Welcome to Economics and Beyond. I'm Rob Johnson, president of the Institute for New Economic Thinking. I'm here today with Thomas Ferguson, the research director of INET, and a longtime friend of mine and teacher of mine. He's written many, many books about the relationship between capitalism, money, and politics, not the least of which was the Golden Rule. Tom has been an enormous influence on the direction of INET research, and he's been an enormous influence on my mind since I was before the age of 20. Today, Tom, I want to thank you just for being here and bringing forth your insights. But I really have to tell this audience, and I think they probably already know that you are one of the people who has been most influential in shaping my mind in the direction of my career and my entire life. The focus, I think, in the light of the pandemic, in light of the unmaskings, in light of all of the kinds of loss of trust and faith and governance and expertise that I'd like to explore with you today, Tom, is how money-driven politics creates what our mutual friend from China, Wang Hui at Tsinghua University, has called the crisis of representation and also what we want to do about it. Tom, describe for us in America and beyond what big money does to the political process. All right. Thank you, Rob, although I think I begin by saying, well, I'm honored and humbled by your introduction. Thank you very much. Now, let's talk in general terms and then move into getting ever more specific. What's the basic problem with politics and money? The short answer is this. Everybody sort of walks around with what we might call the representative democracy model in their head. It is drilled into them in high school civics classes and sometimes lower. All reporters seem to have reflexively absorbed it.  And all that stuff is just basically high-tech versions of this simple model in which the population votes. They choose between political parties. Never mind how many they choose from. That's an institutional detail we can worry about some other time. But they choose between political parties and to get your vote, the political parties have to give you what you want or at least some of it. And the people, the guys who win, guys and certainly these days in the last generation, women too in those parties. The suggestion is the logic of the situation. They got to make you an offer that they think you can't refuse if you like. It's just good. And the first time people spell this out, it seems very compelling. I remember when we were being told as young people, that's how far I go back. During the Cold War, well of course the difference between America and Russia is that we have free elections and they don't. And that seemed for a while like it was compelling. But the problem is basically this. The costs of actually trying to wield power over the state are a good deal higher for ordinary people than sort of the democratic theories tend to allow. They treated this as a sort of costless thing. You know what's going wrong. You can sort of figure out in another version of the theory you can at least vote against what you don't like and things like that. But basically it's pretty simple and cheap. Well it's not. That's the basic problem. When you actually look at what people spend in elections, and I would add pretty much everywhere in France, England, the United States, they're actually very costly. That's a warning. And then the question is, alright, how do you raise the money to make these campaigns? And basically I think the proposition is very simple. If the costs of campaigning are relatively high compared to the average incomes for most of the population, they're in trouble. Because they can't raise the money to get somebody out there to be in effect their champion, if I think like that. Almost as though one were hiring an attorney as it were for yourself. If that's expensive, then power is going to pass by default into the hands of the people who really can't afford political parties to pay. And in other words, people with big money. Now before we go another step, you can see right away, this means that there's a really deep relation between the income distribution and political power. I mean Aristotle, not my favorite authority on anything, but he sort of thought that you had to have a middle class for stability. And I noticed that those comments have become ever more popular as the American middle class has disappeared. Aristotle thought you have a middle class or just disappear. Well, in the US and just about every other country now, what you see, thanks to globalization to put it simply, this is after all a podcast and not a three hour lecture. Income inequality is massively increased. And I mean, there is a point and I think we may actually have reached it in the United States where the problem of income inequality is so overwhelming that there isn't much of anything you can do to deal with it. I hope we aren't there, we will talk about it. I know later in the podcast, what do you do about this?  But income inequality is an enormous background condition here. Okay, now then the next step is, all right, you got to understand that there's lots of ways money is important in politics. One of them is campaign contributions. We'll get around to talking about that later. But there's all these other ways money matters and it's important the whole spectrum of political money, if you like, sort of you need to keep in front of you. Here's some simple examples that may like, for example, and it was I think George Stigler at the University of Chicago who first brought this up very nicely. Lots of payments by corporations on rare occasions, labor unions, there are not being too many of those left now. We had 6% of the population organized or something like that in unions in the working population. Employers get paid to do lots of things by companies. Well, the pricing of those services is very hit or miss. I learned this when my wife and I showed up to buy our first house and the guy who showed up to deal for the bank that was making the loan was actually the speaker of the Massachusetts House of Representatives. He was totally stunned and it was then explained to me later. Well, of course, they just give him that service and he collects, you know, some thousands of bucks for just doing it as, you know, 10 or 15 minute signing business.  If you notice these days, for decades now, more and more people who take jobs in the White House, never mind cabinet positions where they have traditionally had to put in some kind of a conflict of interest statement, but lots of folks in the White House and have to file these conflicts of interest statements. And what you find is the most amazing sets of payments. My favorite was one in the Obama administration for a guy there who got paid just under a million of my memory from an investment house in New York to advise them on charity. Now, look, you don't have to be very smart to realize that going right for giving advice on charities is probably not a million bucks. An unsympathetic being like myself would regard that as a bribe there. And at any rate, the thing that strikes me now about American politics is the way they almost nobody gets into anything from any place in near the White House who hasn't gone through that system of betting that sort of sits off there now. I mean, that was true on the Republican side and also on the Democratic side anyway. So that type of subsidy, if you like, hardly gets discussed. Then there we now know, too, that lots of foundations that are set up by companies match grants with the needs of the companies. So some very nice doctoral dissertations on that. I talked to one woman who'd actually written her thesis on that was actually at Harvard. And I turned to her, she decided not to go into political science, but hey, that was a real contribution to political science. Then there is the whole question of lobbying and most forms of lobbying don't even count as political money. Enormous sums of money for a century or more in the US system have been poured into think tanks, which none of this stuff appears as a political contribution ever. And more recently, we have gotten to cases where we have, for example, it's pretty obvious that stock tips at least sometimes are handed to politicians. There's a dispute in the scholarly literature about whether it's all the time or just some cases. I hold a rather dire view of the business, but that doesn't matter. The point is, is that when you study the portfolios of congressmen and women, many of them turn out to get hugely rich. There are not one but several papers suggesting that they grow their portfolios faster than most people. I have to say there is some literature on the other side. But the point is, if you give a stock tip to a politician, we had a case of that with alleged with Senator Burr, not too long ago. Where he was said to be using the inside knowledge he had as a member of the Intelligence Committee. And he went off and sold his portfolios just as the pandemic was breaking. And interestingly, we know he was telling, like I think it's a Tar Heel group down there in North Carolina, quite different from what he was telling people in public. That is to say he was telling contributors and these donors that there really was a pandemic problem. And he was still behind the official line that President Trump was then pushing, which was this is not really something to worry about. That kind of stuff is really difficult to deal with. It is also true that you got lots of foundations, not owned by companies, but just by foundations. And they've got political alliances and some of their cash is often political. And finally, lots of public relations spending is in fact often hidden politics. I remember once when I asked somebody years ago, was in New Jersey a state where political money sort of runs more plentifully than the Delaware River on many days. I said, how are they going to pay this guy? I'd heard about, I said, don't worry, we'll just have him do a documentary for some station later. And I thought, oh, well, that's interesting. I was an impressionable graduate student. I can't claim to be exactly a credulous and innocent graduate student at that point, but I sort of got the point. All of this stuff, in other words, is political money. And that's before we get to formal campaign spending. All right, so we are talking truly enormous sums of cash here, which then you have to sort of connect. Now it does not help with the press that nearly all of the stuff I've been talking about is barely reported. And the other thing that strikes me is we all know that the cost of the recorded costs in terms of political campaigning have risen hugely over time. Not just in nominal sums, but in real sums too. Although, and although implicitly what I'm saying is a lot of the campaign spending is in effect miscount, because it's not recognized as campaign spending, but even the stuff on the record has been growing a lot. So you don't see this reporting. I mean, almost nobody connects any political activities, whatever, with campaign money. They just wring their hands. So it's not surprising that people don't know quite what to think about this. So let's talk about what all this money actually does very straightforwardly. Okay, and here's how I put it. The first thing you got to realize is that most of the voters aren't sitting around thinking necessarily even about their own pocket books. Though if those are squeezed, they jump. I'm not trying to tell you that most people just want cash handed to them by their government. That's I think clearly not true. In fact, I just quite straightforwardly accept the empirical research that people vote on a whole range of issues there. What that says though is that if you're trying to get elected, you need to appeal to people on a range of issues. And so you need money to do it. Now, let's talk about then what about the cash? And how does it work? Well, here's the really important point, I think, is the big money distorts the entire pattern of political competition between political parties. It distorts it in this way. It means that if they're the only thing you can campaign to get the only kind of campaign pitch you can make is one that you can finance. That point is enormously important. Maybe I just repeated, you know, only campaign appeals that can be financed can be made. Now, that means that you need some block of contributors to want to have something to happen. Now, you could do that. Bernie Sanders did it. Elizabeth Warren to a considerable extent, I think, did it by trying to appeal just to small donors. That's not the way most people put their campaigns together in American politics. You don't have to have the whole business community behind you, but you do need a big chunk of some important segment of it. Now, you'd say, so what? All right, so can't you just compete versus parts of the business community? Yes, exactly. That's in fact been my sort of point about campaign spending for agents that don't think of this as the people versus business. Think of it as blocks of investors on both sides in political parties. Now, what does that mean? It means this is that if you have issues, say taxes, you could which taxes hit something big like big expenditure like Medicare for all, for example, if you have a tax question or property rights question or question about social spending. If nobody in the business community is willing to pick that up, there isn't going to be any campaign bill around it, not by anybody. I mean, I think you get a really wonderful and clear example of this in the Medicare for all debate.  You'd have to sort of invoke to explain it on both reporters and I think scholars. It's pretty obvious that Medicare for all or some scheme like that is obviously a much better way to do health care. The only reason this can't get through Congress is because of the massive dead weight of political money in both political parties holding it up. That's really, I think, a very clear cut case. Similarly, tax reform is clearly blocked by political money. Now the tax issue in the last generation because of the enormous pressures to cut taxes has affected everything. Look, it turned the American education system from a very strong system that actually was giving more and more citizens access to not just K through 12, but higher ed. It turned it into a system in which more and more people are just shut out because they as a after a succession of economic crisis beginning in the 70s. These states cut way back on public education, public higher ed. They squeeze K through 12, although some a good deal of that's financed locally, but poor neighborhoods, poor areas cannot do those financing. So states have to do something else. You know, some states have done something, but the bottom line is in any case where you need public goods, you know, where the states got to actually do something. And not just sit there and smile while the invisible hand operates. You usually need some money. So what you're sitting around in a world in effect where big money blocks nearly everything in the sense of a negative interest group on something happening. And that's this is really critical. It's not a it's the problem in the American system right now. I mean, the systems virtually paralyzed at every level, you know, not only from dealing with COVID, but in in education in the medical care in taxation. This is really all a problem in political money, and it hits both political parties. It's perfectly obvious that the leadership in both parties not only takes large sums of big money, but then they have to go campaign on something else. Now, in fact, let's just talk about this for a second. What are political campaigns look like in a world in which you have big money on both sides blocking basic appeals to interests of the population as a whole? Well, you know what that is. They've got to find a lot a host of other issues to campaign on. I mean, I sort of got this point when I began to ask myself, why am I hearing so much about stuff? Nobody really cares about like the ethnic origins of candidates as they struggle up from the farm or whatever to become whatever they are. I mean, in these political speeches, what's with the 4th of July speech, in effect, which is sort of famously contentless? In fact, maybe I just might be telling for a joke, there is a famous, I guess, true story where Boise Penrose, who was the boss of the Pennsylvania Republican Party, he was asked by a string of reporters, what's the issue going to be for the next presidential election, Boise? And Boise thought about it for a minute and he said, Americanism. And they said, well, what's that? He said, I don't know, but it's going to be the issue. That actually is sort of perfect. I mean, much political rhetoric is just about anything but what the population wants to hear about. Or it's hitting hot buttons on stuff some parts of it want to hit about. That's the next step in this. You get a lot of bland crap, 4th of July stuff. And then you also get, particularly when times get difficult, people start to preach plain old hate. I'm sorry to say. I don't know that we need to get very specific right now. I can't say it's so obvious that you don't have to be Hannah Harrant to know that alliances between the mob and capital to use her famous phrase happen a lot. But my point is, is that campaigns get both stupid and nasty, mainly as a device to avoid talking about issues that people actually want to talk about and care about. So how does big money affect the political system? It fills your airwaves, if you like, mostly with nonsense. But depending on whether times are basically benevolent or difficult, it can fill them with a lot of really hateful and spiteful stuff. Because you've got to find something that grabs people. We now have memoirs or notebooks from Alderman and Ehrlichman Mix and Aid there. And they were very clearly trying to tie drugs with people they didn't like, which were partly what they thought of as hippies, protesting students, but also with black Americans. And they're perfectly clear about it in private. In that sense, the whole war on drugs scheme in the Nixon administration, as my colleague and occasional co-author, Peter Temmin, just wrote very nicely, just recently in an Inet working paper. It was certainly aimed at getting folks who might vote Republican to think, well, that blacks aid the cities or aid to anything else was really all about crime and helping people who didn't deserve it. That type of appeal, I was pretty amazed when Ben Page and I and several other people, Ji Chen, Arturo Chang, Jacob Rothschild, we wrote this paper that came out just recently on Trump's election. And you could see when you were going through the American National Election Survey data, the way that stuff on Obamacare, issues on Obamacare come out suddenly correlated with stuff that on race. And it's very clear the Republicans, I think Michael Tesla who made the point first in an article in the some political science journal, it's very clear that Republican opposition to Obamacare was deliberately racialized. It shows immediately when you start looking at the data, which is, I mean, I've never seen a pattern like because I was sitting there with Jacob Rothschild and I were trying to sort of make sense of some of this stuff. And then it became very obvious that Tesla was right. It really is that racialized. Well, anyway, the point is big money politics doesn't just show as talking about greed. It's talking about all the other stuff that you mostly you hear. Let me bridge in here and ask you some questions, because I remember, and I'm sure you do too that we were planning our conference in Detroit on race and inequality, the city where I grew up. That's right. And the conference was roughly three days after the election. And on the morning of Election Day, I went into a building and saw a man who was a security guard who used to work in the building where my father was a physician. And I said, I asked him, what do you think about this election? And he looked at me and he said, Mr. Johnson, when there's nothing on the menu at the restaurant, nobody eats. And he looked at him and he said, everybody's going to stay home.  But the Clintons are remembered for NAFTA, they're for criminal justice reform, for welfare reform. His point of view was Hillary Clinton hasn't even come to Michigan since she lost to Bernie Sanders in the primary. And so, but he was he was exactly right when you looked at the data that whether Democrats or Republicans are least worst in some sense, in absolute, they were all bad. The relative to Obama's reelection in 2012 and 2016 voter turnout in Detroit was down 122,000. Now you're talking about a population, not voter registration of under 800,000 in the city proper. 122,000 down. I think Trump won the state where the outstate tends to be Republican by something in the neighborhood of 13,000 votes net. So I guess what I'm asking you is, when this mask of obfuscation and issues, or when things are blocked that are public goods that are necessary, and the public becomes demoralized, it tends to what you might call increase the license or feed the license of that big money. And like you've said, Warren Sanders and others appealed to small donors with an agenda that they could recognize and want. But it obviously money is important because neither of them prevailed, despite the enthusiasm that they engendered. So I guess, I guess. You want to talk about the dynamics between Democrats and Republicans. Yeah, please. Yeah. Yeah, let's put it this way. I think the question is perfect. What the Democrats have tended to do is run a kind of top-bottom coalition, where the top is almost always somebody hugely favoring globalization, free trade, and related issues. And then they would try to mobilize horror folks and labor unions. And they would do it, in effect, on the vestiges of the New Deal, on the sort of Shesha cat quality of the Democratic Party, which when you can see this, when you actually read thousands of interviews, interview data in the American National Election Survey, open into questions, and you can see people actually lamenting, oh, the Democrats used to stand for something. Back in the New Deal, when labor unions were something like a third of the, well, they didn't, I think their peak was actually in the very early 50s, but we'll just, around 32 or so percent of the population working in, were in unions. That's dropped back to now six or eight, depending on how you count, never mind. The unions are weak now, and big money is, and it is much bigger, put it simply. And so the Democratic Party, you know, in the 80s and 90s, my Joel Rogers and I wrote a book called Right Turn, it was all about that. The old Democratic appeal got weaker and weaker, and because the fiscal constraints were just too tight. I mean, you could see like when Obama and the administration did not help states at anywhere near the level they should have in 2011, 2012, that was just nuts. And they got the lowest turn, they got enormously lower voter turnout in the midterm election in 2014, I think partly because of that. But the point is, yeah, the Democratic appeal got weaker and weaker to ordinary people. And a lot of people, as they looked at the way Wall Street was rescued, but Main Street wasn't under Obama. By 2016, a lot of people were really, really unhappy. And so Trump came along promising not to cut Social Security and to make America great again. And yeah, he was certainly running on race and very clearly running on anti-woman program. But there were a lot of desperate people out there. And, you know, what we found in our piece, which is, that piece is easy to find in two places. One is, you know, it was first an INAT research paper, so it's right up on the INAT website. And then it's just out in the International Journal of Political Economy, the public's version. This is with Ben Page, G-Chen and others?  Yeah, but the, we actually walked through, we built a sample. Wait, not sample, we took everybody they had, who had a question. They had a question in there on who'd you vote for in 2012, or did you? And so you could track people who'd been for Obama and changed, who had not voted and voted for Trump. Or, you know, change the other way. And what you could see is lots of these folks who had decided just not to vote this time around. They were saying things like, I just don't see a difference between the major parties. And they, this does emerge quite clearly in our data. Yeah, no, the, what you've got here in America right now are two top down led political parties. And sort of making mild appeals on the mildest form of redistribution has been the Democratic staple. And as things have just gotten worse and worse, that stuff looks like, you know, offering you band-aids as you're losing both legs. And the Republicans, you know, Trump's appeal in 2016, yes, it was certainly misogynistic and racial. No question about it. It was also very clearly, I will fix the economy.  And many other issues where the sort of, now, this is how best to put this, my opinion. It's pretty obvious that large chunks of the government are hugely disorganized, sometimes quite deliberately, often in the name of laissez-faire.  But, you know, that's going to, because of the COVID problem, that's going to cost them heavily. It may well cost them the election. But then we're going to have the question of what's the Democratic Party going to do. Right now, and it is perfectly obvious that despite all of the talk about saving Main Street, the financial markets have done well. You know, lists of the Forbes 400 richest Americans show many of them getting richer. I mean, there are people who report to monitor this. I have a few doubts, but basically I don't dispute it. But the average human is pretty badly off. Unemployment rate is astronomical. We just fell off the fabled fiscal cliff, meaning much of that direct aid to people is at the moment, nowhere. It's suspended and maybe they'll get another bill out and maybe they won't.  Trump in 2016 came out and said, the system is rigged. That was like his bumper sticker. So that at some level before he mowed down 15 Republicans and then beat Secretary of State Clinton in the final election, he was appealing to people's awareness that the system was corrupt. Now, maybe his diagnosis was good. It doesn't seem he's prescribed any remedies, but I guess that's your and my job. So how do you see if you want a system that produces those public goods, creates a balance in the income and wealth distribution? You might call alleviates Aristotle's anxiety. What kind of reforms are absolutely necessary to put us in that direction? Okay, I'm going to talk about specific political measures in a minute, but I will just lay it straight out. You can't go on as you have with any quality just increasing massively over time. I think we actually are at the fabled tipping point where it can easily pass into a completely oligarchic system. And you could keep the trappings of democracy. I mean, I have a lot of trouble with all the books walking around claiming fascism, although sometimes when I read recent news, even I wonder about that. But in fact, we're not seeing the type of things that happened in Germany, say in the 20s and early 30s where you have private armies contesting in the streets. You don't have that in the United States, but you do have the democratic forms being exhausted. And it is just the case you look at it. When you get, for example, corporations, this is nicely documented in the case of some of the high tech companies in the big platform companies where they are donating to hundreds of think tanks. And scholars. And the reporting is hit or miss. You know, it came out the other day that for heaven's sake, they had up a thermal Arnold project at Yale, suddenly releases that while she was in fact working with several of the big platform companies. And I and others thought that was utterly ridiculous. And you talk about the Silicon Valley tech companies, big internet platforms. Yes. And I mean, this is tough because of the way the both and reporters, you know, are under enormous pressure. The media is shrinking for lots of reasons. And, you know, among industries that have been well wrecked by the growth of the big platforms. Certainly journalism.  Oh, when was that six, five or six months ago, I forget where something like I read a little item, something like 1500 journalistic jobs in various online media companies were all eliminated in New York City in a single day or two. And, you know, the journalism, I've never been a fan of the American press all of the things we've been talking about in the last 30 or 40 minutes, but none of this stuff happens if the press does its job. But, you know, we'll come to the press in a bit. That's another form of public good. Yes. When you're essentially dependent on private advertising as your means to sustain your company. There is what you might call a tendency to do marketing for them rather than what you might call analysis on behalf of the public. That's what I called in Golden Rule, the black hole theorem. That is to say there's just nobody out there in the in the for profit media that necessarily covers the things you need covered. It's exactly like political parties. The other thing we can add is that as media shrinks, the main what the main papers will speak of them as papers even if they're online. tend to concentrate more and more on the needs and interests of their upper income readers. And that that's very marked in the case of the New York Times or the Financial Times or other stuff and they just, I'm not happy with that stuff, but we'll come back to the media question. Anyway, so you're going to have to do something about income inequality and if you don't, you can probably forget democracy. Now, what would you do to actually stop all of this nonsense or at least a good deal of it? Well, frankly, I think there's one thing that stands out above everything else, which is you have simply absolutely got to have public funding of campaigns. Now, the standard article, the standard objection on this is, wait a minute, why are we making the public pay for campaigns? The important answer is this is a classic, very expensive good and either the citizenry as a whole is going to pay or a few people are going to pay. And, you know, where public corporations really hate public funding, they just even some public funding. I think the evidence of the states that have mild public funding small amounts of stuff is that you get a better system out of it. And I've certainly had legislative representatives say to me, like, well, it means I don't have to spend all my time fundraising, which sometimes unfortunately the unhappy comeback is just lots of it. Well, anyway, public funding is what you need on this thing. And yeah, you would screen out nuts. That's not a serious problem, I think. Now, you can raise the question about the Supreme Court might my check. If the Supreme Court gets in the way, well, you know, Supreme Court is fundamentally going to have to follow the populations thing in the long run, I think I don't favor the kind of public funding sometimes proposed I've seen it. Why don't we ban corporations from funding and leave it to just rich individuals, you know what the problem is there is obvious. I think that's the same type of nonsense you get, especially Democratic Party candidates, or saying things like well, I don't take Pacman, but they take very large sums from individual corporate executives or, you know, 4400 members. Not to mention the fact that wealthy people are invested in the stock market. So they may be advocating for their portfolio. Yeah, so that happens. I regret to say a great deal at the time. Anyway, so it without public funding, you've got to get money out of politics but you know then there's still the problem of all those other forms of political money. I talked about earlier, you know the business of the lawyers payments to political figures foundation grants and things like that. A lot of that stuff you could fix with better disclosure rules, you know, the, not all of it, but a good deal of it the Federal Election Commission is completely unserious. And yet you have now this dark money business where you can be basically setting up what's formally supposed to be a charity. It isn't it's really a totally political pass through or you drop the cash in. They don't have to report where they got it. They do have to report where they spend it but you don't know where it's coming from and so called dark money is a huge thing in the system. And besides raining in dark money, you're going to have to pay people in the government better. I don't mean make them millionaires, but like here for I have for example in mind the following. You know, one thing that Newt Gingrich did when he came into Congress was to make it much harder for aides to congressional aides to qualify for pensions. The idea, if they work there for years, the idea was to make them get out of Congress after a few years and go to work in the private sector. You need to stop that revolving door business at every level. And in particular, I would not allow a Fed chairman or indeed anybody from a high level government position. I just wouldn't allow him for like three or four years to do anything for any business that had anything to do with what they did. You really need the revolving door problem is just crazy because it's become, I mean, look, when Bernanke left the Fed, my memory on this is like within a week or two he was giving speeches for enormous sums. I mean, it doesn't, these guys know that that will happen and nobody has to say anything. I remember doing a radio program with a guy who was later convicted of bribing representatives and are taking money to to, he was actually putting congressional aid to put stuff in bills. And he just said, you know, these guys, when I was outside, I could give, I talked to congressional aides and they could do more for me while they were still formally on the staff. And then when they came over to lobby, and you've got to break that chain, revolving doors, public funds, much better reporting and some absolute bands on the conversion of, you know, if you go out of the system. You know, you can't work for bank if you left the Fed, you can't consult for anybody for three or four years, go do something else, and then pay people if necessary accordingly so that they can reasonably expect to make a living but they're not badly paid at the top of the Federal Reserve. I mean, you and I published that piece, that graph where we graphed the opportunity cost of doing good. Yeah, that was the highest Federal salaries against what you could make by leaving to go to work for, I think our example at the time was Wall Street, you would now add Silicon Valley.  One of the major platform companies hired a British minor party politician, you know, to run their public affairs. I mean, was that was that Nick Clegg at Facebook? Yes. Yeah. Yes. Yeah.  And if you got a break back, if you don't, you are not going to be able to get the, but fundamentally, I am, I have some considerable sympathy for the view that, you know, big money will find ways to support. Yes. So public funding, I mean, come back to the case for public funding as being very important, because it really means that a candidate who doesn't want to take large sums of money to just, you know, the amount piece can actually run and can talk to the voters. That's why that's so important. You can see, I think you can see some traces of this already. You could see how the tenor of American public life changed during the Democratic primaries, in the sense that suddenly Sanders and Warren and a few other folks, local races sometimes too. You know, the convention of the American media has for decades been, you just ignore most everybody with anything that looks particularly radical as a proposal in the prime that that conflicts with their other norm, which you should cover the primary candidates at least a little bit. And so you can see how the public discourse changes for a while. And I think that that's when you get some sense of what, you know, a little public funding to put a candidate like that up there would do if you had a whole system on that. And at this point, it really needs to be emphasized in the local elections in the United States. It's really, I think you're looking at a really catastrophic situation. And why? Because nobody covers local election financing. And I mean, usually doesn't even get reported until it almost doesn't matter or completely after it doesn't matter. That's one problem. But in the local elections, it's very, very easy for companies now. That's the one place I think where Citizens United really does make a big difference. I can just go in and write a check. Now, I'm not people wildly exaggerate the impact of Citizens United. The reason for that is is the even the McCain fine gold reform bill made it very easy to go outside the political party system to give a huge amount, give huge amounts of money. I mean, you're looking at a system here that is really disastrous. And in many, many cases, in local politics is the point I want to emphasize. Since I went to graduate school in Princeton, I used to talk to some of the neighbors. And one of the neighbors was a top exec for Monsanto at the time. And, you know, George Ball, who didn't live that far down all that far from us. And he just laughed because Ball, who was a famous Democrat, would vote Republican in the local elections. And my point is, is that for a large number of local elections, you often have no opposition to what is effectively a just total deregulatory agenda, what you might identify with the Republican Party in the last 30 years, even on the Democratic Party. So there's almost nobody there. If you have a union around, maybe, but you don't have many unions. And in many states, there's almost no union organization at all. And I suspect that that's part of where the teachers unions related to public schools came under attack. Yeah, I would add that, you know, unions, I mean, I was a union official for quite some time when I was in a university. I actually made the decision, as I knew my boss would support me to recognize a union. There aren't many people around who can say that there. But, you know, unions can also abuse their position. I think somebody needs to say that cleanly. In some cases, it happens.  And you need a lot more of it in American politics. Well, I see how do you say many different channels here, focusing on the press to provide scrutiny. Yeah, we haven't talked about the press. One I want to ask you about, Tom, is that campaign funding is used to buy media time. But both radio, television, these are public licenses. Why are they not asked to allocate some of their bandwidth in election years for public service announcements among politicians and reduce the price of running in a campaign? Well, I think, historically in the United States, they didn't have to do that. They did have that much weaker, very different fairness requirement, which meant that if you actually did an open political thing, you had to give your opponent Equal time. Now, the way the papers dealt with that is they decided the news, the broadcast stations, if you were in the news, that wasn't part of that. They didn't do political stuff. But that was abolished in the mid, what, late 70s, early 80s. Under the plea, I'm not making this up.   They should have to do that. I completely agree on the press. I am extremely diffident about telling, laying down government mandates for the press. I really think that's very tricky, but I don't see a problem with telling them, yeah, they're going to have to make a whole blocks of time. I mean, other countries do sometimes do that in France, at least in parts of Simon and in Italy, but that system is very weird. They had the various networks belong with various parties. Now, I think a good chunk of the public airwaves should, after all, be controlled by the public and election campaigns. And the other thing I would be willing to do is given the new era of platform capitalism where you have, you know, Google and Facebook and company. I think the monitoring of this stuff is too hard to do, at least at the moment. That is to say, they can say they don't favor one side, but you can't check it. I'm quite okay with just banning ads for much, which is not that much money for those folks anyway, are political messages of all types in the finals in the, at least, much of a campaign. They have a real problem with platform capitalism because while they'll claim to be even handed, it's just almost uncheckable. You can't tell if they are, in fact, slamming, say, Facebook messages or not. Facebook actually did some experiments on that. They were reported and found out they couldn't move votes and they say they don't do it. I hope they're right, but the lesson I learned from the some years of trying to find out what was actually going on in Facebook and various campaigns is you can't trust them. That the monitoring of online stuff is a separate threat to democracy that needs to be sort of separately discussed. And that's before you get to questions about foreign country interventions and things like that. I guess I better say a word on that. The big problem with claims that it's really all the Russians or the Chinese or the Iranians or the North Koreans, or whatever that sort of put all this misinformation out is it's just obvious that the great bulk of misinformation in campaigns is made in America. I think that Benkler et al. study that came out from, it's a Harvard study that just shows you that the great bulk of misinformation, say, from the right wing in the 2016 election was coming from domestic sources. And all these guys who make a big pitch about all the foreign stuff, they don't control adequately for that stuff. And the question I all my colleagues and I took a look at whether we could get a specific Facebook effect on the voting that because in 2016 Facebook was clearly the ticket I think for what would have been a big influence. And you can actually do that with the American National Election Survey you can find out who's a Facebook person and not. It's not a perfect system for identifying but it's very it's perfectly good for the purpose I think we could never find it. And when you add our equations predicting the look at it in Facebook wouldn't work. And, you know, that doesn't mean that something couldn't go wrong if somebody were really trying. And that's why I think this question needs a much wider it's a separate podcast actually. Well, finally, one other thing that you talked about was the revolving door and you and I did that paper for the first inet conference on the den a jar that referred to that. What is the case for not having a revolving door, but actually training funding and paying senior public servants so that they don't have to appeal to those, what you might call sources of future income or wealth to have their kids be educated and have a proper retirement. Shouldn't we, I mean, it's, I don't know a lot about it, but I understand in Singapore, public servants are paid much much higher than they are in the United States. Would that not help correct some of these problems. It certainly would. Though, where I get slightly nervous about this discussion is, you could see in college presidents in the 1990s, the pioneer was John Silver and a protege of his at Delta University, where they decided they ought to be paid like CEOs, and their CEOs on their board, really thought that was great because they sort of assuring themselves about kindred spirit running the place. You got to really reign in inequality in general. And yeah, I would add, you need, you know, your basic public goods like education and transportation need to be very cheaply affordable or in many cases free. That seems to me still just exactly the way to go. But then yeah, once you sort of do something so that I don't favor paying public servants like CEOs, I'd like to compress the CEOs. I'm not telling you everybody has to be equal. Well, last time I looked, the fabled ratios of average workers to CEOs or something like 450 at one point I think it was 650 it bounces with the market. And, you know, Mike, for all I know it might be a mere 380 this, this second, or something like that. I take is, you know, I think you should be able to live with 50 or 100 to one. Well, Tom, any final thoughts coming down to the homestretch here, you've covered a lot of what's wrong and a lot of ways in which you would address what to do about it in the realm of money politics. I would caution against it actually I can hardly almost not believe I'm saying this but it's true. But it's not as though you can't do anything about this. Now, public funding, strict disclosure, closing the revolving door, these are institutional pressures. These are institutional measures that you can take that really would work.  It didn't. But it was a great better it was a great deal of improvement over what you had in the gilded age.  If you look at gilded age, the way in reform politics in the progressive period work was usually found some local politicians, governors, mayors, wherever, who would actually run against machines but also sometimes against big donors. What you now have in American politics is the nationalization of politics in which the National Party leaderships effectively get auctioned off to donors. Meaning there's like in the Democrats actually had a full system kind of like a serious catalog what what the price would be more how much did you have to raise for the party and raise money from yourself from your other members. I mean, that is to say people when they abolish the seniority system in Congress, it was said to be a reform. Well, it will quickly led to members soliciting cash are also giving cash to other members to get selected. And then they donors came in to and then guys like Gingrich and then the Democrats in on the Republican side and then the Democrats copied the system. The National Party leaders basically became the heads of a pyramid of cash which they could give out there and then you get this sort of heavy interaction at the national level between the donors and the National Party leadership there. Now, what that's tended to do is make everybody all the way down the line quite dependent on sort of funds coming in from outside. Well, Tom, I want to say again, with your books like Hidden Election, like right turn like the Golden Rule, and your relentless work on understanding the structure and incentives of our political system and our political economy. You are an enormous provider of public goods. And I admire your courage.  And thank you for being here today. And as you said, right after the election when they're going to put something together again I think you and I should regroup and do another session looking forward and exploring the kind of vision we would like to see implemented by the next administration. But thanks for being here today, Tom. Thank you for having me. And may I just note that in the last few years a lot of my work's done with Paul Jorgensen and G. Chen. And they deserve a lot of the credit too. I agree. I agree. Thanks. We'll talk again soon. Bye bye. And check out more from the Institute for New Economic Thinking at InetEconomics.org.


I'm going to use sticks to call, but I want you to just give me a quick fist of five to show me five as I feel really comfortable and ready to share a connection between these books. And remember, we go all the way down to, I'm not ready with an answer just yet. So just give me a fist of five in front of you because it's between you and I. And that will help me decide as I pull these sticks out if I'm going to just slip it back in for later on. Owen, would you share with us please, Owen, I want you to share with us please one connection or similarity of these books. They both had to work really hard to get the education and power of learning. They sure did, didn't they? Thank you, Owen, for sharing that thought for me. Show those fist of fives back up again one more time.


That concludes the debate on standing orders temporary rule change proxy voting pilot. It is now time to move on to the next item of business, and the next item of business is an urgent question. If a member wishes to seek to ask a supplementary question, they should press the request and speak button during the question or enter the letters RTS in the chat function. I call Michael Marra. To ask the Scottish Government what its response is to reported claims that there was a cover-up in relation to the publication of the Royal College of Physicians report into breast cancer care in NHS Tayside. I reject claims that there was a cover-up in relation to the publication of the RCP report as NHS Tayside has already publicly stated. They were made aware of an error in the first version of the redacted report, which was published on the website. As soon as they were made aware of this error, it was corrected and the report was published on the NHS website. What has been to use Michael Marra's words covered up is the report author's names in line with data protection. The rest of the report, of course, is completely unchanged. There is obviously nothing in GDPR regulations that mandates the removal of authors of reports, to say otherwise as Arran nonsense. It is vital that we know the authors, as this is the second report on this issue, to be hobbled by conflicts of interest. The names were removed after that conflict of interest was put to NHS Tayside. On whose authority did this happen? Who ordered that the names of the authors of the report be hidden from the public? The greatest respect that Michael Marra should be putting those questions to NHS Tayside should be getting a satisfactory response. There is a lot that I deal with and manage throughout my day. I do not busy myself with redactions of reports from the NHS health boards. That is a job for them to do in relation to their own GDPR practices. Of course, if Michael Marra wishes to question that, he absolutely should. What I was busy doing yesterday was meeting with the clinicians in the breast cancer service when I was at nine wells, talking to them for a good hour and a half, engaging with them about the service, not looking back, because there have been a number of independent reviews and investigations, but all of us, including the clinicians around that table, are interested in looking forward in addressing some of the workforce challenges that the breast cancer service in particular is facing, and that is where my focus will be. Surely the cabinet secretary accepts that there has to be confidence in those reports issued about this critical service, particularly given that reports have previously been withdrawn. That report that we are discussing was just days ago the principal defence that the First Minister used in questions from the Labour Party regarding that service. Now the report is falling apart. There is no data in the report on dosage or any scientific citations on dosage, on consent issues that contradicts David Dunlop, NHS Tayside and the General Medical Council. It references standard dosage and nice guidelines. They do not apply in Scotland of course, but even if they did, the guideline cited do not even contain any guidance on standard dosage as the report claims. The First Minister last week told Labour that she would reflect on the case and decide if an independent inquiry would happen. Surely that case is now made beyond all reasonable doubt. Will the cabinet secretary back an inquiry today? No, I am not backing a public inquiry today. Michael Marra is not unusually indulging in some element here of hyperbole to describe the report as falling apart because some author's names have been redacted. I do not think that it is an accurate description of what has happened. There are genuine questions, I should say, and I do not fault Michael Marra on the slightest or indeed others for asking about the breast cancer service in Tayside. I think that there are genuine questions around the workforce, around the sustainability of that workforce, and I can give him chapter and verse on what Tayside and the Government have been doing to support that workforce. Accusations of cover-up and conspiracy when the reality is far more benign in relation to data protection, as NHS Tayside has said. I do not think that we do this very important issue at the justice that it deserves. Michael Marra would like to meet me. I am more than happy to do so. I am happy to go through the issues that he has raised in the chamber, some of the concerns that have been raised via clinicians that he knows that were involved in the service, via patients in Dundee. I am happy to have that conversation with him, but I do not think that we can say that the independent investigations—a number of independent investigations—have all fallen apart because some author's names have been redacted. In June, I called on you to release a buried report into allegations of bullying at NHS Tayside oncology. A second report into Tayside cancer services has been redacted and seems not to have enough detail within it. A public inquiry is needed now more than ever to restore clinicians and patients' faith in the department. Does the cabinet secretary recognise that transparency is a huge issue, not just in our NHS, but across SNP secret Scotland? Will he commit to a public inquiry? I think that Sandra Scohani, with that last comment that he makes about making a political party political issue, really just exposes his motivations around this. As opposed to the motivation being the patients and the breast cancer service, it is just a stick to try to beat the SNP over the head with, which is, as I said, betraying his real motivations. What I would say to Dr Sandra Scohani is that there have been three other published reviews into this issue, the Healthcare Improvement Scotland report in April 2019, the Scottish Government's immediate review group that reported thereafter and the independent advisory group. Now we have, of course, the RCP report. We talked about redaction. It is really important to be clear what has been redacted in NHS Tayside. I think that this is in relation to data protection law. I will question that, as Michael Marra has asked me to do. He is also free, of course, to pursue that with NHS Tayside. What has been redacted is the names of the authors, but all those reviews and reports have similar findings in relation to the clinical practice at that time. My relentless effort in relation to the breast cancer service, in particular to the cancer service more generally, is not to necessarily look back because reviews have been done. It is to look forward and see how I can support that service with the workforce that it requires. One report without right experts with no evidence references. Another report withdrawn because of a conflict of interest. Findings contradicted by experts made up numbers, patients confused, relatives of patients who have passed away confused and oncologists feeling under attack. The cabinet secretary must understand that none of this is going to go away. For the sake of the service, there must be an independent inquiry. Why cannot he agree to that? I do not know whether Willie Rennie has done this. He may well have done so. I have met with the clinicians on a number of occasions, as recently as yesterday. Yes, he is absolutely right that there has been a number of reviews. People will question those reviews. Some will disagree with their findings, some will agree with their findings. What I think is exceptionally important, having done those, and I stress this word, independent reviews over a number of years now, is so important not to look backwards but to look forward in terms of how we support that service. There are genuine challenges with the breast cancer service and the cancer service is generally in Tayside around workforce or in the oncology workforce. I have asked my senior clinicians to do some working on that. I do not think that the imperative is for the Government to look backwards. I think that our focus should be on supporting that service, and that is what I intend to do. Effective recruitment to have an effective workforce is clearly vital to delivering sustainable specialist services in Tayside and across Scotland. Could the cabinet secretary outline how the Scottish Government and health boards, including NHS Tayside, are supporting recruitment to breast cancer services? That is again an important issue in relation to the very, very question around Tayside breast cancer services. I think that workforce is clearly a challenge in oncology. Workforce is clearly a challenge, not just in NHS Tayside. It is a challenge that is faced right across the UK in fact globally, as Emma Harper will know only too well. I know that NHS Tayside has been working exceptionally hard around the workforce issues. I am happy to report the recent appointment of a local consultant in NHS Tayside. That will help to reduce the number of patients around about seven a week having to travel to other cancer centres for treatment. I also asked one of my senior clinicians to chair a national oncology task force. They will be providing and have provided me with some additional solutions and recommendations around the oncology workforce across Scotland. We will take forward those recommendations. We will work closely with Tayside. I know that they are engaged with recruitment agencies right across the UK in fact globally to try to bring as many of expertise, oncology experts, to the service in Tayside. I will keep the member and the chamber updated on that progress. The cabinet secretary will be aware that this is just the latest in a long list of events that call in to question the leadership of NHS Tayside and cause people to question the care that they might receive. That is not good for any of our public services. He has also indicated that he does not think that a public inquiry is necessary. I think that many of us disagree with him. If not an independent investigation, what kind of open, transparent and independent process does he consider necessary to restore people's trust and confidence in the service? There has been independent investigations. She has asked me what kind of independent investigations. There has been a number of independent investigations, including an RCP report. That is independent of Government. The report is independent of the health board. The Royal College is a very respected organisation. Those findings can be read in detail. I am happy to provide Maggie Chapman a copy of that report if she has not seen it. My focus is really on looking forward in relation to how I support the breast cancer service and the cancer services at Tayside, as opposed to looking back over the independent reviews that have been done. I go back to what I said to Willie Rennie. In almost any review that is conducted, independent or otherwise, people will agree that some will disagree with the recommendations or the analysis of that review. It is exceptionally important that we objectively recognise the independence of those reviews, the clinical expertise involved in those reviews, and we move forward as opposed to look back. That concludes the urgent question. I am minded to accept a motion without notice under rule 11.2.4 of standing orders that decision time be brought forward to now. I would invite George Adam minister to move the motion. The question is that decision time be brought forward to now. Are we all agreed? We are all agreed. There are four questions that we put as a result of today's business. The first question is that amendment 7093.2, in the name of Liam Kerr, which seeks to amend motion 7093 in the name of Mary McCallan, on COP 27 outcomes be agreed. Are we all agreed? The Parliament is not agreed, therefore we will move to vote and there will be a brief pause to allow members to access the digital voting system.


Hello everyone welcome to this session I am Priyanka Bidla and today we are going to see about system modeling and one of the type of system modeling that is context model. These are the learning outcomes of this video lecture. At the end of this session students will be able to define system model then introduce some types of UML diagram that is unified modeling language and students will be able to show how the system being placed in an environment. These are the contents we will be covering in this session now we see the system modeling it is an abstract view of system that ignores system details it represents graphically that describes the system which is to be developed they describe business process they problem to be solved and the system is to be developed. System modeling helps the analyst to understand the functionality of the system and models are used to communicate with customers and here natural language is used to write both user and the system requirements. Now recall user and system requirements before moving towards pause this video for few seconds and you have to think on the requirements. Yes there are two types of requirements first user requirements and then system requirements as I said natural language is used to write both requirements however system requirements are more detailed than the user requirements. So usually prefer natural language for user requirements and use of natural language can be confusing and difficult to understand. So for system requirements use graphical system model therefore graphical representation is preferred for system requirements now we see different system models to represent the system from different perspectives. So there are four perspectives we will see one by one perspective first external perspective where you model the context or environment of the system then interaction perspective means the interactions between a system and its environment or you can say that between the components of a system. Next the third is the structure perspective from the name we can say that model the organization of a system or the structure of the data that is processed by the system. Then last that is behavioral perspective where you can model the dynamic behavior of the system and how it responds to the events. Let us see UML diagram and their types UML stands for unified modeling language already you knew that it is object oriented language for writing software blueprints UML diagram has five types. So first is the activity diagram it shows the activities involved in a process or in data processing then next that is use case diagram it shows the interactions between a system and its environment then third type sequence diagram it shows interactions between actors and the system and the between system components also then class diagram it shows the object classes in the system and the associations between these classes there is association between class to class known as class diagram and finally that is state diagram. It shows the states means how the system reacts to internal as well as external events. So these are the total five types of UML diagram now we are moving towards context model let us see about context model first and then we will see about context model example that is mhcpms the context model shows how the system is being modeled it is placed in an environment with other system they show what lies outside the boundaries in short it shows the boundaries of system however they do not show the types of relationship between the systems in the environment and the system that is being specified. So normally they show that the environment includes several other automated systems this involves working with system stakeholders then employees to decide what functionality should be included in the system and what is provided by systems environment these decisions should be made early in the process to limit the system cost and the time needed for understanding the system requirements and design let us see the context model of mhcpms this is the example of context model the mhcpms that is mental health care patient management system it is an information system for the patient that is intended for use in clinics it consists of PRS means patient record system then admission system prescription system appointment system HC statistics system and management reporting system these systems are interconnected with each other then it forms context model of mhcpms it is simple context model that shows the patient's information system and the other system in its environment you can see that the mhcpms is connected to an appointment system and a more general patient recorded system with which it share the data then the system is also connected to system for management reporting and hospital bed allocation and a statistics system HC statistics system collects information for research and then after this finally it makes use of prescription system to generate prescriptions for patients medication this is the UML activity diagram activity diagrams are intended to show the activities that make up a system process and the flow of control from one activity to another it includes number of notations like circles rectangles rectangles with round corners arrows and solid bars we will see the details of these notations one by one so the start of a process is indicated by a field circle and the end by a field circle inside another circle the next rectangles with round corners represent activities that are the specific sub processes that must be carried out and arrows represent as usual the flow of work from one activity to another then solid bar is used to indicate the activity coordination overall it may include objects in activity charts the system that are used to support different processes now we will see the advantage and disadvantage of context model the advantage of relying on other systems for patient information is that avoid duplicating data and the major disadvantage is that using other systems may make it slower to access information and MHC PMS cannot be used if these systems are unavailable these are the references of this video lecture


How's it going everyone? Caleb here with Layton sports cards. We're gonna be working on a 2021 Tom's Chrome Platinum anniversary baseball Hobby 12 box case break number 16. This is pick your team style. Thank you again everyone for joining I'm gonna read off the teams that you did purchase in the break. Good luck everyone Alex T. Phillies Austin W. Rockies Bill B. Reds Bobby W. Orioles Bobby W. Also with the Giants Brent W. Tigers Brian D Royals Dan G with the Brewers A's Rangers Daniel H with the Rays D&E twins Jacob H. Guardians Jason C. Diamondbacks And Padres Justin B. Pirates Kevin D. Redsox KJP with the Braves Leo P. Nationals It's gonna be Margaret S with the Cardinals and Blue Jays and the and the Mariners Patrick S. Dodgers Paul O. Cubs Yankees Ryan S. Metz Scott C. Marlin Stephen W. Astros Ty W with the White Sox and Yassir S with the Angels. Thank you all. Good luck. See what we got here Yeah, like I said, I would just continue to be on the search I would just continue to be on the search. I said saving that filter on eBay might be um Might be a helpful way to you know keep reminding yourself to keep looking Yeah, sometimes with really specific cards, it can be tough There all the time it happens where someone wants a certain one-of-one card and they just can't track it down, you know So it does happen Here we go, everyone. Let's do this. Let's find some sick cards here. Chrome Platinum Anniversary Hop Let's find some sick cards Box, here we go. Refractor Christian Vazquez William Contreras Pictures are beautiful in this stuff Justin Turner Let's find some low color. Like I said, let's find some low color Ozzie Smith Talking 25 or less. Let's do just that. Babe Ruth. There's a refractor Andre Dawson I'm the refractor. Number 299 here Reggie Jackson. Sick one. You go Yankees It's the green yellow top 70th to 99 while Goldschmidt We'll do a recap as well at the end with anything that's numbered to like 50 or less and any Autographs that's a Jeff McNeil On the X-Fractor Jeff McNeil Silver Martin Perez Silver Or a refractor I should say wow. I don't know why I said silver. Geez small. It's posh a extra base card in there What am I thinking? You Darvish Pedro Martinez So it's refractor Brandon Belt. Almost did it again What is happening? Eloy Jimenez Autograph for the Cardinals Colton Wong Cardinals Colton Wong this time. There you go Cardinals Colton Wong autograph. Luis Castillo Refractor Justin Morneau twins Dane Dunning Marcelo Zunas Will Clark So refractor Kyle Cody Aqua wave is gonna be a Taylor Widener Aqua wave Not numbered. I'm closing it out here to 199 on the Daniel Murphy. It's blue mini diamond there to 199 Go Rockies next one up. Yo, let's get to it rent Roker refractor Sterling Sharp Sends a tell-up base refractor Ryan McMahon Blue Brock still 199 their blue mini diamond Brad hands to 199 Go X factor for the D-back Zach Gallant. We go on the X factor refractor Yusie Kukuchi Remember if you do want a personal this evening, there is still some space to get that in as well It is filling up though rather quick. So I would order it very soon Without being said if it does not rip tonight though, it will be ripping early tomorrow morning with Kenzie both times Does have the hot hand in personal so you're gonna want to get that in Niko Horner Kenzie has the best personal luck out of everyone that I've watched here refractor shirt and a postal Although I did go on that insane flawless run for ants on that night Still can't beat some of your Sunday morning Let's get kind of out of hand sometimes Paul O'Neill refractor autograph there that is gonna be Yankees numbered to 199 Go Yankees Yelby's It is a aqua wave on the Tom Hatch Blue Jays rookie refractor jammer condolario Number 250 here Edward Olivares To 50 on the rose gold 70th wave Toss like six different words together. That's how they make their parallel names. Yeah, that'll work Toss it in there Geo or shella It's a refractor Brad Keller Kyle Lewis and Yarbrough next one up. Here we go. Here we go. Good luck everyone See what we got here. It's a refractor. No, no, no, no Turnbull Failed Martian Aqua wave is verlander there aqua wave Yo astros nice refractor Austin Meadows I don't castle base rookie Rubens here Some of the base rookies are kind of sneaky in this stuff Seem to show up that often and it's gonna be x-fractor Brent Rooker It's really nice if you can find the color then as well You've hit some low number of color out of these products here. You're back on the refractor Justin Dunn Pesednik It's a refractor Steve Carlton Refractor there the Myers Dalton Varshow rookie autograph D bags Dalton Varshow on the auto not numbered Trout base. There's a Ryan Shepard's refractor So see how How's the weekend treating a man you Darvish Karen Pedro Martinez Zach McKinstry So refractor of Kyle Wright for the Braves Refractor and we have number to 70 on the top 70th. He's just a gear You go Marlins and a number to 100 Greg Maddox with the Incredible picture of him What a great photo that they chose you go braves to 100 Guys remember the next break that we are looking to fill up tonight that does have some spots remaining is gonna be Prism basketball one box break number six. It has five to go check it out there linked in the chat Prism basketball was all clean and then I open the box and it's dusty again. How about that? Here we go Doing well doing well found out today that I was not working Monday, and that's great news Really needed that day off to get some stuff done before going to the National and I'm off refractor Manny Machado Padres So that turned my day from okay into a good day Christian Walker But that being said there is still a stream on Monday, I think it's personals with Sam Personals with spicy Sam Refractor Taylor Weidner John Lester Aqua wave is Freddie Freeman Aqua wave for the Braves Bill Braves X-Fractor Jesse Winker on the X-Fractor Refractor Tim Lund succumb There he is giants Blake Taylor That was fun when Blake was here Roberto Ozuna He stuck around for the gaming and we hit like one of the best cards out of this new Japanese set We were really pumped up. I'll have to find the reaction show you later Break he like jumped out of his seat. I don't know if you saw some of the reactions in the morning, too. Yeah refractor They were awesome. You're awesome. It's a gold Schmidt there Yeah, that would be fun Leone Tavares there Aqua for the Rangers on the auto to 150 that would be fun Very nice Yeah, they kind of just got their things going a little bit. We're starting to get it all fired up There's a cronin worth base Refractor Joe Tory, that's it Number two ninety nine here. It's gonna be a green yellow Randy Rosarana Big arrays the top 73 yellow Monty Harrison Brad goes live at 6 p.m. Eastern tonight on gaming guys if you do want to grab up some gaming spots with him Late in gaming comm is the spot to do so Just like you went on the sports card site. You check out the break schedule purchase all your spots that way refractor as true Cabrera Loads of different group breaks Pokemon flesh and blood Meta zoo and magic the gathering All on the late in gaming side That's to 199 there on the Tommy Edmond blue mini diamonds. There you go Tommy Edmunds There's a break schedule link if you do want to check it out Let's keep going These are just our dough It's a refractor Luis Gonzalez Tariq scuba Dylan Bondi Join late. How many mantles have you pulled for me today? Not a crazy amount of mantles yet that I've seen come out. We need to see that SSP for you, sir There is a refractor Swanson. How's it going Paul a rose See that SSP man, I Can't believe you hit one of those right the mantle SSP X-factor Randy Rose Rainer raise I set it on the release date as someone I was just like that's one of those cards Like we pulled it early, but it's like we're not gonna see it again for like a long time I bet 12,000 Yeah, it was like something crazier than the super factory more you will it's that time. That's aqua wave not number Dodgers Geo or shella Refractor Boba Shet Yarbro Autograph is Jean tennis You go Padres Jean tennis base auto not numbered Andres on the hit Oswald Shane McClanahan rookie. There's a Julie look Joey Lakesi refractor Justin Dunn Pesednik Scott Pesednik Vladdy Guerrero, Jr. So a refractor a Brett Gardner You have a sick Joe Torrey refractor earlier for the Yankees Jeter Dave Parker Number to 100 here. It is gonna be rookie for the pirates will Craig to 100 There you go pirates Nice. Okay, here we go. Next one up. Good luck Pasha Brian Garcia refractor Cable Reese refractor Pedro Martinez Zach McKinstry You want him in this? So refractor Jonathan Stiver White Sox The refractor there Franklin Killemay Quenion Kim Jackie there. It's gonna be Jesus Sanchez rookie extractor for the Marlins. He's you Sanchez nice refractor Luis Castillo Strasburg for to go now guys for to go on one boxer number six. Let's get that sold out Let's get that sold out. There's a Wainwright coming up in a little bit this evening having whites for to go It's an aqua wave Dave Winfield Padres and a refractor Willie Starchel number to 70 here Kevin Malar to 70 top 70th for the Red Sox You go Red Sox to 70 interesting hit there Dwight Gooden now auto for the Mets to 70 another top 70th You go Mets on the auto Dwight Gooden You go on to see some names you weren't expecting with this products aqua wave Hazer's Lazardo refractor Keston Hira Roberto Ozuna Babe Roof Vera So refractor Matt Olson is the refractor Derek Lee and to 199 here is Enrique Hernandez blew many diamonds All right second half coming up everyone. Good luck We have a little bit of water we'll get right to the second half here To to go guys to to go on that six boxer Or excuse me the one boxer number six to to go box up featuring the 1952 toms design Come on. Let's find the 52 man soul empty Dusty product here as most chrome products are let's get to it three scoobles refractor Wade Boggs There he is DD Gregorius Lou Brock Jonathan Rose refractor Fred McGriff What Gotcha weathers No more Ahmed Rosario All good It's no problem There's an extractor Julio Franco extractor its guardians Refractor Willie Adamics raise Yeah, literally My dear bro Sure in the past Oh Man That's an aqua wave and Tony oscensatella Refractor Clark Schmidt. Oh, man Number to 70 top 70th Jake cave Ego twins That is an aqua autograph of Kyle Lewis there to 150. There you go Mariners nice Solid aqua auto Very nice Jesse winker aqua wave You want to do that for me? So refractor Phil Niquro set from arrow Will Myers Still in the packs at Lane now Dave Parker refractor cc sabathia That's sick Go Yankees Fantastic number six is sold out Seven to go in seven that's a lucky spot. Don't let that sit for long To 25 Moses aloo There you go. Nice one. Yeah, I know I love the look of these Moses aloo and it's exposed that'll go to the nationals That's what I'm saying like those are selling super well like just vets even as well They were selling super well way above box brace The low color like that. All right, here we go next one up everyone. Good luck Fantastic, thank you Appreciate that mr.  So Lane said not me Had Williams Eloy Jose of Ray you those boxes are pretty sick though greatly kill a man with that being said It's a refractor of Tyler Zuber refractor their Royals Spencer Turnbull Raphael Marcin Extractor of Hunter Renfro Red Sox Red Sox Hunter there Refractor Austin Hayes Orioles to 75 there. It's gonna be Dennis Eckersley to 75 Rose gold mini diamonds have been white Clemente so refractor Kyle Schwabber computers broken Chad McTrump Autograph for the Yankees Paul O'Neill. There he is again Yankees another one. That's the base Ozzie Smith And a refractor Paul the young what is going on That's what I'm saying What is going on? It's an aqua wave Kyle Seager there That's why Dirk Lee I don't want to tell you about that. Honestly, that's unheard of refractor Carlos Santana. Oh man Brian Garcia Second half of Personals is just gonna yeah, yeah, we are probably full on personals guys to 199 That's Evan Longoria Giants. Remember though, if you do want to order it right now, it'll just be one of the first ones to go tomorrow Right away with Kenzie in the morning. So you can feel free to still order.  There you go mark Mulder great pitcher auto.  I agree That's what I'm talking about. You can find the you can find some cool low numbered color in this stuff It's out there refractor lube up It is out there It's beautiful when you do find it like seriously really nice looking Aqua wave Tommy fan Padres Yeah, I have no idea what's going on to 100 Kyle Cody Rangers to 100 Oh Jamie you're in the jackass cards I see Interesting. Yes all 16 At least it's all at once. That's a plus for you. I would say it's a plus I don't know. I'd rather have 16 all at once than 16 Sorted like two four six one one Just get it all done at once. You know that'd be the only plus Romero So the funniest thing is just the box is so our dope and Aqua wave no Marmoussara Yeah Refractor Jesus Sanchez like the box is just so our dope Why'd they make it like that leave a little bit of space to 50 on the Freddy Freeman? You go to 50 Goldwave Freeman Brent Rooker refractor all this Chapman Sensatella to reschool You could like restart the stream the last hour just retitle Jackass personal Extractor Tim Reigns refractor Ashton good. Oh refractor Edgar Martinez Braylon Marquez Ozzy Elves So refractor Hoyt Wilhelm socks Yeah, those were like the dominant pitchers the early days when I used to play MLB the show There's so many names in here from that game when Ryan Howard was on the cover He was oh eight or oh seven that he was on the cover But yeah, those were definitely some names that were very relevant in that game Marcio Dubon He is that's not numbered autograph for the Giants Maricio Dubon. Yeah, for sure though some dominant pitchers It's a cool product you get to flashback at some of those older names that you forget about ends mixed still with like the 2021 rookie class refractor Brady singer a lot of cool stuff and whites Clemente Toss it all in here for you Oswald. So refractor of Carlos Delgado just done You to go here. It's gonna be the 199 for the race Tyler glass now It's blue mini diamond to 199 and a jeeter next one up here Empty and good luck Wait Wilhelm It's a refractor Christian Walker Lester David Wright William Contreras rookie It's a sandy Alomar refractor Number to 70 top 70th Ramon Loreano to 70 Go A's to 199 now Yankees Luke Voigt blue mini diamonds To 199 X Fractor jeeter sick card there. That looks awesome. You go Yankees. Very cool. Nice X Fractor jeeter That's sick refractor Matt Foster Wilson Ramos Jim Rice Rendon refractor as will Clark Giants Face pack there autograph Fergie Jenkins Top five for the Cubs Boom to five. That's sick. Nice one Cubs Fergie Jenkins there beautiful We'll nag that Very cool red on the Cubs card Roof this card for you there refractor AJ Pollock Paul Goldschmidt Aqua wave is Mike Piazza Mets not numbered refractor Julio Franco Guardians base And base wanted to go guys Last one here chrome platinum anniversary hobby Working on a pick your team style break See what we can find here. Good luck Jonathan Oviedo So refractor Eddie Rosario Guardians Ryan Yarbrough shirt and a postal Nice down to five left now on number seven linked in the chat down to five to go Marco Gonzalez It's fantastic It's a refractor of Bernie Williams Yankees refractor there Yankees have had some cool parallels here Aqua wave is going to be from the Red Sox Bobby door X Fractor Taylor Winder It's a refractor of Pavin Smith Luis Castillo Tim linsecum Refractor Casey Mines We go on the refractor Ozuna Base autograph is Dean Kremmer Orioles rookie base auto We go Orioles Gregorius Refractor Roberto Alomar Yo blue jays 14 of 99 Greg Maddox green yellow top 70th Another Maddox parallel there you go braves rose Dallas Brayden It's refractor Marcello Zuna for the braves refractor Med Rosario Last pack here of the break guys It's going to be numbered to 100 Michael Kopeck There you go All right Thank you. Thank you. Let's do a quick recap here for you. All right. We've got numbered a 50 freddy freeman and edward olivaris to 25 moses aloof Autographs dean Kremmer maricelle debon paul o'neal Jean tennis delton varshow Colton wong Aqua these are going to be the 150 power lewis leonito veris refractor paul o'neal That is the 199 the white good in top 70th auto Mark Mulder that's gold to 50 Sick card and a red autograph of verge jankins Number to five for the cubs beautiful card as well There you go cubs And that'll do it. Thanks again so much appreciate it. Uh, we will be on to some more baseball next tonight and shortly Thanks again so much


Oftentimes the first couple things that happen in a new business is that we need to finance the business We need to generate capital. In other words, we need cash So to think about why that is or to think about the process I'm going to open up the balance sheet again, which I closed Just a quick recap if we look at the the accounting equation assets equal liabilities and equity on the balance sheet The assets represent what the company has now notice that this is different than personal assets We don't just have the assets in the company in order to you know, just hold on to them We have them in the company as an investment. So the assets are kind of like an investment Why are they in the company and not in our personal investments? Because we want the assets to generate revenue in the future We think they're going to get a greater return in the business than they would in some other place That's why they're there and then the liabilities and the equity is how we're financing the assets That we have in order to generate the revenue Now different kinds of businesses will have different needs in terms of how much assets they're going to have to need on hand So if you're in a type of business that requires a large capital investment possibly for the purchase Of property planting equipment like a farm like farming or something like that Or any kind of business where you need equipment construction and whatnot in order to do Then what you're trying to do is get money, of course Through financing either you put the money into the business because the equity is not going to be there from business activity at this point because you haven't earned any revenue and you can't Until you get the property planting equipment or you finance it with a loan or some combination of the two In order to buy the assets which might be fixed assets property planted equipment Whose value is there in order to help us to generate revenue in the future? That's the general idea for the first thing we need to do oftentimes Is get that money through a loan or from us putting money in the business taking it out of our personal account And putting it into the business now note if you're in other kinds of businesses Some businesses do not have that big barrier to entry for the purchasing of the capital investment So if you start a youtube channel or something like that or you do You do gig work or something then you might not have a lot of upfront cost Which is great and great stuff to get into but at the same time With the lower barrier to entry there's usually more competition and those kind of businesses So that's the general how it generally works. So now we're going to say okay We're going to finance the business By putting money into the business We'll do one with us putting money in From the owner into the business to finance the person purchase of say fixed assets And then we'll take we'll also enter a loan


This project is by far the most ambitious project I've ever taken on. The plan from how he laid it out was borderline unbelievable. Chris is going as big as you can possibly go. And it's almost like hard to believe that Chris, this like professional skier who has a family and a million other things going on is going to produce this movie. It just shows you like what a vision can do and how it can create something that becomes so magical and so real. I've never had another trip or project that was so heavily invested in by the athlete themselves. That is unique and special and a huge risk too for Chris. It's a tough one to describe quickly anyways and I don't have a 10 second elevator pitch for anything I talk about. I had the opportunity to collaborate with the Grateful Dead. They approached me to do a ski with them that led into this concept I've had for a movie. I wanted to repeat a night segment with Sweetgrass because I was with them for Afterglow up in Alaska and it was one of the most memorable experiences of my life. Can you rotate that pinwheel a little bit? I just want to see like the whole range. I like it. I wish it was like a bigger spread though. Test flight on the drone. Damn, most colors look really similar.  So I just made it down to Mammoth and this is the first time I've gotten to lay my eyes on the hemlocks which is where we're shooting the night portion of Chris's movie and it looks pretty magical. The people that were chosen to work with us through this video project they're deeply rooted friends and family of ours. It is like a unique group of individuals from Rob Machado, Jeremy Jones, Danny Davis, Kimmy and Chris and the conversation is like pretty seamless and normal but also really thought provoking as well. These guys are kind of just set up in their light suits and it's pretty surreal with all the fog. Crazy vision from Chris on this one but it seems to be all coming together. Amazing up here. Check it out. This is epic. It's like otherworldly. Putting on these suits and then looking down now it's like it's a really cool process. It's crazy to think we're out there. Yeah, totally. Oh man, there's a lot of work. Very cool. Have the dream team. It's pretty special. Okay, Jenny's back. All right, strap in my friends. Camera crew at the base is 100. Maybe 100 percent. Where you are 100 percent? Cool. Three, two, one, dropping. Chris was developing the idea for this. He wanted to do this in the eye of a storm. I don't think we really thought about what that would bring. 130 mile an hour winds, freezing fog.  These things just inevitably have more variables and more challenges and we faced all of those. Light suits are shorting and fuses are snapping just because it's so freezing cold out there and it gets to a point where you just can't do anything so we're missing a few ribs here and there and some of the shots. This process has been insane, but it's so worth it. Even though we're exhausted and a day off would feel good, it's not going to happen because I want this project to succeed. He's an artist. He's a skier. He's a producer. He's creating this incredible project and the people that he brought together are all an extension of his family. That tribe that you build is kind of what makes what we do so special. I never understood it before I had a child but you just inevitably grow apart from friends by virtue of those friends not having children of their own and I want to open my child's eyes to how special this planet really is. Selfishly, I want to be, I want to go as best friends and do everything with him. And Michelle seems to just still be as big a part of our life. Watching Chris's vision become a reality and getting to be a part of it was just an honor. This is a full year-long movie that Chris has been working towards and I'm excited to see the full scope of it. Being a part of the shoot was the first time where I felt like I was a part of an art project and I knew every time I was dropping in, magic was happening. I don't know, you leave and you kind of wish that it kept going. I kept wanting to go skiing the next night at night on a lit up face, but that's pretty far off. I guess you have to be Chris Fincheller to make that happen.