Hi everyone, my name is Denea and I'm from the Long Beach Public Library. Welcome to today's summer reading program, SRP for Short Baby Time. We'll be singing about the color of the day and have some fun. But don't forget, at the end of the story time, there'll be a code to add to your Beanstack SRP. Before we start, I'm going to let you know what I'll be using today. I'll be using a scarf and bubbles. So keep those handy and I'll let you know when we'll be using them. We'll be doing the hello song. And in the hello song, we're going to wave and sing hello. We're going to bounce and sing hello. And we're going to clap and sing hello. And we're also going to blow a kiss and sing hello. Can everybody blow a kiss? Good job. Okay, we're going to start. We wave and sing hello. We wave and sing hello. With our friends at story time. We wave and sing hello. And now we're going to bounce and sing hello, okay? We bounce and sing hello. We bounce and sing hello. With our friends at story time. We bounce and sing hello. And now we're going to clap. Let's clap our hands for our Beats. We clap and sing hello. We clap and sing hello. With our friends at story time. We clap and sing hello. Good job. And now we're going to blow a kiss. Can everybody blow a kiss? We kiss and sing hello. We kiss and sing hello. With our friends at story time. We kiss and sing hello. Good job, everybody. It's time for us to get our babies ready to do some stretches. You can either lay them on their back or you can have them sitting in your lap. So now that they're comfortable, let's bring their arms up high. Good job. Bring their arms out wide. And bring it out to the front. Bring your arms back up. And give them a little tickle. And let's move on down to their legs.  Bring their legs out. Bring it back together. And put them on down. So now we're going to do our head, shoulders, knees and toes. And we're going to point out the body parts before we sing the song twice. So let's point to their head. To their shoulders. To their knees. To their eyes. To their ears. To their mouth and nose. Good job. Okay, we're going to do head, shoulders, knees and toes twice. Head, shoulders, knees and toes. Knees and toes. Head, shoulders, knees and toes. Knees and toes. Eyes and ears and mouth and nose. Head, shoulders, knees and toes. Knees and toes. Good job. Let's do that again. Let's point to their head. Okay. Head, shoulders, knees and toes. Knees and toes. Head, shoulders, knees and toes. Knees and toes. Eyes and ears and mouth and nose. Head, shoulders, knees and toes. Knees and toes. Good job. Okay, so let's get our baby ready to do, let's go riding on an elevator. We're going to do this twice. So it's a bounce. And then when we count to five, we're going to go one, two, three, four, five. Down, down, down, down, down. It's really fun. So let's get them bouncing. All right, good job. Let's go riding on an elevator. Elevator, elevator, elevator. Let's go riding on an elevator. One, two, down, down, down. Okay, let's do that again. Let's get them bouncing. All right. Let's go riding on an elevator. Elevator, elevator. Let's go riding on an elevator. One, two, three, five. Down, down, down, down, down, down. Good job. Now I'll be singing a song about a bouncy blue balloon that wants to float into the air and pop without a care. And it's a bouncy blue balloon. So I have the lyrics right here. And let's get started. We're going to sing this song twice, okay? So we're going to start. Oh, I wish I was a bouncy blue balloon. Oh, I wish I was a bouncy blue balloon. Oh, I float into the air. Then I pop without a care. Oh, I wish I was a bouncy blue balloon. Let's do that again. Oh, I wish I was a bouncy blue balloon. Oh, I wish I was a bouncy blue balloon. Oh, I float into the air. Then I pop without a care. Oh, I wish I was a bouncy blue balloon. Good job. We're going to do a song with puppets. Okay. So in this song, we're going to be singing about when animals get up in the morning, they always say hello. And when they do say it, they say their sound. So for the cow, we go moo. And that is what they say. So we're going to start with the cow. And I have two more animals for us to sing about. So let's get started. When cows get up in the morning, they always say hello. When cows get up in the morning, they always say hello. And what do they say? Moo. And that is what they say. Can we go moo again? Just like the cow? Moo. We did good? Yes, we did. We're going to say goodbye, cow. Goodbye. And now we're going to do another one. And he likes to bark and run around. And he loves pets. This is dog. Hello, dog. Okay, so we're going to sing about the dog now. When dogs get up in the morning, they always say hello. When dogs get up in the morning, they always say hello. And what do they say? Oh, that's some really good barking. And that is what they say. Let's bark again. Woof, woof, woof. Good job. Okay, let's say goodbye, doggy. Goodbye. Okay, so now I'm on to my last animal. And he likes to get dirty. Oh, and he likes to wink. And he's pink. And what is it? It's a pig. All right, let's sing about our pig. When pigs get up in the morning, they always say hello. And what do they say? Wink, wink, wink. And that is what they say. Good job. Let's wink one more time, okay? Wink, wink, wink. All right, we're going to say goodbye. Goodbye, pig. Goodbye. Today, we're going to be reading Mary Had a Little Lamb by Hazel Quintanilla. You can go ahead and repeat. After me, after I'm done reading a part. When we're done reading the book, we're going to go ahead and sing the song. Let's get started. Mary had a little lamb. Its fleece was white as snow. And everywhere that Mary went, the lamb was sure to go. It followed her to school one day. When Mary had a little lamb, it followed her to school one day. Which was against the rules. It made the children laugh and play to see a lamb at school. The end. Today, we read Mary Had a Little Lamb by Hazel Quintanilla. Okay, let's sing the song together now. We're going to sing Mary Had a Little Lamb. I have my little lamb here. The little lamb goes, ba, ba. Can we all make that sound of the little lamb? Ba, ba. Good job. We're going to sing this song twice. All right. Ready? Okay. Mary had a little lamb. Mary had a little lamb. Whose fleece was white as snow. And everywhere that Mary went, Mary went. You love Mary. He does. Okay, let's do it again. Okay. Mary had a little lamb. Little fleece was white as snow. And as sure to go. And let's all make the sound of the lamb. Ba, ba. We'll be doing the wheels on the bus. So let's get our arms rolling. And let's start. The wheels on the bus goes round and round. Round and round. Round and round. The wheels on the bus goes round and round. All through the town. The horn on the bus goes beep, beep, beep. Beep, beep, beep. Beep, beep, beep. The horn on the bus goes beep, beep, beep. All through the town. The doors on the bus go open and shut. Open and shut. Open and shut. The doors on the bus go open and shut. All through the town. The wipers on the bus go swish, swish, swish. Swish, swish, swish. Swish, swish, swish. The wipers on the bus go swish, swish, swish. All through the town. The babies on the bus go wah, wah, wah. Wah, wah, wah. Wah, wah, wah. The babies on the bus go wah, wah, wah. We're all through the town. And now we're gonna say the parents. The parents on the bus go, shh, shh, shh. The parents on the bus go, shh, shh, shh. All through the town. Now it's time for us to use our scarves and we're gonna do two songs for our scarf songs, okay? So if you don't have a scarf, you can use maybe a face towel or burpee or something very light that you can wave in the air and to do peek-a-boo. Okay, so let's start. We're gonna do Where is Baby? We're gonna do this song twice, okay? Let's practice. One, two, three, peek-a-boo. Okay. Where is baby? Where is baby? There he is. There she is. We're so glad to see you. We're so glad to see you. Peek-a-boo. Peek-a-boo. Good job. Let's do it one more time. Let's do peek-a-boo. One, two, three. Peek-a-boo. Okay. Where is baby? Where is baby? There he is. There she is. We're so glad to see you. We're so glad to see you. Peek-a-boo. Peek-a-boo. Good job. Now we're gonna do our popcorn kernels. So let's wave our scars in the air. And we're gonna put it in the pot. And we're gonna make that pop. Okay, so we're gonna sing this song twice. Okay. Popcorn kernels. Popcorn kernels in the pot. In the pot. Shake them, shake them, shake them. Shake them, shake them, shake them till they pop. Wow, till they pop. Let's do that again. Popcorn kernels. Popcorn kernels in the pot. In the pot. Shake them, shake them, shake them. Shake them, shake them, shake them till they pop. Wow, till they pop. Good job. Let's get our hands ready for If You're Happy Me Knowledge. So let's rub our hands together really fast. And let's start. If you're happy and you know it, clap your hands. If you're happy and you know it, clap your hands. If you're happy and you know it, then your face will surely show it. If you're happy and you know it, clap your hands. If you're happy and you know it, stomp your feet. Stomp, stomp. If you're happy and you know it, stomp your feet. Stomp, stomp. If you're happy and you know it, then your face will surely show it. If you're happy and you know it, stomp your feet. Stomp, stomp. If you're happy and you know it, shout hooray. Hooray! If you're happy and you know it, shout hooray. Hooray! If you're happy and you know it, then your face will surely show it. If you're happy and you know it, shout hooray, hooray! Good job. Okay, I hope you have some bubbles ready because we're gonna do two songs about bubbles. And the first one will be counting one little, two little, three little bubbles. And the next song is a really cute song about a bubble landing in our hands. Okay, so let's get our bubbles out. All right. Let's blow some bubbles and have them floating all around us. Now let's do our little counting. We're gonna sing this song twice, okay? And start. One little, two little, three little bubbles. Four little, five little, six little bubbles.  And let's get some more bubbles. All right. We're gonna count again. Are you ready? One little, two little, three little bubbles. Four little, five little, six little bubbles.  That was really fun. So now we're gonna sing another song about bubbles and bubbles that's gonna land in our hand. Okay, we're gonna sing this song twice. I'm gonna make some more bubbles for us. I'm giving you a chance to blow some bubbles too. Okay, so we're gonna do. Hello, bubbles, hello, bubbles. Come and land, come right in the middle, right in the middle of my hand, of my hand. Goodbye, bubbles, goodbye, bubbles. Time to go, time to go. I can help with a blow, with a blow. That was really cute. Let's do it again, as well as some more bubbles. And then we're gonna sing our last song about bubbles. Okay, hello, bubbles, bubbles. Come and buy bubbles, time to. I hope you enjoyed today's story time. And I look forward to seeing you guys again soon. But don't forget, there's a code at the end of the story time to add to your Beanstack Summer Reading Program. Keep reading.


From the cosmopolitan hotel in Las Vegas, Nevada, it's theCUBE, covering Coupa Inspire 2019. Brought to you by Coupa. Hey, welcome to theCUBE. Lisa Martin on the ground in Las Vegas at Coupa Inspire 19. Excited to welcome to the program a gentleman from Staples, a place I go to all the time. We have Chris Diorio, VP of Strategic Sourcing. Hey, Chris, welcome to theCUBE. Thank you, glad to be here. So I was just at Staples the other day getting office supplies. It's a go-to pens, file folders, ink, et cetera. You name it, that is a place I think everybody on the planet knows. But I want to talk to you about the Staples business and how you guys now have control over 8,000 suppliers. You've got this visibility and control which I think every human wants in every element of life. You now have 100% of your indirect spend under management. So given those big business outcomes, let's dissect that.  That's why you're here. Talk to us a little bit about Staples, all the different suppliers you guys have and some of the challenges that you came to Coupa to help you race. Well, we had a lot of issues with rogue spend. Everybody was doing what they wanted in every location. We had no verification. We weren't consolidating our spend to get the best deals and get the best outcomes. Lack of consistency, all the stuff you hear about. And since we've rolled out Coupa, we've got a lot of structure in place now and we've got much better uniformity, much better consistency. We've dramatically lowered our costs through the use of the tool and some of the rules that we've put in place as a result of launching Coupa a couple of years ago now. So we're really pleased with how it's helped us organize our business and really bring visibility to where we're spending money and showing us the opportunities and where we can go after them and save even more money. You know, you talk about rogue spending. One of the interesting disruptors of procurement and finance is consumerization. We all have, whether we're going on Staples.com or something else, we're on Amazon, I need to buy this. We have this expectation as consumers in our private lives that we can get anything that we want. We don't have to check with anybody. I have one click. So then when we go in as business buyers, we sort of have the same mentality. But obviously the challenge there is a lot of organizations don't have visibility into where is every single dollar going? How many different suppliers are we working with? Do we have duplicates, triple kits everywhere? So talk to me a little bit about the, really kind of cultural strategic shift that you guys are making now that you have this visibility. Well, everybody's happy with the results. That's always good, right? Yeah, it is. When you have some success and you start to tell a story, then all of a sudden people's eyes get opened. And what's interesting is, I don't think anyone does anything with malice, but if you have a general manager of a warehouse who believes that ex-widget is what he needs to really help perform and do better, he's doing that with the right intentions. What he doesn't understand is everything else that's going on behind the scenes. And we have deals in place with suppliers and there's a level of consistency that we expect that our suppliers expect and that our customers expect and we can't have that experience be different. So once we kind of explain that story and the tool helps us see where that spend is coming from, we go back, we have a conversation and all of a sudden it's enlightening like, oh, I didn't know. Now that I know, okay, I get it. Let me do what you want me to do or what you need me to do. So that's been the biggest shift, I think, is just sharing information and putting a spotlight on things when they come up. And it happens even still, we've rolled out now a little over two and a half years ago and we still have these things come up because you get new people and people change roles and as a business person, there's folks I've done business with in the past that have earned my trust and I want to do business with them again because I know what to expect. And when people get new roles, they do the same thing and sometimes that's not what we need them to do. So once you explain the story and you tell them about it and you show them the results, they come on board. So it's been phenomenal. Everything goes back to the user experience or the customer experience. Whether your customer is an individual buyer or a business of 20 people to a fortune 500, everybody in an organization is ultimately in some form or fashion touching the customer. The customer experience is critical to delight the customer, to drive higher customer lifetime value from that customer. So having the employees on board understanding, we still want you to be able to manage your warehouse even more efficiently but we need you to understand how we're going to give you the tools to do it better. Ultimately at the end of the day it goes back to that customer and making sure that you can keep extracting value from them. One of our core values is put the customer first, always. And that's at the heart of everything we do. It's not about buying things cheap. It's about buying things at the right value and giving the customer the best possible experience they can. So there may be less expensive ways to do it but it may not deliver the outcomes we want. So it's not always about buying cheap, it's about buying and getting the best value for us so that we can deliver the right experience to our customer. Was that a mentality that Staples had prior to bringing on Coupa or now because suddenly you're starting to, you have visibility into everything, you're going, oh, cheaper isn't necessarily better in some of these areas? I think it's a corporate philosophy that we've had. I think we realize that people can shop anywhere and for anything they want at any time. Coupa has helped highlight some discrepancies that we've been able to kind of take out. I would say that Coupa's helped with that but it's also been just a core philosophy in the company for a long time. Coupa's helping us execute against that now. But you're right. Consumers can buy whatever it is. If it's a product like something you want to buy on Amazon or it's a service, maybe it's your internet service provider. We have so much choice. I think vendors of any product or service that recognize that and it sounds like Staples does from a core cultural perspective, you're already in a better position to understand. We really need to fine tune everything under the hood here because they can go somewhere else like that. They can, it's good to understand that but Coupa gives us the data and the facts and the analytics to help prove out where we can make a change and where we can help the company and help our customers. So it's a combination of both. Let's dig into that data. Because one of the things that Rob Bernstein shared this morning was about since Coupa's been public, which was 2016, they have a 5x increase in the amount of spend that is being managed in the Coupa platform. I think the number is now $1.2 trillion. Tremendous amount of data in this Coupa community that everybody can leverage and share. We often hear data is gold. It's the new oil. It is, and you're smiling, if you can actually see it, right? Extracted value, yes. Talk to us about the amount of value that Staples is getting by this Coupa community with a ton of valuable data. I would say we're at the infancy of going into the Coupa community in terms of sharing information and gaining information. I'm excited about the little bit that I've seen and one of the things I want to learn here is more about how it will work and how it can help us. What Rob shared this morning was very interesting to me and I'm very excited to learn more about it. It sounds, and you're right, and even Coupa says they're at the infancy but I think they have a couple of hundred customers that are starting to use the community to share intelligence. So it is early days, but it's also something that I think of when I go to events and we talk about DevOps community, it's very collaborative that not only is it customer-centric, it's also supplier-centric. And Staples is a supplier of a lot of other businesses so I imagine there's kind of double-ended benefits that could be gleaned by you guys from this. We hope so. I think we're probably a more unique customer than many that Coupa has in that we are a customer, we use the tool, we love the tool, but we're also a seller to you guys and to the other Coupa users in the community. So we see both sides of the equation with Coupa and it is interesting to gain those insights and see how we can help both sides of the company help Coupa's customers and our customers more. So if you look at the platform for procurement, invoices, expenses, payments, where did you start a few years ago with Coupa and where are you now in terms of all the different elements that are running through it? We started with simple PO management, secure to pay, then we instituted a no-po, no-pay policy and everyone started using the tool. It really helped us change things. We now use it for expenses. We are starting, like as I said, to start to use some of the analytics. I'm very interested in learning more about Coupa Pay or out here, virtual card usage. That's very interesting to me so I'm curious to learn about that. And we'll see where we go from there. Yeah, Coupa Pay was I think announced just a few months ago in London and we are excited to hear some more news about that tomorrow and how they're expanding that. But this visibility and control idea is so critical because of any type of organization, whether it's a retailer, it's a manufacturer, it's a hospital, there's so much shadow IT going on but IT has a really big challenge of reining in the cats if you will and I'll use cats because we all know now that Robert's team likes cats. But it's one of the things that they're announced with Amazon is, wow, IT can have access to buy all of the software, control it, deploy it, manage it through the Amazon marketplace and you suddenly think, wow, how procurement and IT are going to be aligning joining forces and really affecting top line of any industry. Yeah, I think in Staples our relationship between procurement and our IT STS department has been strong from day one. They were the biggest advocates of us getting the tool to help them gain control and kind of eliminate a lot of the shadow IT organizations as you mentioned. So in our environment we are excited about that, we embrace that, we're trying to force that out so we've always had that sort of very strong partnership with our IT team and that's really what's helped progress the tool through the company with great success with them in the beginning and then you start to tell the story and more and more people are interested in, wait a minute, you help them save how much into the budget and we can reallocate that money and what can I do with it? So it's been really exciting and sort of fun to be part of the transformation. And you guys have what, north of 17,000 users on the platform to date? Yeah, we have a lot. A lot, that's pretty quick adoption in a few years. It's a lot of people to train, to educate and to have it become part of their normal everyday activities. Well, we're going through a relaunch now and the Koopa team has been phenomenal in terms of training and helping my team with all the work that goes on behind the scenes that nobody sees and helping us develop training for all of our associates as we relaunch it because we're really going to change the tool. We were a couple of revisions behind and now we're getting caught up. So there's a lot of change coming in September to my company and to Koopa and thrilled with the help that the Koopa team has given us to launch this. So last question for you, Chris. Staples, a 34 year young business. I was just talking with a gentleman from procurement in Lululemon, a much younger business. And you kind of think, well, will a younger business have more nimble mindsets? Give your advice, your best lessons learned to your peers at older, more established organizations, going through a change and really looking at getting complete visibility of all your spent. What's your advice to them? It's a bit of a cliche, but don't do what you did yesterday. You've got to be open to change. You've got to let the, I always say the numbers tell the story and where are you spending too much and how do you fix that? And just because you love a supplier today doesn't mean you can't love somebody else just as much tomorrow if they can deliver a better value. And a lot of times you can find out that your current supplier can give you a better value than you had before if you just start poking around a little bit. So my advice would be not to stick with the status quo just because it's easy. Challenge yourself, challenge your team, challenge the people you work with. Change is good. Change is good. Chris, what a pleasure to have you on theCUBE. Thank you so much for joining me. Thank you, it was very nice. I appreciate it. All right. For Christy Oreo, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE from Koopa Inspire 19. Thanks for watching.


Thanks Jeff. It's great to be with you. I'm a law professor and I'm a pacer so I can't stand behind the podium for 45 minutes. So I'm gonna move around a little bit. This has been a fascinating program. I want to thank Jeff for inviting me to participate in this. This is obviously I've known about the Mises Institute for a very long time. I appreciate you welcoming me. I'm a Hayekian, more than a Misesian, so I hope that's maybe of not of the high church, but at least of the church. But it's great to be here and great to meet everybody and to come to Birmingham and escape the swamp and it really is a swamp. So it's great to be with all of you people and especially with all these liberty-minded people taking time out of your day to explore these issues. So what I'm gonna talk about today, I'm gonna start off by talking just a little bit about my sort of my experience, my battle, which I think, as Jeff mentioned, I've been around the free market movement for a long time. I've been a senior fellow at various places, Mercadus, Cato, Goldwater Institute. I'm the board of trustees of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, the Institute for Humane Studies, the Bill of Rights Institute. I guess I'm sort of the Kevin Bacon of the free market world. One way or another, all roads come back to me, so I'm glad I finally added the Mises Institute to my punch card of free market organizations. But I'm gonna talk a little bit about, and so from that perspective, I'm gonna talk about some of the other things that were going on when I decided to bring my suit and why I thought it was important, not just for me, but for the principles that we all believe in and hold dear, and what we can learn from this, and some of this is drawing on my own experience working in the movement. Then I'm gonna talk a little bit after that about, you know, the talk Jeff asked me to talk about is the legal, my legal and ethical battle. So I'm gonna talk a little bit then, second, about my sort of the ethical issues, or some of the things I've observed during all this. And then finally, I'm gonna talk at the end about some legal questions, which I think are inherently interesting and fascinating, and bring us back around to the Constitution. And my case was different from a lot of the cases just heard about, say, with Joni and Mitchell, which is George Mason as a State University. That means the Constitution applies. It is a state agency, the Constitution applies. It turns out, I didn't know this, the University is a, as part of the executive branch of the state of Virginia, and so the governor controls, technically, what happens with the University. What Joni and Mitchell were describing were primarily things at private universities, and the Constitution doesn't apply to private universities, so they don't have, and so what I was doing here was a test case for vaccine mandates, generally, as they apply to state action or government action. So, because I was suing, I was suing the state of Virginia. So I'm gonna talk about, and so those are the three things I'm gonna talk about in the time I have with you today. So let me just talk briefly about my personal experience, how I came to brought the suit, and how, and sort of my thinking when I did that, in terms of the principles we can learn about how to try to advance liberty. So, I was an early adopter of COVID. I had the, turns out in retrospect, the luck. I happened to be in New York City the last week and the February 2020, at a conference hosted by the Classical Liberal Institute there, Richard Epstein and Mario Rizzo's organization. And I had to wait around Penn Station for a couple hours waiting to train back to DC. Now retrospect, COVID was probably the fifth most dangerous illness or disease in the air in Penn Station for three hours, but that happened to be the one I got apparently. So I got home and a few days later, sure enough, I show up with these symptoms that I've never had for anything before. And they weren't actually considered COVID symptoms at the time, right? I had a low temperature, I had terrible night sweats, and so, but I never spiked a fever, I never had any trouble breathing. And so, I couldn't get tested. I literally couldn't get tested. I was like, something's going on here, and I've never had something like this before, and they were like, well, you don't have the COVID symptoms, so you can't get tested, right? So I could get that, and then sure enough, and then after about four days, it just went away. And so, so I said, well, I think I probably had COVID, right? And so, a couple weeks later, they added my symptoms to the list of possible symptoms of COVID. And so, came around to that summer, summer of 2020. And because I was pretty sure I'd had COVID. And we all knew that if you had COVID, you were protected from getting COVID, right? We used to all know that, including on May 28th, 2020, when no one, Anthony Fauci himself said he was willing to bet anything that people who recovered from the new coronavirus are really protected from reinfection. Now, that's gone down the memory hole, right? But it seemed obvious, right? It was already obvious at that point that if you'd add COVID, you weren't going to get COVID again, at least for a very long time, right? There weren't, there were basically zero reinfections in the world when it came around the summer 2020. And, you know, I felt like I wanted to teach in person.  I could have said, oh, I'm high risk. Oh, I can't do this. But I was like, this is my job, right? And my job, let's be serious, isn't that hard, right? I'm a college professor. I'm a law professor. I got to go teach students two days a week, right? And you listen to these other professors, you feel like they're like some of the salt mines, right? It's like, oh, I got to go spend an hour in class with 15 students today. I'm going to die from COVID, right? It's like, no, you're not going to die from COVID, right? Basically, my view was, look, my job is to teach. And there are people out there, when I go to the grocery store, there's a cashier there who's concerned about getting COVID. And when I go to the doctor's office, there's a doctor and a nurse there is concerned about getting COVID, right? And when, when I get food delivered, there's got to be people to do that. There's people in the meat packing plants that we were hearing about earlier, all these different sorts of people, right? It's like, come on, I can do my job if I'm going to ask everybody else to do their job. And I've had COVID, right? So I signed up. I went, I got the American Red Cross does any was doing antibodies test, which they started doing again now. So, so there were, it's hard to find a reliable antibody says, my favorite, anybody's got a reliable antibody stats is the Red Cross, right? So I go in July 2020, I get my first antibodies test that comes back positive, said, I'm good to go, right? So I taught all of the 2020 school year in person.  But so, you know, it's like, okay, good. I did my part. I had, you know, it's like more power to them, right? Whatever they want to do. I've had COVID. I don't need to worry about it. Never worried about it a single day, right? So I thought, All right, that's all good. Well, comes around the next summer 2021, the vaccines get created. So that's great. All right, now we can like go back to like doing things like, like normal, right?  I'm not going to spread it. But I did all the little, you know, dog and pony circus. We did the lockdowns and we did the mass and we did the social distancing and we did the scrubbing the classrooms and we did the reduced classes like, All right, fine, eventually, everybody's going to catch up to me.  But that still wasn't enough because what happened next, even though I had COVID, I had natural muni, then the president, as we just heard says, now everybody has to get vaccinated, including those who, you know, no exceptions, right? No exceptions for natural muni exceptions for religious or, or medical exception, exemptions. I was like, that obviously doesn't make a sense because I've had COVID already, right? And so I send them a, I send a message to the people organizing it.  And they weren't even really going to going to think about it. And then that's what led up to the that and that's then so that was the first time I contact them informally by email. The next time I contacted them, it was via my lawyers at the New Civil Liberties Alliance who sent a letter and said, you really need to add a, you know, you need to exempt people have demonstrable proof of natural muni, especially if they've got antibodies, which I did. And they just ignored that. They issued their policy. And that led me to, to my lawsuit against George Mason that progressed fairly quickly after that. It was pretty clear, it seemed to me that they were eager to to settle the case for reasons we'll talk about. So they ended up granting me a medical exemption on other grounds for some of which I'll talk about in a second how I ended up there. And and then eventually they were, they tricked all the students. They told all the students that if you got vaccinated, you wouldn't have to wear masks. And then basically like three days after the deadline for vaccination pass, they said, psych, you got to wear a mask anyway. Right. So and the students like, what the hell? Then I taught contracts to you before so my students are like, Professor, do we have a claim for breach of contract? Right. Because I thought we had a contract with them. They said the only reason I got vaccinated was because I wouldn't have to wear a mask. Right. So anyway, typical ethics of modern university presidents, right, Joni. So so and so at that point, then I just kind of dropped my suit. So I still had to undergo weekly surveillance testing since I was a dangerous unvaccinated person with natural immunity. But everybody had to wear masks and everything else. And so I kind of went through it this fall. I got tested every week this fall and never came back positive. So and as far as I know, I've had an unbroken string of positive antibody tests since July 2020, and never had COVID in that whole period, as far as I can tell. So why did I decide that that was going to be the course of action to sue? And I, you know, and I don't know whether they would have granted me a medical exemption regardless. But but I can't help but thinking it may have made a difference. So why did I decide to sue? Well, here's what it is. And we'll come back to this at the end when I talk about the legal issues, which is judges have been cowards during this entire period, except with a few exceptions. And and I will say that all the exceptions have been Trump judges. The Trump judges have generally been pretty solid on this. The Bush and Obama judges have been terrible. The Bush judges have been just as bad as the Obama judges during all this in terms of standing up for this in general, right? And this became apparent very early on. Many of you are familiar with this Jacobson case, which I'll talk about at the end. But basically early on, whether it started with the lockdowns we heard about, whether with the mask mandates, whatever the what the house arrest orders, they had all those sorts of things, courts simply deferred to the quote experts who usually weren't even experts. But but they simply deferred and they didn't do anything. And there was a case that was filed against the University of Indiana. On behalf of some students who were resisting the vaccine mandate there. And I will go into a lot of detail of the case. But the case was was not it was not a it was a it was a valid case with with with proper plaintiffs, but it wasn't a strategically savvy case. And it ended up going up to the Seventh Circuit and created a terrible precedent that basically struck down, you know, that basically upheld everything Indiana wanted to do to these to these poor kids. And I looked at and I said, Oh, man, if we do that, it's going to just, it's going to just get worse, right? Somebody needs to come up with a case that is not a sure loser. And that was the best thing I've come up with is not a sure loser, because the courts were so deferential to what the government was doing the people and what state actors were doing the people. I said, somebody needs to come up with a case that will really test the principle. Can the government do anything to us in the name of the pandemic that they want to? And that was my case. That was my case, right? Why? Because because number one, it turns out people you hear a lot of people talk about that states have vaccine mandates, for example, states do not have vaccine mandates. What states have our immunity mandates, which is in Virginia, for example, for kids to go to school, they either have to have proof that they were vaccinated, or that they have had measles or mumps or whatever and have recovered. And how do you show that by an antibodies test that you have antibodies to the to how do you know what you're supposed to get a booster shot for measles or mumps or rubella or whatever, or throw an antibodies test, right? It's like, this is how you test whether or not you've had a disease and recovered from it, right? So I knew I had a whole broke unbroken string of antibodies tests. And so what I did when I decided to take on the university was I found this doctor on Twitter, Dr. Huma Norchism, there's a fascinating fellow genius, sort of a fascinating and he's got a background in patients rights. He's just a real hero of mine. And so and he responded to me turns out, fortunately, his brother in law was a law professor at another law school who I knew the Federalist Society. So so he gets this weird email in over the transom and he gets hundreds of these emails. And he's like, who is this guy? And so luckily, I knew his brother in law and so he vouched for him, he gets back mean. So he says we're going to do an antibody set and he was a big believer in natural mean, didn't antibodies test, it comes back, it comes back very high. What was it at the time I think like 750 something like that. He basically says, look, Todd, there's two things, which is as your doctor, right, this man is a trained immunologist, PhD in immunology is taught at Brigham and Women's Hospital and at Harvard Penn University Medical Center, other medical centers, 65 published articles on various things, trained immunologists as well as a surgeon, he says, in my medical opinion, you should not get vaccinated. So in my medical opinion, your current antibodies level is comparable to somebody who's just been fully vaccinated. And it is clear that being vaccinated after you've had COVID substantially increases your risk of adverse effects. And now there are I think our seven studies, all that confirm that that if you've had COVID and you get vaccinated, you substantially increase your risk of adverse effects. And so this was the evidence that I put forward. And now what's very funny about this is, how did this come about? How did I kind of get on to this? Well, I had planned on getting vaccinated. When it came available to my age and risk group, but I ended up getting this terrible case of shingles, something called Ramsey Hunt syndrome in spring 2021. And the entire left side of my face was paralyzed for almost two whole weeks from this. And and I got done with it. And my my my first doctor committed malpractice basically, and it was touch and go for all took me a long time to recover. Fortunately, I've recovered completely. And so I get done and I'm talking to my new doctor and I'm in his office and I say to him after I've had this, I said, All right, now I've done with shingles, should I go get the shingles vaccine? And this guy blesses heart. He's like this. He's this guy who's probably 20 years younger than me.  And he looks at me.  And he's looking at me when I say should I get vaccinated? And like, what's up doc? He's like, he's like, No, you don't get vaccinated against the virus right after you've had the virus. And I said, what do you mean? He said, Well, number one, you don't need it. And he says, come around here. And he takes me and he has me look over shoulder at his laptop. He says, Those are your antibodies right there. He's like, What you need to do is come back and six months or a year and we'll check your antibodies again to see if it's worth you getting a shingles vaccine. And the second thing is, is when your antibodies are like that, if you get the vaccine, you're risking re inflaming shingles.  And I was like, Okay, and of course, I'm walking out of the office. I was like, Wait a second. COVID's a virus too, isn't it? Right. And so and sure enough, it is a virus. And it turns out, you know, it follows basically the rules of viruses, right? So at this point, I kind of understand the basics of it. I get with Dr. Norchism, he writes me a an exemption. You know, well, first he ended up writing me exemption that I had to do. But I decided to bring suit. And so why do I bring my suit then, which is I was the right plaintiff because I had demonstrable antibodies, high antibodies, right?  So Dr. Norchism filed a medical affidavit as my personal physician, saying it is my opinion as an expert that Professor Zawiki does not need to be vaccinated, right? He poses no threat to the community. And it would be a risk to him to do it. He is at least as protected as people who have been up and vaccinated. And then we got them. And then I was blessed to have Martin Koldorf and Jay Bhattacharya whose pictures are earlier step up and they provided a medical affidavit as well, talking generally about natural immunity and the risk of vaccinating people who are naturally immune. Eventually, as I said, the School of Granite and Medical Exemption, based on the idea that there was some evidence already at that point, which has become much more obvious or much more established that COVID vaccines run a risk of both facial paralysis, but also reactivating shingles. At that point, there wasn't a lot, but it seemed to be the case. But that's why I chose it, right, which is I was the pristine case, right? And this is what you have to think about when you're bringing a lawsuit, is you have to bring the best case, because it was like a wall that we were up against, right? We're up against a wall of these judges who wouldn't do anything. And if you just brought a frontal assault right against the wall, you get splat, which is what happened with the Indiana case, right? They brought a frontal assault, and they just splatted right into the wall. So what you have to do is you have to be able to poke a hole in the wall, or you got to find the weakest point in the wall, and you just chip at it, right? This was the weak point. The weak point in the wall was natural immunity with somebody who has high antibodies levels, like I did, who was able to marshal the legal resources, right? I got the New Civil Liberties Alliance to be my lawyers. I got these doctors to weigh in on me. And a plaintiff who was willing to go on 20 television shows over the next week or two, and write an article for the Wall Street Journal sort of talking about my case, right? But it was all not just about my case. It was basically to try to move the law to try to find some sense in this law that that would bring some rationality. And once you chip the hole in the wall, then the idea is then you could use a precedent to expand out, right? And so a lot of people at the time said, well, why are you so focused on antibodies? Why are you so focused on natural immunity? Shouldn't you take it on directly? It's like, yeah, but you can't do that at first or you will lose, right? You've got to like poke the hole in the wall and then start winding it out. You know, what I thought would come next would be the college students, right? Because the college students were at such low risk as well. And the other thing I wanted to do is create a template for other plaintiffs. And fortunately, a lot of other plaintiffs picked it up. Dr. Aaron Kariati, who I've gotten to know, you may have heard of, but a similar case at UC Irvine. And unfortunately, he's out in California, so that hasn't gotten very well either. And the cases, you know, have had a mixed effect. But, but you know, but that was basically what the idea was. And the idea was that the evidence was clear that natural immunity was the least as effective as vaccines, more effective quite clearly than the jacks. You know, at the time it appeared natural many was the least as effective as the most effective vaccines, clearly more effective than the Johnson and Johnson vaccine. And that was another example, which is the other cases focused on taking on the MRNA vaccines, which look good at the time, right? I was like, no, no, no, the weak link is the Johnson and Johnson vaccine because George Mason recognized Johnson and Johnson. And then I have to tell you a hilarious story because this I was on vacation with my wife, and George Mason just never responded to my letter, they just issued their policy. And so I saw the policy I started reading. And all of a sudden I start burst out laughing. And my wife was like, what could possibly be so funny, given your situation about George Mason's vaccine policy, because it's like, you know, where this leads. I was like, well, yeah, they said they're not going to recognize Pfizer and Moderna and Johnson and Johnson, you know, the FDA emergency approved vaccine, but they're going to recognize any vaccine approved by the World Health Organization, right, which included Sinovac and Sinopharm vaccines from from China, which there was a reason why they were recognized like by the FDA and others. And and that was recognized by the George Mason. They were even like they were like barely 50% efficacy like when they were brand new. And so I just start laughing. She says, what's so funny?  And that wasn't the word I used. Every time I'm on TV for the next two weeks, right? Why? Because it showed the hypocrisy. It showed how bogus the whole thing was, right? The idea that Sinovac, the Sinovac vaccine was going to be treated as being valid, but not somebody with demonstrable natural muni just showed this had nothing to do with science, right? This had nothing to do with science. What that what I think it had to do and do with the fact that we got a campus in Korea, and they want the Chinese students to go to they want the dollars, right? This is about dollars. It's always about dollars at the universities, right? I think it was really about getting the Chinese students back in the seats because they pay because they pay full price, right? But and so I think that was another reason why I went away because I'm the case went away because I made a lot of noise. So let me just say a few words about about the natural immunity point. And then and then talk about some other things. So so I just think this is useful and and I could go on for this forever. And many times I have referring to my wife one time she was out with some friends and she's talking about all this stuff. And they said, God, you know a lot about this. Do you like listening to a lot of podcasts? She said, I live with a podcast. But but why is natural immunity? So why was it so obvious from the beginning? Why was Anthony Fauci right in May 20, May 2020, when he said, you're going to be protected against reinfection if you got naturally. It turns out there's five reasons why natural immunity is so protective, even more protective than vaccines. The first and most important is one that most people haven't heard of, which is mucosal immunity. How many people in this room have heard about mucosal immunity? Right? So a very small number of people, it turns out this is the whole game. So mucosal immunity is basically what you it's your mucous membranes, right?   So that is the first line of defense that protects you. That's the first line of defense. And you have you have all kind of immunity of all kind of like, you know, antibodies and stuff in your nose. It's called IGA antibodies is what it's called.  And it turns out that's very durable and very broadband. And so and so that's the main reason why and that's where most things get neutralized. And that's why natural immunity is also sterilizing generally, as opposed to vaccines. Now, vaccines are these are intramuscular vaccines. They create systemic immunity, which are the antibodies in your system, which is what my, you know, what my antibodies test is measuring, what are called IgG antibodies. And there's another one called IgM, which are sort of the short term antibodies. But IgG band antibodies circulate in your system, IgA antibodies and mucosal immunity is the first line of defense. Vaccines cannot protect you against these vaccines, intramuscular vaccines simply cannot protect you for any extended period of time from getting infected, because they don't generate mucosal immunity. Period. That's it. That's the whole game, right? And the second thing, and this is a second point is, this is also why, when you did natural immunity, you are much less likely into affect other people. If you do get reinfected with natural immunity, because the illness is always so mild, and it's being neutralized in your nose, in your mouth. Does that make sense?  And then it starts to neutralize it. But for the first five to seven days, what's going on?  And so that's why vaccinated people are so much more likely to get reinfected than natural immunity. And that's why vaccinated people spread the virus just like an unvaccinated immune person, as you know, right? The shedding and the viral load is the same, because the vaccines are literally doing nothing at all during that first five to seven days when the virus is building up in your mouth and nose, right? And so it's spreading it at the same rate. Does that make sense? And that is like immunology 101, right? I mean, it's like, you know, it's like, in fact, there was a great interview on Unheard, if you're familiar with this, which is the Israeli guy who was the Israeli architect and he basically said, well, it turns out, you know, mucosal immunity matters, right? And this is why, you know, over the long, what they're trying to do is create nasal vaccines for this stuff. So the first thing is mucosal immunity. The second thing that also explains why people are naturally immune don't spread the virus as much and they have much less viral, lower viral load when there's a breakthrough infection. The third that you've probably heard about is variants, right, which is that natural immunity recognizes all 29 proteins in the SARS-CoV-2 virus, whereas the vaccines are narrowly targeted on one on on the now extinct spike protein variant of the original thing. And so what we've seen is that basically the the effort of mass vaccination basically just created Delta to put it bluntly, right? Basically the way that this works, I recommend, really recommend a book if you're interested in this Matt Ridley's old book, The Red Queen. But it turns out evolution, it's really focused on viruses left. But evolution basically has three components, variation, selection and replication. Variation, it turns out is uninteresting. Any person who gets infected can create a variant, right? Most variants go extinct, because they're not as well adapted to their selection environment as as what is currently going on, right? And you remember, during the first year of the pandemic, there was basically no variant, there were no there was one variant during the entire first year of the pandemic, right? Why? Because it was pretty well suited for the environment, the environment that existed. As soon as we introduced mass vaccination, what has happened? One after another, each more vaccine escapist than the one before, first Delta, then Omicron BA1, Omicron BA2. Why? Because variation is always going on whether you're not vaccinated, partially vaccinated, fully vaccinated, the rare natural immune type situation. But and so that just happens. Selection though, and there's a number of papers that show this now, they're disproportionately selecting for more vaccine escapist variants, right? And there was great paper by a guy named Servalita in San Francisco, who captured this in real time, that that people vaccinated people were much, much more likely to be infected by Delta than they were with the original variant, right? And then spread Delta than the original variants, right? So they were exerting selection pressure. And so in the entire world, every time we introduced mass vaccination, Delta spiked immediately after with with respect to that, right? And so and so variants is the the third thing this broadband sort of immunity. Then it also turns out that antibodies and natural immunity continue to evolve after they are created, unlike vaccinal antibodies, which are static after they are they created. And so and then the durability is much higher as well, right? So so five things, mucosal immunity, durability, variants, the continued evolution of antibodies, and reduced a lower rate of us spread upon an infectiousness upon breakthrough infections. And so that was the point we were trying to make in the case, right, which is that for the law to be reasonable and constitutional, you have to recognize natural immunity, because it's at least as valid, or at least as protective and probably more protective than the than the others. That is kind of, you know, bubbled around in the courts and courts have been reluctant to do it. We're just filing a new an amicus brief in a case involving a religious liberties case, a challenge to the military's thing mandate on this. So we're going to continue to keep pushing on this. So let me in my remaining time just say a few words about what I've learned from this and then close a few legal thoughts. Just a few observations from from what I've observed the last couple years. And in particular, by looking at it through this lens of the natural immunity, right, where the science is so clear, right, the science, there is no doubt. It never has been any doubt about the science, the science here. And so it's clearly not about the science, right? So what is it about? I think partly what is about, unfortunately, is simply the bureaucratization of American society today. We live in the tyranny of the mid level human resource manager, right? It is bureaucratic processes. This is what my situation was at George Mason. I told you, I had a doctor who was a PhD in immunology 65 published medical journal articles, very distinguished professor. The George Mason vaccine mandate policy was designed by the university fire chief, and the head of lab safety, right? Because they decided this was just a matter of university campus safety and security. And so literally the fire chief, I was supposed to listen to the fire chief of George Mason, and not to my own doctor, a trained immunologist who is familiar with my medical history. Think how absurd that is. People talk about vaccine mandates, but think about how absurd that is. That that's that that they were basically having people's medical advice, you have to are you're choose, you're forced to choose between your doctor, what your doctor says, and what some bureaucrat in the university administration says, I have a former student who applied for a medical exemption. I'm sorry, religious exemption from his employer. Some 27 year old Smith grad said, I don't think that you have a sincere medical, a sincere religious belief against this. Right? He had a note from his from his from his priest that said he did. And some and it's hard not to conjure up the image I want you to conjure up of the 27 year old Smith grad, right? Doing what 27 year old Smith grads do, right? This is ridiculous, right? But it's this bureaucratization and they've they've admitted this in the federal government. Why did they not want to recognize natural many because it'd be too hard? It'd be too hard. It's just easier to check boxes. And that's what this has all been about is checking boxes, right, for compliance, right? And to actually take exemption seriously, to actually do things like natural immunity, where to acquire some thought and not just simple bureaucratic processes. I would say, um, secondly, another thing that I've, that I've, that I noticed during this, this process was, let's see, as I said, there's no met there's no scientific proof for any of it. We've seen this now more than ever with Omicron, right? Literally just saw a paper today. Vaccine efficacy, I don't know if you know this, but vaccine efficacy against Omicron from about four to six months is negative for two shots. It goes down to as low as negative 79% for Pfizer after about about six months. Right? I've written an essay on this you can find on real clear politics about original antigenic sin. But, but both the president of Pfizer and the president CEO of Moderna have said, our two shots of our vaccines won't protect you against Omicron. Right? Turns out they know what they're talking about. It doesn't protect you. But what do they know? Right?  But there's nothing to do with with this stuff, but they just continue to steamroll along with with this stuff, right? And we all know, but it's but strategic, right? Like masks, right? We heard about masks earlier, right? Well, it's the science, right? Well, the CDC says kids don't have to wear masks in school anymore. So what are they doing now? Parents at least in northern Virginia are suing to keep kids still wearing masks in school, right? Oh, the CDC, they don't know what they're talking about now. They did when they used to, right? So it's bureaucracy. I think the other thing that I've noticed with this is that it's anti democratic, right? So much of this has just been simply anti democratic. And I keep saying we're going to talk about the law part. But it's clear when you read Jacobson, this old case that this all derives from is they said the power resides in the legislature. The reason the legislature does this is because they actually think about it and do stuff, right? As I said in Virginia, for example, the policy for vaccines is not vaccine mandates, it's immunity mandates. That's what you do when you think these things through, right? And you actually do it at a proper democratic fashion. You start thinking, well, how do we make this work? How do we take this into account? None of this was done in a democratic fashion, right? The president of George Mason University basically that set vaccine policy for, I know, 40,000 students, I know 20 30,000 staff and employees, he's not elected official, right? You just go down the list, right? Whether it's mayors, or you know, it's they're not the legislature, right? But you get these people basically setting policy, these mid level people in the state government. And it's totally anti democratic, right? But the people who back it back it, because they like the results you get you get from it, right? The other thing we see here is it's psychological, not scientific, right? I think it's clear at this point that it's really is just about fear. And it's about control of other people, right? There is one fundamental difference. Is anybody here familiar with the five factor test for personalities, right? Well, it's a it's a standard personality test that that they use. And it turns out there is one fundamental distinguishing factor between a difference between conservatives and progressives or Republicans and Democrats. It turns out Democrats systematically score higher on the the attribute on the five factor test of neuroticism. And I want to make sure that you heard that with an N, especially since I see a man with a collar in the front row, that is neuroticism with an N, not eroticism. But but what is neuroticism? It's a tendency to over worry about things. It's a tendency to fixate on things. And my view, why is it that democratic states have systematically been paranoid and freaked out about code? It's the neuroticism, right? And their desire to try to control this. And what form that takes is their desire to control other people, right, to control the rest of us who just want to live our lives, right? And I have genuinely asked myself, what is it that these people are so obsessed with getting that thing in me? Right? I've told them, I've like the whole country knows my medical history, right? They know when I had COVID, they know when I had my my antibody SNES, and they know my antibody levels, right? It's like, what do they why are they so obsessed with getting that thing in me? Right? And it just has to be something psychological, right? Some sort of neuroticism that they're worried, right? They're worried in some sort of way. And that's what I think a lot of this has been. And I think this is what drives a lot of the stuff in schools. There appears to be to some extent a gender dynamic toward neuroticism as well, right? And so I think in terms of sort of setting school policy and that sort of thing and the worry about kids, I think there's some things going on on there. I think when you look at the misinformation debate, you see the same sort of thing, which is what is all this about this idea of sense, you know, stopping misinformation about about COVID? Well, it's clearly not about trying to persuade people to get vaccinated. Because at this point, if you're not vaccinated, let's be serious, you're not doing it, right? I'm not doing it. I don't know if your guys are doing it. But if you haven't got vaccinated already, you're probably not going to vaccinate, especially now that Omicron's here, right? And so who's the same dad? I don't think it's aimed at trying to prevent misinformation. For people I think about, I think it's aimed at them. I think that what the reason they want to suppress misinformation is they don't want to put any doubt in the minds of the authoritarian voters who support them, that they do not have that there is 100% certainty, right? This is they believe they have the moral high ground. This is moral sanctimony, like I've never seen before, right? They believe they're morally correct. Therefore, the science must be must be on their side, whether it's masks, or whether it's lockdowns, right? Or whether it's vaccines. And so I think the idea is we need to keep that wall sound. If we start allowing those people to have doubts about whether everybody should be vaccinated, then they're not going to support repression against other people, right? And we're talking about seriously scary people here, right? I don't know if you saw this, this, this survey that was done by the Rasmus report with and they asked people almost 50% of Democrats said they would support concentration camps for unvaccinated people. 29% of Democrats said they would favor taking away taking kids away from unvaccinated people. About half of them said they would support fines and imprisonment for people who spread misinformation about COVID online. They did another study after the thing happened up in Canada where Trudeau, you know, froze the bank accounts of the truckers, two thirds of Democrats supported Trudeau freezing the freezing the bank accounts of anybody who supported the protest in Canada, right? This is serious stuff, right? And I don't think there's any reason to believe based on what I've observed last year is I don't think there's any reason to believe that they're just talking. I think they mean it. As far as I can tell, I think they mean it. And I think this is what it's about is basically keeping this degree of anger in this degree of paranoia to continue to support attacks on other people. And we even see the opposite, which is you probably saw the story came out that the CDC has actually had data that they haven't been releasing. The New York Times had a big story that the CDC has a whole trove of data that they say they didn't have that they and they've had some lame excuse I didn't. Now, here's the thing. We knew that. There was a CDC slideshow leaked to the Washington Post way back at the beginning of last summer. And what showed was at that point, there are already rising breakthrough infections already showed that about 15% of deaths were among vaccinated people, right? The CDC had that data. We knew the CDC had that data and everybody forgot about it, right? And what did the CDC do instead? Not only did they not release the accurate data, they allowed for months and months and months misinformation to continue percolating, which is if you may remember all last summer, the story was well, 99% of people who are dying are unvaccinated, right? They knew that wasn't true. We'd seen the slideshow from the CDC said from that the Washington Post had that said that wasn't true. What they said what they were doing was they were accounting all the deaths going back to January 1st, accounting those, you know, during January and February and in the March, which were a lot of deaths last year, accounting all those as part of it. And then he would say 99% of deaths right now are as a result, right? So not only were they not expressing misinformation, they were actively encouraging misinformation that they could have could have corrected. So where does this end up with them with Lockner and with Jacobson? Somebody close on this because this is where I kind of started, which is 1905 is a fascinating year in Supreme Court history. Jacobson case is the one you've probably heard about this is a case that upheld the vaccine mandate in Massachusetts under the state police smallpox vaccine mandate in Massachusetts. Now one big difference there is the smallpox vaccine was had been around for over a century at that point. It was only a fine of $5, I think, which is $155 today, right? So it's a lot different from what we're talking about today. And the smallpox vaccine actually kept you from getting smallpox, right? Not just for like three or four months, right? But but interestingly enough, three days after the Jacobson case was handed down, another case was argued, Lockner versus New York. Have you guys heard about Lockner versus New York? Right? It's famous case that stood up for freedom of contract and struck down a New York law that regulated hours in bakeries. Now why does that matter? Because Jacobson said the state has the power under the police power to regulate contagious diseases like smallpox. But they also said, but it must act in compliance with the U.S. Constitution. And what we also know is three days later and a few months they argued Lockner and a few months later they are they decided Lockner and they said the Constitution is serious, right? People have a right to individual liberty. And we're very forceful about that, right? And so you need to think when you read Jacobson, you have to think of it. These are the same people. You also have to think about Lockner, which says this right, this power is tempered by a robust protection for individual freedom in liberty. Well, in Lockner, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote a dissent. And Holmes wrote a dissent in Lockner that said, and I want to I want to quote this correctly. I think that the word liberty in the 14th amendment is perverted when it's held to prevent the natural outcome of a dominant opinion, right? Which is Holmes said basically who are we to tell the majority or the Democratic majority what they can do. Holmes is a dissent in that case. 1927 case known as Buck versus Bell comes up. Buck versus Bell was a case that involved a very common law at the time, which was compulsory sterilization of people who are judged adjudicated to be feeble minded. Now, Kerry Buck herself was not feeble minded.  And when she said he raped me and this is his child, he said she's crazy. She needs to be committed.  She was under Virginia law. They were allowed to sterilize her. Went up the Supreme Court. Holmes got his revenge. Holmes said, yes, you can do that. Holmes said, first, the medical consensus is that that feeble mindedness is is hereditary. Everybody knows this. Who am I to question the medical consensus of eugenics and eugenics was big in this country. Our sterilization laws that were passed in 32 states during that period were the model that the Nazis used for their for their eugenics laws in Nazi Germany. Right. That was the medical consensus at the time was eugenics. Holmes says, everybody knows this. Right. And so who are we to stand in the way of good science? He said, it is better for all the world if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime or to let them starve for their imbecility, society could prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind. The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the fallopian tubes. Jacobson versus Massachusetts. Three generations of imbeciles are enough. Right. Now. That's what the world is like if we have Jacobson without Lachner. Right. That is what the world is like if we just say the majority gets to rule and we're going to just defer to the medical consensus with the doctors with what they think is right without taking any account of individual liberty. And that's what we've seen the last couple for the last two years is judges being totally sleep at the switch. Judges totally afraid to stand up for individual liberty. What we saw in the years following Buck was a recognition that we had gone too far. There became protections for for bodily autonomy. That body of case law has risen up. That's what we were trying to potion in my case was on one hand. Yes, the state has a power to deal with this. But on the other hand, we don't want to live in the buck versus bell world. And the Supreme Court doesn't want us to live in the buck versus bell world. And they say before you start imposing medical treatments on people before you start closing down businesses and doing all these sorts of things, you need to have a good reason. And I think the story is still waiting to be written. But pair, lift you on an optimistic note. I'll say at this point, I'm the pessimistic side of the table. But I think that the kind of work that Johnny's doing and that you are doing and these Chicago kids are very inspiring to see that at least there's a little bit of fight left in the next generation. Hopefully we can learn from this experience and we can make lemonade out of the lemons. So thank you for your time.


Okay, good, the mic seems to be working. So I'm hoping by the end of this talk that I will convince all of you that governance is important. So here's my best job at it. So a little bit about me, my name is Marty Delberg. I am the Senior Coordinator for Wolfware, just like Cal Poly. We have to brand things with our own name and we're the Wolfpack. So we'll do whatever the Wolfpack. And I am part of Delta, along with Lou and Jeff. And we are the Learning Technology Applications Solidities. And Scott, sorry. Thank you, basket. Delta is a division of the provost office. And I bring this up because there are two basic ways for people to organize their LMS structure. One is to have it as part of their IT group. And the other is to have it as part of where they're teaching and learning with faculty or separate by provost for academic technology or something to have it separated from the IT functions. I actually think, and I know that most of you don't have the ability to change the structure of your organization, but we have found and we've done the research and actually wrote a book chapter about that structure and governance and that groups that you have governance that's outside of or that run their LMS outside of the IT functions usually do a better job at meeting the needs of their constituency. And if for no other reason, then they're able to devote the resources and the attention to it and focus on it. Because we all know that when the student information systems or PeopleSoft or e-mail goes down, the LMS is going to get short-tripped. They're not going to be paying attention to it. They're not going to be maintaining it when they have to take care of or put out more urgent fires. So what is governance? Well, I'd like to think about kind of the problems that we have as administrators or people who run learning management system or learning technology. And faculty members are accustomed to being in control of their classrooms. I mean, that's one of the essential functions of classroom management. We are accustomed to being in control of our LMS, or running the show and setting the rules. Now, I'm looking at it from a 20,000-foot view down. I'm doing what's best for the institution. I take all these 11 colleges that we have, all the different classes, and I mold it into one view or one frame. That's kind of the biggest best compromise for the whole university. Faculty obviously have very different thoughts about that. They want to get what's best for their class. And so, inherently, you have a conflict or tension in this relationship. Already, you are their enemy because you're not putting that plug in that they need in order to teach their classroom what they want. So we have 2,000 faculty, 2,500 faculty and 110,000 enrollment, 40,000 students. We can't just go willy-nilly installing plug-ins just on the whim of one person. So there are certainly issues. So we're trying to meet the needs of a large diverse constituency. We're also trying to give them some representation. We want them to be able to feel like they have a voice, like they actually do have control. We need to make sure that we have a viewpoint, that we're understanding the viewpoints of the different colleges. Our college of vet med is very interested in competency-based education. And they're pushing us to move forward with that. I don't know that engineering has really thought about it much. But we need to have representatives from all our stakeholders to make sure that we're understanding what's actually needed and where the future of this technology needs to go. So as I mentioned at the bottom, I will frequently get people who want to, you know, impletely tear me a new one, if you will, because we're happy about something that we're doing. And the easiest way to deal with those sorts of critics is to invite them to come and serve as representatives on committee. And one of two things do that happens is either they come and they understand the bigger picture or they get quiet because they don't want to volunteer to spend the time. So either way, I'm able to kind of calm down somebody that's having a problem.  You know, that's our governance structure. Pretty simple and straightforward, right? Basically, we have, if you look at the pink layers, and I'm color-wise, so if I'm getting the colors wrong, Deli, but I think if the pink is the learning management system steering and content capture steering, those are our two decision-making bodies. As they have three subcommittees that feed into them, we try to look at things from three different ways. Customer needs and policy, so that's typically made up of administrators from different IT administrators, from different colleges and different units on campus. We try to have one from every large unit that's using our learning management system and learning technologies. We have a best practices of support, which Scott heads as a co-chair that handles the qualitative things, kind of how to support people, pedagogy, best practices within the LMS. What should we be doing to promote and help and assist teaching? And then we have a technical concerns committee, which is co-chaired by Jeff, and that's looking at what's feasible when the other two committees say it would be really nice if we could do this. He's the one who kind of reigns in our enthusiasm and says, you know, that's a great idea, but it will never work because we don't have, you know, $15 million worth of supercomputing equipment. You know, what happens? He's the reality check to make sure that things are working properly. Sometimes he says it's easy. Yeah, he's actually a great guy to work with. So, you know, and then this is available online, and I'll actually show you where you can get it on our website. I have a whole list of other resources, so I'm not gonna go over the rest of the chart, but how do you promote transparency? So how do I get, I want people to understand the decisions that we make and why we make the decisions? Because typically when you explain it to a faculty member, I mean, I am the, I'm the master of saying no in getting someone to thank me. So that's part of my job, is that I have to explain to a faculty member, well, I understand that you wanna integrate this book publisher saying blah, blah, blah, but it's not proper complaint. This is why we can't do it, you know, or whatever other issue. So I need to be able to do that with, you know, faculty members that need to be able to explain, we need to be able to get the word out to why we make the decisions that we do. It's not just an arbitrary decision that's made somewhere in a little closed room and then we issue the edict and go. If we do that, over time we'll become hated and reviled on campus. I mean, it's pretty much a given. So you need to get people involved. We often need to actually get their input in these decisions. So it's very important that you get a good representative sample of stakeholders across campus. I will tell you, it's very difficult to get faculty and student representation and I struggle with that constantly. I'm not gonna, you know, sugarcoat anything here. So that's why I regularly, whatever somebody engages me, because they want something I will frequently ask and if they would like to participate. And that's how we keep our faculty slots open. You need to hold regular meetings. So many times I've gone to things where people claim to look for input and they are telling you what they wanna do and just looking for validation. And if you do that with people, they will very quickly realize that it's a waste of time, it's a fruitless exercise. So it's very important to go in there with an agenda of things that you want to talk about but not with the decisions of the agenda. You need to allow people to discuss, go over what their feelings are, have a little, hopefully have some healthy debate about it and then make a decision. Obviously, you need to get to the decision-making stage. So there are other cases where people will argue and discuss and talk, you know, ad nauseam for three months or revisit issues. We're very much trying to be of the mold where we make a decision and then we move on it. I'd rather make a good decision than spend forever to make a great one because you just need to keep moving. You need to get things done. So we try very hard to solicit feedback from the community at large. We have a few mechanisms for that which I'll talk about and we try to get new perspective from people. We try to bring fresh blood in as often as possible. So some of the things that we do, it's about communication. It is really, really difficult to communicate with your campus, with faculty. Okay, they're busy. To give you an example, I send out a direct email once or twice a semester. We go out per year, beginning of the fall, beginning of the spring, and kind of when we're rolling over to the next year. And I've gotten people asking me to unsubscribe. Now, this is crucial information that they need to know to use the tools to do their job. And they're asking me to unsubscribe. I found out that I was remarkably successful because 52% of them opened the email. Now, what about the other 48? A little bit of a problem. So we also, you know, we have a few different channels. We have that, we have what we call Delta Wire articles and just kind of a blog that we keep. We have knowledge-based articles to help them with individual topics, more of a just-in-time type thing, trainings, custom trainings, how to do videos.  I could actually go back and look and say, well, you clicked, you got this message on 17, 2008, you know, whatever at such and such a time as a way of trying to kind of give them or make them a little more mindful of the fact that they need to actually pay attention to these communications. So we're rapidly running out of time. So we've had a number of successes. One of the things that we do, you know, because everybody feels Moodle's open source, we can change it, we can do anything we want. You know, and Lou and I, several years ago, did a talk called Free As In Puppies, Not As In Beer, and the idea being that, you know, Moodle is free, but there's a cost associated with it once you get it for free in terms of maintenance, updating, customization, things like that. So we try very hard not to modify core and to look at both the importance of breadth and depth when we consider a feature request. And so anybody in the community, in our NC State community that can log into our system can put in a feature request. So students, faculty, what have you. What's that? Yeah, okay. So we also have a variety of SOPs that we, the committees have agreed upon as far as retention, as far as, you know, the profit feature request, you know, the whole host of other ones. And so we work very hard to build a shared vision of where we need to be and what we're doing. You know, we actively solicit that input, and we've gotten a lot of positive feedback from faculty. I mean, they're much happier now, I think, than they were 10 years ago when we, or nine years ago when we first got this effort started. I think, you know, this is admittedly anecdotal. I only have a very small amount of data to back that up. But the general climate seems to be that they feel like we're responding. You know, we do have occasional problems with marketing from companies like Kansas.  And so we're actually working on those types of communications to explain why we're sticking with Moodle. There are a couple downsides. We're, unfortunately, I'm running out of time, so I can't really talk too much about those. But it takes a lot of time. Okay, it's a lot of time and effort to spend the time to communicate with people. It's a lot easier to just expel you. We make a decision and move on and go. It also takes additional resources. Occasionally, they're going to drag you to a place where you don't want to go. And, you know, if it's consensus and it can be done, even though you felt that making more expedient to do it a certain way, you may have to go and go with what your governance body suggests. It can also be very, very slow. I mean, you may have to wait until the meeting. One of our failings right now is feature requests could take up to two years before we finally do something, we've decided on them, and actually do something with them. And I think we've had a couple that lasted longer than that. So there, you can actually be sending a message that, yeah, great, tell us, but we don't care about you. So there are dangers associated with this, and we're actually changing our process to try to speed that up. So the resources for you, our portal, and I know people hate that portal word, but it seems to work, is wolfware.ncsu.edu. And these slides are uploaded, so you can just download and take a look. And we also have all of our SOPs, governance structure membership at wolfware.ncsu.edu slash SOP, where you can just go to Wolfware and go all the way to the bottom of the page and click on governance. And you are free to take, steal, copy, paste, do whatever you want, anything that we can do to help you promote, you know, better governance or, you know, better organization management of your learning technologies we'd be happy to talk to you about. That's all I got.