Hi. Good afternoon. Good morning, almost afternoon. Welcome. Thank you for joining us today for our talk about the role of interest groups in shaping policy in Michigan. I'm Deborah Horner from the Center for Local, State, and Urban Policy, also known as CLOSUP. Today's talk is sponsored by CLOSUP as well as cosponsored by the Department of Political Science and the Environmental Law and Policy Program. It's part of the CLOSUP in the Classroom Initiative. Through the current Ford School undergraduate course entitled Michigan Politics and Policy, the CLOSUP in the Classroom Initiative is working to integrate student experiences with the Center's research activities. Both the class and this talk are made possible by a grant from the Provost Office, so we'd like to thank them. This not only helps us to get U of M's state and local government research into the classroom, but also allows us to bring in expert speakers like our guest today, Susan Demas. You can read about her full biography and the handout that was given before the talk, but just let me summarize a little bit by telling you that Susan is the editor and publisher of Inside Michigan Politics. She's been a journalist for 15 years, covering politics for several national and regional publications. She's the only Michigan journalist to have been named to the Washington Post, list of best political reporters, the Huffington Posts, list of best political tweeters, and the Washington Posts list of best political bloggers. In 2010, Susan helped launch the Michigan Truth Squad, which investigates and fact checks political ads and speeches. And most recently, Susan served as the deputy editor for Michigan Information and Research Service, where she covered national and state politics. So the publication Inside Michigan Politics analyzes political and policy trends for several thousand readers, including corporations, trade associations, labor unions, government agencies, the White House, and several foreign governments. Founded in 1987, IMP has been cited in many different media sources, including the New York Times, Detroit Free Press, Detroit News, Christian Science Monitor, the Washington Post, Roll Call, The Wall Street Journal, USA Today Hotline, and the Associated Press. You may be inspired today by what you hear to make sure that you are voting in the upcoming November 8th election. In case you are not registered, I have brought with me registration forms that will take you one minute to fill out. So I want to encourage you, if you're not registered yet, if you've been putting it off, please come see me after the talk. I will be registered and you can be sure to be able to vote here in Michigan on November 8th. And now, without further ado, let me turn the floor over to Susan D. Mustang. Hi, thank you so much for having me. Can everybody hear me okay? I don't want to use the voice that I use with my kids because you won't like that very much. They're teenagers and they don't listen well. So the way that I have structured the talk is I'm just going to kind of give a broad view of kind of the practical issues involved with special interests, lobbyists in Michigan politics. And what I'm really looking forward to is at the end to leave plenty of time for your questions because I've been lucky enough to come and speak to many different classes at the Ford School over the last several years. And of all the talks I do, and I do quite a few, hands down this is where I get the best questions. So I'm really looking forward to that. So as Deborah mentioned, I'm the Ezra and Publisher of Inside Michigan Politics. It's a publication that most of you may not have heard about because I write mostly for people in Lansing and Washington who really want to know what's going on with Michigan politics, elections, policy, who's in charge, what they're doing. And it's been around for almost 30 years and doesn't look very different from when it debuted. It has blue paper, but we do have a website because I'm slowly but surely dragging it into the 21st century. But it's subscription based, so it's for a more limited audience. I do a lot of writing for broader audiences, for people basically who hate politics and try and make them care about it. That's a unique challenge. But today, I'm going to go more into things that people maybe don't know as much about but are very important in terms of understanding what goes on in Lansing and the rest of the state. To be totally honest, if you understand the way that special interests function in Lansing, you're really going to understand much more of how things work than the vast majority of people do. And there are a lot of stereotypes people, you know, kind of think of lobbyists as these shadowy figures and nobody quite knows who they are and maybe they meet in parking garages like Watergate, if you guys have heard of Watergate. But to be honest, the way things function in Lansing at the Capitol, these are people who, yes, are out in the lobby. There are many of them, especially on days when there's a lot going on. I anticipate when the legislature finally comes back to really get work done after the election. In the lame duck session, the Capitol is going to be quite a busy place and probably be open 24 hours a day towards the end. Because just like any of us, we tend to leave stuff till the very end and cram a lot in. So if you're a reporter, as I've been for 15 years and I've covered the state Capitol for 10 years, you know, you see lobbyists all the time when you go to get your sandwich. They're in the expensive restaurants, not the ones I go to. You see them out in the hallway. And if you really want to know what's going on with specific pieces of legislation, a lot of times they're going to be able to tell you a lot more than if you interview a senator on the floor. That's just the truth. By way of a little background, I actually started reporting in the state of Iowa, which has a part-time legislature, and it's not nearly as big of a budget, not nearly as much staff. Michigan is, you know, the 10th largest state. It was the 8th when I started to cover it. And we have a full-time legislature, which a lot of states don't have. So there's always something going on. There are always issues to watch. So it's definitely different than what you might find if you're from other states or, you know, if you take jobs there after graduation. But this will give you a sense of how things work, and Washington is not very different. My husband is a political consultant, and he does public relations, and actually he just registered as a lobbyist a few months ago because there's so much overlap in what he does. So just to throw that out there, so you know the fact that I actually, you live with a lobbyist. He doesn't do love work that way. But, you know, when you start talking with people who actually live and work in downtown Lansing, you run across quite a few people who do lobbying in one form or another. So I'm going to start in a place that a lot of people start out when you talk about special interests, and right away they want to talk about money. Because most people, you know, have the perception that special interests get things done by spending money in campaigns and with direct lobbying expenditures. And certainly that is a big part of things in the state of Michigan. If you go to the Michigan Campaign Finance Network that does a very good job tracking everything, they just put out a report that lobbyist spending is on track to be $21.7 million in July, so it's on track to be the highest amount spent ever, higher than it was by $700,000 at this time of the year in 2015. Not particularly surprising, but interesting to know the numbers. And, you know, when you consider what lawmakers have to deal with the vast, vast swath of issues, not to mention their chief duty, which under the Constitution, they have one duty. Do you know what that is? The one responsibility in office is to balance the budget every year. Unlike the feds, they actually have to do it. You can say that they may not do it well. I've certainly been there for all night sessions when the government shut down when they did not do it well. But that is what they have to do in $55 billion is an incredible amount of money.  Lawmakers have had experience with government on that level. Some of them come from local government, quite a few of them do. More and more in the era of terminal nets, these lawmakers come to government with no experience whatsoever. The people in town who have the experience come from two places. One, their staff. Two, the lobbying corps. There's been quite a bit of overlap in staff. And so there's not nearly any institutional knowledge that there was even five or ten years ago. For the lobbying corps, there are a lot of people who have been there for decades. There are some very prominent former legislators and politicians who are lobbyists. Names that people know. Frank Kelly, the longtime attorney general, has a very prominent firm, Kelly Cawthorn. And former speaker of the house, Rick Johnson. This is going back quite a few years at this point, but his firm is Dodak Johnson. But by and large, the people who make up lobbying firms, it's a lot of former staff members. And I've thought about this a lot because four years ago, I actually had the opportunity to interview Jack Abramoff. And this dates me a bit because this was a scandal a decade ago. But he was kind of the embodiment of everybody's idea of evil in lobbyists. You know, if you saw the pictures, he looked like a mafioso with the fedora. And looked like somebody who was whining and dining people and up to no good. And as it turned out, he was. He was convicted for influence peddling and spent some time behind bars. Since then, he's really tried to remake his image, peel back the curtain of things that can go wrong, abuses of power, do a public mea culpa. He frankly, you know, was very charming and really wanted to talk more about his daughter than he wanted to discuss the book that he was talking. Which I thought was a pretty good PR move on his point in part. But one thing that he said that struck me is he said, you know, I don't really like hiring former lawmakers. I mean, that's the revolving door we all hear about, right?  Jack Abramoff said, in general, I don't like hiring former members of Congress, former senators or legislators for one reason. They're lazy and they don't know what's going on as much. I want their staff members. Those are the people who know how to work. And those are the people who have relationships. And however cliche it is, it's true. Relationships do make a big difference in politics, both in Lansing and in Washington. So if you served for a long time as the committee clerk for like the energy committee and then you go to work for a multi-client lobbying firm that specializes in your specialty's energy policy. Well, you have a lot of relationships. You have a lot of inside knowledge. You've got a lot of friends who are still at the Capitol. So that's very useful. In terms of how things really work, I know a lot of lobbyists who care very deeply about policy, highly intelligent people, do not fit that Jack Abramoff stereotype. There are certainly ones who fit it more. But I have to say as a reporter, the thing that I found most eye-opening when I started covering the Capitol full-time ten years ago was the fact that lobbyists do write legislation. And there's really no attempt to pretend otherwise. I can't tell you how many committee meetings I have covered because I used to be a reporter covering for, you know, day-to-day publications where I actually had to sit through five-hour committee meetings, all-night floor action, all that good stuff that, frankly, most publications don't bother with anymore.  And then, of course, some lawmaker would put their name on it. But they wrote it and there was no pretense. That happens quite a bit. So in terms of how things really work in Lansing, lobbyists definitely have a huge role in policy and in how specific legislation is written. Because, frankly, with term-limited lawmakers who are there for a maximum of six years in the House, eight years in the Senate, a lot of them just don't have the expertise to write complex legislation themselves and even some of their staff doesn't. So understanding more about the process and who these people are and how they go about things is really critical to understanding the pace of things in Michigan government. So one of the things that you do see stories on when it comes to lobbyists, a couple times a year you hear stories about these lawmakers who get $2,000 worth of free lunches from lobbyists. And that's a fun story and you always want to see if it's your rep or your senator and what they're doing. And that's a good symbol for what people don't like about government, what people don't like about politicians and what they don't like about lobbyists. In reality that's a drop in the bucket. A lot of stuff probably is not reported. And there's really no evidence that having a fancy lunch with a lobbyist is going to be more influencing than having, you know, several meetings in your office. But it's something that definitely voters do not care for. It's kind of interesting. We have a state house race going on right now. I'm not sure how many people have heard anything about it. It's out in Macomb County. And the county commission candidate who is running for the, as the Republican in the seat, his name is Steve Arrino. He's a former lobbyist. And he's been caught on tape at coffee hours bragging to constituents about picking up bar tabs for appropriation chairs and being a big shot and having the ear of the government and the governor and really filling that stereotype of the Jackie Romoff lobbyist.  And I think that may very well be the case. But things like that I think definitely don't inspire a lot of confidence with people because a lot of people that you talk to just assume that government is corrupt and that's the way it goes. So going beyond the general picture, I want to talk a little bit about issue lobbying and some prominent groups. As far as Michigan government goes, there are lobbyists for just about every issue under the sun, as I said, where big state, full-time legislature, big budget, lots of concerns. And pretty much the movers and shakers tend to be these multi-client lobby firms. Some of them are law firms that really just specialize in more lobbying work. There are a lot of names that people outside of Lansing don't really know, but some of them are governmental consultant services incorporated, GCSI. There's Kelly Cawthorn and Karubin Associates, Midwest Strategy Groups, RWS Advocacy. These groups tend to represent many different causes and companies. They're the biggest spenders by and large when you look at those charts of top lobbyist spending. But from there, it's pretty hard to know what's going on because were they spending money on the energy fight? Were they spending money on the Detroit school fight? Some other more obscure issues? Those are things that don't have to be disclosed. And if you take a look at some of the other big spenders, like usually if you go on Michigan Campaign Finance Network, they have very handy charts about the top spenders this year, full list. It's a pretty eye-opening view of who the players are. As far as this year goes, you had the Michigan Health and Hospitals Association spend heavily nationwide mutual insurance and National Federation of Independent Businesses. So there are a number of issues that they might be involved in. We've certainly had some insurance reform debates, especially on the no-fault side, which nationwide would probably be very interested in. Michigan Health and Hospitals Association, obviously very interested in this debate over a healthcare claims tax that involves a lot of Medicaid aid from the federal government. So you can kind of draw some of the lines that way. And a lot of times when you look at those issue groups, those names shuffle a little bit more than the multi-clients do based on what are the hot button issues that year. But there are always going to be groups that will just give a lot of money in campaign donations or on the lobbying side, regardless of what's going on, even if their top issues really don't have a shot at getting through this year. It's about relationship building. It's a good way to get a new lawmaker to know who you are. And that's just kind of the way business is done. What I've noticed, Michigan has been under Republican control since 2011. There's definitely been a shift in spending. Certainly Republicans are getting more money, which is typical. You go with the party who's in power. They have much more power to set the agenda and to put it through or to block it. But prior to that, when we had divided government, you would see a lot of groups playing both sides. And there are a lot of groups in town that still do. But more and more kind of dovetailing with more partisanship that we've seen, hyper partisanship, you will see that there are a lot of groups that really do just concentrate on one party or the other. And it's pretty logical who these groups are. For Democrats, it's a lot of union groups. Michigan Education Association is a huge player. You've got the UAW, AFL-CIO, Carpenters, Teamsters. They're not beyond giving to Republicans. But unlike in past decades when you could peel off a few votes for things, and you had some very strong pro-public education Republicans out there, one of them teaches at the Ford School, Joe Schwartz, who's a very good friend of mine. They're more rare species nowadays. And so the unions accordingly have just concentrated more on getting Democrats elected and lobbying Democrats who are in office. On the flip side, the Michigan Chamber of Commerce only rarely will endorse a Democrat. Not all chambers of commerce are like this. Other states function in different ways. But in our state, it's a huge force in Republican politics and nationally. Actually, the State Chamber of Commerce was very instrumental in some of the national campaign finance suits that we've seen. Richard McClellan is a very prominent attorney and does excellent work on their behalf. You do have other business groups that kind of spread the wealth around a little more Michigan Manufacturers Association, Small Business Association of Michigan, but the National Federation of Independent Business is even to the right of the Michigan Chamber, so they only tend to play in that sandbox. And then there are the major forces in Michigan politics that tend to be more bipartisan. Blue Cross, Blue Shield of Michigan, which is the top health insurer in the state, has cornered the market at about 80%. So they like everybody and they give very generously to everybody. Groups like DTE, Consumers Energy, Michigan Association of Insurance, Agents, Michigan Retailers Association, they tend to be less focused on just one party or the other year depending. And the best example I can give you is one that is very well known in Lansing, surprisingly not known as much beyond Lansing, and that's the beer and wine wholesalers. If you look year after year, they tend to give donations to 148 representatives and senators, all of them. Maybe there are a couple exceptions. There aren't that many issues that really come up that have to do with alcohol. You know, we do have a liquor control commission, not every state does, we happen to. But occasionally, you know, there are craft beer bills and can you sell craft beer and wine at farmers markets, some ancillary issues. But we just had an issue come up about raising the beer tax, which was meant with hysteria. We have not raised the beer tax in Michigan since the 1960s, that's before my time. But it is considered to be such an off the wall idea because first of all, it's a good way to anger voters. And there are probably only a handful of lawmakers from either party that really wants to go down that road. If any of you were around for the last decade when we had two government shutdowns and the state was broke and we were in recession for an entire decade, we needed money from anywhere. We ended up raising the income tax, we raised cigarette taxes. We didn't even consider raising the beer tax and we were broke. So certainly as time now when we're in recovery, you see very little interest. So, you know, they're an extremely effective lobby. And you've even seen like the Michigan Chamber has jumped all over the issue kind of trying to get at the forefront of fighting against the beer tax because it's a popular issue, why not? You know, now that we've cut business taxes, they have to move on to smaller issues because that was at the top of their list for a long time. And you do see that when groups tend to meet their major objectives like for the Michigan Chamber cutting business taxes in the state, reforming the personal property tax, going after regulatory reform especially for environmental policy, they've checked off a lot of boxes. Well, the Michigan Chamber is not going to fold up. There's still work to be done and there are a lot of people who support the organization and want a strong business voice in the legislature. So then you see a switch in tactics to some of these smaller issues. Right to Life of Michigan is a great example. We have a lot of major policy limiting abortion in this state. We have waiting periods. We just had legislation a couple of years ago that clamped down on clinic practices and shut down a lot of providers. When you look in terms of where to chip away at abortion rights in this state, you have to get pretty creative because obviously we do have still a federal court decision in play. So they're very creative. We just had this legislation that ups the penalty for so-called coerced abortion. They're always looking at the next fight. They're always looking at ways to inspire their members to inspire giving and to stay relevant. They do a very good job with it. And they're a group that tends to be more on the Republican side of where they concentrate. But there are a number of pro-life Democrats and they've been very successful with that because even when there was a Democratic majority in the state house, they still had a pro-life majority. So that's your ideal situation as an interest group. A couple more things that I just want to touch on before I want to get your questions. I would say that not all lobbying is equal. I think there's an idea and a lot of times reporters kind of pursue this line of, okay, well, you have a major issue like energy policy reform. So let's take a look at the interest groups involved and how much they've given to lawmakers and there's a straight line. While you got a lot of money from DTEs, you're going to vote a certain way. It often doesn't work that way. Money certainly is something that politicians need desperately. So nobody wants to turn on a check. But I've seen a number of times people who have accepted money and their votes don't change. It's really a relationship builder. It's a matter of building trust and trying to get your ideas out there. And, you know, I think some of the smarter groups try and do that with a wide swath of legislators, not just Constraint playing one party or the other.  They're going to work with people more who they know and who they've turned to in good times and in bad. Now, the depressing side of this is this, and I get asked this a lot. So if I call up my representative, if I go down to the Capitol to protest because I care about an issue, how much does my voice count versus a lot of guests? My experience is not nearly as much. They don't know you.  A lot of times they may peg you as somebody who's probably not going to vote for them anyway. All of these things work against you and you're just one person or you're not even from their district and you're just inundating their phone lines with complaints about your favorite issue and so you're not a constituent and you don't have those relationships. To me that is the most troubling part about a system that relies so much on lobbying and special interests is that unless you've hired your own personal lobbyist for your issue, your voice is not going to be recognized as much. Public protests are supposed to be a good way of countering that. I can't really remember the last time I saw a protest move any votes. I'm not saying that you shouldn't do it. It's a constitutionally protected right. I think it's part of democracy. But now that the partisanship is at such a fever pitch, it's very difficult for people to change their minds on things, even if they do have a lot of constituents who don't agree with them. And that's definitely a question for us to wrestle with because people are supposed to have a voice with the people who are supposed to represent them and not everybody can afford a lobbyist at GCSI. One way that people are very eager to change this is with campaign finance reform. Michigan's campaign finance system is particularly bad just in terms of transparency because a lot of times you have no idea how much money is really flowing into election until after the election has passed with late donations and dark money. Dark money is the biggest issue. In 2010, it was widely known that the Michigan Republican Party spent $25 million on that election, especially with down bail races for the state legislature. Very little of that ever showed up on a campaign finance report because there are ways to pass through money and other ways where you don't have to report them and there are independent groups and whatnot. That's only becoming more and more prevalent. And it's certainly not on just the Republican side at all. We had some really big steps towards campaign finance reform on the national level last decade. It's pretty interesting now as you take a look at this election. The two founders of McCain and Feingold are both on the ballot facing some tough elections. John McCain and Russ Feingold, McCain is a Republican, Feingold is a Democrat. They're being vastly helped by PAC money at this point because that's the only way that you win elections now that the law has essentially been taken apart by the U.S. Supreme Court. So, to kind of rectify this imbalance, there is a movement towards a U.S. constitutional amendment, which as you know, very high bar to meet. There's been some murmurs about trying to do something at the state level, but even to do a constitutional amendment at the state level, which the bar is far lower. In general, you would need about 20 million dollars to make that fight. There aren't too many groups out there that have 20 million dollars and there are a lot of groups that I just mentioned that would contribute far more to fight it. So there's really never been a serious attempt. But I think it's worth keeping an eye out on because I think there is a growing consensus. I think a lot of people, Democrats and Republicans think that some changes need to be made and we'll have to see if people are willing to spend the money on what's considered to be a wonky process vote. So, I think I'm just going to leave it here and open up to questions and please tell me if there are other areas that you want me to tackle. I'm happy to talk about whatever you'd like.


Hello and welcome to NewsClick. Today we're going to discuss the recent GDP figures that have been released by the government to discuss that we have here with us today, Prof. Surajit Majumdar from JNM. Welcome to NewsClick. Thank you. Prof. Majumdar recently, as you know, the government has released GDP figures and the release figures show that India has grown at 7% last year. So are these figures credible? Because as you know, demonetization had quite an impact on Indian economy and these figures don't seem to reflect that. Well, there are two sets of estimates that have been given. One is for the growth that is expected for the year 2016-17, which will end on 31st March. The year isn't over yet. But this is based on data about with regard to GDP growth for the first three quarters. And what has been surprising is that these figures seem to show that demonetization has had no impact on GDP growth. So the third quarter GDP growth is no different from what was observed in the first two quarters. And therefore the full year's estimates also are more or less being the same as was made before the demonetization exercise. So this is surprising and many people have expressed this surprise for a set of reasons. Number one is that in an economy where currency is used on a significant scale for transactions, an exercise like demonetization was bound to have a disruptive effect on transactions as a result of which production and income generation activity would be disrupted. Somehow the GDP figures don't, growth figures don't seem to indicate that any such thing has happened, which would go against all economic reasoning. The second reason why this particular figure doesn't seem credible is that if you look at what is called the expenditure measure of GDP, where you measure GDP by the different items of expenditure on what is produced. Within the category of the expenditure, the highest and very high growth has been observed in the third quarter, which is the quarter where you expect where the effects of demonetization should be felt. In the third quarter, consumption expenditure, private consumption expenditure has grown by about 10% in real terms. Now that is rather surprising because you would expect demonetization and the inability of people to use the cash that they have for transactions to hit consumption expenditure significantly because that's the expenditure in which cash transactions tend to predominate. So for these two reasons, it is very surprising that the GDP figures have not been consistent with what economic reasoning would tell us should have happened. And in that sense, the figures are not very credible. However, this does not mean that the figures have been necessarily manipulated. The existing GDP series of India has been and the method used to calculate GDP has been a subject of some controversy even before demonetization. And there is an argument many people have made that the present GDP series is overestimating Indian GDP growth and not capturing what is actually happening in the economy. And perhaps this particular result that no effect of demonetization shows up in GDP growth figures is confirmation of the fact that there's a problem with the method rather than a confirmation of the fact that there's been manipulation of the data. But are there any indicators that at least give an idea to us what actually happened in the economy to the GDP? There are at least three sets of indicators that one can cite which would indicate that there was a effect of demonetization in terms of slowing down the rate of economic growth. One indicator is what has happened to bank credit. As a result of demonetization, of course, people were forced to put money into bank deposits, their cash into bank deposits because of which deposits increased, bank deposits increased and compared to the same period last year the growth in bank deposits jumped up. In the same period, however, what is the exact opposite happened with regard to bank credit, which is bank credit growth actually fell post demonetization compared to what it was before. Now what would explain that, why would bank credit fall? It is because when economic activity is disrupted borrowers are not interested in borrowing money to make. So the demand for bank credit is what has slumped. The demand for bank credit would slump if economic activity was disrupted. So at a time when banks had more supposedly money to lend if credit falls, it must be because the demand for credit was lowered. The second indicator is this that we have data about the use of cards both at for withdrawing money from ATMs as well as for usage at point of sale. We also have data for about the use of prepaid instruments like mobile wallets to make payments. Now if you look at these figures, you of course see after October in November, December and January compared to the previous year a very sharp fall in the withdrawals from ATMs because cash was not available. You do not you do see an increase in the use of cards at point of sale. You do see an increase in the use of prepaid instruments and mobile wallets, but that increase is not was not large enough to compensate for the decline in cash. And cash of course once it is used it is used repeatedly by many people in transactions. So that does not get captured by how much is actually withdrawn. So if you look at the total amount which is withdrawn plus use at point of sales plus prepaid instrument you do see a sharp drop after October in very sharp drop compared to the previous year. So that is the second indicator that there would have been a decline in expenditure in this period which the GDP data is not captured. The third indicator comes from tax revenues of the central government. The up to November the performance in terms of growth of tax revenues relative to last year was fairly good, but in December and January you see a sharp decline in the rate of growth of tax revenues. And actually the because of the decline the fiscal deficit at the end of January is already 105 percent of what was the budget estimate. So that is a third indicator when economic activity contracts you would see a tendency for revenues to decline. So there are several other indicators from which you can get a figure about what exactly is the degree of contraction but which do indicate that demonetization had a contraction effect on the economy. In the past three, four years there seems to be a tendency or a trend where the index of industrial production seems to be going down while the GDP seems to be growing at a normal rate. As we have seen now it's supposed to have grown at 7 percent. Can you shed a little light on this? As you know that there was a change, fundamental change in the method that is used to make estimates about India's GDP with the latest series when the latest series was adopted from 2011-12 as the base year which is different from the method that was used prior to that. The change in the method has been somewhat controversial and one of the descriptor are two important discrepancies that one can note in these figures. One is of course what you've referred to the fact that actually from 2011-12 if you see you have a consistent trend that while manufacturing output as measured by the index of industrial production has been stagnating the GDP in manufacturing according to the GDP series of the national account statistics seems to show a fairly robust growth performance through this period. So the two series toward the two measures of industrial production are extremely divergent and this is an exceptional situation and no one has really quite explained why you get this divergence. The second thing that you see is that most indicators while the overall GDP figure seems to be growth seems to be good when you look at the expenditures on that GDP there is only one item of expenditure which seems to have kept pace with overall GDP growth steadily and that is private consumption expenditure. Now normally consumption expenditure is a dependent expenditure depends on other things in the economy not something that autonomously grows so if you look at investment it has been stagnating if you look at government expenditure sometimes it has gone up sometimes it is not so it has not been a consistently high growth if you look at trade exports and imports they have been performing poorly both exports and imports have been tending to contract in the last few years so all items of expenditure except consumption expenditure seem to have support a conclusion that the economy is not growing very well so only consumption expenditure that seems to be growing and exactly the same problem is being shown up even in this particular quarter that consumption expenditure is again showing high growth when you expect consumption expenditure to actually have been adversely affected and you see the same discrepancy between what the index of industrial production is showing happened in that quarter and what the GDP measure is showing. Despite governments claims that GDP has grown well anecdotal evidence evidence on the street suggests that Indian economy has in fact has not done so well so after four months of demonetization the cash that has been taken out of the economy not all of it has come back what do you think is its continued impact on the economy firstly the effect of the shortage of cash I do not think that that effect has fully disappeared by now because as of now the position is that is still on the availability of currency is to only or only about two-thirds of what it was before demonetization even assuming that there is some shift it is to non-cash transactions the scale of that shift would not be that high as I have said other figures indicate as to make up for the shortage of cash. So, one is that the effect of shortage of cash even if it is not as severe as it was earlier in this four month period that effect is still continuing it is not gone. The second is that when economic activity in a particular period is disrupted or affected adversely it is not that the recovery from that happens as soon as you restore the old in general condition. So, let us say if some economic activities were adversely affected during this particular period it is not that as soon as currency comes back they will bounce back immediately because the effects of that disruption can last into the future. Certain kinds of production activities like agriculture where the production itself comes later in the future the effects of demonetization may be seen only later when the next crop comes when the effects of demonetization on sowing in this period may be felt only in when the next agricultural output comes. So, there will be effects of demonetization that will last into the future and if I put this into a longer term context the future and the present are both part of a longer term story in which there have been very clear signs that the Indian economy significant parts of the Indian economy are not growing rapidly. So, the indicators of physical production industrial production or agricultural production they clearly indicate a stagnation in production in the Indian economy. Other indicators like investment also show that for five six years there have been virtual stagnation in investment in the economy. So, if in economies volume of industrial production is not increasing volume of agricultural production is not increasing investment is stagnating you would say that such an economy is certainly facing serious difficulties which in a sense this seven percent seven and a half percent growth figure is hiding that behind that this is actually what is happening. So, demonetization has had an effect in such a background and rather than correcting the problems which are responsible for this it has aggravated that and therefore the effects may be felt for a long time in the future. But of course if we don't have correct ways of measuring that effect we will never know precisely what is the degree of that adverse effect. Thank you professor Majumdar for coming and discussing this issue with us. Thank you so much.


What would the the KLC today say to that KLC that was first dealing with Master P and all this stuff before it even took off. What would you say to that guy to get him prepared for what he was about to face? um Don't put your loyalty before paperwork. Wow. I agree. I agree a hundred percent. That's that's what you should be telling them Because it's all business because that is free and but it's all be right But see the thing and see the thing about it was like when we when we when we first got with no limit me me a piece There's more big We were so it was just us it wasn't what you saw in 98. Okay. It was just us so it was more like Family Wow, even though a family then but it was like put it like this Just said we all start this big thing, right? Mm-hmm, and it just start popping and then we started that we started bringing in other people You know I'm saying and It's different because they wasn't there in the mud with you you coming in with a successive Has been done already.  They wanted to know like what was the things that um I need to expect Because it's easy when it comes to when you haven't success, right? Mm-hmm.  I so believe that because even then You're older now, and you've learned so much But turn around and try to educate some of these younger people from your mistakes sometimes That doesn't help because not everybody's gonna listen They have to bump their own heads and have to go through their own situations themselves to really learn, right?  And that's why it wasn't when when when he asked the question about what was the calcium not tell the calcium back then is this it's like when when when We was always to a point to where like if we are that close within the family the last thing That we need to be considering is like Being done wrong, you know So when we went into that situation is like I Know things it's gonna be right and then the truthfully is doing that time Then goes, you know, everything was right. Everything was flowing. So and in and in You know as things evolve, you know people change I Don't know what the We all don't know The future motive, you know I'm saying because for me music is something that I always wanted to do You know, that's why I like when I was on the limit. I never invested in it into anything because Anything I was so deep into music anything else dealing with music is what I wanted to do because it's so many ways You can make a living off of music because music and I'm not talking about Lyrics that's written on music. I'm just talking about just making music the music part of it That's the only thing that don't need words to that. Everybody can adapt to That's you know, the thing I can say about you man. Like I said, I always say, thank you That's what I was sitting in seat. It'd be some I'd be like man If it went for you, I wouldn't have did a lot of stuff because I moved by the music, right? That's how I move right like I put in my my stuff in the car like yeah You brought me through a lot of different times man And right and see the thing about is that like when when when it comes down with me Um When I make music I Don't go into the studio thing about What I'm gonna make today. You know how you know how my music is made However, I'm feel however how I'm feeling that day. That's what's coming out the studio. Okay, exclude yourself Top three producers of all time. Did you say you're gonna ask me that? Exclude yourself top three producers of all time. That is easy Larry Smith Larry Smith I'm a breakdown.  Well, I mean it was so many of man The freeze come out at night Music we're hitting different records man. I was in the woods. I really couldn't go many places But I was I was I was getting down. I had my thing going so okay. That's it Larry Larry Smith Man Tronics Man Tronics, I've heard of Man Tronics. Okay.   But but when you talking about Larry Smith He didn't sample nobody music. He didn't believe it.   What was it like? It's like nobody just couldn't it's like he getting his because he was a little He was a lot. Yeah, you can tell you can tell. Yeah, you know what he was doing So it will be Larry Smith Man Tronics Man Tronics The third one it will be Damn You gotta narrow them out then you're eating all the ones out right because if you say top five You know I'm saying put up pretty like this after your first two is it's like anybody else they can depend they can fall in It's like that's right. You know I'm saying and you be trying to pick out of those ones that could fall in that slot But I will have time. Oh, you know what hold on I Have it in my phone In my phone, that's crazy But I know those two though those two Larry Smith and our man tronics one a one be Them two it depends on how I'm feeling that day. We'll get that Yeah, I get it. I get man, but when I think about one love a new Dean is hard man, right? I mean cuz them I mean That was them beats was crazy the sound was crazy. You can listen to it all day and it just right But see you see that third spot it could be It could be a it could be Rick Rubin That's it, you can't you think it'd be either one of us. Let's stick up Rick Rubin That's the first name off It can be like like all the big and he didn't want to be like playing it rock Oh That was serious dog. Yeah, the club scene was different back then but see like like I was going I was young Right, you see the reason why I say that because you listen to all of these like man I was a different the Miami bass booty shake music up temple. Yeah, it started from that record that record Rock was and then Needle still call me about that right and then you gotta think about he signed new addition to his label see It's a bad boy. You know I'm saying it's a bad boy Here he did my favorite break dancing record see when he when I'm finally caught him out there. We don't have problems He did funky mccosal see it bad boy.  Oh, he my top five So who is it number three? I'm still trying to figure it out me too Man Show you the love for the music man Can't put them to that number three right but the thing about it everybody that I named that I'm saying is in the top five Yeah, yeah, yeah, so I'm just trying to make sure. Yeah. Yeah, you picked the right one You know what gonna happen I'm gonna go get my foreign feet. That's what I was talking about But I know it is Larry Smith Man Trinix It could be Rick Rubin or Arthur Baker Wow I just see the this guy knows music. He's playing no games with it. He's been doing it a while. It's life. It's life That's what it's like. It's life and see that there and another reason why I'm saying these artists is like Whoever your favorite but well first of all, let me get this here. This is my favorite producers and hip-hop or anything anything. Yeah Anything but see if that's the case Shit, I'm looking at Marie's wife from earth winning fire Right, I'm looking at got them Quincy Jones. Oh, we're talking about Barry White No rap no hip-hop producers Yeah, I like it because the reason why because hip-hop started off sampling so bad. Yeah, you look at dr. Dre, right? He's considered the top hip-hop producer ever Now if you were to put him in front of Parliament How would you do that when he sampled Parliament music? Yeah? Yeah, you can't do that You can't do that. It's not I have discussions about stuff like it on this show, but you can't do that, but Great, he he's a good. Don't get me wrong, but it's just like me on it. I'm gonna say this on his stores I've all I've owned stores and we've owned multiple stores But the guy that introduced me to dealing with stores. No matter if he only had one location I'll always respect him way more. I don't care what I done Right cuz of the taking us to the trade shows and taking me and showing me the ropes You see what I'm saying so you can never I don't think If I if you get some from somebody, I don't think you can Overseed them you have so much respect for but Dre is a dope motherfucker. He in my top five without a doubt But let me let me clear some up with both of you people use the term producing The way you hear it in the wrong way, yeah Producing is not making beats Producing is you seeing a project from start to finish Meaning through if you in the booth singing, right? And I'd be like, you know what? Don't sing it like that. Sing it like this. Mm-hmm change this word to that word because It has more meaning and it flows better into the lyrics Wow And when you see it don't see it with that a month that much of aggression.  Let's not put that snap that turn the snap on a little bit put the kick up That's great. As a matter of fact the strings bring them down a little bit. Yeah. Yeah Yeah, and then when you go into mastering a producer put it like even even better Our producer the music is like a director. See I was just about to ask you that I was just about to ask That's what I was thinking But then in a movie you have a producer and you have a director. Well some sometime they They multitask You look at all the comic book movies, right? They're taking a script that was already written in comic books and now what a director gonna do is listen to that He gonna look at that comic book. He gonna read the story And take what you have in his book and put it on the screen. Yeah, even though he didn't write it. Yeah He just taking what you do and put it to where people can see it He's taking your imagination so people can see it Let me ask you this because you just made me think about something when you say movies Are you ever gonna do something or you can captivate what you capture what you've done documentary or something new? Biography he's by the palm we working on one now. You're already working on it. Yes, we are okay. Okay, and that's that's needed That's history. It's gonna be very entertaining to How long have you been working on it?  Well, let me know man, cuz I so when are they shooting to? Maybe now we're finally starting to film. Okay, we were finally start How long does that normally take like once people start to film? How long does it take before like two years?  Yeah Now just think if I had Video footage to show y'all something I had be thrown I gotta ask you something that's too far. I forget young bleed. He been on this show. Mm-hmm. You knew young bleed Man young bleed we real solid. Yeah, I talked to him all the time He was one of my first guys that came virtually and he was like man, I'm gonna help you Right. We talk here. We talk all the time like he does be so busy. Yeah He'd be super busy now right sudden But at first he had made time for me because you know I needed him, right You know what I mean and and it's just something Would you he would tell me stories about the P thing too because over time? I think everybody's gonna have situations like you and your brother and sister me and my family member certain family members Me we don't really talk like we used to when we was kids, you know my sisters I love her, but we just not like we were when we're growing up in the same house That's the way it is with people who do music together. It's the same thing really it's like it like everybody even though Everybody have a different story to tell because it wasn't like on Everything he said Applied the same to everybody because you talk about masterpiece, right? It wasn't it wasn't Um Everybody different people because it's like first of all you look at like me a ex, right? Yeah She'd only feed me alone a label correct the moon though Well her what then didn't came on say this but you didn't treat them the same because they're two different type of people That's correct. They're two different artists and then they bring a different value. Yeah, yeah, yeah And that was like the same like with the artists, you know, I'm saying to well, you know You're gonna go through basic stipulation that you will go through just like um You have your standards of how things are paid, you know, I'm saying and how things can go within on contractual situations, but Everybody is not treated the same because everybody value is different now young bleed came into a point to where he was already signed with C. Lo correct and Whatever them and P worked out that was on them So, you know, if I don't know too much about the people that I bought in and came with I Don't know definitely don't know nothing about how they being this way business when correct Yeah, cuz he was I didn't think of that as the remix until he told me go back and listen to the first of it Like that that that song how you do that there was a remix. Yeah, that was that was it was already hot It was already out and I you know, I'm sending it like when Pete picked it up and worked out without the deal to put Young bleed record out. That's when PJ. He just he got on it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, and he big already at the time Right, so that's gonna bring a whole nother level of to that So to that song but I just think you know me I think God works things out I think it's already written, you know I think when you started to send of you off you said that you couldn't you you didn't look at things a certain way It's kind of like you was you couldn't see the picture from being in the pictures what I thought when you said, you know Like you were just moving you know cuz I how big was that did you know that song's gonna be that big? I remember that right and he was like, no, I really didn't think of it Like you see what I'm saying, right cuz sometimes you be in a situation, but you really can't you I mean you you Something new it's exciting and it's your love, right, so you kind of blinded by everything, you know Except for that to be honest with you and that's how I think a lot of people get caught up in deals, too Same cuz they don't be thinking about the the the monitor. Did you ever work with little Wayne or see little Wayne? I've never met him. Okay. Okay, but you knew I probably met met Wayne once about he was younger So he would have moved around quicker And you know what man went me and Wayne shared the stage At the same time and I didn't even know he was standing next to me to my manager told me because he threw the Anifest right yeah, yeah, and when mystical went the DJ said I DJ for mystical, okay, and Wayne was there on the stage but I it never I Never looked his way because When mystical perform you have to keep your eyes on him Energetic man. He is lightning. He is electricity and water. I gotta get him on the show gotta get him on here Yeah, I gotta get him on his electrician No, yeah, that's why I gotta get him on here cuz he might do a little he might give me some He is We've yeah, that's different level energy, right?  So people always ask me Is he like this at home?  Wow. That's crazy, man And and I like I say I gotta meet this guy. I already know it's gonna happen. I believe me Oh, let me tell you something you get him on when you get him on this show you told my entertainment Yeah, he didn't went through a lot like the little beef that he had back in the day I don't know what that beef was about with them. I think with yellow boy and all kind of little stuff They had going on. Oh, no, no You know, that was just like Local dominance and rap. Yeah, just like like sparring in the hood cash money always in it That's it man, so I got a question. So your son lives here in Dallas now, right? Have you ever thought about moving to Dallas? We need you here.  This is your home. I always thought about If I was the move it would be in And it's just ironic the places that I would love to move is where all my favorite teams are So cowboys You know it It will be it will be Dallas because of cowboys Phoenix and a huge Suns fan Seattle because I'm a huge King different Ken Griffith and Seattle man is my favorite ball team I got them Favorite college basketball team is North Carolina Okay, well, we need you to come to Dallas. No, you think about all that other Here now, so Move on over here. Ain't no sense in playing with it, man. Yeah You can always this and it's close to Louisiana you can dip and hit 20 and be home in no time Yeah, me and Cory make me and Cory. Just talk.   Come on I'll play with me. Oh Thank you so much for coming on the show Say man, we're gonna get you back to it every time you come to town. We want to hear what's going down I mean when that when that when that when that short film come out I want you to bring and let me see what's going on with it cuz oh no, no Cuz I definitely know that it's gonna be a banger Because you gonna tell the truth see some of that stuff.  This is when it's releasing Oh, yeah, oh as a matter of fact push it as a matter of fact I just dropped my album KLC the drum major P1. Go get that. There you go. What it was. Yes. Good stuff right time I have dads from the dog pond Snoop Juvenile. That's hot. Um Me and Manny did a song together Lil John, you know, I have my no limit family theme. It's all of me a X serve on X to come on Man, I'll play with me You got everybody and and they can and definitely I see you on Instagram about to follow him for the tap in here in a minute We for the lock all this is follow boss As a matter of fact send me a sim tag me in and soon like soon we get off to Emma. I'm falling. That's what's up, man Thank you so much. KLC for coming on the show man. I love you man We wish you much success. Yes and Dallas a man. We got we going this year to the Super Bowl Yeah, that's what I see y'all can fill us on that stop playing with us. Don't play with us. It's a unique hustle I hope so both talk water


All right, okay, so I think it's time. So let's get started Well, thank you all for being here. You know, I'm really glad to see so many people are interested in this topic and You know cube counts have you know earlier deadlines for the for the talk So when I submitted the talk I want to talk about log processing But when I thought about it when I write up the Slides I saw you know, it's really about stream processing not just limited logs about other things So, you know, my name is Michael Yuan and I'm the maintainer of CSCF's Web assembly runtime project called wasm edge. So that's a GitHub link if you're interested, you know With us on GitHub, you know, there's essentially all our activities happening over there. Hmm. So As you can see the title, you know, there's two seemingly unrelated technologies that have been mentioned in the same sentence wasm and ebpf, you know If I if I ask people most people would just know they're both Lightweight virtual machine formats, but hardly related, you know, that's that's you know We're gonna dive into that and we're gonna even go further, you know, we're gonna towards the end of this talk We can also talk about things like, you know AI and machine learning which seem to be the the the topic of this conference, right? How does that relates to say wasm and ebpf and the whole idea of stream processing, right? You know, so there's a lot of topic we're gonna cover. I do have some Some demos, but I don't think we all have time to do the live demo here so I'm gonna give you the link and And you can you know go home and do that from your hotel room, you know That's I think it also would be more friendly to the to the conference bandwidth, right? so You know From the conversation that I had yesterday and the day before that seems like a lot of people Not really familiar with say the cloud native wasm idea, you know So web assembly sounds like something you use in the browser, you know, how's that how's that related with? You know cloud native computing and what do you mean? What do we mean by? you know wasm on the server side, so This this whole idea goes all the way so I added a couple slides at the beginning of this talk, right? So this is one of the slides that added so The idea goes all the way back to the origin of the cloud computing right, you know, so the cloud is really You know sharing resources with other people, you know on the on the larger computer You know, so there's no cloud that's just running programming other people's computer, right? So the whole idea of this is that the enabling technology really is isolation and virtualization. That's why you know the You know the clouds grow up with say AWS, you know That's we and where you know this generation of companies that provide virtualization and isolation on workloads and the evolution of the of the isolation virtualization goes you know From our point of view goes through three phases the first is the virtual machine era So where you have you know hypervisor and you know things like that and that is where The cloud computing first come up, right? You know you rent VPS virtual machines from say, you know ISPs or you may AWS, right? you know, that's a lot original cloud provider using this technology and After a couple years Docker Camelon and container Camelon, you know, that's people find you don't need to wrap Say operating system and then give people root access to install multiple applications You can containerize each application in their own container. So deploy a lot of those and that's I think that's the Cross of cloud native, right? You know cloud native is to say there's a lighter weight and the more flexible way of running workloads that in isolation So that's the container error, which you know is I Think the error we are currently or though towards the end of it. I think you know, so that's To make application and workload in the container, right? So what's the next generation after container because container why why tell people container is a heavyweight solution Most people are very surprised, you know, especially in cubica people say containers are lightweight solutions You know, you are you know, that's because they're comparing that with virtual machine, right? But if we compare come container with a new generation of virtual machines, you know We we call application virtual machines though, which happens not at the application level isolation But as the function level isolation, you know, meaning that I no longer just isolate an entire application But I isolate a function in the application, right? You know, so that's what we call the wasm area because that's where the the the lightweight virtual machine that is Even lighter than the container orders magnitude lighter than the container can play an important role So that's so if people ask what's wasm on the server side wasm on the server side is even ever smaller Granulation ever small fine agreeing isolation level for applications You know, we go from the whole computer to an application on the computer to a function in the application, right? You know, so wasm would be able to You know, I provide security and isolation for those for those very small workloads, right? so the whole idea of You may think, you know, that's okay That's you are describing microservices. Although traditional definition of microservices is not that traditional definition of microservices is you know Application service that wrapped in the in the container, right? However, if you look at How those today's microservices are being wrong in the in a data center you would find that's you know, a large percentage of the virtue the Utilization is spent on things that are at the function level this things that are transit, you know, that's things are very short-lived but with Container paradigm you have to start a container for those, you know If you if you think about how you set up a Kubernetes cluster, you know There's everything is a container even the weight action doing nothing and weight is a container, right? You know, that's so for all of those you need to spin up the operating system the virtualized environment and all that so, you know To a lot of people this is this as microservices goes More and more finally agreeing it becomes more and more problems, you know So we have worked with large internet companies that has 50,000 microservices, you know, it's not 50,000 the machines is 50,000 different services Each service has a team to maintain and has its own machine provision, right? You know, so it's the you know the the spread of microservices has really put a lot of strength on the on the infrastructure, right? That leads to You know a very interesting Exchange I think from last year. I mean, I'm hoping two years ago, you know, so when Elon Musk acquired Twitter, you know, that's You know, he was Looking to very aggressively cut cost and you know, so he was thinking a lot thinking out a lot at the time A lot of people thought he was you know, this was crazy, you know, that's a you know You can't Move from microservices environment overnight to to something that is not a microservice But you know, that's although you know The Twitter as we know it is still exist still exist, right? And this hasn't crashed yet, you know So, you know, it's a it's a from outside a lot. There's a lot of You know people have a lot of Resentment in terms of you know, how the microservices paradigm is being abused, right? You know, that's to putting everything Every minute function into a container and then make it As part of the heavyweight infrastructure is You know is I think a lot of people the wrong way, right?  You know, that's it was it was very interesting because at the At the time, you know, you would see Twitter has random failures for instance the two fact You know the the two factors indication would fail because there is a microservice that's responsible for sending out the SMS Right, you know, and he shut that down that you know, the two factors indication was suddenly not working, right? You know, so it's gradually to fix all those problems, but you know, that's it is one of those very high profile. I would say You know objections to this whole paradigm of having too many containers and too many services that's that clutter up the whole infrastructure, right? so We so in in the in in the language of the cloud native computing, you know We position wasm as another container on time, you know, so we we often score wasm as a container You know, that's although it's not really a container. It's it doesn't give you operating system It has a very confined set of functionalities that you have to write your application to that specification or to take advantage of it, right? However, if you do that if you use you know, if you write applications in To the wasm API and then compile to wasm the benefit you get is first of all is very lightweight You know, it's a as I will demonstrate in a minute It's about two orders of magnitude smaller than the comparable container images, you know That's so we are going from as I will show in a minute tens of megabytes or even hundreds of megabytes container images To ones that measured in kilobytes. Okay, so a database application can now become Kilobytes in wasm, you know, that's so When we had those screenshots on Twitter, you know people were very shocked, you know That's so so we have a three-tier web application that has a mysql background has a web server and the total size of the application is 700 kilobytes. Okay, you know, so it's so but exchange you have to use, you know Maybe a new language or rust or maybe a new SDK, you know to rewrite your application this way, right and It's gonna go a lot faster than spinning up a container You know, that's all spinning off spinning up spinning up a Linux container. So it would be Again one or two orders of magnitude faster not at a runtime But at startup that allows it to scale to zero meaning you know a lot of container settings Because it takes like close to one second to start up a container in order to ensure that Response always happens in milliseconds. You have to have the container running all the time you have to keep it in the in the In the memory or or have a dedicated CPU to it. It's called keep warm, right? You know, but with wasm you can truly scale to zero meaning you run nothing when when this task is not needed, right? You know, so it's it's it's truly start up on demand, right? Because in wasm, it's you know in the host environment is just starting up a thread, you know There's no additional overheads that you have to load all those memories all those libraries and you know things like that and Wasm can arguably be more secure because it is a it is a new security paradigm that that's that's That's what they call capability based the security meaning that you have to explicitly declare what you Watch this container with this application have access to right? It's unlike say a regular container I'm kidding and as we all see we want to talk about ebpf is that a lot of things asked for the route permission, you know So, you know, you don't really want that, you know That's so in the in wasm. There's more finely green way for you to for you to do those things and perhaps More interesting and very interesting today is that wasm application is truly portable Traditional container applications are not truly portable because when you look at the container images, they have x86 They have arms, you know, I'm CPU, you know, you have at least those two distinguishings Which is okay if you only have two CPUs However, more and more workload. We see today runs on GPUs and other specialized hardware. So If you look at Pytorch Docker image, it has different image for different version of CUDA and different version of CUDA And so there's hundreds of images and each of them has a work has slightly different, you know You know external driver version that is that being versioned to external drivers, right? That's really one of the big challenges in today's Claw native computing is that Kubernetes is designed to distribute binary artifacts It's not designed to recompile your source code on your deployment machine because it assumes That's the binary artifact is somewhat portable and with the new That's why I want to talk about AI in a minute That's with new AI and ARM workloads that promise has been broken, you know, because you know say if I develop Even if a Python application you have to specify whether underneath it you want to do the CUDA driver or something else, right? You know, so if I develop something on the Mac, there's no guarantee that this same application gonna work on A video machine in the cloud. There's no guarantee that this machine this this application gonna work in say the AWS Specialized inference chips. That's called inferon. I think, you know So you are going all the way back to pre Java days 25 years ago Where you developers have to recompile and attest their applications on the deployment platform, you know, so I think that's It's also one of the features that wasm significant features wasn't gonna give us is that it's truly a portable You know, it's just one binary. It's always the independent CPU independent with machine learning and AI workloads It's GPU independent.  So those are the Some of the features.  You know, so if you I know it's a little hard to read but, you know We have You know around that time we we we published the I wouldn't call the benchmarks, but you know some some numbers of you know some applications that we built, right? You know, so those applications is some kind of web service It has a has a you know, it runs a web server So you can access from outside and it has some kind of database on the back end The database could be my sequel could be real S radius could be postgres and if you use the Traditional way to Let's not say Java because Java is hundreds of megabytes But even if you use go to write or us to write those applications and wrap wrap around in a Say a one-two image the the the container size would be in the tens of megabytes But here we can see that's a you know The wasm size the entire application is about I think 700 kilobytes or 800 kilobytes You know, it's that you know a sub one sub one megabytes You know, so it's that the difference is huge the difference is at least one order magnitude often times two orders. So Well, it's not just us that says that, you know, so the since if any survey said What did they say all containers are the new normal and the web assembly is the future I think that's why you know, that's why they say it, right? You know, so So a little word about you know, the wasm age project wasm age project is a cncf And it's only a wasm runtime project in cncf You know, so there's other wasm application project like wasm cloud is actually the application server that built on wasm right, you know, so But wasm age is the actual runtime, right? You know, so it is a what do we call a cloud native purpose build a web assembly runtime for for server side applications and It has a lot of features that are important on server side, but not important in the browser, right? So for instance, it can create HTTP servers and in order to create HTTP servers, you need asynchronous connections because you can't you know Node.js is a single-threaded HTTP server you can have multiple connections coming at the same time But they're on the same thread, but they can share time because they do not block each other, right? So we do the same thing with with wasm age starting with HTTP servers in that right, you know So we support database connections We can connect out to MySQL or Postgres and you know where I have different databases as we have seen from the from the previous tweet, right, you know So build 3TR architecture applications the server the web server the middleware and the database, right? We support a lot of AI workloads, which we're going to talk about later You know, it's including PyTorch, TensorFlow, Lama.cpp and you know things like that to provide a cross-platform AI experience for the for the you know for our applications and Perhaps the more interesting is that we support existing container tooling meaning that's within today you can use Kubernetes or Cryo or C wrong or elements of the or even Docker desktop to directly manage wasm age applications as if they are Linux containers and we're gonna show that in a minute, right? You know, so that's one of the advantages of playing this ecosystem playing the CNCF ecosystem is that we get other tools to support, you know, deployment of of wasm applications So let's see how it works in Because this is the question I get a lot, you know in Kubernetes As we have just mentioned the Kubernetes container Linux container for Linux containers are not Not truly cross-platform. So you need to give it a CPU architecture, right?  So there's a new CPU architecture called web assembly wasm 32 Okay, so when you when you have a wasm binary artifact, you build a wasm application to build a wasm binary Bite code application sort of like Java bit code application, right? you can upload it to Docker hub and give it the CPU label as wasm 32 when the Kubernetes tools like C wrong or container D plus plus a shame plus wrong wasi Pulse that artifact from the Docker club. It checks the CPU architecture CPU architecture to see if it can run locally now. It sees is wasm 32 It's there's no corresponding CPU that can run wasm 32 at that point The tool knows that it needs to use a wasm runtime to run it, right? You know, so at that point it's start wasm edge and run it so for Developers it is a fairly straightforward experience, you know, is that you can run Linux containers and the wasm wasm applications side by side in the same cluster So you have a pod that has maybe three Linux containers running as a servers and the two wasm Applications that running as a serverless functions or something like that, right? So it's This experience of course still needs to be it's continuously being proved, you know So we have you know the partners that we work with like liquid reply You know, they have a k wasm project that has has a Kubernetes operator that's automatically installed wasm runtime on the cluster And you know things like that. So there's lots of things that's that happen in this space But the general idea is that we define the new CPU format called wasm Sorry to that doesn't it really exist, you know in the real world But when the Kubernetes runtime sees that it knows to use the wasm edge runtime to run it, okay? So here are the some of the database connections that we support, you know That's we're gonna go over that. So, you know, that's With all the introduction about what is wasm and you know things like that, you know So we we can finally talk about some use cases, right? you know, so the first use case we want to talk about is wasm for streaming functions and You know, this is somewhat a hot field. So, you know, I think only a couple months ago, you know Well, it's that 222 but I think this may be early release. They have a new updated release. So Streaming engine Red Panda has declared that they would have wasm to build a building to their product You know, so the idea is really to have the messaging queue and processing Live on the same place because used to be they're separate the Kafka server and the flink server are two separate servers One manage the messaging queue as a process the managing messaging queue, right? But with the wasm server is function bedded into the messaging queue You can do lightweight processing right there. So one of the use case examples is that so for instance There are a lot of incoming messages, but some of them have sensitive data like containing password You know things like that or your worse Bitcoin private key, right? So you could have a wasm program that detects those features and the discard those messages not lock them, right? You know, so right there without having to spin up a flink server on the side, right? You know, so do that right there in in the in the messaging queue, right? You know, so that's a red panda's work, but the thing I want to really talk about is We can go a step further to say we can we want to use wasm to do log processing in the in the In our say large department of Kubernetes clusters. So The current state of art or the current state is that's the ELK stack. I think many of you probably have Heard of that and played, you know struggled with that, you know, it's a stack of elastic search lock stash and K-bana Those are three JVM's those are JVM applications And of course you can't directly deploy JVM applications in the in the in a cloud native cluster You have to wrap them around in Linux container the VMs So that blows their size to you know hundreds of megabytes and you know So it's a it is a very popular stack, but it's also in my opinion very slow, right? You know, so this is actually one of the huge bottlenecks if you look at Leading internet companies. So, you know, one of the guys that we work with They have 2003,000 the machines processing locks. Of course, they have 700, you know, they have over a billion, you know, and may use using their platform, you know There's a but you know the the cost that's Inherred by just processing those locks and in the new era of you know People want all their data to do machine learning and you know things like that It's even more costly because you can't really because you want to save those that you want more deeply processes of status, right? You know, so it's a it is a it is a challenge. That's that's that is very big. You know, that's sorry. So how does Wasm help here is that instead of having those three containers for its JVM's and the process data Can't we have lightweight containers? Reading wasm that is much fast that is much faster and much smaller to do Something mundane like processing locks, right? So this is the project. That's exactly what we did with one of our so By the way, I'll give a shout out to Linux foundation Mentorship programs that's you know, so they get graduate students from all over the world to work on You know Linux foundation host data projects. So this is one of our graduate student interns He came up with the whole solution and And so it's sort of like Google summer code, but did the did the whole project, right? So in this project, you know, as you can see He wrote a wasm application that start with the Database bin collector or the pot lock collector, you know, so it collects a lock Hookup with a database or hookup with a log file in the in the in a different in a different container in the same pot, right? collect those Those locks and then with those locks Implemented components to pass those locks and aggregate them and then process them with each step There's a way to plug in your own logic, right, you know, so wasm is ultimately application development platform So it provides You know, if you think in Java terms is the abstract class that dividing here So you have to provide your own implementation, but in rust terms, it's the trades Right, you know, so you implement those straight and compare it with with the existing application You add new features to it, right? So, you know, that's he did all this in rust So he so this so this is the overall diagram. That's you know, that's allows the application to start a very lightweight Wasm application wasm container and then use it to process all this data, right, you know, so the you are the The GitHub repository to this, you know, it's listed here. It's under the wasmage organization it called log flex and If you look at it works out of the box So it has a configuration file That's that you can just simply use because by default it just collects those logs and send them to a database, right? You know, that's so you know So it collected and being locked from my sequel and you know So it's a configuration file the application reads and then it specifies where to collect the data Where to how to combine the data and what's the format for the output to to send out, right? You know, so so I won't have time to really demonstrate this but you know, that's But when you see that you you get the idea, right?  You know don't need the three JVMs plus three containers plus operating system and everything you just have one You know very lightweight Perhaps two three megabytes size, you know Wasm application where you know, you can you can start in your in your your pod and and start to collect all those data right, you know, so this is one of the examples and I'll go a little quicker because I have eight minutes left. So we talked about how to get data and how to You know Process the log. This is one project So I want to move on to the next project, which is also done by one of our Linux Foundation interns so she's also a graduate student and what she did is to solve the problem of How do you get the source of the data? You know because the the the source of the log data typically come from say, you know like in the previous example, it's come from the The Mexico green lock right, but a lot of system level data Increasingly they come from ebpf. So you have a ebpf program You inject into the kernel in the that runs the host offering system, right? You know and then start to collect networking level data so that when that data get emitted you can have the the stack that I talk about instead of the okay, but I have wasm file to process that but to Deploy the ebpf is Is one of the pain points that we we have identified that's you know, that's we we are working with some you know on cloud native companies that's That are doing this work, right? You know so today without wasm There's really two ways to deploy a dbpf one is to integrate integrated control plane You know, that's essentially you start a container to deploy it, right? You know, that's and the other one is that you have a sidecar you have a ebpf demon. That's you know things Project like one would be and things like that. So those are the two existing Deploy models, but they all have problems, you know So for the integrated deployment you have to start container with the operating system Just to deploy a ebpf agent and manage the life cycle of that agent just think about you know Whenever I see those I think about the waste it generates, right?  So this is one of the problem with integrated deployment where you know, you have you have a dedicated Linux container to manage this process, right, you know, so Then on the other side is a sidecar deployment sidecar deployment is Because that's the process you have to run in the pot. It's a lot less flexible It's a lot more Intrusive to the to the Kubernetes system itself, right? You know, so I'm not saying there's anything wrong with those two deployment I'm just saying there's room for improvement, right? You know, so the idea of rooming improvement is really to have The ebpf deployment container not be a Linux container Okay, but a wasm container something like this. Oh, sorry. Oh, I think I'm missing a slide. Okay. Well, yeah So that's the the red one should be a wasm container that has so what we call was the extension for ebpf Meaning that's there's a system a set of system cause that's specifically scoped for deploying ebpf agent and collect data from those agents right, you know, so The project itself is is is is here So there's a library and the tools, you know You have your existing ebpf program and you use the The tools provided here to compile them into wasm, right? And then you use Wasm edge plug-in which provided those host functions into the into the wasm runtime into wasm container And then the wasm container would be able to take that wasm file Strip out the ebpf stuff and inject that into the kernel, right? You know, so it's a complete the whole process, you know, I'd really Again, I'm running out of time, but I really encourage you guys to try this I think this is a really nice way to you know to to deploy ebpf as you know, that's that's you know That's that is lightweight and that's more manageable. Yeah so, you know, so here are some of the You know Benefits, you know, that's it's either faster, but you know, where they knew that, you know That's so we keep I talked nonstop for like one and a half an hour to say why this is better faster either, right? You know, so There's One last thing we want to talk about is that there's another way of streaming processing and streaming processing is called AI You know, the AI applications are just data streaming if you think about the AI applications They're just you know You inject prompts and then you get some data back and then use that data to call function You know something like that When wasm edge first started a lot of our customers use AI on the edge meaning that's the AI in the camera where in the car You know, those are all data stream of image data's right, you know So you do processing over those and the the idea is I would skip forward So, you know, so we have a project called llama edge, which is an application that build on top of wasm edge that's allows a True cross-platform comparability for those applications meaning that's I write towards a wasm API and once I Once it's compiled I can deploy it to any device be it Intel bit AMD bit and media bit Mac bit arm, you know Anything the wasm runtime figures out what is underlying runtime you're gonna use and what's the GPU? It's gonna use right so it's gonna so the there'll be one binary that being concentrated across the entire each network and the the the cloud network by Kubernetes so Yeah, so there's there's I'm gonna share that in a slide So, you know, there's something you can go go to the hotel and try it You know, that's it's gonna download a large language model. We're on your own on your own computer and you can try it right, you know, so Again those the third time those are also built by our interns. Thank you So, you know our interns has to build a pytorch extension to wasm edge meaning there's There's not no Python in there But the pytorch C library and the pytorch C API build that into wasm so that from from wasm You can use rust or go or JavaScript to call those Pytorch functions They build TensorFlow they build open. I know so it's not done by the same internet down by Over the span of I think one and a half a year by Over five or six interns, you know, so some of them build open CV FFM peg You know, so now we can support the the meta models the media type models, which is a Google set of you know Vision and audio models and even things like the yellow five object detection models And you know things like that. So, you know, I think again running of time But there's lots of examples that that you can see for this type of stream processing not really a lot anymore but image data audio language and you know, so you can you know You know every single one of them has you know, a CI CD attached to them So you can see how they run in a to get up environments so you can run it on your own environment and you yeah, that's so Think thank you. Yeah