Podcast appearances and mentions of amy they

To skip the intro, tap 3:25   People pleasing can be harmful for those in recovery, as it often stems from a deep-seated need for approval and acceptance. This behavior can lead individuals to prioritize others' needs and expectations over their own, jeopardizing their sobriety and personal well-being. In recovery, establishing healthy boundaries is important for maintaining sobriety, yet people pleasers may struggle to assert these boundaries, fearing rejection or conflict. The constant pressure to please others can create significant stress and anxiety, which are detrimental to emotional stability. Tonight, we talk about People Pleasing. This week,  Chris, Chance, Falisha, Nicole, Breanne, Joel, Martin, Ginger, Becky, Kim, Shelly, Jim, Shez, Vicki, Rebekah, Jinifer, Dana, Bryan, Tonja, Jean, Tony, Sam, Amy They made their Sustaining Partner Donations. For more information, tap http://recoveredcast.com/partner   This episode is sponsored by  Michael, Teresa, Audry, Kurt, Gigi, Chris, Helen, McQ, Maryann, Kim They used the donation button found on our website at Episode Sponsor   Visit our website http://recoveredcast.com

To skip the intro, tap 3:25   Imposter syndrome, the persistent feeling of being a fraud or undeserving of success, can plague individuals as they strive to rebuild their lives. This mindset can undermine self-esteem and make it difficult to fully embrace the progress made. It is recommended to focus on self-acceptance and recognize that recovery is a journey, not a destination. Engaging in regular self-reflection, celebrating small victories, and acknowledging personal growth can help individuals see their worth and the genuine progress they have made. Tonight, we talk about The Imposter Syndrome.   This week,  Chris, Chance, Falisha, Nicole, Breanne, Joel, Martin, Ginger, Becky, Kim, Shelly, Jim, Shez, Vicki, Rebekah, Jinifer, Dana, Bryan, Tonja, Jean, Tony, Sam, Amy They made their Sustaining Partner Donations. For more information, tap http://recoveredcast.com/partner   This episode is sponsored by  Michael, Teresa, Audry, Kurt, Gigi, Chris, Helen, McQ, Maryann, Kim They used the donation button found on our website at Episode Sponsor   Visit our website http://recoveredcast.com

Experiencing a friend's relapse is profoundly challenging and can evoke a complex mix of emotions, including frustration, sadness, and fear. This situation can create an emotional tug-of-war, where you feel torn between your concern for their well-being and the need to protect your own sobriety. The stress and anxiety from worrying about your friend can add difficulty to your own program, making it essential to find effective coping strategies. Tonight, we talk about Coping with Someone Else's Substance Use.   This week,  Chris, Chance, Falisha, Nicole, Breanne, Joel, Martin, Ginger, Becky, Kim, Shelly, Jim, Shez, Vicki, Rebekah, Jinifer, Dana, Bryan, Tonja, Jean, Tony, Sam, Amy They made their Sustaining Partner Donations. For more information, tap http://recoveredcast.com/partner   This episode is sponsored by  Michael, Teresa, Audry, Kurt, Gigi, Chris, Helen, McQ, Maryann, Kim They used the donation button found on our website at Episode Sponsor   Visit our website http://recoveredcast.com  

Rounding Up Season 2 | Episode 4 – Joy in the Elementary Math Classroom Guest: Amy Parks, Ph.D. Mike Wallus: Teaching is a complex and challenging job. It's also one where educators experience moments of deep joy and satisfaction. What might it look like to build a culture of joy in an elementary mathematics classroom? Michigan State professor Amy Parks has some ideas. Today on the podcast, we explore ways educators can construct joyful experiences for their youngest mathematics learners.  Mike: Well, welcome to the podcast, Amy. I'm so excited to be talking with you about joy in the elementary mathematics classroom. Amy Parks: I'm so happy to be here. Mike: So, your article in MTLT was titled, “Creating Joy in PK–Grade 2 Mathematics Classrooms.” And early on you draw a distinction between math classrooms where students are experiencing joy and those that are fun. And you quote Desmond Tutu and the Dalai Lama, who say, “Being joyful is not just about having more fun, we're talking about a more empathic, more empowered, more spiritual state of mind that's totally engaged with the world.” That really is powerful. So, I'm wondering if you could tell me about the difference between classrooms that foster joy and those that are just more fun. Amy: Yeah, I was very struck by that quote when I read it the first time in “The Book of Joy.” And I think one of the reasons that book is powerful for me is that the two people writing it didn't have these super easy lives, right? Particularly the Archbishop Desmond Tutu was imprisoned in the country that was openly hostile to him, and yet he was still really committed to approaching his work and the world with joy. And so, I often think if he could do that, then surely the rest of us can get up and do that. And it also tied into something I often see in elementary classrooms, which is this focus on activities that are fun, like sugary cereal, right? They're immediately attractive, but they don't stick with us and maybe they're not really good for us. I often think the prototypical example is, like, analyses of packets of M&Ms. When I think about the intellectual energy that has gone into counting and sorting and defining colors of M&Ms, it makes me a little sad, given all the big questions that are out there that even really young kids can engage with. And so, yes, I want children to be playful and to laugh and to engage with materials they enjoy. But also, I think there is this quieter kind of joy that comes from making mathematical connections and understanding the world in new ways and grasping the thinking and ideas of others. And so, when I'm pointing toward joy, that's part of what I'm trying to point toward. Mike: So, I want to dig into this a little bit more because one of your first recommendations for sparking joy is this idea that we need to make some room for play. And my guess is that that raises many questions for elementary educators, like “What do you mean by play?” and “What role does the teacher play in play?” Can you talk a little bit about this recommendation, Amy? Amy: Yeah. So, when I have more time than that very short article to talk about, one of the things that I like to bring out to teachers is that we can think of play in sort of three broad buckets. So, one is “free play,” and this is an area where the teacher may not have a lot of roles except to sort of define health and safety limits. So certainly, recess is a place of free play. But there are places at recess where children are encountering mathematical ideas, right? There are walking in straight lines and they're balancing on things and they're seeing whether they all have the same amount of materials and toys. So, those are all mathematical contexts that we can, as teachers later bring in and highlight in places where they can engage. But they're not places where teachers are setting learning goals and reinforcing things. And particularly in the lower grades, we might see also free play opportunities in the classroom. Amy: You know, many kindergarten classrooms have opportunities for free play during the school day. So, while kids are playing in the kitchen for example, or doing puzzles, they may be again encountering mathematical ideas and teachers certainly can capitalize on that. But they're not directing or shaping the play. And then there are these two other categories where the teacher's role is maybe more present. So, one I would call “guided play.” And this is a case where the teacher and the children are really handing responsibility back and forth. So, the teacher might set up a relatively open-ended task like pattern block puzzles or a commercial game that gets at counting or something like that. And so, the teacher has an intended mathematical goal. She has set some limits to keep children focused on that in some way. But the task is in the hands of the kids. They're playing together, they're negotiating roles, they have that more central responsibility. And the learning goals may be a little bit broader and more open because of that. Because since you're not centrally involved, you can't be so specific. Amy: And then the last kind of play I talk with teachers about are “playful lessons.” Children might not have as much choice in the activity that they do. They might not be able to stop and start it or move in certain ways, but teachers are intentionally bringing aspects of play into the mathematics lesson. And that could be by using engaging materials. It could be by creating places for creativity. It could be by creating spaces for social collaboration. It could be just by inviting children to use their bodies in ways that are comfortable to them instead of being really constrained. But the mathematical task might be much more specific and “Build this cube and identify the vertices on it.” So, the task is constrained, but because they're using materials, because they can do it in different ways, there's this playful aspect to it. So, I like to encourage teachers to sort of think those three buckets of play and where kids are getting access to them during the day. Mike: Yeah, I think that's really helpful. Because I did teach kindergarten for a long time, and so I think my definition of play was really the first one that you were talking about, which is free play. But hearing you talk about the other two definitions actually helps open space up for me. I feel like with that broader definition, it helps me consider the choices that I've got in front of me. Amy: Yeah, and if you talk [to]—or read even—mathematicians, they will often talk about playing with ideas. So, there is a part of play that is inherently mathematical, the part that is about experimenting and investigating and trying things out and recognizing that you might be wrong and getting this engagement from others. So, I think sometimes even mathematics lessons that look relatively traditional can also have this playful spirit if we bring that to it. Mike: I would love to talk to you a little bit about the way that choice can be a key component in sparking joy. So, what are some of the options that teachers have at their disposal to offer choice to learners in their classrooms? Amy: Yeah, I think that this is something that's often overlooked. And I think that for kids in school right now, they often have so few choices. Their experiences are often so constrained by adults. And simply by allowing children to choose when they can, we can make experiences more joyful for them. So, one easy thing is who or whether children will work with other people. So yes, there are all kinds of benefits to group tasks and social interactions, but also lots of children are introverts. And being in a small room for six hours a day with 25 other people can be exhausting. And so, simply giving the children the choice to say, “I'm going to do this one on my own,” can be a huge relief to some children. Other children, like, need to talk—just like other adults—talk to others to know what they're thinking. And so, they need these groups. Amy: And then I think also teachers can get really involved in choosing the magic right group, but often there is no magic right group as we know because we're constantly rejuggling these groups because they didn't work in the magic way we thought. And so just letting kids pick their groups, because then they have responsibility for that interaction. And it's not that they never have difficult social interactions, but they've chosen to be with this person and they have to work through it. So that's one. The other thing is letting children choose physically where they work. Some children lie on the floor while they work, or some children stand up at their seat. Allowing some choice in freedom of movement doesn't mean allowing total chaos. And I think even pretty young children can be taught that they can move within limits in the classroom. And I think if children get to stop expending so much energy trying to control their bodies in the ways adults find helpful, they can engage more fully in the academics of the day. Amy: And then, like, choices of materials. So, we can make different things available to kids as they engage with mathematics, choices of problems. They may choose to do some and not others. Lower grades like using centers. If we have multiple centers that all get at the same mathematical idea, maybe it doesn't actually matter whether all kids get to all of them, right? As long as they're engaging with making units of 10, however they're doing that, can work for us. So, I think in general, the more often we can give children choices about anything, the better off all of us are. Mike: I think that last bit is really interesting. I just want to pause for a second on it. Because what you've got me thinking is, if I have options available and they're all really addressing some of the same mathematical goals or a range of goals that I have in my class, this idea that I can release control and invite kids to make choices, that seems like a really practical first step that a teacher could take to think about, “What are the options? What are the goals that they meet?” And then, “To what degree can I offer those as choices?” Amy: Yeah, and in a really basic way, right? Sometimes we might have a game that works with kids on making tens, and then other times we might have a project or even a worksheet. And different kids may be drawn to those different things. There are some kids for whom games might be really exciting, but there are some kids for whom games might be really stressful, and they would just rather do something else. And that's fine because the point isn't actually playing the game, right? Mike: I think that's really interesting. I could get so caught up as a teacher sometimes trying to get the mechanics of getting kids out to places and getting kids started and making sure that kids were doing the thing that I would sometimes lose track of, “My point in doing this is to have kids think about structuring 10 or making sense of fractions.” That's a lovely reminder. I really appreciate that. I think that this is a really nice turning point because this question about choice actually plays into one of the other recommendations you had regarding time on task. So, I would love to have you unpack your thinking on this topic, Amy. Amy: Yeah. Well, you talked about being autobiographical, and this is definitely autobiographical for me because I am very on task. I like to get things done. I like to check things off my list. And that was definitely a force for me when I was teaching. And I think it was something that, one, caused anxiety for me and my kids, and two, limited our opportunities to engage in more playful ways and more joyful ways to follow curiosities because I was so worried about that. And honestly, when it came home to me was when I started teaching university students because I think it is a little harder to clap your hands at 19-year-olds and tell them to get back to work than to do it with 7-year-olds. And what I realized was if I step back and I let my students talk about “The Bachelor” for a minute, they would have the conversation and then they would move on to the mathematical task, and I actually didn't need to intervene. And me intervening would've shifted the emotional tone of the class in a way that would not have been productive for learning, right? Amy: They would've become resentful or maybe felt self-conscious. And now I have this thing in the way as opposed to just letting them have that break. And I think if we pay attention as adults to how we are in staff meetings or how we are in professional development, we recognize we have a lot of informal conversations around the work we do, and that those informal conversations are not distractions. They're actually, like, building the relationships that let us do the work. And it is similarly true for children. And then I think another thing to remember about particularly young children is language learning, social relationships, all of those are things they actually need to develop. That's part of our work as teachers is to help them grow in those things. And so, giving them the opportunity to build those relationships is, in fact, part of our work. Mike: I think that's really interesting because I found myself, as you were talking, thinking through my own day, when I log into Zoom to talk to someone across the country. We don't immediately start just working through our agenda. We exchange pleasantries, we tell a joke or two, we talk about what's going on in our world, and we can have an incredibly productive chunk of time. But there are these pieces of social reality that kind of bind us together as people, right? When I'm talking to my friend Nataki in North Carolina, I'm asking her about her son. That might take two minutes out of 55. We've still done a tremendous amount of work and thought deeply about the kind of professional learning we want to provide to teachers. But there's the reality that if we didn't do that, how are we connected? If we're partnering to do this work, there's something about being connected to the other person that we can't schedule out of the experience of working together. Does that make sense? Amy: Yeah, a hundred percent. And it's true in classroom settings, too. I was thinking the “Batman” movie, the Ben Affleck one was filmed in Detroit, and they happened to be filming right outside the building where I was teaching. And at some point, one of my adult students looked out the window and was, like, there's Ben Affleck. And of course, all my students got up and went to the window. I could have as the teacher been, like, “OK, sit down. We're doing whatever we're doing.” But their minds were all going to be on Ben Affleck out the window. And so instead, we stopped and we watched the movie for a little bit, and that became an experience we came back to as a class over and over in the semester. “Remember when that happened?” And so, yeah, that pressure to be productive I think often interferes with the relationship building that does support good work among adult colleagues and among kids in classrooms. And I would also connect it to the opening conversation on play. Mike: So, before we close the interview, I'm wondering if you have any recommendations for someone who wants to continue learning about how they could design opportunities for joy in their classrooms. Are there any resources that you would point a listener to? Amy: I mean, I have a book on play in early mathematics, and that would certainly be a place that someone could start. But, you know, the other thing that I might do is just look at some of the great materials that are out there, both like physical things like Legos and magnet tiles, which often if you don't have at your school, you can get through thrift stores and things. And just bringing them into classrooms and seeing what kids do with them. Oh, the other thing that I always recommend is looking at some of the resources on “soft starts.” And if you just Google this, you'll see videos and articles. And this is often a really, like, nonthreatening way for teachers who are interested in this but haven't done a lot of play in their classrooms, to begin.  Amy: And the idea is instead of immediately starting with a worksheet or whatever, that you bring in some kind of toy or tool, and maybe children can make some choices about whether they're going to paint or they're going to work on a puzzle, and you just take 15 minutes and that's how you begin the day. And people who have done this, so many people have said it's just been such a lovely culture shift in their classroom, and it also means that children are coming in a little late. It's fine. They can just come in and join, and then everyone's ready to go 15 minutes later, and you really haven't given up that much of your day. So, I think that can be a really, a really smooth entry into this if you're interested. Mike: Well, I want to thank you so much for joining us, Amy. It really has been a pleasure talking with you. Amy: Oh, you, too. It was so fun. Mike: This podcast is brought to you by The Math Learning Center and the Maier Math Foundation, dedicated to inspiring and enabling individuals to discover and develop their mathematical confidence and ability. © 2023 The Math Learning Center | www.mathlearningcenter.org

In this episode of The Antidote, Amy and Grace connect with standup comedian, writer and actor Jordan Carlos in a live conversation from this year's New York Comedy Festival. Jordan joins Amy and Grace in a new segment called The Wellness Shot, where we give advice to our audience and listeners to help solve their real-life issues. Amy and Grace also share their bummer news of the week –  Odell Beckham Jr. was recently removed from an American Airlines flight, and an antibiotic shortage. They also share their antidotes: Broadway and a “hot girl walk.”  Do you have a favorite antidote, or need an antidote suggestion? A question for Grace and Amy, or something you loved that Amy, Grace or one of their guests has said on the podcast? Share a message with The Antidote team: https://mpr.tfaforms.net/111 or tag us on Instagram with the hashtag #ThatsMyAntidote, or leave us a message on our hotline at 833-684-3683. FULL TRANSCRIPT Amy The world is a dumpster fire. I'm Amy. Grace And I'm Grace. Amy And we want to f---ing help. Grace We're comedy writers in Los Angeles. And as a reflex to the madness on the news, we're keeping a positive but opinionated. Amy We talk about cultural moments we love. Grace Talk to people we adore.  Amy Crushes we have. Grace And self-care we stan. Amy During these trying times, we all need a show that focuses on joy. Grace This is The Antidote. Amy Pow, pow, pow. Grace Hi, everybody. Welcome, welcome, welcome. We are back. I'm a little crazy today. We finished shooting last night at 1 a.m. and here I am in the morning and I feel good. I still haven't seen my friend. Hi, amy Amy Yay hi. And also congratulations to my friend for finishing her shoot. Like, literally, I feel like you've lived in New York for nine years. Grace I know I do too. I feel like it's been 20,000 years. I was young when I left. I'm old now. Amy But at the end of it you have a beautiful, magnificent, funny and hilarious show to show the world and hopefully we will be seeing it soon. Grace Yeah, one that my wonderful friend Amy directed two episodes of. So, so, you know, stay tuned for the Amy and Grace collabo with Michelle Buteau and other wonderful people. Amy Yes, that's right. Grace Girl, girl, did you hear about this Good Morning America thing? Amy The Good Morning America scandal is all over my timeline. My thing about the Twitter feed this past week is that I had to come in contact with two people who I did not know who they were. And now I know everything about them. And I'm talking about T.J. Holmes. Yeah. And Amy Robach. Yeah. I'm like, who are y'all? Grace Yeah, I had no idea who they were either. I mean, the T.J. Holmes guy looked a little bit more familiar to me, but I was like, oh, I've maybe seen that before. But that woman, she she looks like a copy of so many other women I've seen on tv. Amy You know, so crazy to me because both of them are married in other relationships. T.J. Holmes, a man I didn't know existed, you know, posted like a tribute to his wife, man, a year ago, like less than a year ago, posted a tribute to his wife about how I tried to make her leave and she won't leave because she's got a black superwoman energy, whatever the f---. And then literally he's out here touching a white woman's ass. And I'm like, I have to say grace. So the there's this woman on Twitter. I don't know her personally, but her handle is batty, ma'am. So that's B.A. YMCA lady. And she has, like, just a little mini thread called Men Will Embarrass You. And this week's Men Men Will Embarrass You is this man, T.J. Holmes, given this tribute to his f---ing wife? And I got to say, lady, I don't know you, but it's time to leave. Grace You got to. Amy Do you need me to show up, need me- to the window? Just lift it up. Help you down. You can Rapunzel throw out your hair and I'll just drag you. Right? Like, I don't know how we. Grace No. Amy Make you leave, but you got to go, girl. Grace It is so embarrassing. And the thing is that they weren't even trying to hide it. They were not being discreet. Nice. And they know they're on TV. I don't know what they thought. That they could just blend in like that. They were just in a bar on the street, grabbing ass, walking through there, walking through the park hand-in-hand. Like at least have the respect for your spouses that have you off again, because I guess they're both separated, right? Amy I don't know if they were. I mean, that feels like new information was like something that was like we were separated. Like, it doesn't I'm like where they. Like, we'll never know. Grace But even like you still have a marital contract, at least don't like be out in the open, go in the hotel room or whatever. You know, don't be just out in the open grabbing booties and stuff, you know. Amy And also grabbing groceries. They were like doing like daily routine things. Like they're a couple when people on TV back to normal, I'm like, y'all, you have faces. People recognize you're in like a million or so homes across America. Every morning y'all are on TV. You can't just be out here acting like you're f---ing Tam and Pam. But you know Pam, like, I don't know, like in Milwaukee who nobody's paying attention to. Like you, literally. I don't know if I would call them famous, but they are you know, they're known. Grace And that's the thing. Like you get the privilege of having millions of dollars and being famous and getting free sh-- because you are on GMA. So you have to accept what comes with that privilege, which is that people know who you are and you can't cheat out in the open. Yeah, probably any Tom, Dick and Harry or whatever. You could go to one city over and you could be acting like y'all married each other. But ya'll can. Amy Also the audacity to cheat in the morning, because that's the other thing. They're Good Morning America. And then they were out in the open in the morning and I'm like, it just was me. I was like, How do we doing out in the morning doing chores? But anyway, I do think that it reminds me of a conversation we had with Jordan. We had a lot of questions about relationships, about being far our guest that's coming up this episode, Jordan Carlos, who did our live show from Brooklyn, New York, which was a part of the New York Comedy Festival on November. BR Well, we had a few questions about relationships, so stick around to hear that in a new segment we created called The Wellness Shop. And if you're in a relationship now, hug your partner, set them free. But don't be doing this sh--. Grace Don't be embarrassed and ask the men or women. Anyway, we wouldn't need the antidote if we didn't have the bummer news. Amy Starting now, top of the hour. Bummer. News of the week. Our first topic is that athlete and you know, hottie with the body. Odell Beckham Jr has been removed from an American Airlines flight recently over, quote unquote, concerns for his health while sleeping with a blanket over his face. Those who don't know Odell Beckham Jr is a very well known wide receiver in the NFL. He catches ball. He's a free agent right now. Yes. He catches balls for a living. Well done. Great for for sports. But he's like a free agent right now, like people trying to court him because, like, you know, he's good at it. Yeah, he's very good. And it's not just because of his looks. Why am I like, oh, I don't know. Well, Beckham, Junior, what a hottie. But anyway, I only know about him because a a few comedians a few years back said some weird sh-- about him. And then part B, there used to be a billboard of him in an underwear ad on La Cienega, and I'd pass it every time I was going to work, and I was like, Who's that? So I learned about sports that day. But anyway, Odell Beckham has a tradition of draping a blanket over his face during long flights so he can sleep, according to his attorney. And this time, while asleep, the flight returned to the gate and Beckham was asked to leave the flight as he had not buckled his seatbelt at the time due to being asleep. Even after offering to buckle his seatbelt, the flight attendant said it's too late now to exit or the entire aircraft would be deplaned in the airports. Report, they claim, quote, he appeared to be coming in and out of consciousness, end quote. And we're concerned he was, quote, seriously ill, end quote, leading to the plane, returning to the gate after the aircraft was deplaned. Beckham left the plane without incident because, you know, he ig but he did tweet that quote, Never in my life have I experienced what just happened to me. I've seen it all. Grace This seems weird to me. I don't know this. I don't know how this happened. Like he was sleepy and ask somebody with a very sleepy friend, Amy, and she's talking about me. She can sleep anywhere. And there have been times where I'm like, Wake up, Amy, wake up. You got to go like, Oh, and it's not like it's sometimes it just doesn't happen. Some people sleep hard and it doesn't feel like a flight attendant would have never seen that before. And then once he said he would buckle a seatbelt, like, you're going to have to deplane everybody. He was nice because I'd be like, literally, you woke me up to buckle my seatbelt and I'm doing it. So like, why can't I go see a Black man? Amy He had to be nice. Like, that's the thing that makes me upset and that's what it's like. He couldn't be like, what? For too long? It's like he's a famous black man and knows it, and he's like, I got to get off this plane. Like, you can't raise a stink. Grace Yeah, it's weird. I have this story. Something seems off. I and I feel bad because I'm sure that was so embarrassing, you know? And then it becomes a whole news story. And, yes, he should have buckled the seatbelt. Yes. But when he offers to buckle it, they should have just let the plane go without incident. Like what was getting him off the flight? Like it wasn't going to delay it more or less. Like you could have just let him stay. So. Boo American Airlines once again. Amy Oh, my God. They're the same airline that f---ed up my luggage and wouldn't replace it. So, American Airlines, you're on notice. I know that's not the only bit of bummer news this week. The other thing that I read about is that RSV, you know, that respiratory syncytial virus. I don't even know how to say that middle word. That's why we abbreviating it. RSV, a virus particularly common among children, is on the rise and may be resulting in an antibiotics shortage. So I read that amoxicillin, one of the most common antibiotics for children, is facing a shortage because despite RSV being a viral infection, amoxicillin is often prescribed as secondary protection for underlying bacterial infections that arise during having RSV. So a doctor in USA Today said quote, For example, in addition to RSV, a child may also have developed an ear infection or pneumonia which could be treated with amoxicillin. And in most people, RSV just causes mild cold like symptoms. But in children, the elderly, in immunocompromised it can be very severe. So now that we're back into a flu season, now that we're back into a COVID surge, our issues are back to being near capacity and we are having a problem with this. So for me, I'm like, the reason this is a bummer to me is like of all the COVID shortages, we had toilet paper that was out, we had restaurant menus, they digital now. We didn't have hand sanitizer. This one really matters. Like, can we figure out how to get the kids their drugs?   Grace I really hope that Congress, useless congress tries to step in and do something.   Amy I feel you because it reminds you of the baby formula shortage that we talked about a few months back on another episode where it was just kind of like, Wait, we really out here? Just be like, babies, y'all good? Like we have to. The future of the country.   Grace I like that. Some say they're more important than the rest of us. You know, first of all, we already ruined the planet for them. We've already like we don't have a good planet to give them the you know, we flooded their schools with guns, so they now have to to go to school and be like father like I make at home today. So at the very least, can we just get the baby some antibiotics, whatever they need to do? Because, you know, there's nothing fatter than like a sick baby, you know?   Amy Yeah, well, I don't know how science works, but I'm thinking about these babies.   Grace Okay, let's get into this antidote, though.   Amy So this is a segment where we tell you about the culture we consumed and things we did this week that made us feel better about the bummer news. What was your antidote this week, Grace?   Grace Broadway, baby.   Amy Oh, hello. Yes. Hello, my darlin. Hello, my baby. Hello. my honey.   Grace Child, so in my previous life, I was a theater actor. So there is just something uniquely beautiful about going to see live theater. And I just I've been in L.A. for a while, and I'm sure there's great productions in Los Angeles as well. People keep telling me, but when you've had Broadway, you know, it's really hard to even imagine going to see live theater anywhere else. So I lived in New York for a very, very long time, and I actually was supposed to go to Mexico over the Thanksgiving holiday. I don't know what I was thinking, like thinking that I, in the middle of production would go to Mexico. Wait, why? Yeah, I was going to go there for the long weekend, so I decided to cancel that trip, and instead I decided to go see two Broadway shows because I've been so busy at work that I haven't gotten a chance to see a lot of Broadway. So I saw Death of a Salesman.   Amy Oh, nice.   Grace Which is like Black Death of a Salesman. Which is like it should be black because it's such a black story. And Wendell Pierce, he was in like, oh, right above. Like, you know, there is a little bit of a little hiccup, Eddie. And it was so fun because they were smoking on stage. And then the fire alarm went off and they stopped and that it was just like, ooh, peek behind the fourth wall. And there's just like had to get off stage of the they it took about 15 minutes to resolve and then they came back wow. And they started the scene all over again like f---ing pros that they are. But yeah.   Amy They started the scene all over. That's great. And then they just weren't smoking.   Grace Yeah. Yeah. And so it was him. It was Sharon Clark who was also incredible, who played his wife. Then there's a guy named Chris Davis who played Biff and McKinley Belcher as happy. And I cannot forget Andre de Shields was in it as well, who is just a magician? Yes.   Amy And he was The Wiz in The Wiz. Holy sh--.   Grace He was the Wiz in the Wiz.    Amy Oh, I knew. I knew that face.   Grace It was incredible. And like, I wept because I thought about all the black men that were alive back then and the lack of opportunity that they had. So it really hit different when you see a black man going to like this white guy to like beg for a job and that he just couldn't make it work with his family. And I know Arthur Miller wrote it, but it was just it just really hit when you think about our ancestors and what they'd been through. Come on. And so and it was just like such a cathartic weeping. And I was just like, thank you for your sacrifice so that this generation could have what they have. So that was the Friday after Thanksgiving and then the Saturday after Thanksgiving, I saw a show called Six.   Amy Oh, my gosh. Tell me about six.   Grace So Six is about Henry the eighth's six different wives.   Amy Oh, that's cool.   Grace So it's like a concert almost. Mm hmm. So basically, the premise of the show is they're just like, who had it worse? Like a six women. So.   Amy Girl, girl, girl. You all had it pretty sh---y.   Grace Yeah, you all had a pretty sh---y cause that guy was that great. So they each get their own song, and all of them just had incredible voices, but in different ways, and they were just singing down.   Amy It's coming to L.A. just so you know. Six is coming to L.A..   Grace I mean, I would see it again. It was so fun. And then it was also short. It was like 80 minutes, no intermission.   Amy Oh, cute. I like it quick.   Grace Yeah, I like it quick. I'm a half hours high, bitch, you know what I'm saying? And they were just so good. Like, you know, you sometimes you got to go to Broadway to hear real ass voices, you know, like there are singers like Beyonce, say, Adele and like Jasmine Sullivan. You know, we have yes, we have girls that can sing them down. Yeah, but.   Amy Broadway is a different type of vocality.   Grace Yeah. Yeah. But it's genuinely great to see it and to know that it was live and they were just incredible. So that was my antidote. Broadway, baby. So what was your antidote this week, Amy?   Amy Well, you know, a few weeks back, we had a guest on a show named Ashley Blaine Feathers and Jenkins. And I literally have been thinking about the fact that she said you should go on a hot girl, walk for weeks. And I love to walk. I love to walk around my neighborhood. I love to take a stroll. I love to take an urban hike. Urban hike means you're walking through the city.   Grace Yes. She doesn't like a regular hike.   Amy And that's my sh--. I don't like a real hike. Grace knows this. I will do a hike, but I won't repeat a hike. And so this week, like, I've been traveling so much, I'm so tired, I'm still jetlagged from going to India. And so I decided that I was going to walk every day for exercise. And that fell apart real quick because I said, haha you thought and it started raining every morning and so I couldn't walk. But before the day it rains I went for a hiker walk. And the reason why this walk was a hardcore walk to me is because I made a point to walk with a smile on my face, which is really silly. But I was like, I've like really I've been so stressed. And I was like, the corners of my mouth are hurting. Like there was a day where I was like, What's wrong with the corner of my mouth? And I realized I'm actually frowning and I'm like, Oh, f--- this. This is how you get wrinkles. And B, I just think it's stress. It's just like exhaustion and stress and travel and all the things. So I went on this walk and I was like, I'm going to take this walking, I'm gonna smile. And I was listening to this woo woo book while I was walking and just smiling while I'm on my on my little stroll. And I walked all the way up to my viewpoint. There was like a beautiful view above my neighborhood where you can just see, like, west l.a. Like, spread out before your eyes. And I walked all the way up there, and there were some men up there who were, like, just, like, chillin, like, because there's also, like, a sports area. So maybe they're about to play some sports. BELL But at any rate, I stopped up there and I was like, I happen to be a hetero female who's attracted to men. So I saw these men and they were good looking and I was like, Here I am with my little smile on my face up here being a hot girl. And I was like, I didn't interact with them. I was like, they could be, you know, terrible. So I was like, I'm not going to interact with them, but I at least got to just, like, be cute and walk past them like athletic men and then continue on the walk. And I was like, this was a hot girl walk. So I started my day. That day feels so good. And I did the silliest thing. I sent like a video of one of my friends being like, I'm going to walk every day this week. I felt so good. And then the next morning it rains. And I think on video being like, I am walking today, bitch.   Grace How come you didn't send me that video? Who's this bitch? Just sell it. Send a video. That's what I'm saying. Just cause I'm gone. Just because I'm in New York City. This is the reason why I got to get back to L.A.. All my friends are forgetting me that.   Amy I'm like, I can't-   Grace My phone still works. So why.   Amy I can't bother Grace, she's on set. I can't just send her this video of me being like, I love walks. She would have been like bitch I've been up since 3 a.m.   Grace Yes, I would love to get that video. Brighten my day for you that I'd be an antidote. So that's what you did.   Amy Yes. Well, if you guys tried any of our antidotes at home, share them with us using the hashtag. That's my antidote. Or leave us a voicemail at 8336, 8436, eight three. Stay tuned. You'll hear more from our live show right after this break.   Grace Our guest today ain't new to this comedy. You know, he is a stand up comedian and actor who just finished costarring and writing on the first season of Freeform's. Everything's Trash with Phoebe Robinson. He co-hosts WNYC Adulting podcast with our friend in Queens, Michelle Buteau. He has also written for HBO Divorce, written and performed for Comedy Central's The Nightly Show with Larry Wilmore and Recipes First Wives Club. Please welcome the amazing Jordan Carlos.   Jordan Carlos Good knees, good knees. That's what it's all about. And I feel sorry for the people standing in the back.   Amy No, don't apologize.   Jordan Carlos All right. How's it going? Brooklyn. How we doing? Yeah, I'd like to. I'd like to applaud the people that came early over here. Look at this man. It's modest, but so smug. So smug. Got the good seats. Got the good. Good. Hello, love. Gosh, it's just so good to be here. Surrounded by this black excellence on stage.   Grace I hope you're including yourself upon that number that.   Amy She worked with Jordan this week. He's being very humble. He is an amazing actor and so, so funny. And I got to direct him this week. And I got to tell you, I was a tyrant and he handled it well.   Jordan Carlos Yeah, yeah. What have you. What if I said you were she was in one of those, like, elevated seats, right? Like with a crane. But you were you.   Grace She does like to beat people.   Jordan Carlos She was in this really like, official jumpsuit. You are the official ass jump director. She's like, is she directing Apocalypse Now? Like what?   Amy That is right. I need people to know that I came to work.   Jordan Carlos Work it, but you were great. And I was like, there was one little small scene. Hey, everybody, welcome. You know, if you don't know anything about Hollywood, this is how it works. This is how it works. So you have to be an actor has to be directed, right, to do what they're supposed to do, my dumb ass. I didn't get out of the way. Right? I was like, you're like talking. You say your line and you walk the f--- off. Got it. But I just stayed in the studio, you know?   Amy I can see you. That was. That was my fault. That was my.   Jordan Carlos You know what? It's no one's fault.   Amy You're right. It's Hollywood. It's Hollywood.   Jordan Carlos It's Hollywood. Yeah, well, I had to be here.   Amy Yeah. Thank you so much for coming. It means so much to us. And we're both jointly obsessed with you, as are a lot of people in this audience.   Jordan Carlos So that's very sweet.   Amy Yes. You are the co-host of WNYC, his podcast Adulting, where you provide real life advice. And the quote reads with a heaping portion of hilarity topped with a dollop of truth.   Jordan Carlos Who wrote that.   Amy Yes. I mean, I assume it was you.   Jordan Carlos I swear to God I did not write that.   Amy Okay. Well, Michelle,.   Jordan Carlos In a showing of earnestness. And just like a missed. Misting of your heart.   Amy Yeah, well, as the audience entered tonight, we asked them to write down some questions that the three of us will give real life advice to help solve.   Grace Yeah.   Jordan Carlos I am not an expert. I do love how this guy's arms crossed when you're in the front row and non-verbal. F--- you to start the whole thing. And don't blame me. Don't say it's cold.   Amy No, we read the energy.   Jordan Carlos I do. This guy has Roman emperor energy.   Amy We got to work harder to win your love. don't worry.   Jordan Carlos Come and just relax. So everybody just open up your butthole. We're going to.   Amy Everyone release the anus, and let's just answer a couple of what we got. So first up, first up, and if you some people ask these questions, it might be out getting a drink. But if you are here and this is your question, just give us a little cheer. This first one is I was just offered my dream job in L.A., but my partner doesn't want to leave Brooklyn. Oh. How do you find balance between sacrificing and settling?   Grace Leave him.   Jordan Carlos Wow.   Amy Settling.   Grace Leave him. Drop him off leave him.   Jordan Carlos If you have your dream job. I don't know how how long you've been going out with this person, but if you have your dream job, you will work it out with that person. If relationships are all about like, you know, I've been married for 15 years and if you're married 15. Yeah, I know. Impressive. Impressive.   Amy Wow. Wow, it is 15. Yeah.    Grace Came out the womb married.   Jordan Carlos Came out, in some cultures, that's what we do. Yeah. I think what it is all about, what it's all about is, like, just kind of like figuring out that you want to be in it and you want to be in it every day and not leaving it to chance. Then you will remain in it. If this person like lets you go, not lets you go, go do your thing. Yeah. And see where the chips fall. But make sure that you keep a line and a tethered to that person and make sure that they're a part of it and make sure that you're honest with them about what's going on. You if you like it, if you don't, if you regret it, if not, if you want to stay in it. If you don't, you know what I'm saying? Like you might go out there and figure out that your dream job wasn't all it was cracked up to be. Oh, it's time to come back. Oh, no. But you know who will be in your corner every step of the way? Brooklyn boy. Also, you didn't talk about the dark side of the f---ing person that.   Grace That is something that you do need to know.   Amy She did say settling. So it makes me think that the D is medium to small.   Jordan Carlos Is it is it shmedium? Is it like a short medium?   Grace I'm sorry, I, I mean, my resting advice is I was like, leave you. Yeah. No, but I mean, I do think it's like, first of all, you do need to know, like, how long, like, they've been together and like how deep you are in. And there are some bitches that are career bitches like myself, and there are some girls that, you know, prioritize love and relationships. And you just have to be honest about which type of girl you are, you know.   Jordan Carlos Truly truly.   Amy Yeah, that's really good advice.   Jordan Carlos I know what kind of girl I am and.   Grace I'd like to hear it.   Jordan Carlos It's like we're going to. I'm like, if I can make it happen and split myself in half, I will do it because it's worth it. Yeah. Because I feel like it's just Jordan. Cause I'm just saying. I'm just saying you. You may be remembered on this planet for the things that you do and and and make your mark artistically, creatively, in business. But if you have a love that that respect, you hold on to God.   Amy Did you write From scratch on Netflix? That is beautiful.   Grace Convict me, Jordan.   Amy That is beautiful. Wait, I got to move on to the next question. You want the next question? Yes. So question and again, give a little woo. If it's your question, I want to expand my circle and become one of those people who can get dropped into a party and befriend anyone. But it's not really in my nature. Hashtag introvert. What should I do?   Grace Oh.   Jordan Carlos The extroverted introvert?   Amy That's me. You. I'm an introvert.   Jordan Carlos You're an introvert?   Amy I'm. I'm such people would never guess because I'm like, loud and talkative. But when I get home types, how we're off. Yeah, like, I get home and I just like, right. I literally am a secret introvert. I'm such an introvert. When the pandemic, when everything shut down, I was like, This is nice. I don't have to go anywhere. I was fine. I was like, I like it in here.   Grace I was just.   Jordan Carlos Like, if that is your if that's your jam, you need to host more parties.   Amy Yeah. Oh, you're the middle of the party. If it's your party.   Jordan Carlos To be the host or, you know, better be The Great Gatsby. Have the party. Don't show up.   Grace You will be remembered forever. Very, very good advice.   Amy Yes. Okay. Next question. I'm going to do four because these are good. This one I love the most. Give a little woot if it's yours. I need money, but I don't like working.   Grace Gets you somebody rich to marry one.   Jordan Carlos That's the end of it. I need money, but they don't like their wellness shot.   Amy What's the thing that makes them feel better?   Jordan Carlos I need money, but I don't like working. That's. That sounds like the beginning of a beautiful traps to focus on, like working and.   Grace Get some rich, rich rich.   Amy Do you agree with Grace? Just get someone rich. Is that the answer.   Jordan Carlos I would say get someone rich or understand how to manipulate the market.   Grace Or be like a Fyre Festival person.   Amy Oh yes.   Grace Start a scam. Scam somebody.   Amy But scamming is work.   Grace It is work it.   Amy That guy who started we work. What a scam. But he was working. Yeah. He had to take meetings and get investors. Scamming is work.   Grace It means you have to send out like lots of emails about being a price or something.   Jordan Carlos Mostly it's just like the laws that keep scammers back. Same, whatever. Right.   Grace Yeah. So it feels like just get a rich boo.   Amy I think that might be the answer. If you like money and don't like working, get a rich bill. Yeah.   Jordan Carlos I can't. I really can't help you there because this face, I got to work, you know?   Grace No. And a very handsome face.   Amy Everyone is someone's cup of tea. You just haven't found the rich woman.   Jordan Carlos You sound like my mom. Like the African proverb. There is a lid for every pot.   Amy The lion. The lion cares for the antelope. Okay. All right. Last question for you guys. Okay. Oh, this. Oh. How do you deal with the loneliness that comes with your friends all being in relationships? Oh, wow. These are deep guys. I love these questions.   Jordan Carlos Damn. Damn. How do you deal with the loneliness that comes from your friends all being in relationships? Good question. Great question.   Amy Oh, my God.   Jordan Carlos On a long enough timeline, those relationships will end. And.   Amy Rooting for the failure.   Jordan Carlos No, I'm just. I'm.   Grace Well, 50% of marriages do end in divorce.   Jordan Carlos The other 50 percent end in death. Now. I think this like, you know, those rom coms where it's like somebody tries to stop a wedding, like they're like, I got to stop this. It's like trying to stop a bus with your face. Like, don't do it. Don't stop Americans. Marriage will stop by itself. Okay? I've seen it happen way too many times. I've seen it happen way too many times. Right? Yes. I feel like this like like do not become discouraged by that. You know, let your friends live their life. Yeah. They're going they're out doing what they're doing. You should be doing what you're like, what you're doing. Do the things that they can't.   Amy Oh, make them jel, jel.   Jordan Carlos Make them jealous. Go to a bar, you know, go to a rock climbing thing in like five in the afternoon.   Amy Yeah. I'm saying you're like, I took a nap in the middle of the day because I don't have kids.   Jordan Carlos Mean we see everything on Netflix like you're in a relationship, you have to like. Check with the person that yeah.   Jordan Carlos I watch the show so now. White Lotus was supposed to be ours and.   Amy Relish the fact that you're single. It's better out there.   Jordan Carlos Enjoy it.   Grace Well, I would say that I think that it's not.   Jordan Carlos It's all, it's all. You know what I feel like it's grass is greener on the other side. It's all about what you know. It is hard to be single. Of course.   Amy Of course. Of course. Yeah, I.   Jordan Carlos Sharing all you know, sharing everything. Sharing all the coffee, sharing all the coffee.   Amy Sharing the toilet.   Jordan Carlos Sharing the toilet, sharing the goddamn toothpaste. You know, all that and. All. This other. What's wrong with sharing toothpaste?   Amy I thought you said toothpicks. I'm so sorry. I was.   Grace That would be f---ing nasty.   Jordan Carlos Well, who has toothpicks in their house? What in the Tony Soprano's, it's. It's got to be stuff in the house.   Amy No grass is always greener.   Jordan Carlos But grass is always greener. But you know what? If you like to. If you like. Yeah. And you enjoy your own company. Yeah. As you said, Amy, I enjoy my own company. Lord, when my kids and my wife are out the house, I'm like, I'm single. I'm like Tom Cruise in that movie, like gang, gang, gang, gang. Oh, my God. My hips are so good. All right, so.   Grace The hips don't lie.   Jordan Carlos The hips don't lie. That's a lot of yoga you want to talk about your. And it. My antidote. My antidote is yoga. Wow. Yes, that's right. My wife doing it so much, I was like, I want to live a long time, too. So I got to open. Gentleman.   Amy Men die sooner.   Jordan Carlos Your hips are not open, sir.   Amy Open them up.   Jordan Carlos This guy is forward, like he;s taking a sh--.   Amy Right there.   Jordan Carlos You were totally dragged here, weren't you? Well, whose. Whose idea was it? It was her idea. Na na na na. Yeah, that's right. Know. He's like, if I endure this, maybe they will be sexy.   Amy There will be, there will be. There will be. Yeah, there will be. Guys, guys.   Jordan Carlos I know too much.   Amy This this has been an amazing wellness session from Jordan Carlos. The one. The only the me champagne.   Grace Yeah. Thank you so much, Jordan.   Jordan Carlos Amazing. Goodbye.   Amy Bye, Jordan. Thank you.   Grace Thanks for listening to The Antidote. We hope this injected a little bit of joy into your week. I know it did mine. How about you, Amy?   Amy I feel good, girl. We should do this again sometime. Oh, we'll be here next week.   Grace And in the meantime, if you'd like to follow us on social, follow me. Grace. At Gracyact. That's G-R-A-C-Y-A-C-T.    Amy And follow me. Amy at AmyAniobi. That's A-M-Y-A-N-I-O-B-I and follow the show at theeantidotepod.   Grace That's thee with two E's.   Amy If you like feeling good about yourself, please subscribe at Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.   Grace Goodbye.   Amy And when in doubt, do it live. The Antidote is hosted by us Amy Aniobi and Grace Edwards. The show's production team includes senior producer Se'era Spragley Ricks and associate producer Jess Penzetta.   Grace Our executive producer is Erica Kraus and our editor is Erika Janik. Sound Mixing by Alex Simpson.   Amy Digital Production by Mijoe Sahiouni. Talent Booking by Marianne Ways. Our theme music was composed and produced by TT The Artist and Cosmo the true.   Grace APM Studio executives in charge are Chandra Kavati, Alex Schaffert and Joanne Griffith. Concept created by Amy Aniobi and Grace Edwards.   Amy Send us your antidotes at Antidoteshow.org, and remember to follow us on social media at theeantidotepod.   Grace The Antidote is the production of American Public Media.   Amy Woot woot.

About AmyAmy Tobey has worked in tech for more than 20 years at companies of every size, working with everything from kernel code to user interfaces. These days she spends her time building an innovative Site Reliability Engineering program at Equinix, where she is a principal engineer. When she's not working, she can be found with her nose in a book, watching anime with her son, making noise with electronics, or doing yoga poses in the sun.Links Referenced: Equinix: https://metal.equinix.com Twitter: https://twitter.com/MissAmyTobey TranscriptAnnouncer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud, I'm Corey Quinn, and this episode is another one of those real profiles in shitposting type of episodes. I am joined again from a few months ago by Amy Tobey, who is a Senior Principal Engineer at Equinix, back for more. Amy, thank you so much for joining me.Amy: Welcome. To your show. [laugh].Corey: Exactly. So, one thing that we have been seeing a lot over the past year, and you struck me as one of the best people to talk about what you're seeing in the wilderness perspective, has been the idea of cloud repatriation. It started off with something that came out of Andreessen Horowitz toward the start of the year about the trillion-dollar paradox, how, at a certain point of scale, repatriating to a data center is the smart and right move. And oh, my stars that ruffle some feathers for people?Amy: Well, I spent all this money moving to the cloud. That was just mean.Corey: I know. Why would I want to leave the cloud? I mean, for God's sake, my account manager named his kid after me. Wait a minute, how much am I spending on that? Yeah—Amy: Good question.Corey: —there is that ever-growing problem. And there have been the examples that people have given of Dropbox classically did a cloud repatriation exercise, and a second example that no one can ever name. And it seems like okay, this might not necessarily be the direction that the industry is going. But I also tend to not be completely naive when it comes to these things. And I can see repatriation making sense on a workload-by-workload basis.What that implies is that yeah, but a lot of other workloads are not going to be going to a data center. They're going to stay in a cloud provider, who would like very much if you never read a word of this to anyone in public.Amy: Absolutely, yeah.Corey: So, if there are workloads repatriating, it would occur to me that there's a vested interest on the part of every major cloud provider to do their best to, I don't know if saying suppress the story is too strongly worded, but it is directionally what I mean.Amy: They aren't helping get the story out. [laugh].Corey: Yeah, it's like, “That's a great observation. Could you maybe shut the hell up and never make it ever again in public, or we will end you?” Yeah. Your Amazon. What are you going to do, launch a shitty Amazon Basics version of what my company does? Good luck. Have fun. You're probably doing it already.But the reason I want to talk to you on this is a confluence of a few things. One, as I mentioned back in May when you were on the show, I am incensed and annoyed that we've been talking for as long as we have, and somehow I never had you on the show. So, great. Come back, please. You're always welcome here. Secondly, you work at Equinix, which is, effectively—let's be relatively direct—it is functionally a data center as far as how people wind up contextualizing this. Yes, you have higher level—Amy: Yeah I guess people contextualize it that way. But we'll get into that.Corey: Yeah, from the outside. I don't work there, to be clear. My talking points don't exist for this. But I think of oh, Equinix. Oh, that means you basically have a colo or colo equivalent. The pricing dynamics have radically different; it looks a lot closer to a data center in my imagination than it does a traditional public cloud. I would also argue that if someone migrates from AWS to Equinix, that would be viewed—arguably correctly—as something of a repatriation. Is that directionally correct?Amy: I would argue incorrectly. For Metal, right?Corey: Ah.Amy: So, Equinix is a data center company, right? Like that's why everybody knows us as. Equinix Metal is a bare metal primitive service, right? So, it's a lot more of a cloud workflow, right, except that you're not getting the rich services that you get in a technically full cloud, right? Like, there's no RDS; there's no S3, even. What you get is bare metal primitives, right? With a really fast network that isn't going to—Corey: Are you really a cloud provider without some ridiculous machine-learning-powered service that's going to wind up taking pictures, perform incredibly expensive operations on it, and then return something that's more than a little racist? I mean, come on. That's not—you're not a cloud until you can do that, right?Amy: We can do that. We have customers that do that. Well, not specifically that, but um—Corey: Yeah, but they have to build it themselves. You don't have the high-level managed service that basically serves as, functionally, bias laundering.Amy: Yeah, you don't get it in a box, right? So, a lot of our customers are doing things that are unique, right, that are maybe not exactly fit into the cloud well. And it comes back down to a lot of Equinix's roots, which is—we talk but going into the cloud, and it's this kind of abstract environment we're reaching for, you know, up in the sky. And it's like, we don't know where it is, except we have regions that—okay, so it's in Virginia. But the rule of real estate applies to technology as often as not, which is location, location, location, right?When we're talking about a lot of applications, a challenge that we face, say in gaming, is that the latency from the customer, so that last mile to your data center, can often be extremely important, right, so a few milliseconds even. And a lot of, like, SaaS applications, the typical stuff that really the cloud was built on, 10 milliseconds, 50 milliseconds, nobody's really going to notice that, right? But in a gaming environment or some very low latency application that needs to run extremely close to the customer, it's hard to do that in the cloud. They're building this stuff out, right? Like, I see, you know, different ones [unintelligible 00:05:53] opening new regions but, you know, there's this other side of the cloud, which is, like, the edge computing thing that's coming alive, and that's more where I think about it.And again, location, location, location. The speed of light is really fast, but as most of us in tech know, if you want to go across from the East Coast to the West Coast, you're talking about 80 milliseconds, on average, right? I think that's what it is. I haven't checked in a while. Yeah, that's just basic fundamental speed of light. And so, if everything's in us-east-1—and this is why we do multi-region, sometimes—the latency from the West Coast isn't going to be great. And so, we run the application on both sides.Corey: It has improved though. If you want to talk old school things that are seared into my brain from over 20 years ago, every person who's worked in data centers—or in technology, as a general rule—has a few IP addresses seared. And the one that I've always had on my mind was 130.111.32.11. Kind of arbitrary and ridiculous, but it was one of the two recursive resolvers provided at the University of Maine where I had my first help desk job.And it lives on-prem, in Maine. And generally speaking, I tended to always accept that no matter where I was—unless I was in a data center somewhere—it was about 120 milliseconds. And I just checked now; it is 85 and change from where I am in San Francisco. So, the internet or the speed of light have improved. So, good for whichever one of those it was. But yeah, you've just updated my understanding of these things. All of this is, which is to say, yes, latency is very important.Amy: Right. Let's forget repatriation to really be really honest. Even the Dropbox case or any of them, right? Like, there's an economic story here that I think all of us that have been doing cloud work for a while see pretty clearly that maybe not everybody's seeing that—that's thinking from an on-prem kind of situation, which is that—you know, and I know you do this all the time, right, is, you don't just look at the cost of the data center and the servers and the network, the technical components, the bill of materials—Corey: Oh, lies, damned lies, and TCO analyses. Yeah.Amy: —but there's all these people on top of it, and the organizational complexity, and the contracts that you got to manage. And it's this big, huge operation that is incredibly complex to do well that is almost nobody's business. So the way I look at this, right, and the way I even talk to customers about it is, like, “What is your produ—” And I talk to people internally about this way? It's like, “What are you trying to build?” “Well, I want to build a SaaS.” “Okay. Do you need data center expertise to build a SaaS?” “No.” “Then why the hell are you putting it in a data center?” Like we—you know, and speaking for my employer, right, like, we have Equinix Metal right here. You can build on that and you don't have to do all the most complex part of this, at least in terms of, like, the physical plant, right? Like, right, getting a bare metal server available, we take care of all of that. Even at the primitive level, where we sit, it's higher level than, say, colo.Corey: There's also the question of economics as it ties into it. It's never just a raw cost-of-materials type of approach. Like, my original job in a data center was basically to walk around and replace hard drives, and apparently, to insult people. Now, the cloud has taken one of those two aspects away, and you can follow my Twitter account and figure out which one of those two it is, but what I keep seeing now is there is value to having that task done, but in a cloud environment—and Equinix Metal, let's be clear—that has slipped below the surface level of awareness. And well, what are the economic implications of that?Well, okay, you have a whole team of people at large companies whose job it is to do precisely that. Okay, we're going to upskill them and train them to use cloud. Okay. First, not everyone is going to be capable or willing to make that leap from hard drive replacement to, “Congratulations and welcome to JavaScript. You're about to hate everything that comes next.”And if they do make that leap, their baseline market value—by which I mean what the market is willing to pay for them—approximately will double. And whether they wind up being paid more by their current employer or they take a job somewhere else with those skills and get paid what they are worth, the company still has that economic problem. Like it or not, you will generally get what you pay for whether you want to or not; that is the reality of it. And as companies are thinking about this, well, what gets into the TCO analysis and what doesn't, I have yet to see one where the outcome was not predetermined. They're less, let's figure out in good faith whether it's going to be more expensive to move to the cloud, or move out of the cloud, or just burn the building down for insurance money. The outcome is generally the one that the person who commissioned the TCO analysis wants. So, when a vendor is trying to get you to switch to them, and they do one for you, yeah. And I'm not saying they're lying, but there's so much judgment that goes into this. And what do you include and what do you not include? That's hard.Amy: And there's so many hidden costs. And that's one of the things that I love about working at a cloud provider is that I still get to play with all that stuff, and like, I get to see those hidden costs, right? Like you were talking about the person who goes around and swaps out the hard drives. Or early in my career, right, I worked with someone whose job it was this every day, she would go into data center, she'd swap out the tapes, you know, and do a few things other around and, like, take care of the billing system. And that was a job where it was kind of going around and stewarding a whole bunch of things that kind of kept the whole machine running, but most people outside of being right next to the data center didn't have any idea that stuff even happen, right, that went into it.And so, like you were saying, like, when you go to do the TCO analysis, I mean, I've been through this a couple of times prior in my career, where people will look at it and go like, “Well, of course we're not going to list—we'll put, like, two headcount on there.” And it's always a lie because it's never just to headcount. It's never just the network person, or the SRE, or the person who's racking the servers. It's also, like, finance has to do all this extra work, and there's all the logistic work, and there is just so much stuff that just is really hard to include. Not only do people leave it out, but it's also just really hard for people to grapple with the complexity of all the things it takes to run a data center, which is, like, one of the most complex machines on the planet, any single data center.Corey: I've worked in small-scale environments, maybe a couple of mid-sized ones, but never the type of hyperscale facility that you folks have, which I would say is if it's not hyperscale, it's at least directionally close to it. We're talking thousands of servers, and hundreds of racks.Amy: Right.Corey: I've started getting into that, on some level. Now, I guess when we say ‘hyperscale,' we're talking about AWS-size things where, oh, that's a region and it's going to have three dozen data center facilities in it. Yeah, I don't work in places like that because honestly, have you met me? Would you trust me around something that's that critical infrastructure? No, you would not, unless you have terrible judgment, which means you should not be working in those environments to begin with.Amy: I mean, you're like a walking chaos exercise. Maybe I would let you in.Corey: Oh, I bring my hardware destruction aura near anything expensive and things are terrible. It's awful. But as I looked at the cloud, regardless of cloud, there is another economic element that I think is underappreciated, and to be fair, this does, I believe, apply as much to Equinix Metal as it does to the public hyperscale cloud providers that have problems with naming things well. And that is, when you are provisioning something as a customer of one of these places, you have an unbounded growth problem. When you're in a data center, you are not going to just absentmindedly sign an $8 million purchase order for new servers—you know, a second time—and then that means you're eventually run out of power, space, places to put things, and you have to go find it somewhere.Whereas in cloud, the only limit is basically your budget where there is no forcing function that reminds you to go and clean up that experiment from five years ago. You have people with three petabytes of data they were using for a project, but they haven't worked there in five years and nothing's touched it since. Because the failure mode of deleting things that are important, or disasters—Amy: That's why Glacier exists.Corey: Oh, exactly. But that failure mode of deleting things that should not be deleted are disastrous for a company, whereas if you've leave them there, well, it's only money. And there's no forcing function to do that, which means you have this infinite growth problem with no natural limit slash predator around it. And that is the economic analysis that I do not see playing out basically anywhere. Because oh, by the time that becomes a problem, we'll have good governance in place. Yeah, pull the other one. It has bells on it.Amy: That's the funny thing, right, is a lot of the early drive in the cloud was those of us who wanted to go faster and we were up against the limitations of our data centers. And then we go out and go, like, “Hey, we got this cloud thing. I'll just, you know, put the credit card in there and I'll spin up a few instances, and ‘hey, I delivered your product.'” And everybody goes, “Yeah, hey, happy.” And then like you mentioned, right, and then we get down the road here, and it's like, “Oh, my God, how much are we spending on this?”And then you're in that funny boat where you have both. But yeah, I mean, like, that's just typical engineering problem, where, you know, we have to deal with our constraints. And the cloud has constraints, right? Like when I was at Netflix, one of the things we would do frequently is bump up against instance limits. And then we go talk to our TAM and be like, “Hey, buddy. Can we have some more instance limit?” And then take care of that, right?But there are some bounds on that. Of course, in the cloud providers—you know, if I have my cloud provider shoes on, I don't necessarily want to put those limits to law because it's a business, the business wants to hoover up all the money. That's what businesses do. So, I guess it's just a different constraint that is maybe much too easy to knock down, right? Because as you mentioned, in a data center or in a colo space, I outgrow my cage and I filled up all that space I have, I have to either order more space from my colo provider, I expand to the cloud, right?Corey: The scale I was always at, the limit was not the space because I assure you with enough shoving all things are possible. Don't believe me? Look at what people are putting in the overhead bin on any airline. Enough shoving, you'll get a Volkswagen in there. But it was always power constrained is what I dealt with it. And it's like, “Eh, they're just being conservative.” And the whole building room dies.Amy: You want blade servers because that's how you get blade servers, right? That movement was about bringing the density up and putting more servers in a rack. You know, there were some management stuff and [unintelligible 00:16:08], but a lot of it was just about, like, you know, I remember I'm picturing it, right—Corey: Even without that, I was still power constrained because you have to remember, a lot of my experiences were not in, shall we say, data center facilities that you would call, you know, good.Amy: Well, that brings up a fun thing that's happening, which is that the power envelope of servers is still growing. The newest Intel chips, especially the ones they're shipping for hyperscale and stuff like that, with the really high core counts, and the faster clock speeds, you know, these things are pulling, like, 300 watts. And they also have to egress all that heat. And so, that's one of the places where we're doing some innovations—I think there's a couple of blog posts out about it around—like, liquid cooling or multimode cooling. And what's interesting about this from a cloud or data center perspective, is that the tools and skills and everything has to come together to run a, you know, this year's or next year's servers, where we're pushing thousands of kilowatts into a rack. Thousands; one rack right?The bar to actually bootstrap and run this stuff successfully is rising again, compared to I take my pizza box servers, right—and I worked at a gaming company a long time ago, right, and they would just, like, stack them on the floor. It was just a stack of servers. Like, they were in between the rails, but they weren't screwed down or anything, right? And they would network them all up. Because basically, like, the game would spin up on the servers and if they died, they would just unplug that one and leave it there and spin up another one.It was like you could just stack stuff up and, like, be slinging cables across the data center and stuff back then. I wouldn't do it that way now, but when you add, say liquid cooling and some of these, like, extremely high power situations into the mix, now you need to have, for example, if you're using liquid cooling, you don't want that stuff leaking, right? And so, it's good as the pressure fittings and blind mating and all this stuff that's coming around gets, you still have that element of additional training, and skill, and possibility for mistakes.Corey: The thing that I see as I look at this across the space is that, on some level, it's gotten harder to run a data center than it ever did before. Because again, another reason I wanted to have you on this show is that you do not carry a quota. Although you do often carry the conversation, when you have boring people around you, but quotas, no. You are not here selling things to people. You're not actively incentivized to get people to see things a certain way.You are very clearly an engineer in the right ways. I will further point out though, that you do not sound like an engineer, by which I mean, you're going to basically belittle people, in many cases, in the name of being technically correct. You're a human being with a frickin soul. And believe me, it is noticed.Amy: I really appreciate that. If somebody's just listening to hearing my voice and in my name, right, like, I have a low voice. And in most of my career, I was extremely technical, like, to the point where you know, if something was wrong technically, I would fight to the death to get the right technical solution and maybe not see the complexity around the decisions, and why things were the way they were in the way I can today. And that's changed how I sound. It's changed how I talk. It's changed how I look at and talk about technology as well, right? I'm just not that interested in Kubernetes. Because I've kind of started looking up the stack in this kind of pursuit.Corey: Yeah, when I say you don't sound like an engineer, I am in no way shape or form—Amy: I know.Corey: —alluding in any respect to your technical acumen. I feel the need to clarify that statement for people who might be listening, and say, “Hey, wait a minute. Is he being a shithead?” No.Amy: No, no, no.Corey: Well, not the kind you're worried I'm being anyway; I'm a different breed of shithead and that's fine.Amy: Yeah, I should remember that other people don't know we've had conversations that are deeply technical, that aren't on air, that aren't context anybody else has. And so, like, I bring that deep technical knowledge, you know, the ability to talk about PCI Express, and kilovolts [unintelligible 00:19:58] rack, and top-of-rack switches, and network topologies, all of that together now, but what's really fascinating is where the really big impact is, for reliability, for security, for quality, the things that me as a person, that I'm driven by—products are cool, but, like, I like them to be reliable; that's the part that I like—really come down to more leadership, and business acumen, and understanding the business constraints, and then being able to get heard by an audience that isn't necessarily technical, that doesn't necessarily understand the difference between PCI, PCI-X, and PCI Express. There's a difference between those. It doesn't mean anything to the business, right, so when we want to go and talk about why are we doing, for example, multi-region deployment of our application? If I come in and say, “Well, because we want to use Raft.” That's going to fall flat, right?The business is going to go, “I don't care about Raft. What does that have to do with my customers?” Which is the right question to always ask. Instead, when I show up and say, “Okay, what's going on here is we have this application sits in a single region—or in a single data center or whatever, right? I'm using region because that's probably what most of the people listening understand—you know, so I put my application in a single region and it goes down, our customers are going to be unhappy. We have the alternative to spend, okay, not a little bit more money, probably a lot more money to build a second region, and the benefit we will get is that our customers will be able to access the service 24x7, and it will always work and they'll have a wonderful experience. And maybe they'll keep coming back and buy more stuff from us.”And so, when I talk about it in those terms, right—and it's usually more nuanced than that—then I start to get the movement at the macro level, right, in the systemic level of the business in the direction I want it to go, which is for the product group to understand why reliability matters to the customer, you know? For the individual engineers to understand why it matters that we use secure coding practices.[midroll 00:21:56]Corey: Getting back to the reason I said that you are not quota-carrying and you are not incentivized to push things in a particular way is that often we'll meet zealots, and I've never known you to be one, you have always been a strong advocate for doing the right thing, even if it doesn't directly benefit any given random employer that you might have. And as a result, one of the things that you've said to me repeatedly is if you're building something from scratch, for God's sake, put it in cloud. What is wrong with you? Do that. The idea of building it yourself on low-lying, underlying primitives for almost every modern SaaS style workload, there's no reason to consider doing something else in almost any case. Is that a fair representation of your position on this?Amy: It is. I mean, the simpler version right, “Is why the hell are you doing undifferentiated lifting?” Right? Things that don't differentiate your product, why would you do it?Corey: The thing that this has empowered then is I can build an experiment tonight—I don't have to wait for provisioning and signed contracts and do all the rest. I can spend 25 cents and get the experiment up and running. If it takes off, though, it has changed how I move going forward as well because there's no difference in the way that there was back when we were in data centers. I'm going to try and experiment I'm going to run it in this, I don't know, crappy Raspberry Pi or my desktop or something under my desk somewhere. And if it takes off and I have to scale up, I got to do a giant migration to real enterprise-grade hardware. With cloud, you are getting all of that out of the box, even if all you're doing with it is something ridiculous and nonsensical.Amy: And you're often getting, like, ridiculously better service. So, 20 years ago, if you and I sat down to build a SaaS app, we would have spun up a Linux box somewhere in a colo, and we would have spun up Apache, MySQL, maybe some Perl or PHP if we were feeling frisky. And the availability of that would be one machine could do, what we could handle in terms of one MySQL instance. But today if I'm spinning up a new stack for some the same kind of SaaS, I'm going to probably deploy it into an ASG, I'm probably going to have some kind of high availability database be on it—and I'm going to use Aurora as an example—because, like, the availability of an Aurora instance, in terms of, like, if I'm building myself up with even the very best kit available in databases, it's going to be really hard to hit the same availability that Aurora does because Aurora is not just a software solution, it's also got a team around it that stewards that 24/7. And it continues to evolve on its own.And so, like, the base, when we start that little tiny startup, instead of being that one machine, we're actually starting at a much higher level of quality, and availability, and even security sometimes because of these primitives that were available. And I probably should go on to extend on the thought of undifferentiated lifting, right, and coming back to the colo or the edge story, which is that there are still some little edge cases, right? Like I think for SaaS, duh right? Like, go straight to. But there are still some really interesting things where there's, like, hardware innovations where they're doing things with GPUs and stuff like that.Where the colo experience may be better because you're trying to do, like, custom hardware, in which case you are in a colo. There are businesses doing some really interesting stuff with custom hardware that's behind an application stack. What's really cool about some of that, from my perspective, is that some of that might be sitting on, say, bare metal with us, and maybe the front-end is sitting somewhere else. Because the other thing Equinix does really well is this product we call a Fabric which lets us basically do peering with any of the cloud providers.Corey: Yeah, the reason, I guess I don't consider you as a quote-unquote, “Cloud,” is first and foremost, rooted in the fact that you don't have a bandwidth model that is free and grass and criminally expensive to send it anywhere that isn't to you folks. Like, are you really a cloud if you're not just gouging the living piss out of your customers every time they want to send data somewhere else?Amy: Well, I mean, we like to say we're part of the cloud. And really, that's actually my favorite feature of Metal is that you get, I think—Corey: Yeah, this was a compliment, to be very clear. I'm a big fan of not paying 1998 bandwidth pricing anymore.Amy: Yeah, but this is the part where I get to do a little bit of, like, showing off for Metal a little bit, in that, like, when you buy a Metal server, there's different configurations, right, but, like, I think the lowest one, you have dual 10 Gig ports to the server that you can get either in a bonded mode so that you have a single 20 Gig interface in your operating system, or you can actually do L3 and you can do BGP to your server. And so, this is a capability that you really can't get at all on the other clouds, right? This lets you do things with the network, not only the bandwidth, right, that you have available. Like, you want to stream out 25 gigs of bandwidth out of us, I think that's pretty doable. And the rates—I've only seen a couple of comparisons—are pretty good.So, this is like where some of the business opportunities, right—and I can't get too much into it, but, like, this is all public stuff I've talked about so far—which is, that's part of the opportunity there is sitting at the crossroads of the internet, we can give you a server that has really great networking, and you can do all the cool custom stuff with it, like, BGP, right? Like, so that you can do Anycast, right? You can build Anycast applications.Corey: I miss the days when that was a thing that made sense.Amy: [laugh].Corey: I mean that in the context of, you know, with the internet and networks. These days, it always feels like the network engineering as slipped away within the cloud because you have overlays on top of overlays and it's all abstractions that are living out there right until suddenly you really need to know what's going on. But it has abstracted so much of this away. And that, on some level, is the surprise people are often in for when they wind up outgrowing the cloud for a workload and wanting to move it someplace that doesn't, you know, ride them like naughty ponies for bandwidth. And they have to rediscover things that we've mostly forgotten about.I remember having to architect significantly around the context of hard drive failures. I know we've talked about that a fair bit as a thing, but yeah, it's spinning metal, it throws off heat and if you lose the wrong one, your data is gone and you now have serious business problems. In cloud, at least AWS-land, that's not really a thing anymore. The way EBS is provisioned, there's a slight tick in latency if you're looking at just the right time for what I think is a hard drive failure, but it's there. You don't have to think about this anymore.Migrate that workload to a pile of servers in a colo somewhere, guess what? Suddenly your reliability is going to decrease. Amazon, and the other cloud providers as well, have gotten to a point where they are better at operations than you are at your relatively small company with your nascent sysadmin team. I promise. There is an economy of scale here.Amy: And it doesn't have to be good or better, right? It's just simply better resourced—Corey: Yeah.Amy: Than most anybody else can hope. Amazon can throw a billion dollars at it and never miss it. In most organizations out there, you know, and most of the especially enterprise, people are scratching and trying to get resources wherever they can, right? They're all competing for people, for time, for engineering resources, and that's one of the things that gets freed up when you just basically bang an API and you get the thing you want. You don't have to go through that kind of old world internal process that is usually slow and often painful.Just because they're not resourced as well; they're not automated as well. Maybe they could be. I'm sure most of them could, in theory be, but we come back to undifferentiated lifting. None of this helps, say—let me think of another random business—Claire's, whatever, like, any of the shops in the mall, they all have some kind of enterprise behind them for cash processing and all that stuff, point of sale, none of this stuff is differentiating for them because it doesn't impact anything to do with where the money comes in. So again, we're back at why are you doing this?Corey: I think that's also the big challenge as well, when people start talking about repatriation and talking about this idea that they are going to, oh, that cloud is too expensive; we're going to move out. And they make the economics work. Again, I do firmly believe that, by and large, businesses do not intentionally go out and make poor decisions. I think when we see a company doing something inscrutable, there's always context that we're missing, and I think as a general rule of thumb, that at these companies do not hire people who are fools. And there are always constraints that they cannot talk about in public.My general position as a consultant, and ideally as someone who aspires to be a decent human being, is that when I see something I don't understand, I assume that there's simply a lack of context, not that everyone involved in this has been foolish enough to make giant blunders that I can pick out in the first five seconds of looking at it. I'm not quite that self-confident yet.Amy: I mean, that's a big part of, like, the career progression into above senior engineer, right, is, you don't get to sit in your chair and go, like, “Oh, those dummies,” right? You actually have—I don't know about ‘have to,' but, like, the way I operate now, right, is I remember in my youth, I used to be like, “Oh, those business people. They don't know, nothing. Like, what are they doing?” You know, it's goofy what they're doing.And then now I have a different mode, which is, “Oh, that's interesting. Can you tell me more?” The feeling is still there, right? Like, “Oh, my God, what is going on here?” But then I get curious, and I go, “So, how did we get here?” [laugh]. And you get that story, and the stories are always fascinating, and they always involve, like, constraints, immovable objects, people doing the best they can with what they have available.Corey: Always. And I want to be clear that very rarely is it the right answer to walk into a room and say, look at the architecture and, “All right, what moron built this?” Because always you're going to be asking that question to said moron. And it doesn't matter how right you are, they're never going to listen to another thing out of your mouth again. And have some respect for what came before even if it's potentially wrong answer, well, great. “Why didn't you just use this service to do this instead?” “Yeah, because this thing predates that by five years, jackass.”There are reasons things are the way they are, if you take any architecture in the world and tell people to rebuild it greenfield, almost none of them would look the same as they do today because we learn things by getting it wrong. That's a great teacher, and it hurts. But it's also true.Amy: And we got to build, right? Like, that's what we're here to do. If we just kind of cycle waiting for the perfect technology, the right choices—and again, to come back to the people who built it at the time used—you know, often we can fault people for this—used the things they know or the things that are nearby, and they make it work. And that's kind of amazing sometimes, right?Like, I'm sure you see architectures frequently, and I see them too, probably less frequently, where you just go, how does this even work in the first place? Like how did you get this to work? Because I'm looking at this diagram or whatever, and I don't understand how this works. Maybe that's a thing that's more a me thing, like, because usually, I can look at a—skim over an architecture document and be, like, be able to build the model up into, like, “Okay, I can see how that kind of works and how the data flows through it.” I get that pretty quickly.And comes back to that, like, just, again, asking, “How did we get here?” And then the cool part about asking how did we get here is it sets everybody up in the room, not just you as the person trying to drive change, but the people you're trying to bring along, the original architects, original engineers, when you ask, how did we get here, you've started them on the path to coming along with you in the future, which is kind of cool. But until—that storytelling mode, again, is so powerful at almost every level of the stack, right? And that's why I just, like, when we were talking about how technical I bring things in, again, like, I'm just not that interested in, like, are you Little Endian or Big Endian? How did we get here is kind of cool. You built a Big Endian architecture in 2022? Like, “Ohh. [laugh]. How do we do that?”Corey: Hey, leave me to my own devices, and I need to build something super quickly to get it up and running, well, what I'm going to do, for a lot of answers is going to look an awful lot like the traditional three-tier architecture that I was running back in 2008. Because I know it, it works well, and I can iterate rapidly on it. Is it a best practice? Absolutely not, but given the constraints, sometimes it's the fastest thing to grab? “Well, if you built this in serverless technologies, it would run at a fraction of the cost.” It's, “Yes, but if I run this thing, the way that I'm running it now, it'll be $20 a month, it'll take me two hours instead of 20. And what exactly is your time worth, again?” It comes down to the better economic model of all these things.Amy: Any time you're trying to make a case to the business, the economic model is going to always go further. Just general tip for tech people, right? Like if you can make the better economic case and you go to the business with an economic case that is clear. Businesses listen to that. They're not going to listen to us go on and on about distributed systems.Somebody in finance trying to make a decision about, like, do we go and spend a million bucks on this, that's not really the material thing. It's like, well, how is this going to move the business forward? And how much is it going to cost us to do it? And what other opportunities are we giving up to do that?Corey: I think that's probably a good place to leave it because there's no good answer. We can all think about that until the next episode. I really want to thank you for spending so much time talking to me again. If people want to learn more, where's the best place for them to find you?Amy: Always Twitter for me, MissAmyTobey, and I'll see you there. Say hi.Corey: Thank you again for being as generous with your time as you are. It's deeply appreciated.Amy: It's always fun.Corey: Amy Tobey, Senior Principal Engineer at Equinix Metal. I'm Cloud Economist Corey Quinn and this is Screaming in the Cloud. If you've enjoyed this podcast please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, whereas if you've hated this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice along with an angry comment that tells me exactly what we got wrong in this episode in the best dialect you have of condescending engineer with zero people skills. I look forward to reading it.Corey: If your AWS bill keeps rising and your blood pressure is doing the same, then you need The Duckbill Group. We help companies fix their AWS bill by making it smaller and less horrifying. The Duckbill Group works for you, not AWS. We tailor recommendations to your business and we get to the point. Visit duckbillgroup.com to get started.Announcer: This has been a HumblePod production. Stay humble.

Amy Chin is the founder of Calm Better Days, where she educates clients on CBD, its uses, different delivery methods and figuring out the proper dosage. As someone who has suffered from anxiety and depression, she found great relief with CBD and knew she had to help and educate others. By sharing her personal findings, Amy helps clients find a tailored CBD regime based on needs and lifestyle, so they can dive into their CBD journey and live calm, better days. More about Amy Chin. More about The Passionistas Project. FULL TRANSCRIPT: Passionistas: Hi, and welcome to The Passionistas Project Podcast, where we talk with women who are following their passions to inspire you to do the same. We're Amy and Nancy Harrington and today we're talking with Amy Chin, the founder of Calm Better Days. As someone who suffered from anxiety and postpartum depression, she found great relief with CBD and knew she had to help others understand how CBD could help them in a myriad of ways so she became a CBD educator. Calm Better Days walks clients through what CBD is, what you use it for, different delivery methods and how to find their dosage. Clients also receive a tailored CBD regimen based on the individual's needs and lifestyle, so they can dive into their CBD journey. So please welcome to the show, Amy Chin. Amy: Hi. Hi Nancy. Hi Amy. Thank you for having me on today. Passionistas: We're really excited about CBD and want to learn all about it. Tell us what's the one thing you're most passionate about. Amy: Well, it's cannabis. I'm most passionate about plant medicine. It is a gift that can heal in so many ways. And I think that, you know, as a society, we need to learn to tap into that. And I think that we are gearing into that category as we are learning that, you know, health these days is a integrated health, right. That means eating more plant-based diet, as well as doing your exercise, meditation, getting adequate sleep, all those play a role into our health. Passionistas: And so how does that translate into what you do for a living? Amy: Understanding that everything is integrative, right. I always talk to my clients and remind them that CBD will fast-track your health to where you want it to be, but will slow down depending on your other health lifestyle habits. So for example, let's say two people are battling, you know, hormonal imbalance. And if one is doing everything, having healthy habits in terms of sleep, exercise, diet, and let's say spiritually, they're going to be healthier, faster. However, if one is not adapting to those, you know, healthier lifestyle habits, it will take much longer. So that's how it all relates. And I think that we're all learning that as we go now, especially with COVID around. Passionistas: Well, let's take a little step back. Tell us where you grew up and what your childhood was like. Amy: I grew up in New York City, born and raised right in Chinatown. And being in a Chinese household, we didn't really speak much about health. We didn't speak much about feelings and emotions as well in a Chinese household. So for me, growing up now as a mom and being diagnosed with anxiety and postpartum depression was very new to me. I was very thankful it was diagnosed by my marriage therapist because I was not aware of the symptoms because we never spoke about it in my household. And that's why I love talking about it. Because now that I realize when it was diagnosed, I can then treat it. I can address it and take care of myself. When I didn't know what it was at the time, I just thought, oh, this is part of motherhood. This is something that I have to learn to deal with. And I assumed that this was just how it was. So I was very thankful it was diagnosed. And it was my marriage therapist who recommended CBD to me because I was leaning toward a more holistic life after being a mom. And I was not having good reactions from pharmaceutical meds. So I was very thankful that she did recommend something that was more holistic. And this was about eight years ago. At the time that was when you actually had to get a medical card to get CBD. And I got my card and started taking CBD. And that's when my life changed. It went from that cranky, irritable yelling mom that flew off the handle. And I hated who I was. I hated how I was with my children. And once I started taking CBD, I became so much more patient, so much more present and mindful. I was able to enjoy the time when I was interacting with my kids and realize, oh my goodness, life can be like this. It didn't have to be the way it was before. And when I felt that change in myself, it was so eye opening. I was finally able to respond to the days, you know, challenges instead of reacting. And once I felt that calm and ease, I was just like, I knew that I had to get the word out there. Because I knew that if I one, didn't also knew I had anxiety and postpartum depression, I was sure that other moms out there maybe going through the same thing, and may not be aware of it. And knowing that there's a natural alternative out there with no side effects, it is such a big, great help. And so that's how I started Calm Better Days, to help people find their calm better day. I know we go through that a lot where we're just living and, you know, suffering from something, right. Everyone's suffering from something, whether it's pain, whether it's mental, whether it's, you know, different health conditions. And that's the great thing about CBD is that it can address so many different issues, so many different health issues. You almost wonder how can it be? How can it be so wonderful that it addresses so many different health issues from anxiety, epilepsy, Alzheimers, heart disease, arthritis. It's almost too good to be true, but it really does. Passionistas: So I think there are misconceptions about what CBD is, and especially as it relates to cannabis and marijuana and people getting high and all that. So can you kind of talk about the myth of CBD and clarify for people that are listening, what it is? Amy: Absolutely. So CBD and THC, there are both cannabinoids found in a cannabis plant. And THC is the cannabinoid known to get you euphorically high and CBD does not get you euphorically high. They are however, both cycle active in the sense that if I have depression, a person who takes CBD, their moods and feelings will be elevated in terms of not feeling depressed, however, not intoxicated. So that's the big difference between CBD and THC. And because you don't get that euphoric high with CBD, a lot of people sometimes don't know when it's working. Because with THC, you know it's working when you get that euphoric high. But with CBD, because you're not getting that euphoric high people are like, well, what am I supposed to be feeling? And so I describe it as you know it's working when you're not feeling the negative symptoms that you're normally experiencing. So that can be that anxiety, right. With anxiety might come that overwhelm, that high level of stress, that tightness in your chest, or pain for some people, right. So when you're not feeling those negative symptoms anymore, that's when you know CBD is working. It makes you feel normal, not suffering. CBD is a potent bioaccumulator. So what that means is, it's going to soak up all the toxins in the soil, which can be heavy metal, fungi, mold, pesticide, mycotoxins. These are things we do not want to ingest. So always buy organic. And you know, hemp is such a potent bioaccumulator, they actually planted at Chernobyl to clean up the soil from the radiation. So if you're not buying organic and you're not looking at the certificate of analysis that every quality CBD product comes with, you can be ingesting toxins that will set off at another health condition. Passionistas: Is that what inspired you to found Calm Better Days? And what was the process of starting it? And what's your mission? Amy: I started Calm Better Days at the end of 2019, right before the pandemic started. So what happened was in 2018, the Farm Bill was passed. So CBD was federally legal and you did not need a medical card anymore to buy CBD. So that's when we saw that the market was getting saturated. We saw CBD products everywhere. And I saw two issues for new consumers. And that was one: because CBD was so new, not everyone understood how to properly use CBD to really access the benefits from the plan. And then two: because it's such a saturated market now, finding a safe and quality product was another unknown for new consumers. And so that's when I wanted to address both issues. So, what I do is... people can sign up for a virtual consultation, so it can be done anywhere, any state. And I walk people through the basics because if you don't understand the basics, you're not going to really be able to access and understand the plant fully. So when I say the basics, I mean, what is CBD? How does it work in your body that it can address so many different symptoms? And then walking the person through the different delivery methods between tinctures, edibles, vaporizers. What are their different activation times and how long they last for in your body? Understanding that makes it easier for you to develop a routine that works for you. And then also understanding your dosage. Everybody's dosage is very unique. And we're used to going to a doctor's office, let's say. And your doctor says, let's say you're starting an SSRI. We'll start you on a certain milligram. And the doctor will say, well, come back in a month and let's see how that works, and we'll adjust the dosage if necessary. And with plant medicine, it's no different, except that you're able to... if you're able to track and learn to read what your body is telling you, your body will tell you how much CBD you need. And I teach, you know, people that tracking system so that they can find out what works best for themselves. And lastly, after the education portion, I take a look at your specific health condition to recommend the best products for you. Everybody suffers from different things. And, you know, we're learning that CBD is just scratching the surface. There are other cannabinoids and other turpines that play a role in each product and, and the effect. So if you're telling me your issue is say Crohn's disease or a gut issue, then there is a cannabinoid CBG that is great for that, that will help clean up the gut, promote good gut flora, and also help with digestive issues. But let's say your issue is sleep. Then there is another cannabinoid, CBN, that is great for that. So this cuts down on time and money for the consumer because now they don't have to waste money on thinking, well, I think this product might work for me. And then also, you know, they're finding relief faster because now that they have the products in hand that are right for them, now they know how to use it as well. So that's how Calm Better Days was born and the mission behind it. I also carry about 15 to 20 different brands. And I support and focus on small farmed, women own and BIPOC owned brands. One, I believe that small farm that's where the quality is. I don't believe in, you know, huge commercial grows. The standards are very different, as well as you know, I like to look into the company's mission. I want to make sure that they're really about helping people and growing quality product. And that's why I believe that, you know, especially people new to this industry, right. They may not be aware of the history behind it and what goes on. So I want to steer them toward good quality companies that are, you know, really focus on the quality of the product and really helping people. Passionistas: So how do you go from being diagnosed, that this is a treatment that will work for you as an individual, to gaining all this knowledge that you now have, where you can help other people? What kind of studying and practices did you do to get to this place? Amy: Before I started CBD, I was a cannabis enthusiast. And once I discovered the CBD side, I was just blown away. I was like, is there anything this plant cannot do? And it was when I felt the results with CBD, that I started diving into it myself, doing all the research possible. And once I knew what I wanted to do and start my company, I then became cannabis licensed with Dr. Mary Clifton. She is a board certified internal doctor who specializes in cannabis. And the studies don't stop because every day we're now finding new studies, right? Because now we can study the plant. Before we were not able to study the plant because it was, you know, it's still a Schedule 1 drug, and that's why there are no studies beforehand. But like I was saying, now studies are coming out. So it doesn't stop. And every day there are new industry trends that I need to keep up on. But I love, I love finding out all this information. So I take what I've, you know, been consuming myself for years, as well as the studies that are now available, and apply that to people who are looking for new alternatives to health. Passionistas: Tell us a little bit about the pop-ups that you do.. Amy: So I do a lot of pop-ups. I don't have a brick and mortar store, so I do a lot of pop-ups. Especially at women networking events, because, you know, I am a mom. And I know that moms ,we take on so much that our anxiety and stress is... I think a lot of moms suffer. So I'm hoping one day we'll have a brick and mortar so that I can do more explaining and education in the store. I find that right now, although people are in need of it, I think because we're all so busy right now with COVID and everything is online, we're just too busy to sometimes even have that consultation. Or even too busy to go online to order things. So pop-ups are helpful to be right in front of them. Passionistas: We're Amy and Nancy Harrington, and you're listening to The Passionistas Project Podcast and our interview with Amy Chin. To learn more about her CBD related personal events, group and individual consultations, and pop-ups, visit calmbetterdays.co. If you're enjoying this interview and would like to help us to continue creating inspiring content, please consider becoming a patron by visiting thepassionistasproject.com/podcast and clicking on the patron button. Even $1 a month can help us continue our mission of inspiring women to follow their passions. Now here's more of our interview with Amy. You talked a little bit about the different forms that people can take CBD in. Can you kind of talk a little bit more in detail about that? Amy: So back then the only, not the only, but the most common way was through inhalation, smoking a joint or a blunt. Nowadays, we have vaporizers. And I love vaporizers because one, you're not burning carcinogens. Like before with the joint you had the paper, the flour is all burning and that's consuming carcinogens. Which I want to save my throat, so I don't consume flower anymore in that form, but I do use vaporizers. There's no scent to it. There is no carcinogens in my throat, so it saves my throat. But also I love it because it provides the quickest onset. So you'll feel it within 5 to 10 minutes. And this is great for, let's say a person suffering from panic attacks or anxiety attacks, and they need that quick relief. Or maybe they have severe, intense back pain that they need real quick relief from. The vaporizer will get to that quickest. But I also understand that, you know, for some people they just don't want to inhale anything. And that's where, you know, the industry has been so innovative in the different formats that CBD comes in. So there are edibles. And edibles are gummies, honey, chocolate, anything that needs to go through your stomach and liver to metabolize. But because it has to go through your stomach, it will take much longer to kick in. So it takes about 30 to 90 minutes. But people love it because it's portable. It's easy to consume. You just, if it's a gummy, you could put it in your bag, just pop one when you need it. And, it does last much longer than a vaporizer. It can last from 4 to 6 hours, even 8 hours for some people. So when we think about different delivery methods, you want to think about what's going to make it easy for us to consume on a daily basis. Because then you make it easy as part of your routine. But if you're doing something that you don't like, and it's difficult, then it doesn't become part of your routine. So other formats are tinctures. Tinctures are CBD suspended in MCT oil. And it comes in a bottle with a dropper. And normally you want to drop it underneath your tongue. Hold it there for 60 seconds before you swallow. And that allows it to be absorbed into your bloodstream and will take about 20 to 40 minutes to activate. And will last about four hours. And when I talk about delivery methods, there is a time and place for everything. So what I mean by that is we want to think about our situation, what we need to address, and then also about the place where we're at, right? Because we want it to be easy and convenient. Once I wake up. That's when my anxiety and depression is at its worse, right. It's hard to be motivated. I'm, you know, don't want to get out of bed. And it's hard for me to be focused and productive. So I know right away in the morning, I either use my vaporizer or my tincture because I want to set the tone for my day. And I want it to be quick to get out of that slump and kind of like jumpstart my day. So, I either do one of those two things. And then after that, because I know it lasts for about four hours and I work at home, thankfully. So that's when I take an edible. I pop a gummy right before my lunch, because I know I have a long afternoon ahead and I don't want to have to think about redosing. And I take it right before my lunch, because I want it to go down with the good fat from my diet. Because then your body will absorb more of the CBD and also quicker, versus taking it on an empty stomach where your stomach acids might get to it first, or after a full meal where your liver just has to metabolize more. And then after the gummy wears off is probably around dinner time/after dinner. And it depends on what I need to do. If I need to do more, then I'll dose accordingly. But let's say, you know, I put in a hard day's work. I really want to relax. I don't want to think about work, then I can also do something relaxing, like a tea to kind of like set the mood for my night. Set myself up for good sleep and have a really relaxing night. And that's a great thing about it. Is that now with so many different products, it feels like a self treat. I can do an afternoon little chocolate piece or, you know, have my tea, right. Or maybe it's honey drizzled on top or fruit as my dessert after dinner. So there are different ways of consuming it. And not only that, but after my shower, you know, my muscles usually there's like soreness or stress from my neck down. And I love after a shower putting on a good CBD lotion just to melt all that tension, all that stress away. And that also eases me into my, you know, good nights rest. Passionistas: I think everybody associates weed with patchouli. Like these creams and the tinctures and everything. Do they smell like cannabis or do they come now in like lavender? Amy: They do. They come in so many different formats, so many different scents, and I love it. I have this one by Common Ground and it's bergamot and I love bergamot. And it goes on so smooth, so luxurious. So satiny too. I'm loving the creams that they come up with now because it doesn't smell like cannabis and it goes on so nice. It feels like any other luxurious cream, you wouldn't . Even know that it's, you know, specifically CBD. Not only does it smell great, but it really helps ease that tension, melt away any stress or pain that you may have. It's great because it's anti-inflammatory, which can be acne, rosacea, the redness, right. That's all inflammation. So that takes care of that. It also regulates your sebum control. So back then, when I was hormonally imbalanced, I had horrible cystic acne. My face would get shiny in an hour because I was over producing oil. So the CBD oil helps balance out your sebum. So instead of over-producing oil, it was balancing that out. So now my face doesn't get shiny in an hour. And also my cystic acne, it would hurt less because the CBD oil was taking care of the pain, as well as the inflammation. So CBD facial oil is also anti-aging and anti-oxidant. So it's great for the face. And I use it every day. It's cleaned up my skin regimen. Like before I used to apply so much acne medication, so many different retinals this and that. Now is just double cleanse and the facial moisturizers, CBD facial moisturizer and nothing else. It will take out the puffiness. I have an eye serum. And also for dark spots. Because it quickens the cellular turnover, so the dark spots will fade quicker as well. So it's cut down my steps and products. I love it. I recommend it for everyone. Passionistas: What if someone is on traditional medication? Are there interactions that they should speak with a doctor about before starting a regimen? Amy: Always speak with your doctor especially when you are on pharmaceutical drugs. And on my website, I have a partnership with Leaf411, which is a nonprofit organization of cannabis nurses. So what that means is you can call them and say, you know, you were referred from Calm Better Days. And that makes the call free. You do have to pay for the service, but because I have the partnership, it is free. And what you can do is say, "I am on medication X, Y, Z. Will CBD interact with it?" For the most part, CBD does not interact with most drugs. The only concern is if you are on blood thinners or blood pressure medication. Anything that interacts with grapefruit and you cannot take, CBD works like that grapefruit. It's, an enzyme inhibitor. So that you would have to watch. Passionistas: You talked a little bit about how your personal life has changed from making this discovery. But tell us a little bit more about, kind of, the transformation you personally have made since you started using CBD in this way. Amy: Well, let's see, I've been on it for about, CBD specifically, for over eight years now. Cannabis in general, probably over a decade. So I have now become a more mindful person, definitely more aware about my health. And this was also after becoming a mom, more holistic, more plant-based. Because when I was at my darkest point with anxiety and postpartum depression, that's when my health was out of balance. I was hormonally imbalanced. I wasn't eating right at that time. So during the time when I was consuming CBD was also when I was making healthier lifestyle changes in terms of my diet, more plant-based. And as a mom, you know, I know I'm supposed to exercise more and also get adequate sleep. However, it's very hard to fit those two things in as a busy mom, also running her own company. And I know that, right. And that is why I make sure to take my CBD every day. So at least then my body won't crack from not doing the things that I know I'm supposed to do. If I can, I do try to, of course do it. But in terms of lifestyle, that's how it's changed. I'm more aware of what I do need to do, as well as my mental state. I would say before CBD, I felt like my life felt like, you know, how, when you're that hamster on the hamster wheel and it's constantly going. And you just feel that you have to. And then once I took CBD, it kind of took me out of that hamster wheel and I could see, oh my gosh, I'm that hamster. And it didn't have to be like that. It allowed me to have calmness and mindfulness so I can see and be aware of what goes on in my life. And the funny thing is, you know, they always suggest therapy and all that. And I have been going to years of that and try to practice meditation and yoga, but my mind would not be still. And I just could not tap into it no matter how hard I tried. But with the CBD, I was able to finally tap into that and calm my mind and be aware of everything that was going on, so that now if I take CBD before a yoga session or a meditation, it just enhances that session because now I can really focus in and tap into that. Whereas before I just could not calm my mind to, to focus in on that. Passionistas: Do you find that people are, like who don't get it, who don't understand it personally, like are judgmental about the concept of CBD? And how do you address people who come at you in that way? Amy: Absolutely. I get a lot of people who don't understand it. And that's why I love to talk about it. And I get that they don't understand it. And sometimes it comes with, of course, you don't get it because you don't have the basic fundamentals. And, and that's why I'm here to help you understand that, because I feel that once you understand that, then everything starts clicking. And then after that is you have to experiment and try it. And you know, we've been so conditioned as a society to think that, okay, a doctor is here, they prescribe medicine. And then you just take it blindly, right? And with plant medicine, it's a different approach in that you can do it yourself, but you have to be patient. You have to be open to it and you have to be open to tracking it so that you can tell yourself, well, how much does my body need? But we haven't listened to our bodies in so long that it seems like a new practice. And we have to remember that herbs, cannabis, that was the original medicine of days long ago before pharmaceutical medicine was made in a lab. So we have to understand that that's what we started with and it's going back to that. And I understand sometimes even with the education, it may still be hard to understand. But once that person tries it and they feel it, then that is like, I'm hooked now. Now I want to understand more and dive into it more. And sometimes it's all about finding the right dosage to get you there. Or finding the right product because everyone is going to respond differently to a vaporizer versus a tincture versus an edible. You know, for some people edibles, for whatever reason, doesn't work for them, for their body, their genetic makeup. So sometimes that's when a vaporizer can really help. And I love vaporizers because I find that because of the quick onset, that people really feel it. Where sometimes when they're waiting for an edible to kick in, they forget that they're waiting and then the day goes by and then they're not mindful of, oh, my day actually went by smoother. I wasn't blowing up at everything, right. But sometimes people don't notice that because we're not mindful. We're not reading what our body is telling us. And usually we only hear what our body is telling us when it's screaming, right. And that's when it's like suffering from a pain or suffering from something that happened in our body. Passionistas: From all the people that you've worked with, is there like one specific example that you can think of as like a success story that you're especially blown away by? Amy: Well, right now, a lot of clients are coming to me for sleep issues and stress issues and actually gut issues. Well, gut and mind is all related. So that's why stress and gut health are like hand in hand. And that's why a lot of people are coming for that. But sleep. So I've seen a lot of people come back and say, you know what? I've been getting good sleep. And stress has been lowered. I've had a lot of clients who were on pharmaceutical meds for anxiety, stress, depression, and have weaned off of it. When I hear that they've weaned off of pharmaceutical meds and still feeling great, I am so happy because I know that they're feeling better because they're no longer feeling the side effects from the pharmaceutical drugs. Which was the main reason why a lot of them wanted to get off of that. So when I hear that, I just know that, you know, that makes me feel wonderful that I'm actually helping people feel better. Passionistas: Thanks for listening to our interview with Amy Chin. To learn more about her CBD related personal events, group and individual consultations, and pop-ups visit calmbetterdays.co. Please visit thepassionistasproject.com to learn more about our podcast and subscription box, filled with products made by women owned businesses and female artisans to inspire you to follow your passions. This quarter's box is a collaboration with the MOB Nation and features products from mom owned business. Get a free mystery box with a one-year subscription using the code SPRINGGOODIES. And be sure to subscribe to The Passionistas Project Podcast, so you don't miss any of our upcoming, inspiring guests. Until next time, stay well and stay passionate.  

About AmyWith over ten years industry experience, Amy Arambulo Negrette has built web applications for a variety of industries including Yahoo! Fantasy Sports and NASA Ames Research Center. One of her projects modernized two legacy systems impacting the entire research center and won her a Certificate of Excellence from the Ames Contractor Council. More recently, she built APIs for enterprise clients for a cloud consulting firms and led a team of Cloud Software Engineers. Amy has survived acquisitions, layoffs, and balancing life with two small children. Links: The Duckbill Group: http://duckbillgroup.com/ @nerdypaws: https://twitter.com/nerdypaws TranscriptAnnouncer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.Corey: Your company might be stuck in the middle of a DevOps revolution without even realizing it. Lucky you! Does your company culture discourage risk? Are you willing to admit it? Does your team have clear responsibilities? Depends on who you ask. Are you struggling to get buy in on DevOps practices? Well, download the 2021 State of DevOps report brought to you annually by Puppet since 2011 to explore the trends and blockers keeping evolution firms stuck in the middle of their DevOps evolution. Because they fail to evolve or die like dinosaurs. The significance of organizational buy in, and oh it is significant indeed, and why team identities and interaction models matter. Not to mention weither the use of automation and the cloud translate to DevOps success. All that and more awaits you. Visit: www.puppet.com to download your copy of the report now!Corey: And now for something completely different!Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn. I'm joined this week by my colleague, Amy Arumbulo Negrette, who's a cloud economist here at The Duckbill Group. Amy, thank you for taking the time to, basically, deal with my slings and arrows instead of the ones that clients throw your way.Amy: It's perfectly fine. It's not as if we are… not the kindest people within the Slack channels anyway. So, I am totally good. [laugh].Corey: [laugh]. So, you've been at The Duckbill Group, as of the time of this recording, which when you're releasing things in the future, it's always a question of how long will you have been here by then? No. We're playing it straight here from a perspective of, as of the time of this recording, you've been here six months, all of which, of course, have been during the global pandemic. So first, what's that been like?Amy: It has been very loud. And that's to say, I live in a house with five other people in it, so it's one thing for me to be a remote worker and just being at my desk, working quietly, but also having to manage noise that you can't really control, it's been an extra level of stress that I could possibly do without. It's fine. [laugh].Corey: One of the whole problems with the pandemic, from our perspective, has been that we've run this place as a full remote operation since it was started, and people come at this from a perspective of, “Well, this whole experience we've had with working remote is awful. It's terrible. No one likes it. I'm not productive.” Let's be very clear here. There's been a global pandemic; this is not like most years, and there are stressors and things that absolutely suck about this that don't normally impact the remote work story quite the way that they have.Amy: I totally agree. At least before, in one of my previous companies had an office in Chicago, so I would be there once a week, but effectively I was remote because that was an all meetings type of day. And the difference between that and now is that you had very explicit work hours; you had client hours; your work sometimes brought you out the house, if you had to go on travel, or on-site. This is just everything is done within the same ten feet of basically where you work, and you eat, and you sleep, if you have really unhealthy living habits like I do. And while I'm trying to get better at it, I'm also not the best at having time-based boundaries. I'm only good with physical boundaries. So, I have to turn off the work computer, to turn on the fun computer, which are physically next to each other, but I have to look in a different direction. And that is as close as I get.Corey: Yeah. It's the good screen versus the bad screen model of, “Oh, yeah, we're going to stop doing work now and just move our gaze slightly to one side and look at the fun screen and work on those things instead.” And at first, I was trying to be militant when we started the whole pandemic thing and working full remote of booting people of, “Hey, all right, it's quitting time. Go home and stop it.” The other side of that, though, is some people are, in some ways, using work to escape.So, we've modified our approach to get the work done. If you're working consistently more than 40 hours to get it done, let us know; that's a problem. But let people work when they want to work, how they want to work and be empathetic humans. And that carries surprisingly far. Now, the question, of course, becomes, does this scale to a company that has 50,000 employees? I don't know. That's never been a problem that anyone has asked me to solve. But it works for us at small scale.Amy: I find that the attitude working here has been really understanding as to, we know what our lives are like and we know what kind of work that we actually have to get done within a certain time period. And all of us make those. We don't feel the need to explain how we were able to get that work done or what time slots happen. You'll see me and Jesse—one of the other cloud economists—it's like we'll be hitting document at the same time at—for my time would be closer to later in the evening, but that's just because I spent most of the day either taking care of kids or handling house management sort of duties. So, having that flexibility on where my schedule goes without having to answer that question of, “Well, why were you working at that hour?” I feel gives me a lot more control and takes one less thing away that I have to worry about.Corey: One approach that we've always taken here has been that we treat people functionally like adults. And that's sort of an insulting way to frame it. Like, “What are you saying. That a lot of employers treat their staff like kids?” Well, basically, yes, is the short answer, where it's, “great, we're going to trust you with root in production, or a bunch of confidential customer data, but we're also not going to trust you to make a $50 purchase on the company credit card without a bunch of scrutiny because we don't trust that you're not embezzling.”The cross-incentives of different organizational structures are so twisted at that point that it's very hard to self-correct. I mean, our approach going into this was always never to go down that dark path, and so far, so good. Will it bite us someday if we continue to grow to that 50,000 person company? Undoubtedly. But I have to believe it can be done.Amy: I would also think the pressure of managing 50,000 people would break every single person in this company. Just thinking about it gives me panic.Corey: Oh, yeah. When every person becomes effectively, what, 500 people, that's divisional stuff. I don't think that anyone wants to stick around and see a small company go through those kinds of transformations because functionally, it becomes such a radically different place. For better or worse, that's not something we have to worry about, at least not anytime soon.Amy: We work really well with our fairly tight teams, I think. And it's I think it's one of the virtues of the type of work that we do. You don't need a team of 15 people looking at one document.Corey: No. And invariably, it seems like that tends to slow things down. Let's talk a little bit about something that makes you a bit of an outlier insofar as when you are only dealing with a small number of people everyone's inherently an outlier. You're the only cloud economist at The Duckbill Group with a background as a software engineer.Amy: Yeah. I did not realize that when I was joining. So, this deal with my infrastructure background is that I've only ever done enough infrastructure to support my applications. Like, Pete, I come from a startup background initially in my career, where you had to manage your application, you had to manage your own routes, you had to manage your own database connections, your own storage connections, and all of that, which, looking back on it and saying it out loud, sounds like a really bad idea now, but this was life before infrastructure as code and it was the quote-unquote, “Wild West” of San Francisco startups, where you can make a product out of basically anything. And the anything I went into was fantasy football of all things.So, I always made sure to have enough knowledge so that if I knew something broke, that I could blame it on networking, and then I would be able to show the paper trail to prove it. That was the extent of my knowledge. And then I started getting into the serverless space, where I started building things out of cloud services, instead of just spinning up more EC2 because I was young and impressionable. And that gave me a lot more understanding of what infrastructure engineering was like. But beyond that, I build APIs, I do business logic; that's really where my comfort levels are.Corey: For the rest of us, we seem to come from a background of grumpy Unix sysadmin types where we were running infrastructures, but as far as the code that was tied into it, eh, that was always the stuff we would kind of hand-wave over or we'd go diving into it as little as possible. And that does shape how you go through your career. For example, most companies are not going to wind up needing someone in that role until they've raised at least a Series B round, whereas in many cases, “Oh, you're an engineer. Great, why don't you start the company yourself?” From a software engineering perspective. It's a different philosophy in many respects, and one that I think is a little bit on the strange side if that makes sense.Amy: It is. It's extremely strange how completely dependent the two are on each other, yet the mindset to get into either and of that level of engineering is completely different. My husband and my father are both on the infrastructure side, and they've tried to explain networking to me my entire life, and I just—the minute the word subnet comes up, my brain is gone. It's like I'm replaying Star Trek episodes in my head because I can no longer handle this [laugh] conversation.Corey: That's how a lot of us feel about various code constructs at some point. For better or worse, we've made our peace with it, and let's be very direct here for a minute, we've learned to talk our way around customer questions that go too deep into the software engineering space, by and large. What's it like on the other side of that, where there's an expectation that you have a lot more in-depth infrastructure experience than perhaps you do? Or isn't there at that expectation?Amy: There is, I think a lot of that is just because of the type of industry this is. Cloud consulting is always infrastructure first because that is what the cloud is selling; they are selling managed infrastructures. They are giving you data center alternatives, but they're not giving you are full-blown apps. And whenever they do—let's say Lightsail—it's an expensive thing that you, somewhere in your mind go, “I could build that cheaper. Why am I paying for this service?”So, when I am on the phone with clients and they have a situation that is obviously going to be a software solution, where their infrastructure is growing, but it's because their software has a specific requirement, either for logging, or for surge, that they're using either Elasticsearch, or Kubernetes, or CloudWatch Metrics for, and it's turning into an expensive solution, it gives me an inside, “Well, this is the kind of engineering effort that's going to need to happen in order for you to write all of these problems and to reduce these costs. And these aren't as simple as hitting an option within AWS console to bring all of that down.” It's always going to be seen as more of an effort, but you also get a bit of empathy from the engineers you're talking to because you now are explaining to them that you understand what they built. You understand why they built it a specific way, and you're just trying to give them a path out.Corey: You mentioned the now antiquated idea of going on-site and talking to clients. I mean, before pandemic, Mike and I would head out to a lot of our clients for the final wrap-up meeting, or even in some cases kickoffs, because it made sense for us to do it and get everyone in the same room and on the same page. And over the past year, we've found ways to solve for these problems in ways that I don't necessarily know are going to go away once the pandemic is over. Is it more effective for us to travel somewhere and sit down in the same room with people, who in many cases have to travel in for wherever they live themselves? I don't know. There is going to be a higher bandwidth story there, of course, and the communication is going to be marginally more effective, but is it going to be so effective that it's worth more or less throwing a wrench into everyone's schedule for that meeting? That leaves me somewhat unconvinced.Amy: One of the strange things is that previously, I would go on-site to clients and fly out to where they are because as many startups as there are within Chicago, and the [unintelligible 00:13:10], and within Illinois, I'm always being sent to New York, or Atlanta, or Denver, for some reason because they're far and there're planes there. But we always end up having to talk to some amount of people that don't even work in that time zone, or maybe even then in this country, so we're talking to resources in Asia, resources in Europe, which meant we were flying people in to be on somebody else's phone. And I'm glad to not do that. I'm glad to not have to hang out in an airport, there is a burrito place in O'Hare that I truly enjoy, but that is the one thing I miss about traveling. I almost have my punch card done and it stopped right before then, but I'm kind of okay with that.Corey: I was chasing the brass ring of airline status and all the rest for a long time. I can't wait to finally go and hit the next tier and the rest, and where, well, the pandemic through all of that into a jumble and I take a step back and look at it and, you know, I don't miss it as much. What I do miss is that the opportunity, in my case, to get away from everyone that I spend all of my time with now, just for a day or two, and clear my head and recenter myself. But there are probably ways to do that that doesn't keep me on the road for 140,000 miles a year.Amy: I think, or at least I hope, that this will give us a chance to as an industry just reevaluate how we treat travel. A lot of clients treated it as essentially a status level that came with your engagement where we need you on-site so we can show off we have consultants coming in on-site so frequently to give us personal reports, even though we are all in a room on a conference call with other people. So hopefully, even if they're not forcing that every other week—sometimes weekly, depending on what your engagement is—type of cadence on travel, then maybe it'll just increase the quality of life for some of us. It would be nice. It would be super nice. I honestly don't see them forcing that anytime soon, but once everyone gets vaccinated, and there's a successful pediatric vaccine that comes out, it's like, I don't see them, just letting us stay at home and continue doing our job the way we have been for the past year, going on two years.Corey: So, dialing back into the mists of the distant past, it's always a question of where do cloud economists—or clouds economist, depending upon how we choose to mis-pluralize things—come from. And everyone here is a different story and there's not a whole lot of common points between those stories. You, for example, spent some time doing work with NASA. What was that about?Amy: There's a lot of misconceptions about working for NASA like you need to be a doctor. [laugh]. And trust me, you don't. I knew a lot of people who work there that they basically got their degree, and then they just did code work forever and they are lifers there. And it's such an interesting place to be because, on one hand, you have that mission of space and exploration and trying to do better by the world, but also, it's still a federal agency and there's still a lot of problems with federal agencies in that how you get paid is essentially at the beginning of the year, that's when all the budgets are done.So, you can't do the startup thing where you go, I'm going to try a bunch of things, and if one doesn't work, I'm going to pivot to something else because you're essentially answering taxpayers and they don't let you do that. No one wants their taxes going to someone who tried a thing and then found out they messed up. Which is unfortunate, but also a really hard reality of the way these work.Corey: I really love installing, upgrading, and fixing security agents in my cloud estate! Why do I say that? Because I sell things, because I sell things for a company that deploys an agent, there's no other reason. Because let's face it. Agents can be a real headache. Well, now Orca Security gives you a single tool that detects basically every risk in your cloud environment -- and that's as easy to install and maintain as a smartphone app. It is agentless, or my intro would've gotten me into trouble here, but  it can still see deep into your AWS workloads, while guaranteeing 100% coverage. With Orca Security, there are no overlooked assets, no DevOps headaches, and believe me you will hear from those people if you cause them headaches. and no performance hits on live environments. Connect your first cloud account in minutes and see for yourself at orca.security. Thats “Orca” as in whale, “dot” security as in that things you company claims to care about but doesn't until right after it really should have. Corey: I must confess that I'm somewhat disappointed that you opened with, “You don't really need to be a rocket scientist to work at NASA,” just because, honestly, I was liking the mystique of, “Oh, yeah. You need to be a rocket scientist to understand AWS billing constructs.” But I suppose if I'm being honest, that might be a slight overreach.Amy: I knew a lot of people there who had multiple PhDs, and they could barely keep their computer on, so really, I'm finding that I respect very smart people, but it also does not imply your world intelligence anywhere else outside of that very specific field. One of the really weird things about having worked there—I worked at NASA Ames as part of their IT department—one of the things we did as outreach was, we did a booth over at SiliCon Valley Comic Con once, and it was great. We had a vintage display of old electronics, like CRT monitors, and full keyboards, and all of this nonsense, and kids would go, “These are so old. Why would anyone use this? It's so boring.” [laugh].And the entire IT department showed up to volunteer. We're like, “No, you don't understand why it's interesting. It's great.” It was so, so hard to watch young people just [laugh] not be interested in what the past of digital devices were. Very sad. And on the other hand, we did get a lot of interest, but it was also having to have that conversation in real life can be a little disheartening.Corey: It really is.Amy: But it was fun because it was one of the few things that you don't really get to see NASA at a comic book convention, so that was actually a really cool thing to do. Also, we got free tickets, so that was great.Corey: So, what was your background before you got to the point of, “You know what I want to do? Work for a consultancy, whose entire mascot is a platypus, and from there, go ahead and fix AWS bills,” which sounds like, to folks who aren't steeped in it, the worst thing ever? What series of, I guess, decisions led you here?Amy: I know you don't remember this, but we actually met at Serverlessconf, and you opened your talk with, “I am a cloud economist, a title I completely made up.” Your talk was right before mine, so that's why you didn't remember I was there because I was actually on the backstage getting prepared for my talk.Corey: That's right. I would have been breathing into a paper bag right before or right after my talk, trying not to pass out. People say, “Oh, you won't be nervous once you give enough talks.” I'm still waiting.Amy: It never happens. I did finally stop having blackouts, so that's an improvement. It gets better, but it never goes away. And when you told me that, and I saw the listing, I'm like, “I don't know what this job is. There's an easy way to find out what the job is, and that's to apply.”And that is when I started going through the process of applying, and then you hired me some months afterwards. And the thing that I found out about looking through AWS billing is that I found out I have a very specific skill set, in trying to find a discount while looking through receipts. This is a thing I thought only applied to my personal life because I don't really like paying retail prices for anything, so I'm always looking for a way to squeeze out another 20, 30% out of something because 10% is really just taking taxes off of stuff. And the fact that I was able to apply that very specific skill set to an actual technical job is so much fun for me because I like being able to tell stories out of what people spend, just because it is—as we say around here—it's the sum of all of your engineering decisions. Because everything you do, there's a price tag on it. And knowing how you got there, and that you can optimize the architecture by looking through the bill is super fascinating to me.Corey: So, now that it's been six months, is the job what you expected it to be? Is it something radically different? Is it something else?Amy: The tone of our engagements have actually changed within the past six months, partially because of the way AWS has made some organizational changes internally as far as we can tell. But really, it's also what types of companies are finding out that they need a service like this. Before, when I was interviewing, and when I started, I was talking to Pete and Jesse about the types of engagements you do. It was for larger companies; they're looking for some amount of savings, and then we run some tooling and then we get back to them. And now it's turning into… some are relatively small companies, companies that wouldn't get use out of an EDP, for example, because they're spending so low.But also other companies, they don't even really want this saving specifically, they want validation on what the process is like, they want validation on their unit economics and what the cost allocation strategies are. So, it's fascinating what people actually want now that they understand that that option is out there.Corey: One thing that you mentioned a minute ago, was the idea of going and giving talks—in the before times, at Serverlessconf and things like that—how do you find that that has changed for you over the past year? And how are you viewing a slow, but effectively guaranteed in the long enough timeframe, return to normalcy?Amy: So, when everything went virtual, it was a really hard transition for a lot of communities. I'm part of AWS Chicago, I'm an organizer at a meetup group called Write/Speak/Code where our whole deal was to give women and people of underrepresented genders the opportunity to learn how to do open-source, how do you learn how to do technical speaking, we helped them with their CFPs, and all of that required a physical community in order for us to be able to give each other that type of support. Well, we can't do that anymore. The last big event we did was specifically around getting everyone set up into the organization. So, we do one big one every year where we tell you how to do slides, we tell you how to do everything, and then the rest of the year smaller meetups where we do feedback and prompts and other types of support events.Now, that we can't do that, we found that a lot of the people who ran these events, they're extroverts and they're social to begin with, so they got burnt out very quickly, which meant we not only had to find new ways of supporting them but also reaching out to members and making sure everyone could still do the types of thing we promised we'd help them to do. The other issue is that with things going virtual, there used to be clear lines on the types of events you could apply to, which were events that I could reach, that my company would pay for, what have you. But now everything's virtual, I accidentally applied to a meetup that I spoke at that was based in Australia, which meant I was talking at 10 o'clock at night, just because I explained to them the mix-up and essentially begged to get an earlier slot. And it's interesting because it presents both a wide array of opportunities, but it also means that there's now so much noise, and so much burnout and fatigue from these one direction types of conferences, which are long Zoom meetings, which is basically everyone's workday now, which is just full day's worth of Zoom meetings. And it's hard to get people interested.And really, what these events did best was give people who generally don't have that type of visibility—like me—who, I am a female engineer, and I am a person of color, so my opportunities aren't always going to be as well as they could be, but this visibility also gave me a boost. So, when we lost out on physical events, my organization personally lost out on a lot of things that we could do for those people, which is unfortunate, but it's also what was happening, really, everywhere. Now, we're gearing more towards how to do less Zoom meeting type of events, and we're now using a tool called gather.town, which lets everyone go into a space, you can walk around, you can drop in and out of conversations like you would in a hallway, and it has this cute little eight-bit kind of avatar feel to it so it looks kind of like a game, but it's also—if you go around a large group of people, it pulls up everyone's picture and then you're suddenly speaking to each other over voice without having to physically join in or wait for a breakout room or wait to be let into a different room. So, it's been difficult to try to find ways of managing it, but it's also been very interesting seeing the tools that had come out of this.Now, once we start going back to physical events and on-site events, personally, I have a lot of anxiety about that just because my allergies and everything makes it hard for me to do travel in the first place, but also, I'm not really sure how everyone's going to react being in the same space anymore, or how full they're going to be. So, to me, it does cause me a little bit of anxiety and I'm going to wait a little until things are more settled and are a little more stable than they are right now. That said, I believe AWS Midwest is doing something physical at the end of this year. But I'm not entirely positive about that.Corey: One of the things I want to avoid is going back to an old style of re:Invent, where it's only open to folks who are able to spend $2,000 on a ticket, travel to Las Vegas, and get the time off and afford the hotel stay and the rest. One thing I loved about the 2020 version of that was that everyone was coming from a baseline of its full remote. There was no VIP ticket option that got you a better experience than anyone else had. And I do worry, on some level, that as soon as they can, they're going to go running back to a story like that. I hope not.Amy: I hope not, too, because one of the great things about virtual re:Invent was everyone saw the same things at the same time. And you didn't have to give up one panel because you're too busy being in line for another panel. And I've never liked that type of convention activity where you know you're actively giving something up just because the line for the thing you want to get to is so super long. That said, they could have done better a bit on the website. The website was really hard to navigate and confusing and the schedule was weird.If they get that kind of usability fixed and a little more reasonable so that things are surprisingly searchable and easier to navigate, and they have more social type of events instead of AWS is going to—it's going to announce another service that they're calling a product, even though it's just… it's a service enhancement, and that's all it is. I would like for all of that to kind of be streamlined so it's not just more announcements. I can read announcements. I don't need to watch two hours' worth of announcements.Corey: I really hope that at some point, some of the AWS service teams learn that, “Hey. We could announce services anytime of the year,” rather than in a three-week sprint that leaves no one able to pay attention because there's just too much.Amy: And it's hard because it's hard when you have to hold a release because re:Invent's coming up. Or you have to be part of their Developer Relations Group where you have to do all of your training and all of your docs right beforehand, just so that it's prepared for this launch that people may not hear about because it gets drowned out in all the other noise.Corey: And that's sometimes part of the entire problem.Amy: Yeah.Corey: Thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me. As always, it's a pleasure. If people want to learn more about what you're up to, where can they find you?Amy: They can hire me for engagement here. [laugh] but also—Corey: Good answer.Amy: —I do technical talks. I don't have anything lined up right now, just because it's spring in my brain took a break, like everyone else did. I'm on Twitter as @nerdypaws because that was a handle I had since college and have not changed.Corey: Excellent. And we will, of course, leave a link to that in the [show notes 00:31:10], as we always do. Thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me. It's always a pleasure, and it's deeply appreciated.Amy: It's always a good time talking to you, Corey.Corey: Amy Arumbulo Negrette, cloud economist here at The Duckbill Group. I am Cloud Economist Corey Quinn, and this is Screaming in the Cloud. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, whereas if you've hated this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, along with a comment telling me why you do in fact need to be a rocket surgeon in order to properly work on AWS bills.Corey: If your AWS bill keeps rising and your blood pressure is doing the same, then you need The Duckbill Group. We help companies fix their AWS bill by making it smaller and less horrifying. The Duckbill Group works for you, not AWS. We tailor recommendations to your business and we get to the point. Visit duckbillgroup.com to get started.This has been a HumblePod production. Stay humble.

LinksPete and Jesse Talk Account ManagersTranscriptCorey: If your mean time to WTF for a security alert is more than a minute, it's time to look at Lacework. Lacework will help you get your security act together for everything from compliance service configurations to container app relationships, all without the need for PhDs in AWS to write the rules. If you're building a secure business on AWS with compliance requirements, you don't really have time to choose between antivirus or firewall companies to help you secure your stack. That's why Lacework is built from the ground up for the Cloud: low effort, high visibility and detection. To learn more, visit lacework.com.Jesse: Hello, and welcome to AWS Morning Brief: Fridays From the Field. I'm Jesse DeRose.Amy: I'm Amy Negrette.Tim: And I'm Tim Banks.Jesse: This is the podcast within a podcast where we talk about all the ways we've seen AWS used and abused in the wild, with a healthy dose of complaining about AWS for good measure. Today, we're going to be talking about, really, a couple things; building your relationship with AWS, really. This stems from one of the questions that we got from a listener from a previous event. The question is, “How do the different companies that we've worked with work with AWS? Is the primary point of contact for AWS at a company usually the CTO, the VP of engineering, an architect, an ops person, a program manager, or somebody from finance, a [unintelligible 00:01:00] trainer? Who ultimately owns that relationship with AWS?”And so we're going to talk about that today. I think there's a lot of really great content in this space. Pete and I, back in the day, recorded an episode talking about building your relationship with your account manager, and with your TAM, and with AWS in general. I'll link that in the show notes. That's a great precursor to this conversation. But I think there's a lot of great opportunities to build your relationship and build rapport with AWS, as you work with AWS and as you put more things on the platform.Amy: I think one of the things we always say right off the bat is that you should introduce yourself and make a good relationship with your account manager and your technical account manager, just because they're the ones who, if you need help, they're going to be the ones to help you.Jesse: Yeah, I think one of the things that we should also take a step back and add is that if you are listening to this and you're saying to yourself, “I don't have an account manager,” that's actually wrong; you do have an account manager. Anybody who's running workloads on AWS has an account manager. Your account manager might not have reached out to you yet because usually speaking, account managers don't reach out unless they see that you're spending a certain amount of money. They usually don't start a conversation with you unless you specifically are spending a certain amount of money, have reached a certain threshold, and then they want to start talking to you about opportunities to continue using AWS, opportunities to save money, invest in AWS. But you definitely have an account manager and you should definitely start building that rapport with them as soon as possible.Amy: First question. How do you actually engage your account manager?Tim: So, there's a couple ways to do it. If you have reached a certain spend threshold where your account manager will reach out to you, it's real simple: you just reply back to them. And it kind of depends. The question most people are going to have is, “Well, why do I need to reach out to my account manager? If I just have, like, a demo account, if I'm just using free tier stuff.”You probably don't ever need to reach out to your account manager, so what are the things, typical things that people need to reach out to their account manager for? Well, typically because they want to grow and want to see what kind of discounts are offered for growth, and I want to see what I can do. Now, you can open a support ticket, you can open a billing ticket, but what will end up happening is once you reach a spend threshold, your account manager will reach out to you because they want to talk to you about what programs they have, they want to see how they can help you grow your account, they want to see what things they can do for you because for them, that means you're going to spend more money. Most account managers within a little bit of time of you opening your account and reaching a lower spend threshold, they're going to send you an email and say, “Hey, this is my name, this is how you reach me,” et cetera, et cetera. And they'll send you some emails with links to webinars or other events and things like that, and you can typically reply back to those and you'll be able to get your account manager sometimes as well. But like I said, the easiest way to get a hold of your account manager or find out who it is, is to start increasing your spend on AWS.Jesse: So, then if you're a small company, maybe a startup or maybe just a student's using AWS for the first time, likely that point of contact within a company is going to be you. From a startup perspective, maybe you are the lead engineer, maybe you are the VP of engineering, maybe you are the sole engineer in the company. We have seen most organizations that we talk to have a relationship with AWS, or build that relationship or own that relationship with AWS at a engineering management or senior leadership level. Engineering management seems to be the sweet spot because usually, senior leadership has a larger view of things on their plate than just AWS so they're focused on larger business moves for the company, but the engineering manager normally has enough context and knowledge of all of the day-to-day specifics of how engineering teams are using AWS to really be involved in that conversation with your account manager, with your technical account manager, or with your solutions architect, or whatever set of folks you have from AWS's side for an account team. And I think that's another thing that we should point out as well, which is, you will always have an account manager; you won't always have a technical account manager.The technical account manager generally comes in once you have signed an enterprise discount program agreement. So, generally speaking, that is one of the perks that comes with an EDP, but obviously, there are other components to the EDP to be mindful of as well.Tim: So, let me clarify that. You get a technical account manager when you sign up for enterprise support. You don't have to have an EDPs to have enterprise support, but when you sign up for enterprise support, you automatically get a technical account manager.Jesse: And, Tim, if you could share with everybody, what kind of things can you expect from a technical account manager?Tim: So, a technical account manager, I mean, they will do—like, all TAMs everywhere pretty much can liaise with support to escalate tickets or investigate them and see what's going on with them, try and, kind of, white-glove them into where they need to be. AWS TAM's, they also have the same—or a lot of the same access to the backend. Not your data because no one at AWS actually has access to your data or inside your systems, but they have access to the backend so they can see API calls, they can see logs, and they can see other things like that to get insight into what's going on in your system and so they can do analytics. They have insight to your billing, they can see your Cost Explorer, they can see what your contract spends are, they can see all the line items in your bills, they have access to the roadmaps, they have access to the services and the service teams so that if you need to talk to someone at a particular service team, they can arrange that meeting for you. If you need to talk to specialists SAs, they can arrange those meetings for you.With a TAM, you—and if you have enterprise support, and they're looking you for an EDP, you can have what's called an EBC or an Executive Briefing Council, where they, in non-pandemic times, they will bring you to Seattle, put you up for a couple of days and you'll have a couple of days of meetings with service teams to go over, kind of like, what the roadmap looks like, what your strategy for working with those teams are or working with those services are. And you can get good steps on how to utilize these services, whether it's going to be some more deep dives on-site, or whether it's going to be some key roadmap items that the service team is going to prioritize and other things like that. And the EBC is actually pretty neat, but you know, you have to be larger spender to get access to those. Another thing that a TAM can do is they can actually enter items on the roadmap for you. They have access to and can provide you access to betas, or pilot programs, or private releases for various services.You'll have access to a weekly email that include what launches are pending, or what releases are pending over the next week or two weeks. You'll have access to quarterly or monthly business reviews where you get access to see what your spend looks like, what your spending trends are, support ticket trends, you know, usage and analytics, and things like that. So, a TAM can be quite useful. They can do quite a lot for you, especially in the realm of cloud economics. That said, every TAM has their specialty.I mean, depending on how many customers they have, the level of engagement you may get. And, you know, some TAMs are super, super, really good at the financial aspects, some are better at the technical aspects. So, to be fair because the TAM org is so large at AWS, you don't always have the same experience with all your TAMs, and the level of depth to which they can dive is going to vary somewhat.Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by ChaosSearch. You could run Elastic Search or Elastic Cloud or Open Search, as they're calling it now, or a self hosted out stack. But why? ChaosSearch gives you the same API you've come to know and tolerate, along with unlimited data retention and no data movement. Just throw your data into S3 and proceed from there as you would expect. This is great for IT operations folks, for App performance monitoring, cyber security. If you're using ElasticSearch consider not running ElasticSearch. They're also available now on the AWS market place, if you prefer not to go direct and have half of whatever you pay them count toward your EDP commitment. Discover what companies like, Klarna, Equifax, Armor Security and Blackboard already have. To learn more visit chaossearch.io and tell them I sent you just so you can see them facepalm yet again. Amy: So, let's say we got the best TAM—even though he technically works for us now—when trying to envision what our relationship with the world's best TAM is going to be—and I just imagine that as a nice little block text on a white mug—what is that relationship going to look like? How are we going to engage with them? And even, how often should we talk to them?Jesse: I used to work for an organization that had, I believe, quarterly meetings with our account manager and our TAM, and every time we met with them, it felt like this high stakes poker game where we didn't want to show our cards and they didn't want to show their cards, but then nobody really was able to do anything productive together. And I have to say that is the exact opposite of how to engage your account manager and your TAM.Tim: Yeah, that doesn't sound great.Jesse: No, it was not great. I do not recommend that. You want to have an open, honest conversation about your roadmap, about what you want to do with AWS.Amy: They're not getting that mug.Tim: No, no.Jesse: [laugh].Tim: So, if you have a super-engaged TAM—and I will use my own experience as a TAM at AWS—that we had office hours, routinely, bi-weekly. One customer I had, I would have onsite office hours at their offices in LA, and I would have virtual office hours in offices in London. And those office hours, sometimes I'd have—we—that—we would use those to bring in, whether it was specialist SAs, whether we go over roadmap items, or tickets, or something like that, or we do architectural reviews, or cost reviews, we would schedule quarterly business reviews aside from that, typically sometimes the same day or on the same group of days, but there was typically be different than office hours. I was in their Slack channel so they needed to ping me on something that's not a ticket but a question, we could have conversations in there. A couple of their higher points of contact there had my phone number, so they would call me if something was going on. They would page me—because AWS TAMS have pagers—if they had a major issue, or, like, an outage or something [unintelligible 00:11:05] that would affect them.Jesse: I'm sorry, I just have to ask really quick. Are we talking, like, old school level pager?Tim: No, no, no. Like on your phone, like PagerDuty.Jesse: Okay, okay. I was really excited for a minute there because I kind of miss those old-school pagers.Tim: Let me say, it was like PagerDuty; it wasn't actual PagerDuty because AWS did not actually use PagerDuty. They had something internal, but PagerDuty was the closest analog.Amy: Internal PagerDuty as a Service.Tim: Something like that.Jesse: Oh, no.Amy: So, you know, if you have a very engaged TAM, you would have regular, several times a week, contact if not daily, right? Additionally, the account team will also meet internally to go over strategy, go over issues, and action items, and things like that once or twice a week. Some accounts have multiple TAM, in which case then, you know, the touchpoints are even more often.Jesse: I feel like there's so much opportunity for engagement with your AWS account team, your account manager, your TAM. It's not entirely up to you to build that relationship, but it is a relationship; it definitely requires investment and energy from both sides.Tim: And I would say in the context of who's working with a TAM, ideally, the larger contact paths you have at an org with your TAM, the better off it's going to be. So, you don't want your TAM or account team to only talk to the VP of engineering, or the DevOps manager, or the lead architect; you want them to be able to talk to your devs, and your junior devs, and your finance people, and your CTO, and other folks like that, and pretty much anyone who's a stakeholder because they can have various conversations, and they can bring concerns around. If they're talking about junior devs, your TAM can actually help them how to use CloudFormation, and how to use a AWS CLI, or do a workshop on the basics of using Kubernetes, or something like that. Whereas if you're going to have a conversation with the VP of engineering, they're going to talk about strategies, they're going to talk about roadmap items, they're going to talk about how things can affect the company, they're going to talk about EDPs and things like that. So ideally, in a successful relationship with your TAM, your TAM is going to have several people in your org are going to have that TAM's contact information and will talk with them regularly.Jesse: One of the clients that we worked with actually brought us in for a number of conversations, and brought their TAM in as part of those conversations, too. And I have to say, having the TAM involved in those conversations was fantastic because as much as I love the deep, insightful work that we do, there were certain things about AWS's roadmap that we just don't have visibility into sometimes. And the TAM had that visibility and was able to be part of those conversations on multiple different levels. The TAM was able to communicate to multiple audiences about both roadmap items from a product perspective, from a finance perspective, from an engineering architecture perspective; it was really great to have them involved in the conversation and share insights that were beneficial for multiple parties in that meeting.Tim: And oftentimes, too, involving your TAM when you do have this one thing in your bill you can't figure out, saying, “We've looked and this spend is here, but we don't know exactly why it is.” Your TAM can go back and look at the logs, or go back and look at some of the things that were spun up at the specific time and say, “Oh, here was the problem. It was when you deploy this new AMI, it caused your CPU hours to go way, way up so you had to spin up more instances.” Or a great one was a few years back when Datadog changed its API calls and a lot of people's CloudWatch costs went through the roof. And then several TAMs had to through and figure out, it was this specific call and this is how you fix that and give that guidance back to their customers to reduce their spend. So, being able to have that backend access is very, very useful, even when you are working with an optimization group like ourselves or other folks, to say, “Hey, we've noticed these things. These are the line items we want to get some insight into.” I mean, your TAM can definitely be a good partner in that.Jesse: All right, folks, well, that'll do it for us this week. If you've got questions that you'd like us to answer, please go to lastweekinaws.com/QA. Fill out the form; we'd be happy to answer those on a future show. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please go to lastweekinaws.com/review and give it a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, whereas if you hated this podcast, please go to lastweekinaws.com/review. Give it a five-star rating on your podcast platform of choice and tell us, did Tim pronounce the shortening of ‘Amazon Machine Image' correctly as ‘ah-mi' or should he have said ‘A-M-I?'Amy: I heard it and I wasn't going to say it. [laugh].Jesse: [laugh].Amy: I was just going to wait for someone to send him the t-shirt.Tim: Just to note, if you put beans in your chili, you can keep your comments to yourself.Jesse: [laugh].Amy: You're just going to keep fighting about everything today, is all I'm—[laugh].Jesse: [laugh]. Oh, no.Announcer: This has been a HumblePod production. Stay humble.

TranscriptCorey: This episode is sponsored in part by LaunchDarkly. Take a look at what it takes to get your code into production. I'm going to just guess that it's awful because it's always awful. No one loves their deployment process. What if launching new features didn't require you to do a full-on code and possibly infrastructure deploy? What if you could test on a small subset of users and then roll it back immediately if results aren't what you expect? LaunchDarkly does exactly this. To learn more, visit launchdarkly.com and tell them Corey sent you, and watch for the wince.Jesse: Hello, and welcome to AWS Morning Brief: Fridays From the Field. I'm Jesse DeRose.Amy: I'm Amy Negrette.Tim: I'm Tim Banks.Jesse: This is the podcast within a podcast where we talk about all the ways that we've seen AWS used and abused in the wild, with a healthy dose of complaining about AWS for good measure. Today on the show, we are going to be talking about AWS re:Invent. Now, I know that most of you know what re:Invent is, but I just would love to set the playing field level for everybody really quick. Amy, Tim, what is AWS re:Invent.Tim: AWS re:Invent is AWS's week-long corporate conference. It's not really a user conference; it's certainly not, like, a community conference, but it's a week-long sales pitch in the desert. It's like the worst version of a corporate Burning Man you could ever imagine because they even have a concert.Jesse: It is in Las Vegas. Now, I personally have mixed feelings about going to Las Vegas in general, but this adds so much to the conference in general because it's not just in a single conference venue that's centrally located near the hotels. Is it is across the strip—Amy: It's the entire strip.Jesse: It's the entire strip. So—Amy: They block every hotel and they buy every piece of ad space.Jesse: Yes. There is no escaping AWS re:Invent for the entire week that you're there. And sometimes that's a good thing because you do want to be involved in what's going on, but other times, it is a lot.Tim: So, I'm trying to figure out which LP that ‘buy the entire Las Vegas trip' covers because it's certainly not be frugal.Amy: No. [laugh].Jesse: No, not at all. But we do have new information. We decided to do this episode specifically because new information was just released about re:Invent for this year. Amy, what is that information? What do we know?Amy: They've decided, in having to go virtual last year, due to some kind of horrible global crisis, to return in person to the world's most densely packed tourist spot, Las Vegas, and host this huge event from November 29th to December 3rd—that's right after Thanksgiving—and just, what do they say? Return to normal. Return to normal.Tim: That way everybody can get exposed to COVID before they go home for the holidays.Jesse: [laugh].well, you at least get one holiday in, if you celebrate or recognize Thanksgiving, and then you get to bring everything back after that.Amy: Yeah, people bring enough things back from Vegas. I'm not sure we'd have to find more reasons. [laugh].Tim: [laugh].Jesse: I know that there's that great marketing tactic of, “What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas,” but—Tim: That's not what they say at the clinic.Jesse: Nope. Mm-mm. Now, I will say, I know that almost every conference event was completely virtual last year due to the pandemic, and this year, a lot of conferences are still trying to straddle that line between what's acceptable, can we do maybe smaller events in person, some kind of a hybrid online/in-person thing. I have mixed feelings on this. I appreciate that I can still attend AWS re:Invent from home this year digitally, I can still watch a lot of the main keynote events and a lot of the other information that is being shared, but I don't know, it's always hard because if you do a hybrid event, you're automatically going to miss out on any of that in-person socializing and networking.Tim: Well. So, I think it's interesting. AWS re:Invent suffers from the same issue that pretty much all other conferences suffer from is that there's not really value-add in the talks, at least for attending.Jesse: Yeah.Amy: If you're going to be able to see those talks afterwards if the announcements are going to be publicized afterwards which, that is true in both cases, then what's the point of spending the money, and the time, and the possible exposure to go watch them in person? So, then the other thing is, “Well, we want to go for some of the training seminars,” or some of these other things. Well, those are also offered online, often. Or, like, copies of them online. These are the same kinds of tutorials like that that you can have your TAM or SA run if you're an AWS customer currently; that's what they're doing there.The other thing is, too, those in-person sessions get filled up so quickly that there's no guarantee [unintelligible 00:05:08] anyways. And that's one of the complaints they've had about re:Invent in the past is that you can't get into any of the sessions. And so, you couple all that along with most of the reason going being—if it's not the talks and is not the sessions, it's the hallway track. And then you got to kind of wonder, is the hallway track going to be valuable this year because if it's hybrid, what percent of the people that you would normally talk to you are going to be there and what percentage aren't? And so there's a lot of calculus that's got to go into it this year.Jesse: I've always struggled with any vendor-sponsored event, all the talks feel either like a sales pitch, or they feel like a use case that just doesn't fit for me. And that may just be where I'm at in my professional journey; there's definitely reasons to go if you want to see some of these talks or see some of this information live, or be the first person to talk about it. Or even the people who are going to be the news sources for everybody else who want to be the first person to talk about, “Oh, we attended, and we saw these things and were live-tweeting the entire conference.” If that's your shtick, I fully support that, but I always struggle going to any kind of vendor conference because I just feel like the value that I get from the talks, from training if I go to training, just doesn't feel like enough for me, personally.Amy: So, I've done some of the AWS-led training when Summit was in Chicago, a couple years ago, and I'll be honest, you lose a lot in these large AWS-led trainings because these classes, it's not going to be like the ones that you would sign up for even being hosted either by your company or by your local user group chapter where you will have at max 100 people. You have well over that. You have an entire conference room full of people, and they're asking questions that are across the level of expertise for that topic. I went for one of the certification training seminars and straight-up 15 minutes was spent talking about what a region is. And given that's page one of any training material, that was a waste of $300.Jesse: Yeah.Tim: I think you run into the problem because it is, in fact, I mean, let's be honest, it's a multi-day sales pitch. It's not a user conference, it's not user-generated content. It's cherry-picked by the powers-that-be at AWS, the service groups. Is a big push for account executives to encourage high-level or high-spend accounts to participate in those so they get logo recognition. And so that becomes more of the issue than the actual cool user stories.And that's fine if you're using it literally just a sales conference because it's very compelling sales material, your account executive will go there and try and close deals, or close bigger deals, or sign EDPs or something like that, but from an engineering standpoint, from a technical standpoint, it's remarkably uncompelling.Jesse: Yeah, I think that's one other thing to call out, which is, there is definitely this networking opportunity that we talked about from a hallway track perspective, but there's also a networking and business opportunity to meet with your account manager, or your TAM, or your SA in person and have conversations about whatever things you want to talk about; about future architecture, or about closing an EDP—or I should say, about an EDP because the account manager will try to close that EDP with you—and then basically use that as next steps for what you want to do with AWS. But again, all of those things can be done without flying you to Las Vegas and being amongst all these other people.Tim: I mean, let's not take away, there's a certain synergy that happens when you have face-to-face contact with folks, and a lot of these conversations you have in hallways are super, super organic. And so I think that's indicative of conferences as a whole. One of the things that we learned in the pandemic is that, yeah, you can have talks where people just, like, look at a screen and watch talks, and a lot of conferences have done that. But that's not why people want to go to the conference; they want to go to the conference to talk to people and see people. And if you want to have a conference where people talk to people and see people, and that's the whole point of doing it, then the business model behind that looks dramatically different, and the content behind that looks dramatically different.You just have a bunch of birds-of-feather sessions or a bunch of breakout sessions. You do a keynote at the beginning, you do a keynote at the end, and then you just let people mingle, and maybe you have some led topics, but you don't generate content; you shut up and you let the people innovate.Jesse: I also want to add to that. It is one thing to have a conference that is in one venue where everybody is going to be gathered in the same space, creating conversation, or creating easy opportunities—Amy: Five miles worth of content isn't exciting for you?Jesse: Yeah. So, in Las Vegas because the entire conference is spread across the entire strip, you're going to have opportunities to network across the entire strip basically, and sometimes that means you're going to only spend time networking with the people who are in the same hotel as you at the time of the track that you are waiting for, or the time of the event that you are waiting for. It is unlikely that you are going to run all around the strip just to be able to network with everybody that you run into.Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by our friends at Lumigo. If you've built anything from serverless, you know that if there's one thing that can be said universally about these applications, it's that it turns every outage into a murder mystery. Lumigo helps make sense of all of the various functions that wind up tying together to build applications. It offers one-click distributed tracing so you can effortlessly find and fix issues in your serverless and microservices environment. You've created more problems for yourself; make one of them go away. To learn more visit lumigo.io.Amy: The other issue I have, not just with re:Invent, but this is really any larger conference or conferences that rely on the kind of content where it is a person speaking at you and you don't get to meet these people, is that without any level of Q&A or interactivity—and this is true especially for AWS-led events—is that it is no different than watching someone on video. You can go to these talks, and you can perhaps have conversations with people as they filter out of the room, but there's no way you're going to be able to talk to that person who was delivering that content, unless you can track them down amongst the sea of people in re:Invent or [unintelligible 00:12:16] in Las Vegas.Tim: What typically has to happen is that after someone has given a compelling talk and you really want to talk to them, you have to go and talk to your account manager; your account manager will then set up a meeting that will happen at a later time where you're going to all call in over Chime, and then you will quote-unquote, “Meet” that person virtually. And if that's the case, you could have just stayed home and watched [laugh] the talk online, and then done the same thing.Amy: Conferences need more Chime. That's what [laugh] the problem is.Jesse: [laugh]. I think my eye just started twitching a little bit as soon as you said that, Amy.Amy: I'm glad. So, then why would people go? There's the hallway track, but is that worth the heavy price tag of going to Vegas? A lot of us live in areas where there is either going to be an AWS Summit or there are AWS user groups. What do you get from going to a larger event such as re:Invent and having that level of communication that you can't get from those smaller groups?Tim: I mean, the importance of networking cannot be overstated. It is extremely important, whether it's for laying groundwork for future deals, laying groundwork for future collaborations. I've been at conferences where a hallway track, just folks meeting up in the hallway and having a really organic discussion turned into a product within three months. So, those kinds of things are important. And, unfortunately or unfortunately, they do happen better quite often, when people are in-person and they've had a chance to talk, maybe even a couple of drinks or whatever.So, I mean, people ink deals, they shake hands, they get, you know, a lot of work done when it comes to maintaining and managing relationships, and to some people, that is worth it. But I do think that you have to be very, kind of, eyes-open about going into this. It's like, you're not going to go in there to get a lot of technical insight, you're not going to go in there to talk to a whole bunch of people unless you really have a relationship or establish some kind of rapport with them beforehand. Because just to go up and blindly like, “Hey, I'm going to grab you in the hallway, and this is who I am,” that's not always great, especially nowadays, when people are, kind of, already averse to, you know, talking to strangers, sometimes.Jesse: I've always struggled with talking to strangers in general at conferences because I'm predominantly introverted, so if I don't have an open introduction to someone through a mutual third party or mutual friend, it's just not going to happen. And I've gotten better at that over the years as I go to conferences, but it's going to be especially tough now in cases where folks are not just averse to, I don't want to say strangers, but averse to physical contact and adverse to people just, kind of, approaching them out of the blue. It's tough. I want to be more mindful of that and I want to be better, but it's hard, especially in cases where you're in a crowd of hundreds of people or, you know, thousands of people across the strip, that it just gets overwhelming really quickly for some folks.Amy: I do want to loop this round, if anything, just for a poll for Twitter. Do not close an EDP in Vegas. You're probably not of the right mind [laugh] and have the right people to do that. Wait till you get back to work. Please. That's just me. [laugh].Jesse: I would also like to add—we talk about why people go; I think that there's definitely a solid contingent of folks who attend re:Invent because it is the one time a year that the company sanctions them getting away from their family for a couple of days, getting away from, you know, the day-to-day routine of whatever work is going on for a couple days, and go to Vegas. Now, I know that the company is not going to sponsor them drinking every night, or gambling, or whatnot, but they're likely going to be doing those things anyhow, so it is this company-sanctioned opportunity to just go experience, you know, something different; go take a vacation, basically, for a couple days.Amy: Corporate Burning Man.Tim: Corporate Burning Man, exactly. A vacation in Vegas.Amy: I am not a fan of ever working in Vegas. If I'm on the clock, I cannot be in Vegas, not because I'm prone to excessive behavior when I'm on my own, but more that I cannot be productive in that much noise and that much flaky internet. It drives me absolutely batty, and I'm only going to be, as far as implementations, so productive in a crowd that large.Tim: I will say this, especially in regards to Vegas, there are other places you can go, other places that need the money more. AWS wants to rent a city, rent a city that needed the money. Put that money where it could be to used, where it really makes a difference. I don't know if Vegas is the right place for that, if I'm being honest, especially after all we've learned and dealt with in 2020. And so that's why in 2021, yeah, no for me, continuing to have re:Invent in Vegas is very, very tone-deaf.Jesse: I still think, Amy, you and I just need to—actually sorry, all three of us should attend and basically keep a running Waldorf and Statler commentary through the entire conference. I don't know if we can get that little, you know, opera booth that's kind of up and away from all the action, but if we can get something like that and do some sports commentary—ohh, maybe on the expo hall—Amy: That would be great. That would be great if we don't get banned. [laugh].Tim: I think what would be even more fun is to give a MST3K—Jesse: Ohhh.Tim: —treatment of the keynotes afterwards, you know what I mean?Jesse: Yeah.Amy: Yes.Jesse: I mean, Amy and I had also talked about playing some Dungeons and Dragons while we were there, and I feel like if we can find some, I'm going to say, tech-themed RPG—I realize that is a broad category, and everybody's going to spam me afterwards for this, but—Amy: I got that. Don't worry about it.Jesse: Yeah, I'm on board. I feel like anything that we can do to create a roleplaying game out of this conference, I'm down.Tim: I'm still waiting for you to explain to the audience in general who Waldorf and Statler were?Jesse: Oh, yes, that is fair. Okay. Waldorf and Statler are two characters from the old-school Muppets Show, which is amazing and delightful. It's on Disney+; I highly recommend it. They are basically—Amy: They're two grumpy old muppets, and they have been roasting people since the 70s. That is—that's all it is. [laugh].Tim: All they do is they sit up in the upper booth and they throw shade, and I love it.Amy: Yes. And they just show up in random parts in different movies. They'll be, like, on a park bench, and there'll be a serious moment, and then they'll just start talking crap for no reason. And it's great.Jesse: They're the best. They're absolutely fantastic. I adore them. I hope to be them one day.Amy: One day.Tim: Really, both of them? I don't, I don't know how that's going to work.Jesse: I am hoping to clone myself. One of me is going to have fabulous hair and one of me is going to be balding. Probably the clone is going to be balding; sorry about it, future me. But—Amy: [laugh].Tim: Well, I mean, and have just a magnificent chin, right?Jesse: Yes, yes, that's the trade-off. Losing the hair up top but absolutely fantastic chin.Tim: Here's what I want to see. I want to see the listeners submit things that you think should be on the re:Invent bingo cards.Amy: Ohh, yes.Jesse: Yes.Amy: I would love to see that.Jesse: So, for those of you listening, you've got two options for submitting things that you'd like to be on the re:Invent bingo cards. The ideal option is going to lastweekataws.com/QA. Fill out the form and let us know what you think should be on the bingo card. You can also respond to the social media post that will be posted for this content, and we can take a look at that as well. But that'll be a little bit harder for us to follow because I'm unfortunately not like Corey. I can't absorb all of Twitter in a day; it takes me a longer time to read all that content.Jesse: If you've enjoyed this podcast, please go to lastweekinaws.com/review and give it a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, whereas if you hated this podcast, please go to lastweekinaws.com/review. Give it a five-star rating on your podcast platform of choice and tell us what you think about AWS re:Invent.Announcer: This has been a HumblePod production. Stay humble.

TranscriptCorey: This episode is sponsored in part by LaunchDarkly. Take a look at what it takes to get your code into production. I'm going to just guess that it's awful because it's always awful. No one loves their deployment process. What if launching new features didn't require you to do a full-on code and possibly infrastructure deploy? What if you could test on a small subset of users and then roll it back immediately if results aren't what you expect? LaunchDarkly does exactly this. To learn more, visit launchdarkly.com and tell them Corey sent you, and watch for the wince.Jesse: Hello, and welcome to AWS Morning Brief: Fridays From the Field. I'm Jesse DeRose.Amy: I'm Amy Negrette.Tim: And I'm Tim Banks.Jesse: This is the podcast within a podcast where we talk about all the ways we've seen AWS used and abused in the wild, with a healthy dose of complaining about AWS for good measure. Today is a very special episode for two reasons. First, we're going to be talking about all the things that you want to talk about. That's right, it's time for another Q&A session. Get hyped.Amy: And second as is Duckbill's customary hazing ritual, we're putting a new Duckbill Group Cloud Economist Tim Banks through the wringer to answer some of your pressing questions about cloud costs and AWS. And he has pretty much the best hobbies.Tim: [laugh].Jesse: Absolutely.Tim: You know, I choke people for fun.Jesse: [laugh]. I don't even know where to begin with that. I—you know—Amy: It's the best LinkedIn bio, that's [laugh] where you begin with that.Tim: Yeah, I will change it right after this, I promise. But no, I think it's funny, we were talking about Jiu-Jitsu as a hobby, but my other hobby is I like to cook a lot, and I'm an avid, avid chili purist. And we were in a meeting earlier and Amy mentioned something about a bowl of sweet chili. And, dear listeners, let me tell you, I was aghast.Amy: It's more of a sweet stewed meat than it is, like, some kind of, like, meat candy. It is not a meat candy. Filipinos make very sweet stews because we cannot handle chili, and honestly, we shouldn't be able to handle anything that's caramelized or has sugar in it, but we try to anyway. [laugh].Tim: But this sounds interesting, but I don't know that I would categorize it as chili, especially if it has beans in it.Jesse: It has beans. We put beans in everything.Tim: Oh, then it can't be chili.Jesse: Are you a purist that your chili cannot have beans in it?Tim: Well, no. Chili doesn't have beans in it.Amy: Filipino food has beans in it. Our desserts have beans in it. [laugh].Jesse: We are going to pivot, we're going to hard pivot this episode to just talk about the basis of what a chili recipe consists of. Sorry, listeners, no cost discussions today.Tim: Well, I mean, it's a short list: a chili contains meat and it contains heat.Jesse: [laugh].Tim: That's it. No tomatoes, no beans, no corn, or spaghetti, or whatever people put in it.Amy: Okay, obviously the solution is that we do some kind of cook-off where Tim and Pete cook for everybody, and we pull in Pete as a special quote-unquote, outside consultant, and I just eat a lot of food, and I'm cool with that. [laugh].Jesse: I agree to this.Tim: Pete is afraid of me, so I'm pretty sure he's going to pick my chili.Jesse: [laugh].Amy: I could see him doing that. But also, I just like eating food.Tim: No, no, it's great. We should definitely do a chili cook-off. But yeah, I am willing to entertain any questions about, you know, chili, and I'm willing to defend my stance with facts and the truth. So…Amy: If you have some meat—or [sheet 00:03:19]—related questions, please get into our DMs on Twitter.Jesse: [laugh]. All right. Well, thank you to everyone who submitted their listener questions. We've picked a few that we would like to talk about here today. I will kick us off with the first question.This first question says, “Long-time listener first-time caller. As a solo developer, I'm really interested in using some of AWS's services. Recently, I came across AWS's Copilot, and it looks like a potentially great solution for deployment of a basic architecture for a SaaS-type product that I'm developing. I'm concerned that messing around with Copilot might lead to an accidental large bill that I can't afford as a solo dev. So, I was wondering, do you have a particular [bizing 00:04:04] availability approach when dealing with a new AWS service, ideally, specific steps or places to start with tracking billing? And then specifically for Copilot, how could I set it up so it can trip off billing alarms if my setup goes over a certain threshold? Is there a way to keep track of cost from the beginning?”Tim: AWS has some basic billing alerts in there. They are always going to be kind of reactive.Jesse: Yes.Amy: They can detect some trends, but as a solo developer, what you're going to get is notification that the previous day's spending was pretty high. And then you'll be able to trend it out over that way. As far as asking if there's a proactive way to predict what the cost of your particular architecture is going to be, the easy answer is going to be no. Not one that's not going to be cost-prohibitive to purchase a sole developer.Jesse: Yeah, I definitely recommend setting up those reactive billing alerts. They're not going to solve all of your use cases here, but they're definitely better than nothing. And the one that I definitely am thinking of that I would recommend turning on is the Cost Explorer Cost Anomaly Detector because that actually looks at your spend based on a specific service, a specific AWS cost category, a specific user-defined cost allocation tag. And it'll tell you if there is a spike in spend. Now, if your spend is just continuing to grow steadily, Cost Anomaly Detector isn't going to give you all the information you want.It's only going to look for those anomalous spikes where all of a sudden, you turned something on that you meant to turn off, and left it on. But it's still something that's going to start giving you some feedback and information over time that may help you keep an eye on your billing usage and your spend.Amy: Another thing we highly recommend is to have a thorough tagging strategy, especially if you're using a service to deploy resources. Because you want to make sure that all of your resources, you know what they do and you know who they get charged to. And Copilot does allow you to do resource tagging within it, and then from there should be able to convert them to cost allocation tags so you can see them in your console.Jesse: Awesome. Well, our next question is from Rob. Rob asks, “How do I stay HIPAA compliant, but keep my savings down? Do I really need VPC Flow Logs on? Could we talk in general about the security options in AWS and their cost impact? My security team wants everything on but it would cost us ten times our actual AWS bill.”Rob, we have actually seen this from a number of clients. It is a tough conversation to have because the person in charge of the bill wants to make sure that spend is down, but security may need certain security measures in place, product may need certain measures in place for service level agreements or service level objectives, and there's absolutely a need to find that balance between cost optimization and all of these compliance needs.Tim: Yeah, I think it's also really important to thoroughly understand what the compliance requirements are. Fairly certain for HIPAA that you may not have to have VPC Flow Logs specifically enabled. The language is something like, ‘logging of visitors to the site' or something like that. So, you need to be very clear and concise about what you actually need, and remember, for compliance, typically it's just a box check. It's not going to be a how much or what percent; it's going to be, “Do you have this or do you not?”And so if the HIPAA compliance changes where you absolutely have to have VPC Flow Logging turned on, then there's not going to be a way around that in order to maintain your compliance. But if the language is not specifically requiring that, then you don't have to, and that's going to become something you have to square with your security team. There are ways to do those kinds of logging on other things depending on what your application stack looks like, but that's definitely a conversation you're going to want to have, either with your security team, with your product architects, or maybe even outside or third-party consultant.Jesse: Another thing to think about here is, how much is each of these features in AWS costing you? How much are these security regulations, the SLA architecture choices, how much are each of those things costing you in AWS? Because that is ultimately part of the conversation, too. You can go back to security, or product, or whoever and say, “I understand that this is a business requirement. This is how much it's costing the business.”And that doesn't mean that they have to change it, but that is now additional information that everybody has to collaboratively decide, “Okay, is it worthwhile for us to have this restriction, have this compliance component at this cost?” And again, as Tim was mentioning, if it is something that needs to be set up for compliance purposes, for audit purposes, then there's not really a lot you can do. It's kind of a, I don't want to say sunk cost, but it is a cost that you need to understand that is required for that feature. But if it's not something that is required for audit purposes, if it's not something that just needs to be, like, a checkbox, maybe there's an opportunity here if the cost is so high that you can change the feature in a way that brings the cost down a little bit but still gives security, or product, or whoever else the reassurances that they need.Tim: I think the other very important thing to remember is that you are not required to run your application in AWS.Jesse: Yeah.Tim: You can run it on-premise, you can run at a different cloud provider. If it's going to be cost-prohibitive to run at AWS and you can't get the cost down to a manageable level, through, kind of, normal cost reduction methods of EDPs, or your pricing agreement, remember you can always put that on bare metal somewhere and then you will be able to have the logging for free. Now, mind you, you're going to have to spend money elsewhere to get that done, but you're going to have to look and see what the overall cost is going to be. It may, in fact, be much less expensive to host that on metal, or at a different provider than it would be at AWS.Corey: This episode is sponsored by ExtraHop. ExtraHop provides threat detection and response for the Enterprise (not the starship). On-prem security doesn't translate well to cloud or multi-cloud environments, and that's not even counting IoT. ExtraHop automatically discovers everything inside the perimeter, including your cloud workloads and IoT devices, detects these threats up to 35 percent faster, and helps you act immediately. Ask for a free trial of detection and response for AWS today at extrahop.com/trial.Jesse: Our next question is from Trevor Shaffer. He says, “Loving these Friday from the field episodes and the costing”—thank you—“I'm in that world right now, so all of this hits home for me. One topic not covered with the cost categorization, which I'm tasked with, is how to separate base costs versus usage costs. Case in point, we're driving towards cost metrics based on users and prices go up as users go up. All of that makes sense, but there's always that base load required to serve quote-unquote, ‘no users.'“The ALP instance hours, versus the LCU hour, minimum number of EC2 instances for high availability, things like that. Currently, you can't tag those differently, so I think I'm just doomed here and my hopes will be dashed. For us, our base costs are about 25% of our bill. Looking for tricks on how to do this one well. You can get close with a lot of scripting and time, teasing out each item manually.” Trevor, you can, and I also think that is definitely going to be a pain point if you start scripting some of these things. That sounds like a lot of effort that may give you some useful information, but I don't know if it's going to give you all of the information that you want.Tim: Well, it's also a lot of effort, and it's also room for error. It won't take but a simple error in anything that you write where these costs can then be calculated incorrectly. So, that's something to consider as well: is it worth the overall costs of engineering time, and maintenance, and everything like that, to write these scripts? These are decisions that engineers groups have to make all the time. That said, I do think that this is, for me I think, one of the larger problems that you see with AWS billing is that it is difficult to differentiate something that should be reasonably difficult to differentiate.If I get my cell phone bill, I know exactly how much it's going to cost us to have the line, and then I can see exactly how much it's going to cost me for the minutes. The usage cost is very easily separated from—I'm sorry, the base cost is very easily separated from the usage cost. It's not always that way with AWS, I do think that's something that they could fix.Jesse: Yeah, one thing that I've been thinking of is, I don't want to just recommend turning things on and measuring, but I'm thinking about this from the same perspective that you would think about getting a baseline for any kind of monitoring service: as you turn on a metric or as you start introducing a new metric before you start building alerts for that metric, you need to let that metric run for a certain amount of time to see what the baseline number, usage amount, whatever, looks like before you can start setting alerts. I'm thinking about that same thing here. I know that's a tougher thing to do when this is actually cost involved when it's actually costing you money to leave something on and just watch what usage looks like over time, but that is something that will give you the closest idea of what base costs look like. And one of the things to think about, again, is if the base costs are unwieldy for you or not worthwhile for you in terms of the way the architecture is built, is there either a different way that you can build the architecture that is maybe more ephemeral that will make it cost less when there are no users active? Is there a different cloud provider that you can deploy these resources to that is going to ultimately cost you less when you have no users active?Tim: I think too, though, that when you have these discussions with engineering teams and they're looking at what their priorities are going to be and what the engineering cost is going to be, oftentimes, they're going to want metrics on how much is this costing us—how much would it cost otherwise? What is our base cost, what's our usage cost?—so that you can make a case and justify it with numbers. So, you may think that it is better to run this somewhere else or to re-architect your infrastructure around this, but you're going to have to have some data to back it up. And if this is what you need to gather that data, then yeah, it is definitely a pain point.Amy: I agree. I think this is one of those cases where—and I am also loath to just leave things on for the sake of it, but especially as you onboard new architectures and new applications, this should be done at that stage when you start standing things up and finalizing that architecture. Once you know the kind of architecture you want and you're pushing things to production, find out what that baseline is, have it be part of that process, and have it be a cost of that process. And finally, “As someone new to AWS and wanting to become a software DevOps insert-buzzword-here engineer”—I'm a buzzword engineer—“We've been creating projects in Amplify, Elastic Beanstalk, and other services. I keep the good ones alive and have done a pretty good job of killing things off when I don't need it. What are your thoughts on free managed services in general when it comes to cost transparencies with less than five months left on my free year? Is it a bad idea to use them as someone who is just job hunting? I'm willing to spend a little per month, but don't want to be here with a giant bill.”So, chances are if you're learning a new technology or a new service, unless you run into that pitfall where you're going to get a big bill as a surprise and you've been pretty diligent about turning your services off, your bill is not going to rise that much higher. That said, there have been a lot of instances, on Twitter especially, popping up where they are getting very large bills. If you're not using them and you're not actively learning on them, I would just turn them off so you don't forget later. We've also talked about this in our build versus buy, where that is the good thing about having as a managed service is if you don't need it anymore and you're not learning or using them, you can just turn them off. And if you have less than half a year on your first free year, there are plenty of services that have a relatively free tier or a really cheap tier at the start, so if you want to go back and learn on them later, you still could.Tim: I think too, Amy, it's also important to reflect, at least for this person, that if they're in an environment where they're trying to learn something if maintaining infrastructure is not the main core of what they're trying to learn, then I wouldn't do it. The reason that they have these managed services is to allow engineering teams to be more focused on the things that they want to do as far as development versus the things they have to do around infrastructure management. If you don't have an operations team or an infrastructure team, then maintaining the infrastructure on your own sometimes can become unwieldy to the point that you're not really even learning the thing you wanted to learn; now you're learning how to manage Elasticsearch.Amy: Yeah.Jesse: Absolutely. I think that's one of the most critical things to think about here. These managed services give you the opportunity to use all these services without managing the infrastructure overhead. And to me, there may be a little bit extra costs involved for that, but to me that cost is worth the freedom to not worry about managing the infrastructure, to be able to just spin up a cluster of something and play with it. And then when you're done, obviously, make sure you turn it off, but you don't have to worry about the infrastructure unless you're specifically going to be looking for work where you do need to manage that infrastructure, and that's a separate question entirely.Amy: Yeah. I'm not an infrastructure engineer, so anytime I'm not using infrastructure, and I'm not using a service, I just—I make sure everything's turned off. Deleting stacks is very cathartic for me, just letting everything—just watching it all float away into the sunset does a lot for me, just knowing that it's not one more thing I'm going to have to watch over because it's not a thing I like doing or want to do. So yeah, if that's not what you want to do, then don't leave them on and just clean up after yourself, I suppose. [laugh].Tim: I'll even say that even if you're an infrastructure engineer, which is my background, that you can test your automation of building and all this, you know, building a cluster, deploying things like that, and then tear it down and get rid of it. You don't have to leave it up forever. If you're load testing an application, that's a whole different thing, but that's probably not what you're doing if you're concerned about the free tier costs. So yeah, if you're learning Terraform, you can absolutely deploy a cluster or something and just tear it back out as soon as you're done. If you're learning how to manage whatever it is, build it, test it, make sure it runs, and then tear it back down.Jesse: All righty, folks, that's going to do it for us this week. If you've got questions you would like us to answer, please go to lastweekinaws.com/QA, fill out the form and we'd be happy to answer those on a future episode of the show. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please go to lastweekinaws.com/review and give it a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, whereas if you hated this podcast, please go to lastweekinaws.com/review, give it a five-star rating on your podcast platform of choice and tell us whether you prefer sweet chili or spicy chili.Announcer: This has been a HumblePod production. Stay humble.

On the eleventh installment of our See It to Be It podcast series, Amy C. Waninger speaks with Bobbie Shrivastav, co-founder and CPO of Benekiva, about her personal journey that led to the insurtech industry, and Bobbie graciously shares where she goes for support among other women and people of color in the insurtech space. Connect with Bobbie on LinkedIn, Twitter and Instagram.Find out more about Benekiva. They're also on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and Instagram.Find out how the CDC suggests you wash your hands by clicking here.Help food banks respond to COVID-19. Learn more at FeedingAmerica.org.Visit our website.TRANSCRIPTZach: What's up, y'all? It's Zach with Living Corporate. Now, look, for those of y'all who are new here, the purpose of Living Corporate is to create a space that affirms black and brown experiences in the workplace, right? There are certain things that only we can really understand, and when I say we I mean the collective non-white professional [laughs] in corporate America. And when we look around--if you, like, Google being black and brown in corporate America, you may see, like, a post in Huffington Post or something that kind of communicates from a position of lack, but I don't know if we necessarily see a lot of content that empowers and affirms our identity and our experience, and that's really the whole purpose of Living Corporate. It's with that that I'm really excited to talk to y'all about the See It to Be It series. Amy C. Waninger, who has been a guest on the show, who's a writer for Living Corporate, and who's also the author of Network Beyond Bias, she's actually partnered with Living Corporate to actually have an interviewing series where she actually sits down with black and brown professionals so that we can learn about what they actually do and see ourselves in these roles, right? So it's a variety of industries that she's--she's talking to a lot of different types of folks. You're gonna be able to see what they do, and at the same time you're gonna hopefully be able to envision yourself in that role, hence the title See It to Be It, okay? So check this out. The next thing you're gonna hear is this interview with Amy C. Waninger. Y'all hang tight. Catch y'all next time. Peace.Amy: Bobbie, thank you so much for joining me. How are you today?Bobbie: I'm doing good, Amy. How are you?Amy: I'm doing great. I was hoping you could tell me just a little bit about your company so that we can sort of level set on what the heck is insurtech anyway.Bobbie: So a little bit about my company. I'm co-founder and chief product officer of Benekiva, and our entire mission for our company is to bridge the gap between the carrier, the policy holder and the beneficiary, and we do that by offering carriers--right now we're focused on life and annuity--organizations with claims automation, asset retention and data management.Amy: And so for the people who aren't in the insurance industry or don't know a whole lot about life insurance, let's break that into plain English. So you're trying to solve the problem--I'm gonna put words in your mouth and you correct me if I'm wrong--you're trying to solve the problem where someone dies and they have a policy and their beneficiaries maybe don't know that that policy exists or how to get to it, and you're trying to help people get the money that they deserve based on those policies being in effect, right?Bobbie: So yes, so--it's actually six-fold, 'cause our--we have six different modules that we've created, but before I go into the six different modules, success for our company is when a beneficiary has just received a check that they had no idea was coming. For us, that is what we are striving towards. Our foot in the door is through claims, and what we've learned by just interviewing and just statistics alone is that the claims process is simply outdated, so we have a 100% digital claims solution that also includes moving the money if the carrier wants to. So that's our first module, then we have modules that allow carriers to track their unclaimed property in the shipment [logs?], Bene Retention is taking the claims process and giving the ability for the carriers to serve the beneficiaries by using their sales [force?]. The module that you talked about, which is Bene Update and Bene Notify. So what we want to do is Bene Notify is when a triggering event happens--and unfortunately in life it is a death, death is a triggering event, that's when we want to notify the beneficiary. But on the update side, what we want to encourage carriers is how do you create that engagement with the policy holder so that we're getting that Bene information ahead of time? So you're not--right now if you look at carriers and how they're trying to find beneficiaries, Google is their best friend. How do we make Google not their best friend? 'Cause they can't find these benes, so they're looking online, they're look at obituaries. It's just a manual process to just find a beneficiary. Amy: Yeah, you would think they would've had that under control years and years ago, but good for you for putting all those pieces together.Bobbie: Oh yeah, and we've heard horror stories, even on the carrier side, where their bene information is still in file folders. So it's not--they've not even done the transformation to get some of the information online. So yeah, it's a huge problem, and we are very excited to solve it. So that's what, you know, drives us every day.Amy: That's fantastic. So can you tell me--how did you get into this space? Because obviously you're solving a problem that's never been solved before, and something led you here, so what was it?Bobbie: So it's an interesting story. So in 2016 I was working on a startup with Soven, who's one of the co-founders of my original startup and Benekiva, and he's also my husband. So both of us had this startup around digital--it was a digital documentation and e-signature platform, and he has roots in Iowa, so we--his parents were coming from Nepal, so we decided to go visit them, and my key was, "Hey, we're beta testing this product." And the product is Docsmore. I'm not sitting there and hanging out with family. That's great, but I also want to do some business development and just see what the Des Moines area looks like--'cause we live in North Carolina. So that's what led us to meet Brent, 'cause we had reached out to several people, and there was one person in particular we met, and she was Brent's client, and Brent Williams was a financial advisor, a very successful financial advisor--250 million assets under management--so he met with us, and he initially thought--when his client heard about what we were trying to do she's like, "This is interesting. You should talk to Brent, and let me do the introduction," so it was once again that networking. It was so cool. So we met up with Brent, and Brent thought he was telling us about financial advisory 'cause of our corporate backgrounds. He was like, "Okay, they look like good couples. I can help serve them," and the entire conversation--this is when Soven's like, "We're more interested in learning about your startup. What is it?" You should have see Brent's eyes. He just, like, "Oh, my gosh. I gotta share about this insurtech startup" that he was starting, and it was--as a financial adviser, he has gone through the claims process with this policy holder's loved ones, and he's seen the breakdown from the insurance--like, from an advisory angle, and that's when we fell in love with the problem. He was looking for innovation and tech folks to jion the team, and Soven and I had just bought life insurance policy because we--my child right now is 4, but at the time she was 1 and we just bought a life insurance policy. I'm like, "Are you telling me there's, like, a two-thirds chance that policies don't get claimed?" And she may be one of them. So we're gonna go--we're gonna go solve this problem. So that's how we connected back in 2016. That's when Benekiva was born.Amy: That's awesome. So you actually have a tech background, not an insurance background?Bobbie: I have a tech and financial services background.Amy: Okay. Also--Bobbie: Insurance is brand new, and I kind of immersed myself when I met Brent.Amy: That's neat. Yeah, a lot of people in insurance don't get there on purpose, right? They kind fall into it, and that's okay. We'll keep you. Bobbie: I love it so far. It's been amazing to find people like you and Tony and others that--it's been a great community of people, so I feel so welcomed.Amy: Good, I'm so glad. So what's been the biggest surprise to you about starting this venture in the insurtech space?Bobbie: So initially the town that I live in and our startup community, I'm the first insurtech startup in our area, in Winston-Salem. There's not many, and if there are they're hiding 'cause I've not seen anybody. Amy: Startups that hide are usually not very successful, by the way.Bobbie: So when I talk to folks about Benekiva in our local community, they were like "Yeah, that's not a problem. That's not a problem that needed to be solved," and I was like, "How can you say that?" And it's because they don't work in insurance. They've never been in the insurance--they don't understand the value chain. So I came in with the bias that yes, we are solving this problem, how will the market react when we launch? And we literally thought it was going to be this short, steady ride, we'll have this, like, really, really [?]. It's just gonna be just new. It's gonna be a long several years before we can get some good traction, and we have been blown away, and that's been the biggest surprise. So we know now, like, that kind of is confirmation. Like, we did so much research so we knew that there was a problem, but the fact that the market and the carriers and the supporters that we had gives us such good confidence that yes. So all of those other folks in my community who said "You don't have a problem," I do. I'm solving a problem. So that's been--but what's funny though is the same people that, when Brent talks to them, they're just enamored by the problem we're solving, but when I pitch it's kind of like, "Yeah, you don't have a problem." So I get some type of a bias sometimes, and I'm wondering what it could be, but... oh, I know what it is. Never mind. Amy: Imagine that. So yeah, I know people who will hire--I have talked to a couple women entrepreneurs who have hired men to go in and say that they're the boss to get money, to get clients, to close deals, and because for some reason when it comes from a man it's a great idea, so they just make that work for them. So I guess it's good that you have a partnership with someone who--Bobbie: Yeah, and we work so well as a team, and honestly from a Benekiva perspective, our entire team, we're just one big family. But he even recognizes, you know, that we do a lot of partnering when it comes to--'cause he's done sales all of his career, right, and I've been in tech, so I've learned a lot, and we've just been jointly doing selling, and what we've found is super powerful is when you have a male dynamic and when you have a female dynamic in the room trying to work with problems, right? I come at it from a different angle. He comes it at from a different angle. And we have just made that work so good, and it's actually what makes our company unique, because we do, we have that--we embrace diversity, and we do things together.Amy: That's awesome.Bobbie: Yeah, and he's a big supporter. He's like--he's the first one to say, "Okay, Bobbie, there's a woman in tech event and you're gonna go and present that." So I have a very supportive founding team. They push me to do stuff, so it's great.Amy: That's awesome. I'm so happy for you, because there are so many women, especially in tech, who would just, you know, yearn for an opportunity like that, to have an opportunity to contribute at their fullest, and I just think it's wonderful that you've found that and that you're doing it in a way that's just gonna help so many people. I just think it's awesome. I'm so excited for you.Bobbie: Thank you, thank you. And I encourage other women too. Like, that's--get out of that mental state of "We can't do it," you know? We have enough supporters that we'll make it happen, and a lot of our supporters come from men. So it's awesome.Amy: They need too because they're the ones with the seat at the table, right?Bobbie: Yeah. I mean, just recently a Twitter post where they had published, like, a top 10 or top 20 or top 30 insurtech list, and Nigel was like, "Where are the women founders?" And he, like, blasted [a few?] women founders, and it's people like that that make you feel so supported in our industry. 'Cause our industry is tough.Amy: It is, absolutely, and, you know, I've seen so many, like, future leaders, right, and almost without exception future leaders are young, white men, and it's like, "No, future leaders are everybody, and if you can't see that, then you're perpetuating the problem." So I'm so glad that you have those allies in place. So speaking of that, where do you go for support? And I know that you identify as a woman of color, being Indian-American. Where do you go for support among other women or other people of color in your industry?Bobbie: So honestly, in our industry, it's social media. I have a great group of core women that we support each other. Like, you're one of them. We support each other by tweeting, sharing. If I have an issue--like, I was just texting with my friend Marie, and just, you know, [?] is another one. We just have a good support system, but there's a group in LinkedIn for women in insurtech, and if you're a woman in insurtech you need to join that LinkedIn group. Add me on LinkedIn and I can add you to that group, because it's a good way to get that community growing and just encourage women entrepreneurs, especially in our industry. So I've done mainly--100% actually. It's all social media.Amy: I think social media is so under-recognized as a networking tool, and I did that myself early on. I was like, "I don't want anything to do with Twitter. I don't understand it. I want no part of it," and someone told me "No, you really need to be on Twitter," and the really needing to be on Twitter thing was like, "Okay, fine, whatever," right? And I started a little bit and I started a little bit more, and then I started to figure out how to grow my following there, and my network has exploded because of Twitter. And it's not superficial, ridiculous, like, trolling kinds of relationships, right? It's real, honest to God human people who, you know, called me when my book launched to congratulate me. Called me on the phone to congratulate me. Not tweeted at me, right, but, like, actually made a human connection. It's people who have invited me to speak at their companies. It's people who have, you know, referred me for opportunities. There's such a sense of community on social media, and I think a lot of people who don't use it that way don't recognize that that exists. When people say, "Well, how do I connect with people who are different from me?" My first thing is start on social media, because it's a great way to listen to a conversation without inserting yourself into it, and that's the first step in building trust.Bobbie: I'm reading a book right now about how to create--I'm on the chapter about how to create, like, CHAMP networks. It's--yeah, I mean, doing things on social media, I think people, there's--you know, you often get so much spam, and I think that's why people don't engage it in much, but once you can filter those people out there are some--especially in insurance, in insurtech--there's great conversations that are happening in pockets and bigger pockets, and it's a great support network.Amy: Absolutely, and, you know, as people connect with you and see you as one of their own, whatever that means, right, whether it's in your discipline or in your industry or in your demographic group, right, when people connect with you and really feel that they start to open doors for you. And these are people you wouldn't have access to you because they don't live where you live or they don't work at your same company or whatever. So I think it's just so powerful to put yourself out there and kind of let the universe take over in a way.Bobbie: Yeah, it's been the best--I was always on LinkedIn, but I think I really truly started understanding the value of LinkedIn in the last two years, because I have not--I've not been one of those people who truly engaged. I had a good following, you know, but now if you look at the conversations I'm having they're super meaningful and I'm building those relationships. Previously I was just at'ing co-workers and, you know, having the relationship and bonding at the workplace. Now, as an entrepreneur, you know, you don't have that luxury, especially with me being in Winston-Salem, being the only insurtech company, it's just it forces you to reach out.Amy: Definitely. So if somebody's not already in insurtech, where do you recommend they go to learn about this industry and what skills they might have that would transfer in or how they might get started, you know, in a career of their own here.Bobbie: So the way I entered insurtech was through startups, right? Like, I had an initial--I was an entrepreneur and just landed myself here. So I saw a complementary need that what I was trying to do with Benekiva was doing. What I would recommend folks that want to get into insurtech is find those problems that you want to solve. I wouldn't have gone into insurtech if I didn't fall in love with the problem. That's just not my personality. I don't build companies just to say, "Oh, it's gonna be profitable." I'm very mission-focused, so it's gotta touch my heart in order for me to even get involved. So I think if there's a passion or an interest or, like, if you're even curious about "Why does this happen in the insurance space?" Oh, my gosh, find a startup, and I would always encourage people to find a startup. Go to those startup weekends, right? Create something, like, an idea. You get resources for free. So much resources are available. Just maximize on that. And then if you've got enough momentum, build it. If not, then partner with somebody. You know, like, as a start, you know? So I always encourage entrepreneurs, like, if you're passionate about something, just do a side hustle, do a whatever, but just figure out, and then once--you will feel it when you've got the momentum to say, you know, you can leave, you know? You can leave your full-time job and do your own entrepreneur journey.Amy: It's scary, isn't it? 'Cause you went through that when you were an employee--Bobbie: Yes, that side hustling. Amy: Yeah, so tell me about that thought process. How did you prepare for that departure?Bobbie: I think I shared that story with you when we first met. So--it was so funny. So 2015 is when I was, like, you know, I jumped into entrepreneurship. And I had a full-time job. I had a very nice career. And when I dipped my toes in, the first thing I did was I told my boss, which there were--my employers, they were super supportive, and they were like, "We all have side hustles. You should have one too," so they totally encouraged me [?].Amy: That is so rare, by the way.Bobbie: Very rare, but I worked for a fantastic organization. And then I literally had--there's so many phases, and you've probably experienced it--imposter syndrome. "Am I gonna make it?" Oh, it's so tough. I mean, there's so much, like--it's a hard road. So one of my friends--we became very good friends, and she does coaching. She's a transformation coach. And she's just like, "You know what, Bobbie? You're so smart and you can do this," and I'm like, "Yeah, she's just saying that because she's my friend," but she's like, "Let me do a coaching session with you," and that went onto I wasn't part of a group coaching on things that initially, before I did that, I thought it was all, like, voodoo stuff [?], but it really worked because it helped me declutter all of the biases that I had and gave me the confidence. So what I did was March of 2017, I won't forget, I wrote a card and I said--I kind of planned my end-of-day--like, this is the date I'm gonna leave my work. I'm gonna have this grand party. I'm gonna say bye to everyone. And I wrote the date of September 29, 2017, and I looked at it every single day. Every single day I looked at it. So it gave me this kind of, like--I'm a project manager by trade--gave me, like, a timeline to get things done, get things planned out, and September 29th is when I left my full-time job.Amy: That's incredible. I love that story for so many reasons. Okay, so just one more question and then I'll let you go today, but when do you feel included, Bobbie? Tell me about a time when you felt genuinely included.Bobbie: You know, honestly--so the entrepreneurship journey has been difficult, and everybody has those stories, and I think I've literally felt included when--I've been on this journey in my local community since 2015. 2017 is when I really pushed, really organized an event where I really wanted local companies to meet startups, local startups. We talk about buying local, and I'm like, "It's time that you buy local products from startups, tech products. Don't go to Company ABC when another company is doing something similar. You should give them an opportunity. Give them a seat at the table." So I worked with our co-working space to do an event, and I was told that "Bobbie's legit," and I think that's--it kind of, like, pissed me off, but then it also gave me, like, this confirmation. Like, "Okay, now I think people are taking me serious," you know? But it took two years, and that's what my mission is, is it took me two years as a woman, right? And I know what the biases are. It's because I'm a woman. That's the issue, and I don't want any other woman to ever feel like they're not included earlier on in their journey. I felt included, and now I'm never gonna let anybody else not feel included until they've proven themselves. There's no need. There's no need.Amy: That's so beautiful, and I love that, that it took somebody else saying "You're legit." And how many of us struggle with that feeling of "I won't be accepted. They won't think I'm really supposed to be here," right? You know, Amy Cuddy, who did the TED talk famously on, you know, power poses and, you know, she talks about, "Oh, well, I'm not supposed to be here" because she had been in an accident and lost some of her IQ, you know, even though she had been on this meteoric rise. Then that was kind of taken away from her, at least in her own mind, and I think so many of us feel like we're just not supposed to be here, and when somebody else says, "No, no, no, you're legit," or, you know, someone that we really admire, you know, talks to us as an equal or, you know, or treats us that way. I just think that has such a profound impact. And you know what? It costs nothing.Bobbie: Yeah, it costs nothing. It's just you have to have an open mind and an open heart.Amy: Exactly. Bobbie, thank you so much for being my guest today. I greatly appreciate your time and your talents and I look forward to so much more from you.Bobbie: Thank you. Thank you so much.

Amy Cunningham is a progressive funeral director and the owner of Fitting Tribute Funeral Services in New York City. A former journalist, Amy co-authors a blog, The Inspired Funeral, with Kateyanne Unullisi. Full Transcript: Intro: This is Tanya Marsh and you’re listening to Death, et seq. The Fall semester just started at Wake Forest, so we’ve gone to episodes every other week for a little while, but the students in my Funeral and Cemetery Law class this semester will be helping me with some episodes, so you can look forward to some interesting topics. In the near future, you can look forward to an interview with Josh Slocum, the Executive Director of Funeral Consumers Alliance, and a conversation with my friend Tim Mossberger, the unofficial archivist of The Avett Brothers, about their music and mortality. But today’s episode is an interview with my friend Amy Cunningham, who is a progressive funeral director in Brooklyn, New York. Amy went to mortuary school in her 50s and embarked on this second career with an incredible amount of energy and empathy. She is the owner of Fitting Tribute Funeral Services and she is one of my favorite people. I hope you enjoy our conversation. Tanya Marsh: I am sitting with Amy Cunningham today in Brooklyn. Thank you, Amy so much for joining me on Death, et seq. Amy Cunningham: Hi Tanya. I’m very excited to be here. Tanya: Amy, I think of you as a non-traditional funeral director for a couple of reasons. You don't come from a funeral family. This is your second career. And you actively promote home funerals, green burials, and a number of other of “non-traditional” processes, rituals, and methods of disposition. And you do all of this in a state, New York, whose licensing makes it particularly difficult to be a non-traditional funeral director because of the licensing requirements. So can you just share your story and what motivated you to become a funeral director? Amy: Sure, it started with my father's death in South Carolina in the care of hospice and you know down there it's obvious to people in the small towns who to call when they need a funeral director—they know the funeral director from the Chamber of Commerce, from Rotary. So when my dad died we gave him a magnificent music-infused funeral service in the Presbyterian Church. I was amazed by the sweetness of the funeral director down there. I came back to Brooklyn. I was then a journalist writing about Buddhism meditations, spirituality, the new spiritual marketplace in the United States, how families were into marrying and mixing faith within their family system. I came back to Brooklyn after Dad's funeral and said to my husband, “gosh I admired that funeral director so much. I wonder what it would be like to be a funeral director. I wonder how you go about doing that.” That was in 2009, and six months later I was enrolled in mortuary school here in New York. It was a very rigorous demanding year and far more embalming and chemistry and science education than I ever anticipated. I'm not bitter about that now, but I was then. I got through all that and then took six months to, at the age of 54, not many funeral homes are eager to hire a mother of two who's had a career in journalism that doesn't seem applicable to the funeral biz. So it took a while to get a residency. But I did land a good one with a marvelous man who trained me and then I stayed there for three years and was always consistently interested in meeting the needs of families with a lot going on in terms of their faith constellation. The average family I meet with in Brooklyn these days—someone's a lapsed Catholic, someone's Jewish, someone's going to Buddhist retreats and practicing yoga. And they're trying to figure out how to arrange a funeral for a grandmother who had no faith at all, but then became a Mormon in the nursing home where she fell in love with the chaplain who was a Mormon and people come to me in that state. And when I sit with the family like that I feel I'm really in my sweet spot that I can truly help validate them and show them that they are not atypical that this is really the way we are right now in the United States. We can build a good ceremony. Tanya: I like that phrase “faith constellation” because that kind of pushes back on the notion—a notion about America in general, but maybe Brooklyn in particular, that we are increasingly unchurched and without faith. But that's suggesting that you actually have this sort of diversity and these mixed families of different ritual backgrounds, different faith backgrounds and so trying to find the middle ground or factors that are common to all of them, something that's meaningful. Amy: And yes there's a core of spirituality there and there may even be prayers or poetry that is loved within that family. So it's finding the right mix of language and music and the flowers and the right casket for that kind of group. They've got a lot going on so they want to keep it simple. And they're terrified about being ripped off or paying too much and too many people come in quite uninformed so to guide that kind of family through an experience that that then leaves them in an exalted, uplifted place is very meaningful work and I love it. Tanya: So what would you say your goal is as a funeral director with respect to families and the funerals that you're trying to accomplish. Amy: While I do a lot of alternative services, home funerals, green burials, witnessed cremations, I start out a bit simpler than that. I just want to give them a kind of ritual, a separation ritual that will be meaningful to them and that will endorse or include the values of the deceased and also send them out of the cemetery or out of the crematory that day off to their luncheon or whatever meal they're going to have after the service send them off in a place where they feel that that deceased person was loved, honored take good care of, and that we really did as a group the best job we possibly could. Tanya: Do you tend to deal with people more on a preneed basis? Do you have a lot of people come to you in advance to arrange their own funerals, or do you find that you're dealing more with families after the fact, or is it a mixture. Amy: Increasingly, as I get better now I've been very fortunate to have some good press, people are coming to me in advance. But I would say more frequently they're calling me the night of or two days prior to the death and the care of hospice occurring. A lot of my folks are dying in the care of hospice. I'm making inroads through hospice and getting known to hospice workers as someone who will take not only take great care of the deceased person but manage that complex family constellation. Tanya: And so mostly you're serving people in Brooklyn? Amy: Brooklyn and Manhattan, and Queens recently. Tanya: And then where are their families located? Are the families predominantly local. Or is an aspect of it that … I mean is part of the reason that people are calling you sort of at the last minute because the families coming in from out of town and nobody has made any arrangements. Amy: Some of that. I'm calling people who are in hospital corridors. But the cell phone will say they live in Portland or Cincinnati or Florida. So a lot of kids with parents dying here in New York because that's got that's got to be a challenge. Tanya: If you're not from a funeral family, you're not inheriting a funeral home or buying into an existing funeral home that has a book of business. Amy: Right. Tanya: Because most funeral consumers, the studies show, don't shop around. And there's an incredible reliance on using the funeral home that you've gone to funerals at before, to stick with a funeral director or a funeral home for multiple generations. So what are some ways just from a marketing perspective, getting started as a new business owner that you've tried to use to combat some of that. Amy: I used my background in journalism to develop some PowerPoint presentations that are purely educational or are not sales pitches. I just show people what a cremation is. What is cremation history. What did cremations look like in ancient Rome. And I started delivering those presentations at the Park Slope Food Co-op. Now we have 15,000 members in an alternative grocery store here in Brooklyn. And then my little show kind of took off and went on the road and Greenwood Cemetery now has me giving those kinds of workshops monthly and that's been great for all of Brooklyn. If someone asks me for a business card I may give it to them but it's not about spreading the word of my company, it's more about just giving them the facts because I think all funeral directors need to see themselves as educators. Death is a rather complicated today and there are a lot of important decisions to make involving thousands of dollars. And families will really feel cared for when they feel like they've been educated not just sold a bunch of goods. Tanya: Is it that younger people? Older people? Amy: It's neat. A lot of older people sometimes maybe couples in their 50s, 60s, 70s saying to each other “we really got to get going on this. We want to spare our children the struggle of putting a funeral together for us.” But then also I'm seeing people in their 20s and 30s are interested in funeral planning but also looking at careers in the end of life sphere. And I love these kids. I'm really impressed with the young people I'm meeting. I tell older people are in good hands because these are the people who are going to be taking care of us. And I think the book has not yet been written on how 9/11 influenced a whole generation of people. and deaths awareness and Caitlin Doughty’s books and all the great articles that have been running in The New York Times about getting ready for death and how to face it with dignity and courage. All of that is feeding a culture of young people who really want to get involved and help do death differently. In whatever way that means. And we used to say … I lead a Death Cafe at the cemetery now and it used to be said that death was the last thing any family wanted to discuss. And it was a forbidden topic. I don't find that to be true anymore. I think podcasts like yours, everything that's going on, has made death much more interesting to folks and a great topic to contemplate daily, just as the Buddhists advocate that life is improved through death and contemplation and then awareness. Tanya: The rural cemetery movement of which Greenwood was a part of, Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge Massachusetts as a part, were designed in part to give lessons to the living. They were designed as places of contemplation. I mean that was a thing that was part of our culture not that long ago a century, a century ago, and that we've really lost connection with. That acknowledging death and its inevitability and trying to think about how we want to deal with it both for ourselves and for the people that we care about doesn't have to be a scary icky saying it's actually an affirming thing right. Amy: Right. I may be a funeral director because I spent two weeks every summer of my girlhood in Texas and my grandparents used to take me to church every Sunday. And then after church we would drive to the cemetery. It wasn't even a topic of conversation. We would just go pull weeds up look at the stones and say, oh you know, there's Aunt Mildred. And then just go out to lunch. Nothing was really spoken, that was just a ritual that we had. Tanya: I mean I used to go to Nebraska in the summer of visit my grandparents and my grandmother and I in particular we used to go around to all the cemeteries in the county and she'd point out to me who all our people were. We'd pull grass. We were just in Nebraska about three weeks ago and cleaned up some grass around some of the tombstones, and I think I put on Facebook that were visiting my grandmother. Amy: It’s a lovely thing. Tanya: It's a connection. It's a connection through the generations and your relationships with people don't end at death. So Amy, you've talked about people coming from a whole diversity of backgrounds and positions of faith or ways of looking at the world and what some of the common factors in a good funeral might be. So have you thought about what makes a good funeral regardless of your background? Amy: I think even folks who are secular do well to study the structure of a religious funeral, because there are keys to the high notes and the important moments there. Even the terminology and the names of things are wonderful to study. I was just looking up the “death knell.” They used to ring bells when deaths occurred. There used to be callers out on the street, centuries ago, who would notify the community of the death. Today we have Facebook. We toll the bell in a completely different way, but a good funeral involves acknowledgement of the death, an announcement, an obituary, something like that. Tanya: An acknowledgement to the community and by the community. Amy: Right. And then kind of separating process. You know not all deaths occur in the presence of family. But when that death has occurred in the hospital room and family members are standing there weeping…we need to figure out how to, if there's not going to be a home funeral, preferably, it's wonderful to advise the family, if you get them early enough and can educate them, to spend some time with that deceased person and alert them to the fact that it is perfectly legal to keep that deceased person in a hospital room for three or four hours, or if death has occurred in a home in the care of hospice, that person doesn't need to be whisked away. We shouldn't be afraid of the body that we can actually sit there, cry, tell stories … hold the hand of the deceased, comb the deceased’s hair, maybe dress them, wrap them in a shroud. There's things that we can do at these moments that are very beautiful. So a good funeral I feel involves some involvement with the body. That doesn't mean if it's not your tradition, or not your inclination to be with a deceased person's physical body, you can sit in a quiet chapel at the crematory or at the funeral home in the presence of the body in a closed casket, you're still with the body, the body is still there. So I help people who are intimidated by too big an old fashioned deathbed experience to at least maybe sit in the funeral firm for a moment and have something like a visitation. So the announcement, the body, and then some kind of acknowledgement of the meaningfulness of that deceased person's life through a eulogy, through could be a written statement, something often in the context of a service, I think is great. And just feeling like you said to that person everything you had to say and that if you loved them, you said that in the presence of their body even when life is no longer going on within it. And then I think there should be something having to do with friends and a meal or you know these are the the bits, and I divide it up and look at it. And every family does part of it differently and some families try to forego a lot of it, but if they can just have one piece of it, then I feel like they have something they can talk about later and share with their friends that we did the best we could. We gave mom a good send off … we looked through photo albums. There's just there's a lot to it. And the days that unfold after death in the family… we call it a liminal time and space. Sometimes I call it sacred. If someone is secular and they don't like that word it's a special time. It's not every day you have a death in the family. So do whatever you can carefully try to seal yourself away from work and find activities that that will help you honor that person. It could be as a small ritual as if your grandfather washed his car every Saturday, you could start washing your car every Saturday. Some kind of little funny thing that brings that life back to you. You could change your Facebook password to have that person's name in it. Little teeny salutes to the value of that person's existence. I think make for a pretty good funeral. Tanya: We’ve also talked about that you think the start of a good funeral is with the transfer process and there are improvements that the industry more generally could make to the transfer process. Amy: Tanya, if I could make one change in the funeral business, if I could just help the industry see that that transfer from the place of death is the beginning of the funeral. This is where the healing will begin. To train the people who are coming into hospital, walking down the corridor with the rolling funeral home stretcher or cot and orchestrating a transfer from that bed where the deceased person died in and taking … it's a changing of the guard. It's taking a deceased person out of the hospital or the home and into the funeral home and doing that with grace and art and respect. And so many families come to me and say “oh my god my mother died and these guys came and they asked us to leave the room and then we heard the zipping of this bag and then they left as if they didn't want to talk to us anymore. And that was that. And we felt there was a tremendous rupture and sadness and that's when we began to grieve.” That's an unfortunate moment. So I like to go to hospitals with flowers in my arms. I greet the family. I speak to the deceased person by name. And everybody seems to feel good about that … that they know they're giving me permission to transfer that deceased person and take them into my care. But on a slower schedule, at a pace that they can tolerate, and including them and asking them to put music on a cellphone so that when we walk out the door and down the hospital corridor there's some kind of ballad in the background that articulates something about their love for that person. I have a very pretty cot cover. Nothing's ugly. I put flowers in the arms of the deceased so often. There might be flowers on the window sill that have been languishing there through the whole prolonged end of life period. So I take those flowers and I put them in the deceased’s hands and we cover with a pretty cot cover and we only cover the face when the family has told us it's OK to cover the face. So it's a moment and it's a … I make it a thing. I've tried to bring pageantry and a kind of ecstasy back into the whole period and make people feel like home. Okay, now we can go home we can bathe we can be ourselves for a while and let's get ready for the next phase of this thing. Tanya: I think it's so interesting because I've had a lot of conversations so far with people talking about the diminishment of the ritual as in the funeral. But you're talking about imbuing this whole period right after death with ritual that I think we have not had more broadly speaking right. And you're right. I mean the death of a person is such an abrupt transformation. Psychologists and sociologists have talked about, how at least in Western culture, we view human remains as unclean and that part of the funeral ritual like embalming and dressing and putting makeup on is and making a person look more alive is a way of socially transforming this unclean thing into a clean thing because it appears to be alive. Which is I think sort of, more traditionally for the past century, the way that we've all kind of viewed this and so if you look at it through that lens, yeah, take the unclean thing away immediately and then make it presentable again to be given to the living but you're sort of rejecting that idea. And I don't think you're alone in that. I mean I think there are a number of people who are rejecting that idea and saying that it is in fact that abrupt transformation or wrenching away the body that is unhealthy right to processing grief and saying goodbye. Amy: I think of it energetically and I feel like there's still even after a death has occurred a life energy in the room. So I happen to feel, at least it's very helpful to me. I don't know if a soul exists. It's very helpful to me as a funeral director to believe that one does because I comport myself as if the soul is watching me at all times. And it's a mindfulness practice. You have to feel that that deceased person has their eyes on you and that's a lovely relationship. It's not scary. It's a great thing. I talk to deceased people. I that kind of energy in the room. And I think people respond very positively to that. My funeral families seem to like me for that reason. None of us know. But it’s a good idea to just trust. Tanya: So I I've been asking this question of a lot of people and plan to continue to do and to do so and I think your answer just sort of showed your hand on how you might answer it. But do you think that funerals are for the dead or for the living. In other words, should we be respecting the wishes of the deceased with respect to their own funerals. Or should we be focusing more on what those that they've left behind want out of the whole process. Amy: This is the great mystic question. Actually, it was discussed in the first week mortuary school. And I think the technical answer is that it is for the living. Tanya: What do you mean the technical answer, you mean the answer that funeral school… Amy: Yeah, that you're wanting to engage that family in in a meaningful experience and that they are paying for a meaningful experience. But the wishes of the deceased certainly have to come in there. If grandma was a strict Roman Catholic, many families come to me saying we don't go to Mass anymore but grandma would want us to do this. This is what we're doing. Or they might adapt it a little bit, change it slightly. But I do think sometimes the wishes of the deceased can be disobeyed. And this is my example of that. It's not what you think. A friend of mine's mother said “I will haunt you,” as she was dying, “if you give me any kind of funeral. I don't want any funeral.” And they didn't have a funeral. And months later my friend was saying you know that was like Mom's final deprivation. We should have done something. So I think sometimes dying people may insist they don't want much but I think we can give them more than they ask for. Tanya: Well I think it's interesting especially since you mentioned that in the first week of funeral school that this was something you talked about, because the position of the law, and this has been true since Roman times, is that it's the decedent's wishes that matter. Right now part of this I think in the Anglo-American system had to do with the established Church of England and Christian doctrine about you need to be buried in consecrated ground. You needed to have, you know, the priest or the minister preside over your funeral if you were going to be resurrected eventually. So it was so important for the deceased that there remains be treated in the correct way and their eternal salvation rested upon that. That it was like a social contract. I'll take care of you, if you take care of me. And it was sort of an assumed baseline of what the decedents were going to want. Amy: It’s fascinating. Tanya: So the attitude of the funeral industry is so opposite to the tradition of the law that that's just it's really fascinating to me when you have these kind of incredible tensions and disconnect between two different institutions that are both sort of longstanding. No wonder people are confused, right? Amy: And that makes the appointment of agent to control the disposition of remains that are very important for people who whose wishes run contrary to the wishes of their families and that they want to make sure that they're protected. Tanya: Well and you know a practical problem that I've heard a lot of funeral directors say is that especially if a person died and they didn't have a spouse or their spouse predecease them and they have children where they have you know some other category of people who get to make a decision and that there's disagreement within the category. Divorced parents making a decision for a deceased child or children making a decision on behalf of a parent that you can have real practical problems and try and sort it all out. And that's the deceased left behind instructions then that's going to be a lot easier for everybody. Amy: Exactly. Tanya: So what kind of conversations do you have with people on a preneed or an at-need basis in terms of what kind of goods and services that they're looking for from you. In other words, why are families or soon to be decedents coming to you and so some other funeral establishment. Amy: Well one thing that I offer, and I'm very clear about on my website, is that I make every effort to make the funeral eco-friendly. So my customers tend to come to me because they know I'm going to offer them a simple casket and they also are not interested in embalming. My customer almost uniformly … I think maybe I might have one or two embalmings a year. And I don't mean to upset embalmers or be anti-embalming. It's just interesting to note that my customer is wary of embalming and not desiring that. So they may even ask about it, “You're not going to embalm.” And I say as you know, that's what I say on my website, I make every every effort not to embalm. I partner, I have my registration at a Jewish firm and it has a very large refrigerated space. So all our deceased people live back there, they are kept cool and can last a long time without any chemical intervention. That's … I've found that there are enough New Yorkers who find that important that they come to me and trust me. Tanya: And so a lot of people are coming to because of environmental considerations. Amy: Yes. Tanya: And so you have observed that their objection to embalming is part and parcel of their environmental considerations? Or is there something else going on with their objection to embalming? Amy: That’s a great question. I think they want as little intervention as possible. And here's the key word—they want an authentic experience. They want authenticity the whole way. Tanya: And they're viewing embalming as antithetical to authenticity. Amy: Yes. And I feel that there's a new generation of funeral customer who wants to see what death looks like. I recently had a family that even said “don't even close Dad's mouth.” A lot of funeral directors would find that outrageous, that of course you're going to close the deceased’s mouth for them. But this family said he looks fine. And they want things as natural as possible. And they're sometimes very amenable to viewing with very minimal care. They say goodbye at the hospital. They may take a glance or sit with the open casket for a time and they don't feel that chemicals are useful to them. And this is a customer that wants to watch money. But I also feel like they might be shopping at Whole Foods where they may be paying a bit extra for an organic apple just because it's organic. Tanya: Right. So interest in driving down the price of the funeral is not something that you've observed is a primary consideration. Amy: I tell that to other funeral directors as the good news of this thing because this customer wants it real and is willing to pay for that. Tanya: So what does a home funeral look like in New York City? Because it's always seemed to me that the urban areas were some of the first places where funeral homes became popular and widespread because people simply didn't have enough space in their own parlors. They had to go to a funeral parlor. And you still have some of the space considerations and people don't have cars. I mean you have a lot of sort of practical constraints in a city like this that you don't have in many other places that would that would seem to complicate a home funeral. So are you looking at home funerals and for the folks that come to you, it's like a whole range of different options? Amy: Sometimes a home funeral in New York is a delayed transfer or pickup. I'll get a call from a family they'll say “we've just called hospice. Mom is dead. We'd like four hours.” And I say “great you know let's set a time. Let's send text messages to each other. You tell me when you're ready and we’ll come over.” That's a mini home funeral. You don't need any dry ice for that. Sometimes it's an overnight. We've done quite a few of those. Sometimes it's a longer, more prolonged ritual. I had a Tibetan case where we kept a deceased gentleman in an apartment in Bushwick Brooklyn for almost three days. Tanya: You used dry ice? Amy: I left dry ice there but that particular gentleman was an advanced tantric practitioner. He visited with the Dalai Lama before his death. That gentleman was almost incorruptible. He was magnificent and knew how to die. And if ice was used, it was very little. Quite fascinating. But that was a great experience. But there have been other times where we brought deceased individuals into a brownstone in Brooklyn and laid them out in the parlor in the old fashioned way and then taken them back to the funeral home in the casket that night. So you're right, we have smaller living spaces, I think where the family centered funeral is really inhibited in New York and only at the point of families ever using their own cars or carrying someone out onto West 57th Street. That's not gonna happen anytime soon. I've had conversations with Josh Slocum about this. Much can be overcome that the city does pose some obstacles. Tanya: You mean just the practical realities of living in the city. Amy: I envy the Texans who can put granddad's casket in a pickup truck and take to the cemetery themselves. That's a tall order here in New York. We still have and that's why part of my business is rather conventional. I still use hearses and sometimes limousines. We have old fashioned cortège going to the cemetery and cars in sequence and all the old trapping, but New Yorkers still gravitate to that and want a little bit of pomp and circumstance. Tanya: So you mentioned witnessed cremations a couple of times. And I think that's really interesting to talk about. Because I've been to … Fresh Pond Crematory and toured that and that's a fascinating historical place that is really set up to and oriented to witnessed cremations for people from a whole bunch of different faith perspectives. I mean I think they've made a real effort to be to be inclusive in that way. But not every state has witnessed cremations or makes it very easy to have a witnessed cremation. So what do you think is valuable for families if anything about experiencing a witness cremation? Amy: Witnessed cremation has gone up a lot in my practice in the last two years. I think some people want to accompany their loved one the whole way as far as they can almost as if it's to the edge of a kind of grave they want of an experience. It's not that … I am careful with my language … it's not that they want it but they find benefit in the witness. What is a witness—it means that after the chapel service at the crematory or a funeral home, you can go to the area of the cremation plant or facility and witness the casket entering the cremation chamber or retort. The door is opened. Generally at Green-Wood the casket is on a lift, a hydraulic lift, it lifts up to the height of the retort and then the men gently guide that vessel into the chamber … Tanya: I've been I've been to the crematory at Green-Wood as well, and so the family is standing in a separate room, right? And so there's curtains… Amy: They’ve redesigned it. We’re going into the retort room now because it's so beautifully styled and designed. It's so beautiful back there. The metal of the doors is a kind of bronze and they're symbols of the world of antiquity back there that are very touching and moving. When that chamber opens you see a sort of arch of brick on the top of it and the glow of the embers. You don't see flames but if the family opts for this they can push a button on the wall that then lowers very slowly the door of the retort. It has a kind of magnificence to it. And certainly a finality. I don't use the word closure because there is no such thing as closure. You're going to carry this loss with you for the rest of your life. But it does make people feel like wow I took it as far as I could. I was with her every step of the way. And I was sort of available for every emotional aspect of this experience. People's knees buckle a little bit but they walk out of the room saying “Wow I've never seen anything like that before. Thank you.” Tanya: So that really challenges the notion that people are opting for cremation primarily because of cost. I mean because it was I guess it all has to do with the ritual that surrounds it because the pushing the button and the witnessing seems very similar to a graveside service where you're where you're putting a handful of dirt on the casket. Amy: Yeah. People want to do things even in a time of grief. And when I think of my male compatriots and my teachers in the industry who I love. I notice that in their lovely masculine way they've been depriving people of experiences because they feel that those experiences aren't good for them. And they say we will take it off your hands. We will do it for you. We are here for you. And it's very nice. And some families like that but increasingly families are saying “no we want to do that. We want to be there. You don't have to take it off our hands. We want to pay you to allow us to be there and be fully present.” Tanya: That we're going to get more value as a family from involving ourselves in the process. Amy: I recently had a group of people, a family, seated in the home with the deceased person present. They had on their own after death lit candles, put rose petals around her body, bathed her, brushed her hair, and then they were ready for me to come. I ended up coming with my own two man stretcher which is like a fireman's pallet. And I didn't call the man at the firm that I used to help me with these transfers. I went by myself and we were on the upstairs level of a two-story townhome and I said to the people assembled: “Listen, I thought about you guys, I knew that you have dressed her and cared for her and been here all this time. I thought that you might want to help me carry her out down the stairs.” Not every funeral director would be comfortable with this because there are liabilities, what if somebody stumbles. What if… it's always gone well for me, I don't know how to explain it any better, because it's like this family would have paid more to have the experience of carrying their loved one out of the house. That's an extreme example. But when we got to the bottom of the stairs we put this lovely woman, we covered her respectfully in gorgeous fabric. We put her in the back of my car. I closed the door. I turned to them and the gratitude was amazing to observe. These are very small ways that we can include families and continuing to love the person that they are now missing and help them in their adjustment to the new reality. Tanya: Let me ask you a final question for you but before we get to that this is sort of a mundane question. A lot of the things that you described doing do not fit with the general price list. Amy: Yes. Tanya: So how do you try to forge this new set of services? The gorgeous fabric, the involving the family, and transporting the body, the transfer process. A lot of these things that you're talking about—you did a direct burial not too long ago and there is a play list that you played. These are all services and incredibly important touches. But I'm just wondering how you reconcile that with a very formalized set of requirements imposed by the Funeral Rule. And then also sort of the established norms of how this industry works. Amy: I recently found myself standing in a Bed Bath and Beyond looking for some kind of piece of fabric or throw to put over a casket in the deceased person's favorite shade of robin's egg blue. And I stood there asking myself “how do I get this onto the Price List?” The GPL is not working for me. In time all I can imagine is perhaps getting so well-known for this kind of lovely series of gestures that I could raise my non-negotiable…my arrangements fee. It doesn't fit anywhere else doesn't it well. I mean there's no hourly wage, there's no funeral preparation hourly fee or something like that. I'm not able to monetize it yet. All I'm doing is building my brand and getting the word out that I'm available to you to do these kinds of things right. Tanya: Right. Because I mean the GPL is set up for … even though you still have this non-declinable fee for covering a lot of your profit and, you know, your services in the cost of goods. But if you're not doing an embalming that's out the door. Amy: The caskets aren’t expensive and they’re not marked up. Tanya: So that's a real challenge for people who are sort of pursuing a nontraditional kind of a path. That is much more service oriented. But the question is how do you accurately communicate the cost of those services to families. And right now there's transparency and fairness and that you're getting fully compensated for your time and expertise right and that they know what they're getting themselves into. That's the challenge. Amy: The guys at the funeral home watch me arrange rose petals in the interior of the casket where the deceased is never going to be viewed. They say, “Amy, just close the casket.” Well I want to finesse the shroud a little better. Yeah, I don't know. I mean I don't think I'll ever have any feeling of … I have to learn to protect myself, I guess. But I would love to sit down with others in the industry and figure out how we can offer these kinds of things and really save the funeral industry in so many words because it's not working the way it's set up right now. Tanya: So my final question is what sort of advice do you have for people who are considering following a path like you have. What have you learned? What would you do differently? Do you think that this is a path that others should follow? Amy: I think there are so many opportunities for thoughtful people in this business. And it's such fulfilling work. I would never discourage anyone from getting into it. However there are so many impediments and barriers to entry and hoops to jump through. My husband used to watch me studying late into the night in mortuary school and he'd say “honey this is like a hazing. I can't believe this. You know you want to just do good funeral services why are you having to memorize every bone in the foot.” So one thing I do say is that you really have to want to get into it, if you're in any way unsure then maybe it's not for you. It tends to be a business that is so hard to enter that you really have to want it more than anything else and almost see that there's no other path for you. If that requirement is satisfied then go on, get through the school that will maybe be one of the worst years of your life. But it's only a year you'll get through it. You'll be proud of yourself. Your family will be proud of you. And then try to negotiate the best residency you possibly can in those states that insist upon that yeah. And the embalming requirements are really tough and each state is different. So I was advised to just show my boss what I was good at. And I think he acknowledged after about four months of having me back there in what is known as the pit that really wasn't my gift. So I got through that part with all the legal requirements for residency and licensing in the state of New York and it's good to know a bit about embalming but I don't want to say it's going to be obsolete. There's always going to be a call for it but I don't know that the emphasis in the in the mortuary schools needs to be so focused on it. Tanya: Well there's definitely been some studies have indicated that the number of women who are interested in becoming funeral directors is artificially depressed by the embalming curriculum. Large numbers of women have said that they would be much because they're more interested in the I guess you call “front of the house.” Amy: Right. The suits, yes. The people who want to sell the funerals. Tanya: Well or just be involved in the experiences and helping people have a meaningful experience and funeral but they're not interested in the embalming side of it. And so coupling those two different professions into one. And the requirements to become both into one has cut down on a lot of people who would probably be pretty funeral directors Amy: Yeah, yeah. I am finding that the men in the industry I'm around are very moved by what I do and don't criticize me or make fun of me in any way at this point because they see that this is sort of why they got into the business themselves in the first place. I help remind people of the gorgeous nature of this work. And I think we all need each other and can work together and make for a new way for families to say goodbye. Tanya: Well I think that you are an absolutely inspiring funeral director and you're so positive. And that we could all learn a lot from the experience that you have and what you're trying to bring to families. Amy: Thank you thank you so much. You know by the way I have a blog that I write with Kateyanne Unullisi, a Seattle funeral celebrant, called The Inspired Funeral. And a lot of these ideas are on there. We divide the whole end of life period into nine different moments and we have readings for each of those moments and a lot of good material. Tanya: I'll put that in the show notes. Amy: My life as a journalist continues. Tanya: Awesome. Thank you so much Amy. Amy: Thank you.

Xiaohua: Recently, there is a 2014 version of the “Top 11 Careers in China that Prospective Partners Shun the Most”. Those careers are: writer, migrant laborer, singer, delivery worker, host, salespeople, lawyer, cook, news editor, journalist, athlete and flight attendant. My question is why are three media related jobs on this list which all together has only 11 jobs. Amy: Yes, a little bit sad. But I think it’s a little misleading thing, saying the “Top 11 Careers in China that Prospective Partners Shun the Most”. Because in reality what they have done is taking a survey of single people and figuring out what percentage of them are in certain careers, which is not the same as somebody saying I will never date you because you are a journalist or I will never date you because you are a host. It’s just… John: But perhaps this is actually more accurate. I mean, because they are looking at the actual, you know objective reality of the leftover category so like 27 and older and who is it. The proportional of those is in what careers, right? Amy: Yeah. But for a lot of these careers, the explanation is that they simply don’t have many opportunities to meet people. So it’s not necessarily that there being shunned because of their career. It’s just their career may not lend them opportunity to meet other people. Xiaohua: Right, so I think the more appropriate title would be “11 careers that have the most number of single people”, probably in that. Let’s take a look at some of these ones. There are some explanations. Do you think that these are why people in those careers are single or mostly single? Amy: Yeah, definitely. I think what is interesting is about 20% of leftover males are journalists and about 18% of them are lawyers. So if you look at journalists and lawyers, for lawyers, because of the nature inhabited of the job, lawyers always need to keep calm, be logical and they are not considered like fun and easygoing kinda people, because they are always busy. John: Wait, so you think this is a good explanation. Amy: I think them being busy is a good explanation. John: So not the fact that they’re not a lot of fun because they are too logical. Xiaohua: You don’t know. You’ve never dated a lawyer. John: I think most of these don’t make any sense to me. Migrant laborers, I think that one is pretty obvious, I mean you’re moving around a lot. And also we have to remember that most leftover men quote-on-quote are usually migrant laborers. So there is that difference, while most leftover women quote-on-quote are usually white collar workers. But like writers, they need to stay at home and write to make a living? None of the writers I know stay at home. Amy: They all go to cafes. John: Yeah, they all go to cafes and bars. I mean, no seriously, you know in university, even up to now, the writers that are quote-on-quote creative that I know, they are always out. The guys usually have a girlfriend, maybe not a long-term girlfriend. Amy: Maybe they are not presenting their best self. Maybe they are being a little pretentious when they are out there. Xiaohua: Or I think the fact that they are not married probably because they don’t want to get married, because they have so many girlfriends or boyfriends. Amy: Maybe, yeah. For sure, that’s got be a fact that is true. Xiaohua: We cannot think of the career that has a lot of single people as a pathetic career that nobody can get married forever. And also, you know entertainment people and entertainers… John: Singers especially. But also why should we care about singers and celebrities. They are famous enough. Amy: Yeah, I mean it’s the same case in the States where singers and celebrities are always single, because they are always getting divorced and cheating on each other, exactly. Maybe if you are famous, it doesn’t count. Xiaohua: Now let’s talk about us, the media workers. I mean hosts… John: No, this explanation does not fit us at all. As a public figure, hosts always have good looks. We’ve talked about this previously about he or she has a face made for radio. You weren’t here for this discussion. But I think unfortunately, that applies to all of us. Amy: Yeah. I mean this description says they have a higher standard for their partners so they think themselves as superior and thus they have trouble finding spouse. Xiaohua: That is totally not true. Amy: I’m not sure that’s true. But what I think is really interesting about this survey is that when we talk about leftover females, they are mostly white collar workers, including flight attendants. And that seems to make sense with our conception of what leftover women are. But this survey of leftover men seems to be a little bit weird for us, because we don’t think of journalists and lawyers as being leftover men. But we do think of leftover women as being white collar workers who have higher standards and can’t find a man because they’re working on their career. John: Yeah, because first of all, obviously, leftover women is a bit derogatory. We need to come up with better word, but there is anything that… Amy: Right. They are calling them leftover males and leftover females. John: Right, but in general, it’s really derogatory to apply them to both but since we are using it, leftover women in general are more visible to us in the middle class, because they are also part of the middle to upper class. Again 60% of leftover women are white collar workers. To be honest, it’s probably a bit higher. Whereas leftover men are usually from lower to bottom ends of the social economic scale, so I think that’s really why we end up talking about leftover women more and again why they are so much more visible.

XH: Actually this one is from Yale University, that’s being played. Actually, that doesn’t sound too bad. It has an ancient feeling to it, as well Amy: They all have ancient feelings to them, but you know I think that Chinese ones and the Yale one we just heard, and even like my alma mater, they all sound the same. It’s like a choir singing it, and it sounds like you’re in church to for some reason. XH: Yeah, it’s very ceremonial feeling to it. LY: Also like a spiritual experience, I guess, but I have to say I do kind of dig, the song from Communication University of China, because it’s a lot more pop, yeah, than the rest of bunch. And also this one I have to applaud their effort because they do not only have a song, they also shoot a music video for it. And a lot of stars are actually in that music video, because they graduated from that school. So I guess that’s a lot of star power. Amy: That’s kind of pretty cool. XH: That’s probably public university, because you know a lot of celebrities from graduated from their universities anyway, so you know why don’t they choose the most famous one? It’s pretty good promotion idea. And I think some netizens are questioning this ranking, you know, they’re saying why is the song from Zhejiang University No.1? Or why don’t we know about it like if we’ve known about it we go online, and try to vote for our university. Amy: Is anyone that invested making their university song No.1? I mean they all kind of sound the same singing like in the English and Chinese and Latin whatever. They all sound exactly the same with like slightly different melody to it. LY: Yeah, I have to say I’m with Amy on this one. I don’t really think people are that invested, if they do I can only say I can only quote very popular Chinese saying 认真你就输了 it’s just popularity contest, so what’s the big deal if the school doesn’t have the No.1 song, my school has the No.1 song; I didn’t even know it had a song. XH: and you don’t like it. XH: and also here we have a listener on WeChat Emily actually sent us, her school song. She’s from Hunan University of Technology, let’s take a brief listen. Emily: 大家好，我的校歌叫做《心愿》，湖水是你的眼神，梦想满天星辰，星辰是一个传说，亘古不变地等候，成长是一扇树叶的门…… XH: that’s not too bad. Amy: Is that a school song, or is that a pop song? XH: see, now you’re criticizing you know, the song being too pop, this doesn’t sound like a school song. Amy: maybe in this case it’s not fair because its way more popular, sounding than other school songs. XH: Yeah, I guess and if it were for me, it would be impossible for me to choose which are the best school songs. So do you guys have an opinion as like music DJs, do you have a standard to judge the best school song? LY: I guess it would be very difficult because different people have different tastes, so if you are into a certain genre of music, of course you tend to give that particular type a higher score than the rest. So I do know for a fact, for example, Wang Wei is very keen to Hip Pop. XH: Hip Pop school song. LY: but I don’t think we have come across any school song that’s actually hip hop, and it would just be very difficult imagine if actually any school song has a hip hop feel to it. Or worse any swearing in it. Amy: Yeah, I think maybe you would have to judge it based on the lyrics, cause they all…. I don’t think anyone just wants to like going home and listening to CD after CD after CD after school songs. XH: No. Amy: so maybe just have to like base on lyrics and if they strike you, make you want to go studying hard in the library, then it’s must be a good song. XH: Yeah, for me, I don’t mind the ceremonious songs, in fact I love operas and stuff and classic songs, but it still has to be like, it still has needs to have a good melody. I think that’s still most important of all. Amy: Yeah, definitely. XH: Yeah.

XH: Recently, the Ministry of Education releases the Top 10 University alma maters that are welcomed by net users. The top three songs are from Zhejiang University, Fudan University and Communication University of China. So a school song is also known as an alma mater, which can also refer to, you know, 校友 in general. Oh no, sorry, 母校 in general， so the university you graduated from. So do you think that why is there a need to have a song for universities? Why is there a need to have 校歌？ Amy: I’m not really sure what the need is but I do know that most universities have one if not all universities, even in America, even your high school has a high school song, fight song, and then some high schools may even have an alma mater as well. LY: I guess because this type of song tends to be anthem, and when you are singing anthem, you tend to be in a high spirit. Maybe, you know be, proud of where I come from, be proud of my school, that kind of thing. Amy: But I feel like the fight song should be enough, right, cause I think a lot of people in the US don’t even know their alma mater, they only know the school fight song. XH: so the fight song is? Amy: the one you sing at the football games, or you know at other sporting events usually, and it’s the one that the cheerleaders, well you know, pom pom to yeah, and the marching band will play it. LY: yeah, I have to agree with Amy. I think, you know, a fight song is probably a better idea for most people, but I guess when it come to Chinese universities again, you know, sometimes they just want something that’s attached to their face because face value is very important. If somehow they don’t have a school-wide song that is a representative of their school, they just don’t feel like this is complete, something is missing. XH: Yeah, that’s probably true, and also I think Mark Griffiths of China Drive was saying that in Britain, there weren’t a lot of those school songs, but it seems that in the US there are a lot, in China there are lot. So I guess there’s a sort of difference country to country. Amy: maybe he doesn’t remember his school song. XH: in fact, I think that a lot of people don’t even know that their schools have a song. LY: Guilty as charged, I never know my school had one song. Amy: Really? Which school? Is yours on this list? LY: It’s actually ranked No.1, Zhejiang University. XH: So actually, let’s take a listen at part of the clip. It’s like a Waltz. You know, it’s like a tune you dance to. Amy: Yeah, it’s very formal. XH: let me get your opinions as DJ’s, cause you guys are DJs as well. Amy: Hehe, terrible. LY: Hahaha, well since it’s my school. I shouldn’t use the word terrible, but that’s how I feel as well, because melody-wise is just it’s not one of those songs that can immediately put you in a good mood. I think as a school song, it should be able to do that. And also, lyric-wise, it’s not modern Chinese. It’s . . . just imagine if we’re talking about a school song in the United States, and the lyrics actually are full of words like Thou, you know, that kind of thing. Of course, it doesn’t make any sense. People would not remember. Amy: Well, actually I think a lot of school songs in the States do have Thou, Thee. I think I’m trying to remember all the words to my alma mater, and it’s like Minnesota~, something, something, I know there’s a Thee like there, ends with Thee, so I think a lot of the school songs were written like a long time ago, in university of Minnesota opened in I think like 1850s something maybe 1860s somewhere in there, but I think a lot of the school songs use this old language, and it’s just not relevant to us now. LY: See, that’s the point, I mean it’s not relevant to us, but we are still the ones who are supposedly singing these songs, so of course it’s very difficult for us to like the song. On the other hand, you can argue that “oh it’s all about tradition, so of course such language is necessary,” but who is your target audience? XH: Yeah, also I think when these songs are chosen a lot of it is about showcasing how long a history we have, so we’ve got use the ancient language. I remember there’s a song in a US university I forget whether it’s Harvard or some other university that’s written in Latin. Actually, there’s not a word that we can understand. Amy: so it has, you know probably a little prententious XH: Yeah, I guess. Also let’s take a listen at a part of the songs and which are the runner up, which is Fudan University and also the third which is the Communication University of China. LY: so this one is from Fudan, right? XH: Actually this one is from Yale University, that’s being played. Actually, that doesn’t sound too bad. It has an ancient feeling to it, as well. Amy: They all have ancient feelings to them, but you know I think that Chinese ones and the Yale one we just heard, and even like my alma mater, they all sound the same. It’s like a choir singing it, and it sounds like you’re in church to for some reason. XH: Yeah, it’s very ceremonial feeling to it. LY: Also like a spiritual experience, I guess, but I have to say I do kind of dig, the song from Communication University of China, because it’s a lot more pop, yeah, than the rest of bunch. And also this one I have to applaud their effort because they do not only have a song, they also shoot a music video for it. ...

John Artman: With mobile devices becoming so popular, people joke that the distance between life and death isn't as far as the distance between people while staring at their phones. Increasingly, we see this happening even in college classrooms. To combat this rising tide of inattention, the Management Department of the Luoyang Institute of Engineering has taken matters into their own hands. Now, students must put their phones into storage bags before the class even starts. So before we look at what the Luoyang Institute of Engineering has done, how serious is the staring at your phone all the time of problem in universities? Amy Daml: I’m not sure this is so different from way it back in the day, when grandma Amy was in university and we used to do crossword puzzles and sudoku , you know, I think it’s exactly the same thing. John: Or doodle. I used to doodle a lot. Amy: You used to doodle? Okay. John: Not diddle, but doodle. Zhou Heyang: Oh god. Amy: I think everybody… college students always find a way to screw around with your time in class whether it’s… you know just have a perfect device helps you do it. ZHY: Yeah, totally, I think people daydream. They… well, college students they just don’t really want to just focus on the books any more since that’s what you have been doing all your life in China, I guess. John: But this isn’t the point that’s going to the university and going into the classrooms for to you to pay attention, I mean that you are paying for, right? ZHY: Totally, but a lot of the times when you are just imagining you in the shoes of a college student, often I think for Chinese college students, it’s just like freedom after years of being, you know, supervised by your teacher and parents all the time, now you have the freedom to do whatever you want. And then people just feel like they have the time to throw around. But that being said, when I first saw this, I just thought, why are we… are we talking about college students? I mean this should be something that high school students or teachers do, I think. I think we you are in college, you are a young adult. Shouldn’t you be, you know, grown up, more grown up than this? John: No! Amy: You’re a young adult, but just barely a young adult, a very young adult, I mean. I remember going to college, and I was like, “Woohoo! I’m out of my parents’ house, and finally I don’t have the try so hard, and I can do ever I want. My classes don’t even start until 11 o’clock, like if I’m gonna go them at all.” You know, it was like this world opened up to me. I had all these choices. And it takes you while as a young adult to be disciplined enough to choose the best thing for yourself. John: Well, also I think it’s a little bit different in terms of Chinese culture, especially with the relationship to technology. It does seem that in general, compared to the US, these new, newer technologies get picked up really, really quickly. And I think that, yeah portable screens, as my mother would call them, are becoming a problem around the world, but especially in China and other Asian cultures, to be honest, the portable screen is… it just kind of sucks people… sucks people’s soul away. They’re there, but they’re not really there. ZHY: But still you are a young adult, that’s, you know, getting your hands onto the device in the first place, and allowing themselves to get sucked into it. John: So blame the parents. Don’t buy the phone, right? Amy: Well, I mean, I would tend to agree with John. I think that this is much more of a technology focused culture than back in the States. At home, you know, we have like, come up with some social rules about when it acceptable to use your iPad, your iPhone or whatever, and so we know that when you go into a movie, you shut your phone off, when you go into class, you shut your phone off, you know, or at least you put it on silence so that the teacher doesn’t catch you to playing games. ZHY: Yeah, but do students actually do shut their phone off in American classrooms, I kind of doubt that. Amy: They put them on silent, I think. John: Well, I don’t know, I mean it’s been so long. Amy and I are so old now. But, seriously because when I was in university, I just had like a little crappy, you know, Samsung feature phone. ZHY: And it doesn’t stop you from texting. John: All you could do was play Snake on it. Amy: Yeah John: But so we’ve gone off on a bit tangent here, but to bring it back, let’s take a look at what the Luoyang Institute of Engineering has done. So again, you have to put your cell phone into a bag before class starts. Do you think this is going to work in terms of attention and getting them to focus on their school work? Amy: Well, so they started this project on April 3, it has even been a week yet, so there’s plenty of time for it to succeed or to fail, but basically, the idea is that they bought a big that I image like a shoe storage a kind of thing, and then you each got a pocket, and then you stick your phone in the pocket at the beginning of the class, you can get it back at the end of the class, but basically you have to voluntarily surrender your phone during class time. ZHY: So do you have to? I think if people who are willing to do so can have it done Yeah, so I guess for those already pretty disciplined, I would say, to be willing to give up their phone during class, then they can do it. I think that is a good way to just physically keep it away from you, then you kind of have to focus on whatever you should be doing. But that doesn’t always work, because for those who want to daydream, I don’t think put your phone away will stop you.