So I don't know when you're posting this one. I'm sure it'll be several days after the fact, but rest in peace. I'm going to watch Goodfellas tonight and yeah, I just in his honor. That's so sad. It's so sad.  I am not Ray Liotta. All right, Ray Liotta. Yeah, one of the greats, man. One of the greats. You can follow us on Instagram, Twitter, for more juicy content. Thanks for the patience, follow us through the account. Subscribe if you haven't hit the like button. Today we've got a really interesting video that I'm really interested in. This is called Do Northeast Indians Considered Themselves Indians. So this girl who I don't know what nationality she is, but she goes around and she talks to people from Northeast India about all the, you know, they go through discrimination and all the kind of stuff. What do they identify as? What do they feel about all the the kind of discrimination they feel when people say they're not really Indian or people don't know? Look at them and think that they're Indian. And so she kind of asked them specifically. So I'm actually quite interested in hearing these people. I know it's going to be quite sad, probably at some point. Yeah, probably so. And I'm in that same vein. I don't know if you heard this, but I sent the information to Alexis because I knew she would want to know. But there's a story that was this morning in variety that President Biden is meeting with. This isn't the joke. He's asked BTS to come to the White House, and I'm sure he's invited other people to come representing different groups. But specifically to talk about anti-Asian hate crimes and what can be done, which is really smart because BTS has so many people connected to them and anything that can be done to help promote. It's amazing that you still have to talk about this in a world where people have a brain. Yeah, anyway, it's quite unfortunate. Obviously, America has always dealt and probably will, unfortunately, for a long, long time with bigotry and racism like that. Because that's just everywhere, everywhere. Because we've seen it. We've seen it in India. We've seen we personally ourselves. We talk about this a lot when we were there right outside the Golden Temple. And these girls came up to us and said someone had spit on them and said, go back to China, but there are some ease. Yeah, it's awful. So anyway, it's quite interesting in this video. So ready? Here we go. Yep. Three, two, one. Hey, everybody, it's Carrie from Asian Boss. Where do you think these people are from? Would you be surprised if I told you they're actually from India? It's not just appearance that differentiates I would have been a few years ago who are often discriminated against for having a different cultural background, religion and ethnic makeup. So how do Northeast Indians feel about these conflicts between them and mainland Indians? Do they consider themselves as true Indians? We hit the streets of IZOL to find out. How would you describe your ethnic background? I belong to one of the states in Northeast India, which is Mizoram. They have told us that we have migrated from China itself, from Mongolia. I think I heard they should. What? So now, OK, we're not so we can't really tell for sure because there are very limited researchers that have been done. But politically speaking, I think we are we can be regarded as Indians because we are part of the Indian continent. Do you know what Northeast India is like? Foreigner Rampoon Mi. What is the origin of this problem? Do you know what Northeast India is like? I don't know. Well, I don't know. I don't know what to say. He's a good person, but I don't know what to say. But I think it's a Japanese. I can see a very similar Japanese type of look in this place. What makes us different in the Northeast Indian is that diversity, not just our ways and our culture, but I think languages as well. And the way we look when you we're not all the same. Many people are not aware of the beauty of the Northeast. Like it's it's very green. The greenery is so much mountains, plains, rivers. And everything makes notice so different from the mainland and it's it's highly the culture and heritage is very high in notice. Do you really consider yourself as an Indian? I do, but I'm not sure other people do. Smiled up to them. where I stayed there. So the people asked me if I'm from which place I am. I said I'm from Assam. Okay, they asked me from Bangladesh. I was like, no, it's in India. Come on, you should know that Assam is a part of India. It's mistaken for Nepali, Chinese, even Korean, if that even seems possible.  But I think the farther away I get from northeast that is the more south I go, then the harder it is to recognize the fact that we are Indian. That's just my personal experience. Mainly because we're not so involved in mainland India, its politics or even the pop culture northeast in particular hasn't really been popularized that much. So they don't know that much about us as much as we know about them. The northeast part has been ignored a lot by the central government.  People don't know about this place. I was once asked if everyone ate cats and dogs. I don't know if that's common, but that is a stereotype that have been asked. Whatever cliches they have in their head or whatever is being told to them, then they accept it for the truth a lot of the times. Well, I have heard many of my friends saying they have faced discrimination based on their looks. There's still a lot of discrimination that's going on in mainland India, but I think India is progressing towards a less racist country. During my years in college, I have experienced friends, close friends of mine, who did face a lot of discrimination from their landlords, who faced violence even just based on the fact that they're northeastern, and they aren't really considered to be truly Indian. Actually, there was a very mass protest from everyone from the northeast. Even so many Mizors participated. It was in Bangalore, and it was because this one person who was Manipuri, he had been physically abused by his landlord, and everyone fought back in that case, and it was a very beautiful instance of unity, and everyone came together and fought for him and put the landlord in jail, and we saw through to that, so I think that was a very good experience. For my age group, we are the youth now, so we really need job, then we need places to study. I really hope these things are like the new leader sees these kind of problems and solves them. I hope that we get new leaders who inspire the young teens, and I hope that we get new leaders who are not too old, who are able to keep up with current events and who are able to can recognize innovative ideas. I really want leaders who make a difference. I would love to have the opportunity to come here and experience these beautiful landscapes, and our amazing food, our amazing cuisine, and just to get to know the people here, amazing people. We're all very friendly here. I really want them to accept us as we are, our culture, everything might be different to what they know. They have to learn to accept that we are a little bit different, but being different is not a sin, it's not something bad, and I think it really adds to the diversity of the country. What did you think of the video? This was one of our most highly requested videos, and we were able to make it happen thanks to our volunteers in Mizoram, India. If you have any topics you'd like to see covered in our videos, feel free to leave comments or reach out to us through our social media. If you'd like to help us make videos happen in other countries, check out our description box for a link to our volunteer form. For more authentic insight into the latest news and cultural trends from all over Asia, be sure to subscribe to Asian Boss and follow us on our social media. Thanks for watching, and as always, stay curious. Great video. And is Mizoram, is that where Osam is, or I thought Osam was its own state? It is. I'm unfamiliar with Mizoram as far as where it relates in the northeast. I don't know. I know Osam is northeast, it's above West Bengal. It's amazing how, you know, no matter where you go, there's always been people that discriminate against people for just how they look. Right? No matter where you go, no matter what, obviously some are worse than obviously the United States. We were kind of just born with racism. It's kind of just in our DNA, unfortunately, right now that we're trying to literally ink out very, very slowly, unfortunately. But it seems like it happens everywhere. And it's just, it's just so hard to wrap your mind around the fact that you can discriminate on somebody because of the way they look. But you know, people do, and it's just so mind-boggling that they do that. It's just... They discriminate. People discriminate on the way you look. People will discriminate based on your gender.  People will discriminate based on your age. It's just this awful part of our freaking thin nature that makes us do... I can't comprehend it. And for as much as racism is deeply steeped in, for example, in America, there is one thing, it really depends on where you grow up. Because I think for anybody who's grown up in international cities, particularly like myself, who was born in New York, raised in LA, one of the beautiful things about that is you're exposed to everybody from everywhere. And I remember I've talked about this before when we lived in Texas for nine years, when Ashley, Alexis, and Micah were really their formative years from, you know, Ashley barely won. Like, Alexis and Micah were born there all the way up until the ages of like 10. So they're childhood years. And I, when they were old enough to start to understand, I would point out to them. And this is just the nature of San Antonio for the most part. We'd be in a restaurant and I would say to them, look around and tell me what you notice. And at first, when I first started to do that, they didn't know what I was doing. And they were looking around and they would say a couple of things and then they would ask me what I was pointing out. And I said, everyone in here is Caucasian. Everyone. The representation in this room compared to what's going on in the whole world is very one-sided. And it's important that you're aware of that to recognize that this is not the world. And all I had to do at some point was go, and it makes me uncomfortable.  And that's all I needed to say. And they'd recognize the fact that, wow, there's nobody but white people in here. And that's because that's not a true representation of this world. Yep. And that's one of the most beautiful things about Los Angeles, in my opinion. Me too. But there's absolutely so much diversity. It's literally somebody from every different culture around the world just here and probably has a restaurant or a business. And it's just absolutely wonderful to see that kind of diversity. I remember when I was an Uber driver, I think I've talked about this once before, and I had done a carpool.  And two men in the back, one was, both of them were very devout and their religious beliefs based on the way they were dressed. The man on the right side was Muslim. The man on the left side was a rabbinical Jew. And they were in the backseat sitting next to each other talking about the apps on their phone and laughing and enjoying their company. They got dropped off last. And I had the woman in the front seat with me afterwards. And she said what I was thinking. They got out of the cars. I'm driving with her and she looked at me and she said, don't you wish the world was like that? And I said, yeah, wasn't that beautiful to see those two men? One, a man from Islam, another one from Judaism enjoying each other's company and laughing over their phones. Man, I wish the world was more like that. Yeah. And unfortunately, the internet, I think, has just made it worse just because people can hide behind screens now and just be even more hateful out in the open because they, yeah, but... Yeah, because I talked about that too, what you just mentioned, the social media aspect that used to be when I was a kid, the only way you had a platform for society to hear you, it had to be earned. You don't have to earn a platform any longer. All you need is a phone. Yeah, it's quite frustrating. But I thought it was a great video. And also, I did look it up. It's around the horseshoe of Bangladesh. So it's on the very other side of Bangladesh from Kolkata. Got it. I mean, the one that's... Yeah, so it's basically the last part of India before you go into Bangladesh. No, no, no. So like, here's Kolkata, and then there's the horseshoe, and then it's over here. Because you know how India kind of has that space with Bangladesh? Because it goes around it. It's on the other side. And so it's on, I think, on the very edge of basically India. Because I think it borders Myanmar. Oh, is that what you're talking about? Yeah, borders Myanmar and... I think Nepal would be above it, right? But Manipur is above it. And Assam is above it. Yeah. But no, Nepal is more east or west. I mean, sorry, west. But yeah, fantastic video. If you are from the northeast India, please let us know.  If there's stuff other than Assam films, like if there's stuff from this state or stuff like that, please let us know. It's just, it's not because we don't want to.  Ignorance and availability. Yeah. So please, obviously, let us know down below. And obviously, treat everyone with respect and dignity. And don't discriminate on people just because they look different than you. Obviously. Obviously. Love everyone. Bye-bye.


Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here. We're in our Palo Alto studio for a cube conversation, getting deeper into virtualization and containers. And as we get ready for DockerCon that's coming just around the corner, it's fourth year. There's a lot of exciting things going on. And one of the exciting things is a new company that'll be launching there called Applariat. We're excited to be joined by Applariat CEO, Mazda Marvasti and former VMware CTO and Applariat advisor, Ben Fati. Gentlemen, welcome. Thank you. So Ben, why did you join these guys? What are you helping them with? What opportunity, you've been in the business a long, long time. Aren't all these problems solved yet? No, we create new ones. We create new ones, okay. Let's solve a few, create a few more. Job security. So Mazda and I worked together at VMware for several years and I initially managed the vSphere operating system and hypervisor. And Mazda was the CTO of the management business unit. He was responsible for the vision of how we're going to manage all these virtual machines that people are creating and the applications running on top of them. And then later on I became the CTO of the company and continued to work with Mazda. And one of the things that happened over the last year or so that we were at VMware together was the rise of containers and Docker and cloud native applications. And we actually worked together at VMware trying to integrate containers and Docker directly into vSphere to enable cloud native applications to run on vSphere environments. Anyway, make a long story short, so we both left and I became an advisor to several startups and Mazda started this company. So after about a year or so he came back and we had conversations about what he was trying to do. And meanwhile I'd gone off to a startup where I personally delivered software as a service using cloud native applications. So I built the operating system and was also trying to deliver applications in the cloud native format. So I felt the pain of what Mazda was trying to solve. And when he explained his approach of what he was trying to build, it was really, it resonated with me in that he was seeing the IT organizations and developers in existing enterprises struggling with this move to cloud native 12 factor applications and moving to the cloud. So the environment that built really makes it easy to containerize applications and move them to the cloud. And by doing so, they make it more portable. So you have the ability to go back and forth and get all the advantages that you would have a containerized modern cloud native application. So that resonated with me and I felt I could add some value and obviously he felt I could add some value. And after all, it's not often you get a chance to work with somebody who's named after a car company. So that was a big factor. Is he autonomous? That's what I want to know. I'm working on that. I'm working on that. But it begs the question, obviously a lot of activity around Docker and a lot of buzz around Docker and DockerCon and Kubernetes and this move around containerization.  So from my perspective, the big challenge is how do you deploy these things at scale to existing applications, right? If you're developing a brand new application, right? You can just go hire yourself a software artist to handcraft one of these beautiful works of art that you can then deploy. And if that guy leaves, good luck, right? Which again, it's all over the place, right? If you go look at kind of the graveyard of applications sitting at the enterprises, right? So how do you take that environment and bring it into the modern environment of running it as cloud native? So that was a technological challenge for us. Now when Ben and I were talking while we were at VMware, we were kind of discussing all these issues and what we were seeing with customers and how we could kind of approach and solve it. But then we both ended up leaving and then after I had a chance to go think about it some more, kind of approached Ben and said, listen, if we do it this way, what do you think about that, right? And then you started kind of contributing back, well, have you thought about this? Have you thought about that? So that's how we kind of got into a mindset of, this is a solvable problem, if you just approach it from the correct angle. And I think that's where we kind of came together on that. Right, because it is very different, right? If you're building a native application versus now people want to get some of those cloud native benefits with the legacy stuff either a rewrite or a lift and shift. And so there's, the momentum is there, obviously cloud is a giant, we just got back from Google Next and IBM Interconnect and AWS show. So the clouds there, enterprises are all in, but there is now the legacy stuff where people want to get that stuff into the benefits of cloud architecture. And that's what you're helping them with. That's exactly it. I think there's going to be a mix. There's obviously going to be a long tail of legacy monolithic enterprise applications that are going to continue to run for the next 10, 20, 30 years on prem. And at the same time, a lot of those applications are getting re-architected, broken down into microservices, built cloud native, or sometimes built on prem because of the timeliness and the availability of resources and corporate requirements. But then you also want to be able to go back and forth to get advantages of the cloud and the on-demand nature of cloud that you don't necessarily get when you have an on-prem application. But it's early days. I think you're going to see a lot of improvements, not just in the approach to move the applications to the cloud, but also how to manage it once you get it there, how to do day two operations. And a lot of things that Mazda and the team have built into the App-Lariat environment is the ability to do load balancing, to do failover, just have an inventory of your entire application stack so the IT organization can also have more control over how they're running and how they're behaving after they've been on site. So that's interesting. Of all the times we've been to DockerCon, which are numerous, I've never heard the expression day two operations. There's a lot of talk about spinning stuff up and how quickly you can spin stuff up, but it's that pesky day two. There's still day one. There's still a day one. But then you got to run the stuff, which is not the exciting step necessarily. It's not the sexy part. It's not bringing these things to life. It's the day to day grind, if you will. Yeah, I think, and that's some of what you get from Mazda and myself is our experience and many years of working with enterprise IT environments that do have, it's not sexy, but they do have to worry about security and compliance and archival and management and failover and load balancing. All of those things are key parts of capabilities that we need to automate in the new world of the cloud native applications and that we're not there yet. Right, and especially in the enterprise requirements and compliance and we were at RSA and the security's got to be baked in everywhere and traditionally, not so much anymore, but the traditional cloud entry was test dev, test dev, test dev or cloud native, he didn't have these issues. I mean, even back when we were at VMware, we were seeing small startups come in and we were looking at acquisition or partnership. Frankly, a lot of what we saw were toys. People hadn't quite grasped the whole concept of what it means to create cloud native applications and containerized environments and operating environments and management of those applications. One of the reasons that I liked Mazda's approach was that it's an API driven mentality, which really resonates with the developers and it has a simplified UI on top. A lot of the applications and startups you see out there today are toy UI environments. They work fine for four or five apps, but you really can't use them in an enterprise that has thousands of applications. So having the capabilities of both the API driven model as well as a simple UI that App Lariat or their partners can go in and help an enterprise build those large catalog of applications, I think the two really resonated with me as something that's mature and will help. And was the market clamoring for this? Is it more of a band aid to a fix that people were having an issue with or is it more of a kind of a vaccine that you're kind of looking down the road a little bit further and trying to help them out? Well, so think about it. So containerization is something that everybody's looking into. Every enterprise you go to, there's some kind of a science experiment already going on, right? Because they got to jump on the bandwagon, right? Whether it's happening from the developer side, whether it's happening from the IT side, so they're already there, right? But like Ben said, nobody's really thinking about the day two operations forward, okay? And so how do you, so let's just say you do have your environment containerized and let's just say you're now about to deploy it into production. Great, after the party, what happens, right? You've got to manage this thing on an ongoing basis. How do you roll changes into the code into it, right? How do you scale it up? How do you scale it down? Those things are not trivial, right? So having a policy-based mechanism of managing those environments on a day two forward is really critical to get the whole solution working properly. It's not just about getting your things, getting your applications containerized. It's about ongoing basis. How do you manage and maintain it so that it's still useful to you from an IT perspective, not just from a developer perspective. Right, right. Because that's part of the whole promise of the containers, right? Is that you can bring these apps up and down and scale them big, small, depending on what the requirements are and how they change. But again, day two, I'm going to steal that line, the day two operations, that's a good one. So, so look. I think if I can just add a little bit to that. Absolutely. What Mazda is trying to explain is back with the old traditional enterprise applications, you had a thick operating system, let's say Red Hat or Windows. And on top of that, you had a fairly thick and monolithic stack that may have had a database, let's say an Oracle database. But there were relatively few knobs that an IT organization had to play with. As long as you knew you had Red Hat 7 with these five patches and Oracle or SQL with these 12 patches, you were okay. You could pretty much support any application that had been tested with that. What containers have done and what the cloud native service oriented architecture has done is they've completely blown that up. The OS is now a very thin layer, whether it's core OS or one of these container environments. And then on top of that, each application stack really declares its dependencies on other services and other libraries. What that means to the IT organization, and this is the day two issue that they haven't really grappled with yet, is you can't just have two or three knobs of a Red Hat and Oracle. You now have 27 knobs for each of those applications and services you're trying to run. And it becomes really difficult to keep track of it, both for security purposes. If I've got 10 apps running, each of them could pull in 20 different libraries, each with some security vulnerabilities. How is an IT organization going to deal with that? Those are the types of things that I think this environment really helps in terms of having a single inventory of your software stack and your application stack, so you can quickly go in and say, I know what version is running, I know what the security vulnerabilities are, what updates I need to do, and it brings sanity to that environment. That's the dirty little secret then of the API kind of based application. Because the other thing where I thought you were going is where before it was that infrastructure that determined the apps that you could build, now really it's driven by the application on top and then what microservices and infrastructure does it need. And then of course there's this thing called portability, as you move things from test dev to production, maybe you want to put part of it in a cloud, you don't want it in a cloud, it's on-prem based on data server and the issues and those types of things, so it's a much more complex environment with just like you said, a lot more knobs like that analogy, 27 knobs, just not just three. Every time you introduce a new abstraction layer, somebody gets helped, somebody gets hurt. Right, right. In this case, it's much easier for the developers to be able to develop the unit that they're working on, develop a reusable unit, be able to test it and then move it along, right? When it gets thrown over to the wall on the IT side, all those, every one of those little units becomes an independent variable that has to be managed by somebody on the other side. That's where the complexity is. That's why you can't really do it the way you traditionally did it. You have to do it via policy driven mechanism. Because the developers don't want to deal with it. That's the whole problem too, right? They don't have to deal with the infrastructure so much but like you said, it's the day two, they actually have to operate it. Excellent, so as you look forward, any particular opportunities in terms of verticals or application type that you see as kind of a little hanging fruit where you want to go first or where there's the kind of biggest ROI for your customer? Sure, so I mean, it's interesting that we've seen it across verticals, right? These are custom apps, right? That enterprises use to essentially deliver business, right? And so we haven't really come across one vertical that says, oh, this one is really aching for this problem, right? The problem is, you're not able to compete with your smaller competitors that goes right across verticals, right? So how do you bring these capabilities into your environment? So we really haven't come across, maybe you haven't been out there long enough to find a particular vertical but right now we're seeing it cuts across verticals because it's a business problem that cuts across the verticals. All right, so Ben, I'll give you the last word. Your next advisory meeting, board meeting, whatever you guys get together, coffee, Friday beverage, what's kind of top of mind awareness of really critical things that that player it's got to make sure we're taking care of? I think to harp on the same comment, I'll say day two stuff. And these guys have seen that every time they come to me, they've built a really smooth on ramp for taking the applications to the cloud but I keep harping on this, what about day two? Have you thought about providing a central inventory? Have you thought about easy search if I have a thousand applications that I'm trying to manage? Have you thought about security implications of, what if I can quickly find all the versions of this crypto library 5.6 so I can apply a pass to them? Those types of day two operational IT additions and improvements, especially at scale when you're dealing with lots and lots of applications, I think are what's going to turn this from a toy application to a real enterprise ready application that an enterprise can work with. So that plus working with partners because of the API driven nature of this, I think it's really important to build that team of partners who understand it are experts and can go in and help the enterprises who don't want to do it themselves. It's just like the buzzkill. Everyone's all happy. Like you said, they had the party, they go live, there was drink and champagne and then you're waiting around for the sun to come up the next day. Here we are guys. Here we go back to work, right? All right. Well, that's exciting, right? Big problems are big opportunities and thanks for stopping by and taking a few minutes and best of luck. We look forward to watching the story unfold. All right, Ben and Mazda, I'm Jeff. You're watching theCUBE. Thanks for joining us. We'll be back.


have grown recently, right? Especially after last month's CPI report, the PPI report, they've come in hotter than expected. Our next guest is watching everything ahead of what sectors could have some opportunity for investors with the reflation trade. Is that still alive? Melissa Armo, founder, owner of the stock swooshes with us. Great to chat with you. We're watching the Fed watching inflation, right? Even President Biden today came out and said he thought it was transitory. Now, he's not the Fed head. Let's be clear. He's no Jay Powell, right? Jay Powell makes this decision. What are your thoughts? Do you think that the Fed's response to the current inflation levels will continue and stay steady? I think right now it's a wait and see because when you're having inflation, the Biden administration wants to raise taxes. That's not the best course of action in my opinion. So they're trying to stimulate the economy and continue people to be able to spend. That's why they had the long-term unemployment benefits for the people that were out of work. They had the child tax care credits where they're giving people now approximately $300 a month depending on their qualifications for the number of children. It's one 300 per child. But I will say this, that if this does extend into 2022 and this is not temporary inflation, then we have a problem. And I really think the idea of increasing taxes with the administration is trying to do with this new spending bill is bad timing. So I think Jay Powell is waiting to see what exactly the administration does with the tax hikes. And he's also waiting to see if we have another shutdown. Nobody knows if that's going to happen. And I think the market got spooked today because the cases have gone up in the United States and there's a possibility that the administration could shut us down again. And I think that would be extremely problematic for the economy. You can't continue to pay people not to work. We can't close down forever. There will never be no COVID cases ever, ever again. I hate to say that it's terrible. But the fact is we can't shut our economy down again. I don't even know what the market would look like if we did that. And I will say there's a 50-50 chance that that could happen in the next six months. And that would be very, very dramatic for this market. I don't think today is it. I don't think today is it at all. I think we're going to rally back from this. But if that would happen in the next six months, nobody's going to know before it happens. If it happens, it would be devastating to this market, devastating the economy. And then Chairman Powell, I don't know what he'll do to try to fix things. You can't continue to keep pumping money into the system forever and ever and ever. What happens is then you go to the store and instead of it costing $3 for a dozen eggs, it costs $13 for a dozen of eggs. Everybody's money when they keep giving free money isn't worth as much. It makes sense what you're saying in the 50-50. Wow. I hope that shutdown is not as likely as that. I'm hoping 10% to 90%. No. That being said, tell me about investor strategy, right? You can gauge which sectors may or may not yield returns. Some people may want to dip their toe into energy today as it sells off. Maybe some who've said, I wouldn't touch it. I have no interest in energy.  I'm sorry, or I like technology. What sectors do you see that could have some opportunities for the long term?  You're starting to see some of those tick up now. In the last couple of months, it's the summer, people are going on vacation. I say focus on maybe buying some of those names that could turn around if we do not shut down. Coming into 2022, people will be flying, taking more vacations, the cruise lines are not back up and going. If they ever get back up to full speed and again, we don't have a shutdown, you're going to see some nice rallies in something like RCL or even CCL that have just fallen, fallen, fallen. I do like Chevron for the oil stocks. That is still strong. I had to sell off, but it's still holding very, very well. Even in the sell-off today, a stock like that has held up pretty well. Again, gold. I like gold. You can continue to buy, look at GLD. Some of these things that people normally trade, for example, Apple or Facebook, their earnings are coming up in the next two weeks.  Some of the earnings are going to turn out to be... So is that right? Wait, let me clarify that for folks. So you would say to wait until after earnings to get in on some of your favorite names. I know you have names like Delta, Royal Caribbean, Chevron, which you mentioned, GLD. When would you say to get into some of these names? I would wait until after earnings. We're in earnings season. It started last week. This is the fifth of it. We've had the bank earnings are ready. And guess what? Some of them didn't perform as well as they thought. Some of them ended up being up on the earnings initially in the morning and then falling. And then, of course, we had the drop-off today. Even though people have been liking the financials, I was surprised at rally that they had at the beginning of the year. I'm not as bullish as some people on some of those charts. And yes, they've made new highs. Yes, they continued to rally. It seems like they're going forever. But I got to tell you, sometime it's all going to come like this. And that could also hurt the market of the supply because the financials are part of the S&P because eventually some of people are going to default on some of these mortgages. I mean, at the end of the day, not everybody is going to continue to be able to pay, pay, pay if we don't get the economy back up full throttle. And again, they've extended the unemployment benefits. What if they stop and then people can pay their mortgages? You've had a lot of these landlords that have mortgages, commercial property mortgages in some of the buildings. And some of them have gotten support, but it's not going to last forever. And gold that has run up, you still like this? I do like that. I do like that. And I think people are going to look to some of those more solid, solid things. Oil is one of them. Commodities, so people are going to look to things that are solid. If in fact the economy has a shakeup again, which again would be unfortunately another shutdown. Today, Delta and Royal Caribbean, I mean, basically airlines and cruise lines all pulled back because there's worries about the Delta variant. Talking about Delta airlines and Delta variants, the Delta variant has pressured the travel stocks and we saw 2.2 plus million people in the TSA on Sunday. So the people have not gotten the message that be careful because they're ready to travel. So you think a pullback might be an opportunity too, right? Well, exactly. And those things tend to report later, later in the summer. So you're not going to see some of those cruise lines earnings and the airlines earnings till later in the summer point. And again, if we would have a shutdown, I don't think it's coming in the next week, although anything can happen. It might be between sometime between now and the end of the year. But if we stay open is what I'm saying, you're going to continue to see everybody want to get out. People have been penned up for a year. That's why you saw all these number of people that have been out and traveling, whether they're concerned about it or not. I think many of the airlines are still requiring masks to try to help with the protection and people have been vaccinated. So people are feeling like, hey, they can get out. Why not all the whole country has been vaccinated? A lot of people have gotten vaccinated. Yeah, they really have. I mean, that's basically more and more getting vaccinated. Melissa Armo. Thank you founder owner of Stockswoosh. Thank you.


don't forget. Good morning to everyone. That's just dialing in. So thanks. Good morning Ravish, how are you? Very good. And I see Ken on the line. What Ken is this? Ken Johnson from Centera healthcare. Oh, good morning Ken. Are you are you new on the call? No, I was here last time. Oh, okay. I guess I should update my name. Yeah, that's okay. Yeah, Stephen just did it. Yeah, sometimes it's hard for me to track who it is, because I usually can remember names, but not always. But anyway, well, good to have you on. Good to have you on. And Wendy's just got on the call. Fantastic. Good morning everyone. Good morning. And we have a Brian on the call. What Brian is that? Oh, and he doesn't have, he doesn't have, doesn't look like he has a mic. So we'll get that sorted. All right. Well, so as folks get on the call, thanks. Good morning. Good afternoon. Good evening depending on where you're calling in from. Great to have you on this Friday. Here in Seattle, it's a bit overcast and gloomy, but that's okay. That's springtime weather out here. So we do have a pretty full agenda today. I do want to get started. And as always, first thing we want to do is talk about antitrust with our antitrust policy for the Linux Foundation. I am sharing my screen, so you should see that. And if not, please let me know. Otherwise, there's our antitrust policy. In short, it means be good to others. And so, but I'll urge you to read through there as far as any kind of details go. And that's available as well through the link, the full link for our antitrust policy going forward. Can I ask someone to take notes for me today, please? Oh, and this is always the fun part. If I don't hear, if I don't hear anyone volunteering, I'll start picking names. I rich, I'll take notes. Yay for Wendy. Thank you. Awesome. Just very, very high level notes, Wendy. It'll just help me get notes together after the meeting. So thanks. I appreciate it. And then just email me whatever notes you have. Okay. With that said, I also want to sort of ask if anyone is new to the call, new to the group? And I'd love to hear from you. Anyone on the call who wants to introduce themselves to the rest of membership? Okay, Rich. I'm new to, I think this, relatively new to the overall group, although this is not my first meeting. Go for it. Yeah. So my name is Brian Bento from a company called Instamed. Oh, yeah. Yes. So hold that, Brian. I don't want to not allow you to introduce yourself, but I'm going to have you introduce yourself later on because you're actually in the agenda. And so I'd like to have you talk more at that point, if that's okay. Okay. Anyone else on the call before we get started wants to introduce themselves? Okay. All right. Well, we'll get started then. So I see a lot of familiar names. It's great to see everyone. And as I said, we do have a full agenda, so I do want to get started. Okay, great. So first of all, I want to go through our subgroup updates for those of you that may be new to the group. We have three different subgroups. The subgroups are really focus areas for this special interest group in healthcare. And these three subgroups are not the end all be all, which is to say that if you have other ideas or other areas of interest that you'd like to participate in, I'd love to have you sort of step up and say, hey, I got an idea about a work effort that we can do through this special interest group. Keep in mind that we have over a thousand members in this special interest group. They're already sort of, as I describe it, pre-filtered with an interest and a professional background in healthcare. And of course, also an interest in blockchain technologies, particularly using the Hyperledger frameworks. And so, you know, with over a thousand members, that's over a thousand resources available, we can do some pretty amazing things. So if you don't see anything here in these subgroups that's particularly interesting to you and you see something else that you'd want to pursue, please let me know and I'm happy to facilitate. Again, we have a lot of resources on hand that we can put to use. So with that said, let's see, is Benjamin on the call? I do not see him. So patient member subgroup, I'll give you a sort of a general overview. So their focus, as the name states, is interested in the patient aspect of what I call the trilogy, which is patient, payer and provider. So it tends to be patient focused. Their background and their history, they've been around for the organization. The subgroup has been around for just over just about a year or so, I'd say, with the big focus in donor milk project, which is also a hyper hydro lab project. And that is looking at the supply chain for mother's milk for babies that are born prematurely with mothers that can't yet produce milk for their child. And it's an interesting supply chain exercise. So that's part of the focus for that subgroup. They're also looking at other options, other new projects, and other supply chain issues going forward. And so I would recommend that you contact Benjamin. The easiest way to do that would be through our rocket channel chat, which is the Hyperledger HC SIG channel. And feel free to contact me or look on the wiki for details for that, for connecting through rocket chat. And they meet every two weeks. Really, it's actually opposite this week. So next week, Friday, I think I want to say nine o'clock Pacific, they meet nine to 10. And so it's every two weeks. Ravish, you want to talk about payer subgroup? Sure, Rich. A couple of updates. One, if you remember, we have been talking about the white paper and there earlier, but looks like we have picked up this team. So last few meetings, they've been good discussions. And also, people have started contributing to the paper. We have the paper on the Google Docs and the meeting agenda and notes that I share. Patricia, I believe Allen, and I also got an email from John Stolman. He's been a regular attendee earlier and he had some break time and now he's coming back and wanting to engage more on that. So I would say steam on that side, which is good. So it's progressing. We are hoping that we will wrap up something in this quarter for that. Second is we also had a good discussion around starting the prototype on a use case. So that will be picking up. I have also thought about, you know, before we pick that up, I was, I've started talking to a few leaders in the area and also talked to Maryland Center for Entrepreneurship. They are willing to host an event, a hyper ledger event, including bringing in some of the leaders in the local area to talk about hyper ledger and blockchain and healthcare. So that's, that is really recent development. I had literally had a discussion on Tuesday, you know, after our call. So that's something that is coming together. I am hoping to have a physical, you know, attendance event if possible. And obviously inviting some more folks to the party, if you will, to work on or start planning on the prototyping that we are planning to do on one use case that we plan to pick up. I will be sending out a communication as well on that regarding to the whole group to invite if anyone is interested to contribute towards prototyping that we'll start working on, on hyper ledger fabric and, you know, related to healthcare payers. That would be a good idea for them to join. So that's where we are right now. Excellent. And can you sort of give everyone sort of a quick summary of what, what the payer subgroup does? Absolutely. So payers subgroup is more focused from healthcare payers perspective. There is a, there is a lot of interest in a number of use cases in healthcare that may be a valid use case, a leveraging blockchain. And we focus on all our discussions related to payer and how it will facilitate adoption in payer industry. And, you know, last few meetings, we have been, we have been able to make some good progress on the white paper that we were planning to publish. And hopefully this, I am hoping to wrap this up this quarter and then also kick off the, the prototyping effort or some kind of POC effort, just like the donor milk use case. I will be looking for a sponsor in the healthcare industry. And that's what the, that's where the, you know, the Maryland Center for Entrepreneurship and, and their engagement with a lot of local businesses, including the larger companies is there. So they will help promote that event and, and bring in some, you know, people together here physically so we can, you know, really put some steam and steam and some sponsorship behind the use cases. Excellent. And, and when, when do you meet, Ravish? We meet every other Tuesday. And it's the same week of the Tuesday that we meet for this, you know, Friday. So we met this last Tuesday and we'll, we are meeting every other Tuesday. And, and at what time? It's from 3 p.m. to 4 p.m. Eastern Standard Time. Excellent. And it's the same conference number and everything. Correct. So anyone who's on the call is will, and, and wants to contribute, they are welcome to join. Perfect. Okay. Thanks, Ravish. And then our newest subgroup, the healthcare interoperability subgroup, which we call his, not to be sexist or anything. Stephen, you want to talk a little bit about that? Sure. There hasn't been any substantial progress since the last meeting. We're not probably going to be, well, I don't have a firm date. Right now, I'm really overwhelmed with a large contract that is coming to fruition next weekend. And not this coming weekend, next weekend. And so the build out for that has ramped up, as you can imagine, quite, quite heavily. And so there's not, I'm hoping that in middle May, we'll be able to start the meeting. Part of the reason that I don't want to start it sooner is because I want to make sure that we have enough momentum to begin to carry through. There's several things that we'll be doing initially, which will require a body of different types of people, clinical people, software people, to begin to build out specifications. And that's where the documentation will be coming from in this particular health group. The goal here is to actually build a working hyper legend POC that can respond to episodes of care use cases and be able to put interoperable semantic data on the chain or accessible from the chain and build out the transaction policies and assets needed to do all that. And just to sort of, you want to give kind of an overview of the intent of the subgroup? Okay. They skipped that. So the intent of the subgroup is to take a different approach than most of the other groups of, at least I've been involved in here, and that's a bottom up approach to actually tackle the technical requirements and build out actual code and documentation that will be things like software design documents, that sort of thing to actually build a hyper ledger fabric health channel for a consortium of health systems and individual patients so that we can begin to see just how we would exchange data where it's needed to be exchanged and how it's going to be stored on a distributed ledger. So it's a bit of an investigation, sort of a spike, so to speak, as we say, but we will be actually building code and requirements from that. That's sure which is going to drive, which I'm sure at the beginning will drive the requirements for the blockchain in documentation then as we build it out it'll circle back and feedback into those requirements. So essentially it's to build several use cases. The first one we'll probably be taking a look at will be immunization. Very simple thing to describe the use case and then how that immunization, once it's been put on the blockchain, is used by the patient and by their primary care manager to service that data from the blockchain. We're making a lot of assumptions, things like identity, consent management, all those very nice things. We're going just to make assumptions, document them out so that we don't get bogged down with distractions to exactly how to persist or make available interoperable data on the blockchain. Excellent. Yeah, I think that's pretty good and it just occurred to me as you were speaking that you've generated a charter for the subgroup and I really ought to get it up on the wiki and so I have a note to myself to get that taken care of because I think that'll also help to inform newer members about what it is that you're planning to do going forward and I think as you know, Steven, we've gotten an awful lot of really interested folks that are looking forward to participating in this subgroup, so I'm very excited about that. Yeah, and I think it'll be a great effort. I'm looking forward to it. I'm very, very sorry that I haven't been able to, I had hoped to get this started back in March, but I just became overwhelmed and just didn't want to start something that we couldn't carry momentum forward. So May looks, I'm going to try everything possible to get this mid-May and yes, you're right. We've got a lot of people that have contacted us and so that's that's perfect. I don't want to let that momentum die as well. Right, good. Okay, thanks, Steven. Okay, and then we also have teams that we put together. Teams tend to be more, well, ad hoc, you know, they kind of come and go, although sometimes they spin out more permanent groups which become subgroups. In fact, the healthcare and operability group that Steven was just talking about was a side effect of an ad hoc team that we had put together. So Ravish is on the call and he leads the wiki redesign team. I don't know, Ravish, if there's anything new that you want to report out for that? No, I think, Rich, I don't know if there was any meeting that was set up after Dave's initial discussion, but I think nothing else has come up on that. I think we've been fairly using the wiki and I find it effective as well. There are some confluence features that we are not using today that I can definitely share because there are ways you can create tasks in there for the people who, you know, at least that's something that I've been trying to do. But it's not being used consistently. There are some really good features that confluence has that can be effective. Okay, and yeah, I would agree. It's been pretty quiet on this side. So in general, earlier this year we moved to confluence from our old wiki. The old wiki is basically read only at this point. So you'll notice that up on our wiki page we have some older links that sort of dead end answer. We're in the process of cleaning up that transition. And then as Ravish points out, we have a couple of newer features that we'd like to implement for this SIG. And then the broader issue that Ravish was alluding to is we're trying to work with all SIGs and work groups within Hyperledger to generate a sort of a common look and feel for membership. And it's taking an awful long time, it seems, because well, part of it is we're growing at such a fast rate. The organization's growing at such a fast rate that it's just really hard to keep up with things. And so kudos to Ravish for helping to drive this. It just takes an awful long time to get this stuff sort of synced up. Okay, so this is really exciting. So we also have an academic research team that's sort of come together. It was originally kicked off by Adrian Berg, who I don't believe is on the call this morning. Adrian brought this issue up in one of these general meetings, I want to say October, September, October of last year. And so we started talking and generated a proposal, sort of a proposal for where we thought this research team would go. So the gist of it being in short that in healthcare particularly, it tends to be driven in large measure by academic research and the process that academia has used for vetting new ideas through peer-reviewed papers and journals. And so we wanted to find a way to sort of encapsulate that and generate some activity through this SIG for the sake of academic research. Logan, so we had a great meeting, I want to say about a week or so ago. Logan, who's one of our team members, put together a proposal. So thanks, Logan. Did you want to talk sort of briefly on that? Thanks, Rich. Just would invite all feedback. There's no pride of authorship here. There are several things that the paper actually talks about. One is it's a pivot to actually talk or engage academic medical centers in delivery of healthcare, actually applying blockchain and specifically smart contracts into healthcare delivery. There's actually a checklist in there. There's an attempt at a generic care continuum model that potentially can be looked at by other groups. There's also, within the checklist, a look at who and how you can potentially drive interest in, not just creating papers, but actually doing evidence-based medicine and attracting the economic interests of the U.S. healthcare specifically, the payers and the providers. So welcome any feedback, and obviously I'm very happy to be part of the team. Thanks. Thanks, Logan. Yeah, and I think the way forward is, at our last meeting, I think we're going to do, probably get together for an initial meeting. So if there is anyone that is on the call today that's interested in getting more involved in this particular team, please let me know. And again, either through chat, which is a little bit difficult, but more so either through email or the rocket channel chat, or rocket chat channel. And the reason for that is we're still sort of coming together with some focus on how best to proceed. But we have a great team. I'm really excited. It's fun. Particularly for SIGs of this nature, we have folks that are really, really sort of top-shell folks from all over the world that participate. And periodically, we'll have a group spin up, and then it tends to queuesce for a while. Then it's sort of, you know, we can get another big kick of very, very good resources. So this is a great example of where Adrian and I sort of let this languish just a bit. And then we had some other great people, including Logan and Wendy, Nisarg as well joining the team. And we're really sort of moving this forward again with great momentum. So this is a very exciting group. Okay, well, good. And so more on that going forward, like I said, we probably have at least one other meeting. In fact, we may end up turning this into a subgroup because of the enthusiasm behind it and the interest behind it. So more to come on that point. Alrighty, old business. So first of all, thanks to all of our subgroup leads, Stephen Ravish and Benjamin. We have a quarterly report, which we're obligated to generate at a quarterly interval, of course. And what that does is that tends to sort of summarize the work that's been done the prior quarter. And so this is that page. And this is part of our Wiki. So feel free to parse that as appropriate. I think it's a great resource for people coming online, or people just general membership that wants to get a sense for kind of where we are at a granular, higher level, quarterly level. But thanks particularly to subgroup leads for helping to make this happen. It tends to just be one of those things that you just got to get done. And so we got it done actually in advance of our deadline, which was fantastic. And interestingly enough, the deadline was a tax day here in the US. And so all the more thanks to you guys for making this happen because the timing was odd. So last meeting, and actually two meetings ago, because our last meeting was our guest speaker, we had a discussion about use cases. And this was really a conversation that came out of some feedback that I received at the HIMS conference back in February, which was the HCCIG, this group, doesn't really have use cases documented per se. We have some very old sort of stale use cases that are floating around in the old wiki. But the question really was, do we want to generate use cases? And I think Wendy sort of, we'll talk a little bit more about sort of her insight on this because she's put together a great resource for us for the sake of research that will, I think, influence some of this discussion. But here's kind of what I want to talk about this morning, which is I'm interested to get a sense for what people's thinking about use cases are and really sort of the corollary to that is, because I have a view on this, is who would like to volunteer in this space. So first of all, let's talk about use cases. Who sees value in it? And again, we need to sort of think about not just ourselves because we tend to be maybe a little bit more thoughtful or maybe progressive in understanding blockchain technologies. But I'm thinking more about people that are just sort of maybe learning about blockchain technologies in healthcare and want to maybe learn more. And part of the value I can imagine of a use case is a good example of how to maybe implement a blockchain solution in the healthcare space. But I'd like to get your feedback on this. So anyone want to just sort of jump in and make a comment about this? I have a question first. Go for it. So when you say a use case, can you elaborate more? My understanding when you say use case is I'm thinking something like donor milk, which is a specific, you know, let's say industry, it could be a specific service or product, something to that extent. Is that what you mean by a use case, you know, tracking a specific product or something like that? Yeah, I could be. So, you know, so that would be a good supply chain use case, the donor milk project, for example. So the feedback that we were receiving from the HIMS conference was, and this, it just, to be honest, it's a little odd to me. But people came would come up to us and say, well, what are your use cases for your hyperledger projects? And, and I said, well, as long as you sort of understand the underlying technology, there, you know, there are an awful lot. But in the supply chain space, for example, we have, and I go on to talk a little bit about the donor milk project. So, so to answer your question, yeah, the use cases are really good, good examples within the context of the healthcare industry that are good examples of utilizing blockchain technologies. So really, it sort of unambiguates the question of, well, gee, why can't you use a traditional database, you know, centralized database instead. So I think, and I think the rationale behind why people are interested in use cases, and this is part of the discussion point, I think, is they want to have a better understanding of the bounds of blockchain technology and when and where, and when not to use blockchain technologies. Does that make sense? Yes. So I've been talking to quite a few folks recently. And I've been getting questions about use cases. And to me, this, I might, perhaps I share some of your maybe confusion or, you know, there's an obvious use case in healthcare, which is interoperability and sharing data across different providers. You know, the, and I know we're going to talk about this in a little bit, but my thought was that taking the fire specification, which is all about being able to exchange information across many different use cases as it were, you know, could be sharing immunization data, could be, you know, selling a product, submitting claims, you know, there's all, all the different ways that different processes and transactions occur in healthcare. It's defined within the fire spec. And if we want to add new message formats, we can add them to the fire spec. You can join HL7 and work on that. And, you know, I don't feel that we need to have like, you know, 10,000 different explicit use cases, because in healthcare, there's, you know, over 100 specialties and hundreds of thousands of procedure codes and so on and so forth. You know. Yeah. So I agree. So here's, here's my concern about use cases. It, in my mind, it's, let's see how to, in my mind, what it, what it, what it feels like sometimes is people say, well, you know, if I said here the, the 10 use cases that we present, I don't want people to, to sort of stop thinking that, well, gee, here are the 10, 10 times, 10 opportunities I would use a blockchain solution and that would be it. And I'm limited to these sort of 10, 10 different sort of examples or 10 different instances where blockchain technologies would be appropriate. And it kind of shortcuts people's sort of understanding or expectations of the, of the technologies. Now the flip side of that being examples are always great to present because it gives some context for the implementation of technologies, particularly newer technologies. So people can kind of understand where the value in the technologies are and are not. And again, like I said, you know, the corollary that was at the conference, people often ask, well, can't you do this as a central database? And the answer is, yeah, in some cases, you certainly could. And so you want to be able to, in this case, underscore the fact that blockchain solution usually is optimal if you're, you know, working across organizations rather than within a single organization. And of course, there are obvious examples where that is not necessarily true. But I think, I think the value then of a use case is that it does present a good examples so that people can better sort of understand the technology and sort of, you know, see different facets of value as implemented. So I get that. But again, maybe to your point, it just, I'm always a little cautious about it, because I don't want to try to limit the discussion to, you know, the five or 10 different options or examples that we present. And that's the only thing that, you know, a hyperledged solution affords. The example that I've been using that I think has been helpful in conversations is to say, you know, and this is coming back to the project that we did, but, you know, a patient goes to a doc, goes to the hospital, the hospital for a single visit, you know, they maybe see six different providers that are all contractors. And then, you know, a couple months later, the patient gets six bills from six different organizations. And for all for the same visit and the patient is extremely confused, because they wonder if they've already paid the bill, they have to go to six different websites and follow six different payment processes and have six different logins just to pay for that one visit. Obviously, the US problem. But what would be, if you wanted to think about what would be an ideal state would be that there would be a virtualized single system where I as a patient would only have one set of credentials. And as a participant, I would be able to see all of my data across all of those providers and see all my balances in a seamless low friction experience. So the creation of that virtualized one system, similar to, hey, you know, how would it be if we had to, if we were calling different people in the United States, we'd have to have six different phones, one for each different part of, you know, bell telephone, because those different organizations didn't speak to each other and we're not interoperable. Yeah, yeah. And yeah, and exactly. So this intermediation is a great example of, you know, how blockchain technologies can sort of solve some of the issues there. Hi, this is Wendy. Is that okay if I jump in? Yeah, I was just going to open it up to everybody else. So thanks, Wendy. Yeah. These are great examples, Brian. Thank you for offering those. I would like to offer kind of a big picture suggestion for starting. And I'm more than happy to jump in and volunteer to lead this effort if the group would benefit from that. I see this as overlapping tremendously with our academic research because a lot of the use cases are being developed and established in academic research. And I wondered if it would make sense to start by just creating a skeleton, basically a list of use cases that have been proposed out there so that we don't try to recreate the wheel and we just kind of consolidate just as at a high level, just what are different topics under different categories. And then we as a group decide after we have a chance to evaluate and really incorporate the diverse experience of this group that we pick certain use cases that we feel like have the most potential and the most attraction for those organizations that are really looking for a value added approach. So what do you think about that? That would be fantastic. I love volunteers. And of course, I'd be happy to facilitate and get that spun up. So I'd like to hear from others. I'm interested to get people's perspectives on where the value lies and where we want to maybe avoid areas that maybe don't don't demonstrate value to purpose. So yeah, one of the challenges there's it's always the values in the eye of the beholder. And I am aware of about 150 different use cases in healthcare. And some seem more tangible than others. So I wondered if it would make sense to just start listing them and then picking where we want to elaborate. So what do you think about that? Sure, that would be great. I'd love to open this up to others. So how about this Jonathan? So I don't like the the use case approach. It's more important probably like case studies. My background is in healthcare, but also is in medical informatics. And one of the pillars of medical informatics is an ethnographic observation of information flow. So it really is not just throwing out a use case, let's say immunizations, it's really taking that as a case study of where the information is, who holds the information, who are the stakeholders, how is that data modeled. And in this case, really the provenance of the flow of the information and who their controls it. So I don't like just throwing out a buzzword of, oh, we're going to put immunizations on the blockchain. It really is taking each of those. And you can create a list. There's lots of lists out there. I'm starting with immunizations as well. But I think that is kind of like the hello world of healthcare. When I was in my master's degree, it was like I had to build an EHR system. And we started off with a immunization or vaccination registry because everyone has one, or at least they should have one. It's decentralized by nature. And you don't get all of that in one place. So it has to do with identity, it has to do with lot numbers, it has to do with track and trace, et cetera. So I think it's a fascinating starting point. The mother's milk is in the use case, I've heard about last year, it's so specialized that it's not probably, it can't be torn apart and actually broadly applied. So I was just thinking about it more of a case study. And once you actually have a systematic way of tackling it, really understanding all the nuances of the information and then see how actually that could be generalizable into other use cases. Yeah, very, very good point, Jonathan. So this is useful. And what I'm going to ask is, and again, I'm happy to set this up. Wendy, I'll sort of put you on point for helping to drive this. What I'd like to do is get a meeting together offline with anyone that's interested on the call. So if you're interested, let me know or let Wendy or Jonathan know over on the Rocket Chat channel. And we'll schedule a meeting and it'll be in the next week or two to talk more about this and to set some direction. And so like as I was talking about before, we have ad hoc teams that we put together for dealing with issues like this. So if you're on the call and you're interested, please feel free to let me in and the others know and we'll move forward from there. Does that sound reasonable, Wendy? That sounds great. I am always eager to hear everyone's perspectives and to determine the most efficient approach for moving forward. Awesome. And thanks, Jonathan, too, for your input. I suspect you'll probably want to be interested in that conversation. And probably Brian as well would be my guess. Yeah. And we are. So the immunization use case is actually, so I'm on the IEEE, so the Identity Healthcare Working Group for IEEE. So that's actually our use case. And that's a subgroup within IEEE, the 2418.6 specification. So I think it's probably important to have these standards developed across the board. So now it's just out of one standard's body. It actually is that we get buy-in from different standards organizations. Oh, excellent. Yeah, even better. Yeah, even better to cross-pollinize that. Yeah, fantastic. Great, great. Good, good, good. Okay, Richard. Yes. Yeah, hi. Bob Coley. I'm trying to determine when Benjamin Deedee set out a private email back on April 12th, which was a call for project ideas. Is this synonymous with this use case investigatory effort, or is this something totally separate? He's not on the call, unfortunately. Right, right. So Ben's really more interested in looking for use cases within the context of their subgroup, which tends to be a little bit more patient-facing. So it's very possible that the work that we do out of this ad hoc team is a feeder into the patient subgroup. But right now, they're really a little more separate than not. Okay, all right. And before I forget, Jonathan, can you contact me through the Rocket Chat channel? Because I don't think I have your contact information. Yeah, sure. Thank you. And are you local, by the way? Are you in Seattle? No, so I'm in Chicago now. It's Jonathan Holt, H-O-L-T. So I'm the founder of Transcendex. And are you on LinkedIn? Maybe I can just contact you through LinkedIn. Perfect. Okay, thanks. Okay, and thanks, Bob, for the comment. Yeah, so I know Ben is trying to look at other use cases for patient subgroup, and so that's kind of been his action. Okay, thank you. Okay, in the same sort of general context, the other comment that came out of the HIMS conference was an interest in blockchain governance. And so this, we had a discussion two meetings ago. I ran this up through Hyperledger Community Leadership and asked them, is anyone doing anything in this space right now? And the answer was no. And our sort of broader interpretation of blockchain governance really is cross-cutting. So it isn't necessarily specific to the health care industry. It really is going to apply to just about any organization that stands up a blockchain solution and then has a need to understand how to sort of manage it going forward with best practices and so forth. So, and I'm going to color this a little bit, but my sense was this is going to be a lot of heavy lifting, but in part because I don't think the organization really quite has mechanisms in place to make it easy to contact organizations laterally. I mean, even with our Wiki, it just seems to be taking a long time to sort of get synced up across SIGs and we really haven't worked with the work groups quite yet. However, that said, I think there is value in this. I just wonder if this is something that we want to try to do within the context of this health care SIG. And of course, if anyone has a real interest and again wants to sort of volunteer themselves as a resource, I'm happy again to facilitate, make introductions and so forth. Anyone want to sort of talk more on this particular topic? Oh, now I've done a horrible job and I've frightened everyone. So, well, so I'm going to say, I think there's value to this. I think really, I think, and this was sort of my recommendation was we may want to spin up a standalone work group called Blockchain Governance that is really focused on this, again, at more of a cross-cutting or sort of more lateral view on this. Because again, this is something that it was brought up in February and it's a great story because people are in some ways already accepting of the technologies and they're looking ahead to say, well, three to five years out or a year, even a year out, how do I manage this solution in the same way that I manage other technologies that are pretty well established, again, thinking centralized databases and doing updates and CI type activities. And again, what are demonstrated best practices and where are they documented? But again, my sense is that's out of the context for this healthcare group. But again, I'd be happy to facilitate if we have people that have an explicit interest in pushing this. Okay, well, so if you happen to, after the fact, feel free to contact me and we'll continue to push this. Okay, so on a new business and I'm looking at the time we got about 15 minutes. So, this is great. So, I'm going to let Wendy talk a little bit about this, but one of the great things that Wendy brought to the table several weeks ago was a list of her sort of private citations that she's been collecting over some period of time. I sent out a special email about a week ago to membership and this was to all membership to talk a little bit about this great resource that she's provided. So, it's officially now part of our wiki and it is vast. On paper, it's about 97 pages. Of course, a wiki page, there is no such notion of that, but it's phenomenal. And so, Wendy, do you want to talk a little bit about this and more sort of how this came together and how you use it? Oh, sure. So, this because I come from academic research and trained as a scientist, I really find value with exploring the academic literature, especially because it has gone through peer review. So much information we find a blockchain on the internet hasn't been scrutinized and hasn't gone through a rigorous review process, but academic research provides another layer of scrutiny to ensure that the information is more credible. So, over time, I had been collecting references in EndNote and then I realized as we had an academic research team in this special interest group that it would be valuable to export some of the references that I have. So, the way that I created this export is to also include links to where you could find information, where you could find these articles, and I noted next to each whether it was open access or whether it required a subscription to review. Anytime that reference required a subscription, I also looked to see if it was posted somewhere else as open access, so that you could click on the subscription information, which contains all the details that you would need to download the reference if you liked it, but otherwise you could access the article for free. And I provided an abstract so that there were more key terms so that if you were looking for a particular topic, you could just do keyword searches and see which articles seem to mention that topic, and then you could click on the link to access that information. So, I cannot provide the subscription only articles to the larger group for copyright due to copyright restrictions, but if anyone absolutely loved an article and they just couldn't access it, send me a private email, and I can provide it to one individual. So, just I hope that this is a helpful resource, and I plan on updating it approximately every month, and Rich and I are still working on figuring out how to best update the website. So, where'd it come from? So, excellent. Thank you for that, Wendy. I mean, this really is a phenomenal resource. It really is an amazing document, and thanks again, Wendy. So, that does remind me. So, if anyone is on the call that is familiar with Confluence, as it turns out, there does not appear to be a direct way to import a Word document, a Microsoft Word document, into Confluence without losing formatting. And that's really key, because again, Wendy's original Word document, we're going to use her document, which is offline as a single source of truth, which means, as she updates it, and we're hoping about a monthly basis, it'd be great if we could do it more often, but we need a workflow for this. We need to be able to import these with zero friction, or near zero friction, and at the moment, there is apparently no way to do this. And I've been working with Hyperledger community leadership to see if there are plugins that are available, and there used to be a plugin, as we understand it, but there doesn't appear to be a plugin that allows us to do that. So, anyone has ideas? I know. Rich, this is Ravish. Yeah. Just a quick thought. If you save the document as HTML, you will not get a Word document, but it'll just flow, and if there are links in the document that works, you can import the HTML into Confluence. Yeah, and I've done that, and the issue that we have is horizontal lines, even in HTML, don't get carried into Confluence. And as it turns out, we exercise that particular issue in this document, which is really ends up being a high cost issue. It's about a 20 minutes or so to reintroduce those horizontal lines. But Ravish, let's take this offline and talk more, only because, yeah, this is a big deal, and I'd love to find out. If you can send me a template document, I can try and I can send the directions. Sure. In fact, Wendy, can I have you just email that document to Ravish? Would that be okay? Oops, absolutely. I'm not sure if I have Ravish's contact information, so maybe we can just exchange that offline. Sure, I'll make introductions. Okay, so I'm just mindful of time. We have about 10 minutes left, so I'm going to move forward pretty quickly here. So every so often, we have opportunities in the healthcare space that come up that present us with very interesting opportunities, collaborate, and work as a team, or as teams, plural. So if anyone is familiar with the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, they tend to fund a lot of socially sort of facing challenge opportunities. There was one that I participated in a couple years ago. And so we have two opportunities that are just opening up at the end of this month, so about 10 days from now. One is social determinants of healthcare, the innovation challenge for that, and then the other is the home and community-based care innovation challenge. So I've provided links in the agenda and feel free to walk through here. There's sort of the statement for this particular challenge. And I want you to think in terms of blockchain solutions, of course. And then for the home base, innovation, and here's sort of the challenge sort of thesis here. And I see Alan Bachman on the call. And we just did a kidney ex challenge courtesy of Alan and CVS Health about a month or so ago. So again, this may be something that we may want to think about. And my background's in kidney care, and so I'm looking at this and going, well, we could maybe do something with blockchain technology as a kidney care. So anyway, so I'd really like you to think sort of long and hard about these two opportunities. And again, imagine from your perspective that we have over a thousand resources potentially available who would want to participate in something like this. And so it is, as is the case for a lot of these challenges, it's a very, very short window of opportunity about a month to put something together. The deliverable, I believe on both of these, is a very short statement document. And then I think 10 pages, up to 10 pages of slides, and a wireframe sort of prototype of the solution. So the deliverable is reasonable for that one month sort of turnaround. But of course, you'd have to really be moving along with some velocity sort of quickly to put together a solution. So it's a bit early. I'm thinking out what I'm going to do is I'll generate an email to introduce this to full membership, and then we'll sort of coalesce some teams around these two points. But what I'd ask is, since this is a very quick sort of introduction, I think I learned about this maybe last night is when the email went out or when I saw it. We do want to sort of try to operate quickly and see if there are people that are interested in moving forward on this. Okay. And then finally, and we have Brian on the call, and I'll let Brian speak for a little while. We've got about five minutes left on the call. Brian will be presenting next general meeting, which is May 3rd. And he's from Instamed and just sort of point out Instamed. There's their website, and they're working on some solutions. What's really great about it, and this is going to be the real incentive for people to go play, they actually have a demo that's up and running. And so I'll let Brian speak a little bit more about his presentation at our next meeting. Thanks, Rich. Yeah, I wanted to quickly say, Jonathan, I loved your comments. We wanted to take a similar approach of building something that is more generalized, that's more generic. And we open sourced our code. We implemented, I even translated all of the HL7 fire resources, including the clinical ones, to the Hyperledger, Node.js SDK, and Convector TypeScript model. So it would be very easy for anyone to build on top of what we built and just implement other flows as defined by HL7 fire. But the specific aspects of HL7 fire that we implemented on Hyperledger Fabric included the financial management workflow part of fire, if anyone is familiar with it, and specifically to solve the problem that I mentioned earlier, where as a patient, I, the majority of bills that are being sent to patients are done via paper. And then when the patients are paying those bills, they tend to pay them by mailing a check in yet still. Sometimes they pay online, but it's very inefficient. Over $400 billion a year comes from patients in the US market alone. And the fact that it's so difficult and expensive to collect from patients is a huge burden of inefficiency on the market. And then a couple other big ideas that I thought about while implementing this is that InstaMed is a clearinghouse, but we are focused on healthcare payments. I'm thinking about this as clearinghouse 2.0, that if organizations wanted to host their own node and be a member, they could, or they could go through another member and just be a participant. But this is not too dissimilar from what clearinghouses do. But in clearinghouse 2.0, in addition to just being able to support the claims and remittances and eligibility and a few other of the HIPAA transactions, it would be being able to support a much broader set of data exchange. And I also think about this, I've been thinking about hyperledger fabric as something more about interoperability and the, it's kind of like the TCPIP protocol. Nobody should own the TCPIP protocol. What would the internet look like if companies tried to own their own protocol? We might have 10 different internets or 100 different internets. This, my thinking is that we did this work in an open space and made it open source so that anybody could use it. We're not saying we don't own it. We're trying to become a hyperledger labs project. I met with David Boswell yesterday to talk about it. And we're also talking to HL7 fire and, you know, trying to ask them to make a few enhancements and add new resources to the specification. And we're trying to get a working meeting at the September working group meeting in Atlanta to have a conversation about interoperability and blockchain. Because right now, you know, OAuth is great. It allows, you know, you to use your credentials from a third party application. But it still doesn't solve the problem that if I go to six different doctors, now I have six sets of credentials. And so we need some sort of single sign on, you know, some way to be able to access all of our data across multiple providers to create that layer of abstraction while still maintaining HIPAA compliance and security. So, you know, those are some of the ideas. And you'll be sort of focused on this discussion in your presentation at the next meeting? Correct. So I will be demoing, taking a look at our open source repository, demoing our application, and then talking about the big vision of, you know, what are some possible things we could do with this code base and move the ball forward, you know, next steps. Because the purpose of this was not to just solve our one problem. I took this opportunity to come up with a generalized solution that other people can just carry forward and start working and cut down on the work that they need to do to implement their use case.  They're already been translated for you, implement a few of the controller methods. We have instructions on how to deploy it and you're done. Literally, you could probably get implement your use case as it were, you know, in a few days. Because we've done all this heavy lifting for you. Excellent. Well good. So this is a great intro to our next meeting and a great segue to sort of close out this week's meeting. We're at the very top of the hour. So thanks everybody and stay tuned for in two weeks. And Brian will be talking about their open source solution using hyperlittra fabric and instrument. So with that, it'd be great to say thanks everyone. Have a great weekend. We'll talk to you in two weeks. Thank you. Thank you.


In this lesson, Anna visits a seafood market. The signs at the market tell the cost of the seafood. One sign says ears of corn cost $12 for one dozen. When we say the cost of one dozen, we say a dozen. The abbreviation or short form of the word dozen is DOZ. Listen to this conversation. How much is the corn? It's $12 a dozen. Now you try it. Crabs cost $20 for one dozen. How much are the crabs? They're $20 a dozen. In many markets, signs tell the cost of one pound of a food. For example, signs in the seafood market tell the cost of shrimp. The abbreviation for pound is LB. Signs may say LB or LBS for more than one pound. When we say the cost, we say a pound or for two pounds. Now you try it. How much for two pounds of shrimp? It's $31 for two pounds.


We recently came across a most curious artifact, one which has been claimed as having once been found, just like a handful of other exquisite objects we have previously shared, within a lump of ancient coal. It is a once-smelted, solid iron recreation of a face whose owner could have lived an unimaginably long time ago. With the claim written by John D. Morris, PhD, quote, I was recently contacted by an older lady who grew up in the coal mining area of Appalachia. Her ancestors, having lived in the area for generations, her now deceased father was a miner who had once made a remarkable discovery embedded within a coal seam, a human face made from cast iron. Like most people, they had been taught that coal is far too old to contain any human artifacts. The miner was so proud and perplexed by his find, it eventually became a family heirloom and was simply named Man. As a large, heavy object, it was eventually used as an ornament, decades later becoming stored among his belongings. He distinctly remembers her father's story of its discovery and the care he had taken with this prized object, having recently rediscovered it among her father's possessions, end quote. The owner of this artifact has requested to remain anonymous and to withhold her identity. This makes the story even more appealing to us, as throughout our time researching these types of claims and indeed artifact, we find that those who are pushing a supposed discovery, publicizing themselves while touring an object, are often in a search for a profit and recognition. Thus, as she is seemingly fearful of the artifact's disappearance, it would seem her story would align more with someone who possesses an item, not only of an extraordinary, incredibly controversial age, but also has a sentimental value, one which outweighs any idea of selling the item or even risking losing it from exposing its location. How old is the so-called man, who could have made it, pouring cast iron into a mole, resulting in an exact duplicate of the man's face in the form of a three-dimensional mask? Would we be peering at the face of an ancestor, once of incredible importance, one from a lost civilization, a lost time within our planet's history? We find such possibilities incredibly intriguing.