And welcome to the iconic central library, our very beautiful central library. I'm Ramiro Salazar, I'm the Director of the San Antonio Public Library. I'm pleased to welcome you here to this evening's event. We are hosting Mayor and Secretary of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, Julian Castro, as he will share with us his new book, an unlikely journey waking up from my American dream. I'm also happy to have State Representative Diego Bernal with us tonight. This is the third program he has participated with us. A couple of years ago, we had our first platica. He interviewed Congressman Charlie Gonzalez and he liked that so much. He said, I'd like to do it again. So he's done it several times. So this is our platica or conversation. So we're happy to have him doing the interviewing today. Before we begin our program, I would like to recognize some folks in the audience. I'll start with our Mayor, Mayor Ron Nuremberg. Thank you, Mayor, for being here. Have our Assistant City Manager, Lori Houston. Lori, where are you, Lori? There you are. We have some members of the Library Board of Trustees. I'll start with Paul Stahl, who's our Chair. He's on his way. He told me there was a traffic jam or something. But we do have Linda Nairn representing District 10, Vice Chair of the Library Board, Judy Cruz, who is the Mayor Oral Appointee and actually Mayor Kossler telling Judy Cruz to the Board. We have Gene Brady, Immediate Past Chair, representing District 1. Welcome, Gene. Margarita De Leon representing District 3. And Andrea Sanchez representing District 4. I also want to recognize Lily Gonzales, Deputy Executive Director of the San Antonio Book Festival for helping coordinate this event. I would also like to recognize Rosy Castro. Welcome, Rosy. Thank you so much for seeing you. Thank you for giving us. Secretary Castro, thank you for bringing him here to this Earth. And also, if I may, I also want to recognize you for your efforts in helping establish the Latino collection in this past weekend. We had a very successful event. And so it's growing. Thank you so much for your contribution in that effort. And special thanks to NowcastSA, who's live streaming this event on NowcastSA.com as well as the Twig Bookshop, who is making books available for sale today. If you have not had an opportunity, you can purchase your book after the event. Secretary Castro will be signing books next door in our gallery after the event. Again, as I indicated earlier, our moderator today for this evening is Texas State Representative Diego Bernal who serves in the Texas House of Representatives representing Texas 123rd District. He's the Vice Chairman of the House Committee on Public Education, a member of the House Committee on Urban Affairs and the House Committee on House Administration. Before he was elected to the state legislature, Representative Bernal was on the City Council representing District 1, the City of San Antonio City Council. And of course, our featured author, Secretary Castro, you may recall, was elected Mayor of San Antonio in 2009 becoming one of the youngest mayors in the nation. Prior to serving as mayor, he was elected to represent City Council District 7 from 2001 to 2005. At age 26, he was the youngest city councilman in San Antonio history. Secretary Castro's impact on San Antonio's is evident. I would like to highlight and share some highlights for you in terms of his many contributions while he was serving as not only on the council but as mayor. He created SA2020, a planning program, a community-wide visioning effort to provide a forum for the community to voice their thoughts and to think big and aspire for the future. During his tenure, Secretary Castro proclaimed the decade of downtown an initiative that he collaborated with then-Council colleague Diego Bernal which sparked investment in San Antonio City Center. And as you know, San Antonio downtown is booming. Laurie plays an important role in that regard, bringing infrastructure and businesses and creating a dynamic downtown. And so I wanted to recognize Secretary Castro for starting this. He also started pre-K for SA in effort to focus on pre-kinder for our kids here in San Antonio. He also started Cafe Commerce, it's now called Launch SA. He visited the area just before we came over here to the auditorium. And Secretary Castro entered the national stage when he became the first Latino to deliver the keynote address at the 2012 Democratic National Convention. Two years later, he accepted President Barack Obama's offer to join his cabinet as Secretary of Housing and Urban Development. We're extremely proud of Secretary Castro and we're extremely proud to have him here today to share with you his new books, his new book. Thank you. Thank you for being here. Well, thank you, Armino, and everyone from the library for having us. This is a treat. You and I don't get to sit down and do this that often. We get to do it a bit. Or never. First of all, I think the interest in the room demonstrates that a lot of folks I think know who you are. I don't think anyone's sort of wandering around the library wondering what's going on here. That's probably true. But I also I also don't want this to be just a rehashing of the book. I want you to go buy the book. So what I thought we'd do is talk about some of the things that are in the book and then maybe go a little bit deeper in different directions. But I certainly don't want this to be the sort of Wikipedia summary of the book. I think it's important that you read his own words. I'm normally not nervous when my mother's in the audience. I'm all nervous because your mom's in the audience. She's going to give you a report card. You better be nice. Right. So so we know him as a as a phenom. We know him as a council person. We know him as a mayor. We know him as the HUD secretary. We I think we'll know him as the future leader of the New York Times bestseller list. Hopefully. But let's let's go back and I think that I think that the fact that you were raised and worn on the West side is not a secret. But but explain to people where you grew up. I mean, I think that's a catch all phrase West side. We all have an idea what that means. But talk about the place where you're from. Yeah. And first of all, thanks a lot Diego for doing this and thank you. Ramiro went to the board, many of whom I know are here to everybody that's here tonight and especially to my mother is here tonight. Yeah. I mean, you know, one of the things that I want to do is to describe the West side of San Antonio and I started the description in the book really when my grandmother arrived and the history of Mexicans who came over during the Mexican Revolution and set up essentially these neighborhoods and enclaves on the West side with their little bakeries and cleaners and some printing presses and then tried to describe the West side that Joaquin and I grew up in, you know, with dogs that would roam around the streets. Right. Like there was a pack of dogs that owned every block basically in the West side that we grew up in. It was a neighborhood we grew. We were growing up in different places, but a lot of our formative years were really only the Algo Street, which is off of Southwest 19th, not that far away from raised drive-in in that Las Palmas area. Right. You know, and it was a back then. I think that there was some sense of community. My grandmother would go and hang out with a couple of neighbors in the early evening. There was this guy that everybody used to call Wile that used to drink Milwaukee on his porch. Right. And he had a fly swatter right next to him swat the flies or the mosquitoes that would come around. But there was this sense, you know, and like we would roam around. I talk about in the book and on our bikes with our friend and play basketball, you know, there was this, this sense of community that existed there. It was also though operating against the backdrop of real deep economic and educational challenges that I also talk about. People have often heard me discuss the day that my brother and I went to orientation for instance with my mom and Rhodes Middle School and that she heard them expressed doubt about whether the kids there could get out of the eighth grade. And so that's why we ended up at the FOIA where we eventually met you. I think we were two years ahead of you. But yes, that was the West side with this deep sense of community, but also these deep challenges that, you know, operated basically as this headwind on a lot of people. At what point did you recognize those challenges? I think when kids are growing up they're not always as aware of what's happening around them, what's happening in their part of town or even on their street relative to other places. At what point did you recognize that there was something different about where you were from relative to the rest of the city? That's hard to say, but probably not until we were teenagers. You know, obviously our mother was very active even back then. I remember the 1980s, you all may remember when we had like that rollback election. Some folks in the room will remember that, the rollback election of 86. It was a very active time and my mom was participating in some of that and that was really overlaid with this sense of injustice. And she had run for city council in 1971 in part to try and equalize the kind of investments that were made in neighborhoods, including the West side of San Antonio.  And all of the basic things that you and I would come to work on later on, I mean you could see it, but it probably was in my teenage years that I started to get a sense of there's here and then there's over there and things, you know, at least a lot of things are better over there. I want to get back to that, but you write a lot in the book about your grandmother. And of course I want you to tell the story, but the primary question I have is what part of her do you see in yourself now and in your work now? I think a lot of folks have an easier time making the connection between you and your mother because both of you have lived relatively public lives. But I'm wondering as a public figure, as a father and as someone who's an author now and who's considering other things, where do you see her pop up in your own personality and in your work? No, I mean I think personality-wise we're not too far off because my grandmother was also, you know, not shy or quiet, but she wasn't the loudest person in the world, right? She was, I think probably my personality isn't too far off from hers. But also, I remember thinking, because my grandmother had diabetes, and so for the last few years of her life, like a lot of our relatives in this city, she was battling that, and she would end up in the hospital for different bouts of treatment. And eventually, right before she passed away, she had one of her legs amputated below the knee. But I remember during that time that she was very good at rolling with the punches, you know, like of the procedures, of the treatment, and I think that came out of the fact that she had this childhood that was so traumatic. She had lost her parents, and that's why she came to San Antonio, and then she, as I write about, she lost the woman basically at her new household and her new family that was like her mom, like her second mom, and so she kind of developed a stoicism, you know, in that way. And I think to some extent, not in exactly the same way, but to some extent I see that, you know, in myself. I'm sure I'm not as tough as my grandmother was because she went through a lot more than I have, but there's some of that. Do you find that keeping your composure and having a cool exterior has served you well in your work? Yeah, yeah. That exhibit hate, right? Yes. So far so good, Diego. So, let's go back to the West Side for a minute at Defoea. So instead of going in a road, you go to Defoea, and you talk about Defoea a lot. I talk about Defoea a lot. It's more Defoea classmates are in the room right now, actually. But what about that place in particular is so special? There seems to be a lot of stories and talent that comes out of Defoea. What about it do you think has made it what it is? Now, how did it affect you? Yeah, no, I've said that Defoea was the best educational experience that I had, including going to Stanford and Harvard. Because I think that everybody there had this, you know, in that multilingual program, this kind of optimism about what they could achieve. And it's not like later on folks didn't have that, but it was different. We were a different age and some of that is more expected. It was just a collection of people from around the district that were high achievers and that believed in themselves and also just had a lot of personality. You know, there were a whole bunch of characters there. And there was a lot of fun in it too because we were getting crossed into the school, you know, and most of the teachers were great teachers that really cared about making sure that we learned. Which one of those, which one of those teachers do you remember the most that left an impression on you? I hope none of them are Japanese. So I took three years in Japanese. My Japanese teacher, Miss Foster, also she was my algebra teacher, but she was also a Spanish teacher, Miss Garcia. Remember, yeah. Miss Foster was my homeroom teacher. Oh, all right. And you know, Miss Foster passed away a few years ago. I think it was her niece that reached out to me. She still had my card from when I was on the city council. And, but I hadn't talked to her probably since back then. Right. Or maybe I guess I ran into her briefly, but really hadn't talked to her in a long time. But yeah, I mean you just had a whole bunch of teachers that really cared about the students and students that cared about each other in this community that formed, I think in part because we were all part of that magnet program. And then for some people, you know, continued if they went to Bragg and Ridge, we didn't, but we probably should have, right? But it was just a great program. And one of the worst things that I think happened with this ASD is that they started to basically take away from that program over the years. I forget which superintendent it was that started to make that mistake, but it's not the program today that it was back then. Yeah. I actually did go to Bragg for a year. Like I kicked out. Well, we went for two days. Yeah. I went to Bragg for a year and I got kicked out at the last grading period and that's where I came in. Why did you get kicked out? Let me turn the interview around for a second. Why did you get kicked out? I mean, I probably, I think I told, I think I told a teacher about herself in a way that she didn't appreciate. Which was, I guess would have been part for the course at Jefferson. Yeah. Yeah. So, so I ended up at Jeff. You know, one thing about the FOIA that I think is interesting and I don't know if you've thought about it this way, but I wanted to ask, one of the interesting things about the way that they ran that MAGNA program was that even though they were bringing students in from other parts of SEISD, with the exception of the language part, we mixed with the students whose home school was the FOIA as well, right? So, to the degree there's socioeconomic diversity in SEISD, I think it brought all those kids together to learn from one another from sixth grade to eighth grade, which are formative years. I just, the more schools I visit, I think that's unique. That doesn't always happen. You can have different programs at different schools that keep the kids very separate from one another. And at the FOIA, they were all, with the exception of those courses, they were all blended together. Yeah, no, no doubt. You know, and there are friendships that were lasting with people inside that program and outside of the program there and some folks that went over to Lanier afterwards. Right. And so when you left, you ended up with friends all over the city because you had gone there. So then we get to Jefferson, right? Jefferson's fine. At what point did you decide to go or even apply to Stanford? Well, I think, you know, that one of the things that our mother gave Joaquin and me was this self-confidence and this sense that you should reach for as much as you could get, basically, or even more than you thought you could get. I think that was one of the most valuable things in my life. I'm sure many of all have parents or relatives that have given you the same sense of self-worth and self-confidence. And so we basically, Joaquin and I looked at the US News and World Report rankings, you know, those damn rankings they published that the colleges hate because if they're not number one, they're trying to figure out how they, you know, game the system to move up in the rankings. But we basically just looked at those rankings and then we applied to the top 10 or 11 schools and also, you know, we applied here to Trinity and to UT and got fee waivers to be able to apply. The mode that we were in was just try for those schools, basically. There's a, we're not going to go through each class you took at any of these schools, but there is a story, there is a story you tell that I love. Being at Stanford and having a moment where you recognize the talent level at Stanford isn't that different than the talent level of the students that you went to high school or middle school with and you sort of take stock of where you're at. Can you just sort of do the nutshell version of that for these folks? Yeah, well, I mean, and, you know, we had several of those moments really in college and law school where, you know, we had the chance, Joaquin and I had the chance to study with people from all over the country and different parts of the world and to realize once you got into it that a lot of the people that we had grown up with and gone to Duff Oil with or to Jefferson with would have been able to do just as well as we were doing or as other people were doing, but oftentimes they didn't have the opportunity that we were able to get. And sometimes, and I write about this, people wrote themselves out of that opportunity. Joaquin and I did not graduate as a valedictorian and salutatorian of our class at Yale. You know, we did very, very well, but there were some people that were ranked higher and only some of those people actually applied to those schools. And so you had a combination of realizing that a lot more of the folks that we'd grown up with could swim in those waters and do well and should get that opportunity. And then also that there was this under-matching problem to use the technical term, you know, in higher education of people not trying.  And all of that was part of why I was so held back to come back and to do things like Cafe College and to try to make what I was working on first and foremost to change the educational trajectory of this city. So you decided early on, I'm skipping past city council for a second, just getting to the mayor piece, you decided early on that you, even though you're a mayor and you're at the municipal level at the city level, that there were waters that you could and should wade into with regard to education. And was that to make your experience more common to make it less special and sort of more available to other folks? Yeah, I mean, I think that Joaquin and I both had a chip on our shoulder about this city, you know, that we didn't see enough people from this city in those places. And I came back determined to make sure, not just that place or, you know, those schools, but in general, that folks would have more opportunity. And in 19, I think it was like 1979 or 1980, Cisneros had had this two-fisted approach to the future of San Antonio. And back then he was talking about improving education and then also basically what Henry's known for now, right, is the economic development that he did for those of y'all that remember the 1980s. And I felt like that they made a lot of progress on the economic development part and only very limited progress on the education part with the education partnership and the 1989 library bond issue probably being the signature pieces of his mayoral term. But I felt like I was watching all of these mayors, these city leaders come by, you know, whether it was Thornton, Peek, Garza, Hardburger, and none of them was hitting that. Like none of them was addressing what we really needed to address for the future of the city. And so, you know, it was frustrating to me, but in one way it was also teed up because I really didn't have any competition for, you know, like, oh, like Ron will know this, right? People tell you, oh, somebody's already defined by that. You know, you want to find your own thing, whatever it is, right? Like, it was wide open when it came to education too and that gave me motivation. But, you know, normally in our city, education's not the purview of the city, right? I mean, it's not like Houston or the city and the ISD are mixed together. What gave you the confidence or the drive to say we're going to break into that? Because I think that if I remember, I'm getting to pre-K right now, I remember the ISD's and there are many in the city, too many. There were terrorists worrying about all things education, not just pre-K, right? What gave you the confidence to say we're going to force through anyway? We're going to crack that code? No, because I believed that the people would accept that, that the people wanted that. Whether these institutions wanted it or not and that there was room to do that. Also, one of the prime rules of moving anything at this city level is do you have the money to do it? When they're looking at, you know, if you're going to build light rail or whatever the transportation plan is, you know, the first question you ask is, okay, well, where's the money to do this? And we had that eighth of a cent sales tax. So we had money to bring to the table. And so I knew that there was something that we could do. All right, so let's go to the eighth of a cent, right? You knew that it was unspoken for, that we could spend that money, right? Yeah. You decided, don't want to get this wrong, you decided that you wanted to spend that money on something education-related, right? But you wanted to make sure that it was spent the right way. So talk about the process of knowing that you had that money, deciding you wanted to spend it in this fear and the process to going from that to pre-K. Well, I think a lot of it wasn't just me, right? It was the community had come forward as part of SA 2020. And that was, I think for its time, a groundbreaking process because it involved people from all over the city and there was a lot of enthusiasm. And in March 2010 or March 2011, when it completed, you know, people basically said that the two most important issues that we needed to address were education and transportation. And so I knew there was a big sentiment for that. And that's what we appointed the Brain Power Task Force. And it was that task force and especially Joe Robles and Charles Budd. And with regard to pre-K, especially Charles Budd, that basically started to zero in on using those resources for early childhood education. At the beginning of that process, was it we want to do pre-K, make it work, or was it find out, scour the planet for best practices that are going to produce the results we want and come back and tell us what it is? Yeah, it was that. It was the beginning, it was basically should we spend it in the early childhood years somewhere in the middle or in higher education access and completion. And pretty early on, it was decided by the task force that we would focus on early childhood education because the research is so compelling that that's where you get the biggest bank for the bot. Right. And so talk about venturing out into the community saying, hey, you've probably not thought about this before, but I'm going to ask you to spend this remaining fraction of a cent on this idea, which I don't think anyone was expecting at all. Talk about being in the middle of that, leading the charge on that, being the tip of the spear on that. Well, I mean, I think people were receptive to it. The Lumina Foundation had come out with this analysis that ranked San Antonio 84th out of 100 different metro areas in terms of educational achievement. I think just at a personal level, it resonates with a lot of mothers and fathers that our education locally is not what it should be in a lot of these school districts. And so we needed to improve the trajectory of these young people. So, you know, I never thought that it was an especially difficult sell. There were points of it that I think were key to selling it, number one, to be straightforward with people that you were asking them to raise their taxes. You know, I would tell people, yeah, I'm asking you to raise your taxes by $7.81, you know. And for that, this is what we're going to get. And it also helped to have the support of the business community that gave it for, you know, independence, moderates, the imprimatur of, like, we need this for the future of our city, yeah. I mean, all of that helped, yeah. And it was very, very much. There were so many voices that were campaigning for that. I was one of those voices, and obviously, as a mayor, a prominent voice. But there were a lot of people that helped make that possible. And a lot of the folks that invested in that campaign, you know, hundreds of thousands of dollars that helped make it happen. Yeah, you know, what's interesting is that now you sound confident. And then you were confident. It didn't feel easy to me when we were in the middle of it. I remember sitting with Councilman Saldanya thinking this is a very, very heavy lift. And our experience out in the street trying to get people to support it was, you know, we did it dutifully. And we believe in it. But we did not come back and say, this is going to pass. And on election night, I remember in 2012 that the early vote came back. And as you all know, the early vote is usually reported like by 7.15 by the election clerk. And the early vote was 50.024 to 49.98 against.  And, yeah, folks will tell you that usually the more liberal or progressive candidate or measure starts to climb on election day. But that had really changed in San Antonio after the 2008 Democratic primary between Obama and Clinton where I think a lot of Democrats, you know, progressives basically started early voting more. So you couldn't bank on the same climb that you could before. So at that point, I was thinking, I think we're going to win, but it could go either way, you know. That was probably the scariest moment, you know. Well, that and then a few days before, there had been a poll that showed it at only 40, like 43% or something, that just turned out to be completely off. Right. Just like I think this poll is off and Ted Cruz is going to lose on Tuesday. But I digressed here. Oh, no, no, it's a good point. I was going to make that point. Let's just, here's what I'm going to talk about. Let's talk about Joaquin for a minute. Let's say Joaquin. He's not here. Is it safe to say that he's your best friend? And my wife, yeah. Right. Because I spend more time with her now than I do with him. That's true. That's stuff. And is it true that you guys can communicate without saying a sound? No, no. When we were at the FOIA, Miss Evans, one of the teachers there, I didn't have her. I don't know if you did. She had us take this ESP test, like with cards and we had to put them up. I'm like, what? I think there's a picture of us doing that. And I don't think it found anything. But because when you're a twin, for those of y'all that are twins or if you have twins, you know, that you're kind of a package deal, right? Like people think of you and they think you're one person. And because you look the same and people treat you the same way and you live your life having the same experiences, basically. In fact, my brother was the ultimate fact checker on this book because he was there for the whole thing. You tend to kind of interpret the world in the same way and it just makes it a lot easier to interact with somebody. So it's not that you have like this ESP, it's that you're kind of on the same wavelength, you know?  And then we went into a law firm together. You went into a law firm together and you're... Well, and he was living with me when we moved back to for a little while. He was living with you or you lived with him? No, he was living with me. I bought the house. Oh, okay, all right. All right. So I, you know, people ask me the question all the time about ego, about competition, about managing aspirations. I mean, put that to rest here. Talk about how you guys have figured that out. Well, I mean, and I write in the book, you know, folks who read it will see that it's... That was some of the most fun part to write, which was about the competition between my brother and me. And we were very competitive, you know, in sports, in school, when we were growing up. And I think that that made us better, you know, that that actually made both of us better at sports and school. But one of the neat things about growing up and becoming more mature in your relationships is just like your relationship with your parents is not the same at the age of 15 and 35, right? Like, it matures. Our relationship as siblings has changed. And now we're each other's best friend and advisor and supporter and more collaborative really than competitive. You know, I didn't really get to write about it in the book, but after I lost the 2005 mayor's raise, you know, at the time I was down and I thought that I wasn't going to get back into politics and all this stuff. I remember that I think a few weeks after I lost, my brother came to my house and he gave me this book.  Well, I think that's that Dummies series is a serious series. So this was a spoof, but it was like how to be president, you know, but it was a little gesture, but it was kind of saying, you know, I love you and I believe in you. And I believe that you have a future in public service if you want it. And so you should think about like none of this stuff of don't get that, you know, like, I'm not going to do it anymore. Like think about continuing. And so our relationship has basically matured since we were teenagers. And so you're one another's number one advisor. Yeah, for sure. And whenever a decision is made, that's the first call. That's the first conversation. Politically, yeah. I'm sure he called Anna for a lot of others. Yeah, yeah. Or my mother. So let's talk about politics for a minute. I think that that, by the way, I'm asking a lot of questions that people have asked me as if I know and I don't know. So one question that I get quite a bit is considering your mother and her background and her sort of historic history in our city, there seems to be a decision by you and your brother to focus on elected office as a way of serving people as opposed to, let's say, outright capital A activism. Was that a conscious decision? Is there a reason for that? And what about public service gives you motivation to continue? Yeah, you know, during my grandmother's time, it would have been unthinkable for somebody for a woman like her and then Latina to hold public office. I mean, even, you know, to go and get a college degree somewhere, there are very few. But my mother came of age during the 60s and during this period of tumult and activism, but there was still kind of this ceiling, you know, in terms of getting into politics and being successful. And I talk in the book about her running for city council with the Committee for Body Obediment in 1971 and that slate of four people that ran and all of them lost. I see the decision by my brother and me to go into politics in the public service as a gift from that generation, basically, that they worked hard for so that we knew we could actually go into it and win and become office holders. They worked so that we could do that.  She ran in 71 before there were single member districts in San Antonio. At the national level, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was extended to Hispanics in 1975, folks will remember. And the poll tax had just been eliminated in 1966, I want to say. And so you have all of these changes, basically, improvements in the country and the community living up to its ideals that allows my generation to say, well, of course we can go into politics and win. But that was different from, I think, what was available to previous generations. And so who was first? You were a council person before your brother was a state representative, is that right? Yeah, so I got elected in 01 and then he ran and got elected in 02. That's right. I remember. Okay. I was in law school. I remember. What I wish I could do is cut to your mother and say, how did it feel to watch your son win an election after all the work you've done? But I think that it's a tremendous payoff and a tribute to you. We've brought up Erica a couple of times. How did you know she was the one? And was the chapter convinced? I felt like I had to convince her, of course. Yeah. In fact, in the book, I write about our first date, which was at Mithiera on, I think it was May 26, 1999. You're weird that way. I can remember dates pretty well. That's an important one. It's been 20 years in May since we went on our first date. And it freaked me out because we went and we sat down and I ordered my food like we were going to order and she didn't order anything. So I thought that since she didn't order anything that she wanted to get out of there as soon as she could. So I ordered like the biggest plate of nachos that they had to take me a good long hour and a half to eat. But I knew because of the way that we got along and because I thought she was so beautiful, obviously. And I think she shared a little bit about this in the book. She shared the same values. And I can't believe that it's almost been 20 years since we met. Time's flown by. As your political career has progressed, are those tough conversations say, hey, I want to do this now and this is going to require more time. There's more geography. You're probably going to see less of me. What's that been like? Because I feel like it's not like you're going from city council to school board, right, to city council to mayor to DC. Those are not easy transitions. Yeah, no, I mean, that was a conversation that we had about going to Washington, DC. And it's a conversation that we're having right now about the possibility of me running in 2020, which is just a completely different scale. And especially during the campaign period, basically you're gone. And so when I've talked in the last couple of months about a decision that I need to make, I mean, that's the biggest thing that weighs on me is that Garina is going to be 10 and Christian is going to be four.  And also, you know, Erica. Erica has always been wonderful about supporting me and my career. But that is quite a burden. So I guess we'll find out sooner or later. Yeah, eventually. He wanted me announced tonight here. His camera is already there. It's like now cast would have the scoop on everybody. Right. That would be poetic.  Like you stepped down because you got this amazing opportunity. What's it like getting a phone call from Barack? And then what's it like? Like I know him, right? And then what's it like? And what goes through your mind when you tell the sitting president? No. Well, I mean, the first time I felt like I still needed to stay here and pre-K for SA had just passed. That was right, like literally less than two months after that. And so we're about two months after that. Were you worried about a window of opportunity closing because you said no? I think afterward, yeah, after. So this was what I get called in early 2013 about the possibility of joining the administration and, you know, did not. And then after that, you know, I write in the book about beginning to feel like, well, maybe I should. And also by the time I said yes to taking the HUD role in the spring of 2014, we had already implemented pre-K for SA in the fall of 2013. Yes, it was up and running. I knew that it was well executed, that it was going to, you know, it was kind of on its own. And Cheryl and the board had done a great job of implementing it. And, you know, I felt like that I could see also with I had, I would have had one more term left. You know, I felt like I had done a lot of what I wanted to do in that role or enough of what I wanted to do and that I was ready for another challenge. You know, so it was just a better time. And, you know, I don't know how many people know about this, but there was this sort of VP thing in the air, right, for a good minute. Talk about what it feels like, what it was like to be considered to be on the list, to have people sort of debate you and your qualifications and whether or not you'd be good for the job on the airway of stealth, the opportunity to sort of speak up or defend yourself. I know it's probably really hard for you to have people talk about your kids all the time. But I think people are much more familiar with the HUD piece than that particular moment. Yeah, no, I mean it was a, it's a crazy process, the vice presidential process, because it's so unlike any other part of American politics. Most politics, you're running for something, you know, you're running for mayor or running for Congress or whatever, and you're asking the voters, the people, to vote for you or not vote for you. That VP process, you're kind of pitching to one person and maybe, you know, three or four other people that advise that person on whom they should pick. And so it's just weird. Also, the ritual is that you're not supposed to even acknowledge that you're under consideration or suggest that you're interested. Even if they did ask you, it just goes counter to the idea of okay, well, it's just, you know, what's the deal here?  And I think of politicians in two different ways. There are politicians that are very good inside players and politicians that are very good outside players. And by inside players, I mean the people that become the Speaker of the House or the Leader of the Senate or if there's a council and it's the president, you know, you have a council president. I think that VP process is suited to the inside players that can work, a small network of folks. And I have seen Joaquin and I as better at the outside with the people. And so I never felt like that was something particularly suited to, you know, what I was about. And I write at the end of the book that by the end of the process, by the time I actually sat down with Hillary, I mean, I pretty much knew that I was not going to get selected. So you were prepared for that?  You allow yourself to think about it for a little bit, right?  Yeah, yeah, yeah, of course.  And just the vetting process was a 129 question survey and I had to get a physical and you go through about six hours of interviews with a team of lawyers that has done a whole bunch of background and opposition research on you. And they ask you questions about your personal life, your, you know, financial affairs, everything else, political stuff.  All right. I know I have a stack of questions from the audience I need to read and I want to get to those. So I'm going to ask you two more questions. We probably could do this for another hour. Although we may almost be out of time. I don't know. Is anybody keeping time? We're good. All right. And I recognize you're not announcing today. We're all disappointed. But let me ask you two, two questions that touch on that a little bit. The first is about immigration. The current president is, is employing immigration in a political way. And I don't think that's a, I don't think that's a partisan thing to say. It'll dance a surprise to anybody. What do you wish in the folks who subscribe to his orthodoxy when it comes to this issue, what do you wish they understood about immigration that you understand that they don't seem to get? What do you wish they got? About the folks that are trying to get here, not the enemy of the country. That especially these folks that are part of the so-called caravan are people who are hungry. They're fleeing violence. They're desperate. A lot of them are women with their young children. They are refugees from a very dangerous and unfortunate situation. And I wish more folks understood on that side of the aisle that we're a strong enough and a big enough nation to deal compassionately with this group of individuals. Yeah, it's been, it's been terrible to watch this president fear monger and appeal to the smallest of instincts and divide people just to try and win an election in a few days. And we need to be bigger than that and summon our better angels as a country. So you're in the middle of a big, you're considering a big decision, right? It's a big decision. You wouldn't be thinking about it at all if you didn't believe that there was something the country needed that it doesn't have right now. What is that? What do you think this country needs? You mean in a president? Yeah, a lot. Well, I mean, yeah. But if you're asking about the country, I would say that the number one thing this country needs right now is a way to summon our common sense of national purpose. There is not a common sense of national purpose right now and the country feels very divided. And it's not like this is completely new, but we're going through leadership that is absolutely determined to exploit every single division in our country and make it worse. And so our country needs to be able to summon that common sense of purpose and identity and to chase big goals. And then we need leadership, not only a president, but people in Congress and people at every level in the public and the private sector that are trying to bring people together instead of tearing apart that have integrity and honesty that are focused on opportunity for everybody instead of picking and choosing who gets opportunity and who doesn't and that have a strong vision for the future of our country. And if I decide to run for presidents because I have a strong vision for the future of this country and I'm going to make that case to the American people. So you don't know if, but we do know why. All right. Thanks for chatting with me. I'm going to go through as many of these questions as I can. If I pull one out, it's because I feel like you already answered it. Otherwise, I'm just going to take them as they go. There's no curating over the questions. It's easy anyway. We're getting the last one. It's about working. What lessons can other cities learn from San Antonio? What do you think that we have to offer that we can export to other cities? Well, I mean, I think generally this city has been well run. There's been, you know, a focus in this city on and especially under, you know, Ron's leadership now I think more and more of a focus on equity. Right. Starting with single member districts in 77 when before that, a lot of the investments that were made were anything but equitable. And I think we've been getting better and better. There's still a lot of room for us to improve. But I think that's one of the things that we can take also just more deeply and more like less politically. The thing that I always loved about this city is that there's still this sense of community like this sense of connection between people that often goes away as cities become bigger and bigger. And I believe that, you know, whether it's the fact that we have such great participation in National Night Out or a lot of neighborhoods here you still have that sense of, you know, community spirit and you have neighborly interaction. That's something that doesn't exist to the same extent in a lot of big cities. Right. Mr. Secretary, who will be your running mate in 2020? This is from Ron. This is a really interesting one. How will you calm the fears of those Americans that oppose the browning of the country? Yeah, you know, one of the things that has given me a lot of hope these last couple of times that I've gone down to the border to McAllen and then to Torneo where the tent city is is that I saw a lot of people that don't look like me that were also there protesting, standing up for these children. And, you know, it's not the color of the skin, but it's the shared values that we have of compassion and of treating people humanely and of what has made America stand out. And people like that come in every color and throughout the country. And so it gives me great hope that just like President Obama showed that if you're an African American candidate that you could win. I think that a Latina or Latino can win. How old were you when you started thinking about seriously we started thinking seriously about elected office. What besides this is what it says besides your mom caused you to think of that of elected office in particular. Well, you know, and I write a little bit about this also in the book. It was and I've said when I was mayor that it was getting away from this place and seeing the stark differences between San Antonio in the Bay Area and that that place had a higher education levels higher income levels. It had it was more entrepreneurial in the early 90s with the internet boom and wanting to come back here and combine that with what I thought was so special about our city which was this sense of community and that people still felt connected. That's what and this chip on my shoulder that I had about the city of trying to improve it like Joaquin and I used to say when we were at Stanford oh consider San Antonio you know to our classmates about like you should consider moving to San Antonio just this pride in the city. All of that kind of mixed up and when I was growing up I mean Henry had been the mayor and he had kind of glamorized the position of being mayor of San Antonio because he did so much with it. So I saw that as a legitimate vehicle to make change in the city. So I want to make this point. I think one thing is really interesting is that even when you when you went away for school you knew then that you were going to come back. Yeah. Because I think for a lot of folks we're going to school far away Stanford, Harvard, MIT, Michigan, right? What have you. There's lots of places to go. And so you made a conscious decision from the beginning that you were going to be back here. Yeah. Yeah. Very briefly thought about going back to the Bay Area but you know pretty much knew that we were going to come back. Right. And I think this is the best question to end on. It is what is your best memory of your time at a library? Who knows who wrote that question? But it's my best. I have a worse memory. I know. Tell us that one too. No, no, my best memory I think is you know probably going on the bus with my mom she would take us to Las Palmas and take us back to the old downtown library when it was over there was it on St. Mary's? Is that right? Going, taking the bus over there and you know being amazed at the books and checking out books and bringing them home and starting to read them. Just the excitement of all of that, you know. And my worst memory, it's not that bad is sitting in some organizational meeting that they were doing like for something, some activism and it was at the library for three hours or something, you know. Like it's just so boring when I was like nine or ten years old wanting to get the hell out of there already. All right. Well look, we're glad you're back here. We're happy to have you home for as long as we do. Thank you for spending time with us and talking with us and sharing with us. Thank you guys for coming. Please go buy the book. It's a great book. Let me just say this personally. Aside from thanking you for allowing me to do this for the third time, in our city I think that we are spoiled because politics in the city is very, it's very face-to-face. If you want to, you can grab coffee with the mayor. You can hang out with the congressperson. You see the county judge running around. Being a state rep's not that big a deal. You've got state senators that you can meet with. It's not like that in other places. And so the idea that someone from here who went to school here has done all that he's done and is even considering and has seen as viable to run for the highest office in the land is tremendous. I think we take it for granted and don't understand it because we're so kind of used to you. But let me just say that from afar we should, if we don't recognize or an amazing spectacular thing it is that we're witnessing and hopefully about to witness. So thanks for spending time with us. Thanks a lot. I appreciate it. Thank you. Secretary Castro, State Representative Devnav, thank you so much for giving us an interesting and insightful conversation. It's just great. Mayor, thank you for joining us this evening. Rosie, thank you so much to all of you. Thank you so much for spending Friday evening here with us. I have a few announcements to make. First of all, I want to acknowledge library staff who helped organize this event this evening. Special thanks to my chief of staff, Jessica Zurita, who handled the logistics and far more than that. So if you haven't purchased your book you can purchase it outside. Secretary Castro will be signing in the gallery as soon as we end the program. And let's see my notes here. Got it all. Thank you all again for being here this evening. Thank you. Thank you.


Sometimes the hardest part is peeling the paper off the back of the sticker. Hey guys, welcome to a video, a new video for my creative year for January 2021. Holy cow, where has the time gone? Anyway, so this month we are doing creative words, still daily word prompts. You all really liked them last year and really wanted to keep doing them, so here we are. Anyway, I've been working on my words in this particular, there it is, journal. This is a Moleskinkie. And I started doing these halfway through last year instead of just doing, here we go, random word sketches in a little journal like this where I literally just did a drawing based on the word. I am doing those because I'm trying to catch up on words that I've forgotten to do. That's another whole conversation. Instead of doing that, I started taking, and I had so many word lists to catch up on, I started taking two lists per journal and doing them in sort of a compilation style of journal page with a little bit of collage, a little bit of drawing based on the words and some quotes and thoughts. And so I thought I would show you guys exactly how I'm doing that. I've changed it up of course this year, but I thought I'd show you how I'm doing that. Last year did these same kind of pages for about half of last year using two words. This year I'm only doing one. So I have the other sort of lists of word prompts that I need to catch up on, but I am going to do them in separate little drawing journals. For here, for my creative year, we're going to focus on the words that are in my creative year. So for the month of January, our theme for the whole month is sprouting and all of the words are inspired by that theme. Now you will notice when you download the words from the group, your words look better than mine and look properly formatted than mine because mine is printed from the original document before I decided to make it look pretty for you all. So anyway, you're wondering why mine, this looks a little different. Same words. So these are the pages I've done so far. I have this little pad of calendar days. I found it on Aliexpress. Rather than writing the day in like I did last year, I would write the date. This year I thought we would put these on here. And I have these little books of stickers, which I didn't know were stickers at first, so I would just glue them in. Fun fact, these are stickers back here anyway. So you'll notice how they look white here and then here they're transparent. Same thing. I just peeled the backing off because I got a clue anyway. So I do the two collages, usually one upper left, one lower right. And then I find the word and do the drawing. These are all sprouting growth inspired words. So more often than not, my word has something to do with drawing a plant this month. And then for the quote, there's a number of different apps you can get from the app store for quotes. I use zero quote and or I go to Google and I usually use goodreads.com or but I usually go to Google and type in like whatever I'm thinking of and then quote and see what comes up. Zero quotes works more often than not. I will tell you to be cautious because even in zero quotes, not long ago I was looking for a quote to use on my page and I like to have something more positive themed. I generally am not sure who the author is at all. So if it's somebody offensive, I apologize in advance because I generally don't know. When I do know, I don't use that quote. For instance, I was searching easier quotes for a quote and one from Adolf Hitler came up. So yeah, I didn't use that one needless to say. So these are my pages so far for the month. Now I usually write the quote on the right side and then as I'm writing the quote and finishing up any final touches on the page, I'm thinking about what other thoughts I want to say about what's on here and that's what these words are. These are from my brain, whether they make sense or not. And so these are the pages we have so far. It's just a fun sort of different way to do some sort of art inspired journaling, a little bit of collaging scrapbook type stuff, some writing and also a little bit of, you know, actual drawing or painting. If you're using a different kind of journal, you probably could do these in watercolor. You could do them on little pieces of paper and tape them in. You could also tape them in and have the Mia flip out a tip in. So that's a possibility. So these are the ones we have so far. That's yesterday's. I use these pieces of plastic underneath to protect the prior pages and future pages. There we go. So the first thing I do is tear off my date. It's a 12th. And then a couple of these little stickers. I have a number of these little books. Again, these are from AliExpress. And then I start in a similar fashion to how I started the other pages in that I look for bits and pieces that were in my crazy envelope, which is here, you can see kind of the pile over here. I do also have a number of other things on the table. So let's start with papers. I usually start with papers. I do have these paintings I did today. Do I want to use any of those in here? I don't know if I do. This one's really pretty, but I'd have to fold it or cut it or I don't know that I want to do that. All right. We're not going to go too far with those, but I don't think I'm going to use them. Here's a fun piece of dyed paper. So I usually sort of do a test layout like that just by laying them, get some pieces on the page and seeing where that takes me. See, for some reason, I'm seeing rainbows today. I don't know why that is. I do think I have a smaller something. Oh, maybe that. And then I'm trying to use, I have a lot of stickers. I love stickers, fun fact. So, but I'm trying to use up some of what I have.  God forbid, I should just stick to what I have. So I usually just flip through here to see if there's anything in any of those that is speaking to me. And then we start gluing down.  So I'm just going to use a Yoohoo glue stick like I do in most of my journals. And the best way to do that is not to cheap out on the glue. It's okay to be heavy-handed. Add some of this to here. This is how I do it downstairs. I don't, I don't have a paper trimmer downstairs. So I want to cut something like that. I just do it by hand. It's a big sticker. It's from one of my sticker flake sets. It's a picture that I took. Whoops. Just threw a piece of paper along the floor. That's all right. I pulled these out, but do I want to even use them? I don't think I do. That happens. I've got to put the date on here. I think right about there. Now you don't want to cover up too much because we still have to put the quote on here and we still have to put a drawing, some thoughts. So, and I'm not usually about filling up the entire page anyway. So, and then do I want to use one of these on here? Some of these are smudged, but that's okay. I'm going to use them anyway. The question is, do I want to want to use these? Now, if you haven't seen me use these before, these are oh, maybe. These are some of my artwork and designs printed on overhead projection film and then cut into little squares and I use them in my journal pages. You can do this with any of the digital downloads of artwork from my Etsy shop. You can just rather than print it on regular paper, print it on projection film. If you have some overhead printer friendly, this is just masking tape, but you could use washi tape. You could staple it in just like that. Now, what is our word for the 12th? Forest. Alrighty, put the cap on the glue. Find my phone somewhere and I'm going to spend some time on Pinterest looking for inspiration for drawings or doodles based on the word forest. So you could use Google, you could use Pinterest. We're not looking to copy the artwork in question, but we're just looking for inspiration when you're stuck on a word and you don't know what to draw. Yeah, that's a good one. Okay, so the first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to write the word down here at the bottom. The first thing I'm going to do is put my reading glasses on so I can see what I'm doing. So I always do the drawings in big pen. You of course can do it in pencil or whatever you happen to have on hand. It doesn't have to be Picasso. Just have fun with it. Practice your drawing. Nobody ever has to see this except you. You don't have to be like me and be crazy and show it to the entire world. And I always seem to be drawing like right over the spine, which is ridiculous, but you know. Now I'm going to take a green highlighter marker, which are one of my favorite things to color in these journals with, because even though the paper is pretty thin, these don't really show through very much. They don't bleed. And this is a Java power line. And this is mild green, mild catty. It reminds me of like a sap green color, but because it's a highlighter marker, it's translucent. And so you can see the big pen underneath it so I can add color to my drawings by using these highlighter markers just like that. Just like that. It doesn't have to be more than that. Now we're going to look for a quote. So we're going to go look at zero quotes, which is a quote for today. Now they have a daily quote, which you may or may not like. So if you don't like that one, if that doesn't work for you, then you can just scroll to the left and find another one. You can keep doing that until you find one that speaks to you. I sometimes have to scroll a lot. Okay, that one's funny, but I'm not going to use it. Ask not what you can do for your country. Ask what's for lunch. That's funny. I like this one. It's Confucius. Okay, so once you find a quote that you like, let's write it in here. Now you notice I'm not trying to write neatly. That's on purpose. Because I never get it as neat as I want it to be, so why not just be messy to begin with? And I already know what I want that to say. So the other thing I do is I take that quote and I share it to my social media. Because not everybody's going to get to see the journal page, but usually it's a quote I like. And so usually it's something I want to share with people. And I don't share the quote with you all. I share it in my other Facebook group, A Life of Art and Self Expression. They don't get to see the art I made, but they get to see the quote. Okay, and that's that. And that's how we do those journal pages. So I would love to see what you're doing with the words this month. Please do share. And let's start a conversation. I hope you all, if you can, support the free content, not only here in the Facebook groups, but over on the YouTube channel. You can do that in a number of different ways. I have Patreon. I've got Nettsy's shop. Check out the video description for my link tree list of links and different ways that you can do that. In the video description is also the link to the art foamy's page with my designs on it and stuff like that. So check out that video description. I do have an email newsletter, and that is in the link tree list of links. So if you'd like that, don't forget to sign up. And what else? Please stay safe, stay healthy, stay creative, please wear your mask, and don't forget to go out and do something nice for yourself because you deserve it. And I'll see you later. Bye, guys.


Well, hello everybody and welcome back to my channel today. We are finally working on my September budget I know it's a few days into September, but we're still gonna go with it. Sorry about the weird like shadowing over here It's pretty late at night. So I'm gonna have to use artificial lighting for this. I figured I would show you what I'm about to do So I am gonna use some of the stickers from this Aaron Condren sticker book This is the monthly collection edition 2. There will be a link below for you guys If it's your first time ordering anything from Aaron Condren There is a specific link for you down below if you sign up and Use the $10 code that's actually emailed to you then I get a $10 off coupon code as well Once your item ships if you have already used Aaron Condren products and have your own profile There is another link down down below for you. It is an affiliate link just to let you know so I Just signed up for that and I don't know how it's gonna do, but we'll see But Aaron Condren just announced that actually the other day and I signed up and got approved So use that if you want. I don't know. I think I think it's kind of like some sort of affiliate link I I mean it is an affiliate link don't get me wrong But like I don't know if it's like you get start credit or like I don't know how it works because I haven't you know No one's used it yet. So you guys are the first ones that have it on your little description So anyway, I figured I would use this sticker sheet. This was actually a I think this was in my last seasonal surprise box Yes, I know it's rose gold, but I want to use these painted petals really bad. So It's just gonna happen But they do have a pain I believe they have a painted pedals version on the website But this I think was an exclusive design for that seasonal surprise box Also, I'm gonna be using my paper mate inkjoy gel pens. There is a link below for the black one I figured I would do the incoming in green and the outgoing in pink. I was gonna do red But there's no red on here. So I don't know figured switch it up Why not and then my little case that says budget on it you can get these this was a customized one obviously I Can get those on Aaron conran calm All right, and then Let me show you guys what I'm working with All right, so I've got these little stickers here, which is from paper house life organized is what it said There's stickers. I actually got this from a lovely company that sent it to me However, I know you can get these on Amazon if I can remember I will link them down below for you guys So I might use a couple of these and then I have all of my amazing Emily's budget bundle stuff from Catherine over at coffee break planner I love her stickers. This is not in the budget bundle by the way, but I love her stuff It is so nice and I track all of my monthly spending with this. So I'm gonna put those off to the side All right, so we are in September here and I like to write down like any additional Expenses in here and I don't really have any this month So that's kind of nice you guys like it's usually really nice and I don't have those extra like monthly expenses, so Let's get right into this page All right, so a lot of people ask me what I do with this page I don't do anything. I've never done anything you guys have always given me great suggestions, but I Don't know it just doesn't appeal to me to like do anything with it as of this moment But that might change. I don't know you never know I might switch it up at some point But I think you guys are more creative than me because I like to see What you guys create via Instagram or whatever So if you guys do your budgets in your Aaron Condren monthly planner, please tag me I know some of you do and I get all excited when you guys tag me in your photos So feel free. Please tag me. All right, so I'm gonna use this little guy right here. Oh my gosh Put this little chucker in here. Oh, ah, don't do it crooked Emily. Come on There we go. All right, I'll use some of these in just a little bit, but I'm gonna put them up here for right now So let's do all the incoming which I'm gonna put over here. I think kind of like I did last month I'm gonna use a couple of these little stickers because They're freaking adorable a little dollar sign. Sorry about the lighting you guys I have this like light fixture where this these lights keep going in and out and it's driving me absolutely baddie I think I just need to replace all the lights in it because you know, they like came with the house Oh, no, are you guys gonna be able to see this? Hold on change of plans We're gonna do a black pen. Give me just a second here. Actually, let's get really weird and let's use a blue pen I haven't even used this one.  Anyway, you guys can giggle amongst yourselves. All right Can we see that a little bit better? Oh, yeah, we can see that better I'll look back at the footage once I actually upload it and see if you could actually see this pen I don't think you could so anyway, I just have the little like Viewfinder to look at so I'm like, oh my gosh. I don't know if they can see it. So let's see here We're gonna do how many weeks are in this month here We've got one two three four five Fridays. So partay So we're gonna have five paydays and so I always say this in my Videos if you haven't watched before but this is my average if I work 40 hours a week and no overtime I typically have like more time than 40 hours not always So I just like to work off of just 40 hours and then you know kind of work Work from there and then, you know, do my budget accordingly Also, I am a decorative budget planner as you guys can probably notice I'm not kind of a I'm not like a no-frills budgeter But I just want to make my budget look pretty because if I make it look pretty then I'm more inclined to like look at it and reference back into it later on in the month and You know stick to the budget if you will I really really like that. All right, so my total incoming is going to be a grand total of three thousand two hundred eighty seven dollars and seventy cents, and I don't have any like specific additional funds coming in I know I don't normally have additional funds anyways, but just saying let me get you guys a little bit closer here Hopefully that's not too annoying with all the shadows. Let's use I'm gonna use a little orange guys for the house because This is all pretty much house stuff up here, and I'll Go like go like a diss and maybe this will be helpful. All right, so here is all of my outgoing All right, so here is all of my outgoing for right now. These are just kind of like my more House related set expenses in my life. So my mortgage is four fifty one thirty eight My HOA is a hundred and fifty eight my electric estimate because obviously that just depends every single month is around a hundred dollars My gas is actually at a set price of forty four dollars and once I'm here for I think it's either six months or a year It'll like pro rate again. So they just kind of keep adjusting it, you know plus or minus My trash is always the same at twenty nine dollars and seventy five cents. The water estimate is sixty dollars I actually just pulled my bill from last month and it was Almost sixty dollars. So I'm assuming this month. They'll be using the same amount of water And then my auto insurance is always the same at eighty five dollars and forty two cents My Wi-Fi is always the same at forty five twenty nine Netflix is the same at ten dollars and sixty eight cents And something I actually forgot to put on my last Monthly expense was a culligan. I actually have a water softening system that I rent from them I pay thirty one dollars and eighty five cents a month, and they actually come and service it as well I pay extra when they service it But they only have to service it about every like three to four months And they actually put in like more water softening pellets and make sure everything's on the up and up I guess the original owner had issues with the water softener like within two years And I guess a lot of people did in this area I don't know because there's like really hard water or there's something is there's an issue with the city Water and water softeners So he decided and actually a whole bunch of the neighbors here decided to use the culligan service Because it's a culligan owned device So if for any reason that water softener goes out They just replace it or they fix it for free because I pay this like monthly Installment so I'm not actually I mean, I guess I'm kind of renting it, but I don't actually own it So I guess if I ever sell the house and the next person doesn't want the culligan service They'll have to get a water softener of their own But I don't know I guess the other the other issue is the owner that's had this culligan thing in there They have had to replace it once already So I mean and the house was built in 2002 and no one even like lived here until 2003 Yeah, it's just I don't know it makes me feel better and It's fine, and I just know that if there's an issue I just call them and I go to work and then they come and replace it or they come and service it and it's fine So I don't mind paying a little bit for that. Let's use Some of these bad boys in here. I'm not sure what I want to use Maybe I should just like stick with rose gold because that's kind of what's happening in here right now Use these Goodness Getting all rose gold out on my freaking Budget you guys if you guys watch any of my other videos, you know that I don't really enjoy the rose gold, but whatever But I like this design like I want this design. Oh, I forgot to put in this. This is my little Foily guy that says September Ta-da, I don't know. I just want to make it cute you guys I just want to make it super cute. This is a good quote for this month If this one says you are entirely up to you That is so true. Let's Let's put this somewhere. Hmm. Hmm. Hmm. How do you want to put this? Let's put this down at the bottom here Trying to try to figure out how I want to Set this all up, you know Anyway, all right, so let's get into like actual like cash cash money spending money All right, so gas I'm actually gonna up the budget a little bit I've been driving a lot more for work and Just like going to job sites and stuff and it's getting like a little taxing, but whatever So I'm spending a little bit more in gas. I normally budget about $200 I'm just gonna budget three just for the heck of it because we've got five weeks to deal with and I would drive a little bit more. So I'm just gonna go with $300 for gas and then for grocery I've been like really trying to eat a lot healthier nowadays so like lots of like fresh fruits and vegetables and I don't know I feel like it's harder to do when you're single But I think I'm gonna guesstimate about $300 for that as well my dining budget I don't have anything specific planned for this month for like, you know dining out but I think what I'm going to do is put $100 in there because it's always a nice safe bet and then Like miscellaneous So I should have like a miscellaneous fund which now I have a fund because I'm writing it down But for grocery like I do that like straight food I know a lot of people ask that question of like so what do you do if you want it need to buy like dish soap or a lint roller or Napkins or something like what do you do? Well, I don't use that as grocery money Like I will separate my transactions the reason that I kind of separate this stuff out is Because I have a problem spending in those categories really gas to be honest I don't have a problem spending because like if you need gas you need gas But like the grocery in the dining that's usually like those are my big trigger areas because I'm like Oh the cart's not full like fill it up, you know at the grocery store or like oh dining. Yeah Do I do I want an appetizer? Sure? I want an appetizer, you know So it's like it just kind of controls that a little bit more So the miscellaneous would be like if I need like some makeup Or if I want to get any of those other miscellaneous items I was just talking about so like paper towels toilet paper Shampoo like little things like that because I'm pretty well stocked in all those areas And I feel like maybe like once a month like one or two items will come up like oh I need toothpaste and I need razor like cartridge refills like okay Well, that's it so that's like less than 20 bucks right there So it's like I don't really overspend in that stuff But I do overspend in the grocery for sure So under miscellaneous, I'm just gonna put $100 in there because I think I'm gonna be running low on a couple of things pretty soon So let's get this all totaled up and then we will figure it out from there Oh, also, I think we need more of these because these are so cute.  So let's do that. All right So my grand total for all the things that are outgoing is $1,816 and 37 cents and then we've got the incoming Potentially of $3,287 or $87 and 70 cents. I can't talk today you guys It's been a day. All right So that has me saving a potential of $1,471 and 33 cents. There are always little miscellaneous things that come up or You know, sometimes I can actually you know, like some of these estimations if they're wrong I can save more, you know It just depends on the month of like how everything Shakes out. So I'm really excited about these totals this month that extra week like always helps It's kind of like when you get paid three times if you you're someone that gets paid every other week It's like kind of those magic months as they like to call them But yeah, I just I always get excited when there's five weeks in the month because it just makes my life so much easier y'all So anyway, I think that is going to be it for this month's budget If you have any questions feel free to post them below I will link all of the sticker sources that I used and showed down below as well if you like these videos and budget videos in general feel free to give it a good old thumbs up and Feel free to make a comment that always really helps out my channel So thank you guys so much and also obviously if you got questions, you know Just put them put them down there y'all. Also, if it's your first time here or you're a long time lurker Feel free to subscribe. I am here every Monday Wednesday Friday with new content for you guys So thank you guys so much for watching and I will see you all in the next video. Bye guys


So if you're finding yourself stressed out or deciding what kind of physician to be, I know that decision seems very committal because honestly, this is probably the first time in your life where you're shutting a door saying, I'm not gonna do this, I'm gonna do this. But understand that there's nothing wrong of walking through a door and experiencing it. Often we'll realize that that was the door we're meant to walk through. And if anything, you kind of make the most of those experiences. And so the best advice that I can offer is to find the skill sets and the qualities of a physician that really resonate with you because then those same qualities will resonate when you are actually practicing with your patients. So if you're somebody who prefers to be in the clinic or wants to talk to your patients more, ask yourself which specialty would allow you more experience of doing it. Or again, there isn't one right answer, but that may show you that a life in emergency medicine may not fit with your criteria. And on the opposite end, if you're somebody who wants to stay away from clinic, there are plenty of still options that you can do such as being a surgeon who's not very clinic heavy or are doing things like radiology or pathology. I also have those options for you, but again, no wrong answer.


Eddie Amos from Juniper. Okay, come on in. We've been waiting for you guys. Good job. Nice to meet you. All right. We've been covering Juniper on the news on SiliconANGLE.com in the past couple of days. You guys announced some things this week here at Java One around Juno's lab. Was it? But Juno Space and things around Junosphere and various things that we're doing around the network and programmability on the network today. Okay, great. And obviously Juniper, Cisco, you guys are retooling, there was a rumor and confirmed about some layouts at Juniper which was, I was corrected by your PR team that yes, there were layoffs at Juniper, but overall headcount is increasing which was confirmed by you guys. But that speaks to the changes at Juniper. I've been covering Juniper for a few years now. You guys have had Juno's out there. It's been, you were the first company really to put out this software approach. 321 has been the network kind of positioning, kind of flattening the network east-west, north-south, more east-west. Give us an update, which has been a compelling announcement. There's been some talk that Juno's has not had the uptake folks had expected but the market is changing, but still relevant. So what I wanted to ask you is one, give us an update on the networking space. Obviously Cisco has its own challenges and they're kind of underwater. Juniper's doing well. Talk about what's changing in that pure play networking space and then talk about, let's talk about the software role, the software plays. I'll see a key area. As we sit back and we look at what's going on in the networking space, it's very dynamic. If you sit back and if you read the various publications and believe the various schools of thought and internet of things or a billion connected devices, we're going to hit a wall pretty soon in terms of the amount of traffic and what can happen on the internet. So we actually think we're in a sweet spot. If you look at the innovation that we brought to the market in the early days and what Pradeep actually brought when he created Juniper, I think the market's still very relative and we continue to expand out our product line to address the growing needs of the market. So you guys had two, I think key things in the past two years that I think it was very notable with Juniper. One was the, really of all the vendors, the first to focus on mobile. And the other one was Junos and Juno Space as an operating system. Where are we with those two things with Juno? Can you give us a quick update on where they stand? Obviously, mobile security, you guys have been talking a lot about lately. Just give us the update on mobile and then Junos. So of course on the mobile space, we have Junos Pulse and it's, the uptake on Junos Pulse has been very dramatic in terms of you look at the mobile operators and folks that are looking to adopt it to add that extra layer of security on to an extra services to their end customers. In terms of what's happening with Junos and in space today, Junos, as you know, is our single OS across our various devices and do customer demand and various things that's happened over the years. We've exposed more and more of that functionality out through the Jonas SDK. That work continues to be formalized. We've announced that we're going to expose all the SDK workout and the Eclipse IDE. We're getting very, very aggressive in terms of getting more use cases out to meet the needs of not just the service providers but also our enterprise customers. So if you think about Junos, it runs on the boxes. And if you think about the middleware component that runs across the various devices, that's Juno space. And the interesting thing that I'm starting to see with Juno space is the wide array of applications that are being built on it today. Not only do you have network monitoring solutions, you've also got energy management companies like Global Knowledge who are coming back and building interesting things to come back and look at carbon offsets or how to manage the various devices within your enterprise. So we continue to enhance and get more functionality out of the market out on the Java one stage. We've got four or five really compelling applications, everything from load balancing on the router to interesting things that we've worked with in terms of exposing the APIs using Kinect technology to show folks how they can do the minority report type of moving screens around. So it's been a lot of fun and I think people are starting to see a lot of value in what we're bringing to the market. That genuine emphasis at the show here is Java one, right? Is that correct? Correct. You guys are sponsoring some of that. We're sponsoring Java one and we looked at this as an opportunity for us to come out and start talking to a broader audience about what we're doing with the programmability piece of the network. As you may or may not know, Bob Muglia joined us from Microsoft. Bob, my old boss for many, many years said brings an extra dimension in terms of things that we're doing. Bob is software core through and through and when you take Bob's knowledge of software and what we're doing with silicon and systems, it's a win-win I think for our customers. Well, you've talked about the programmable network. What is it? Talk about that a little bit. Yeah, so think about it. For programmers, for years and years and years, if you want to get down to that core network components, you have to go through some pretty unnatural acts. Sure, we can come back and give you a triangulation on your cell phone. We can come back and give you a little bit of this or a little bit of that, but the real power's always been into the network protocols themselves. The problem is, all of that's been controlled by a very, very few folks within the enterprise. So how do you take that power and actually abstract it out so normal developers can take things and take advantage of that power? So that's what we've done with both Junos and Juno Space SDK. We've actually taken it, abstracted it out, and then we give both the service providers and our enterprise customers new and interesting ways to come out and take advantage of the power of the network. I've always been impressed with Juniper, obviously, Pradeep, who I've interviewed a few times into some of your events in Barcelona, Mobile World Congress, impressive vision. He's still involved in the company and you guys obviously have the Microsoft execs coming over there, leading the company, but the world's changed a bit in the past two years and Juniper's always had a nice position with the mobile focus and with Junos with software. Couple things, obviously here, it's big data, right?  So real-time analytics is dashboard-based, so mobile plays a big part in that. So I want to talk about that for a second. The other one is the software you mentioned, Junos. I'll see HP is doing very well in the converged networking space around how they organize numbers of storage and networking and servers, but also there's new movements around the software network. Things like OpenFlow, for example, is out there. So talk about two things. The mobile world relative to analytics and the role security plays in accessing the data. And two, software in the network, as people talk about the software switch. Those are two areas that are now emerging and are pretty fundamental and relevant and a lot of people don't know about it. Can you share anything on that? Yeah, so we set back and we look at like on the mobile space and what's going on with big data. One of the things that we made a conscious effort when we built space was make sure that we're taking the components and expose them out through RESTful APIs. I have no idea about how much programming language my developers want to use. They could be all across the board, whether it's a .NET, a Java, you know, a Perl script or so. I want to make sure that I'm exposing those components out in something they can use. So think about big data. All of the information that's coming out of the network is just another great source.  We can provide a lot of interesting structured data that's going across the network through our approach and then exposing them out through RESTful APIs. It's very easy to bring it into an iPad, an iPhone, you know, an Android device, a Windows mobile. We really don't care from a client perspective. Again, I'm a pretty interesting application on my iPad today that we put together for the show. I'm actually consuming four web services and I can tell you anything and everything about what's going on with four routers on my network. Very, very compelling. So it's easy to extract that out, but you want to make sure that the data that you're giving folks is relevant to what they're trying to do. In our case, it's about networking, how companies are going to run their network and optimize for the end customers. Now, when you mention things such as, you know, open flow, it's interesting when you sit back and you hear all the companies jumping on the bandwagon, the first commercial. They're really heavily venture-backed too. You have a couple in the space with $30 million in the bank, $60 million in the bank. I mean, there's a land grab going on there, so explain to what's going on there. But it's interesting when you sit back and you look at one of the first commercial implementations of open flow, it's on Juniper Equipment. Why? Because a company named Big Switch actually took our SDKs and built out an implementation on it. How well it took up that? Yeah, it goes back to the open nature of what we're trying to do as a company. Now, we'll continue to push the envelope on anything and everything to make sure that our systems, Silicon and software will meet the needs of our customer, but we have to be open enough to make sure that our customers and partners who want to take advantage of those can. Explain, we've got 450 people watching right now who might not know the nuances of Juno's. What's the magic going on in the software that enables a Big Switch, which a couple startup founders get your SDK, get some venture funding and can get into the marketplace pretty quickly. Talk about what you guys are enabling with that for startups like Big Switch and others, and then what it means for carriers and companies. What's going on there that can you explain that and simplify that a little bit? So when you go back and you talk to the founders of Big Switch or Kyle, the marketing folks and things like this, if they had to go back and recreate this infrastructure, wow, it's going to take them a long time to come back and build it. Those guys have an incredible amount of knowledge and IP on this subject matter to being able to take a platform that actually supports this and let them build it out on was a win-win solution for them. So, A, I credit the founders of Big Switch to actually looking and surveying the market to find a platform that was ready for their ideas so they could build it off of. And then coming to us and say, look at what we've done. Great, that's what you do with an open API set for folks that want to come out and build great applications. Now, your question about the service providers. Wow, service providers have many, many things they're trying to do. I mean, a lot of them are getting killed with over-the-top traffic. I want to make sure that we can come back and give them access to our API so they can come back and think about anything and everything possible in terms of traffic optimization, video insertion, deep packet inspection, edge devices, things in the data center, things that we are good at at Juniper, just making sure that we're exposing those APIs out so they can build those great applications. So, converge networking is essentially a speeds and feeds thing where you got kind of hardware integration. Talk about the innovations around software around open flows and example. It's an indicator, we're kind of where the market's going. What benefits does someone get with Juniper and what are you guys doing in that software world? And we have things like virtualization out there. This kind of all ties together, you got mobile. But specifically, what is the software doing at that level and beyond the hardware? So, once again, when we said back and we put Junos out there, it was to come back and make sure that we could manage and optimize what we're doing with our routers and switches. But the added benefit is the actual innovation that will come to come out and create new protocols or new ideas. That's what happens when you build a developer network. I mean, I would love to be able to come back and build every scenario known to mankind and every customer requirement that comes my way. But I don't think there's enough engineers in Silicon Valley to handle that. But being able to give these companies the guidance, being able to give them the bits, I'm pretty sure that they got some pretty smart developers all around this valley that will build the next big thing. I'm just an enabler of that technology in many ways. Eddie, I wonder if you could talk about the competitive landscape a little bit. Not necessarily individual competitors, but the concept of best of breed versus sort of the vertically integrated approaches. You're seeing a lot of consolidation in the industry.  Obviously, consider yourself, I'm sure, best of breed. Talk about that. With all the consolidation in the industry, what do you guys see going on there and what's your position on that? I mean, you're always going to have competition in the market. The thing is, is that you go into most companies, it's going to be a very heterogeneous environment, whether you're in an enterprise or you're a service provider. Being able to make sure that we're providing that best of breed and key interoperability into those components, that will be he who wins. So when you set back and look at things that we're doing, we spend, or maniacally focus, to make sure that we continue to push the envelope, not just on speeds and feeds, but also solutions that run on top of that and also being able to make sure that we have the right interoperability. If you look at some of the announcements around things like Q-Fabric, pretty revolutionary in terms of 321, as we talked about earlier. It's basically just simplifying that equation so that you don't have a thousand moving parts because as you know, the more moving components, the more likely something's going to break. So is it getting harder to justify in your customer base that investment in best of breed or no, because you're able to do that integration through software and other partnership approaches? I mean, do people want a single throat to choke? And if not, why you? Well, I'm not a psychiatrist or a sociologist, so I can't answer that question. What are you hearing in the customer base? What I hear from customers is they want the best solution that addresses their needs, and if it's best to breed, so be it. So when we were out talking to folks, they want to know about what we're going to do to help them solve real-life problems that they're facing every day. And I think that's what our sales force is maniacally focused on. I think that's the solutions that we bring to market. Do you think there's a difference between, I mean, clearly a difference, but talk about the difference between service providers and traditional IT. You hear, you talk to IT people here, do more with less, budgets are flatted down, talk to service providers and hear the exact opposite. We're growing like crazy, we're innovating, you guys sell to a lot of service providers. What are you seeing there? And what do you think that means for the industry going forward? Well, who knows in this economic environment? We do know that as we sit back and we talk to our customers, that they're still willing to pay a premium for good value and for things that's going to help them solve needs. In terms of the economic cycles, I'm not a Wall Street expert. You see the cycles and the durations in the market, like everyone else does, but I'm continued to be impressed and encouraged when I go out and talk to customers, especially the developer world, about what we're doing and the value that we're bringing to market. So you guys are at Java One and it's really kind of out in the other side of the town, but there's been great feedback from developers, but it's pretty exciting over there from what we've been finding out yesterday and reporting on on our site. And we had Red Hat on yesterday and we were talking about the demand in the marketplace and open versus closed. The industry has the Oracle as a specific purpose-built kind of focus. Cisco's always kind of had this closed architecture end-to-end. You guys have been really first movers in a lot of areas we mentioned mobile and Juno's, but you guys are open with the software approach. The question is open versus closed. Where are we in the industry? I see Java One and MySQL, Oracle now, but still open source. Open source has grown. You guys have had Juno's out there. What do people need to know about, one, the open source movement relative to the networking side, talking about software. And then, two, in general, this purpose-built versus open architectures, these debates that are out there. Could you elaborate on that? I think you're always going to have the bait in terms of open versus proprietary. I mean, that's just the nature of the beast. But I think the folks that end up winning is the ones that take the best of both worlds and merge them together and come back to satisfy the needs of the customer. At the end of the day, you'll sit back and you'll hear various customers saying, well, what the spec says is this, but what I really want is that. That's when you cross that line from being open to proprietary. And even things that could be written on open used to say that it's not proprietary writing on something that is open. So I think you will have that mixed world for quite a period of time to come. And our approach is we want to make sure that we have our APIs that are well documented, open, that folks can come back and build new and interesting things. What are you hearing from your customer base in terms of the developers out there? And this is a developer question. Because the enterprises are investing, although budgets are flat, Dave says, but there's a renewed project base around real doing more top line, drive the business, less cost reduction, more kind of create top line. What are you hearing in the developer community within your customer base, both on the IT side and service providers? What's their core concerns that you hear that you guys are addressing? Well, I would hear different concerns on the developer side of the house than you would on the IT pro side of the house. The folks that actually run the routers and the switches in the data center. But when I talk to developers, their whole thing is that, how can you give me the access to what I need? Can you help me solve this problem in a simplified manner? So I don't have to go through a hundred lines of code when I can do it with two lines of code. So the developers are simplicity, it's time to market, how we can make the tooling easier, how we can make the whole experience easier, how we can give them the use case, the reference architecture and the bits to help them solve their problems. Eddie, what are your thoughts on platform as a service? There's a lot of different options out there. It's confusing for a lot of people. What are you seeing in the marketplace and what are you forecasting there? I know you don't like to prognosticate, but you're out there, you're in the trenches. Our audience wants to know what you think. Well, I mean a lot of it is you can look at platform as a service, infrastructure as a service, software as a service, they all have their niche. It depends on what you're trying to accomplish. I mean you sit back and look at some of the players such as an Azure and EC2, they've done a wonderful job. Salesforce buys Heroku, very interesting move. You sit back and look at the other players out there. So it kind of goes back to what niche you're trying to solve and what problems you're trying to solve. So I think over time, the platform is a service movement. It's starting to take off.  But then again, how many companies do you see that has a pure SaaS play? People just want to take that various component and not deal with it in their data sense. So I think there's going to be room for all three. We'll see how it emerges over the next five years. The beautiful thing about it, they all require routers and switches which hopefully we can help them. Yeah, you guys got a great reputation. No doubt on the product side. And I always felt that Juniper is a little bit not as well promoted in the marketplace in terms of getting the message out there. You kind of always have been on the shadow of Cisco but always been great on the leadership side of products. My question is more management question. That was actually Kevin Johnson's been at the helm for a while. You mentioned you came in and worked for Bob at Microsoft. What's going on at Juniper right now in the management team? Obviously, and Pradeep is still there. The founder is still around doing a great job. Very active, great vision, really relevant. What's the vibe like within Juniper at the top of the company of the management team? I just got some Microsoft DNA. Tell us, share with us what's going on internally.  I mean, from Microsoft to IBM to several startups. It's one of mutual respect. It's an incredible culture. It's very innovative. And I think that all comes from the leadership team. Whether it's Pradeep going to the whiteboard, Kevin thinking about a new business idea, bringing in someone like Jerry Elliott to do sales. It's an incredible bunch of folks there, RK with things that we're doing around Q-Fabric. So in terms of what's the buzz and the feel, I think the buzz and feel is pretty strong in terms of what we can offer as a company and the direction that we're heading. I'm very pleased with this leadership team. Okay, Juniper Networks, Eddie, Amos, thanks for coming on theCUBE. Yeah, thanks a lot, guys. Good to meet you, any time. Good luck for the show.