Here's the best way to work out postpartum. Our next caller is Ashley from Pennsylvania. Ashley, what's happening? How can we help you? Hey guys, I'm super excited to be chatting with you. I've been listening since 2017 and it's been really cool to see how y'all have grown over time. I came for the fitness info but have been thrilled to see how you've like evolved over time, especially. I've loved hearing you talk about your class with Dr. Becky at Good Inside because I'm obsessed with her. My jaw hit the floor when you said you were doing EMDR because I don't know, just never thought I'd see that from y'all. It's just been really cool. Is that you do that for a living or something or why are you interested in that?  And then I'm exploring doing it again for some of the same reasons that you're doing it. I'm a mom and I just want to be like the best mom that I can be. So same thing. Awesome, great. All right, thanks. How can we help you? Cool. So I'm trying to decide what level of program is the most appropriate for me. So in certain programs like in MAPS resistance and MAPS 15, there are different levels or tracks of the program. So for anybody that doesn't know what I'm talking about, in resistance, there's a body weight track, a dumbbell track, and a full gym track. And in the body weight and dumbbell track, the exercises and workouts are the same throughout the phases. You just add sets as you progress through. But in the full gym version, the workouts are different in each phase. In MAPS 15, the normal version, the workouts repeat twice over the course of the week, but they're different every day in advanced. So my preference is to have a different workout every day or over the phases, just because I really like to switch it up. But I'm trying to decide if I'm ready for the more advanced version. So just for my specific situation, I started lifting consistently in 2015 and was super into my fitness from 2015 to 2020. I ended up taking most of 2020 off because I was pregnant and because of the pandemic. And then I was consistent for pretty much all of 2021 before taking most of 2022 off because I was pregnant again. So I started working out consistently again since February of this year and I followed the New Mom recommendation. So I did starter, and now I'm on phase three of resistance doing the full gym version. I'm planning on doing MAPS 15 next and I would prefer to do the advanced version. I also don't have a suspension trainer, so I feel like I'm doing the advanced version. But my concern is I have a lot of other stresses in my life, so I don't want to overdo it. I have a two and a half year old. I have six month old twins. We aren't sleeping all the way right now. I'm also breastfeeding. I'm not tracking any food. I just try to eat a lot because I'm literally like starving all the time. And then I don't have a super stressful job, but I have a semi-stressful job. So I'm just trying to figure out like how can I still see the benefits of doing the advanced version of MAPS 15 without overdoing it or should I maybe do something else next instead? You're on point. You know why? Because a lot of people in your position would not be asking this question with a program like MAPS 15. They'd be something like, can I do MAPS aesthetic or something like that? You're six months postpartum with twins. Okay, yeah. We're on the same baby schedule, Sal. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I know what that, okay. So I think you're fine with MAPS 15 and here's what I'm going to say. I think you should get a suspension trainer and I think you should gauge whether or not you do the suspension-based workout or the barbell-based workout based on the previous night's sleep and how you feel, okay? So some days you could pick the advanced version, do some barbell exercises. Some days you could do the suspension-based workout because I was up four times last night and I'm not feeling very energetic and I'm kind of, you know, whatever fatigued then I would do the suspension version. I think that program would be ideal for you, especially because you've already been working out consistently. I think that that'll be totally fine. Yeah, I think it's a great question, but I think you already on, MAPS advanced, 15 advanced is I think going to be totally fine for you. And then another option if you don't switch the suspension trainer here and there is just to scale back on the intensity.  Baby was up, up and down all night and didn't get sleep in. So, you know, you still follow the program, but just reduce the weight by 50%. You know, just go through the move, go do the movements, but just back off the intensity. So you can easily modify it that way based off of the ebb and flow of your sleep schedule and stress levels throughout the week. But absolutely think you're ready for MAPS 15 advanced. I think you'll be just fine doing that. Ashley, you're breastfeeding the twins? Yeah, so I'm actually, my son has latching issues. So I've pumped for him and I breastfeed her. Okay, so that's a lot. So I do everything. I was just going to say, that's okay.   I don't think people realize what you're doing.  What time do you go to bed? How many times do you get up? And then what time is everybody up? Yeah, so we put the kids down at like, basically between seven and eight, we switch off. So I'm either doing the twins or my two and a half year old. And then just kind of like chill, sometimes watch something with my husband until like nine. And then I get ready for bed. I pump one more time or like power pump. If you know what that is, like pump a couple of times. And then my husband feeds the twins a bottle at 10 and I get in bed like right at 10. It varies a lot when they're up and sometimes the two and a half year old gets up occasionally too. Like the night before Mother's Day, my daughter slept all the way until 5.30 and I fed her at 5.30. So I got like a really good chunk of sleep. But then sometimes she'll be up at 1.30, 3.30. And I typically only feed her once at night, but we'll be up getting them a few times. And I try to like kick my husband and get him out of bed half the time just because sometimes if I don't go in there, she'll go back to sleep. But sometimes it just doesn't work out like that. And as soon as she peeps, you've said this before, Saul, with the mom thing, like as soon as anybody peeps, I'm like, what's going on? Yeah, a lot of people don't know this, but mom, especially postpartum, you're heightened for that. And so when you hear the sound, even if they go back to sleep, you've got stress hormones and catecholamines to keep you alert. And you can't just go back to sleep. Because I remember thinking that like, oh, when the baby goes to sleep, go to sleep. And I think it's not that easy because you got to get your body to calm down at that point. So that's a lot on the body. So I'll go back to what I said. I think you should alternate and even take days off if you feel like you need them. Because you are probably redlining right now as it is with minimum workouts. You're probably on a daily basis. You probably feel like, ooh, I'm already at the edge with, yeah. So I would be very careful to not overdo it. And I would treat the workouts as recuperative. I wouldn't even try to chase progress, but rather, can I go through the movements? Can I feel good? Can I get good full ranges of motion? Because otherwise you'll probably hurt yourself or you'll start to over-train your body. Now, after about a year, so you've got six more months or so, this is usually when things start to become a little bit less crazy and hectic.  But I would definitely air on the side of less than more. So try to do less, not more. Because that sleep is such a big factor, especially so consistently, that even the, you could over-train so easily because you're already at the edge. Yeah. Do you have any thoughts about sleep? I feel like it's the one thing that you guys would normally be like, sleep more and then you'll feel less stress. But I feel like I don't have that much control over it. Yeah, that's why you didn't hear that from us with you. Yeah, thanks. I appreciate that. Yeah, no, we recognize that. I mean, it's a different situation. It's a different monster when you have You're in a season. Two newborns and a two and a half year old. Like we all, we're all parents, so we all recognize that like, yeah, we could sit here and give you advice all day. Hey, get eight hours of sleep. You'll be just fine. It's like, yeah, right. Okay, come on. The likelihood of that is slim to none. So you got to modify other things. The best advice that I've gotten so far personally is, are you getting out of the house every day on your own and get a little bit of time to yourself? That helps a lot. Yeah, I try to at least take a walk every day. And then I do try to a lot of times that it's just like me on my phone for like 30 minutes in the evening. But even that is something. But like leaving the house and interacting with other adults, that makes a big difference for moms. Yeah. Okay, because it feels very lonely.  So some of the advice we got was, I get out of the house, go interact with other adults, even if you're just walking around target or going to the mall or whatever. Do that, try and do that a little bit every day. Some supplements can help. Ashwagandha is supposedly safe during breastfeeding. It helps the body deal with stress. Because you're nursing, I'm going to tell you to do your own research and see if that's something that you can take. But that's something that we've used. And then just being very easy on yourself. Just being very easy on yourself because you're running that red line right now. Your stress hormones are high just to keep your functioning at the moment. So pushing those even higher is not going to be beneficial. I would try and do your best to prioritize time for you and your husband to like when the kids go down. So maybe when you would normally be on your phone or maybe you guys would watch a show of just having like 30 minutes to an hour of like just you and the two of you talking.  I found that for Katrina just me able to hear where she's at, what she's going through, how her day was that just that conversation of keeping us as a strong tight unit and conversing on a regular basis. Because I do know how easily you can be like divide and conquer. You know what I'm saying? Like you guys. Yeah, then you don't see each other. It's you guys are playing defense on three opponents. It's three against two. We're not man on man anymore. Yeah, it's not man on man anymore. And you can really easily get into this like all you talk about is, Hey, did you get the milk ready? And oh, did we go to get this? And so it becomes versus just how you doing honey? And how's your day? And I'm talking about our relationship. I fought and when you talk about trying to manage stress and things like that, I really think that there's tremendous value in that.  It was like, let's go together and we would get a good hour talk like that. I found a lot of value in that. So if you don't already prioritize that, I think there's a lot of value in that too for managing stress. Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. And then obviously you said, you know, the next six months I'm still kind of going to be in this air flight survival mode. I was planning on doing symmetry next. Do you think that that's okay? Or do you think I should do something different after? Sorry, I'm doing 15 and then I'm going to do something else. I was thinking symmetry would be great. I would wait till you're done breastfeeding. So how long do you plan on doing that? I'm hoping to make it to a year, but we'll see. Yeah, a lot of things change when you stop breastfeeding because your hormones are a little different while you're breastfeeding too. So in my experience training women postpartum, they would stop breastfeeding and then their body would start reacting like it used to type of deal. So part of that is they probably got more sleep. And the other part of it is the hormone changes. So I would wait and right now your goal with exercise is going to be recuperative, maintenance, keep myself healthy. Once you get past that kind of hump of what's going on, then it's okay. Now how can I progress? And then at that point, map symmetry would be great. Do you have that by the way? I do. I have like all everything. I have everything except for anabolic advanced basically. Are you in the forum? I'm pretty far out from doing that. Are you in the forum? I don't Facebook. Okay. Oh, you don't Facebook. Oh, that's healthy too. Yeah. I use the Facebook and then all the old people that I know got on it. And I'm done out there now. Well, if you want, if you don't mind Facebooking, I don't know, I don't know, you could, it was a verb. If you don't mind Facebooking again, we'll put you in the forum. We can send you a link to it. Either that or let me, let me give her the, let me give her the free program, the new program. Oh, it's a surprise. Oh, we can say it, huh? Yeah, we can talk, we can talk about it on this one, right? Yeah. So we have an, it's an all bands program. So it's, Oh, okay. Which I think could actually complement where you're kind of at and where you'll be in the next year or so. So we'll have Doug hook you up with that. Awesome. That sounds great. Okay, cool. Thanks for calling in Ashley. Thanks so much. I really appreciate you guys. You got it. Yeah, it's funny.  Oh my God, that's a, yeah, that's a zoo, you know, at home. But I mean, at that point, your workouts are not, you're not trying to progress as much as you are trying to keep yourself healthy. That's really it. Because if you keep, if you push it, you're already pushing it. Everything's pushing it. Yeah, you got to take into account your environment and totally like what you can really like accomplish. And yeah, for the most part, it's really just staying healthy and like being energetic. That's like the two biggest things. Yeah, I can't help but think when we talk about health, we, we talk about it as, as total health, right? There's so many other parts of it. It's not always just like the physical aspect. And so if you accept that this is where I'm not going to be in my most physical prime. So it's more like what you said, it's like treat your workouts as more recovery and kind of maintaining and just being healthy as far as movement's concerned. And then honestly trying to prioritize other parts of that. That's why I kind of want the direction with the relationship. Because I know when you get, I mean, I don't know from a personal experience what it's like to have three kids. I can only imagine, but I know what it was like just playing defense with one. How easily you can get separated from your partner. Like two ships passing in the night. Yeah, it becomes a, it becomes more, you know, and, and there's nothing like the two good partners tend to work like that. Hey, now we're on a team. This is a hard time in our life. Let's conquer that.  When was the last time that we talked about our personal needs or the things that we are happy with in our relationship or we're working on? And so, I mean, that's a part of health. And doing that, I think we'll bleed into the other pursuits too.


Well, thank you everyone for being here on the very last session on the very last day. So these are the quantum true believers as far as I gather. I revamped this a little bit based on the conversations the last couple of days. It became really clear to me that there's a lot happening in our industry. I'm sure every one of us knows someone that's had a layoff in tech and I'm hearing a lot of comments, especially in the Fang side of things, especially what's happening sort of further south, Seattle, Silicon Valley. There's a big transition happening where people are realizing that the days of working for Google, Facebook, et cetera are winding down from the kind of the golden era. Meanwhile, quantum computing is kind of booming. So we're going to chat today about what quantum computing really is. Open source and quantum computing, 10 points if you spot the typo and 20 points if you just politely pretend it's not there, jet lag, and how to get involved. So I'll give a bit of a run through first of who I am. We might come in, guys. You missed the very best bit. The first 10 seconds were the best, but in terms of who am I, so I was actually born in the outback in a town you've never heard of, Mount Isa. I come from the reddest red part of Australia. The most cliche immigrant family mining town you can imagine. So when I'm about to talk about a career in open source that leads to quantum computing, it's probably something that you could make up as a fiction story. If I can do it, literally anyone else can. So you don't really see any quantum computers in this photo, do you? But how I got from there, from Red Dirt to Red Hat, nice little pun, do you like that? I spent a chunk of my career working in this wonderful company in the era between IPO and getting bought out by another company. Any IBM employees in the house? Yeah, good. It's too bad there's one that ruined the joke. So the era I got to experience was the chaotic dogmatic era of post-IPO. A lot of buzz around open source back then. All the venture capitalists thought we can make a lot of money doing this. Then the reality, then the cycle of, oh, we've got to make this work right up to the point of acquisition. So that was a really great education for me. I have a lot more gray hairs. I'm a lot younger than I look living through this era. What was fun about it is I got to meet and work with basically all the characters that make our industry possible. Now, one of these people I'm with likes me and the other one doesn't. Can anyone guess who might be the grumpy person in this photo? On the far left, so what had happened is at Red Heart, I had the opportunity to essentially work on anything I wanted as a technical writer. I came from a corporate background. I used to run supply chain analytics for a large coal company here in the US. And I took a role as a technical writer just to get into open source. I took anything available. I would have swept the floors. I had the opportunity, thankfully, to build something that became the content management system that still powers Red Heart today, which is kind of cool. And I met this gentleman. Does anyone know the gentleman on the right? Do you recognize him? So that's Stormin over there. The other gentleman, the smiling one. We're actually in his country. This is really cool. So when we think of the three people that created the operating systems that changed our life, who are they? Throw out some names. OK, that kind of ruined my story. So I was going to say Steve Jobs in terms of what brought it financially, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and Bob Young. So Bob Young's the co-founder of Red Heart. His whole thing was to always be invisible, to always be the one that would make things move behind the scenes. And what I loved about Bob is we don't know him. I didn't know him until he pulled me up when I spoke at a conference in New Zealand. And I was talking about how I built something at Red Heart. And he basically said, hey, this sounds interesting. Here's a check. Do something with this check. And if we like what's happening, have you considered taking your open source project and spinning it out as a startup? I said no, because I never wanted to be a Silicon Valley bro. But then I became a Silicon Valley bro. And that became an eight-year journey of me learning how to build a project into a product. And then a year and a half ago, I had the opportunity to sell it, which is the most brutal experience you'll probably go through. And that led to me being able to join a company called Quantum Brilliance. What's really cool here is this object I'm standing next to is a quantum computer. It is a world first.  It crunches all our weather data and the weather data for the UK. That little box I'm standing next to is patched into it with a power cable and an ethernet cable. And it's the world first example of hyperparalyzed co-computed. So I think CPU, GPU, and we built the QPU. It's only two qubits, I'll say only. It was a test build to prove if this was even possible, but it's worked. And now you can probably hear my voice has gone a little bit. We're constantly on the road now because everyone's realized, wow, the era of useful quantum computers is here, which is why I changed this whole talk quickly to be more like, how can we get us into this industry? So we're no longer having to think about Oracle, IBM, Facebook, et cetera. So what is quantum computing? So is anyone going to have a guess? There's going to be some interesting feelings of what it is. Anyone brave enough to dare to try to say what quantum computing is? And there's no wrong answers. Someone? Anyone? If you like frown a lot and sound convincing, that'll pass master, right? It's close enough. Yes and no. What I'm going to do is I'm not going to talk about the technical side. Nearly every time you hear someone talking about quantum computing, they're going to go through the absolute same story. Superposition, they're going to be talking about qubits. They'll talk about the double slit experiment. They'll talk very technical things. When in reality, it doesn't really matter on that size. You'll get pointed to this a lot. This is IBM's, this probably was an Osprey. I think it was maybe one or two versions ago. We always call it the chandelier in the industry because we actually all get on really well. It's a very small industry, which is my disclaimer for saying, I mock IBM relentlessly and vice versa, because my company does diamond-based quantum computing. They often say we're the blood diamond company, which is very offensive. So we say this is the chandelier. So this is an enormous warehouse that uses a lot of energy to super cool something to create high-fidelity qubits, which is lots of power. This is science fiction made real. It's really, really interesting. We do something different. That little box is a 19-inch rack for RU. World-first room temperature quantum computer that can actually run at scale. You just plug it and go. It's a lot less qubit, so a lot less mathematical power than the previous one. So when I say we all get on, we're not competing for the same thing. IBM and Google are over here competing to be like the most miraculous and the rest of us are saying, okay, slow down. What is the use case that we're doing to actually make something useful out of this technology for real businesses now? And of course, I had to ask mid-journey what it would think the future of a diamond-based quantum computer is. This idea of a QPU is what a lot of companies, including ours, are going for. Think of CPU, went to GPU, and you had that co-compute. We're moving into an era in the next five, 10 years where you're going to have small form factor QPUs. We might not ever get to the size of a phone. That's something we're trying to do, but the reality of physics makes that hard. But we will get to something not as blinged out as this, but our company's North Star is what we call the integrated quantum chip. And there's a lot out there doing similar to us to try to get to this form factor. I really want to convince you of this today. Quantum computing is actually boring. Again, I'm not going to talk about the science behind it, because there's plenty of great YouTube videos. Because I'd rather talk about what it does that's really useful, and that is useful for people's careers. Anyone here want to do a physics PhD to get into quantum computing? Or would you rather a well-paid job in quantum computing? So I'm experimenting with the latter lately, right? But what I really want to show is that, despite not having to talk about the deep science of it, the same way that no one in this room actually wrong conference, half of us in this room probably don't care about how a kernel works.  So the idea of what makes quantum computing really useful, and the one thing you can take away from this if you're not really familiar with the industry, is that it's really good at probabilities. The way that bits are sort of on and off, you've probably heard that in quantum space, there's a range of things that can be held at once. So this is the whole showering is cat, is it dead, is it not dead? It can hold probabilities, and when we measure them, we get output. So if that one thing you take away is that this is just a great way to hold massive amounts of data and be really good at looking at the probability of outcomes. Sometimes. I'm also not gonna touch on how difficult this is. There's a pick any style of quantum computing, and there's something in it that's almost impossible that is slowly becoming possible year by year, which is really, really interesting, whether it's the noise around the qubits, whether it's the fact that when we measure something, we basically destroy the state of the qubits. When we ask the question, essentially, of this quantum state, it changes it. There's lots and lots of really hard things. We're getting better at making it real each time, but I just wanna stress that we're not out of the woods yet for whether this perfectly works. The phrase I wanna hit you with is quantum utility. It's another one to sort of keep in mind. You'll hear a lot about quantum supremacy. A few years ago, the team at Google behind a project called Sycamore had a massive achievement. It was the first time they proved that they had quantum supremacy. When I say proved, I mean, published the paper, most of us said, okay, that stands up. And of course, if you've ever met physicists, we tend to argue a lot and we like arguing. So very much like open source. So we had a field day saying, is this really quantum supremacy? That's the giant ones you see. The rest of us are talking about, that's really cool. I really love science fiction, but it's more interesting to find out for something that's quantum utility. Is it really useful? I take a second on this one. So these are some of the usefulnesses that you'll see out there by different industries. This is one of McKinsey's charts. And if you're familiar with McKinsey, they love to make things complex so they can tell you that they're making it easy. What I like to break this down is much simpler and we'll get on four cases where you might see a career popping up for you. But we ask if there's no utility, where's the money coming from? Can you wanna guess where the money and quantum is coming from at the moment? Yeah, VCs, investors. I like you said VC without like a negative tone of voice. It's not a, trust me, I spent so long at Red Hat where the communication around VCs was always so negative internally. Until one day I realized, hang on a minute, we are a VC backed company and I would actually be cheeky and say, and someone's gonna lynch me for this in this room. Open source is the industry we know would literally not exist if not for the venture capitalist getting behind people like Bob Young who said, I'm gonna support Linus and find a business model to make our industry sustainable so we never have to deal with VCs again. That was the paradox and it happened. If you don't know, Red Hat's IPO was the largest in history at the time. It was so oversubscribed that Bob was calling people and saying, stop buying the stock, stop it, literally, he has so many great stories. We are in this bubble right now in quantum. Have a look at that uptick. This is great because I have a job and I have job security. And I'll say this because if I wasn't in this right now, if I was in my old roles, if I had to take in the role with Amazon or other things that popped up, I would be very nervous at this time because we're watching our industry decline. I'm sure there's not a single one of us in this room that hasn't got some exposure to that. Yet this is one of the few up and to the right stories which is why I want to sort of tweak the idea of the talk today to bring some kind of confidence and maybe hold a carrot in front of us as a community. So we're asking, are there any consulting companies in the, ah, yes there is, it's McKinsey. Of course they are, boom. Here's a typical McKinsey chart. So if we could take a second to admire their overwhelming numbers. But the one to look at is on the left. Quantum computing is somewhere between, I love this range, a $9 billion and $93 billion industry. In the next 10, 20 years. Having been an analyst, not sure I would have gotten away with that range personally but I am comfortable that they're at least being a little more honest. If you look at these reports, and by the way I have all the links to the source data at the end of this and I'd encourage you to dig through them, a couple of years ago the numbers were like, it's definitely gonna be five trillion with the confidence of like make believe. We're in this era now where people are saying, okay, quantum utility, it's probably narrowing. So we're getting closer to what the real world case is going to be. Another interesting number there, 223 startups as of December, end of last year. That's pretty interesting and these are not for friends in a garage in Palo Alto startups. These are 50 million, 100 million backed, very stable companies usually with brilliant physics PhDs and some clowns like me around them. This is a model that we're seeing. So what's the most likely thing to reach quantum utility first? This is the question I asked myself when the company I worked for reached out to me and said, do you wanna come and join the product team? I was curious where we'd be headed. So I run the product team at quantum brilliant so I'm always asking this question, who are our users, what is the problem we need to solve? What's interesting is going into another more narrow understanding of market size, it's pretty interesting over a trillion dollar market size and they have quite confidence around that. Chemicals, catalysis, anyone's across this chemical industry, it's really hard to make them massive amounts of energy to do that. The math that it takes to analyze and run classical compute to look at how to make chemicals and find new ones, it's actually really trivial on quantum computers. So that's one of the industries that we're seeing that we already have revenue coming in on that space. And it's exciting to think it's not just about money, but the energy that's used to create these things is exponentially less. So literally better for the world, not Silicon Valley better for the world, actually better for the world. I can't segue to finance after saying better for the world, but we can assume that there are quants and there's industries that are using quantum computing in there. Life science, that's usually the polite industry way of saying pharmaceuticals. It makes people less angry to say life sciences and automotive. Automotive, I'll say as an aside here, as long as you don't tell anyone else. Imagine being a small form factor quantum computer that can go inside a self-driving car and you can probably guess at some of the projects that were involved in the moment, which is super, super cool. So if you want to work for a company like Tesla with maybe a less unstable boss, there's a lot of companies coming through that have a looking in this space as well. Glad this is not being recorded by the way. So let's get out of trouble and talk about open source and quantum computing. Great, so we know market size, we know it's up and to the right, we know it's a great place to work. How do we get involved? What are the main ones? Bit of a busy chart. And again, I'll be sending this and more data out to you all if you're interested. What we noticed from the top projects is yes, it's dominated still by some of the large companies. IBM is the big gorilla, the big blue gorilla in the room. And what's been interesting about IBM is they've been actually fantastic in the community. So they haven't been the old IBM, which used to be the one that would be, let's get as many patents out in the world as we can and close off access to things. They've changed the way that they measure success even in DevRel is how many papers can we get out to the world? How many communities can we seed? So there's some Kiskit project. Some of my team actually were involved in kicking it off to the point when they were teaching it at university, they'd have the latest compilation of it every day and it didn't work for about six months. But the fact that they could compile code and showed students kept people involved long enough to have an interest. All of us are lucky that these are now very mature communities. Kiskit would have about maybe 5,000 stars on GitHub if that means anything to anyone, but it's very robust. What's interesting about IBM's approach is they actually de-branded it. So Kiskit, open source, it's not a big bluish thing. It's a very red hat approach for things of like red hats relationship with Fedora is like IBM with Kiskit. So very fond to Kiskit. Google's obviously got their own with Cirque and some of the TensorFlow stuff. This company is Zanado, you'll see Penny Lane. Each one of these would be interesting for you to have a look at even the GitHub repo or have a look at the community landing page, have a look at how they communicate. All of us, every company on there, I'm speaking with them pretty much week to week. It's a very small community, we all get on really really well and we're always looking for ways to sort of, not trade users, but to find things where we say, hey, we need some community managers. They're like, oh, do you know any designers? It's so early that it's exciting that you know each other by name. Like in a few days I'll be in San Francisco and I'm catching up with a bunch of the people from here to basically share ideas of how do we find people like us and give us the opportunities to do people like me in our doing. So how do we get involved? The kind of roles, can anyone guess, it's gonna be interesting. What would be the number one in-demand role in constant computing right now? The usual answer is developers, right? Usually in everything. Funnily enough, it's not. It's not the number one in-demand role, which makes me smile. Even though I was a developer, I don't identify as one. It feels like a very post-modern thing to say. I'm a product manager. I never would have thought that product managers would be involved. Here's all the roles that we are hiring. Here's all the roles that that whole list you saw before are hiring. Genuinely makes me excited to see that there's a growth industry in tech. A lot of people don't like us anymore. The newspapers, media, tech is kind of the boogeyman for a lot of things. So it's really nice to know that there's job security emerging. When we see these roles, I used to be a bit of an outsider to tech, and I used to think, how do you actually be any of this? How do I be a technical writer? Or how can I be even a content creator in this space? So to make it tactical, let's take a moment with this. So developers, yes, make code, submit a feature, et cetera, but sometimes it can be as simple as reaching out in a community, contacting a DevRel. So part of my role is DevRel. So if you liked what Quantum Bruins was doing, it's like I'd like to be involved. If you went to a university, a great way to get touches to contact people like me and say, hey, there's a university coding group. Do you have anything for us? Could you show us an open source thing?  Always remember that the people that you talk to have their own KPIs and they have their own goals inside of a company. Sometimes it's enough just to ask. When I joined Red Hat as a technical writer, it was because I asked some technical writers, what does good look like for you? What's a good week? What are your KPIs? And they said, oh, we need to work out ways of not writing giant books, of writing quick starts. So I just wrote a quick start. And I didn't know how to do any of the things I was writing about. I just took the boring documentation and put it in a new blog post format. Really. And I learned from the process and that's what got me a job that led to me becoming a founder, oddly enough. So none of this is wasted time. QA testers. I still find the word QA testing kind of intimidating. It's like the person that's telling me I'm very bad at what I do. But that's a great way to get into it because you could just provide feedback. You could test the install. That's on a quick start guide. It just makes it, check that it actually works because often they don't. Reporting on bugs, et cetera. If I'll go into one I really like. So my personal number one request right now, I would love if anyone was curious enough to get involved in quantum, to even just do some quick starts. Take existing content and rewrite it. Put it on dev.to, hash node. Those communities are very early junior dev communities. I love them so much. They have the enthusiasm that tends to fade as you get into your 40s like I'm finding. So these are just like a quick idea of the many, many ways. By the way, all of this is an invitation to you all. If you're at all interested in like, oh, I'm a supporter, I'm a dev, reach out to me and I'm always happy to brainstorm, jump on a Zoom call and find opportunities to do this kind of thing. Resources wise. So even though I did downplay it, there are some fundamentals to learn in quantum computing, which is interesting because you probably could be a technical writer, a product manager, a designer, et cetera and not really know the science. The same way that few of us working in tech actually know how the silicon works or a CPU works or a kernel works. I worked on a middleware team and I think over two years building in JBoss, if anyone knows the product, I was learning my way down the stack. I even wrote the certification. I'm sure someone at this conference has been certified in JBoss and I wrote that while I was still using a Mac before I was fully, I actually shouldn't admit that. We should delete that bit, but you don't need to know the full stack to be involved and to have a feeling of belonging in the community. So these are kind of the standard answers, right? University, I believe there's over 50 certified university courses around the world at established and quite respectful unis. They're booming in India. Massive, massive growth there. The US, okay, Australia funnily enough is one of the world leaders in it. Woo, USA, let's have a. Oh, okay, New Orleans, right? Oh, cool, oh, respect. I wouldn't have picked that. How long's it been there? Huh, this is a great little exchange, thank you. You've got your homework now to let me know. A lot of great MOOCs coming. Let's say that maybe if the Linux Foundation, actually this is a little test. If the Linux Foundation wants to do an entry level course that was free or some content around that, who would be interested? Please all put your hands up because the person in the room that can make this happen is in the room to make that happen. We actually have three courses on that. Look at that, see that's quantum. Do they or don't they have? And it's only when I said that we measured the state that we got the outcome. It's my one quantum joke for the moment. Courses, I know there's actually been a lot of push and pull around edX and Coursera and others. My boss used to be from IBM and he was involved in creating a lot of the early content. But in the early days, and a few people know these early days, perhaps some of the big brands, legal's team would get involved a lot because IP and knowledge used to block people from sharing, which is ironic that we're now at a point now at an open source conference where we're literally giving everything away and saying here's all the knowledge that we have. It makes it easier for us to do what we do by giving, what am I saying? It's an open source conference, you get this. Clearly I've been dealing with academics for so long and having to restate the fundamentals of open source over and over again. Incredible content on YouTube, incredible content. I would actually say that is probably the leading content in the world right now besides Linux Foundation. I only got trouble there. And on the community side, each of these communities, like I want to make fun of IBM. It's so deep in my blood to want to make fun of IBM. But the community that they've built are probably some of the best community builders I've met in my life in and around their kisket and outreach. In fact, if you jump on YouTube, anything that's come through in the last two months, Veritasium, MKHBD, I think that's how you say that. And some of the crew around there have done some great YouTube videos that I'll link you all to. All of them are enabled by the IBM team. And you can see them in the background, but they're not pushing their brand forward. So we're in an era where it's like great advocacy is coming through. I'm gonna do an experiment though. So I wanted to make this more of a slight Q and A. This QR code goes to a Google form. And it's simply asking one thing, would you be interested if I made some time available and don't tell my boss to create a little working group and we can, let's say it's a four week working group, four to six. And the sole purpose of that is to get a feel for what we collectively as an open source group want, get some information and what we think would be useful, whether it's courses or certification or whether it's even getting a couple of our companies together to say, hey, could we collaborate on something? That leads to the form, just send me your email and what you think. I'll also send you an absolute treasure trove of data on the industry that I used when I was researching the job. I was actually coming on board at QB first as a dev role and just advising in product management, but I got so hooked that I accepted a role as head of product within like three or four weeks.  It's exhausting, the industry's moving fast, but that's not to scare you off. If you're interested in getting involved, I can absolutely promise you that I will throw a lot of time and attention into pulling people into the community if you'd like, which is a really nice segue to any questions. Or I'll turn this as a question to you. What brought people here? Why are you in a room for something as vague as quantum computing? What are you looking to get out of potentially this area? Is it knowledge? Could it be a role? A career change? Is anyone brave enough to throw out an idea? If you have a question, I got a mic. Just randomly give someone the mic. Yeah. It's a very quantum way to do it. But is the mic on or off? First of all, thank you for the talk. I think it's the best for the last. It was amazing. So I work for a company called Quantum Insider. We are mostly publishing more like a media company for the quantum industry. And we have a kind of data platform for like crunch base, but really focus on the quantum industry. I had the privilege to work with a startup that has an API over the existing quantum computers across the world. But I want to go further. That's why I came today. I was curious about getting behind those APIs. I guess my question will be, you mentioned that, I guess the developers are not much in demand, but what would you say is a potential career path to still be a developer from the stack that we know today to Quantum, but also even move forward to project management. That's a really good question. So I first want to shout out to the Quantum Insider. So this is a good one. Again, QR code, I'll link you to it. They're probably the, you said it well, they're like the crunch base of the quantum community. And my understanding, it's a few people that were writing earnestly about it, got together and realized, hey, the industry has become so serious now that we can actually make a living being tech journalists, just like you. The writing's incredible and they've wrapped together a product that's kind of a, this is what's happening, sort of subscriber-ish type thing. It's really, really good. I love your framing of like getting through the API because that's the feeling in tech sometimes, right? We can have these roles where it's developer, advocate, community, even sort of product owner. And sometimes you feel still is a bit of an outsider. I could be cheeky and say one way to get through that is community and education, which would be even ourselves in this room, right? How could we take our collective journeys together? It could be something like a Slack channel. I really recommend getting a small group of people that have commonality. Communities are practice, essentially. It could be four people and say, how do we go through? And then being really surgical and finding people like myself, finding equivalent of me, Jordan at Amazon Bracket, or even at Nvidia as a quantum team. Find out who are the DevRel people, whose job it is to talk, and then really ask them what's been happening in your org that creates opportunities. That's how I ended up at Red Hat. I talked to a gentleman called Paul Gamp who ran Red Hat in Australia and he gave me the quote, don't ask what seat on a rocket ship, right? You get in the rocket ship. Bit of a startup trope. I can't believe I went on stage just then, but it ended up being quite a real thing. So once you're inside and give you an example of what I did at Red Hat, so I was a technical writer and I started doing all the certifications. The first one was brutally hard and I failed it the first time, the RHCSA. If anyone's done certs at Red Hat, you know, and I think Linux Foundation do the same. It's got some gotchas. Can't talk about it as an NDA and also I love it so much I'd never spoil it. But once I got through the RHCSA, all my certified engineering Jboss ones are a piece of cake because I felt like, oh, I could be a developer. I think we all just need that key moment, right? Can I get a community around me that people will believe that it's possible? Can I solve something hard, which might even just be going through the quick starts? And can I contribute something small that people take me seriously? Which again, I'm going to be selfish and use our example here. I'll tell you something that isn't going to be known publicly for a week, but we're about to GA an open source product called Crystal SDK. We had an open beta. It's essentially our software development kit for our entire suite that's geared towards HPCs and hyperparalysation. Those words don't need to mean anything to you. If you just wanted to see how to use quantum computing, we've got these quick start guides there. I would love to see someone take those guides and write a blog post about it, which could be copy and paste and a little bit of wink-wink chat GPT, right? But that would be enough for us to see, oh, people are signaling that they want to join the journey.  So we have that cash and we have a mission to do. So as a community comes around, the cool thing is when you're early like this, even if someone did that, I would make lots of time in my day to say, this is cool, because if you come on this journey with us and it could even be at IBM, it doesn't have to be a start-up, then the outcome is going to be great, right? And I think over time, it's really powerful. Thank you for presentation. For me personally, it's two reasons, right? The first one, it's my job. I'm dealing right now with the VB6 replath warming, and this is like my hobby, breath of fresh air, right? Geeking out and kind of continuing with the second topic, you know, when I talked to my brother, he's not a tech guy. You know, the quantum computing is some stuff happening. He's like, is that for real? Is that really happening? I thought this is just science fiction. I was like, no, it's actually happening. So being on that bleeding edge or being at least a part of it, it's just so motivating, you know, in a sense. So for me, those are two reasons and I'd love to chat. That's lovely. Thank you for sharing that. This conference is the best Linux conference I've ever seen in terms of organization. It's also beautiful and it reminded me of a feeling I got the first time as a red dirt born Australian that had the chance to go to San Francisco. If you've been through the Computer History Museum, anyone? There's a few nods. It's basically across the road from Google Campus. If you're ever down in Mount View, please go there. It's got the prototype of Waz's Apple, like the hand-soldered wooden breadboard one. It's got everything from abacus through to supercomputers and I used to go through there and when I ran my own company, I'd hire a team and bring them through. I'd give every new employee, say like, we are a part of this. Super cheesy, right? But there'd be a point at the end where there was a photo of Bob Young on this wall and I'd never mention it. I'd wait for the team member and go, oh, that's our advisor. That's our investor. These are just normal people like us. We don't talk about anyone in tech, except, you know, our own special snowflakey kind of ways. But to be a part of it and be a part of it now, we just had a new employee join already indispensable.  I'm so honored and excited to be joining blah, blah, blah. What I would call a veteran, a ye oldie tech person was like, take photos every week because you're probably making history in quantum. The company fails and we get swept up by someone else. You know, I'm smiling as I say this because I know even if quantum brilliance doesn't work, what we're doing is the fundamentals of the next wave of computing. That's way more cool than being the person at Google in charge of a button or any of 50 other chat apps, right? I have a bias here, so I'm just disclaimer. But yeah, thank you for the sharing. Who has the mic? I have the mic. Can you tell us if quantum brilliance has any emulators or STQs or things that folks like us who might be interested can play around with and understand the technical aspects of the system and potentially try it? It's a really good question. It almost feels like someone's paid you to say that. Why it's funny you say that because quantum brilliance has to... They haven't paid me yet. I'll be waiting out there. That's funny. So put in context for those that might not be familiar. The fundamentals of quantum computing are really quite well known. How to do it's hard. How to make these things. I'm not even going to go into the science of it. How to make the information do something and get the information back out. To make that happen, we've seen there's the giant ones, the little ones, but we all have the same problem of how do I start getting my developers and my business teams to know how to prepare stuff to get it ready for this format. SDKs are the first thing you make, obviously. Let people develop and make things. But then this word emulator. So the emulators are fascinating because they don't just emulate the quantum state or emulate what's happening. They emulate the noise because it's a very noisy and chaotic thing that we're doing. And again, the science I won't bore you with but just imagine a raging inferno and we're trying to tame this madness and get this information out. We're in an era often called NISC. Just essentially we're in an era where there's noisiness around what we do. So even though we're seeing utility it can be quite hard to get good data back out. So what we've just launched and we chose to do it in two ways. Quantum rants chose to do the open source SDK just to get this out there and get feedback but we chose to keep our emulator as a commercial product for the time being. I'm going to say this with bias and I'm already uncomfortable how much I've said my company's name because it's been but we think what we've made because our founders are literally the world leading experts in diamond base quantum computing that we have the best emulator and that's the thing that makes us able to work with our commercial partners that gives the company stability so we're not just reliant on investors which is a really strong position to be in. Having said that as we evolve the SDK is already really useful for the community and we have been granting some access to the emulator to work with partly why I'm doing experiments like this is feeling like should we make a user group that gets early access to the emulator would that be something that people would find value in their career because you don't have to be with us if there was thousands of people working on diamond and V based quantum computing out there even if they never use our product that's good for us too because in the open source community we're all sharing the software and especially the papers we're looking at what everyone's research there's a chat channel in the company and every day we're looking at everyone's white papers and it's a thrilling feeling long answer to say yes really good question I'll just repeat that for anyone who might not have heard what are we looking for for developers that come into a company like ours or maybe IBM or et cetera what's great about that is the early era it was physics PhDs and this infuriates me that someone can have two PhDs and just like I'm going to learn Python in a weekend and be a master at it I have imposter syndrome every day talk about being humbled what's great now is we're in an era where say there's a UI being built for our open source stuff don't need to know any physics you need to know something harder called JavaScript in my opinion but essentially if you have a little bit of Python a little bit of JavaScript then you're qualified same for dev role the roles that we take for granted outside say fang type roles or elsewhere are now popping up in our space I'll give a shout out to a company I really like in Australia called Q-Control some of the best marketing I've seen but they're looking for UI designers they have a whole product that's an LMS like an online learning system their customer is like military et cetera it's quite a good way actually to learn quantum personally lean towards the less structured learning but for them like they're always looking for product managers, marketing people designers, developers just coming in that can work front end what's great though is if I sort of extrapolate my Red Hat experience once you come in it's like I'm just going to work on the front end of something and then all of a sudden you get exposed these other things like oh that's an interesting API what's happening on the back end there oh okay so how do you actually paralyze what does that mean and so on so again long long answer say all the entry level roles that we know elsewhere are now becoming valid in the quantum space the cool thing that I'll put is a teaser I love the fact like the team that I came through there's 12 engineers nearly all of them are physics PhDs humble sighted like crazy so many papers out there and yet I learn so much from them every day they're the ones telling me like oh I never knew that you could automate this or mark on or something that I'm bringing in and that exchange of knowledge is again it's thrilling and I haven't felt that in years had that at Red Hat I didn't have that other bigger orgs where I just felt like a cog so whatever skills you bring now's the time that they're really valid any other hi there great talk I'm I work for the company behind Majorna that other particle I'm surprised you didn't take a crack at them what's interesting about I'm a product manager so what's interesting about the use cases that you projected was not what I would have thought about from a quantum computing perspective from where I said I see it being pluggable easily into a cloud back end but what you showed me just kind of intrigued me where you put up a desktop like you ever think that that's going to happen in parallel or that's like a way future state of affairs that you're just enticing us into really really good question actually so I love this to the the banter or the the sharing of opinions even within product managers in the industry what's unique and I won't use brands here what's unique in one position some of the early well well funded venture back to quantum companies some that raised a spack if you're familiar with this this vehicle that was popular for a while how to get on the stock market without actually really owning your stripes that hasn't gone well for them a very big ones at risk of being delisted our heart goes out to them because these are our colleagues basically getting laid off and you can't even really blame the leadership team on this it's just the industry the problem is it looks bad for the rest of us so what companies like ours try to do is remain lean and find use cases than aren't because it was and if I was being a little cheeky I'd say it was obvious to try to say quantum computing in the cloud because you just look at EC2 you walk in the room on Sandhill Road pitch investors and say we will be the Amazon AWS of quantum computing compelling pitch hasn't worked I can say personally my own bias I would rather crawl over broken glass than try to get quantum computing working in the cloud because not only are you trying it's very traumatic of me but not only are you trying to get quantum computing to work now you're trying to get it to work to scale to federate to somehow have the front end like all that other stuff you have to build it just hasn't worked D-Wave and other companies have done great jobs but here we are a decade in and the bet that they took hasn't moved quantum computing forward it's just gotten them stuck in trying to compete with EC2 and Amazon AWS not a good battle to be in I'll say I love Amazon to pieces Amazon's tactic though is the one we're all wary of in a way the same way that open source has been this conversation around okay when these cloud vendors that have economies of scale use our things how do we feel about that it's valid in the GPL but how do we feel about that so we're avoiding that conversation what we've done by going into small form factor mass paralyzation and aiming towards like joking the IQC the integrated quantum chip is that our devices aren't trying to be the massive super powered ones the million qubits which will be something that breaks RSA a number large in that sake of argument IBM and Google are going into that range of supremacy we're going into a range of quantum utility where our pieces I said you can plug and play immediately if you've ever been into a data center they're noisy there's a lot of stuff happening to get something working at a small form factor that reliably works there now without super cooling without crazy lasers without trapped ions without anything fancy it's just the use of diamonds how we can have this diamond MV space has been really exciting and it's working so our products will be used on satellites our products will be used in cars our products will be used in mining our products will be used in finance it's just a case of which use case for we as an organization gets us through this cycle to get through solving the problems of noise etc now that's a hypothesis and I want to be clear with that it might not be possible what we're trying to do to get the scale we're trying to get the same way every other vendor has something that might not be possible personally as a product leader with the capital we have we're really solving the real problem of customers that want to buy the real units we've now proven work in the real world then having this kind of beautiful science fiction experience and then saying but in the cloud which just doesn't work right now if it does that's really exciting I can't wait to see that day but again we won't be competitors in that space the same way that a company that makes a mobile phone is not a competitor with Amazon's EC2 so long winded answer that I feel you bro hope we can be friends but definitely different use cases and I was fudging things into a kind of a simpler story but I know you've got a lot more nuance than perhaps what I showed there how do you feel about that does any of that feel like a real answer to you kind of sort of which is very quantum sir okay if there's no more questions I'd just like to say a quick thank you to our sponsors and if it wasn't for them none of us would be sitting here so thank you thank you sponsors


Welcome to Asian Review. I'm your host, Bill Sharp. Our show today, Why Is America in Asia? And joining us is today's guest, Peter C. Olson, former Pentagon and CIA analyst who specializes in intelligence and is widely published in that area. Welcome to Asian Review. Thank you, Bill. Nice to be here. It's great to have you. Well, let's get right into it. What is America's position in the world today? Well, you know, ever since the Second World War, the United States has been the principal world power. It really got to that because of the devastation of so many other nations. So there really was no competitive power in the period initially following the Second World War. Of course, with the rebuilding of Europe, the rebuilding of Japan and Asia, the growth in China, the relative power of the United States to other nations is less than what it was, although the U.S. clearly remains the most powerful nation on the planet. That being said, geopolitical trends always continue, and they always change. There's nothing that's permanent, so you would expect to have a change. And I think what we've seen in the last decade or two with the United States is that there are competing economic powers, especially with the growth of the economy in China, but also elsewhere in the European Union, so that the United States may be the first among equals, but it's more that than it is the dominant hegemon. Do you see other countries beginning to form alliances with other countries that don't necessarily go accord with U.S. interests? Oh, clearly. And I think one has to expect that. You know, every nation state will pursue its own critical interests. And in the past, of course, many of them have been reluctant to, shall I say, go against the interests of the United States because of different types of dependency, whether that was in a military alliance or whether it was economic. But as that evolves, they look to what are their best interests. And frankly, and you see it in the Asia Pacific area, I think more so than any place else, that the countries that make up this area are finding that what they need to do is talk to one another and do things in their in their own interests, which may be not totally in concert with what the U.S. would like.  Indonesia being a good example, you know, which sees Chinese fishing vessels and sunk them, you know, versus the Philippines, where clearly Duterte, in my opinion, has been bought off by the Chinese through economic aid and maybe other means that we aren't quite aware of, so that he's been soft peddling what the Chinese have done in the Scarborough Reef area, which is clearly, you know, Philippine territory. Right, right. Well, you said a lot there, and that's a lot of really interesting, you know, comments there. Some people would say other countries, how should I say, tendency to want to form alliances with other countries has been somewhat accelerated because of the inconsistency coming out of Washington. Well, yes, and that's not surprising to me. I mean, if you're a country in Southeast Asia and you're not quite sure where the United States stands, you sort of have a choice. You can play up to the Chinese or you can try to resist them by looking who are your friends in the neighborhood. And I think we see a little bit of that with Vietnam. I think we certainly have seen that with Japan. Abe is one who even 10 years ago was looking for the kind of international structure that would be a counterweight to the increasingly aggressive Chinese actions, not just in the South China Sea, but in the East China Sea and against the Japanese islands and that type of thing. So I think it's natural. And I think the America First policy leaves a lot to interpretation and not all of it, which is comforting to other countries. You know, you mentioned the Philippines and President Duterte, as you suggested, perhaps has been bought off by the Chinese. But I also look at South Korea. And I wonder if that relationship has meandered a bit. Well, yes, I think it has. I mean, clearly the threat from North Korea with its nuclear tests and its missile firings has unnerved the South. And clearly President Moon or I think anybody who would be president of South Korea would be willing to go a long way to avoid a war that would be absolutely devastating to Seoul and South Korea. So you can understand that. And the tough talk from Washington hasn't always accorded with what is, I think, a softer, more conciliatory approach from Seoul. You know, that being said, there comes a point, as we well know, that you can't be, say, conceding to a threatening nation forever.  So, you know, the problem, I think, that we face on the Korean Peninsula is a South Korea that definitely does not want to go to war. Some uncertainty as to whether the current administration in the United States is willing to go to war, even preemptively. And, you know, that's a different point of view. Right. One wonders, too, just how successful the Chinese have been in weaning Korea away from South Korea, away from the United States, and how much of a wedge factor that China has been. Well, you know, economically, South Korea looks to China as a major market, and that's quite natural. You know, the Chinese are superb at using their economic power and other things as a political lever. Of course, the United States has done that for decades, as did the British when they had the Empire and, you know, any Empire beforehand did. So, that's, it's not a surprising development. But I think the fundamental issue with South Korea is one of trying to avoid hostilities. Interesting. Really interesting. Well, Xi Jinping has been very prominently mentioned in the news this week, given that the National People's Congress has been in session and approved an amendment to the Constitution, which according to everybody's view will clear the way for him to be in power forever and ever. Sort of a la Putin. What's your take on that? Well, it's interesting. Clearly, he has interest in remaining beyond what the previous Chinese law would have permitted. It's not surprising. Autocrats always like to stay in power. Of course, in some countries, non-autocrats like congressmen also like to stay in power. But that not withstanding. I think it remains to be seen whether he'll be successful in that in a long term, maybe in a short term, maybe in, you know, a few years beyond what is his term in office. But developments in China could change. And there are a lot of internal pressures in China, particularly economic and social, between the very wealthy cities basically along the seacoast and the interior, where there's, you know, a mass of population that doesn't really share to the same degree the wealth along the coast. And there's an interesting thing in the longer term that could really affect that. And that's climate change. Because if you look at sea level rise and the projections that can come between, shall we say, one meter and three meters over the next 30, 40, 50 years, that's going to flood a lot of China's coastal areas. And climate change also has a tremendous impact on habitability. And heat temperature rise will affect China very significantly. And it'll also affect food supply, both the ability to grow things on the land, but also with the acidification of the ocean, what it may do to the ability to harvest fish upon which the Chinese population is far more dependent than just about any other major power in the world. And I think that's one of the underlying reasons why the Chinese have reached out into the South China Sea to make it their own economic zone. And that's very interesting what a view that you raise. And also it seems that the Chinese are perhaps surprisingly, but again, maybe not so surprisingly, very strong proponents of the Climate Change Treaty, Paris Climate Change. I think they recognize the danger. They certainly have seen the danger from air pollution. If you look back a couple of years ago, and I forgotten, I think they called it the smug apocalypse in Beijing. But there was one report I read at one point that said a third of all deaths in the major cities there could be attributed to air pollution. I can't confirm that, but the fact that there was a study that alleged that tells you that it's a serious problem. Wow, that is really, really interesting.   So, you know, if you build it for traders, but the armies may come, you know, that is a very long term, probably century long vision of China, of how we can make itself a true center, if not the center of power in the world. And they think in terms like that. Right. We, you know, we still think in terms of, you know, quarterly profit statements, which doesn't always allow us to, shall I say, get our arms around a strategy that's going to be particularly effective. We seem to be having a lot of trouble getting our arms around a strategy right now. So let's take a break right here. You're watching Asian Review. I'm your host, Bill Sharp. My guest today is Peter Oleson. Peter has 48 years of experience in intelligent matters, intelligence matters. He worked in the Pentagon. He worked for the CIA. And he's really been giving us some really interesting things to think about. So don't go away and we'll be right back. Hi, I'm Pete McGinnis-Mark. And every Monday at one o'clock, I'm the host of Think Tech Hawaii's research in Monart. And at that program, we bring to you a whole range of new scientific results from the university, ranging from everything from exploring the solar system to looking at the earth from space, going underwater, talking about earthquakes and volcanoes, and other things which have a direct relevance not only to Hawaii, but also to our economy. So please try and join me one o'clock on a Monday afternoon to Think Tech Hawaii's research in Monart. And see you then. Aloha and Richard Concepcion, the host of Hispanic Hawaii. You can watch my show every other Tuesday at 2 p.m. We will bring you entertainment, educational, and also we tell you what is happening right here within our community. Think Tech Hawaii, Aloha. Hi, I'm Ethan Allen, host on Think Tech Hawaii of Pacific Partnerships in Education. Every other Tuesday afternoon at 3 p.m., I hope you'll join us as we explore the value, the accomplishments, and the challenges of education here in the Pacific Islands. Welcome back to Asian Review. I'm your host, Bill Sharp. My guest today is Peter Oleson. Peter is a former Pentagon and CIA intelligence specialist analyst and consultant. We've been talking about America's position in Asia. And we were just talking about Xi Jinping and his apparently he's going to stay in power forever and ever, a la Putin. And we're talking about the possible ramifications of that. But on the other hand, I wonder if Xi Jinping will be assassinated. Well, there's a long history of, shall I say, violent departure from high office in Chinese history. So this is the essence of the romance of the three kingdoms. Yeah, those things are, you know, very hard to predict. But I would not be surprised. I think it could be terribly destabilizing. And therein might lie the real reason to say, you don't want to see that happen. It's not clear to me that there is an alternate power structure in China. And were that not to be, and there was a subsequent struggle. It could have major implications for the stability in the country and international trade, economics, and even military action. I see what you're saying. I mean, it would certainly create instability of this for a period of time and who wants an unstable China. I don't think anybody wants an unstable China. I think people would like to see China, you know, evolve to be more a member of the, shall I say, the liberal coalition of nations, liberal meaning that you believe in resolving issues through diplomacy and international bargaining and that type of thing and not by the use of force. But China uses a bit of both. Clearly, what we've seen in the South China Sea is a bit of force. I think even some of the reported movements of Chinese forces to the North Korean border is a signal to Pyongyang to maybe cool it a little bit. But I also think it's very defensive on the part of the Chinese who probably are worried about mass migration out of North Korea if things start to, you know, to go badly and they don't want to have to absorb a mass migration of Koreans. That's really interesting comment because it seems to me that a lot of if there was a major turmoil in North Korea, yeah, there would be some people who want to rush into China, but there also be a lot of people who want to rush into the South. Well, yeah, the question is what would block you going either way? And if things were really going badly, and there was a military confrontation along the 38th parallel, rushing to the South may be a little difficult. Rushing to the North might be the easier path, even if it might be longer. Right, right, right. Is there a possibility of rushing to Russia? That's true. And it's interesting if you look at the population mix in Russian Far East. The Russians have a somewhat tenuous grip from a population perspective, you know, in the East. And it's not too long ago that there was conflict between Russia and China along the Amur River. And Chinese claims to things that the Russians believe are theirs. So, you know, this is this is not set in concrete. That's that's very, very interesting, because while China talks about protecting its sovereignty, and we'd be willing to almost come to blows with Japan over the little islands called the Senkakus. What about that Russian Far East? I mean, that, you know, was part of the Manchu Empire. And by China's way of thinking that should be part and parcel of China today. They tend to look the other way. Well, you know, remember that Russia is a major source of military equipment for them. It's a major source of energy. They are an ally in many respects in the international arena. It would be somewhat short sighted to, I think, poke the Russian bear's nose and the Chinese think in the long term. I discussed the same issue with a very prominent international relations specialist at Fudan University, why I was there. And his comment was very amusing. You know, we never pick fights with people that we think are as strong as us or stronger. Yeah. Smart. And I think that's true. Plus, as you say, I mean, Russia is still supplies very sophisticated weapons. Yeah, I know. Well, okay. The big news everybody's talking about is this potential meeting between Trump and KGU is beginning to be called in the press. Kim Jong-un. So what do you think? Is it going to happen? Or is this just a chitter chatter? Or what's your take? I have a big question mark in my mind. And it comes down to what prompted the the invitation? And on one hand, you can think of it that the sanctions were starting to hurt, and that Kim needs to resolve the issue because it's hurting those who support him and his family dictatorship, which is what it is in the north. The other hand is it's all part of the charm offensive that we saw, you know, with starting with the Olympics and a way to drive a wedge between Seoul and Washington. I believe that the basic goal that Kim and his father and his grandfather had to reunify Korea, which is something they've never been able to do. You know, the grandfather started a war to do it. Clearly, the son wasn't willing to do that, although he certainly undertook many provocations, including, you know, sending a team to try to assassinate President Park in Seoul. And the son would love his place in history of having succeeded doing what his father and grandfather couldn't do. And I don't think that thought goes away. But in the short term, he's probably worried about his survival as leader. And so he may be taking a step back in order to protect his position. But I don't think he's giving up his long term goal. How do you read President Moon, the president of South Korea? I mean, he said to have very pro United Korea stance of you, very similar to the previous president with whom he was very close President Roe. Is he being manipulated by KJU? Probably. I mean, that's that's what Kim does. I mean, he manipulates everything. If you read his propaganda, you know, it's really quite remarkable. You know, he's the greatest person who's ever lived in the history of the world. And interestingly, even the propaganda today now calls him Marshall Kim, which I thought was an interesting change from dear leader. And but it sends a message. And, you know, it's kind of kind of interesting to see. So, you know, the old analogy of the carrot and the stick, you know, he's, he's got one in each hand, and we'll have to see which one he does. If there is another nuclear test, if there is, I think, more testing of long range of ballistic missiles that might have the capability of, you know, hitting the United States, then I think any kind of meeting is off. However, my real concern is that we'll have a meeting and the US will not be well prepared for, shall I say, the very sophisticated capabilities of the North Koreans in negotiations. And the problem you have to remember is that they have never lived up to any agreement that they've done. So, you know, clearly echoed in the press. Well, it's true. Yeah.  And the verification issue is always a tremendous sticking point. You know, that's the problem that we've had with Iran. It will be a problem that we'll have with North Korea. It's a problem that we now have with Russia because Russia is violating the Intermediate Nuclear Force Agreement with its new weapons systems and where they've placed them. And we really, you know, we can say, hey, you know, you're violating it, but we haven't done anything about it. Getting back to President Moon, you know, it seems that he is not particularly enamored with the United States, that he does have this very strong pro unified Korea stance, Korean nationalism. And I'm just not sure where the balance is with him.  I think it's a very natural thing to believe that being together is a good thing. We certainly saw that in Germany with the reunification after the wall came down. And I would think Moon would have some reservations with the United States, particularly with this administration that, frankly, has, you know, basically threatened preemptive action. And yet when you look at the military structure and in South Korea, it's a joint structure. Right. It's not a US Army and a South Korean army. It's a joint army. Right. And so, you know, I don't think he wants to be dragged into a conflict that he doesn't see as in his nation's interest. So we talked about the possible assassination of Xi Jinping. And I know that you've written a few articles about the political assassination. What about KGU? Will he be assassinated? That I think is a higher probability than Xi in China. If things get bad enough in North Korea for those who are, shall I say, close to the center of power and feel their position slipping, that may be possible. That would be really interesting. But again, I think you would have instability in the North. Sure. And that may be of great concern, not just to us, but I think to the Chinese too. That's true. We only have one minute left, as I just been informed. So let me quickly sneak in this question. I wish we had longer for this, but what's the relative importance of Asia to the United States? Why is America in Asia? Well, I mean, historically, you know, we got into Asia as the result of the Spanish-American War, you know, in terms of being a power, we'd always been trading with Asia. I mean, go back to Perry in Japan and all that. And then after the First World War, of course, we picked up a number of island territories under the trusteeship of the League of Nations. And then, of course, with the Second World War, you know, became the dominant power there. And, you know, with forces in Japan, forces in Korea, you know, we really had a major stake. I think our major stake now is economic, because Asia is our biggest trading partner, far surpassing the EU or Europe. And that's in Americans' interest. I mean, what can you buy that's not made in China? You know, for day-to-day living, and we depend upon it. And they depend upon us. So the ties that bind are economic. The others worry me that they may break that and cause us problems. Great. Well, I think we'll leave it there. I want to thank our guests for being with us today. I want to thank you for joining us. And we'll see you again next week when my guest will be Dr. Zhang Qin and his wife, Dr. Eugene Chen, coming to us from Gaoshuang in Taiwan. We'll see you then.


Good morning, I'm David Adcona, I'm a PSD student in Insight at DCU and I'm working on education analytics in computer science degrees or in programming contexts in order to help students that are having difficulties with these courses. The non-progression rates in computer science are typically double the average dropout rate in college. We design predictive models in order to predict students at risk using resource aspects logs in a similar way as you are using loop or model and we are using as well programming skills acquired in a weekly basis of what programs students write in this laboratory work they do. The features are fairly simple, programs students write and slide visited in a similar way as a model and we carried out retrospective analysis in DCU in programming one and programming two courses taught at the start of the degree in computer science where there are around 150 students and at the moment we are running real-time predictions on them and I think they are doing at this time the lab exam, the last one so hopefully my predictions work well or they do well and everybody passes, okay. And so what opportunities and challenges do we have here at the moment there is a skills gap in Ireland and a high demand from graduates in the ICT sector. Our predictive models have proven to work well with significant lab work or programs and we are offering as well personalized feedback or some kind of recommendations for those students which are being taken at the moment. In terms of the challenges as you probably know gathering data from different sources at university is a real challenge, it's a long and tedious process, you have to get the progress from different committees and students also come with low math and living cert entry points and that's a real challenge because those students don't perform well in programming and math related courses and as well programming is not that easy and only a few students find it easy at first. Those next steps we are going to take, I'm combining different data sources like Philips location data, academic history, demographics from the students in order to help those students early on in the semester as Emma from UCD was mentioning to identify the students at an early stage so we are able to help them faster. We are also looking at other courses, programming in second year and math related ones and program wise as well we want to identify who are the dropouts in computer science. We are applying different data mining and machine learning techniques as well like the recommendations we are tailoring from higher performing students in the class that are recommending programs automatically to at risk students that might keep them more motivated. So that's it, thanks very much.


We learned about two types of particles in the last video, leptons and hadrons. Remember, the strong and weak forces act on hadrons, only the weak force acts on leptons. In this video, we'll learn more about these classes of particles, and begin to learn about some of their key properties. We'll start with leptons. These are fundamental point-like particles, which basically means we can't break them up into smaller constituents. There are six leptons in total, which happen to fall into two categories, charged and uncharged. The charged leptons are the electron, the muon, and the tauon. All of these have a charge of minus one. The uncharged leptons are all neutrinos. The electron neutrino, the muon neutrino, and the tauon neutrino. Up until recently, we thought these particles were massless. As it turns out, they're not quite massless, but this is the story for another time. At this stage, you might be wondering why the names of these uncharged leptons are so uncreative. Well, there's a reason for this name association. If you recall a nuclear beta decay, you might have some idea why. In a nuclear beta decay process, you have something like this, where carbon-14 transforms into nitrogen-14 by basically changing a neutron into a proton. That reaction also comes with the formation of an electron and an anti-electron neutrino. Or the other alternative, fluorine-18 becomes oxygen-18, so it changes a proton into a neutron and also produces a positron and an electron neutrino in the process. The electron anti-neutrino and the electron are both reaction products in the first beta decay process, while the electron neutrino and the positron are reaction products in the second beta decay process. Basically, whenever we produce an electron or positron, we'll also produce either an electron anti-neutrino or an electron neutrino in the process. The same kind of pattern is observed for the other charged leptons. Their production only occurs with the production of an associated anti-neutrino. And as a corollary, the production of charged anti-leptons is associated with the production of an associated neutrino. We know the neutrinos and anti-neutrinos are different because of how they react with matter. Each type of neutrino or anti-neutrino leads to distinct reaction outcomes, which we'll discuss in a bit. Because of this, we say each lepton and its associated neutrino is a family. Unlike electrons, the muon first discovered in 1936 by Carl Anderson, who also happened to have discovered the positron, if you'll recall, and his colleague Seth Nettermeyer, is unstable. So the muon decays in this way, and its antiparticle decays in the opposite way. So the muon decays by producing a muon neutrino, an electron, and an anti-electron neutrino. It has a pretty short lifetime of about 2.2 microseconds. The anti-muon decays by emitting the anti-muon neutrino, a positron, and an electron neutrino. The tauon first discovered in the mid-1970s by Martin Perle and his colleagues at Stanford Linear Accelerator Center is the heaviest of the leptons, about 3,500 times the mass of an electron, and is also unstable, with a mean lifetime of 2.96 times 10 to the minus 13 seconds. It actually has a lot of different decaying modes, which we're not going to summarize here, but they all follow the same kind of pattern we've just seen for the case of the electron and the muon. So the pattern to these decay or reaction processes can be summarized like this. For every lepton that's produced, an associated anti-neutrino is produced. For every anti-lepton that's produced, an associated neutrino is produced. For every lepton that decays, an associated neutrino is produced. And for every anti-lepton that decays, an associated anti-neutrino is produced. So when I say associated neutrino or anti-neutrino, I mean the neutrino or anti-neutrino that belongs to the same family as that charged lepton or anti-lepton. Okay, so what does this pattern potentially mean? Well, let's take muon decay, for example, and make up a quantum number associated with each lepton family. For each family, the lepton in that family gets a plus one and the anti-lepton gets a minus one. So if you do that for muon decay, what you'll see is on the left side, you have a plus one for the muon family. On the right side, you also have a plus one for the muon family. You also have a plus one for the electron and a minus one for the anti-electron neutrino. So in this reaction, the lepton number for each lepton family is conserved. As it turns out, all the reactions that involve leptons follow this rule. So this leads to our first new conservation law. In any reaction, the lepton number for each lepton family must be conserved. This conservation law is in addition to the conservation laws we've already learned, either in this module and previous ones. So that's conservation of charge, conservation of linear and angular momentum, and conservation of energy. In physics, a conservation law is something we found to be true over and over and over again in many different experiments. If we were to find a reaction that seemed to violate one of these conservation laws, we would, of course, reexamine it.


Next question. What were the questions asked in the interview? Did you get any specific questions? They want to know if you're right fit for the job, right? Because they're really concerned, like, will you be able to work with kids? Do you know how to work with kids? Are you patient? Do you know how to play with them? Do you know how to calm them down? Do you know how to solve problems? Do you know how to make sure that your classroom is safe, right? Because you have to understand that the industry, one of the major concerns, like forget about the English, the first concern everyone has in China, like when it comes to early childhood education, is safety, right? Safety is number one, right? So when parents send their kids to training center or to grade one or to kindergarten, they want to make sure the child is safe. That's it, right? So they do ask a lot of questions about how are you with kids? Like, what do you do? Like, so be prepared, be prepared to tell them story. Yeah, you know what?  And what's the age of the kids you've been working with? Since I've been here, I went anywhere from like toddlers, two years to like eight, nine, 10. I did kindergarten, I did primary school, I did middle school. I still combine both, right? Like my primary job right now is kindergarten, so I'm teaching five, six. But I also do grade one or two, grade three on a part-time basis. Yeah. I did some, I did, I did some, I did some training for Air China. It was like a temporal thing, so we did like a flight attendants and stewards, did that to adults. Okay, so it's actually possible to work with adults as well, not only. You can work like oil, gas, the air, you know, the airlines, that's a huge industry. Yeah. And what about some online opportunities? Are there any online teaching jobs in China, like available for people who actually stay somewhere else? There is, but I think this market is a bit overcrowded, right? Because right now, like no, obviously there is not too many in-class teachers. So in a lot of, the market was overcrowded before the pandemic, right? Because you will have a lot of partners from across the globe, right? You have some, I had some friends from states doing that, like, you know, at night time, I had some friends from Italy doing that. And to be honest with you, like, I'm not really interested in online teaching. Like I didn't do a lot of research, but from what I've heard, the wages are not that great, right? But I'm sure there are still opportunities there. Thanks so much for watching. We are ITTT, the leading provider for Teflon TESOL training courses. If you like this video, please subscribe by clicking the button down here and click on any of the videos here on the left for more interesting teaching tips for getting certified to teach English abroad and online.