The subconscious mind does sabotage the conscious mind every second of every day. It is the one that's in charge. In a battle between emotion and logic, emotion will always win, hands down, every time. From same-say markets, this is the outflow trial. And there are lots of opportunities. 100 points is weighing on the doubt. So I needed to have success for me to stop believing. A lot of people don't make successful trades because they're fearful, they don't know enough or they think they don't know enough. Hello and welcome to the Artful Trader. I'm Michael McCarthy, Chief Market Strategist at CMC Markets Asia Pacific. In our third season, we talk to the experts in their own fields to uncover what gives them the confidence to succeed. We uncover confidence, unlocking the secrets behind resilience, preparation and growth, and how it can make you a better trader. Today we're speaking to transformational consultant Sarah Laminen. Sarah unlocks the subconscious minds of her clients to reclaim lost confidence. She does so by unpicking the root causes of low self-esteem, among other issues. Sarah describes herself as a transformational ally. Her practice is based on the belief in the human capacity to evolve when the power of the mind is fully understood.  We'd like today to get an understanding of what it is that you do with traders. So perhaps we could start by asking you, what is rapid transformational therapy? So rapid transformational therapy was developed by one of Britain's top therapists, Marissa Peer, and she is the therapist to various celebrities in the royal family. And she developed a method over 30 years that utilizes hypnotherapy and various psychotherapy tools to really affect change rapidly at a deep level within the subconscious mind. And so she has basically shared her formula and trained other people to do exactly what she does to get the results that she gets. OK, well, let's get into why it's so important. Why don't people trust themselves? What's the origin of self-doubt? The origin of self-doubt is a belief found in the subconscious mind, and it's a limiting belief. It's usually typically a belief that sounds something like, I'm not smart enough. I don't know what's, I essentially don't know what the right thing to do is. And if I don't know what the right thing to do is, I can't possibly trust myself. So what we do with this therapy is we go right into the subconscious mind through the use of another brainwave, which is the alpha brainwave, to get into the subconscious mind and find out what's actually going on in there. Because you might consciously say, I do believe in myself. I know I'm competent. I know I've done the training. I've developed my hard skills. But then when you get into the subconscious mind, you find something very different. So why do our subconscious beliefs have such a grip on us? Well, because the subconscious mind is actually driving everything. All of your thoughts, your feelings, your actions, behaviors come from originally from the subconscious mind, the data running in the subconscious mind. And when you learn how to leverage it and actually get in there and clean things up and install the correct beliefs, your abilities, your capacity is limitless. What are some common subconscious beliefs and how do they impact confidence? One I find that's very common in traders in particular is the belief that I'm not really good enough. I'm not really talented enough. I don't really have that edge. And why do they believe that? They believe that because there's something that happened in their childhood. Some event, it could be major trauma or it could be something that was very seemingly insignificant. But they formed a belief in that moment in time about themselves. And that belief was I'm not smart enough and I'm never going to be smart enough. And surprisingly, those childhood memories are still living in you. They're still living in me. And they're still impacting our behavior today. OK, so are these beliefs logical or illogical? They're illogical. So this is what I love so much about this work because I have never once had a client go in back to a belief, which is the root cause of why they are, let's say they have low confidence today and high self-doubt. They've never once had someone look back at that belief from their perspective today, turn it over, look at it every which way and decide that, yes, indeed, they should have formed that belief. It's always illogical. And in that moment in time, there's a profound level of understanding and an opportunity to change that belief because you can see really how illogical it is and how it's irrelevant to your current day life, to your reality. How does self-doubt impact our decision making as traders? So self-doubt triggers a fear response. So if you really are about to make a move or you're at a decision point, fear is essentially triggered if you don't believe that you have the capacity or the ability or the knowledge or the skills to understand the nuances or whatever you're looking at in a decision-making point in time. So it triggers fear. When you trigger fear, you have the stress response. And what happens is that you lose access to the higher functioning prefrontal cortex of your mind and all of your resources go to survival, the fear response. And that's essentially the last thing you would want to be doing, right? When you're when you're analyzing a situation in a high-paced, fast-moving moment with a lot of information, data coming your way. You don't want to lose your highest order of functioning, your executive functioning. So by installing self-trust and installing incredible confidence, you have the capacity to mitigate that fear response. Do we learn to be fearful? I believe that we do. I understand that there's there's only a couple of fears we were born with. And one of them is the fear of being dropped. That's a fear we're born with for good reason, right? Initially as an infant. But other than that, fear is learned. It's a learned response to life. Well, anybody who's seen a baby stick everything they can get their hands on in their mouth understands, I think that there's not a lot of fears present at that time. Exactly. Exactly. So what's the relationship between emotion and behavior? So emotion informs our behavior. So we have beliefs held in your subconscious mind. And your thoughts come from those exact beliefs.  And then we act and behave from those emotions and feelings. So and our actions and behaviors determine our results and our performance. So it's really the quality of the emotions you're having that determines the quality of your performance and your results. So what how do you determine the quality of your emotions? Well, that's by understanding the beliefs held in your subconscious mind. Are they healthy? Are they expansive? Do they support your ability to go out and take risk to take measured risk?   Yes. Well, if we're going to liken the primitive brain to the subconscious brain, I can tell you that, yes, the subconscious mind does sabotage the conscious mind every second of every day. It is the one that's in charge in a in a battle between emotion and logic. Emotion will always win hands down every time. And the emotional mind is the subconscious mind. So how do we know when we're being driven by our emotional mind? Well, we're always being driven by our emotions. I think the question is what is the quality of our emotions and what are those emotions leading us to do? Are they leading us to self-sabotage or to actually make and take great risks or make decisions or improve our systems? I think that's the question. OK, so is it external measures that tell us or? Well, I think it's based on the way you feel, first and foremost, if you feel good emotion, positive emotion, I think that's a great indicator that you have sound subconscious beliefs, beliefs that are supporting you.  Then I think that's a strong indicator that there is some cleaning up to be done in your subconscious mind. And the other thing is that it's not your fault when you have these behavioral, these performance blocks. It's really important to understand that it's not your fault because the conscious mind can't outsmart the subconscious. So the best thing you can do is actually go in there, explore what it is. And the thing is, is it doesn't take that long to resolve and clean it up? And that's what I love about this method is that in one, two, three sessions, you can have a massive transformation. Perhaps it's just that you've explained it so well, but it sounds very straightforward. I mean, why is it hard to change old habits? It's hard to change old habits when you try to change them through the conscious mind. So we can sit here, Michael, and talk all day long about what, why you're not performing at the level you want to perform and we'll never touch the subconscious. We'll never get to the root cause. OK. But if I put you into hypnosis and I start asking questions when we go in and find out what is the root cause, what's actually happening in that subconscious emotional mind that's driving your behaviors, then we're going to get answers. And then you have an opportunity to change it. OK, so you've said two or three sessions delving into the subconscious can be enough to bring about very important change. Can you tell us how that works or what your therapies are? For example, I work with a lot of traders that come to me for this feeling of consistent doubt, self doubt in their trading fear, that feeling of fear overcoming them, right? And they want to manage that or get that resolved or lowered enough so that it's not impacting their day to day trading. So how I start is I have a console. We talk about the issues they're having. We determine what is the most pressing issue to deal with right away. And often, as I said, it's the self doubt. It's the slow confidence. And then we would schedule a two hour session. And what happens is hypnotherapy is just like being in a relaxed state. It's it's like having a conversation with me where you're totally relaxed. You have your eyes closed. You remember everything.  And we just move through the process, through all the different tools that I have. And I walk you back to the memories that are fueling. So memories are just like data playing your subconscious on loop that are keeping those beliefs alive. So what we do is I regress you back, which just means asking your subconscious mind. What's the root cause of this? Why do you feel the way you do today? Whenever you go to make a trade, why does that fear come up? And your subconscious will very easily give you memories. That are the origin of that belief that created that. So the memory might be that, you know, you lost a race. You were eight years old. It was elementary school. You became last in the whole class in a running race. And some of the kids made fun of you and you decided in that moment, I'm not good at this and I'm probably not good at anything. And if I'm not good at anything, I'll never succeed. And in that moment that gets locked into your subconscious, it's a belief. And it lives there. But then when you go back and you look at the memory as an adult, you can go, I lost the running race, big deal. I was really good at this.   And realizing that was never true. And the fact that that belief, that memory is still playing in your subconscious and making you feel that way is totally illogical, right? So it's very liberating to release that. I understand why your clients feel lighter after a session. Yeah. So through the Artful Trader podcast series, we've been lucky to speak with people from all over the world who are experts in trading. One of them was Jack Swager. Jack, of course, is the author of the Market Wizard series. And Jack spends his time matching traders up with funds. And Jack said he's never seen a successful trader sit at the feet of another trader and learn that trader's method and make money that way. His belief is that every trader has to find their own way. Do you find that with traders as well, that those beliefs that are holding them back are different or are they common? They're very common. There's only a handful of limiting beliefs that we see in our work. And they are, I'm not enough. So it might be I'm not smart enough. I'm not interesting enough. I'm not talented enough. I'm not lovable. I'm not connected. But what I want is not available to me. Those are a few of the ones that always that's if you take away everything else, boil it all down. That's what you'll get to. Well, a lot of early work around trading was about suppressing emotion. But more lately, there's been a move towards using emotion.  And she was a very big on recognising her emotions and utilising them. Do you have a view on how traders should deal with the emotional aspects of trading? I do. I think that it's incredibly important to be aware of emotions and not to take a back seat to them and let them be the things that inform your decision making without actually being conscious and aware of what's going on. So back to what I said originally, which was that the quality of the emotions, if they're positive emotions, you might feel a level of tension and excitement. But that's different from that feeling. And you can connect with that in in session with me. That feeling of fear, that feeling of doubt, that feeling of I am not enough. That's very different. And when you can understand the difference between those two, then you know which emotions are actually informing you in a healthy, positive, profit producing way and which ones are actually sabotaging you. Well, I'm very relieved to hear you say that. I've come to love the markets and I get quite excited about trading. And I've been told a number of times by mentors that I need to make my trading more boring. I look forward to having that discussion with them again after your input. Thank you. OK, great. Excellent. So I'd like to get an understanding for our listeners as to how this happens in practice. Could you run us through perhaps? Obviously, we don't want to destroy any confidentiality, but could you give us a case study as to how this might happen? Yeah. So I've prepared a hybrid case study. And of course, my client confidentiality is of utmost importance. So I've put together a couple, a few different client scenarios to walk you through to show you how this actually works. Trader comes to me. They've been trading for five years. They're breaking even. But after analyzing all of their trades, they realize that they're not getting the results that they want. So we have a console call. We talk about what are the issues? What are the biggest issues they're having? And basically we find out that, of course, it's that feeling of fear. It's that self-doubt, that constant doubt and changing their strategy based on the doubt rather than being consistent and confident. So we go in and ask what's the root cause of this self-doubt, this feeling of self-doubt that you're feeling now related to a childhood memory. The subconscious brings up a memory. So the first memory example I'm going to give is, and I always go to at least three memories because that's how we weave it all together. We get all the puzzle pieces through three memories. So the first one being, again, that elementary school running race example. So the first scene is the belief that came up after the running race was I'm not good at this and I won't be good at anything. It'll always be this way. I'm going to fail. Second scene that comes up is 11 years old. Report card time. The child brings their report card home. It's not good. The marks are very low. He or she is humiliated and embarrassed, shows mom and dad. They're very disappointed. They're shaking their heads. They're saying, what are we going to do with you? You need to work harder. You're not working hard enough. And they're clearly disappointed. And the belief that's formed in that particular scene and that memory was if I can't work hard and get good grades, I'll never be smart enough to get it. And I just, I won't make it. I won't succeed. And then the third scene, the third memory that comes up in this case study is the child is 10 and he or she gets in trouble with their cousin for stealing candy from a store. They get caught. Mom and dad sit them down and say, you better tell the truth. Who did it? They're pressuring them. They're angry. Then they say, wait, whoever tells the truth will get a reward. So you decide, the client decides that they're going to tell the truth. They're going to fess up to it, but the cousin actually did it. The cousin actually stole the candy. But they think, well, if I tell mom and dad, they'll be proud of me. I did the right thing. While the client fesses up, he gets harshly punished and decides, I thought it was the right thing to do. But clearly it was the wrong thing to do. Therefore, I can't trust myself because if I think something's right, it's actually going to be wrong. And I can't be trusted to make the right decisions. In other words, I can't trust my own instincts. And that's a really interesting example. And I had to share that because that comes up a lot. A childhood memory where you thought you were doing the right thing, and then you get this total opposite response. And you decide in that moment, I can't trust myself. Well, then when we look back in the session and go over those, those particular memories, and the third one, for example, the client realized that, no, I was doing what I thought was the right thing. I was a good kid. I was trying to make my parents feel better. It was a high pressure. I was scared. But then looking back on my life, have I made good decisions? Yes, I have made good decisions. Do I have good instincts? Yes, I have good instincts. I don't always get it right, but I usually get it right. So in that moment, as you're going over this, you're changing that actual belief, the way that data is running in your subconscious. And then after we've done that, I create a recording. We call it transformational recording, and it installs all of the correct beliefs that we've just rewired into your subconscious. And you listen to that every day for 21 days. And that's how you change the subconscious, how you actually hardwired. So we rewired in the session, and you hardwired over 21 days by just constantly flooding the subconscious with the correct beliefs, which are essentially the beliefs you were born with. You were born with confidence. You were born to be clear-minded, to, you know, to try things. As you said earlier with babies, right? You could try anything. Yeah, exactly. So the heart of what you do, you help traders overcome doubt and fear. Exactly. Yeah. It does not take decades. It doesn't take a lifetime to resolve these issues. And that's another reason why I love this therapy. Fantastic. Well, as somebody who's used hypnotherapy to give up smoking, I understand what you're saying, but I had never thought of applying it to trading. Is what you're doing, is what you're doing considered radical in the trading community? That's a great question. I don't know, is it? You might be the better one to answer that, is that radical? Well, I'm a rugged individualist. So I tend to avoid discussing that sort of thing with traders. Yes. It's about keeping my methods to myself. But yeah, I don't think so. I must say, you know, 25 years ago, meditation was a new thing in trading, you know, calming the mind and putting yourself in a good state to trade. But it's pretty commonplace these days, I must say. And particularly with the newer younger traders coming through, they seem to be much more open to drawing on knowledge and wisdom from from other fields of study. So yeah, that's wonderful. There's a real hunger for it, a real interest in learning more about this and understanding the psychological edge to their performance. So I see that there's a great interest out there, and that's really exciting. How do your clients find you? Well, I do speaking engagement, so they find me through that. And then I have a website at sarahlaminen.com and I blog on there and I love hearing from people to answer questions and you can schedule a console calls on my website. And that's how they find me. That was Sarah Laminen in the first episode of the Artful Trader Confidence Uncovered. This series, we're talking to experts in their own field to unlock the secrets behind resilience, preparation, determination and growth and ultimately how this can make you a better trader. Join us next time.


Welcome to today's program. I am Dr. Pallavi Kugoy of Krishna Kanta Handic State Open University. Today I shall take up Unit 8 Chinvachi B and the poem prescribed for you is A Mother in a Refugee Camp. In this video I shall be taking up the explanation of this particular poem. The course is Journal English Semester 1 Block 1. So let us quickly begin. First I shall start with table of contents, starting with the learning objectives, explanation of the poem A Mother in a Refugee Camp, questions to check your progress and the references. Learning objectives after going through this particular video the learner will be able to explain the summary of the poem A Mother in a Refugee Camp and describe their poets thoughts and reflections. Let us quickly come to explanation of the poem. I hope in your spare time you will also go through this particular poem and the text of the poem that is so that you will have a better idea of the explanation that I shall be providing to you in this particular video. The poem begins with the representation of a mother's love and sacrifice through the figure of Mother Mary and her son Jesus Christ. The opening line spelled the mood of the poem itself, capturing the pain and suffering of a mother. Here a mother with a son in tow is but a ghost of her once happy self when she held her child with hope in her eyes. Now fate seemed to have shattered that self image and a vibrant sense of optimism with the rage of war. She like many other women was a victim of the war and a story is captured in the poem A Mother in a Refugee Camp which is prescribed for you. The description of the refugee camp itself speaks of the sufferings met by the children and the women alike. There is a gloomy atmosphere in the camp with the heavy orders of diarrhea of children suffering from malnutrition and of unwashed bodies. You can well imagine the condition of babies and little children with undernourished bodies, protruded bellies, prominently visible ribs, feeble steps and cries of hunger. The condition at the refugee camp was so horrific that mothers ceased to care and surrendered to their fate except this one woman who held on despite the sense of diminished hope. This woman was only a fragment of hope she must have been once trying hard to smile through her loss and suffering. She seemed to cling on the vestiges of her memories, the memories of a mother's pride that she had once cherished. She remembered all the little things that were special to her as a mother but everything was lost in an instant. All that remained was a bundle of possessions from which she took out a broken comb to comb her son's rust-colored hair. Perhaps this takes her back to both their happier days when she did the same things with her mother's joy. She may have never realized how special these little moments were until they were all lost. With the hanging uncertainty of their future, the unfortunate mother does all that there is to do with the dying hope of her little son's survival. With this we come to the end of this particular video. Now we shall come to your questions to check your progress. I hope you'd also go through the explanation once again so that you're better able to answer the same. Question number one, give a detailed explanation of the poem A Mother in a Refugee Camp by Chinima Achive in your own words. Question number two, give a brief description of the refugee camp in Bifra. Question number three, what did the mother remember in the time of her suffering? I hope you'd also go through the BA English Graduate Self-Learning Material SLM of German English course BA First Semester Block 1 Unit 8. Thank you dear lagers.


Good afternoon and This is bill by the way. I'm Sean. I don't want to I don't want to be mistaken for my manager And we got a joke there. All right, let's go. So the first thing we're actually going to do today Just just as a quick intro for us as a team with the developer and cloud advocacy team at VMware We run a website called Cloud Journey IO. It's a little bit different There's absolutely no mention of vSphere or VMs anywhere on this thing. So it's a little bit different for VMware And so that's why we tend to push it pretty hard But we're a small team and really we're excited to be here today To talk about the journey of continuous verification.  So let me jump over here. So this is what we are looking at today in GitLab This is actually our application as a microservices based application And I know we'll talk a little bit more about it There are multiple services associated with it I'm going to make a modification to the cart service just to kick off the pipeline And then I'll come back a little bit later on and do a little bit further demo at it So let me jump over to vS code And I will just make sure I'm in the right directory perfect So I'm going to make a modification to the Docker file because they don't let me touch production code It's true So let me jump down here real quick So I'm going to delete this and insert London commit Perfect It's all the fun stuff we have to do and now I did not document that properly you'll get over it Push All right, so I am now pushing this come on internet work with me There we go. If I jump back over to GitLab You should see let's double check Just now so we're now kicking off the pipeline and I'm about right there just so everybody sees it's going and then I'm going to turn it over to Bill And I will come back a little bit later on and show you the stages as they run Absolutely, I can do that that better Perfect. Thank you for Being an interactive audience Thank you So thanks Sean. So as the pipeline is kind of moving along here I'm going to talk a little about what we're showing right what is a concept and it goes back to the title of this talk Which is continues verification. We'll come back to the pipeline in a few minutes, right? And we'll take a look at some of the bits But let me give you a little bit of background on it and what that means You know If we kind of think about where we've evolved from and where we are evolving to right Lots of different types of applications. The architectures have changed significantly, right? So you're no longer on the stack based environment. You're looking at lampstacks or other types of component architectures today you've got a myriad of different Languages databases different environments that you're running on to right from Amazon to on-prem to Kubernetes and serverless, right? And so the combinations are endless the ability to kind of manage that and Actually work through it is mind-boggling right in actually getting control of it But if we think about how to get control of it, right? The application is first and foremost the key or actually as we think about it the unit of measure now because those environments are varied And in order to kind of get that control, right? The CI CD pipeline is as I as we think about it is the vehicle right for getting that control There's a lot of the processes and the components that you are going to implement are going to be in and out of that pipeline, right? So, you know, we talk about two parts of it, right, which is a CI and then the CD components and at the end of the day You're gonna have a significant portion of the CI that'll go and cover things like sas-dast and we talked a little bit earlier You know about the security components But there's a lot of bits that you could do in the CD portion also And if we think about what those bits are right you have to think about how you're managing your processes today You're gonna have a set of guidelines or guardrails and components that you think about if I go and deploy an application I want to make sure that I have enough capacity in Amazon I want to ensure that I have a significant set of security Qualifications that are done before and after it goes into let's say the endpoint and a lot of these checks that we do on a regular basis are done sort of Post deployment in some cases pre right there may be sneaker net right you kind of going on checking the application and the Actual deployment architecture where it goes and double-checking those configurations Prior to it and in some cases we're gonna go post a lot of times We find issues right post because something has changed something has not been accounted for at the end of the day and You know this causes issues with respect to how we actually manage and where we spend our time Now ideally, you know if we think about this pipeline That we're managing and it's it has to be efficient and effective right from end to end a good analogy that I can draw for you is think about a car factory right and If you think about cars being manufactured today, they are done very effectively and efficiently right There's a lot of components that are reused a lot of components that are checked on a regular basis And if you if you think about that There's people that are they're checking the quality of that car is it going through and the failure rates are you know Yes, we do have recalls right, but if we only Given the number of cars that are produced the quality is pretty high for that complex of a product right and We can only aspire to have software development producing our end applications at that level right and If you think about where the efficiency comes when we think about that Pipeline right it really comes through the reuse of components if you think about We'll take forward as an example. You know the different or Toyota right? I mean a Camry, you know Couple of other cars are based off the same platform, so they're reusing those components, but also during their build processes they're reusing a lot of those bits to right from the checks to the actual parts itself and The checks are the important piece because that's what helps improve the quality right and there's a process of actually thinking about those checks And if we take the same concept on that thought process from a car manufacturing line and we apply it to Our CI CD pipeline right You know we live and breathe in this Kind of flow that's highlighted here, and that's standard where we live nowadays but if we take that analogy back to the Automotive industry and that pipeline and we add similar sort of checks Right, we certainly extend that pipeline now We have an ability to do different sort of checks on a regular basis and those checks will check for anything from you know budget performance or security and That is what we call Continuous verification It's effectively the ability to query external systems to get information about what is happening Currently and then taking that information and reformulating another sort of guardrail or Policy and then continuously working through that right on a regular basis because things are changing right If you look at our output from your or your endpoints Amazon you got features coming in on what daily basis, right? So there's it is going to be a continuous process. You can't just Set it and forget right it's a constant learning process But the fact that you can use these external actors is Important because that gives you the information to act upon Issues that could potentially crop up and so what does that mean for us, right? That means as dev ops people right get more time off you get more time to relax And your life should improve right Ideally so what we'll show today is How you can use? Specific external actors in the pipeline and in particular we'll show Ones that are highlighted here in circle and purple which are the ones at VMware offers But there's a myriad of options that you can choose from and If you look at some of the categorizations that we have here, right? It is sort of endless, but we picked a few that we thought were important obviously based on some of the products that we have Cost utilization being one of them And that we have a product called cloud health Compliance is huge right now. There's some open source tools. There's also Off-the-shelf ones like red lock or our product secure state and we'll show you a little bit of that You have image security right Claire as an example. Let's open source and and and get lab integrates with that We also have bit now me on our side And then you have access and authorization. How would I do that? We're definitely going to use API calls into Amazon You'll use Things like turbot, which is a an off-the-shelf product also and then performance detection You have way front another product of ours and so on and so forth What you pick and choose is all up to you in this pipeline, right? These are just some categories There's no necessarily sense that you have to pick everything But that's really based on your processes and what you choose as an SLA To make sure that that gets checked before something goes into staging or production, right? And so that that that list of categories could be endless what you pick and how you utilize in what combination? It's all up to you. There's no SLA right or wrong The fact is that you need to be adding this to help make it efficient, right? And that's what we we call contused verification. So So I think what we'll do now is to switch back into the scenario that Sean kicked off and we'll kind of work through that Can you hear me? Okay, perfect. There we go. Apparently me coming back on the stage was not in the plan So I do want to look at this real quick So in in the broader case of our application that we've built you see a bunch of microservices Then on the left-hand side obviously into the build stage for the sake of time I only chose to modify the cart service and have a kickoff its process It takes about nine to ten minutes depending on the scenario the back end just so you're aware as Azure AKS Obviously from a Kubernetes perspective and so let's jump into let's jump back in to get lab here And I'll show you a little bit of what is going on from this particular process It actually succeeded and it only took seven minutes. It's faster over here apparently You can tell I ran it the other day and it failed miserably Well because of me but anyway, so in this case, here's my pipeline I show all of the stages that are complete so I'm actually going to walk through a little bit of this to help us understand Really the power of get lab Along with the idea of continuous verification. So in this case, I'm obviously building the cart service Pretty simple stuff here. You can see all the output. Yes, we need to upgrade pip. I understand that And really this is meant to fail in a couple of ways But who's it? You know quick example of the build I'll jump back in to the overall pipeline. So we broke this down into stages and in some cases We are running simultaneously. So our scanning stage is I The next one we will be two things at once, but this is the container scanning stage focused on Claire and Yes, we do have some unapprovals and yes, I use the power of get lab to override My failures. This is meant to be a demo. I think everybody understands that Not a real production app, right? I have to clarify that every time I talk about it Because it might be running on something on VMware. But anyway, so in this case, here's all my CVs that have failed But this is the power of get lab obviously in integrations with Claire And you know personally for me when looking at get lab and utilizing get lab in this case I actually live the simplicity of the output really from a From a terminal perspective and obviously it's tied to my commit if I would have labeled it properly read it just says London Now let me jump into the next stage So this one's a little bit fun in this case. I am actually doing a couple of governance checks Now as Bill mentioned in this idea of continuous verification We used a couple of VMware solutions in this particular case, but you can use your own We've actually seen some very unique scenarios where a single customer may have a wavefront and Prometheus or wavefront Data dog right this the idea and really the power of get lab behind it allows you to have Really your organization's context in mind. So in this case, I'm going to do a quick budget check now In our example, we are making an API call wrapped in a Python to cloud health But it's very simple. We're looking to see if I have budget for this particular use case And and for this particular project and in some cases you may not be doing this yet But when I've started talking with customers over the past few months They said, you know, we don't really do budget checks. We don't do cost analysis from a CICD perspective You know, the line of business owner actually does care But it is a manual step and like, you know, we can actually automate this And so it's just getting it's really getting you thinking about ways to improve the overall processes And I call automate all the things Automate all of the manual things and in this case, it's a simple one about doing a simple budget check. Is it within budget? We wrapped like I said, we wrapped it in Python Made the necessary check the seconds the second check in this phase is a security check Now in this in this example, we are using the more secure state Obviously, I did the same thing as you see earlier. I'm running a VSS findings Python example, and I am really looking for is is there any violations found? So I do want to say there is a violation found in this particular example So let me jump back into secure state real quick. I'm looking at all the violations. This is a graphical representation But let me let me Remove my provider real quick Just to show you we're looking at you know, we can look at both AWS and Azure from an example perspective And look at different things like port 22 that you know is RDS accessible. Do I have encryption? Right? There's so many different things we could check for but in this example I did know it down and we're looking if port 22 is open and so this is the graphical view But for me, you know, I don't really care about this view, right? We made sure that we wrapped up the security check from a GitLab perspective in Python Rain the quick validation got some output from the From this particular case and then decided we're okay with the failures and continue on in the GitLab perspective Now, I do want to show you what we did from a cloud health point of view as well So here is the graphical representation who shows my budgeting from an Azure perspective Obviously, I have a plethora of ways to look at this I'm showing you kind of the broader view I could launch directly into AKS or the Azure Kubernetes service and show You what my expenses are really this is meant to highlight really the power and really your options So we're looking at the overall Azure expense overall in a month But you could get very granular right you could do it at a project-based level. You could do it an application But we want to put it back in your hands And really this is the you know from an API perspective We're giving you options and so however you want to run the the the cost check is really up to you And this is just meant to be a simple example, okay? So if I jump back lastly from a pipeline view, I see a couple more stages. I See my deployment stage obviously it's past You know these really this is the the simple piece right? We're just continuing the process of building out And here's all of my You know here's my create namespace GitLab username login one of the unique things that we've done our team We have a couple of Kubernetes clusters running in AKS And for each of us when we kick off this pipeline We actually have it auto creating a namespace for us And so I have my own namespace bill has his own the rest of the team And this allows us to do some fun things and get creative, right? We're just using the power of variables Within GitLab to to highlight really the simplification of our process really depending on our needs And so this is just one of the examples right there That's why you see GitLab user log and that would be me. I already had it populated So that's why it took only seven minutes to recreate the cart service But the overall process takes about 20 minutes and deploying the seven different services So lastly I'll show you one more We see the overall, you know, excuse me one more check. This is our performance check We're doing two things in this particular stage We're actually running locus from a traffic generation perspective and then we are You know running a quick test to do some you know simple, you know User performance testing right obviously you can expand this you're probably doing a lot more than we are in this pretty simple view But then we call wave front now wave front right Prometheus wave front data dog as an example We're running a very simple check here. You see we're checking the kubernetes pod container CPU usage rate Right, we're looking for it to be at a specific a level and in our case We're not really doing anything because it's not a real production app, but it's spun up locust did a couple of tests It's fine and obviously it spins back out and says hey, we're good. You're gonna go ahead and continue In and allow this particular check to run through Now isn't it you know for us and I'll do this later on I don't know why I didn't add it to the deck and we have all of our kind of test checks that we have running We can actually I'll push those out to a repair and make those available off. I'll put it out on Twitter Is it to make it available to everyone just kind of see what we're doing as a kind of a simplification of the process and Obviously, we deployed a production from there. So overall You know, it is build engine. This is really about you utilizing your solutions And tool sets right if it doesn't have an API right at write a wrapper or do something creative with it But at the end of the day our goal this really kind of as we've worked with customers Is we're saying more and more customers try to take those manual processes or enterprise IT centric processes And push them into the pipeline right in this case We're using some of our tooling some open-source tooling But it really comes back down to you and to your context in your organization as an example So with that I'm going to turn it back over to Bill and we're going to move on to the next stage Okay, thanks, John So hopefully they provide you a really good example a simple example of what continuous verification is and you know Specific checks that you can make and I don't think you always think about these sort of checks inside the CD environment But hopefully this gives you an idea to start adding some of these right Now apart from just implementing this There's something else you got to think about so let me run through the story with you guys right Think of DevOps as a border collie Okay, let's start with that concept And think about what a border collie actually goes and manages right as the devil's person it manages a couple of apps or sheep and Initially, it's kind of easy right and you're gonna be managing that pipeline and those applications are sheep in the space easy I got it not a problem Gets a little bit more Yeah, they grow. Yeah, I still have some control at this point right and this is okay, and I can still implement let's say CV Organization goes even further and oh god, we're just out of control now, right? and This is where you know implementing. Let's say CV takes on a whole different thought process It's not just about adding those checks, right? We'll talk about what that means in a minute So if we think about what we're trying to do is you know, if you think about the border collie and having to manage You know, you don't want them managing this this this sheep kind of going in all different directions, right? And having and taking control of that is pretty hard We've got significant herd now going out and actually going all over the place or running towards the lake but what you want to do is to be able to Have some control over them and how do you do that? Right? So if you look at the picture on the right, you know basically fencing them in creating some kind of control or gates and fences and gates as we call it to help control, right that those Those sheep and at the end what happens, right? You have a Border collie that is frustrated, right instead of this you're gonna get one that's very happy because hey now There's some control is not running around as much much happier. Okay, so If you think about this with respect to continuous verification, right? What you want to try to do is in the question for you guys is do you guys want to go chase the herd or? Do you actually want to go build what what I just mentioned is called fences and gates, right? And the implementation of continuous verification is not just adding those API calls that we talked about and what Sean showed It's about actually thinking about a full line of guard rails Right and those guard rails are what you have to manage to effectively make your operations more efficient, right? And those guard rails are what I will in this analogy what we call fences and gates So if you think about what we showed in that pipeline, right? We had a set of checks. Okay, you can call a policy I don't like using that term policy because it has so many different connotations. We use guard rails, right? that's why we pick fences and gates and We had a continuous security or a security check that he showed you we had a cost check that we actually implemented right and There's so many different variants of that right and we didn't want on performance, but managing those Guard rails you're going to keep that again in files I think he showed you one with cost where it was actually pulling out of a JSON file, right? And you're going to continuously iterate that but getting a good handle on what your policy is is the biggest Step it is probably the biggest hurdle right in understanding that and then having to iterate on that on a regular basis So it's not just going in okay We'll just go add these checks But you have to have an entire process put together and then iterating through your fences and gates It's probably the hardest one because it requires buy-in from You to think about it but buy-in from the actual app teams the security teams and then continuously Verifying and checking that and just iterating that on a regular basis, right? So those are the two pieces right continuous verification Includes the implementation of these guard rails So finally if we Just you know to conclude, you know, I think you know, hopefully what we've shown you today is that you know with a little bit of work a little bit of thought process and a Kind of introspection of what's happening in your processes and by adding these checks In an appropriate locations in particular read to this in the CDEAP component with GitLab as an example You can really achieve a really efficient and effective process on a regular basis and utilize information on a regular basis to continuously improve upon that process We particularly obviously showed you some of the some of the tools that we have here at VMware And hopefully, you know the combination of some of those like cloud health and secure state and wavefront in conjunction with GitLab In Bitnami will give you a really nice kind of solution You obviously can pick what you want from the outside. We hopefully this framework that we've showed you right is Making you guys think a little bit about hey, maybe I should go implement this right and kind of think about this And if that's the case, I think we've achieved at least the fall process today. So That's all we have and we'll open it up for some questions


Hey guys! Last month, I went to a convention in LA called KCON and I wanted to share my experience there with you. Actually, a group of us brain education instructors got invited to staff as vendors at KCON with EXO drop skincare, but more about that to come. First things first, what is KCON? KCON is the world's largest gathering of fans celebrating Korean culture and music. I met people who flew in for the event from all around the US as well as from other countries. KCON's event in LA is the one that I went to and it drew in a total crowd of more than 90,000 attendees over a span of one weekend. Wow! There are of course many elements of Korean culture, but the ones that KCON mainly focuses on are K-pop, K-beauty, and K-food. Many vendors actually came all the way from Korea to represent one of these categories with their products. So how did I end up here? It's because of this booth right here.  Dr. Yan is a professor at the University of Brain Education and Global Cyber University, which, if you've been following our channel, you know that Global Cyber University is the university created by the founder of Brain Education Ilchi Lee and that six out of the seven members of the insanely popular boy band BTS attended there for undergrad. Dr. Yan's skincare company was invited by the KCON committee to be a vendor at the event, which was such an exciting honor because you can't just pay to be a vendor at KCON. You have to be formally invited by the committee to attend as a vendor. Check out our booth that we had at KCON. Isn't it nice? We had a really good corner spot in the front near the entrance too with a lot of foot traffic, so quite often we had a long line of people waiting to try our products. I got to learn a little bit about the science behind EXO drop skincare while I was there. Dr. Yan and her team patented the process of extracting exosomes, which are nanoparticle byproducts of cells that contain DNA and proteins. She extracted exosomes from plants and put them into creams and soaps to improve skin quality and health. Exosomes can communicate with cells to deliver beneficial ingredients from one to another, so when you put exosomes into skincare, the benefits of the ingredients are carried easily from one cell to another without needing artificial chemicals to transfer them. EXO drop skincare contains 100% vegan plant exosomes from the Huangchil tree, known by its Latin name Dendropanix Morbiferous, which is a cousin of the more commonly known super plant, Jinseng. Dr. Yan and her team have conducted countless research about the healing benefits of Dendropanix Morbiferous and have found that the leaves and sap of the Huangchil, aka Dendropanix Morbiferous, trees contain high anti-cancer, anti-inflammatory, and antioxidant properties, which are most often absorbed by the body through ingestion, but can also have benefits when taken in through the skin. Do you have dull, tired skin? Exosomes from the Huangchil leaves contain skin-brightening properties for getting that dewy, glowy look. One of the things I noticed right away was how quickly the product seeped into the skin and made it very moist and bright. And my favorite part? This Huangchil skincare is registered with the US FDA, which means that all ingredients are natural and safe to use. If you're someone with sensitive skin in their 20s to 30s, I recommend the Dendrexo Facial Care Solution line. All the products here, the cleanser, toner, serum, and cream, are fast absorbing without irritation and moisturize, brighten, and even out skin tone. If you're someone who wants wrinkled care in their 40s and beyond, I recommend the Premium line, the oil and cream, to tighten and brighten the skin, all using the science of plant exosomes from Huangchil. I love that Exodrop is woman-owned and operated, with the spirit of bringing human beings closer to nature, and using nature as Mother Earth intended to help create healthier and happier lives. That's a philosophy that we believe in in brain education. If you're in search of a new skincare line to try, I highly recommend Exodrop Skincare. I'll leave a link in the description below on how you can get some. See you next time!


We present a novel silicon-based pneumatactor array controlled by a sequence of high-frequency air walls engineered to deliver vibrotactile feedback. The device is constructed using high-speed switching relays, solenoid walls, and silicon pneumatactors. A PWM signal controls the direction of airflow within the walls, alternating their opening and closing to inflate and deflate the pneumatactors. At high frequencies, the pneumatactor diaphragms oscillate rapidly, up to 90 Hz. The setup can be multiplexed to form arrays of pneumatactors. Each of them have differential wall thickness, resulting in unidirectional inflation and deflation. An array of pneumatactors can create interesting haptic patterns suitable for a range of applications in prosthetics, VR, and beyond.


I recognize it's Friday afternoon. You've had a whole week of listening to economics talks and I'm sure you're all thinking, wondering yourself, well, I can't wait to listen to what Dr. Patrick Newman has to say, haven't heard him speak at all this week. So I recognize this is number four, but I saved the best for last. So this is, as we're moving through history on Wednesday, I, Freedom Fest, I spoke about the Constitution. Then after I spoke about here today at 9 a.m., I spoke about the early American history. And now we'll be speaking about the progressive era of the early 20th century and the new progressive era of the early 20th century. So we're moving through history. So what is this about? I'm going to compare the progressives of the past. So of the early 20th century, the progressive era, which Murray Rothbard documented so well in his book, The Progressive Era, and their policies with those of today. So the early 20th, 21st century, right? Because we hear a lot about how the years, the year we're living in now and the next upcoming decade, the 2020s, is going to be a new progressive era, a new great leap forward of all sorts of wonderful things, wonderful policies, a whole new revolution in how the government controls our lives in the economy and all sorts of great stuff. And I want to try and show that, well, in many ways it's very similar to what the progressives of the past were trying to do, right? Because we're continually told that, okay, this is progressive, we're moving forward. In reality, as I'll try and argue, the progressive era of the past, as well as the progressive era of today is really a regressive era. Like we're going backwards. We're adopting all of the stuff, all of the bad policies that we broke away from basically all new modern forms of mercantilism, et cetera. So I could talk about all the ways in which the progressives of today are similar with the progressives of the past, but that would take a whole week, not just 45 minutes. So I only am going to concentrate on a couple of things. I want to talk about their similar ideological backgrounds and just other aspects of their backgrounds. I want to talk about how both progressives have been working to cartilize industries to benefit big business, okay? So we'll talk about that. Also want to discuss briefly the progressives environmental laws and their labor laws. And I also want to finish up by talking about how they did fund their programs and how the progressives today plan to fund their programs. And it's with taxes. This may come as a surprise and I'm sort of letting out the big secret now. Draconian taxes in particular. So who are the progressives of the past? So we think of the individuals, the men and women who were responsible for pushing for all sorts of new laws. Some of these laws I'll briefly talk about later in the presentation. Who were these individuals? Surprisingly, they came from a very tight background, similar background, as I'll show many of the progressives today come from. They were Yankees. Okay, so that doesn't mean they supported the Yankees baseball team. That came later. Yankees really refers to, they were descendants of the New England Puritans, okay? They either stayed in New England or they moved to New York, particularly Western New York, the state, and the Midwest, okay? So it's a certain type of ethnicity basically comes from New England, all right? Most progressives were Yankees, okay? They also had an evangelical zeal. So they had this urge to really remake society initially by coercively stamping out sin, particularly alcohol consumption, okay? So the progressives were pietists or as Rothbard describes, they were post-millennial pietists. So a post-millennial pietist is someone who tries to bring about the thousand year kingdom of God before Jesus can return. So in order to do that, you have to get rid of all the impurities in the world. In order to save yourself, you also have to save others, right? So this started off with, you gotta crack down on alcohol consumption, Sunday fun, immigration, you gotta make sure kids are reading the right Bible in school, et cetera. They commonly classed with liturgicals, okay? So if the pietists were Methodist and Baptist, et cetera, who wanted to use the government to run society liturgicals, Catholics, certain Lutherans, et cetera, they said, well, as long as you just stick to the teachings of the church, you can just focus on saving yourself, you'll be good, et cetera. They continually clashed with those groups, okay? They were also intellectuals, right? So they had earned their PhDs in socialist Germany, so under Bismarck's, the Bismarckian socialism, the Second Reich, okay? So that was the area where PhDs were granted. Initially, the United States didn't have PhDs until the late 19th, early 20th century. I don't find it a coincidence that PhD granting institutions comes more socialist policies. It seems to be a correlation that is not merely coincidence. So anyway, all of these pietists, they went to Germany to get their PhDs and they learned how they could regulate the economy, right? To improve it. And then they came back to the United States to set up their own PhD programs to try to increase the scope and power of government, et cetera. This is the transition from when they went from post-millennial pietists to sort of a more secular angle where they became less religious in the sense that they were less trying to focus on saving individual souls and more to improving public welfare. So this is a resurrection of the old alliance of throne and altar, right? To the alliance between the king and the church, right? The king would support the church and in return the church would basically preach the benefits of the king to the public. Saying the king is divine, you have to pay taxes to the king because he's an agent of God, et cetera. And then it became, well, you got to pay taxes because these taxes are going to improve GDP or they're going to improve public welfare, improve public health and all sorts of stuff, right? So it's just a similar, it's just another agent basically, right? This is why most intellectuals are interventionist because most intellectuals wouldn't be able to survive on the free market. Free market does not really pay for new analyses of Beowulf or all sorts of other stuff, but a public state school will. So anyway, it's a big surprise. They were also eugenicists. So they wanted to control and tinker with the labor supply to improve its quality. They basically thought humans were sort of no different than dogs and that could be selectively bred in sort of bad attributes could be very quickly ironed out. So there's a great book that came out by Thomas Leonard a couple of years ago called The Liberal Reformers and it's all about how progressives supported all of these policies, minimum wage, immigration restriction, labor laws, et cetera, because they wanted to prevent what they called race suicide. They said all of these immigrants from Eastern Europe, all of these Polish people, all of these Italians, you got people from South America, you got the Chinese, you got the Japanese, et cetera. They're all diluting the racial stock of the country away from the WASP, the white Anglo-Saxon Puritan stock. And even the women were working when they should be staying home raising children. So you read all of these progressives of the past and they're all very strong eugenicists. And in particular, they wanted to use the government to promote eugenics and get rid of the undesirables, so to speak. So the original eugenics was actually, couple of some academics in the late 19th century, they wanted to improve the quality of the labor stock. They advocated, well the government should subsidize, they should pay very intelligent people to procreate with other individuals. So basically they became these academics advocating subsidies directed towards them for them to procreate and there's a very clear special interest problem there. But anyway, then it became, it switched to a much more nefarious angle. Last but not least, they were bellicose on foreign policy. They didn't just wanna save the United States, they wanted to save the world. This is Wilsonian democracy. This is, we need to have bases in Europe. We need to expand into Asia. The progressives were ardent imperialists and they thought they were better than other countries and the United States needed to rule over them. So, all right, I've gone through a good amount of individuals, but of course you want names, right? So just a brief snapshot of who some of these individuals are, you've got Theodore Roosevelt, okay? He's the top left. He was a president in the early 1900s. He had a Harvard education. He married into the Boston Financial Oligarchy, okay? So again, some of that New York, he was from New England stock. He later became governor of New York. He was also a prohibitionist, okay? Alcohol consumption was bad when he was initially a police chief of New York City. He enforced the reigns law, which cracked down on Sunday liquor consumption and the selling of liquor, right? So progressives were very anti-fun on Sunday, right? The great progressive fear, the great pietist fear, as H. L. Menken once said, was that somewhere someone is having fun, okay? And that was the progressives were trying to stamp that out. He was also a militarist. So the rough riders in the Spanish-American War, he was an ardent imperialist.  You have Harvey Washington Wiley. He's on the top right. He was the main chemist behind the 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act, okay? Similar background as most other progressives.  Certain foods were sinful were bad. Now what's kind of odd about this is that he was ardently pro-sugar, okay? He was connected with many sugar interests, which is why he was pro-sugar. But so somehow sugar wasn't sinful or bad for you. So he would attack saccharine, but he would be pro-sugar. And he had many lines. He said, childhood without candy would be like, would be heaven without harps, okay?  Again, I kind of find this odd because he's in charge of our nation's public health. But anyway, he studied at the University of Berlin, okay? So again, you got that German background. He was an imperialist. He was pro-annexing Hawaii, Puerto Rico and the Philippines, okay? Last but not least, we've got Richard T. Eli. He was the main founder behind the intensely pietist and interventionist American Economic Association, right? This association of economists, which is still around was explicitly designed to be anti-leserfare. And many of its initial founders were directly linked with the social gospel movement of the past, okay? He was the son of an extreme pietist farmer. He got a PhD from Germany. He was a staunch eugenicist, he was pro-minimum wage. So Eli, along with many other progressive economists, said that, well, we need to raise them in a wage because this will explicitly unemployed immigrants. People who have lower marginal value products, marginal revenue products, right? So this is a blatant interventionist economist sort of the model of progressive economists, okay? And usually in history books, when these guys are discussed, a lot of the nasty details are sort of covered up. When they are, they're always sort of a, just dismissed away, right? None of these are ever big problems if they support intervention, et cetera. It's only the free market individuals of the past that all of their views are held up to extreme scrutiny. Okay, so with that being said, now we can compare them, these individuals or the general classification analysis of progressives of the past with progressives of today, right? So who are the progressives of today? The individuals in control of our lives now, right? Well, they're not necessarily Yankee, but they do live in Yankee regions, we could say. So they predominantly live in New England, right? If you think about the major, the Ivy Leagues, the center of a lot of intellectual life so we'll be talking about, that's in New England, as well as the major coastal cities. So you've got New York City for finance, Washington DC for politics, San Francisco for big tech, Los Angeles for media, et cetera, right? The rest of the country is so-called flyover country, either Chicago and maybe a city somewhere else, but everywhere else is just kind of irrelevant, right? There's also Miami too, right? You can go then there and have fun, but the rest of the country is just sort of this rural place that you can see when you're flying in a plane, okay? They are social justice warriors, as we all know. They're not religious traditionally, in fact, they're often explicitly atheist, but they are crusaders for egalitarianism and other initiatives. So they have that same desire that drive to really remake society and to stamp out sin, right? So to speak, right? By racism, sexism, et cetera, all these problems in the world, they're finding them and they're all pointing to one ultimate cause and it's the worst ism of all capitalism. So they're saying all of mankind's social ills, everything from global warming to discrimination, to viruses, to et cetera is all due to the profit making motive in private property, et cetera, right? I'm not telling you anything you don't already know. We've all seen this time and time again. They are intellectual, so they're heavily educated, usually at Ivy League universities and other prestigious universities. This includes University of Chicago, the elite California schools on the West Coast and so on. And they also want other people to be educated but not as educated as them, right? So we all go, we have to go to the schools beneath them, right? So you hear about this now or before everyone needed to graduate high school, now everybody needs to get an undergrad degree. The phrase as an educator myself, I hear about K through 20 more and more where now the further beginning of college is supposed to transition students from high school into college and now the dividing line has to be a master's degree, right? So we're moving from everyone has to have a high school degree to everyone has to have an undergrad degree to everyone has to have a master's degree. Eventually in 10 years, I'll be giving this talk and everyone will be getting a PhD, et cetera. We'll be just like the Soviet Union. Everyone's got PhDs and all sorts of things. They're social engineers. They're elitists that want to mold society. They want to shape people's ideas. They want to get rid of certain undesirable behavior, right? Toxic masculinity. So now our razors, they're gonna tell us how we should behave. Certain bad behavior needs to be canceled, et cetera, right? Everyone else can be molded but the progressives are the rulers, right? We're just the ruled, right? So there can be exceptions made for them. If you kiss up to the right people, et cetera, well, you can get away with certain bad behavior but everyone else can't, okay? And that's their main drive, you could say, along the cultural front. They're cultural imperialists. They're gonna get rid of all the other cultures except their own, all right? And the last but certainly not least, they are globalists, right? So these men and women are foreign interventionists. They want America to play a leading role in world affairs. So everything about the neoconservatism of George W. Bush and many Republicans, it's really just a variant of progressivism, right? Because these individuals are more or less just big government just like the progressives, all right? Maybe not in certain areas or they wanna have to give certain tax cuts, et cetera, but it's really just about using our military to promote the right values abroad, to rule over other countries to tell them how they should govern themselves, so on and so forth, okay? So the American empire is alive and well among progressives, right? America should play a leading role, should subsidize Europe, should play a role in Asia, et cetera, so on and so forth, okay? But what I now wanna do is analyze the particular types of policies, progressives of the past pushed for, as well as progressives of the future, right? So this is gonna be partially looking at some of the prior government laws of the past and I wanna try and spend more time on the current laws that have already been passed as well as in the future with particular emphasis on 2020 and beyond, so the COVID crisis, okay? So progressives wanted to cartilize industry. So we think about cartilizing industry, they wanted to basically create government run agencies that would enforce the pricing and production decisions of businesses. So they wanted businesses to group together, restrict supply and raise price, right? On the free market, you can't do that because of competition, so that's why any cartel that lasts to the extent it lasts at all has to be propped up with government intervention, okay? So the progressives passed a whole, tedious laundry list of various regulations. They resurrected the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890, the Elkins Anti-Rebating Act of 1903 regarding railroads, the Hepburn Act, Meat Inspection Act, Pure Food and Drug Act, Federal Reserve Act, Federal Trade Commission, et cetera, okay? So all of these laws restricted price and product competition, okay? So just go through a brief example, we've got rebating. Rebating was a way businesses competed with one another by offering discounts to their customers that bought more. This is no different than the fact that you go to a grocery store, you have to buy a loaf of bread, it costs X amount of dollars. If a restaurant is buying bread from a wholesale or grocery store, they're going to get it at a cheaper amount. Why? Because they're buying more, okay? This is basic economics, this is a way businesses compete, but businesses got tired of doing this, okay? So they got the government to outlaw these rebates, okay, that railroads were granted to shippers and so on, okay? They also got rid of product competition by cracking down on so-called adulteration, which is when you would change the composition of food. So you might add additional meat into some sort of sausage to improve its flavor or some grain or ice or whatever. And they would say, well, this is an impurity. Again, you got to think about like, what would Harvey Washington Wiley say, right? And this is bad, we need to get rid of this, et cetera. This is just a form of competition. And big businesses supported these laws because they weakened free market forces, the internal, the constant competitive pressures inherent in the business world and because it would sort of stop more hostile regulation from socialists, right? So they're trying to block out capitalism and communism for that middle of the road way, so to speak, okay? In these laws, of course, they raise compliance costs on newer and smaller businesses and this promoted big business at the expense of small business. Now, when you read about this in your traditional American history course, you're not gonna hear that at all. You're gonna hear the opposite. Oh, these are against big businesses, fought these, et cetera, et cetera, but instead our wise politicians switched to laws that would improve the public welfare, okay? So progressives cartilizing industry now, I know this has been discussed. We've got big tech, so the large companies, Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, et cetera, they all support increased regulation, right? Over their companies as well as other companies, social media companies, et cetera. They wanna stop the passage of harmful legislation and they also wanna hurt smaller competitors, right? So newer social media sites such as Odyssey, Rumbler, Rumble, Parler, et cetera. This is a great screenshot of an article that came about a year ago in the Wall Street Journal. It says, tech giants, new appeal to governments, please regulate us, okay? And at the bottom there's a quote, there's no question in my mind that artificial intelligence needs to be regulated. Alphabet, which is in charge of Google, CEO Sundar Pichai said in early January, the question is how best to approach this, right? And how best to approach it is the way the large companies wanna approach it. I mean, that's fairly obvious. Of course, he's not gonna say that. He's gonna speak in a much more grandiose language. So how exactly are these laws going to hurt smaller competitors? Well, I think it's very revealing when you have Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg saying, quote, we don't want private companies making so many decisions about how to balance social equities without a more democratic process. Doesn't that just sound great?  He's looking out for you and me, particularly after 2016. So he's saying, what is fair and democratic? Or when you really think about it, he's saying, well, what the government in the business is lobbying it decides, okay? So the large companies are going to be doing everything fair and democratic, but it's the other companies that are not going to be doing things fair and democratic. Just like the large companies of the past, well, they didn't adulterate their products, right? It's just the small companies. They're the ones doing everything bad, okay? Well, it's very clear that the government would play winners and losers in the expensive artificial intelligence in the platform requirements would impose compliance costs that would hurt the smaller social media companies, okay? So that's why they really want this stuff to consolidate their monopoly positions, positions they've gotten through government intervention and lucrative government subsidies such as from the military, et cetera. I also find it important to note that in the current administration, there's certainly a friendly forum, all right? Kamala Harris, current vice president has many close ties to big tech, okay? Big tech has funded her previous elections in California. A former senior counsel is an Amazon lobbyist, okay? So again, one of the major e-commerce giants. Her first campaign manager now works for Google. Her brother-in-law is a chief legal officer for Uber, et cetera. Okay, so these companies have invested well in her. So if she's in a position where she can exercise influence on this in this regard, she's gonna push for policies that will block out more hostile legislation for more hardcore socialists and really hurt big techs competitors, okay?  It's just like the progressives of the past, okay? So progressives then as well as progressives now want to cartelize industry. They also support these costly environmental laws, okay? So these laws of the past progressives, they channel taxpayer subsidies into the research and development of irrigation while restricting use of timber. So they didn't complain about global warming 100 years ago but they said, well, we're using too many of our resources too fast. We need to stop this and we need to promote more eco-friendly lines of production, right? Irrigation, which supposedly is. Now this encouraged all these subsidies, encouraged the uneconomic development of irrigation and settlement out in the West, right? So that's why sometimes a lot of times you just see these towns out like the middle of nowhere and you're like, how did this get there? And you go like, well, that was federal subsidies for irrigation or some other law. The restriction of the use of timber, so making all of these national parks and blocking off lumber companies from chopping down trees in certain areas, et cetera. This benefited land speculators and railroads. Why? Because then they could sell their trees at higher prices. It's no coincidence that the major financial backers behind all of these timber laws and regulations were the railroads, okay? Because they knew that their property wouldn't be effective. It would just be other property outside of their control. And the progressives were able to realize this through various laws and regulatory agencies, the Bureau of Forestry, the Reclamation Act, the Public Lands and Inlands Waterlands, the Waterways Commission, excuse me, of the early 1900s, okay? So all of these environmental laws were pushed by the progressives. This is all under the mantra of conservation, et cetera. Well, as we know, progressives today are strong environmentalists. You've got the Green New Deal, which is gargantuan program estimated by some that cost over 10 years, 93 trillion dollars, okay? That's a lot. You know, again, I cannot stress how much that is and how much that would hurt the economy. And this is in real terms, so it's not in nominal terms after inflation or whatever. And this would restrict the use of fossil fuels and subsidize eco-friendly sources. AOC, the famous congressman from New York City, is prominent behind these saying, well, we've got to save the planet in order to do so, we have to push for all of these laws, getting rid of fossil fuels and getting rid of our ability to eat cows and all sorts of other stuff. Now, we're not there yet, right? Many progressives they've been pushing for these laws and in the current regime, you're instead only getting a more moderate approach, right? And you get progressives, they're sometimes upset about this, they're saying, oh, well, this isn't enough, but this is just classic strategy, right? Because you get the opening wedge, right? You get your foot in the door, so to speak, by pushing for a moderate environmental program, because then a couple of years down the line, you'll be able to get what you want, okay? So you sometimes will advance radical legislation by just continually pushing for more, more and more moderate. It's not like once you pass this, you say, all right, well, we get this infrastructure bill passed and this environmental law passed, that will satisfy them, like now we'll be good. It's just gonna be the next congressional cycle, so to speak. Biden's proposed infrastructure spending bill, which is as of April, about two and a half trillion dollars, certainly contains enough of this opening wedge. Half of the proposal is really just a plan to reduce CO2 emissions through energy efficient homes, public housing, carbon free energy grid, et cetera, right? All under the guise, well, we got to do all this stuff, particularly the United States, we have to cut down on all of our emissions. And it's interesting to note, just like big business was behind environmental laws of the past, big business is certainly behind the environmental laws of the present. Hedge funds and tech companies are very big green energy investors, okay? So they're saying, yeah, well, we support all of this because if you wanna have solar panels on every house, well, there's gonna be companies making these solar panels, et cetera, and those are gonna be the companies we will invest in. Okay, of course, that's not really discussed so much. So if businesses are doing that, that's just their altruism, right? They're just generous, unlike all of us greedy individuals. You've got expensive labor laws, all right? So progressives of the past pushed for very expensive labor laws, such as compulsory workman's compensation laws, right? These provided for a system of disability insurance, which we'll talk about in the Federal Employees Compensation Act of 1916, okay? So the progressives wanted to, they said, well, the labor markets are imperfect. We have to push for all sorts of new policies that are going to revolutionize how bosses deal with their workers, how the employer deals with the employees, et cetera. So these workman compensation laws of a worker got injured on the job, well, there would be a mandatory insurance fund that would basically pay out for their injury, okay? Bear in mind, before these laws, injuries and accidents were going down as a result, not of progressive legislation, but because of greater technology, more savings that was leading to safer mines, safer factories, et cetera, right? That downward trend never gets discussed. You would think there was just as many kids working in sweatshops in 1909 as there were in 1809, okay? And these laws were promoted by big business. Why? Because they already had their own compensation programs and these laws forced businesses, as well as taxpayers to cough up funds for worker welfare and disability insurance. And this raised compliance costs on small businesses. They are now forced to keep track of these programs. They had to hire accountants and other sorts of individuals, as well as just the whole apparatus of keeping them up and running, all right? And these laws were sort of the opening wedge to a much more nefarious labor law in my view, which is the Social Security Act of 1935, right? Which is the program libertarians know and love because it's never gone in solvent and will always continue to earn enough money. I mean, completely sarcastic here. It's continually headed towards bankruptcy and it's been near and solvent before. This law required companies to basically set up retirement programs for workers, businesses, and the workers would have to pay a payroll tax, okay? Payroll tax that would supposedly never have to be raised in the future, et cetera. And the government would have surpluses after surpluses for the future. No surprise that big business supported this program because it would raise compliance costs on smaller businesses, whereas smaller businesses viciously fought the adoption of Social Security, particularly under the National Association of Manufacturers, okay? So again, these are some of the revolutionary labor laws of the past, right? Well, what are some of the revolutionary labor laws of the future, okay? Well, we hear about this a lot continually. The specter of technological unemployment, which bear in mind has always been a problem. People were saying in the 1950s and 60s, machines were gonna take over. People were saying in the 1980s, computers were going to take over. Now people are saying artificial intelligence is going to take over. Everyone, of course, ignores the fact that well, declining work was actually a sign of progress, right? Machinery automation increases real income, this lowers prices of goods and it creates new jobs, right? Your parents or my parents, when they were growing up in kindergarten in the 1960s, the education system prepared them for jobs that were not gonna be around when they were working in the 1990s and 2000s, just like today, right? It's the same thing, but people always say this time is different, blah, blah, blah, blah, right? So now we hear well in the face of this massive burst of unemployment that's coming, we need to have universal basic income of say $12,000 a year. So that's about $1,000 a month. Politician Andrew Yang from New York is a very ardent proponent of this, saying that well, people, everyone should be entitled to $12,000 so they can not work and they can pursue their hobbies and everything and we live in a post-scarcity world, so this is gonna be great. Well, we're not there yet, but we're certainly making progress to it, unfortunately, we know that during COVID, there was all sorts of stimulus checks and very generous unemployment benefits provided. So last year in March of 2020, there was the CARES Act, it was about a $2 trillion stimulus package, which included $1,200 stimulus checks for individuals in certain income brackets, as well as $600 in extra unemployment benefits for a certain period of time. Then at the end of the Trump administration in December, 2020, you have the Consolidated Appropriations Act, another $600 check, $300 unemployment benefits, and last, well, not really last, probably not last, and certainly not least, you have the American Rescue Plan Act of March, 2021, which is $1,400 stimulus checks for certain individuals in $300 unemployment benefits. So if you've received this money, this is about, again, it's several thousand dollars that the government has just provided to you and that's excluding whether or not you're collecting unemployment benefits, okay? So this is kind of the beginning of the stimulus checks because now the public is going to expect some form of stimulus each year. So they're like, where's my stimulus check? Now, where are my Biden bucks, so to speak, okay? And then this is gonna be, okay, what's gonna happen? And similar to Social Security of the past where politicians would vote on granting Social Security payments right before an election, you're gonna probably see, again, additional pressure for stimulus checks before an election to benefit incumbents in power. The unemployment benefits, if you're paying people not to work, they're not going to work, right? Just like if you tax something, you're going to get less of it. If you incentivize something, you're going to get more of it. This is basic economic logic, which is probably why it's so hard for various people to understand, okay? And then if you're paying people not to work, they're not going to work and then the rest of us are going to have to wait a long time to order food at a restaurant or get something done at a basic service industry. This is not criticizing the individuals doing this, they're just following the money, so to speak. It's criticizing the politicians. This is a great little chart showing the spike in the number of people on various forms of unemployment benefits and it's a surprise to various individuals that the job market, the labor market has recovered more sluggishly. People are not taking as many jobs as we thought they're looking for higher benefits. The decline in people on these programs is decreasing, but again, it's at a relatively slower pace than many envisioned, okay? And this is the consequences of what would happen if we actually adopted a full on universal basic income, right? Many businesses would be forced to go bankrupt because they could not compete, right? Large businesses could get away with paying their workers more, but many small businesses could not. They would be forced to pay for expensive automation or pay more for workers, et cetera, and this is gonna result in higher prices in reduced production for all of us, okay? The market can bring us towards nirvana, so to speak, we'll never get there, but if we try and speed it up through government intervention, we're not going to get closer, we're just gonna go backwards, okay? So this to me is sometimes the most astounding thing is that we see it all the time when we go order stuff, et cetera, and some people are like, no, it's not due to the unemployment benefits. I think now it's sort of being grudgingly admitted. It's like, yeah, maybe paying people not to work, yeah, that could possibly, partially maybe, cause people not to take jobs, and you're like, all right, that's progress. We're getting there, at least in terms of greater economic knowledge, but I'm not sure at what pace, okay? Last but not least, we've got draconian taxes, so this is what every progressive loves, right? The raised taxes on other people. In the past, you had the corporate income tax of 1909, which was legally considered an excise tax, right? So it was like, well, corporations, on all income over a certain amount, just for the privilege of operating a corporation, you have to pay a tax. This was initially 1%, right? On all business income over $5,000. Back then, $5,000 was actually a pretty decent amount, right? So it was actually on the, just on the unrelatively wealthy corporations, and it's a small amount, 1%, okay? Then you had the 16th Amendment of 1913 that's legalized the income tax, right? Before, an income tax was unconstitutional. It was made constitutional, and the highest bracket was 7%, okay? Again, on the top, so that's not a whole lot. And this is what usually happens when taxes are advocated.  Trust me, right? That's what usually happens, but of course, give it a couple of years. If not a decade, the rates are going to go up, right? To pay for World War I, taxes rose, including on the less rich, the middle class were paying income taxes in World War I. By the late 1920s, the corporate income tax was 11% and the highest bracket for the personal income tax was 25%, okay? So they were higher during the war, but then they were cut in the 1920s, but they were never cut back down to their original level, okay? So what's the lesson here? The lesson is the severity and scope of taxes always goes up, right? Because after this, in the Great Depression, taxes rose on the middle class, including the payroll tax I mentioned before and in World War II, et cetera, right? So initially, it's always advocated saying, oh, the rich are only going to pay this tax, but then what happens, give it enough time, the middle class, the less rich, even the poor, et cetera, will pay a tax, okay? Well, we can see this now with the new taxes progressives are advocating, right? We can start off with a wealth tax, right? So progressives advocate wealth taxes on the rich. Most prominently, you've got Senator Elizabeth Warren who says, well, we need a 2% wealth tax on a net worth of greater than 50 million, 3% tax on net worth greater than 1 billion, okay? So this is on individuals who are making a lot of money, such as me, this is incredible, I'm just joking, I don't make anywhere near 50 million, it's more like 40 million, but anyway, so I'm safe for now. And they say, well, Warren's even championing, well, you got to impose an exit tax so on rich people who leave the country and they move their wealth out, the government's going to hit them on their way out and they're going to collect like a 40%. Something ridiculous like that. So it's a very draconian tax. These taxes are not going to remain only on the rich, they're going to spread given enough years on less rich people and on the middle class because in order to fund all of these expensive programs, the middle class has to pay. The middle class finances social security, it's not on the Uber rich. Again, most people, most progressives just say, well, the rich can pay for everything. We divide the amount of money Jeff Bezos has and we take the current price of a car, everyone could get a new car, et cetera, and the math, that's just completely wrong, et cetera, but that hasn't stopped anyone from changing their math. Interestingly enough, this is one of the most fascinating proposals, this is more recent, is Biden and the Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen, they want to raise the corporate income tax to 28%. All right, so President Trump cut it from about 35% to 21%. Biden wants to raise it up back to 28%. Our corporate income tax used to be very high relative to other nations, including for things like deductions, exemptions, et cetera, which made our businesses less competitive. So what's fascinating is that Biden and his Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen is a former chair of the Federal Reserve, they recognize this, they say, well, if we want to pay for our infrastructure programs and all sorts of other stuff, we're going to have to raise taxes, but this will make US businesses less competitive. Oh, I know the solution. Why don't we get the rest of the world to raise their corporate income tax? Just like any sort of cartilizing progressive, right? You recognize, well, you've got to get everyone involved to prevent the external competition. So Biden and Yellen are pushing for the rest of the world to adopt a 21% minimum corporate income tax. And they would enforce this by basically companies that aren't complying, they would then, for countries that aren't complying, excuse me, they would get rid of various exemptions, et cetera, aka they would raise taxes on their country, on their companies operating the United States. So if some Eastern European country refuses to comply, well, that country's companies are going to face increased pressure in the United States. And this is very clearly to reduce competitive disadvantages from higher US corporate income tax. This is extremely blatant, this is the anti-competitive, just animus of most progressives, all right? You're trying to weaken your competition, okay? All right, so we're conclusion, we're out here. I know, it's been a long day. Today's progressives are very similar to yesteryear's progressives. The policies of the past created a regressive era, the policies proposed now would do the same. You haven't done so, you should buy Murray Rothbard's Progressive Era, which was edited by me. And so you should buy it, not just for that, but because it's a great book. And you should also read my Mises Institute articles, Are We on the Cusp of a New Progressive Era? And is Kamala Harris the 21st Century Woodrow Wilson? With that, I think I will conclude. So thank you so much, I hope you enjoy my presentation.