Hi everyone and welcome back, today I'm going to play with new products from the latest release by my favorite things. There are many stumps, dies and stencils to choose from this month, they are all adorable just like always, in every release it makes it really difficult to choose a favorite. So today I'm going to play with stumps perfect for holidays and I'm starting out with this one, this is called Loach of Joy, there are tracks or trains which are full of gifts and there are lovely creatures that are driving them, such as penguins, snowmen, reindeer and there is also a santa that you can use as well as some trees that you can work with to create your asins. I am going to create a little scene on my garden, I'm going with one of the tracks which is loaded with gifts and a little snowman is driving that but I don't want my snowman to be alone so I'm going to give him some company, that's why I'm going to stamp the little reindeer as well and the trees, for all of these images there are matching dies available which I'm going to use later on, for now I'm going to do my coloring, for coloring all my images I'm going to use my alcohol markers and I'm using my triblant brush markers, I did do a swatch on all the colors that I have as well as some quick review on them but today I'm going to use them and you can see them in action, so here I'm using the dark reds for coloring the track, if you are watering I'm working on Nina Solar White cardstock, this is the 80 pounds cardstock and I'm starting by laying the lightest color all over the track, this way I make sure that everything is nicely saturated, the paper is nice and wet and now I'm going to go from darker all the way to lighter, you will see that they blend nicely, I love the nib, it's nice and soft, very juicy and it makes blending really easy, one thing you need to keep in mind is that brush is not very thin which means that it is quite difficult to go to very small areas for that you can either use other markers that you may have that have a very fine tip, I do have the other triblants which make my life easier but of course you can use your pencils for very tiny areas, here I'm doing very quick coloring, I'm not going to switch to any other coloring medium, I'm just going to use the triblants and you may notice that sometimes I go outside of the lines just because I'm doing very quickly and I'm not very careful, however this is not a problem for me, I will use my dies to cut them out and if I have a little bit of color on the white border that the die leaves then I can use my gel pen marker, my white gel pen and cover it up, no one will ever know. So I use the dark red to color the track then I used the cool grays for coloring the wheels as well as some different details on the track and for the gifts I played with greens, blues and yellows. Now with the magic of video editing you will see all the images colored and ready to go, I don't like to introduce many new colors on my images so you might notice that I repeat the same colors for the trees as well as for coloring the reindeer, I used the magic dies to cut them out and I did cut out with some of the slope dies that I have in my stars a couple of pieces that I can stack one on top of the other, the one in the front has some foam tape at the back while the back one is completely flat with glue directly on top of my blue cardstock. So now I have my slopes of snow, I do have my sky and I decided to put that reindeer on top of the track so the snowman is driving the car while the reindeer is handing out the gifts.  The trees are going completely flat at the back and for that I used my nouveau de luxe glue and I think this is a lovely detail that really completes the whole scene. Now all I need to do is to stamp the sentiment, I used one of the sentiments from the same stamp set, it reads Christmas cheer is on the way and I stamped that with black ink and finally I'm going to stick this panel on top of a standard card that's four and a quarter by five and a half and the only thing that's missing now is falling snow. There are many different ways to add snow on your little scenes, you can go with stencil and embossing paste, you can use your brush and create white splashes. I decided to go for this card with my nouveau drops. Here are some close-up photos on a card that I absolutely love because it combines two of my favorite things. First of all it is a Christmas card and Christmas themed cards are my favorite plus it has a lovely scene on top. Now let's create another card perfect for holidays, this time I'm not going for a scene so I'm going to use three of the snowmen from this adorable stamp set, this is called present time, it comes with five different snowmen in different positions smaller or bigger and they are holding presents or stockings. You also get four different sentiments to work with for your projects as well as a couple of trees in different sizes so you can easily use this stamp set to create scenes if you like. For this card I'm going for a completely different design, I chose three of the snowmen and I'm going to stamp them with black ink and I'm going to color them with my tree blends. These are again my alcohol markers, the marker I'm using here is true blue and I used the lightest one to add some shading. Once I apply a touch of that blue I then go over it with a colorless blender just to smooth it out and fade it out just a little bit. Coloring the snowmen is really easy I'm just adding some shadows where I feel they should go and then blend it out. Remember I prefer doing quick coloring and I think that at the end just because the images are super adorable they look always nice so here I'm going with my colorless blender and I have this one by Spectre Noir but any brand would work just fine. For the Christmas stocking I'm going to go with a dark red and to bring all those different images together I'm going to add the same color on all three of the snowmen. So the one with the stocking is going to hold a red and white stocking, the other two are going to have red scarves again using the same marker and I'm going to add green for the gift as well as for the big bag of gifts. So you see how easy it is to add the shading here I don't have to look through my drawer of markers to find something that matches. For the white areas I'm going to add that shadow with cool gray.  I'm going to put on some music and let you see how I did all the coloring and then I'll cut you back once I have cut out all the images. Notice that I did use my white gel pen to go over the areas that I have went outside of the lines no one will ever know if your coloring is not perfect. I am using the matching dies to cut them out securing them down with some wash tape and I decided to go with a green panel as my background for that just because I don't want that to be super plain. I'm going to use this lined by hand background stamp this is from my favorite things from a previous release. It's going to give a very subtle look since I'm going green over green just a slight darker than the actual cardstock. Now notice that I did place my cardstock kind of on an angle inside my mist just because I didn't want to have those lines vertically or horizontally. I wanted them to be on a diagonal this didn't stamp the whole panel so I had some empty corners but I am using the same dark green ink to add some inking all around so this is going to completely cover up any empty spaces. Now the stamping is really subtle but you will be able to see that on the finished photos by adding some darker border all around it kind of draws the eye at the center and it makes it look as if it is glowing. This is the Merry Die from the latest release and I did cut it out from glitter gold glitter cardstock and I used the same glitter gold cardstock to act as a mat for my green panel so I'm going to stick that there and the Merry at the center. This is a lovely card design as it is you can embellish it if you like with holy berries that you can cut out I decided to use the snowman that I'm going to nest all around. I do have foam tape at the back so they are a little bit raised and I'm going to add them as if they are nested somehow in between the letters and as a finishing touch I did add some gold gems all around the card. Now on the close-up photos you can see that very subtle stamping at the background with the lines. So these were the projects for today using products from the latest release by my favorite things I hope that you had fun that you got inspired just like always you will find links to everything I used down below in the description area don't forget to like and to leave me a comment thank you all so much for spending some time with me today and until next time stay safe


Welcome back to my channel guys. It's Iker Coco Styles and on this channel. We talk about beauty fashion and lifestyle But in today's video, I'm gonna show you guys how I make ginger beer now I never heard of it before a friend of mine introduced me to it And I went to a Jamaican restaurant. They made it from I know it was fresh But it was so good. So this is my little spin on it And I'll show you guys how easy it is five minutes. You can make it. There's some ginger beer now I will say you can use plain Spring water. I only drink spring water or you can use sparkling water But what I did notice by using this the sparkling water is that you have more suds And you may have to strain it with a cheesecloth, but let me just get started. So I have some Pineapple, which is my added ingredient pineapple Maybe like four chunks. I have maybe a third of a cup of fresh Ginger I drink ginger every morning. So this was easy for me to make I have Some ice cubes so I can be really really cold And I have some agave and I have about a Tablespoon of agave Okay, so what I'm gonna do is I'm just gonna add in my ice cubes And you could put as much as you want I'm gonna add in my fresh ginger. I Don't like to add too much because Ginger ginger burns. I don't care what nobody say and I'm gonna add in my Fresh pineapple and I'm going to add in my agave and The agave is what's gonna give it like that little kick Because to be honest with you the um The ginger is really really strong and Then I'm going to add my spring water I'm gonna get a little bit more Okay, so I'm just gonna add some more water and And I use my nutribullet and the reason why I use my nutribullet is because That's all I have but this works just fine and We're just gonna juice this up plug this in really quick and And go from there, so this is it Ginger agave Ice cubes and some pineapple. Okay, so what you will notice that it looks a little sudsy When you are making it with the sparkling water you have a lot more suds than this like I said, you could actually Strain it out or let it sit for a second and then pour it into a glass and that's what I'm gonna do I'm just gonna let it sit for a second and then I be back and let you guys see How this looks and me tasting my Ginger bear cocoa spin on ginger bear. So I'll be right back guys Okay, guys, welcome back. So I let it sit for a little while. You guys can see the color The suds and then the ginger You can let it sit a little bit longer if you want so I can just like Settle in but since I'm really thirsty I'm just going to open this up and I Am going to just pour Into my cup and I try my best not to get a whole bunch of the the suds in there and Voila This is my ginger Beer, okay, I don't know why they call it ginger beer. Don't know but this is so yummy guys. Let me taste it for you guys mmm Yes Yes, yes, yes, okay if it's too strong for you guys I would recommend Putting more agave. I'm okay with it because I drink ginger every day But if this is something that is just because it's like a brunch check I like it, but if it's too much for you, you can add a little bit more agave And be good. I don't know about honey. I use agave. That's my sweetener I don't use regular sugar. So this is it and this is my ginger juice guys And I hope you guys like it So if you guys like videos like this, please comment below if you like this video, please hit that like button Don't forget to subscribe And if you stay to the end of this video, please comment Coco, we see you and I will see you guys in the next one Bye


Um, Austin, the guy that does the SCIENCE of stuff, he's uploaded a, uh, CIS location science video, so I thought I'd react to that. I didn't react to the last game theory, because I had audio issues, and I didn't want to upload my reaction without my audio, so I just didn't upload it. It was okay, it was kind of just a recap of, um, help on it, so it wasn't really much of a game theory, if you ask me, but, you know, I can't say stuff like that, or else people get offended, they dislike the video, and, um, it makes me sad. Anyways, the SCIENCE of CIS location. Apparently it's about, like, Enno's body suit with, um, um, Michael Afton, so, uh, yeah. I'm really intrigued about it, actually, because I don't think anyone's really looked into that type of stuff. I believe this is the first time someone's actually gone into that, so I'm pretty excited. While we're here, don't forget to hit that like button. Please. Dear Scott Cawthon, uh, uh, uh, spit it out. Hey, it's Jack. I was good. Oh, I didn't do that. Would you like to give it another try? I believe in you. Oh, now someone's gonna make that. Good job, Austin. I hate myself and never want to sleep again. I hit sister location and some things stood out as super strange to me, and now my sleep was nice. You got to sister location and that's when it started getting weird. I think you skipped a few games. I'm pouring over the weird implications of what may be one of these strangest endings to any video game ever. La la la la la. Hey, custom night. I don't know the ending of sister location. It's pretty dark. There are two endings, the bad one and the other bad one. Both of which essentially end the same way. The main antagonist entered a f***ing not entered and they go. Anyway, entered a hybrid animatronic containing the hive of the minds of fun time freddy fun time foxy circus baby and ballora and I think that's all of them. Anyway, I'm bowing you into a not at all suspicious sounding scooping room they confess to you that this is all been a plot to escape captivity in circus babies entertainment and rental their big plan revolves around using the scooper out and scoop you out and then wear your body like a suit so they can escape without being Yeah, now that someone says it out loud to me I do realize just how weird this the ending is my exotic butters yes voted my popcorns from all around the world this were all I had to go on I'd just be like gross and then move on that's not all I have to go on because Scott cotton later released the custom night which allowed you to several more nights of sister location that were even harder thanks for that one pal the nights themselves are not oh wait I thought it was going to talk about ultimate custom night you kind of you goofed me though Austin with a minigame that is canon in this minigame you watch eggs benedict a.k.a. the player character a.k.a. Michael Afton there you go I was scared it was going to say William Afton there outside birds are singing why are sands here sands why in a series of seven cut scenes we see the body of Michael Afton getting progressively more discolored and disfigured disgusting where this body staggers to a halt and summits up the remains of entered into the sewer which is what ultimately reveals that the events of these cut scenes take place after the events of sister location yeah you right men eggs is kind of hope many more questions than the answer like why is entered still hiding an eggs body when they've already escaped captivity what sort of errands could entered possibly need to run do they wear the suit 24 7 or do they take it home and I don't know the answer to how a human skin suit puppet works is amazing is he going to teach him about how to control a human I don't know how much I want to learn he's got a can in height like a puppet so first we got to figure out how possible that even is and unfortunately we don't know exactly how big entered is because entered is an amalgam of like half a dozen animatronics and we don't know how many parts are squished into their frame that being said we can make a pretty close estimate using a can in blueprints of circus baby ballora oh we can ah the heads in the scoop entered I average their heights and their weights to get a ballpark size and wait for entered which comes out to 325 feet I guess we won't do that and 393 pounds definitely taller than the average that is huh it's pretty tall oh my god hello foxy basically a bunch of wires twisted together to form a super wire cable using pixel measurements from fun time foxy fun time foxy foxy looks weird it looks like scrap from the ice age movies I can't look at him the same way 150 feet or 76 meters yike oh oh no this ain't it you're a bit chunky but there's no way that all of entered could fit inside of one man's bomb so not really busted because we have no reason to believe that this is what enter did entered could have just as easily scrapped all the parts they didn't need in order to fit inside of eggs body and operated like cranged from the ninja turtles after almost the point of having a whole mechanical body when you already have made a flesh and blood right there the real question I think is how much death the cells responsible for pumping blood throughout your body and the heart sees up and power mortis sets in where all your blood stops moving around in drains from your capillaries the cells of your muscles unable to produce adenosine triphosphate the molecular energy currency due to a lack of oxygen contract with no ATP to signal relaxation all of the muscles in the body stiffen entirely this is what's called a rigor mortis literally stiffness of death interesting unable to function properly seven orange this loosens up all the muscles and allows the joints to move again need under normal conditions all this happens in about a day and up until this point the body looks mostly normal baby a little pale is not said in yet and rigor mortis can be alleviated by massaging the muscles in question why do I you're going to massage a corpse I bring this up because the more I look into it the more massaging a corpse human flesh puppet like enter does in sister location it's totally plausible just like those dead frogs legs can be compelled to contract by introducing electricity and calcium ions to the sciatic nerve or sodium ions directly to the muscles it would be totally plausible that the I still hate I still hate this guy's face, he just looks So fine. It's really scary. Her rectus. After day two or three, though, things get a bit more complex. Autolysis progresses, bacteria that ordinarily would be kept in line by the immune system start to invade the body and leftover ions and ATP run out of energy. Muscles and other organs would stop functioning even with electrical stimulation because on a microscopic level, well, they no longer really resemble cells anymore. They're just broken masses of quickly gelifying organic materials. That doesn't look so good. At this point, rigor mortis is definitely gone. And if entered were to, say, install motors at the hip and kneecaps, they'd actually be able to walk more easily than before. But then there's the problem of putrefaction. The body is decomposing quickly. That's disgusting. Reimbalming the collapse of a human body is fast. Enzymes leaked from birch cells and organs combined with bacteria start to produce gases that will fill up every cavity and begin to bloat after three days and the body turns green. Shweck. Please don't show it. Red. Literally, we see this happen in games. Seven cut scenes in a row where the body gets progressively more mango. It gets a worse color. Entered starts to have a difficult time walking properly. People are frightened. Just talk to you at first probably because of the smell. That guy, he knows what's happening. Starts to turn literally green within the exact decomposition time frame forensic experts give for an unattended body. By day six, he's turned red. Well, okay. Yeah. But he's definitely changed color from green. He is nasty. That's not so hot. He's barely holding himself together. And when entered leaves, eggs' body collapses as though it was literally made of liquid. The point is that this is surprisingly, amazingly accurate for a hack job done by Ascension Animatronic with no access to embalming materials or a walk-in refrigerator to delay decomposition. This is exactly what would happen at the... Oh. Less likely that entered ran away from eggs' body and rather that they literally just couldn't keep exist amazingly accurate for a hack job done by Ascension Animatronic with no access to embalming materials or a walk-in refrigerator to delay decomposition. This is exactly what would happen at the exact same rate as it happens. It's actually less likely that entered ran away from eggs' body and rather that they literally just couldn't keep the body together and walking anymore. Plus, walking corpse is not a very good disguise. So what do you think?  I recommend buying a giant refrigerator. They can keep bodies from decaying for weeks, if need be. Also, remove all the internal organs. They're just going to accelerate the rotting process. And if you can get your hand on embalming fluid, you can probably use a body for several months. Learn from entered. Don't rush it. Preserve and pursue. And it will last for ages. Sincerely. Austin. That was pretty good. That was weird. Creepy and disgusting, but pretty good. Oh, another add in two seconds. Luckily, I get to leave. That was really interesting. Disgusting. Yes, interesting. Definitely. I guess we've all learned something today. Not to follow Ennard's footsteps. Literally and figuratively, I guess. Yeah, that was really good. I always love the science of series, just because it's so fascinating. Austin usually picks really interesting topics and just the science is the heck out of it. So it's really, really fun to watch. And I really liked this video. So that's it. Pretty, again, disgusting, especially the part with all the frogs and the dying bodies and all that stuff. But interesting, very, very interesting. And it's always good to go back to early FNAF games when it was complicated, yes, but still more simpler. But that's it. If you want to watch the video, just without me talking, it's linked down below. Thank you everyone so much for watching, and I'll see you all on the flip side. Goodbye.


this video we're going to talk about setting environment variables and one very common use case is to use environment variables to override log levels. So let me toggle over to IntelliJ real quick. So you can see here for this application, the application properties that's getting deployed. So I have everything in a package called Guru Spring Framework SFG Rust Brewery and that is at a debug level right now. So let me come back over to the command line and we can do cube CTL get all and let's do cube CTL logs and we'll pass it in the ID of this container and here we can see in my beer loader we are getting loading initial initial data so count is zero. Let's see that we have the started started that but the primary one is here we have count is zero and this is from Guru Spring Framework Rust Brewery Bootstrap and we can see this is log output and we are at a debug level so we can see that right in the log data and for deployment a lot of times development wise we loved getting log data at a debug level but when we have stuff running in production obviously that's not something that we want so what we can do is clear this in here let's come in and edit the deployment like so and come down here and in the containers there's actually we can actually set a another property and that is going to be here. I'm going to come in actually I want to use spaces here for YAML. I'm going to say ENV and this is going to take a name value pair as a list of different environment properties that we are going to be setting and here what I want to do is say name and what we want to do is for the properties that we set in our property file it's going to be all uppercase with an underscore so we'll do logging so that is going to be the environment property name and then we give it another property for the value creatively name value and in this case we're going to switch it to the info log level so this sets up the environment property and again just remember in our property files we're going to have name dot dot name here we're going to go name underscore name so logging underscore level underscore guru package name and then the value of info so let's go ahead and write that and here another thing we can do what we can do here is we do have that up and running we can see that's going for six minutes we can do apply minus F and this is going to tell Kubernetes to go ahead and reapply that it's changes and it will cause that container to restart with a new environment variable and we see they get all and here you can see one pod is terminating and another one is starting so let's grab this one and it actually started up before I could get that command in but you can see now the debug log information is no longer there so that environment property has been applied to the container and we've changed the log level of our spring boot application so now we are not dumping that debug information into our container log so again this is very common use case so when we have stuff that we're debugging locally as a developer obviously we like that when we are running in a deployment environment typically we don't want to have all that debug log data going through our system so I clear this and just take a quick look at that you can see down here on the bottom for our spec on the containers we edited this file and we put in the property ENV which is going to take a list of environment variables and that is going to be setting up the log level for my package to info overriding what is in our spring boot deployment artifact


Well, good afternoon, Professor Scheik. Anwar Scheik, it's a pleasure for me to meet you here. And we're going to have a discussion about your work, your theoretical work, your political work. And first of all, I think it's worthwhile to start with your intellectual biography. Could you tell us a little bit about yourself, like how you developed into the intellectual that you are today? Yes. Well, first let me thank you for the invitation here. This conference has been really excellent. And as I mentioned in my first, in my session, one of the things that motivated me to become an economist was a confrontation between the levels of development that I perceived as my family moved across the world and the discrepancy between what I perceived and what seemed to me could be done. My early training was as an engineer. So I tended to have the attitude that if there's a problem, you can fix it. But that led me to study economics. And then I discovered to my shock that economics didn't really portray the world adequately. And therefore, the fix becomes a problem because you're starting from a foundation which is already misrepresenting the world. That led me to graduate school. And in graduate school, I encountered political movements. There was a strong anti-war movement in the United States at that time in pro-civil rights, pro-feminist rights, women's rights. So it was a very progressive time. And it led me to question what I was being taught as a student and to read more widely, more generally, about how the world actually worked rather than how it was misrepresented within economic theory. Yeah. So you're an economist. You come from a department that is particularly non-pluralist in many ways that many of the heterodox approaches to political economy actually exist outside of the economics department. And until at least the crisis, you had the situation that the methods of the abstract, mathematicized, equilibrium theory-based methods actually infiltrated or influenced many social sciences, political science in particular, game theory, et cetera. But the crisis kind of changed things in a way that you had revolts against neoclassical economics in so far as it didn't explain the crisis. But for you, it was political movements actually that got you interested in different models, not the inefficiency to explain. That's an interesting question, because actually when I was the first studying economics, you have to remember that the economics profession was broader and more open than it is now, because it was a time when Keynesian economics was still taken as a serious economic school. And that in itself was interesting, because Keynesian economics had come into power because of the failure of the orthodox economists to understand what the Great Depression was about. And that led to a big opening. But by the early 70s, that opening was closing down. And by the 80s, it had shut down completely. I, however, had already been exposed to that opening. And I was fortunate actually to read the work of the man who would later become my colleague, Robert Halberner, in a book called The Worldly Philosophers. And there I discovered that economics had always had a grand set of different visions of which neoclassical economics was the smallest, so to speak, in my opinion intellectually the smallest and least interesting. And yet that was all that I was being taught. And so that spurred my interest in all these different ideas. And because I was also lucky that I ended up teaching at the new school, which was a very progressive institution founded in the early 20th century by progressives who had left Columbia University and created their own school and then later by progressive scholars coming from Europe with the rise of the Nazis. And that meant that I was fortunate to be in an internationalist, progressive environment as an economist rather than someone outside of economics. Yeah, wow. I mean, as Germans, most people know that Habib Makuza was, of course, was at the new school himself. But so you were exposed, or you grew up in a situation where the economics departments were strongly influenced by Keynesianism. And Keynesianism was also the profession. And it was also until the crisis of Fordism, the dominant economic policy, anti-cyclical.  Can you tell us a little bit about why you, what the critique is? Well, what I observed coming from travels across different parts of the world is that people behave differently and in complicated ways. I mean, no one can study history without understanding the role of culture and institutions and emotions and angers and sacrifice and violence, all of these things. And so when I was introduced to the foundations of economic analysis in the traditional sense with optimizing and maximizing, it seemed to me a completely absurd way to start and kind of indeed an insulting way to start to represent human behavior that way. It wasn't certainly not true in, as a European human behavior, it wasn't true of any. But I also observed that many of my heterodox colleagues accepted that as representing something that was in the past and was not true any longer. And that seemed to me a trap. Because if you take a foundational view of something being true in the past and you see the present as being imperfect, which is how many heterodox economists go, imperfect competition, concentration, monopoly power, then you're trapped in the framework of perfection. So that led me to investigate from the start how can we start with a different foundation. Now, in my early years in graduate school, I also studied anthropology, because that seemed to me the right place to begin when you're talking about people's behavior and psychology and political science. But then the question is, how do you put that together in an economic analysis? And that took me some time to show that you can go from the foundations of how people behave all the way up to the macroeconomic patterns and market patterns of how capitalism behaves in a systematic fashion. And I didn't want this to be just a book of axioms. I wanted my work to be grounded in empirical analysis, because in the end, if you're going to do a project of this sort, you have to be able to show that it's capable of understanding what really happens. So I think of it as there's an opposition on one side between perfect competition, perfect economics and imperfect economics. In my view, they're tied together. And I prefer to call what I'm doing real economics, that is economics that's grounded in the actual behavior. I should say that is not a new thing because that is how Adam Smith approaches capitalism. It is how Ricardo approaches it, how Marx approaches it, and it might be then also how Keynes approaches it. And once we understand that there is a big tradition of the best economists of the profession, of the pantheon so to speak, who are already doing this, we don't have to feel that we're doing something outside. We're actually doing something that was the majority until neoclassical economics became dominant. So I mean, if one were to categorize or pigeonhole the various, like in the history of economic thought, could probably say that you have like the classical political economy, which Marx ended up being like saying that he was better at explaining the origin of profit, for instance, as opposed to Smith and Ricardo. And then you had the neoclassical onslaught against Marx and that whenever there were crises, it seems that you get a tendency or a current of thought that, and that's why I found your work particularly interesting, that starts with the market, has it as its original premise, but then adds a lot of exceptions to the rule. Then like if you, for instance, read Max Weber, seems that he has like thousands of explanations why the market isn't working as it is working, but he sticks to it as like the original premise to the way he's thinking. And it seems that whenever there's crises, you have economists going back to history and looking at culture and all those social environments and language, but I was just surprised that you excluded Keynes from that particular category of say institutional political economy from John Stuart Mill, maybe via Max Weber to Keynes, Galbraith, maybe Stieglitz today. That's right. Why would you exclude Keynes? Because I think Keynes was posing a fundamental question which is not institutional, but fundamental to the structure of the market itself, which is the better way to put it is the effect of a big stimulation of the economy on the economy itself. Now the problem goes back earlier. Marx has a discussion about the effect of the discovery of gold mines in California as the gold was discovered and flowed from California across the west, from the west to the east, and then from the east to Europe. This was a problem investigated by Thomas Tuck. What happened to the European economies with this huge influx of purchasing power, what we would call now a massive stimulus? Well, the classical argument from Ricardo and it was the idea that it would just cost prices to rise. But we observed that instead, the main effect was that it cost quantities to rise. It caused employment and growth. So Marx already remarks upon the fact that capitalism by its nature is capable of responding to a stimulus. But that discussion is not there in Marx's own work because most of his work is unfinished. He didn't in fact live to do most of what we consider to be his work, was put together by angles after his death. So that raises the question in the classical tradition, how do you understand the responsiveness of the system to a stimulus? And Keynes is the one who poses that problem as fundamental and Kalatsky also. But really Keynes is the most conscious of the break. But the difficulty for Keynes is that he has nowhere to go with this understanding beyond the macro level because he's trying to, whether consciously or unconsciously, find a connection between his macro policies and the micro theory of the people that he was opposing. And that contradiction meant that Keynes was then able to be pulled back into the framework by their saying, look, he himself says he's one of us. And yes, so we will make him one of us by adding some imperfections. Keynes' economics becomes an imperfection. From my point of view, Keynes' economics is about a fundamental property of the system, which is a, I don't like the word perfection, but it's in effect a real characteristic of the system, that it's responsive to a stimulus. Whether the stimulus is the printing of money or the discovery of gold. But then the issue is what is the limit to that from the classical side? How does that have something that creates factors that overturn it or damp it down or cause consequences that are unintended? So I saw this some time ago, but the issue was how to go from a systematic framework that can explain the behavior of individual markets, microeconomics, all the way to the macro and explain the patterns that you actually observe without using any of the foundations of orthodox economics, no maximizing, no utility, no perfect knowledge, no rational expectations, no equilibrium in the traditional sense of being a state of existence. And so you have to have a starting point that can encompass the real processes. And you need different tools, different math, different methodology. But in the end, you have to address the same patterns. This is interesting because, as you know, within the Marxist political economy tradition, there seemed to be those who say that Marx was actually writing a categorical critique of classical political economy that he was criticizing the concepts themselves but did not try to supersede those. Whereas others are saying, no, he was actually in the classical political economy tradition. He tried to be the better classical political economist. And he seemed to side with that tradition that one has to develop, like one actually has to solve the transition problem and things like that. Yes, but I think the problem is that what unifies Marx with the classical economists is the idea that they're analyzing the real world, capitalism itself. And a critique of the foundations of somebody else's approach will not give you that analysis. Marx spent a huge amount of time studying the behavior of prices, relative prices, productivity, technology, land rent, wages, labor conditions. He spent time understanding these so he could show how he could explain what was happening as being intrinsic to the system. So if you're a philosopher, you can talk about the critique of the classical tradition and you can talk about Marx's foundational break with it. But if you're an economist and someone says to you, so how does that explain whether there should be austerity or stimulus in Europe, in Greece, what can you say? You can't throw out the tropes of exploitation and alienation. That's not going to help. You have to be able to answer the same questions. And I think not only it's very clear that Marx tried to do that, that his work focuses on those patterns, but it's also clear that he didn't finish writing what he projected to do. And so that was a task. And by the way, when he leaves to Engels, he says, well, look, Fred, you're going to have to finish up this work, which I didn't do. And I'm sure that my followers will be able to understand this foundation and take it on to the proper development of political economy, but they didn't do that. They didn't. Well, I mean, in April 58, he had that project of writing six books, which would have included a book about the international market and the state and so on. Wage it is. Yes. But to come back, I want to ask you a little bit about those things as well. But to come back, some people would have said that, say, the main interest or research interest of Marx was to analyze not why that particular price, but why that particular social form of organizing an economy. But you would say you need both, or they're both in Marx. Anyway, I deny it's absolutely that Marx was only interested in one side. One of the things that happens with Marx, this is an analogy I use. I may not have the exact numbers here, but when Newton was working on the law of gravity, he came to a stunning realization that you could unify these in the idea that two masses are attracted towards each other and that the size of the masses determined the gravitational force between them. And so he could explain why we could take a ping-pong ball, a table tennis ball, and a golf ball, and in the absence of air, they would drop to the ground at the same rate. That's a beautiful, beautiful thing to understand. However, he had a problem. Outside the Earth is the golf ball, the moon is a table tennis ball, and it's hanging there and is not coming down. And Newton was faced with the difficulty that if his argument was correct, he could explain why apples fall from the tree to the ground, but he couldn't explain why the moon didn't fall to the Earth. Now, it took him the development of calculus and I recall it 12, 13 years, some number like that, before he realized that if the two objects are moving relative to each other, they can be in an orbit. Now, suppose that Newton had died before he did that. Suppose he had died only with the apples falling to the ground, then his followers would have split into two parts. Those parts would say, well, he was interested only in the fundamentals, the basic laws, and that he really didn't care about the moon and apples, it was just his point of entry, or the other side would say, well, we need a different principle for that. So maybe we start with Newton, maybe we don't, but we need some way to explain why a big object doesn't fall. And Newton was conscious of the danger, so to speak, of a half-finished theory. Unfortunately, we have from Marx a half-finished exposition, not a half-finished analysis in my opinion. He did a lot of that work, but a half-finished exposition. And it split the movement precisely in that expected way. Some went to the idea that Marx was only interested in a foundational critique, but not interested in the vulgar things like prices and interest rates and exchange rates, but we know that's not true because Marx spent a lot of time commenting and writing about that. And others would say, well, the ideas that Marx put forward are no longer true because he was talking about competition, and we don't have competition. Now we have monopoly, and so they move on to the idea that we have to explain the moon in a different way. I've always argued that both of those are mistakes, that there was a path after Tony Blair known can never say a third way, but there is another path that can't unify the starting point, the elements which were laid out and show that it's capable of explaining much more than was actually used or developed in the classical tradition. And Marx's followers, they try to actually develop or fill the lacunae in Marx's work. For instance, like Hilferding with this book on financial capital or Luxembourg with a book on the accumulation of capital. But in your work, Luxembourg has seen a sort of renewed interest in her work, particularly because of her Landnahme theorem, like the idea that there needs to be an external to capital, only that she was wrong thinking that it had to lay outside of the external borders of nation states, but that it could actually be like the new deal, be inside of existing social formations. But Luxembourg hasn't influenced your work as much. You're drawing a lot on- No, let me say two things. Before I wrote this book, which took me 15 years, I spent 10 years on another book, which was about the movement from Marx to Hilferding and Luxembourg, and I still have that unfinished manuscript. I did, I threw it away. I mean, it's hanging around, but I didn't use it. And I didn't use it because that manuscript focused on the incompleteness or problematics of each of these people in relation to Marx. It became a book about concepts, but not about the issues involved. When I read Hilferding, for instance, and Finance Capital, two things seem to me very important pose there. One is, is it true that there is monopoly? And you have to, when I read that book, I say, how do you know that it's monopoly? And the answer is because firms are big, but big firms, concentration centralization, is not in Marx a source of monopoly. It's a mechanism for competition. However, if you're starting from orthodox economics, perfect competition, then the fact that firms have any scale at all is an indication of imperfection. So what it crept into the Marxist tradition was already the nascent dominant ideology of capitalism, the perfection ideology. And it's absolutely dominant today. The Monthly Review School people have recently published, I mentioned in my book, their notion of what competition is. And they say, well, it's the same as Milton Friedman. Well, that's an astonishing statement from a Marxist group because if they've read anything in Marx, it's all about the fact that competition is the operative principle that regulates capitalism. So when I read Luxembourg was a different question. Luxembourg question was, what about effective demand? What is the place in Marxist scheme? And she focuses on the schemes of reproduction and says, well, where does the demand come from? I read that very carefully and I did a lot of work on it actually at one point. And I realized that the problem was twofold. One is how is the system able to finance growth? And that's a kind of externality, especially if the growth is going to be beyond the internal mechanism system. And the second is how does the system respond to a stimulus of effective demand? And that leads you pretty much to Kalecki and Keynes, which is where Kalecki says he comes from Luxembourg anyway. But then that's disconnected from the other laws. It appears only as a problem at the aggregate level, but surely that cannot be true. Every of these problems appears at the level of the micro. So I try to show that you can stitch these problems together, you can answer them, but not necessarily in the way they were posed either by Hilfiding or Luxembourg. For instance, in the book I show about finance capital. I have a discussion of how finance capital can be treated analytically. Yes, thank you for holding it up. Please buy that book. You will see it's quite heavy, it's not easy to hold up. And here is another problem that comes up. Most Marxist tradition focus on the idea that profit comes from surplus value. What I point out in the book is that Marx makes the argument that it doesn't and people ignore that. And the reason is very simple. Before industrial capitalism, there was 2,000 years of merchant capitalism, not a system in itself, but in some countries and some areas, big trading families, big trading regions, where did the profits come from for those trading regions? They didn't have manufacturers to do it. They went abroad, they took things from here, took them to China or Arabia and they brought back other things. So that was an unequal exchange in the sense of Marx which produces profit. In the beginning of that chapter on profit, I mentioned that I start with Stuart, Sir James Stuart, who says there are two sources of profit. And this is the first section of theories of surplus value of Marx. Part one, chapter one, he discusses, say, Sir James Stuart's idea that there are two sources of profit. And Marx says, Stuart doesn't explain where the second modern profit comes from, which I, Marx, will. That's going to be surplus value. But he's right that there is another profit, which I am going to call profit on transfer or profit on alienation. And that's going to become important later when I get to the distribution. Of course we know he doesn't get to it. But that clue is very important because it's also the source of explaining many problems such as a transformation problem, the appearance or disappearance of profit relative to surplus value, as well as financial capital, as well as trading capital. So I try to show that the same principle operates to explain the particular problems, but the principle has different moments, so to speak. There's a production of profit and there's a creation of profit through transfer. And that solves a lot of problems that appear otherwise to be unrelated to the main argument.


It's like business is completely unlimited and so what you have to do is just get a system in place that keeps you at the top of what you can handle at all times. This is what I believe. I'm sharing that with you for nothing.  I think you hit the nail on the head. You don't know too much about a business. I feel like a lot of us are shuffling to keep organized with the leads that come from the database. There's some of that business for a year even. Why are we trying to follow up with them? Just say hello because we don't want to lose them potentially, you know? It's okay. What you have to do is you have to get in this mindset that it's okay to lose people. You see, you have to sacrifice. There's no system out there, my guy, that will win every single lead. There's thousands and thousands and hundreds of thousands and millions of real estate agents. You're just not going to win every single prospect. What you have to do is put together a system, put a system in place that's going to give you the best opportunity to capture as many as you can. The ones that fall through, you know, you can't win them all. And so you can't sit here and worry about, am I going to capture every single lead? You just do the best you can do. It's kind of like not worried about the results kind of thing.  The weekly email is a safety net on the back of my business, right? Whereas if I show property to people and they don't buy anything, right? They say they even quit returning my calls and went totally ghost on me after I spent three days showing them property. That's fine. They're still going to get that email. And in three years, they call me back and say, hey, remember me and say, yeah, I don't remember. Oh, yeah, they're the ones that went ghost on me. I showed property to three days, but I'm not going to bring that up. I'm just going to say, yeah, what can I do for it? Oh, we're ready. We like this house. Okay, cool. Let's go. Boom. We write an offer. And so that email is a safety net on the back of my business. Whereas it's not going to catch every single lead. Some are still going to fall through the holes of the net, but it's a pretty secure net. Like it's going to do its job for the most part. And so you just have to be happy with, you know, and satisfied with, you know, you have to have a system in place. You feel confident will capture the most back in, you know, like this is where you win is not necessarily in the front. And everybody does a good job on the front end getting the leads, following up, showing the property, writing the offers. Everybody who does good there, but what's going on on the backside? What kind of safety net do you have on the backside of your business that will give you at least a chance? See, a lot of people will take that lead, that buyer lead that didn't call back or didn't answer the calls and they'll just kind of throw them away. Or they don't have really anything on the back end of the business to give them a chance. See, I just want an opportunity. You know, I just want, if I can even get like a 10% chance on the back of my business to get some of these people to come back to me later. You know, and I don't know what the percentage is. You know, I may get 20%, 50%, 70%, 5%, I don't know what it is. It's enough to keep me busy, keep me selling 100 properties a year. You know what I mean? That's the main part is it's like business is completely unlimited. And so what you have to do is just get a system in place that keeps you at the top of what you can handle at all times. See, I'm saying like your business and your success is predicated on how much you can handle at once. You know, as a team, mentally, whatever. And so you got to figure out where that limit is. Okay. How many active listings can we handle at once? You know, and how many active listings and pending deals can we handle at one time? Right. What is the maximum? That's what you have to figure out as a team or whatever you guys are. You have to figure out what your maximum limit is and what you can handle. How many active listings and how many pending deals? Because there is a limit. You know, you can sit here and tell me you can handle 300 active listings, but I don't believe you. Right.  You have to figure out where that limit is and you may know that limit. Right. You may not know that limit. If you don't know that limit, then it's time to overwhelm ourselves with business to get to that limit so that we know what that is. Then we know what our full potential is as far as what we can handle. And now we want to have a system in place that that enables us to stay right there at what we can handle at all times. See what I'm saying? Then you're going to get to where you're reaching your real full potential. See what I'm saying? So me, I like to have 50 listings and 20 pending. You know, 10 to 20 pending and 50 listings is kind of where it's my happy place. It's kind of where I like to like to live. You know, that keeps me at 100 deals a year or a million a year. That's kind of where I want to stay while I'm building this coaching business.  You know, if I were just doing real estate, then maybe that would be a little higher, but I'm really comfortable there. So I know where I want to be and I have the system someplace to keep me right there. I know that if I get down a little bit, I can just turn right around and get on the phone and ramp it up and get it right. You know, I know how to work the system to stay right there.