Well, thank you everyone for being here and thank you for making it an amazing cube con. So Before we jump into the topic is something really short. I want to jump into and first This really is about the community everything you see here like everyone that is working on all these projects It's at the bottom. We have people that are here So like first round of applause for everyone who is here who is part of the community and for everyone who is not here it was unable to attend and and and one other thing as well is that You'll see a photo of this actually make a point of it's pretty pretty soon But if you are also in need of like if you're not if you're feeling burnt out if you need help like please reach out to somebody Please look after yourself like we don't this is not a sprint It's a marathon and it's something that we want to make sure everyone is doing things They can not only for the best of the projects but also for the best of yourselves So make sure that you are also looking after yourself Drink lots of water get lots of sleep make sure that you're enjoying yourself and help make it a safe space Not only for yourself, but for others. So again, thank you So let's jump into it There's this concept that we have called the emergence and it's my merchant system. So it's when you have a System where the individual components that make up the system do not actually have the properties of the system as a whole They have unique behaviors that arise as part of that system The first example is is you have this and so you have a flood that comes along the ants all clustered together and now they Float and last I check ants don't tend to float very well and survive But in this scenario they gather together You also have all the pheromones that they put out so like the individual like how do they go off and gather and Act as a whole like they have entire behaviors. They're not actually encoded into the ants But when they get together they actually have a set of behaviors that they act like like in unison Also, I mentioned about self-care remember There's some ants at the bottom of these of these things that are actually latching on to the grass And so if you're feeling burnt out, you're probably one of those ants Pop up for air and ask for help and ask for somebody to help you with with that task.  You don't have the ability to see everything There are things going on in projects like I got a lot of visibility compared to many others And I can tell you I have just I can only see the tip of the iceberg I cannot see everything that is going on and so since there is no global observability Yet despite that we still have a convergence where that convergence occurs There's a given the structure that that arises out of it And so the system that has that structure behavior is not present in the individual individual components And yet we still have this amazing beautiful thing that comes up There's also an emergent structure. So those are major behaviors But you also have emergent structures where things get put together and welded and so in this scenario you have these These ice crystals that are formed and if you look at how water ends up working and how they all combine like you can have these type of structures arise and I also put this is a previous kubecon. I believe it was 2019 Europe and I want to say Barcelona but In this scenario we have a whole Economy of people like you are in here. You're part of a you're part of an economy You're part of a you're part of a organization of people who every group is acting in in different ways And yet we still have all of these amazing things that come out that has Priyanka that's right before affects seven million other people that people are depending upon and This is one of the central places where you can come together and be a part of that story and help Influence the direction again not control, but to influence And so how do we influence them? We start with open standards So open standards drive commoditization and we want to make it Make sure we have the definition here. So when we say commoditization, we don't mean commodification so commodification is where you're taking something that was like not sellable and you make it sellable in Terms of commoditization what we're looking at from this definition is Something that anyone can use that it's easy to access that you can just pick up and start using and so we want to focus specifically on open standards and Specifically on the word open so I know there's a lot of definitions that people tend to have I tend to use the OSI Definition of open and in terms of open source. It's something that is Accessible to everyone something that is approachable that like if I go in decide hey, I want to go in use HTTP There's no one there saying no you can't use HTTP Because it's a closed standard and this is super important because without these open standards are what drive The ability for people to consume But it also represents a place where we can where we can influence and And so as we move forward that open standards ends up enabling emergence like we have IP and how much stuff is built on top of IP We have HTTP how much stuff is built on top of HTTP in the in cloud native community We have things like the cube API. How does the cube API end up affecting your ability to to deploy or to or to build products on top of so with the So with open standards Like we part of what we should be looking at is how do we can we how can we make sure that we're putting into the properties that We're influencing the structure and then making structure Predictable on what the outcomes are likely to be knowing that we're not going to control everything It's that we shouldn't even try to control everything But we should try to put things in a way that are that are flexible enough so that people can go and do interesting things But we all converge back to a central to a central location so in And so in this scenario we're saying cloud native embraces open standards and if you want to know what it means to be cloud native I know we have the official term cloud native and all they talking about like tight loops and in feedback loops and similar But I would also argue that if the standards were not open if people were not free to come and use it We would not be here We'd be having a very small trade show at the most if we were lucky So the reason why we are so successful is because we have been working on building new and even though They're not technically standards by the official definition like there's no there's no board there and some of them and actually some of them do have boards now, but generally we start off with like well, let's go in and find something we can work on that we can all come together and Put a stake in the ground and say this is where we're going to start doesn't mean it gets ossified but but it's something that in time we can continue to build and and rally around so And so that means that if we were embracing open standards and we're thinking about how do we set things up so that everyone can access We get that diversity of people like diversity of ideas at that point We are embracing the concept of emergence and embracing the concept that we can actually come together We don't have to control everything So I can mention we are building standards like if you look at every single one of these things Even if you don't technically call it standards like there are protocols like you have a Kubernetes API This is like how can I go and deploy things? I have like the OCI that describes a variety of different things on how do I actually run in an image or how do I package a container image Things like C&I the control networking gRPC so like you have all of these different things that people are rallying around and They're all also opportunities that if they're not going to be perfect So part of it is these are some of the plays not the only ones This is a very small list of everything that we're doing but part of the challenge is Is learning what's out there so that you can then learn not only just what you're doing But you can learn from others who you're working with and you can tie it back into What you're doing for those for those standards and a really good example that I like to use in a scenario is with like I do a lot of work with spiffy and spiffy represents a path for how do we get identity where I've sped up my spiffy Identities for my workloads and another company might set up theirs. It gives the opportunity that I can Consume their identities and I don't have to know anything about their internal infrastructure We have something on the top in the same way that I don't have to know anything about your infrastructure if I'm using HTTP I can do a get to call on it and it'll act in the way It's supposed to which might be give me something or maybe it tells me you're not authorized But I'm gonna get something that's predictable so with things like spiffy, I'm able to get that identity Across across boundaries and I can start reasoning about other other entities and that has massive implications There's another thing to consider as well. It's not just about the technology like said it's about the people and How many people here used to run infrastructure before you adopt the Kubernetes like you're the person who has to run No, you're like a person is part of the runbook and they say okay John it's your turn to go and set up the script John Amy it's your turn to go in and set up the firewall and something goes wrong And so you have these really complex systems and again Thank you for Duffy for having this conversation with me because this is helped me set this up And so we part of what we have to look at is what are the human processes that we have? What are we changing it so everything that we put on our API's has an implication on What happens to in terms of our human processes both positive and negative because like I mentioned a lot of people have burnt themselves out Trying to manage the system because there's not enough of us here But at the same time it also provides a path towards like I can build an image and I can give you an image And if you want to run it, you there's There's nothing special you have to do in order to Understand how my image works at least from the infrastructure side like sure you from the application side You have to learn something about how my image works, but that doesn't say anything about I don't have to give you very much information because it's all in the specs It's all in the standards and we continue to improve on those so that everyone gains those those capabilities So many of these processes have been standardized through the through the Kubernetes API So please like whenever you're thinking about standards or you're thinking about like what how do I build the protocol out? Always think of the people I think about how people are going to consume it How how is this going to affect the people who are going to be up late at night? deploying deploying your code out I want to also make a prediction as well so today we now that we've covered emergence and how the how the entire Space is an immersion system and we're an emergent community We can also think about where are we going next and so if we take this as a as an initial standard one of the things one of the patterns that I'm saying is is We have a really clear definition on what an application is and that continues to become more generic and Kubernetes is an orchestrator. It is definitely one of the most popular ones. It is becoming commoditized We have turnkey solutions for it, but at the same time the applications themselves They have different places where you may want to run So there's a there are teams over here who I've been working with who have been working on 5g edge computing And they're trying to work out. How do I deploy my application? so that actually lives close to you like maybe you're working in Manufacturing and you're trying to control a robot the latency to your cloud is too much And so you have something close by or self-driving cars are often Another example you want something that's close by so that if you lose the link to your cloud environment You're you still have something operational that's close by so So we have these applications that eventually we will start to schedule have a manifest We'll have something we can describe What are the what are the requirements of the application then be able to deploy that application anywhere in the world based upon the Properties are there if you need a GPU you land you into an environment that has a GPU if you need if you're a wasm Base system then we have to make sure you we land you into into that correct area And there's a numerous places that today you can start to deploy against so not only when Kubernetes and Clouds and edge systems We're also seeing CDNs actually start starting to run workloads in their actual environments that land literally like Within some scenarios within the kilometer of where you're at depending on again depending on your location and so We have a whole set of protocols that have been serving us well here in the cloud native and I believe that we're able if we are careful as a community and thoughtful with how this is how this works I believe that we can take it to the next level and set it so that instead of just being bound Primarily to Kubernetes we can actually make this so that is something that is useful globally that when I then my infrastructure Things that I'm working on connects into your to your systems that we have those top-level APIs those top-level systems Of course an escape hatch because you sometimes need things that are not provided by those systems But if we can get most of our environments to think in that specific way with Uniform approaches or close uniform approaches to this and get down to better standardization. I think we can have something that's much bigger than just Kubernetes and cloud native and just what's within this community so With that This is the main point I want to make is that these standards that that we have they will continue to evolve and they Will allow us to to schedule Anywhere to to have that to have that interaction where we can then predict like we can then deploy to anywhere or any particular group Based upon the needs of the application rather than Rather than what was the system what infrastructure was that system designed for so with that? I want to thank everyone for for your time and Have have an amazing cube con


The only reason I know what slow is is because I know what fast is Just like if you're going 100 kilometers an hour on a highway or for you American weirdos with the imperial system 100 mile 100 miles an hour. Well, if you pass someone that's going 20 miles an hour Like man, you feel like you're going fast. If you're going 100 and you pass someone who's going 96 Doesn't really feel that fast. It's so relative So my uncle came down and we go to the symphony and Beethoven starts and it starts My music channel, I think I did a reaction on one of those and I have like three records already of Beethoven 6 and one's just piano And it's one of my favorite symphonies of all time and in that scenario You can't do anything but slow down


Good morning. So today is Sunday, May 14th, and let's put it this way. The past week has been pretty shitty for me. Not in terms of P&L because I managed, for some reason, don't know how to actually be green and net green on the week, which I was shocked when I found out yesterday, but overall super happy about that. But my training was absolute trash. And I have to attribute it to pretty much not putting it to work because it's getting nice outside. You know, summer's starting and you feel like doing pretty much anything except for staying at your screen. And I've been just lacking and it's slowly catching up to me. All right, so let's talk about what really happened this week. So the week didn't go well, but that's pretty vague and it's not precise enough. And if you just go about your week like this, it's going to be hard to fix anything. So yesterday, I did absolutely nothing. And I just sat down and really thought and look at my trades and realized that a lot of it didn't have to do with my actual trading, but most of it was about what's in my head. And the biggest thing was I've been coming off from a pretty good streak and my trades were really big in that streak. So right now when I'm taking a trade and I'm seeing that it's a very small winner compared to those big trades, I'm just not really happy or not satisfied. So I'm chasing or I'm trying to, you don't maximize a trade, but the trade is already done. So the good news is that I understand the big issue, but the bad news is I still need to fix it. And if we look at the 90 day, we can see that, you know, days were pretty small in this area. And then they started to really be bigger and bigger. And overall, we can definitely see these are the big days that I'm talking about. So now, like these smaller days, like we can see here, they're pretty average. They're pretty good, but I'm just used to like those massive days over here. So it's getting a little tough. But overall, the equity curve is still trending up. I have a bit of issue in it was November till like beginning of December. And then it just picked up and it's been pretty much straight up since. And we're picking pretty much at all time, 90 day high. Overall, the numbers are looking pretty good. And I'm pretty happy about that because I know a lot of guys actually blew up recently on these like Chinese name and you just see overall on Twitter, a bunch of spaces. Everybody that's really inclined on the short bias, which I am. And sometimes it's an issue, but they're just getting destroyed and having these big drawdowns. And I'm currently not in a drawdown, which is great. And I actually building on momentum. So pretty happy with the result right now. I think it could be better because the stats are good, but my feels and my trades are not looking good aesthetically. And I wish I could improve that. But overall, I got to listen to the stats. And if that's how I trade, that's how I trade.


All right, let's have a look here wait to some people come on. It's the New Year's Day I was watching yet. Here we go. Kirsten D joined. How you doing? Nice to see you here Dart touchdown joins my mate Mark. What's up, Kristen D? Spenny. What's going on? Spenny O joined. How you doing? We're just about to go through New Year's resolutions We're here in New York City. This is my New York City apartment. Happy New Year to you Kirsten D and Dart touchdown This is can anyone tell me which part of New York City this is right now? I'm gonna give you a shout out if you tell me if you get it correct Tell me which part of New York City which neighborhood we're looking at right now down there, and I will give you a shout out Take a guess. Take a guess. Take a guess Long Island incorrect art touchdown, but not a bad. I know not a bad effort, but no Kirsten D says Brooklyn Nope. Nope. Stop Brooklyn. Keep trying. Here we go again. How many people do we have? We've got four at the moment We should just tell them because two of them are so far off.  Arena Talon over joined. How you doing? Now listen, I'm gonna tell you in a second, but in the meantime Please touch the screen and retweet this out to your Twitter followers now If you do that, I'm gonna give you a big shout out and thank you personally I'm gonna answer your question personally. So before we begin.  I'm gonna get your news resolution Hit the screen and Retweet and invite followers right now dark touchdown. Just did it. Thank you for sharing on twitter dark touchdown. I love it Thank you for doing that. I appreciate that Uh, if you're watching this right now, just put your finger on the screen Okay, and then And then retweet it out to people just go bang retweet. Who else is gonna do it? Come on Gotta do more. We gotta do more. We gotta do more. Come on now. Come on. Do it Uh, this is what this is my apartment in new york city. Um It's a little bit messy because we've been talking and stuff kirsten de joined again. This is the lower east side Okay, well, that's actually the east village But where I am down there, that's the east village there and on this side where I am is the lower east side Uh, so that's the answer mark. What is your new year's resolution? Old new year's resolutions. I have a lot I'm gonna set up a daily phone call with my parents or weekly phone call Or I pose a deep question and we'll dive into so I really get to connect with them better I don't know about you guys, but sometimes I have these like really surface. Oh nice retweet kirsten de shared Thank you. Thank you. Well done kirsten I don't know about you guys Do you have these surface conversations with your parents or loved ones? Like you love them so much But sometimes just this time passes and you you're just talking about your day and work and you never really Pilled the onion on what really matters to you as a human being. I find that happens a lot with my parents So one of my new year's resolutions is to set up a weekly call with them or we dive really deep On a certain question and I get to hear their like opinions and thoughts on things and That's one. What about you james? It's one of yours. That's a good one, by the way So you're trying to avoid trivial conversations trying to avoid trivial conversations with my parents and really getting to know them better I did that once I asked them what their favorite childhood memory was And I told them mine and it just opened up this like really beautiful Combo between us. I'm like, oh, we should do that weekly. I just find one good question a week And we'll jump in and I think I'll get to know my parents in a new way. That's awesome. Good job I I have a few new year's resolutions, but one of them is to really have a fantastic amazing relationship with A woman or women could be women maybe plural But really maybe christen d But really it's but really it's just it's just it's more like um, I want to focus on having a deep meaningful relationship with someone It doesn't just have to be a woman. It can be with like, you know, uh, colleagues or acquaintances or my family I just want to have deep meaningful relationships. And if that includes the romantic one then terrific Uh, christen d's married What is she saying? Damn So, uh, if you're just joining for the first time, we're talking about new year's resolutions Marx is to get have a deeper relationship with his parents A mind is to have a deeper relationship with people in in in general alex weston from ukraine and ohio Do you notice that both of those things? Okay? um Uh, it uh, it is all about getting more connected with people Do you notice that so he wants to talk to his family more and a deeper conversation with his parents And I want to have deeper conversations With people because in life human beings want connection, right? We want to feel connected Do you know, all right, so has anybody here studied blue zones? Do you know what that is? It's the areas that people study that where people live the longest, right? And one thing that shocked me about these studies It's these areas that have had the most people that live to 100 And what they found is is that you think that they'd have like really good physical around this way Yeah, they'd have some really good like physical habits good diet good exercise and things like that And that's true like these places a lot what they have in common is is they eat small meals And they generally eat a lot of seafood and vegetables and stuff like that Yeah, one of the biggest things they found in all these societies where people live the longest is they're connected as they get older And people often discount the um the thing that connection plays in our lives like how it affects our health How it affects everything it's like such an important thing So I don't think it's a coincidence that we're talking about that right now And you know what we were just going over I was showing mark my um my notes here from a book Called never eat alone by Keith Farazi and you can see my name there I actually type out these uh the best parts of the book and I give them to you free if you go to jamesswannock.com And put your email address in there. I'll actually send you my notes from this book never eat alone by Keith Farazi and also This book here, which is winning with people by john c maxwell Um, let's see what he says here one of the most important things you will do is choose your friends Positive people with good character lift you up negative people with poor character pull you down The people you are closest to will shape who you are So if you want to get all of those notes And learn how to win with people go to jamesswannock.com And put your email address in there, and I'll send that to you this man is a wealth of knowledge Seriously, he's the fountain of knowledge an ozzy fountain of Of smart shit Can you curse on here? Yeah, you can go John bayonet says i'm giving up alcohol for at least 30 days. Thanks for the inspiration. You are so welcome vlada To million says hi from russia. Got someone from russia, dude. Hey girl. How you doing? Now listen, if you're watching us for the first time, please press the screen and retweet this to your followers right now So we can share this and if you share it with your followers right now I will give you a big shout out and I'll answer your question. So vlada 2000 000 hit the screen pull down and then and share it and uh, I'm gonna I'm gonna see you when you share I'm gonna kiss give I'm gonna give james a smooch, but on the cheek No tongue shannon girl. How you doing? Good to see you here. We're talking about new year's resolutions What's your new year's resolution for your health this year for your physical health? I don't know if you guys ever heard of something called cryotherapy you get in this chamber and they blast you with this really cold nitrous oxide Um, it helps I have a bad back and it helps my back in a massive way So what I want to do is I want to do it More regularly than I already do ahead of time now. I go in I hurt my back. I go in and I do it I want to book it ahead of time. So I'm always saying on top of my game crowd highly recommend cryotherapy. It's amazing Okay, I've done cryotherapy as well. You go in there. It's kind of cold In fact, if you want to see a video of me doing cryotherapy or you want to see uh, a little 15 second video go to my instagram at james swanick and um, you can see me in the cryotherapy from about two months ago So go back to my instagram at james swanick and from two months ago. You can see me doing cryotherapy My name is vladislava. She said do you like russian girls? Um, not really to be honest But i'm sorry vladislava. I'm open. I'm open, but just generally speaking. I'm more of like a latin americ and you know girl, but you know Nothing personal. I'm sure you're lovely I This is like a dating app the periscope now. We'll see about it's all I know Poor old kirsten hasn't he's married so she doesn't get to enjoy the company as well. Yeah, what are some of your guys's resolutions? Yeah, what's your resolution kirsten d? What's your resolution vladislava? I've what's your resolution? Hello from turkey How you doing? Nice to see you here. What's up? Welcome. We're hanging out here in new york city This is the lower east side kirsten d says she has 16 new years resolutions. Well, just give us one. Give us one This is new york city. It's your most important one nyc Wow, let's have a look. Do we see some people down there? There we go. There's some people walking Yeah, it's all happening um Okay, new years resolutions type out your new years resolution right now mark and I are going to comment on them Tell them tell you we're going to give you a score out of 10. We're going to rate your new years resolution So type in your new years resolution now my business resolution is to sell A lot more of these swanis blue. Can you open these for me just slowly? These are my swanis blue blocking glasses. If you grab them on amazon Oh, yeah, you're just nice and gentle because I've got to still got to give those to people. There we go Um, and you wear them they block out the blue light from computer screens and cell phones and laptops. Look at that beautiful And I'm um, we sold out of them actually we sold out in the first. Yeah, there's my brand swanwick and then you open them up and uh There we go. You don't need to pull them out of the wrapper because but you can just show them there there They are oh, yeah, orange lens which blocks the blue light the dangerous blue light You wear these things. They're very stylish. I've got it. I've got another pair of them here actually Here's a pet If you go to bitly.com forward slash swanis. In fact, can you can you hold that for me, mate? You just talk in there. I'm gonna write this down Write the actual do you want me to say something? Yeah um Hey worlds, what's going on? I'm in new york city with my buddy james and life is good What makes you guys happy? Let me hear. What are some things that make you happy aside from james swanick Women in drinking. So this is the link here. Okay bitly.com forward slash swanis Is that back the front as you're seeing that or are you seeing that the way it is like is that I think they're seeing it back the front.  I think it's back the front. Is it back the front? Can you tell me if you're watching this right now is are these words back the front or are they normal? Oh, it's proper. Cool. Awesome. All right. So there's the link bitly.com forward slash swanis um Now we sold out of them about a week ago, but you can you can Buy them now and we'll deliver them to you in the first or second week of february So you do have to wait five weeks. They were so popular that we sold out and we're just waiting for the next shipment to come in Um, but they blocked the blue light. So do you know why blue light is dangerous mark? No, okay, so At night time you're supposed to when the sun goes down you're supposed to not be in light But since the invention of the light bulb, we're all we're living in this artificial light So our body thinks it's still nighttime, which means we don't create melatonin and melatonin is what helps us sleep And so because we're living in this artificial light. Look, there's an example There's artificial light. Look, there's the light up there Then plus the light from my cell phone and look the light from my computer Let me just do this and this computer screen and any electronic display Is emitting blue light, right? So the screen that's coming in So what it's doing is is that it's telling you that it's daytime even though it's nighttime So what happens is is that it's almost like taking a cup of coffee before you go to sleep It's like you drink coffee and then you're kind of like active and it's hard to sleep When you look at blue light from a cell phone or a computer or your in light Your body thinks it's daytime, which means it hasn't started to create melatonin Which means you don't fall asleep as easily or your sleep is not as good So what these blue blocking glasses do is that they eliminate blue light Now let's find some blue here somewhere and I'll I'll I'll show how I'll I'll give you the view where there's no blue Is it blue? You grab that blender bottle for me, please mark for a second Okay, I'm going to show you here. So these are blue blockers, right? So you wear these and now we've got a blue we've got a blue container here. See it's actually it's blue Now look now look at how this is going to block the blue. Look, there's no blue there Let's just do it over this way a little bit more. See there you go. It's blocking the blue light There's no longer any blue. It's taking out the blue. You understand on this way There we go So there's the blue and then we put this over and there's no more blue Okay So it blocks blue light completely which comes out from the screen which comes out from your cell phone Which comes out from your laptop.  It just keeps going on and on and on Or because you sleep you're sleeping the way that nature intended So if you want to grab a pair of those you can pre-order them at bit.ly.com forward slash swanis Or if you go to swanwicksleep.com Um, I'll send you a free book on seven ways to improve your sleep. Hope that helps. All right We're going to head off now. Uh, mark's got to go he's got to go and write down his goals Thanks for being here mark gets to meet everybody. Thank you for being here as well I enjoyed this talk from new york city. Have a great new year's day And I will catch you on the next one. See y'all


Good evening, everyone. So everyone having a good time? Lots of smiles. I'd like you to stop having a good time I'd like you to put on your serious face, and I can look at this lady She's sick. She's rocked up to ED. The doctors don't know what's wrong with her. They're gonna take a blood test They're gonna send it up to the pathology lab a couple of hours Maybe they'll have the results a couple of hours is a really long time if someone's really ill Now at the same time if we wanted to just find her blood sugar levels We could rock up with little portable device And a matter of minutes have the result now What about if we had a similar tool at triage when she came in we could find out in a matter of minutes If she was about to say have a heart attack or we could have a desktop one that could tell us if a cancer patient was in remission Now imagine if those tools are cheap They're wide ranging everywhere from GP clinics to raw flying doctor service Now if we could do that we could actually change how We treat people in hospitals and how we treat people in remote countries, sorry remote areas and even developing countries Now if we're gonna do this we need an automated tool to detect disease and generally what we do is we want to find a Certain protein maybe that's at elevated levels when you have a certain disease Problem is if that proteins in blood or in urinary and saliva. There's lots of other stuff in there So scientists have come up with a way which appeals to me because I'm a physicist to isolate it Isolate this protein that stick a magnet on it Now if we can find the magnet we can find the protein we can have a good idea of what's wrong with this person Of course proteins are small so we need small magnets, but chemists can make small magnets These are a hundred nanometers. We can go 20 25 times smaller if need be but small magnets need small sensors Now the current sensors are kind of like electronic compass needles Imagine the needle and it moves slightly and then we detect that electronically when a particle comes along What we are doing at the school of physics and this is research which is now funded by the Australian Research Council and the US Air Force is To look at vibrating compass needles, and these are nanoscale compass needles If we can do this and actually make these work then it's going to overcome limitations of current detector technologies We can make smaller sensors. We can make faster sensors And these are going to be faster because the needles are going at around about a billion times a second To test this out. We're making devices. We're measuring and measuring them in the lab And we're running simulations on supercomputers. So a lot of the work is really physicsy We're trying to understand the devices test them and optimize them And if they're as good as sensitive and as fast as we think they will be I've got a good chance and not only Contributing to point of care diagnostics, but also making cheaper tools for medical research So think about the vibrating nano compass and hopefully helping out with diagnostics, and I'll thank you for your valuable time


started. Thank you all for staying and braving what is another snowstorm. My name is Tim McCarthy and I'm the host and director of the ART of Human Rights and this is the launch of our spring series and this is a collaboration between the American Repertory Theater and the CAR Center for Human Rights Policy, the Kennedy School, to use art to foster and inspire public conversations about human rights issues and political concerns. And so I am thrilled, thrilled beyond, beyond explanation to be sharing the stage tonight with three folks who need no introduction, but I will just run through them quickly. Eric Foner, who's been described as the nation's finest living historian. Susan Laurie Parks, whose play many of us have just seen and who is who has been described as the finest living playwright and and then my dear colleague and former professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr., who one of my students referred to last week as the Oprah of academia. Without the bank account. Right, right. So, so it's wonderful to have all of you here. Thank you so much for joining us today. So we're going to just have a conversation with four of us here for a bit and then we'll open it up for questions and comments from from the audience here. So thanks so much for being with us. So the first question I want to ask is to Susan Laurie, who's brilliant work we've we've just witnessed. And to talk a bit about what inspired you to write this play and at this particular moment, what you see it's sort of offering to the world. Oh, I don't know that the last one. But so I'll tell you about the show. You know, my father was a career army officer. He passed away. He was a career army officer before he was a professor.  My growing up was my dad going away to war and coming home. He would go away and come back and go away and come back. And the story goes on the day I was born, my dad was out rehearsing for war. They called it being in the field, not behind a plow. But in a tank, he was a tank commander, really tall guy in a tank, rehearsing for doing war exercises. So the title was the beginning of it. And father comes home from the wars. And so I started writing. And yeah, other things came. Yes. So one thing that came is that this is set in the midst of the civil war, right, in and around emancipation, the emancipation proclamation. And yet it's an epic in so many ways in drawing from that tradition.  Yeah, I know, I know where I'm aware of the community that I am sitting in front of right now. And I'm one of those writers who writes and the ideas, if they come, the ideas that I have something to say about something come much later. Okay. All right. We'll get you to elaborate more on that in another question. So I want to ask Eric and skip to give us your this is the first time you've both seen this play. You just saw it for the first time and have heard about it in various ways. Give me your sort of audience reactions, not necessarily your scholarly reactions or critical reactions, but your audience member reactions. Eric, Eric. Well, I mean, I loved it. So congratulations. You know, it's it's fascinating. And I have to say, even though they're not here, the acting was superb. I mean, really, you know, congratulations to the actors. So, you know, to me, I mean, most of my scholarly work has focused on this question of freedom in one way or another. I can't remember them all, but I've written quite a few books with the word free or freedom in the title, freedom, nothing but freedom, free soil, free life, my most recent book, Gateway to Freedom. I've always been very interested in this question of what people think freedom is, how they achieve it, how they struggle to make it mean something, why it's never quite satisfactory in some ways.  And I think you did a great job of showing the complexities.  And even among a slave community of a few people, there's not one idea that everybody shares. There's conflict, there's fear, there's struggle. And, you know, so I just saw it as I think without being unkind to anyone in the, who is a movie director or theater, there's a lot of works which have a historical base, movies or plays, which really have no real understanding of the history. But in, I won't mention any names here. But, but I think this really captured something real about that, about that moment and about the, you know, the way people kind of responded to it. So, you know, that to me it brought alive things that were real in the history. So it's not a history, it's not a footnoted work of scholarship of history, but there are real insights into history there. So that's what it, that's, you know, that was what impressed me about it. Good. I'd like to preface my answer with a question by my friend Susie Lurk. How many months was hero gone? How many months? Yeah. Maybe the actors now. I'm sorry. I didn't, someone count. Oh, Benton. Yay, our hero. 18 months. Oh, thank you, Benton. I just want to know who the baby daddy was. That's all I'm talking about. And I'm not the only one. I was thinking, well, who's baby daddy? Penny's baby daddy? Yeah, you know, if he was gone eight months, that could be one baby, one daddy, but he was going 18 months. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, yes. Yeah. He was gone. Yes. More than, more than a year. Yeah, there you go. Well, he should have killed him. Skip, it's a human rights panel. We're not going to talk about killing people here. He were on that. But anyway, no, no, I love the play and I love the play because far too, I mean, Eric feels very strongly, Eric and our very, very good friends. And we have a very, a regular email exchange, particularly about things like historical accuracy and feature films. He's the historical accuracy and I'm the feature film. And we, he and I could argue about this all day long. But I've also found that historians, often, particularly liberal historians, historians of a left of center bent, often reduce the complexity of African American community in ways that are deeply offensive to me as an African American. And it's not a card I play in public because I don't, you know, when I was coming of age, we were talking about this before. I was an undergraduate Yale between 69 and 73. And it was the time of high essentialism. We didn't even know the word essentialism was, but we knew the white people weren't supposed to write about black people.  Smart people can master any subject and write about any subject with sympathy. We'll talk about that later. No, I know I will argue that till the day I die. You don't know what I'm okay, great, great. But I also know that there were times when historians, particularly white liberal historians would censor themselves in reaction to this bullying of black militants. So and I've had friends, not Eric, but I've had friends who were white and prominent historians would say, No, we can't talk about them public. Well, it might be true, you can say it, but I can't say it. Or this is what I think in private, but don't quote me, because I don't want to be accused of being a racist. And that's a sad state of affairs. And one area was the the black, the role of black people voluntarily and involuntarily in the Confederacy. And it was very easy for people to say, Yes, yes, involuntarily, they were slaves, blah, blah, blah. But I also know, just think about it, because of human nature, there had to be somebody black who volunteered to serve in the Confederacy. There just had to be. There were in the 1860 federal census, there are 4.4 million African Americans, 3.9 million are slaves. 262,000 out there, 488,000 who are free. 262,000. Okay, more than half live in the states that become the Confederacy, plus the four border states where slavery remains legal during the Civil War. Now, here's where it gets interesting. Those black people lived in the Confederacy weren't, you know, lynched during the Confederacy. I mean, they lived under a lot of pressure, I'm sure. But by and large, they were not molested. And in fact, what's curious to me is that in the new episode of, you know, my show, Finding Your Roots, I have two African Americans, I can't tell you who. Both of whom have free people of color in their ancestry who were complicitous with the Confederacy. One was a blacksmith who did regular business with the Confederacy. And we showed her, we turned the page and I show a receipt from the Confederate Army for fixing a wagon. And then I set her up by saying, I'm sure that they made him do it, I'm sure it was only once.  And the other one was the valet to the man who was the senator from South Carolina, and then the governor, the richest man in South Carolina, they went to Canada. His valet later said that he was ambushed by abolitionists. The senator of the rich, you know, senator, governor, rich white man from South Carolina looks all over for him, goes to Boston. I can't find him. So he goes to Boston. Two weeks later, the valet comes back, apologizes and said he'd rather be a slave in South Carolina in the big house than free and homeless and poor in Canada. These are two stories that actually happen. So all of this is to say, thank you. Right on. It will open a big discussion. And John Stoffer, my colleague at Harvard in American Studies and in English and African American Studies, is probably a great essay on how many black people, but he's concluded voluntarily served in the Confederacy, and it's about 3,000, just over 3,000 people. And I encourage you all to read it on TheRoot.com. You give complexity to the black experience that is very important, and you're opening a debate, and I applaud you for it. So I want to, I want to ask, because we were talking about this on the way over from the airport this morning about this debate that's reemerged over black Confederates. And I see on the one side, what you're, what you seem to be saying is that there's a need for any of us who are doing this work, certainly as scholars, to, to, to, to sort of work out the complexity of this history, right? That there's a need for us not to oversimplify. Or censor yourself. Right. Or censor yourself. Right. And I absolutely see that. But I'm also wondering, like, what is at stake in this new debate about how many people who were African-Americans served in the Confederacy? And to, to, to parse that out, what does it mean to serve in the Confederacy? That we know the stories of the Massachusetts 54th. We know the stories of African-American soldiers on the Union side and sort of what their service looked like. And so what's at stake in this debate? Well, you know, in a way, you're going to elevate the question to what is at stake anyway, in talking about the Civil War, what is at stake in talking about slavery, which is still an uncomfortable subject for many, many people to talk about. You can, you know. And what is at stake if, to say, slavery was the fundamental cause of the Civil War, which I find, when I say that in lectures around, I find there's a lot of resistance to that. Nobody alive today owned a slave in the United States, right? Nobody alive today was a slave. No one is being accused of anything personally. Nonetheless, there are people who find it a kind of personal affront, if you say that the Civil War was fundamentally fought over slavery. Now, there is no question, as Skip said, of course, when you're four million or more people, that you're going to have a tremendous range of ideas of responses to the war. The notion that some black people in the South identify the Confederacy should not surprise anyone. There were black people who served in the police in South Africa. There were blacks, there were slaves who fought for the British in the wars of the Caribbean. This is not something that is unusual. You're going to lose complicity with the notion? Yeah, complicity. But I think, but the, on the other hand, one has to push back, if you go to the internet, which doesn't always give you the correct information, you will find websites devoted to legions imagined legions of black Confederates, thousands upon thousands of them, it's sort of to demonstrate that the Confederacy was sort of a multicultural paradise. Right. And that, no, and that indeed then, and that in fact, it was less racist than the North. There was certainly plenty of racism in the North, obviously, but you know, the sort of historical defense of the Confederacy has now taken on a new, you know, a new language 50, 60 years ago, it was people didn't mind defending slavery in a certain way. Now you sort of can't do that anymore. So the Confederacy is seen as a, so the black soldiers represent the good race relations of the old South and of the Confederacy. I, as, as scholars, we have to do the research and decide what, what it is. Stalford puts, I mean, I have to say Stalford, don't take this wrong, is a professor of literature. We won't tell him. And as a, as a historian, I find the evidence that he puts forward, let us say, a suggestive, but not conclusive in many ways. Its reminiscences and other things. But nonetheless, the fact is that the Confederate, there is no question that some small number of African Americans did volunteer and probably served in Confederate armies. No question about that. On the other hand, the Confederacy as a government was very resistant to enrolling blacks in the army all the way through until the very, very, very end of the war when they finally said, okay, we're going to, we're in this desperate state. But the point is, yes, we have to separate this history from, you know, current politics in a sense, at least at the beginning to try to figure out what is the real, to say no black person in the South could have possibly identified with the, with the Confederate cause is absurd. On the other hand, the, one has to kind of distinguish between the, you know, distinguish the particular anecdotal event and the kind of center of gravity. And there's no question that the center of gravity among the slave communities in the South was sympathy for the North, desire for Northern victory, desire for freedom, as you show. So, you know, it's, it's, it should remain a historical debate. But as you say, there's, there's layers and layers of emotion and politics, you know, layered onto it. Right. No, Eric's absolutely right, that they're confederate organizations that claim tens of thousands of black men fought for the Confederacy, but this is rubbish. But a few thousand did. And, and I'll accept that. Right. That's enough complexity for me. Yeah. Interestingly enough, another fact that's important is that, what do we estimate about 500,000 black people were freed by the Emancipation Proclamation, right, which means that they ran away or were able to get behind Union lines after the Union soldiers liberated the areas in which they lived, which is what the Emancipation Proclamation was all about. You accept that? Skim and I don't agree about the Emancipation Proclamation. I don't know if this is the place to have that debate. Let's go. But you got to tell them what the positions are. I, I, I don't, I don't think this is the place that I debate. The Emancipation Proclamation did not end slavery, but I, my position is it changed the character of the war and made the death of slavery inevitable if the Union won the war. If the Confederacy won the war, slavery would have existed for a long, long time. No question about that. I agree with that. But the number, to say the number freed by the Proclamation is, I think, open, open to dispute. I would put the number considerably higher than that. Yeah, I wouldn't. All right. So Susan Laurie.  And I think when we look back into history, where the kind of history where, as you said, none of us actually lived. And we look around us here and all over the world today. The notion of the idea of complexity and the other are things that are very hard to bring together. It is very hard, in my experience, for most of us to imagine the other and complexity. The other is that one, those people who do that. And even sometimes in our own community. We like to see ourselves.   But the question is asked often. And so it is hard for us to imagine complexity today. And it would also, I think, be hard to imagine complexity back then. We are not, we do not practice that often enough, I think. However, I was, let me just, as the historian, complexity is essential, but it is not an interpretation. In other words, you can't just, you can't just say, well, my view of the Civil War era is it was complex. That's not sufficient, at least for a historian. You know, then you have to, as I said, say, well, what is the main tendency? Not the 100% tendency, not that every single person, but what is the main tendency that's going on? That's what the historian has to uncover. Complexity is important to remember, but it is not sufficient as an explanation of what was going on. I mean, there's more, there's more interesting complexion than there is in complexity. You know, the one drop, well, that's very interesting, but we don't really look at the one drop in terms of opinion when it comes to looking at ourselves and looking at the other. And that's one thing that does, I think, go on in the play. There are a lot of people thinking a lot of different things about the same thing, apparently. Well, I wanted to ask you a question about, about Hiro, both the character and the archetype, right, that you are, that he contains multitudes, right? He's constantly shifting and changing and containing all these things, not always at the same time, but it's revealed. He, I think one of the things that's brilliant about the play is that he always enter, he's the sort of center of the play in so many ways, but yet, at the same time, he only appears halfway through each of the parts, right? He sort of emerges. And, and, and there are all of these reveals, right, as the play goes on. And in a sense, what I guess the question I have for you is, does this play have a hero? Is Hiro that play? And is, are you actually creating complexity in, in that archetype, right? This play is, I mean, he's named Hiro, he could be seen as such, he's tragic, he's flawed, he's, contains multitudes. Are you trying to push against that notion that we need heroes or heroines in the, in these stories? A lovely question. I'm just showing him. I mean, he's, his name is Hiro, but as we find out in part two, his first master only called him Joe. Right. He decides to name himself Ulysses, putting him square in the sights of the greatest man of the moment to him. And in the, you know, right in the bullseye of the historical or the literary historical Ulysses who comes home and kills people. Darn. You know, so I'm just, I'm just, I'm one of those writers, there are lots of writers who have these ideas, they're going to subvert and there are writers like me who I have something, I have someone that I'm, that I love and I want to show you what he's like. Uh-huh. Okay. All right. Good. Skip. It's up now. The, I'm trying to ask a question that you'll answer in public, which is, yes, which is about your relationship to Greek tragedy and to Greek myth. Right. So, so why, why cite it, why use these archetypes? And some of the, some of the figures are very consistent with Greek mythology and some of them aren't. Curiously enough. So, so why, why sort of borrow or, I love, I'm so happy to answer that. Ulysses' wife is, was famously. Yes. Faithful. Yes. Unlike. Yes. Hero's wife. Yes. Or well. She was, faithful in her mind. She was true. She was true. She was true. There's honest, true and faithful. Oh, okay. Hero is honest. He exists in the framework as a good guy. Penny is true. Homer is true. True North. The dog is faithful. The dog is faithful. Yeah. The love that passes understanding. That's, that's the dog. But the dog says, I have no choice. It's part of my DNA. That's what, but that's, you know, he is called by power that is, is greater than himself, you know. Okay. But, but why do I follow the Greeks? I laugh when you ask that because, yes, because I, I love them. And because they're in the ground water, much like the Civil War for most Americans, much like who's the name of Hero's new, what's the name of Hero's new wife? This is the question I look. Yes. And who has a wife, a new girlfriend whose name is Alberta also? Ever heard of a play called Fences? Yeah. Yeah.  It's so in, it's so woven into the ground water of my personal cultural experience that when the guy whose name is Troy comes home, he's got a wife named, he's got a new gal named Alberta. That's funny. Dang.  That's called intertextuality, where it's my day job. I prefer and messed in the shit, actually. Well, I'm curious, actually, since the Greek mythology is built in, what kind of, to write this, what kind of like historical research or reading, if any, did you do? I've read some of your books. I mean, did you sit down and start reading all sorts of work? She read the short history of reconstruction. No, no, actually, that's a lot of words. I've been writing about this period for a while. So I have a cube, I mean, I've written a lot about Lincoln and linking and how he links, you know, and I went off on that for a long time. So I've been reading a lot about this period for quite a while, but at the same time, you break free, and suddenly you're running down the road because what I wanted to capture is not what had already been written, but the thing I was hearing, those voices that are beyond, and so have a great respect for, you know, historians and history and wonderful works of literature and scholarship, and also we need to, you know, that's freedom, talk about freedom. It's true. You know, it's, and it's something in our arguments, I insist on, which is the freedom of the artists, artists that take historical facts and ignore them. You know, it's called art, not history. I completely have to do that. I completely agree. As long as they don't claim its history, like some people do, if it's art, if it's theater, absolutely, perfect novels, but some of these folks unnamed go out and say, this is real history. I'm giving it into the schools. I want it into the history class. Oh, yeah, well, that's wrong. I'm with you on that. But I'm talking about feature films or plays. I mean, after all, this very much reminds me of the first time, and I hadn't read the plays the first time I saw it, because I wanted to react spontaneously, and I love your work. I knew I'd love it. The first time I read Their Eyes Are Watching God by Zorna Hurst, how many of you have read Their Eyes Are Watching God? Okay, a lot of people. So I'm reading along. I'm 27 years old, 26 years old. I'm a new professor. I mean, with exaggerate quotation marks. I'm a lecturer convertible. It's called Haven't Finished My PhD. And one of my students said, you need to read Their Eyes Are Watching God. We need to teach this.  Nobody knew I was. I wasn't anybody. And she, it was out of print. So she gave me a Xerox. So I read it. And I'm reading, and it's like realistic, realistic, realistic. And you get to this point where the buzzards start to talk. You know, buzzards like buzzards. And there's a mock eulogy. And then the buzzard do a mock eulogy, which is like, what the hell kind of book is this? I had a similar experience on the stage here in the audience when the dog talks. And I thought, well, if there's anybody who thinks that this play is tied to historical reality, now they know that it's not. And I like that. You'd be surprised. So is that the explanation of the dog in the play? Because I'm waiting for one. No, I don't have one. I'm just saying that no one could make the mistake of saying that this is masking itself up as history. No, but I'm with you in terms of a history curriculum has to be, if I may, subject to evidence. You can't just make it up. But what happens is, and this is very much on my mind because of Selma, I think what's happened, what historians have done to Ava DuVernay is just, is horrible. You know, it's on play about Lyndon Johnson. Lyndon Johnson, big guy. Lyndon Johnson could take care of himself. There's a whole Lyndon Johnson industry. And when as soon as people say what will the children think, I think, didn't that happen in Athens? You know, a guy walking around and they made him drink hemlock because they said what will the children think? What will the children think if they listen to Socrates? Are you kidding? Nobody's going to see Selma learn about Lyndon Johnson for Christ's sake. But people have just tried to tear this poor woman apart. And I happen to love it. And as a scholar, I have a BA only in history. I'm not a professor of history. I'm probably a professor of English. But I do write a lot about film and I even make films myself. And there is a difference between making a documentary and making a feature film. And if the there's a beautiful essay that is a total deconstruction of the imitation game. If you've seen the imitate, I love the imitation game. I like Benedict Cumberbatch. I went home and read this essay. It's like it didn't happen. Or it didn't happen this way. But nobody is trying to keep that that imitation game from winning an Academy Award, which they did for Eva DuVernay. And it's just not right.  You know, it's not your job to read the fact. But there's isn't. I mean, this is one thing that drives me nuts about that the role of the public historian is fact checker for cultural productions. Right. Right. That there's got to be more useful role for historians to play in the world than to say, well, Lyndon Johnson took two bathroom breaks during that time that he was on the phone with those three senators. Maybe it was two senators. I mean, it seems to me that there's a more robust and interesting role for historians to play in the public sphere when it comes to debating these things. And one of the things and I so skip I agree with you very much so. But yet what is the role of the historian then when these kinds of historically themed art forms emerge, right? When a play like this comes, when anything that you do comes along, when Selma comes along, when 12 years of slave comes along, when these sort of artistic forms are generating and catalyzing fierce historical debates, what is the role for historians to play and what's the role for historians to play in conversation and debate with the artists themselves, right? Which is I think what is I agree. I don't think the job of historians is to just say this this little conversation didn't happen that way or this didn't happen on that day. Obviously the artist, the filmmaker, the playwright has the right of creative, you know, for invention and that's that's the genre. But I do think we should say and this is I like Selma a lot and I think the critique of the treatment of Johnson is a complete red herring. But I think there's something that of course the play doesn't fall into this trap at all. But there is something about Hollywood history which always tends to go to the great man. I don't care whether it's Gandhi, Malcolm X, Lincoln or even in this movie in Selma, you know, King. Yes, what I like about the movie is that it gives you James Bevel and it gives you some of the others who are unknown today. But it's still King really as the you know, the real catalyst of the movement. I think that's just that's in the DNA of Hollywood that you've got to have. And it's always a great man. Is there any woman one can think of who's had a movie like that? I can't think of one. Margaret Thatcher. Margaret Thatcher. All right. You can have her. I think we do have a responsibility to say I'm not talking about individual thing, but a movement, a something like emancipation, something like the civil rights movement is not the work of one person. So let me take a crack if I may. The role of the historian to be a consultant, first of all, any smart director will anticipate the criticism of the public historian, as you put it, by incorporating the game in the game plan.  Right. So free tickets, 200 bucks. So why don't they find out and so that they know and then say then they can be proactive, say, look, I knew this and that way they won't be defensive because I think they were caught off guard and then they were defensive and then that created the narrative to begin to spin out of control. But in the end, no, the creative writer is not obligated to get the facts historically right. It's a different genre. And Eric, I was so pleased when you wrote me that email and I told people, I said, ask Foner. You know, Foner and I agreed for once, by the way. This doesn't agree a lot of the time. I know, I'm being funny. I was thinking also about it.  But it used to be that in theater, the stories were also going to the big one. I mean, you think of the Greeks, you think of Shakespeare and it wasn't really until we started getting beautiful plays like Death of a Salesman, you know, Salesman was the hero, really. And I just take it the next step where my hero is someone you've never heard of. And I would in your presence say it feels like it happened.  Did just, these people in this play, the majority of them cannot write. Can't read.  The bits and pieces of story that my father told me about his experience in the war. He was a career army officer, okay. Years went by and he said nothing. One day I said, finally, dad, what was it like? And again, he's six four and he curls himself up like this. And he just looks at me. And that was all he said about his service because that's what it was like for him, six four, riding around in a tank. That was it. So the stories were told. So, you know. But that's also a metaphor. Well. The fetal kind of, I mean it had to be, he had to have moments like that. Well yeah, but what I'm saying is it wasn't written down in a document that could be stumbled upon by somebody and then published and called history. Yes. So much of it is unknown. So this history that we're seeing here, and I talk about it a lot in some essays that I've written, I'm making history. Yes. Making it up. Okay. But it read true. What you said is absolutely true. That it, I mean read true metaphorically. It sounded true. I mean it was very, very convincing to me. And something about the tragic hero, which I think it's important to say.  So he's supposed to be in every man as it were, every person, but you went back to the tradition and made him the hero, which is what the hero is. A hero is the hero, right? And then who has to have the fall? But I would say as a student of tragedy, and tragedy is one of my favorite genres. I mean in Cambridge where I went to graduate school, you had to read three papers they were called and tragedy was one of them.  You know what I mean? Nobody, you would not read Hamlet to get an idea about the succession of Danish princes for an anthropological paper. You just don't. They were, you knew that they were allegories, fictional or use whatever word that you wanted. So I never took them as historical personages. I took them as excuses almost, as a literary license. So it didn't matter to me that Arthur Miller made the salesman as, I know it mattered in the history of theater, but it did matter on another level. But what you do is to go back and take in every man and elevate him and give him a noble status within your play. And he has a great fall. But he's fallen to, talk about that for a minute. You know, this is not a guy who's up here and then has a hubristic moment and then falls. He's very compromised from the very beginning. But he also rises and falls continually throughout the play as he comes and goes, right? So he's not someone who has one trajectory, either up or down, right? He keeps moving. I know. I mean, that's why that's- And yet doesn't. Well, but he follows the brightest star that he knows, who happens to be a person named the Colonel. But he has, at high noon in the second play, what I consider to be the best moment of his life, he stands there with that rope, the end of the rope. And he decides not to follow that course. And for one brief second, and we've all had this in our lives, for one brief second, he decides he can free a man. And then in the next second, he cannot free himself. And then he can tell a story about it, which becomes either told- Well, exactly, the dog doesn't believe him. The dog even doesn't believe him. It had happened. Nobody's gonna believe him. Even faithfulness has its limits, right? Yeah.  And that's the- I wanna get back, you mentioned, I'm waiting for someone to analyze the dog. And I mean, I think the dog does exactly what you did at the beginning, right? There are three sort of, I mean, there's lots of stuff you're working out here, but it seems that the truth, the honesty, and the faithfulness, that without the dog, you can't parse out the distinctions, even when they're the blurriest in the play. You can't actually parse out all three of those things without his faithfulness, right? And, but yet at the same time, the faithfulness of loyalty, right? Of the faithfulness of a dog to a man, or a dog to an owner, however you're gonna conceive it, is also at the same time doing what Skip said, which is to say, look, signal to the audience, this is not faithful to reality, right? The dog is faithful to hero, but it's not faithful to reality, and that's the role that it- You like that? You like that? Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. It's like you intended that. And, but I wanna ask you a question and then I wanna open it up to the crowd. And this gets at a little bit of what Eric was talking about at the very beginning about freedom, right? Freedom is a word, if there's a word cloud for this play, freedom or free is, has a significant place in the center. And I can't help but ask myself and then I wanna ask all of you, who's free, right? Is anyone free in this play? And what contribution is this play or these three parts of this larger epic nine-part series? What contribution is it making to our debates about what it means to be free? In this play, you know, I used to think the dog was free, but then he's just the first runaway of the play in part, before part one, as you're gathering into your seats, he's running. You know, Homer's free until he falls in love with Penny, and then he's not free. He's tied. Penny's not free. She's in love with two men. I don't know. The colonel is free because he's dead. That's what the missus says. He's not free. He can't imagine his life without hero. And he also feels free because he believes so deeply in the fiction of whiteness. Well, he's so not free. Yeah, bless his heart. Bless his heart, as they say in the South. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, he's hopelessly enslaved. Totally, right. He's like Hegel's essay of Lurchhip Abundance. I mean, that's what I thought of. I thought of what you were reading is the way that, in case you haven't read it recently, but it just says that the status of the master is dependent on the status of the slave. That neither is free. That they're both slaves. They're equally free and equally enslaved. You can't be a master unless you have a slave. And you can't be a slave unless you have a master, right? So that's what that means. What interests me is how, and in the writing of history lately, there's been a kind of tendency to, not exactly denigrate, but to deemphasize freedom in the sense that more scholars now, I mean, if- That's because you used it up with all those books you wrote about freedom. Go back to- Nobody can write about it anymore. You got the Pulitzer Prize. They tried, they tried. Go back to John Hope Franklin, you know, from slavery to freedom. That was a pretty clear trajectory. 1948. 1948. Yeah, well, but not a lot of addition. But that was a story which was very easy to understand, right? But today, a lot of, you know, you have books about the limits of freedom, the failure of freedom. I think it's, I think our views of freedom in the past are often, you know, are shaped by what's going on today. When people are disappointed as they are today, they look back and they say, things didn't quite work out the way we expected, you know. So whether it's the results of the civil rights movement or the results of the civil war, freedom didn't quite become the utopian thing that many people hoped it would. But what I like about the play is that you have a lot of different views of freedom in there, and, but you do not succumb to what some historians, I think, do is just saying, well, it doesn't mean anything. Yes. You know, and that between freedom and slavery, there's no difference, right? Which is not true. Well, in your book, Nothing but Freedom, you talk about that. You say they had nothing but freedom, but freedom was not nothing. Oh, no, it's huge. But I think the freest moment to me in the play, and I'd have to see it again, but as of right now, it's when the old man renounces the boy that he loves. That's the moment of freedom. Because he turns on him and you think he's gonna be loyal to him. He's going along this story and whatever he says, he's going, yes, that's right, yes, that's right. But as soon as he finds out that he's portrayed Homer, right, he turns on him, right? And that to me shows that the old man is free.  He does have values.  And I admired that, I like that.  And then he says, he promised he'd come home with luck it won't be long. And I just know that he's still tied to him. And you know, right, he's not a son anymore, but he's sitting there hoping that he'll return soon. Which is just adds another layer to the, right, the same, but you're right. I think you're right, I think the old man is the, but again, the runaways ask in part three, where is freedom really? Will the air smell sweet? Will the streets be paved with gold? Will there be a bed to lay my freedom head? Will there be food? Will I say at the end of the day, God, I wish I'd stayed home? Yes. Which is, yeah. Yeah, but that's beautiful. But you know, Eric will give us the statistics, but I remember when, no, and I meant that in a very admiring way. The, I'm very interested, the irony of doing black genealogy. If you're descended from slaves, well, we're all descended from slaves, but remember those stats I gave you at the top? So in 1860, 12% about of the black community is free. So if you know, if you're, you descend from people who are free, it's easier to do your family tree, because they're in the census and they're legal people. And by definition, being legal means you have a name and it's written down, you pay taxes. You pay taxes, et cetera, et cetera, right? So the irony of being able to do black genealogy, if you're descended from people who weren't free until the 13th Amendment, is that you need to find the white person who owned your ancestors.  So that what you're hoping, if you're me, is that all black people are in the 1870s. They're in the census for the first time with two names, right, because that's five years after the end of the Civil War. So you find them, let's say Oprah, we found Constantine Winfrey living in Attala County in Mississippi.  And not only did we find that, but he's living next door to the white man who owned the slave 10 years, Absalom Winfrey. So what I'm fascinated by is the notion of freedom and naming. All this was a preface to that, which is how many black people, the percentage of black people who took the name of their owner. Because at different points in the historiography, and I'm always fascinated by the waves of history, they're fads for historians. There's, at one moment it was thought that the slaves just took the names of the mess. Then another moment that none of the slaves rejected them. And another moment they all went to the north.  But the truth is, most of the slaves maybe walked off the plantation they were on and turned around and came back. There was a great deal of stability after the Civil War. And in a class I teach, there's an essay published in a special issue of the North American Review in 1884. It's like on the Negro. And this guy predicts that the South will soon be black. It's a white sociologist. I mean, it was a product but slightly before sociologists invented it. But he gives us the statistics and said, these are really black states. And these Negroes are never gonna move. If they didn't move before the Civil War, after the Civil War, they are never gonna move. And then six years later, great migration starts. All I'm saying is that, so I wanna know if, despite the horrors of slavery, isn't it true that most of the former slaves stayed where they were more or less? Pretty much or nearby, anyway, yeah. No, they wanted to be, as we know, when people asked about 40 acres of mule and everything, this was not out in Nebraska or the Homestead Act. They wanted land where they were. Their communities were rooted there. The guys in South Carolina with their petition said that. We want land where we are living right now. So, yeah, I mean, and to go to the North was not exactly a great option at that time since there were very few jobs available for blacks in the North. No, the question after the Civil War was what kind of rights and power and recognition they would have in the places where they were living. That was what the battle was over.  I mean, this is like a horrific kind of thing, but that's what they did. And today, we stay in relationships that are less than perfect and we stay in jobs that are less than great and we can understand that. That's the thing, we understand and we can have a compassion for people who don't get up and go, you should leave. Well, you know, they were human and that's the thing about, I would say, that is one of my charges as an artist. And that is the only way that I'm interested really in addressing what people call the raised question or whatever. It's just reminding people that my people are people. And under that comes everything. But at that, you excel. And that's why you not only deserve one pool of surprise, you deserve another one, as far as I'm concerned. That's good. Let's open it up for questions from all of you. So, do we have two mics? We're gonna share. We're gonna share. I'll share, we can share. Okay, we'll share. Okay, so raise your hand, identify yourself and ask a fairly succinct question. Okay, right here. My name is David Rubin and I wanted to just do a... quick comment and then a question. The comment is that in some ways I found the most compelling thing about Hiro was that he wasn't a volunteer. He didn't do it out of, he didn't join the Confederate forces out of any idea of service to that cause. He was trapped, basically, in a set of survival questions. And I thought you brought that out very beautifully, painfully, but very well. It reminded me a little bit of Mother Courage, the breath play and this... I think one of the things you're doing, which I value a great deal, is you're bringing back the teaching theater, part of Brecht's idea, the didactic theater and by distancing the action as you do, connecting it in so many ways with myth and other literary echoes, I think really accomplishes that. The question is, at the end of the play, I had at least in the back of my mind that Hiro was testing Penny Penelope with the idea that he had a second wife and another life and not... I don't hear that in the conversation, but she never appears, so there's no dramatic part to that. And I'm not sure how well that actually works if I might be so bold, but I wonder what you had in mind because the odyssey was rattling around in my mind, but I don't think to any real purpose. And I don't think you had it in mind. Thank you for your comments. Alberta, well, parts one, two and three and parts four through nine are coming. That's the short answer. And she is real, she's, and again, she borrows her name, the groundwater, the funny referent that I could not escape is fences where Alberta does not appear. So there's a lot of, there's that, the misses they speak of never appears either, yet she is real up at the house. So there's a lot of barring from the Greeks, a lot of things that happen or are happening offstage that we do not see right away. So it's really in that tradition that I'm resting in. Other comments, questions, it's hard to see right here. I was surprised that people didn't say the union, the black union soldier was free. What'd you say?  Blackish. One of the, but see, this is why I asked you about what you were reading because everybody's heard, especially in this town of the 54th, Massachusetts, 55th, but very few scholars even know about the Kansas colored unit. So why did you pick on that one as just to be, to identify that soldier? Is that right? Is that right? It was just, I didn't wanna choose one that was already done in some movie about something.  The second play is called A Battle in the Wilderness and not The Battle of the Wilderness, you know. So it's intentionally not, yeah. So, but in terms of Smith's being free, it's funny, he is, he is. I would say he is and he's, I love him very much. He's on fire. He has Pentecost happening and yeah, I love him very much. And I think you're right. I think he is a free man of color. Yes, please. Can I ask you, did you start with, I was thinking, well obviously, why did she make him a capable passing, right? So then did you start with the character who's capable passing or did you start with the situation and then say, well the only way this would work is to have a black man who looks white because obviously the boss, the master boss would have killed him, right? Exactly, exactly. No, it started actually, that's a great question. It started with the two coats and if you just, oh, do you want more thing to throw into it? So I wrote part three first at the public theater, you know, that's where the whole play's been developed associated with ART and they wanted to produce part three by itself and I said, no, I have to write more because I knew it was a nine part play. They said, well we'll go forward, next play's Penny and the Wilderness or what, you know, with the baby and then Albert and Hiro at home because his name was only Hiro then. And I said, no, the next parts come before. I have to go backwards because I need to know where Hiro got his two coats. So it started with the two coats and asking, where did you get your coat? That tall, tall tail? The dog in me wanted to know the story. And so it went backwards into the coats and yes, the only person who could pull off that was someone who could pass. Like so many people in our families can like, whoa, pass. But chose not to and blah, blah, yeah. Yep, up there, Abby. Hi, I'm Abby Wolfe, no friends on the stage. I have a question about one of the most powerful moments in the play I thought was the hands up, don't shoot part. And the way that made the play resonate with, if it hadn't already, the way it resonated with things going on today. But that brings me to a question about costuming. This might seem like a minor question, but I was a little bit thrown off at the beginning in the first part by the crocs, the old man wears crocs. The one of the less desirable slaves wears Timberlands. Penny's shirt looks like it comes from Forever 21. So I'm just wondering where, I'm assuming it's intentional, but what was the intention? And then all the runaways have sneakers on. Yes, exactly, right, and the sneakers at the end, right. The black sneakers with the whites. Yeah, and one of the less than desirable says snap. Right, so it's right embedded in the language. And Esosa who did the costumes totally picked up on that. He also, we also worked together for Porgy and Bess and Top Dog Under Dog. But here we really, he really picked up on the fact that, whoa, this is now, this is then, this is now, this is then, this is now. And so he worked with us to put in some contemporary references. And the way it lined up with the events of the day from the hands up to make it possible so I could find a way to breathe, to even on a personal note. My, I had a son who died in an early age was something that actually happened at the public theater with one of our colleagues. So it just lined up in a, it kept lining up with now. Right, right. You didn't need, you didn't need the crux for people to understand it was now. Yeah. You know that, right? I didn't do the costumes. I share, you know, I share the process with my colleagues. One of the other things too, in terms of the resonance, I mean, it's unmistakable, the hands up don't shoot, right? And the comments about the patrol men and when, you know, when we're free, will we be able to say, you know, we're here and we're free and we're not gonna get shot? Right, all of that is so resonant. And, but one of the other things too that struck me as being quite resonant with this play is the fact that we never see war. Right, that one of my students, I think last week made some comment about how they're very happy to be studying the Civil War in such a way that isn't just about white boys on battlefields and looking at African American perspectives and women's perspectives and all these different ways to think about the war. And one of the things that I always loved about August Wilson's work is that so often the white people aren't on stage, right? There are other referred to, right? And the systems of oppression and the people who are in control of those things are often offstage. And it seems to me that the war is always there, right? And all of the violence in the play, the physical violence is truncated or aborted, right? There's almost a stabbing, there's almost a shooting, there's almost a whip, right? Well, there was one striking, yeah. No, the foot. Right, right, the foot, exactly. So much of the violence is suggested and it appears it's performed and then almost all of it is sort of held back. And yet to me, that resonates so powerfully right now, we're a world at war. We're a nation that's been at war for most of my students' lifetimes. And this is a war generation. And yet most Americans have no connection to the war, no connection to the violence, no connection to the trauma. And it's striking to me how personal and also how profound that representation of the civil war is where you never see a battlefield. And yet violence is absolutely pervasive to the system of slavery, to their lives, to the way that they are bound to each other and bound, was that something you were intending? Is that something that... Did I write a battle scene and then cut it down? No, no, no, are you making a larger commentary on the sort of pervasiveness of violence that is often sort of out there? It's always there and yet it's suggestive in some way. Well, so many of my plays and so many of the things I write, novels, songs, everything, it's the impact father comes home from the wars. So it's what happens in the home, in the community. It's a relationship. Yeah, I'm just, yeah, that's kind of where, because that's the thing that most of us, even if we do have service people in our family, that's the thing that most of us are dealing with on a day to day, that's the thing. We can't go over and solve the issues of the crisis, but we are dealing with somebody at home. Mm-hmm, right, skip. I've had one scene very violent. To be locked in a cage is an act of violence. And I found that an actualization as it were of violence is very subtle, but horrible if you think about it.  So anyway, that's my only. And that's also the part where the colonel does strike hero. Where that violence occurs too, and there's this, yeah, absolutely, we have time for one or two more questions. Right here. Hi, my name's Sophie. I first just wanted to thank you so much. I saw the play on Thursday and thought it was absolutely incredible. And one thing that I experienced was just feeling like my expectations were really confounded. I think I didn't realize that I had expectations for what the play was until I was watching it and realizing that none of them were being met. And I think part of it was I studied history here under Professor McCarthy. And I think I became really comfortable with the genre of slave narratives and came to expect things from it. And for one thing, a character who often is a hero and then having a narrative that has to do with escape and freedom. And of course there's diversity within different slave narratives, but I hadn't realized how much there was an expectation for me about what representations or narratives of this period in history were like until all of a sudden I was watching something that didn't obey any of those. So that was one of the most amazing experiences for me in watching this play was having all those expectations upset. And I'm just wondering if I'm not sure if you sense people's expectations and writing this kind of thing or if you ever had expectations yourself for what, for a play of this period following that certain format. I'm just wondering if you could speak to that. That's such a wonderful comment. I've really never thought about that. I've read, of course, plenty of slave narratives and respect them tremendously. But it is, yeah, they do follow a form. And they were written in a certain time where there were tremendous expectations. And, yes, I didn't wanna say, I was like saying, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. And again, this is to break free of the traditional narrative and to say we have a hero who does not follow the hero's journey or here is a hero's journey, too. Just to put him alongside of all those other heroes and heroines is a way to be free.  You know what I mean? We have expectations, we have narratives and we have things put on us. And to find ways in which you can be of service and be free at the same time. Yeah. I think that's a good place to end. Let me just a couple of quick announcements. One is that the Airt of Human Rights series will continue on throughout the spring. There's also a new initiative that Skip is part of, that I'm part of, that Eric Foner and Susan Laurie and so many people in this room are part of, that Harvard is going to have a whole series of events around commemorating and interrogating the Civil War and it's the Harvard Civil War Project. The Office of Fine Arts has put together all of the list of everything that we know that's happening starting now through the spring. And so if you go to the Office of Fine Arts website and look for the Harvard Civil War Project, there are literally dozens of things that are going on on Harvard's campus throughout the semester and Skip. And Eric Foner came not only for this discussion, but he will be giving the first of three lectures in a lecture series Monday, tomorrow Monday, and then he'll be lecturing on Tuesday and Wednesday. So please, please come, it'll be in the Thompson Room in the Barker Center, which is 12 Quincy Street and four o'clock, four o'clock tomorrow. So please come, he's not only a dear friend, but he's a great scholar and he's a magnificent lecturer. He's pretty smart. Yeah, so it'll be a real treat. Here's my dissertation advisor, pretty smart guy. Thank you all very much. Thank you.


FNN headline news update. Good afternoon, folks. Steve Rhodes coming to you live from the shores of sunny Del Ray Beach, Florida. This is your 1 p.m. update, and we've got a mixed bag out here. You have the Dow trading down 135 points, about four-tenths. The S&P is flat. It's down one point. NASDAQ is up 58. Russell's up one point, so flat there. Summai's up 10. The trannies are up 78. There are these strong indices out here. Gold is off four bucks. Silver down 29 cents. That's a little over one and two-tenths percent. Lights recruit off a buck 70. That's off two percent. Let's go take a look at our nine-panel market update chart. We begin by taking a look at the ES mini. This is an A to B equal CD to the upside. Let's reach the 1.272 expansion level. Unless there's a bearish reversal candle that forms, price will target the next price projection area, and that's at the 45.78 level. The spot follow tunics, which is trading at a lower low than yesterday, look, just trading below the 50-day expansion will be an average. There's enough wind at the back of the S&P 500 or the ES mini to continue to move higher. In the case of the NASDAQ, it's also got an A to B equal CD pattern. I don't have that drawn in here for some reason, but we'll draw that in right now. The A point out here on the low of October 4th. The B point looks like it's the high from October 8th, and the C point looks like it might be the low here from October 12th. This price target area to the upside is 15602. If you take a look at the US dollar index, it is back inside its daily profile. The price closes below $93.43, price will target $93.12, the bottom of the profile. Gold not doing much off a few bucks, but not that big of a deal. Really, it is still above the top of its daily profile, so that's an indication of a change in trend. It's trading with inside the weekly profile. The real need, though, is for gold to close above on a weekly basis, 1790-60. That's the center of its weekly profile. If we get that, that tells us the price should rise to the 1838 level. Silver is giving this a signal, even though it's back a decent amount today. It's still well above the top of its daily profile. In Turkey, with closing above the top of its weekly profile, which is 2423. If it does that tomorrow, you get a change in trend signal. Light tweet crude, it's got an A to B equal CD, but I don't have it drawn in here, but you do have a bearish reversal candle. Now, what that tells us, if that, in fact, is what unfolds at day's end, is price should pull back and test the bottom of a new profile. That's at $79.30. Natural gas, she's got a new bullet structure profile as well. This profile is at a higher level than the prior profile, so natural gas should find its legs again and resume up to the $5.73 level. Folks, stay tuned for the Trader Zed Show, but if you have to start here Thursday, have a terrific one, and we'll look forward to seeing you again soon. Take care.


Going on everyone Sam here with late sports cards working two boxes of 23 top Star Wars signature series For Jean-Lucca are so good luck here Jean-Lucca. See what we got for you buddy. Come on. Let's see something big It's gonna be a lira or so. This is gonna be your first thought from rogue one Veline Kane John No, no, I know what you're Sean invitation That's when they're Jean-Lucca come on. Let's see something big in the second one That is Imperial Freighter pilot nice one there Alexander Wraith as Imperial freighter pilot that'll do it for your break there Jean-Lucca Thanks again for the sport buddy in both the group breaks tonight and this personal get him right out to my friend