which aims to put epsilon size input to just a constant level does not need the convergence to plus minus one at all. And actually, this is the second goal. So our idea here is to construct another polynomial g which is devised only for the first goal and replace the pure f composition by the mixed composition of g and f. And we said a new core property four, which we will not describe in this talk, but we replaced a core property two and three in fn by a new core property four for g and polynomial and successfully constructed the g and polynomials. So for more details on the construction of g polynomials and its efficiency, please refer to our full paper. This is the graph of g polynomials and we can easily check that gn looks quite different to previous fn polynomials. For example, gn is not flat at plus minus one, but it is much steeper than fn at zero point. So it shows much better performance for our first goal, but they cannot purely used for the second goal. And the right side graph shows the total example of the comparison of pure fn composition and mixed composition of g and fn. So it experimentally also experimentally shows that the mixed composition shows better convergence rather than just pure composition of fn. Now we'll present some results of our work. So from the concrete analysis, we showed that our new comparison algorithms showed the optimal of synthetic complexity among all approximate polynomial evaluation of the sine function within the same measure determined by isilon and alpha. As you can see, our method show logarithmic complexity compared to the minimax approximation method and even much smaller than the previous work. And our new comparison method also shows quite nice performance in practice. We implemented our method on the HAN library, which is an implementation of the approximate HSCIMS called CKKS. And as you can see, in amortized running time sense, our accelerated method shows about one millisecond for comparison of 20-bit integers. And this is a comparable result to the bitwise comparison method based on TFHE. And even in latency, while the previous method required more than 40 minutes to compare 20-bit integers within 20-bit alpha precision, our method only requires one and a half minute, which is about 30 times faster result compared to the previous method. Before the end of my talk, I would like to share some interesting further works and open questions we may think of in this line of works. Firstly, as a follow-up study of this work, we believe it is very important to provide a strategy to the choice of N. Here N means that FN and GN polynomials denotes 2N plus 1 degree polynomial we devised. I mean, in this talk, we introduced family of polynomials FN and GN for each N. And their compositions achieve asymptotically optimal complexity for sine function approximation. But we haven't discussed which N is the best choice. But this question is not the simple because the computational cost in HE is not purely determined by the number of multiplications, but also the depth of the target circuit. And the cost model cannot be uniquely defined and determined because it varies for each situation and applications. So classifying the cost model of HE and providing the best choice of N for each situation would be an important step for this work. And the second one is the analysis on our GN polynomials actually includes some heuristic parts improving the convergence rate of mixed composition of FNG to the sine function. So it is another open question to be solved. And lastly, we believe the following open question would be a very worthwhile and interesting topic. So in the current state, regardless of the choice of the HE scheme, we are able to do both polynomial evaluation and comparison operation regardless of the efficiency. However, one fundamental limitation is some operations are built upon the other basic operations so that they cannot be super efficient as we want it. For example, in worldwide HE schemes as done in our work, we achieved the morphic comparison through the polynomial evaluation. And in bitwise HE schemes, they achieved the homophic polynomial variation by assembling logical gate operations. So I think it would be a very big step if we could get out of get out from this framework. So proposing a proposing new comparison algorithm without polynomial representation framework would be one option. And the other option would be to construct a totally new HE scheme which support both polynomial and logical operation as basic operations. This is the end of my talk and thank you for listening and watching.


It feels good to be appreciated and share a space with all these talented people, so it's good. All they have to do is keep up with the changing times and keep updated with the media, player by changing media.


What if there was a better low carb treat than these new low carb ice creams? Would you try it? Either njrew22.com here with another short low carb recipe vlog. And this is gonna be quick. We've been going on and on about the sweets in people's lives. We're sort of on the fence about it. And we think that eating anything sweet or even artificially sweet or even naturally sweet like fruit or berries, we're on the verge of pretty much giving it all up. But we've had this year, we experimented with these low carb ice creams with success, I guess you could say. We haven't gained weight, we haven't eaten out of control, but I'm not really liking the low carb ice creams because you still can't quite control yourself. So I came up with a little bit of a recipe here. I'm like, you know, I have this ricotta cheese. It's pretty tasty, even just plain. If you need a little satiation, just get a little food in your gut, so to say. But so the other day I was experimenting, I just threw a spoonful of unsweetened cocoa, which is pretty much zero carb, very low carb. And I put some of this natural sweetener, it's swerve, it's called, it's erythritol. And I did the powdered sugar version. And I mixed it up and it tasted like, and I experimented it a few times, and it tasted like sort of like a ice cream slash and maybe a soft cheesecake filling. It was really actually quite satisfying. It wasn't as, let's say, yummy as like some of these low carb ice creams that we've tried. However, I think it fit the bill. Like say you just want just a quick bite. So here's what you do. You just scoop some ricotta cheese in a bowl. You can follow a recipe and weigh it and do like eight ounces or whatever. Whatever, you don't have to do it. Just experiment with it. That's what we did. So you throw a few scoops into a bowl, take a heaping spoonful of cocoa, another heaping spoonful of this swerve stuff. And I noticed that the swerve stuff, you sort of can't go too light on it. It's not really going to have that perfect sweet taste. Again, I'm totally on the fence about this. I don't think anybody should be eating anything sweet. But if you want to try it out, this is something fun.  But this is, look, no, or chocolate ice cream, whatever. I don't understand why this thing goes in and out focused. It's supposed to stay focused. Next video I'm going to adjust the focusing range. I think I have to make it focus on the whole channel, not just the center here. I don't know, whatever. So you mix it up and the good thing about this and the best thing about it is that I think it satiates you more than ice cream. I find myself that you always want that next bite of ice cream.   And that kind of is part of the purpose of eating, is to fill you up. So give this a shot and let me know what you think. If you see this video, we're buried deep in the search results. No matter what we do, what keywords, hashtags, but no one finds us online. I think I have to kind of market myself, but that's it. Let me know what you think and I'll see you next video.


from Boston, Massachusetts. It's theCUBE, covering WTG Transform 2018. Brought to you by Winslow Technology Group. Hi, I'm Stu Miniman, and this is the second year of theCUBE at what is now WTG Transform 2018. And happy to welcome to the program, Scott Winslow, who's the president and founder of Winslow Technology Group. Scott, always great to see you. Good afternoon, Stu. Happy to be with you. Hey, and Scott, thank you so much. You not only brought us back a second year, we've got a nice table here, but I'm not tripping over myself saying that it's the 14th anniversary Winslow Technology Group Dell EMC user conference in lovely Boston, Massachusetts in the background, in fact, it was like, ah, it's literally WTG Transform rolls off the tongue. So thank you. You were the inspiration for us, Stu. Your comments last year precipitated the change in that name. I know your team just looked at it and felt sorry for me because it didn't roll off the tongue quite as easily as the new one. It was a mouthful. Yeah, so Scott, you and I, we bump into each other a bunch. We tend to go to many of the shows, the Dell show, the Nutanix show. Let's talk about your show first here. It's the 14th year, it's users. One of the reasons I love coming here, besides getting to talk to you and Rick and some of your partners, it's users. I will speak to more users in one day here than I do with some of the big shows I go to. Yeah, I mean, it's a great opportunity to thank our existing customer base. You know, we have a four fold purpose for this event. We like to educate our customers. We hope that they can pick up some knowledge, maybe an aha moment that they have with them looking at hyperconverged solutions or all flash solutions. We've got a new Dell client display here this year that we've never had in the past. So we're looking to educate. We love to give them an opportunity to collaborate with other practitioners to compare notes. The feedback I get from them is they really enjoy that piece of it. We want to have some fun. And it's a tradition that we want to keep rolling and they're helping to make it very successful. So it's been a great venue for us and a great event for us over 14 years now. And Scott, you couldn't have ordered a better day. I mean, New England, it might change in an hour but right now temperatures in the low 70s, it's mostly clear. Gorgeous backdrop here, as you mentioned in the open. Socks have their ace pitching tonight and they're still in first place. So yeah, it doesn't hurt. We're in the customer service business, right? So you have to think of everything. Temperature, starting picture. And we try to make sure we've got a good agenda and there's a lot of good information for them here.  It's because year after year after year, I feel like we've delivered and then we have kind of a continuous improvement process and we try to improve it every year. Here we are. Talk about your business a little bit. First time we met, Winslow Technology was one of the, it was the Dell partner of the year. So been a long time Dell partner. The Dell acquisition merger with EMC. It's been interesting to watch. I know you've got some viewpoints but before we get into kind of the Dell piece of it, talk about your business as, I guess we call you a channel partner down there. What's driving your business? How's growth going? How are things up here in New England and beyond? Because you're much more than New England.  Initially we started out as a compelling partner and then compelling was acquired by Dell and then five or six years later after that we have the Dell EMC consolidation. So I think we've had to learn to be flexible. And one of the things we've seen with that is we just, each time there was an acquisition, it allowed us to increase the size of our portfolio with more solutions that we can offer our end users, more services that we can provide. You know, along the way we've added a lot of other solutions to like the Nutanix solution in the hyperconverged space. So our business is going great. We're, you know, the highest employee count we've ever had our revenues were as high as they've ever been last year. We had a record Q3, record Q4 in Q1. We grew our Dell business by over 30%. That makes Dell very happy. That makes us very happy as well. So, you know, as this whole industry evolves and, you know, the digital economy progresses, there continue to be the need for the services that we provide. All right, so let's talk about Dell. As you said, you've come from the compelling piece, the Dell XC, which is the Nutanix OM is something that I know your team is, you know, very involved with, you know, how is Dell and Dell EMC? How are they doing for the channel these days? I think they're doing very well.  I think that they have proven that. They've put together a very good channel partner program under the leadership of John Byrne initially and now Joyce Mullen. You know, I think that they incent you to work with them. They try to incent the sales people and sent the companies, but they also put together very good programs for you to run marketing events like this. So an event like this, we couldn't do it without the support of Dell Technologies and they've been, you know, very supportive of us. You know, they're providing speakers like Dave Singer. You've got all kinds of subject matter experts here. We've got lots of hardware and software folks through, you know, demo. So I think overall the partner program's been very good. Great, and Nutanix, as you said, you get it through the Dell. So I'm curious, has the move as Nutanix is shifting more to really that software model?   Before Dell acquired EMC, our hyper-converged solution was Nutanix. We built together, you know, a very nice base of customers, many of whom, you know, are here today. So as they evolve to a software model, I do think they're going to be less concerned about what hardware platform it goes on because they're truly creating all their revenues, you know, from the software side. So they're very, they don't care really what hardware platform is being used. So, you know, we feel like we've got the best two solutions in the hyper-converged marketplace between the portfolio of Dell solutions, you know, VSAN, VxRail, Vblock, VCE, and then Nutanix with the Nutanix solution. Typically with Nutanix, we tend to put that on a Dell server platform. That's where we lean. We think Dell's got the best server technology in the industry. That's a nice way for us to bridge that gap between the two companies. So a lot of times our customers are putting a Nutanix solution on a Dell platform. Yeah, key themes I heard in your talk, Rick's talk, David Singer's talk this morning and what I hear from customers, digital transformation and hybrid cloud. Are those top of mind with your customers today? Absolutely, yeah. I think, you know, Rick alluded to it in his talk, a lot of customers are coming to us saying, hey, help us with our cloud strategy. And so we're going in and saying, tell us about your applications. You know, these are applications that we think belong in the public cloud that makes sense in the public cloud. And, you know, that could be disaster recovery, it could be backup, it could be Office 365. And these are other applications that we think might be more well suited for a non-premise solution. So that could be active file transfer. And so, you know, we think that leads naturally to a hybrid cloud discussion. We've got a customer here today, a financial customer from New Hampshire and their CIO call me. I'd known him previously at a famous sneaker company in town. He went to a financial institution and he said, hey, we want to move everything to the cloud. Can you come up and consult with us on that? And we ended up putting in a hybrid cloud forum, you know, featuring a hyper-converged solution that had the cloud integration that he needed. So I think that's the kind of activity we're involved in today. Yeah, use the word conversation. And that, and the customers I've talked to, they like, they need advice and they want someone that's not just, oh, well, here's the solution that you're going to buy. No, no, no, it's a conversation. There's lots of decision points and as you build out that hybrid cloud, yes. It's going to be made up by definition, multiple pieces. It's not necessarily going to be one company that's going to do it all, but, you know, your team helps them along that journey. Absolutely.   We tell our salespeople, you got to use them in that portion. So you really got to kind of listen to the customer. As I said, try to understand what their applications are.  If it's a Microsoft shop, you know, Azure might be their choice for, you know, public cloud or they might be interested in AWS. So you got to kind of work through those, you know, scenarios and then build out a solution that's going to work for them. We, and we rely on our solutions architects, Brian Vino runs our SA team and he's got a group of five SA's that we think are very adept at, you know, putting those solutions together. Yeah, Brian's actually not far from I said here, you've got the new hands-on lab is one of the new things that you added here. Anything from that or from other things at the event that you'd want to highlight as we wrap?  And I see a number of customers in there using that. So I'll talk to our team after the event and find out how it went. We always try to look for, you know, improvements along the way, but you know, there's opportunity in there to play with those demos in terms of storage, in terms of hyper-converged, in terms of Dell OpenManage Essentials, which is the software that manages your entire server farm. So I think that's been a good addition. I'd say the other addition is, this year, as we were planning it, we said, hey, our people are really good. We need to get our people up in front instead of relying so much on the OEM and they're great and they provide great resources. But I know that our people have so much to offer as well, particularly because, you know, we're out there, you know, putting solutions together for customers. And I think that breadth and depth comes through. So that's been a nice addition this year where it's not just been Rick Allen and myself, but we've utilized a number of members on our team. Ed Palmer is the moderator for a customer experience as an outcome session this afternoon that we're really excited about because at the end of the day as a solution provider, that's our job is to produce results and outcomes for our customers. That's how we're going to be judged. That's how we want to be judged. So I'm really excited about that session because we've got Improvada and Boston Architectural College they're going to present up their respective deployments and they were different of hyperconverged technology. So I think the voice of the customer, we really want to make sure we're continuing to bring that back to this event. So. Well, Scott, always a pleasure to see you. Thanks so much for bringing the queue back to this event and thank you for all the customers we get access to. We always love to talk to the customers. By the way, if you're looking to have a customer on the queue, that's what we're always looking for customers. So either look at the events where we do have a Boston area studio and a lovely Palo Alto studio. So reach out to the team, be happy to talk. I'm Stu Miniman. Thanks so much for watching the queue.