Podcasts about bmcs

Bryan Cantrill is the co-founder and CTO of Oxide Computer Company. We discuss why the biggest cloud providers don't use off the shelf hardware, how scaling data centers at samsung's scale exposed problems with hard drive firmware, how the values of NodeJS are in conflict with robust systems, choosing Rust, and the benefits of Oxide Computer's rack scale approach. This is an extended version of an interview posted on Software Engineering Radio. Related links Oxide Computer Oxide and Friends Illumos Platform as a Reflection of Values RFD 26 bhyve CockroachDB Heterogeneous Computing with Raja Koduri Transcript You can help correct transcripts on GitHub. Intro [00:00:00] Jeremy: Today I am talking to Bryan Cantrill. He's the co-founder and CTO of Oxide computer company, and he was previously the CTO of Joyent and he also co-authored the DTrace Tracing framework while he was at Sun Microsystems. [00:00:14] Jeremy: Bryan, welcome to Software Engineering radio. [00:00:17] Bryan: Uh, awesome. Thanks for having me. It's great to be here. [00:00:20] Jeremy: You're the CTO of a company that makes computers. But I think before we get into that, a lot of people who built software, now that the actual computer is abstracted away, they're using AWS or they're using some kind of cloud service. So I thought we could start by talking about, data centers. [00:00:41] Jeremy: 'cause you were. Previously working at Joyent, and I believe you got bought by Samsung and you've previously talked about how you had to figure out, how do I run things at Samsung's scale. So how, how, how was your experience with that? What, what were the challenges there? Samsung scale and migrating off the cloud [00:01:01] Bryan: Yeah, I mean, so at Joyent, and so Joyent was a cloud computing pioneer. Uh, we competed with the likes of AWS and then later GCP and Azure. Uh, and we, I mean, we were operating at a scale, right? We had a bunch of machines, a bunch of dcs, but ultimately we know we were a VC backed company and, you know, a small company by the standards of, certainly by Samsung standards. [00:01:25] Bryan: And so when, when Samsung bought the company, I mean, the reason by the way that Samsung bought Joyent is Samsung's. Cloud Bill was, uh, let's just say it was extremely large. They were spending an enormous amount of money every year on, on the public cloud. And they realized that in order to secure their fate economically, they had to be running on their own infrastructure. [00:01:51] Bryan: It did not make sense. And there's not, was not really a product that Samsung could go buy that would give them that on-prem cloud. Uh, I mean in that, in that regard, like the state of the market was really no different. And so they went looking for a company, uh, and bought, bought Joyent. And when we were on the inside of Samsung. [00:02:11] Bryan: That we learned about Samsung scale. And Samsung loves to talk about Samsung scale. And I gotta tell you, it is more than just chest thumping. Like Samsung Scale really is, I mean, just the, the sheer, the number of devices, the number of customers, just this absolute size. they really wanted to take us out to, to levels of scale, certainly that we had not seen. [00:02:31] Bryan: The reason for buying Joyent was to be able to stand up on their own infrastructure so that we were gonna go buy, we did go buy a bunch of hardware. Problems with server hardware at scale [00:02:40] Bryan: And I remember just thinking, God, I hope Dell is somehow magically better. I hope the problems that we have seen in the small, we just. You know, I just remember hoping and hope is hope. It was of course, a terrible strategy and it was a terrible strategy here too. Uh, and the we that the problems that we saw at the large were, and when you scale out the problems that you see kind of once or twice, you now see all the time and they become absolutely debilitating. [00:03:12] Bryan: And we saw a whole series of really debilitating problems. I mean, many ways, like comically debilitating, uh, in terms of, of showing just how bad the state-of-the-art. Yes. And we had, I mean, it should be said, we had great software and great software expertise, um, and we were controlling our own system software. [00:03:35] Bryan: But even controlling your own system software, your own host OS, your own control plane, which is what we had at Joyent, ultimately, you're pretty limited. You go, I mean, you got the problems that you can obviously solve, the ones that are in your own software, but the problems that are beneath you, the, the problems that are in the hardware platform, the problems that are in the componentry beneath you become the problems that are in the firmware. IO latency due to hard drive firmware [00:04:00] Bryan: Those problems become unresolvable and they are deeply, deeply frustrating. Um, and we just saw a bunch of 'em again, they were. Comical in retrospect, and I'll give you like a, a couple of concrete examples just to give, give you an idea of what kinda what you're looking at. one of the, our data centers had really pathological IO latency. [00:04:23] Bryan: we had a very, uh, database heavy workload. And this was kind of right at the period where you were still deploying on rotating media on hard drives. So this is like, so. An all flash buy did not make economic sense when we did this in, in 2016. This probably, it'd be interesting to know like when was the, the kind of the last time that that actual hard drives made sense? [00:04:50] Bryan: 'cause I feel this was close to it. So we had a, a bunch of, of a pathological IO problems, but we had one data center in which the outliers were actually quite a bit worse and there was so much going on in that system. It took us a long time to figure out like why. And because when, when you, when you're io when you're seeing worse io I mean you're naturally, you wanna understand like what's the workload doing? [00:05:14] Bryan: You're trying to take a first principles approach. What's the workload doing? So this is a very intensive database workload to support the, the object storage system that we had built called Manta. And that the, the metadata tier was stored and uh, was we were using Postgres for that. And that was just getting absolutely slaughtered. [00:05:34] Bryan: Um, and ultimately very IO bound with these kind of pathological IO latencies. Uh, and as we, you know, trying to like peel away the layers to figure out what was going on. And I finally had this thing. So it's like, okay, we are seeing at the, at the device layer, at the at, at the disc layer, we are seeing pathological outliers in this data center that we're not seeing anywhere else. [00:06:00] Bryan: And that does not make any sense. And the thought occurred to me. I'm like, well, maybe we are. Do we have like different. Different rev of firmware on our HGST drives, HGST. Now part of WD Western Digital were the drives that we had everywhere. And, um, so maybe we had a different, maybe I had a firmware bug. [00:06:20] Bryan: I, this would not be the first time in my life at all that I would have a drive firmware issue. Uh, and I went to go pull the firmware, rev, and I'm like, Toshiba makes hard drives? So we had, I mean. I had no idea that Toshiba even made hard drives, let alone that they were our, they were in our data center. [00:06:38] Bryan: I'm like, what is this? And as it turns out, and this is, you know, part of the, the challenge when you don't have an integrated system, which not to pick on them, but Dell doesn't, and what Dell would routinely put just sub make substitutes, and they make substitutes that they, you know, it's kind of like you're going to like, I don't know, Instacart or whatever, and they're out of the thing that you want. [00:07:03] Bryan: So, you know, you're, someone makes a substitute and like sometimes that's okay, but it's really not okay in a data center. And you really want to develop and validate a, an end-to-end integrated system. And in this case, like Toshiba doesn't, I mean, Toshiba does make hard drives, but they are a, or the data they did, uh, they basically were, uh, not competitive and they were not competitive in part for the reasons that we were discovering. [00:07:29] Bryan: They had really serious firmware issues. So the, these were drives that would just simply stop a, a stop acknowledging any reads from the order of 2,700 milliseconds. Long time, 2.7 seconds. Um. And that was a, it was a drive firmware issue, but it was highlighted like a much deeper issue, which was the simple lack of control that we had over our own destiny. [00:07:53] Bryan: Um, and it's an, it's, it's an example among many where Dell is making a decision. That lowers the cost of what they are providing you marginally, but it is then giving you a system that they shouldn't have any confidence in because it's not one that they've actually designed and they leave it to the customer, the end user, to make these discoveries. [00:08:18] Bryan: And these things happen up and down the stack. And for every, for whether it's, and, and not just to pick on Dell because it's, it's true for HPE, it's true for super micro, uh, it's true for your switch vendors. It's, it's true for storage vendors where the, the, the, the one that is left actually integrating these things and trying to make the the whole thing work is the end user sitting in their data center. AWS / Google are not buying off the shelf hardware but you can't use it [00:08:42] Bryan: There's not a product that they can buy that gives them elastic infrastructure, a cloud in their own DC The, the product that you buy is the public cloud. Like when you go in the public cloud, you don't worry about the stuff because that it's, it's AWS's issue or it's GCP's issue. And they are the ones that get this to ground. [00:09:02] Bryan: And they, and this was kind of, you know, the eye-opening moment. Not a surprise. Uh, they are not Dell customers. They're not HPE customers. They're not super micro customers. They have designed their own machines. And to varying degrees, depending on which one you're looking at. But they've taken the clean sheet of paper and the frustration that we had kind of at Joyent and beginning to wonder and then Samsung and kind of wondering what was next, uh, is that, that what they built was not available for purchase in the data center. [00:09:35] Bryan: You could only rent it in the public cloud. And our big belief is that public cloud computing is a really important revolution in infrastructure. Doesn't feel like a different, a deep thought, but cloud computing is a really important revolution. It shouldn't only be available to rent. You should be able to actually buy it. [00:09:53] Bryan: And there are a bunch of reasons for doing that. Uh, one in the one we we saw at Samsung is economics, which I think is still the dominant reason where it just does not make sense to rent all of your compute in perpetuity. But there are other reasons too. There's security, there's risk management, there's latency. [00:10:07] Bryan: There are a bunch of reasons why one might wanna to own one's own infrastructure. But, uh, that was very much the, the, so the, the genesis for oxide was coming out of this very painful experience and a painful experience that, because, I mean, a long answer to your question about like what was it like to be at Samsung scale? [00:10:27] Bryan: Those are the kinds of things that we, I mean, in our other data centers, we didn't have Toshiba drives. We only had the HDSC drives, but it's only when you get to this larger scale that you begin to see some of these pathologies. But these pathologies then are really debilitating in terms of those who are trying to develop a service on top of them. [00:10:45] Bryan: So it was, it was very educational in, in that regard. And you're very grateful for the experience at Samsung in terms of opening our eyes to the challenge of running at that kind of scale. [00:10:57] Jeremy: Yeah, because I, I think as software engineers, a lot of times we, we treat the hardware as a, as a given where, [00:11:08] Bryan: Yeah. [00:11:08] Bryan: Yeah. There's software in chard drives [00:11:09] Jeremy: It sounds like in, in this case, I mean, maybe the issue is not so much that. Dell or HP as a company doesn't own every single piece that they're providing you, but rather the fact that they're swapping pieces in and out without advertising them, and then when it becomes a problem, they're not necessarily willing to, to deal with the, the consequences of that. [00:11:34] Bryan: They just don't know. I mean, I think they just genuinely don't know. I mean, I think that they, it's not like they're making a deliberate decision to kind of ship garbage. It's just that they are making, I mean, I think it's exactly what you said about like, not thinking about the hardware. It's like, what's a hard drive? [00:11:47] Bryan: Like what's it, I mean, it's a hard drive. It's got the same specs as this other hard drive and Intel. You know, it's a little bit cheaper, so why not? It's like, well, like there's some reasons why not, and one of the reasons why not is like, uh, even a hard drive, whether it's rotating media or, or flash, like that's not just hardware. [00:12:05] Bryan: There's software in there. And that the software's like not the same. I mean, there are components where it's like, there's actually, whether, you know, if, if you're looking at like a resistor or a capacitor or something like this Yeah. If you've got two, two parts that are within the same tolerance. Yeah. [00:12:19] Bryan: Like sure. Maybe, although even the EEs I think would be, would be, uh, objecting that a little bit. But the, the, the more complicated you get, and certainly once you get to the, the, the, the kind of the hardware that we think of like a, a, a microprocessor, a a network interface card, a a, a hard driver, an NVME drive. [00:12:38] Bryan: Those things are super complicated and there's a whole bunch of software inside of those things, the firmware, and that's the stuff that, that you can't, I mean, you say that software engineers don't think about that. It's like you, no one can really think about that because it's proprietary that's kinda welded shut and you've got this abstraction into it. [00:12:55] Bryan: But the, the way that thing operates is very core to how the thing in aggregate will behave. And I think that you, the, the kind of, the, the fundamental difference between Oxide's approach and the approach that you get at a Dell HP Supermicro, wherever, is really thinking holistically in terms of hardware and software together in a system that, that ultimately delivers cloud computing to a user. [00:13:22] Bryan: And there's a lot of software at many, many, many, many different layers. And it's very important to think about, about that software and that hardware holistically as a single system. [00:13:34] Jeremy: And during that time at Joyent, when you experienced some of these issues, was it more of a case of you didn't have enough servers experiencing this? So if it would happen, you might say like, well, this one's not working, so maybe we'll just replace the hardware. What, what was the thought process when you were working at that smaller scale and, and how did these issues affect you? UEFI / Baseboard Management Controller [00:13:58] Bryan: Yeah, at the smaller scale, you, uh, you see fewer of them, right? You just see it's like, okay, we, you know, what you might see is like, that's weird. We kinda saw this in one machine versus seeing it in a hundred or a thousand or 10,000. Um, so you just, you just see them, uh, less frequently as a result, they are less debilitating. [00:14:16] Bryan: Um, I, I think that it's, when you go to that larger scale, those things that become, that were unusual now become routine and they become debilitating. Um, so it, it really is in many regards a function of scale. Uh, and then I think it was also, you know, it was a little bit dispiriting that kind of the substrate we were building on really had not improved. [00:14:39] Bryan: Um, and if you look at, you know, the, if you buy a computer server, buy an x86 server. There is a very low layer of firmware, the BIOS, the basic input output system, the UEFI BIOS, and this is like an abstraction layer that has, has existed since the eighties and hasn't really meaningfully improved. Um, the, the kind of the transition to UEFI happened with, I mean, I, I ironically with Itanium, um, you know, two decades ago. [00:15:08] Bryan: but beyond that, like this low layer, this lowest layer of platform enablement software is really only impeding the operability of the system. Um, you look at the baseboard management controller, which is the kind of the computer within the computer, there is a, uh, there is an element in the machine that needs to handle environmentals, that needs to handle, uh, operate the fans and so on. [00:15:31] Bryan: Uh, and that traditionally has this, the space board management controller, and that architecturally just hasn't improved in the last two decades. And, you know, that's, it's a proprietary piece of silicon. Generally from a company that no one's ever heard of called a Speed, uh, which has to be, is written all on caps, so I guess it needs to be screamed. [00:15:50] Bryan: Um, a speed has a proprietary part that has a, there is a root password infamously there, is there, the root password is encoded effectively in silicon. So, uh, which is just, and for, um, anyone who kind of goes deep into these things, like, oh my God, are you kidding me? Um, when we first started oxide, the wifi password was a fraction of the a speed root password for the bmc. [00:16:16] Bryan: It's kinda like a little, little BMC humor. Um, but those things, it was just dispiriting that, that the, the state-of-the-art was still basically personal computers running in the data center. Um, and that's part of what, what was the motivation for doing something new? [00:16:32] Jeremy: And for the people using these systems, whether it's the baseboard management controller or it's the The BIOS or UF UEFI component, what are the actual problems that people are seeing seen? Security vulnerabilities and poor practices in the BMC [00:16:51] Bryan: Oh man, I, the, you are going to have like some fraction of your listeners, maybe a big fraction where like, yeah, like what are the problems? That's a good question. And then you're gonna have the people that actually deal with these things who are, did like their heads already hit the desk being like, what are the problems? [00:17:06] Bryan: Like what are the non problems? Like what, what works? Actually, that's like a shorter answer. Um, I mean, there are so many problems and a lot of it is just like, I mean, there are problems just architecturally these things are just so, I mean, and you could, they're the problems spread to the horizon, so you can kind of start wherever you want. [00:17:24] Bryan: But I mean, as like, as a really concrete example. Okay, so the, the BMCs that, that the computer within the computer that needs to be on its own network. So you now have like not one network, you got two networks that, and that network, by the way, it, that's the network that you're gonna log into to like reset the machine when it's otherwise unresponsive. [00:17:44] Bryan: So that going into the BMC, you can are, you're able to control the entire machine. Well it's like, alright, so now I've got a second net network that I need to manage. What is running on the BMC? Well, it's running some. Ancient, ancient version of Linux it that you got. It's like, well how do I, how do I patch that? [00:18:02] Bryan: How do I like manage the vulnerabilities with that? Because if someone is able to root your BMC, they control the system. So it's like, this is not you've, and now you've gotta go deal with all of the operational hair around that. How do you upgrade that system updating the BMC? I mean, it's like you've got this like second shadow bad infrastructure that you have to go manage. [00:18:23] Bryan: Generally not open source. There's something called open BMC, um, which, um, you people use to varying degrees, but you're generally stuck with the proprietary BMC, so you're generally stuck with, with iLO from HPE or iDRAC from Dell or, or, uh, the, uh, su super micros, BMC, that H-P-B-M-C, and you are, uh, it is just excruciating pain. [00:18:49] Bryan: Um, and that this is assuming that by the way, that everything is behaving correctly. The, the problem is that these things often don't behave correctly, and then the consequence of them not behaving correctly. It's really dire because it's at that lowest layer of the system. So, I mean, I'll give you a concrete example. [00:19:07] Bryan: a customer of theirs reported to me, so I won't disclose the vendor, but let's just say that a well-known vendor had an issue with their, their temperature sensors were broken. Um, and the thing would always read basically the wrong value. So it was the BMC that had to like, invent its own ki a different kind of thermal control loop. [00:19:28] Bryan: And it would index on the, on the, the, the, the actual inrush current. It would, they would look at that at the current that's going into the CPU to adjust the fan speed. That's a great example of something like that's a, that's an interesting idea. That doesn't work. 'cause that's actually not the temperature. [00:19:45] Bryan: So like that software would crank the fans whenever you had an inrush of current and this customer had a workload that would spike the current and by it, when it would spike the current, the, the, the fans would kick up and then they would slowly degrade over time. Well, this workload was spiking the current faster than the fans would degrade, but not fast enough to actually heat up the part. [00:20:08] Bryan: And ultimately over a very long time, in a very painful investigation, it's customer determined that like my fans are cranked in my data center for no reason. We're blowing cold air. And it's like that, this is on the order of like a hundred watts, a server of, of energy that you shouldn't be spending and like that ultimately what that go comes down to this kind of broken software hardware interface at the lowest layer that has real meaningful consequence, uh, in terms of hundreds of kilowatts, um, across a data center. So this stuff has, has very, very, very real consequence and it's such a shadowy world. Part of the reason that, that your listeners that have dealt with this, that our heads will hit the desk is because it is really aggravating to deal with problems with this layer. [00:21:01] Bryan: You, you feel powerless. You don't control or really see the software that's on them. It's generally proprietary. You are relying on your vendor. Your vendor is telling you that like, boy, I don't know. You're the only customer seeing this. I mean, the number of times I have heard that for, and I, I have pledged that we're, we're not gonna say that at oxide because it's such an unaskable thing to say like, you're the only customer saying this. [00:21:25] Bryan: It's like, it feels like, are you blaming me for my problem? Feels like you're blaming me for my problem? Um, and what you begin to realize is that to a degree, these folks are speaking their own truth because the, the folks that are running at real scale at Hyperscale, those folks aren't Dell, HP super micro customers. [00:21:46] Bryan: They're actually, they've done their own thing. So it's like, yeah, Dell's not seeing that problem, um, because they're not running at the same scale. Um, but when you do run, you only have to run at modest scale before these things just become. Overwhelming in terms of the, the headwind that they present to people that wanna deploy infrastructure. The problem is felt with just a few racks [00:22:05] Jeremy: Yeah, so maybe to help people get some perspective at, at what point do you think that people start noticing or start feeling these problems? Because I imagine that if you're just have a few racks or [00:22:22] Bryan: do you have a couple racks or the, or do you wonder or just wondering because No, no, no. I would think, I think anyone who deploys any number of servers, especially now, especially if your experience is only in the cloud, you're gonna be like, what the hell is this? I mean, just again, just to get this thing working at all. [00:22:39] Bryan: It is so it, it's so hairy and so congealed, right? It's not designed. Um, and it, it, it, it's accreted it and it's so obviously accreted that you are, I mean, nobody who is setting up a rack of servers is gonna think to themselves like, yes, this is the right way to go do it. This all makes sense because it's, it's just not, it, I, it feels like the kit, I mean, kit car's almost too generous because it implies that there's like a set of plans to work to in the end. [00:23:08] Bryan: Uh, I mean, it, it, it's a bag of bolts. It's a bunch of parts that you're putting together. And so even at the smallest scales, that stuff is painful. Just architecturally, it's painful at the small scale then, but at least you can get it working. I think the stuff that then becomes debilitating at larger scale are the things that are, are worse than just like, I can't, like this thing is a mess to get working. [00:23:31] Bryan: It's like the, the, the fan issue that, um, where you are now seeing this over, you know, hundreds of machines or thousands of machines. Um, so I, it is painful at more or less all levels of scale. There's, there is no level at which the, the, the pc, which is really what this is, this is a, the, the personal computer architecture from the 1980s and there is really no level of scale where that's the right unit. Running elastic infrastructure is the hardware but also, hypervisor, distributed database, api, etc [00:23:57] Bryan: I mean, where that's the right thing to go deploy, especially if what you are trying to run. Is elastic infrastructure, a cloud. Because the other thing is like we, we've kinda been talking a lot about that hardware layer. Like hardware is, is just the start. Like you actually gotta go put software on that and actually run that as elastic infrastructure. [00:24:16] Bryan: So you need a hypervisor. Yes. But you need a lot more than that. You, you need to actually, you, you need a distributed database, you need web endpoints. You need, you need a CLI, you need all the stuff that you need to actually go run an actual service of compute or networking or storage. I mean, and for, for compute, even for compute, there's a ton of work to be done. [00:24:39] Bryan: And compute is by far, I would say the simplest of the, of the three. When you look at like networks, network services, storage services, there's a whole bunch of stuff that you need to go build in terms of distributed systems to actually offer that as a cloud. So it, I mean, it is painful at more or less every LE level if you are trying to deploy cloud computing on. What's a control plane? [00:25:00] Jeremy: And for someone who doesn't have experience building or working with this type of infrastructure, when you talk about a control plane, what, what does that do in the context of this system? [00:25:16] Bryan: So control plane is the thing that is, that is everything between your API request and that infrastructure actually being acted upon. So you go say, Hey, I, I want a provision, a vm. Okay, great. We've got a whole bunch of things we're gonna provision with that. We're gonna provision a vm, we're gonna get some storage that's gonna go along with that, that's got a network storage service that's gonna come out of, uh, we've got a virtual network that we're gonna either create or attach to. [00:25:39] Bryan: We've got a, a whole bunch of things we need to go do for that. For all of these things, there are metadata components that need, we need to keep track of this thing that, beyond the actual infrastructure that we create. And then we need to go actually, like act on the actual compute elements, the hostos, what have you, the switches, what have you, and actually go. [00:25:56] Bryan: Create these underlying things and then connect them. And there's of course, the challenge of just getting that working is a big challenge. Um, but getting that working robustly, getting that working is, you know, when you go to provision of vm, um, the, all the, the, the steps that need to happen and what happens if one of those steps fails along the way? [00:26:17] Bryan: What happens if, you know, one thing we're very mindful of is these kind of, you get these long tails of like, why, you know, generally our VM provisioning happened within this time, but we get these long tails where it takes much longer. What's going on? What, where in this process are we, are we actually spending time? [00:26:33] Bryan: Uh, and there's a whole lot of complexity that you need to go deal with that. There's a lot of complexity that you need to go deal with this effectively, this workflow that's gonna go create these things and manage them. Um, we use a, a pattern that we call, that are called sagas, actually is a, is a database pattern from the eighties. [00:26:51] Bryan: Uh, Katie McCaffrey is a, is a database reCrcher who, who, uh, I, I think, uh, reintroduce the idea of, of sagas, um, in the last kind of decade. Um, and this is something that we picked up, um, and I've done a lot of really interesting things with, um, to allow for, to this kind of, these workflows to be, to be managed and done so robustly in a way that you can restart them and so on. [00:27:16] Bryan: Uh, and then you guys, you get this whole distributed system that can do all this. That whole distributed system, that itself needs to be reliable and available. So if you, you know, you need to be able to, what happens if you, if you pull a sled or if a sled fails, how does the system deal with that? [00:27:33] Bryan: How does the system deal with getting an another sled added to the system? Like how do you actually grow this distributed system? And then how do you update it? How do you actually go from one version to the next? And all of that has to happen across an air gap where this is gonna run as part of the computer. [00:27:49] Bryan: So there are, it, it is fractally complicated. There, there is a lot of complexity here in, in software, in the software system and all of that. We kind of, we call the control plane. Um, and it, this is the what exists at AWS at GCP, at Azure. When you are hitting an endpoint that's provisioning an EC2 instance for you. [00:28:10] Bryan: There is an AWS control plane that is, is doing all of this and has, uh, some of these similar aspects and certainly some of these similar challenges. Are vSphere / Proxmox / Hyper-V in the same category? [00:28:20] Jeremy: And for people who have run their own servers with something like say VMware or Hyper V or Proxmox, are those in the same category? [00:28:32] Bryan: Yeah, I mean a little bit. I mean, it kind of like vSphere Yes. Via VMware. No. So it's like you, uh, VMware ESX is, is kind of a key building block upon which you can build something that is a more meaningful distributed system. When it's just like a machine that you're provisioning VMs on, it's like, okay, well that's actually, you as the human might be the control plane. [00:28:52] Bryan: Like, that's, that, that's, that's a much easier problem. Um, but when you've got, you know, tens, hundreds, thousands of machines, you need to do it robustly. You need something to coordinate that activity and you know, you need to pick which sled you land on. You need to be able to move these things. You need to be able to update that whole system. [00:29:06] Bryan: That's when you're getting into a control plane. So, you know, some of these things have kind of edged into a control plane, certainly VMware. Um, now Broadcom, um, has delivered something that's kind of cloudish. Um, I think that for folks that are truly born on the cloud, it, it still feels somewhat, uh, like you're going backwards in time when you, when you look at these kind of on-prem offerings. [00:29:29] Bryan: Um, but, but it, it, it's got these aspects to it for sure. Um, and I think that we're, um, some of these other things when you're just looking at KVM or just looks looking at Proxmox you kind of need to, to connect it to other broader things to turn it into something that really looks like manageable infrastructure. [00:29:47] Bryan: And then many of those projects are really, they're either proprietary projects, uh, proprietary products like vSphere, um, or you are really dealing with open source projects that are. Not necessarily aimed at the same level of scale. Um, you know, you look at a, again, Proxmox or, uh, um, you'll get an OpenStack. [00:30:05] Bryan: Um, and you know, OpenStack is just a lot of things, right? I mean, OpenStack has got so many, the OpenStack was kind of a, a free for all, for every infrastructure vendor. Um, and I, you know, there was a time people were like, don't you, aren't you worried about all these companies together that, you know, are coming together for OpenStack? [00:30:24] Bryan: I'm like, haven't you ever worked for like a company? Like, companies don't get along. By the way, it's like having multiple companies work together on a thing that's bad news, not good news. And I think, you know, one of the things that OpenStack has definitely struggled with, kind of with what, actually the, the, there's so many different kind of vendor elements in there that it's, it's very much not a product, it's a project that you're trying to run. [00:30:47] Bryan: But that's, but that very much is in, I mean, that's, that's similar certainly in spirit. [00:30:53] Jeremy: And so I think this is kind of like you're alluding to earlier, the piece that allows you to allocate, compute, storage, manage networking, gives you that experience of I can go to a web console or I can use an API and I can spin up machines, get them all connected. At the end of the day, the control plane. Is allowing you to do that in hopefully a user-friendly way. [00:31:21] Bryan: That's right. Yep. And in the, I mean, in order to do that in a modern way, it's not just like a user-friendly way. You really need to have a CLI and a web UI and an API. Those all need to be drawn from the same kind of single ground truth. Like you don't wanna have any of those be an afterthought for the other. [00:31:39] Bryan: You wanna have the same way of generating all of those different endpoints and, and entries into the system. Building a control plane now has better tools (Rust, CockroachDB) [00:31:46] Jeremy: And if you take your time at Joyent as an example. What kind of tools existed for that versus how much did you have to build in-house for as far as the hypervisor and managing the compute and all that? [00:32:02] Bryan: Yeah, so we built more or less everything in house. I mean, what you have is, um, and I think, you know, over time we've gotten slightly better tools. Um, I think, and, and maybe it's a little bit easier to talk about the, kind of the tools we started at Oxide because we kind of started with a, with a clean sheet of paper at oxide. [00:32:16] Bryan: We wanted to, knew we wanted to go build a control plane, but we were able to kind of go revisit some of the components. So actually, and maybe I'll, I'll talk about some of those changes. So when we, at, For example, at Joyent, when we were building a cloud at Joyent, there wasn't really a good distributed database. [00:32:34] Bryan: Um, so we were using Postgres as our database for metadata and there were a lot of challenges. And Postgres is not a distributed database. It's running. With a primary secondary architecture, and there's a bunch of issues there, many of which we discovered the hard way. Um, when we were coming to oxide, you have much better options to pick from in terms of distributed databases. [00:32:57] Bryan: You know, we, there was a period that now seems maybe potentially brief in hindsight, but of a really high quality open source distributed databases. So there were really some good ones to, to pick from. Um, we, we built on CockroachDB on CRDB. Um, so that was a really important component. That we had at oxide that we didn't have at Joyent. [00:33:19] Bryan: Um, so we were, I wouldn't say we were rolling our own distributed database, we were just using Postgres and uh, and, and dealing with an enormous amount of pain there in terms of the surround. Um, on top of that, and, and, you know, a, a control plane is much more than a database, obviously. Uh, and you've gotta deal with, uh, there's a whole bunch of software that you need to go, right. [00:33:40] Bryan: Um, to be able to, to transform these kind of API requests into something that is reliable infrastructure, right? And there, there's a lot to that. Uh, especially when networking gets in the mix, when storage gets in the mix, uh, there are a whole bunch of like complicated steps that need to be done, um, at Joyent. [00:33:59] Bryan: Um, we, in part because of the history of the company and like, look. This, this just is not gonna sound good, but it just is what it is and I'm just gonna own it. We did it all in Node, um, at Joyent, which I, I, I know it sounds really right now, just sounds like, well, you, you built it with Tinker Toys. You Okay. [00:34:18] Bryan: Uh, did, did you think it was, you built the skyscraper with Tinker Toys? Uh, it's like, well, okay. We actually, we had greater aspirations for the Tinker Toys once upon a time, and it was better than, you know, than Twisted Python and Event Machine from Ruby, and we weren't gonna do it in Java. All right. [00:34:32] Bryan: So, but let's just say that that experiment, uh, that experiment did ultimately end in a predictable fashion. Um, and, uh, we, we decided that maybe Node was not gonna be the best decision long term. Um, Joyent was the company behind node js. Uh, back in the day, Ryan Dahl worked for Joyent. Uh, and then, uh, then we, we, we. [00:34:53] Bryan: Uh, landed that in a foundation in about, uh, what, 2015, something like that. Um, and began to consider our world beyond, uh, beyond Node. Rust at Oxide [00:35:04] Bryan: A big tool that we had in the arsenal when we started Oxide is Rust. Um, and so indeed the name of the company is, is a tip of the hat to the language that we were pretty sure we were gonna be building a lot of stuff in. [00:35:16] Bryan: Namely Rust. And, uh, rust is, uh, has been huge for us, a very important revolution in programming languages. you know, there, there, there have been different people kind of coming in at different times and I kinda came to Rust in what I, I think is like this big kind of second expansion of rust in 2018 when a lot of technologists were think, uh, sick of Node and also sick of Go. [00:35:43] Bryan: And, uh, also sick of C++. And wondering is there gonna be something that gives me the, the, the performance, of that I get outta C. The, the robustness that I can get out of a C program but is is often difficult to achieve. but can I get that with kind of some, some of the velocity of development, although I hate that term, some of the speed of development that you get out of a more interpreted language. [00:36:08] Bryan: Um, and then by the way, can I actually have types, I think types would be a good idea? Uh, and rust obviously hits the sweet spot of all of that. Um, it has been absolutely huge for us. I mean, we knew when we started the company again, oxide, uh, we were gonna be using rust in, in quite a, quite a. Few places, but we weren't doing it by fiat. [00:36:27] Bryan: Um, we wanted to actually make sure we're making the right decision, um, at, at every different, at every layer. Uh, I think what has been surprising is the sheer number of layers at which we use rust in terms of, we've done our own embedded firmware in rust. We've done, um, in, in the host operating system, which is still largely in C, but very big components are in rust. [00:36:47] Bryan: The hypervisor Propolis is all in rust. Uh, and then of course the control plane, that distributed system on that is all in rust. So that was a very important thing that we very much did not need to build ourselves. We were able to really leverage, uh, a terrific community. Um. We were able to use, uh, and we've done this at Joyent as well, but at Oxide, we've used Illumos as a hostos component, which, uh, our variant is called Helios. [00:37:11] Bryan: Um, we've used, uh, bhyve um, as a, as as that kind of internal hypervisor component. we've made use of a bunch of different open source components to build this thing, um, which has been really, really important for us. Uh, and open source components that didn't exist even like five years prior. [00:37:28] Bryan: That's part of why we felt that 2019 was the right time to start the company. And so we started Oxide. The problems building a control plane in Node [00:37:34] Jeremy: You had mentioned that at Joyent, you had tried to build this in, in Node. What were the, what were the, the issues or the, the challenges that you had doing that? [00:37:46] Bryan: Oh boy. Yeah. again, we, I kind of had higher hopes in 2010, I would say. When we, we set on this, um, the, the, the problem that we had just writ large, um. JavaScript is really designed to allow as many people on earth to write a program as possible, which is good. I mean, I, I, that's a, that's a laudable goal. [00:38:09] Bryan: That is the goal ultimately of such as it is of JavaScript. It's actually hard to know what the goal of JavaScript is, unfortunately, because Brendan Ike never actually wrote a book. so that there is not a canonical, you've got kind of Doug Crockford and other people who've written things on JavaScript, but it's hard to know kind of what the original intent of JavaScript is. [00:38:27] Bryan: The name doesn't even express original intent, right? It was called Live Script, and it was kind of renamed to JavaScript during the Java Frenzy of the late nineties. A name that makes no sense. There is no Java in JavaScript. that is kind of, I think, revealing to kind of the, uh, the unprincipled mess that is JavaScript. [00:38:47] Bryan: It, it, it's very pragmatic at some level, um, and allows anyone to, it makes it very easy to write software. The problem is it's much more difficult to write really rigorous software. So, uh, and this is what I should differentiate JavaScript from TypeScript. This is really what TypeScript is trying to solve. [00:39:07] Bryan: TypeScript is like. How can, I think TypeScript is a, is a great step forward because TypeScript is like, how can we bring some rigor to this? Like, yes, it's great that it's easy to write JavaScript, but that's not, we, we don't wanna do that for Absolutely. I mean that, that's not the only problem we solve. [00:39:23] Bryan: We actually wanna be able to write rigorous software and it's actually okay if it's a little harder to write rigorous software that's actually okay if it gets leads to, to more rigorous artifacts. Um, but in JavaScript, I mean, just a concrete example. You know, there's nothing to prevent you from referencing a property that doesn't actually exist in JavaScript. [00:39:43] Bryan: So if you fat finger a property name, you are relying on something to tell you. By the way, I think you've misspelled this because there is no type definition for this thing. And I don't know that you've got one that's spelled correctly, one that's spelled incorrectly, that's often undefined. And then the, when you actually go, you say you've got this typo that is lurking in your what you want to be rigorous software. [00:40:07] Bryan: And if you don't execute that code, like you won't know that's there. And then you do execute that code. And now you've got a, you've got an undefined object. And now that's either gonna be an exception or it can, again, depends on how that's handled. It can be really difficult to determine the origin of that, of, of that error, of that programming. [00:40:26] Bryan: And that is a programmer error. And one of the big challenges that we had with Node is that programmer errors and operational errors, like, you know, I'm out of disk space as an operational error. Those get conflated and it becomes really hard. And in fact, I think the, the language wanted to make it easier to just kind of, uh, drive on in the event of all errors. [00:40:53] Bryan: And it's like, actually not what you wanna do if you're trying to build a reliable, robust system. So we had. No end of issues. [00:41:01] Bryan: We've got a lot of experience developing rigorous systems, um, again coming out of operating systems development and so on. And we want, we brought some of that rigor, if strangely, to JavaScript. So one of the things that we did is we brought a lot of postmortem, diagnos ability and observability to node. [00:41:18] Bryan: And so if, if one of our node processes. Died in production, we would actually get a core dump from that process, a core dump that we could actually meaningfully process. So we did a bunch of kind of wild stuff. I mean, actually wild stuff where we could actually make sense of the JavaScript objects in a binary core dump. JavaScript values ease of getting started over robustness [00:41:41] Bryan: Um, and things that we thought were really important, and this is the, the rest of the world just looks at this being like, what the hell is this? I mean, it's so out of step with it. The problem is that we were trying to bridge two disconnected cultures of one developing really. Rigorous software and really designing it for production, diagnosability and the other, really designing it to software to run in the browser and for anyone to be able to like, you know, kind of liven up a webpage, right? [00:42:10] Bryan: Is kinda the origin of, of live script and then JavaScript. And we were kind of the only ones sitting at the intersection of that. And you begin when you are the only ones sitting at that kind of intersection. You just are, you're, you're kind of fighting a community all the time. And we just realized that we are, there were so many things that the community wanted to do that we felt are like, no, no, this is gonna make software less diagnosable. It's gonna make it less robust. The NodeJS split and why people left [00:42:36] Bryan: And then you realize like, I'm, we're the only voice in the room because we have got, we have got desires for this language that it doesn't have for itself. And this is when you realize you're in a bad relationship with software. It's time to actually move on. And in fact, actually several years after, we'd already kind of broken up with node. [00:42:55] Bryan: Um, and it was like, it was a bit of an acrimonious breakup. there was a, uh, famous slash infamous fork of node called IoJS Um, and this was viewed because people, the community, thought that Joyent was being what was not being an appropriate steward of node js and was, uh, not allowing more things to come into to, to node. [00:43:19] Bryan: And of course, the reason that we of course, felt that we were being a careful steward and we were actively resisting those things that would cut against its fitness for a production system. But it's some way the community saw it and they, and forked, um, and, and I think the, we knew before the fork that's like, this is not working and we need to get this thing out of our hands. Platform is a reflection of values node summit talk [00:43:43] Bryan: And we're are the wrong hands for this? This needs to be in a foundation. Uh, and so we kind of gone through that breakup, uh, and maybe it was two years after that. That, uh, friend of mine who was um, was running the, uh, the node summit was actually, it's unfortunately now passed away. Charles er, um, but Charles' venture capitalist great guy, and Charles was running Node Summit and came to me in 2017. [00:44:07] Bryan: He is like, I really want you to keynote Node Summit. And I'm like, Charles, I'm not gonna do that. I've got nothing nice to say. Like, this is the, the, you don't want, I'm the last person you wanna keynote. He's like, oh, if you have nothing nice to say, you should definitely keynote. You're like, oh God, okay, here we go. [00:44:22] Bryan: He's like, no, I really want you to talk about, like, you should talk about the Joyent breakup with NodeJS. I'm like, oh man. [00:44:29] Bryan: And that led to a talk that I'm really happy that I gave, 'cause it was a very important talk for me personally. Uh, called Platform is a reflection of values and really looking at the values that we had for Node and the values that Node had for itself. And they didn't line up. [00:44:49] Bryan: And the problem is that the values that Node had for itself and the values that we had for Node are all kind of positives, right? Like there's nobody in the node community who's like, I don't want rigor, I hate rigor. It's just that if they had the choose between rigor and making the language approachable. [00:45:09] Bryan: They would choose approachability every single time. They would never choose rigor. And, you know, that was a, that was a big eye-opener. I do, I would say, if you watch this talk. [00:45:20] Bryan: because I knew that there's, like, the audience was gonna be filled with, with people who, had been a part of the fork in 2014, I think was the, the, the, the fork, the IOJS fork. And I knew that there, there were, there were some, you know, some people that were, um, had been there for the fork and. [00:45:41] Bryan: I said a little bit of a trap for the audience. But the, and the trap, I said, you know what, I, I kind of talked about the values that we had and the aspirations we had for Node, the aspirations that Node had for itself and how they were different. [00:45:53] Bryan: And, you know, and I'm like, look in, in, in hindsight, like a fracture was inevitable. And in 2014 there was finally a fracture. And do people know what happened in 2014? And if you, if you, you could listen to that talk, everyone almost says in unison, like IOJS. I'm like, oh right. IOJS. Right. That's actually not what I was thinking of. [00:46:19] Bryan: And I go to the next slide and is a tweet from a guy named TJ Holloway, Chuck, who was the most prolific contributor to Node. And it was his tweet also in 2014 before the fork, before the IOJS fork explaining that he was leaving Node and that he was going to go. And you, if you turn the volume all the way up, you can hear the audience gasp. [00:46:41] Bryan: And it's just delicious because the community had never really come, had never really confronted why TJ left. Um, there. And I went through a couple folks, Felix, bunch of other folks, early Node folks. That were there in 2010, were leaving in 2014, and they were going to go primarily, and they were going to go because they were sick of the same things that we were sick of. [00:47:09] Bryan: They, they, they had hit the same things that we had hit and they were frustrated. I I really do believe this, that platforms do reflect their own values. And when you are making a software decision, you are selecting value. [00:47:26] Bryan: You should select values that align with the values that you have for that software. That is, those are, that's way more important than other things that people look at. I think people look at, for example, quote unquote community size way too frequently, community size is like. Eh, maybe it can be fine. [00:47:44] Bryan: I've been in very large communities, node. I've been in super small open source communities like AUMs and RAs, a bunch of others. there are strengths and weaknesses to both approaches just as like there's a strength to being in a big city versus a small town. Me personally, I'll take the small community more or less every time because the small community is almost always self-selecting based on values and just for the same reason that I like working at small companies or small teams. [00:48:11] Bryan: There's a lot of value to be had in a small community. It's not to say that large communities are valueless, but again, long answer to your question of kind of where did things go south with Joyent and node. They went south because the, the values that we had and the values the community had didn't line up and that was a very educational experience, as you might imagine. [00:48:33] Jeremy: Yeah. And, and given that you mentioned how, because of those values, some people moved from Node to go, and in the end for much of what oxide is building. You ended up using rust. What, what would you say are the, the values of go and and rust, and how did you end up choosing Rust given that. Go's decisions regarding generics, versioning, compilation speed priority [00:48:56] Bryan: Yeah, I mean, well, so the value for, yeah. And so go, I mean, I understand why people move from Node to Go, go to me was kind of a lateral move. Um, there were a bunch of things that I, uh, go was still garbage collected, um, which I didn't like. Um, go also is very strange in terms of there are these kind of like. [00:49:17] Bryan: These autocratic kind of decisions that are very bizarre. Um, there, I mean, generics is kind of a famous one, right? Where go kind of as a point of principle didn't have generics, even though go itself actually the innards of go did have generics. It's just that you a go user weren't allowed to have them. [00:49:35] Bryan: And you know, it's kind of, there was, there was an old cartoon years and years ago about like when a, when a technologist is telling you that something is technically impossible, that actually means I don't feel like it. Uh, and there was a certain degree of like, generics are technically impossible and go, it's like, Hey, actually there are. [00:49:51] Bryan: And so there was, and I just think that the arguments against generics were kind of disingenuous. Um, and indeed, like they ended up adopting generics and then there's like some super weird stuff around like, they're very anti-assertion, which is like, what, how are you? Why are you, how is someone against assertions, it doesn't even make any sense, but it's like, oh, nope. [00:50:10] Bryan: Okay. There's a whole scree on it. Nope, we're against assertions and the, you know, against versioning. There was another thing like, you know, the Rob Pike has kind of famously been like, you should always just run on the way to commit. And you're like, does that, is that, does that make sense? I mean this, we actually built it. [00:50:26] Bryan: And so there are a bunch of things like that. You're just like, okay, this is just exhausting and. I mean, there's some things about Go that are great and, uh, plenty of other things that I just, I'm not a fan of. Um, I think that the, in the end, like Go cares a lot about like compile time. It's super important for Go Right? [00:50:44] Bryan: Is very quick, compile time. I'm like, okay. But that's like compile time is not like, it's not unimportant, it's doesn't have zero importance. But I've got other things that are like lots more important than that. Um, what I really care about is I want a high performing artifact. I wanted garbage collection outta my life. Don't think garbage collection has good trade offs [00:51:00] Bryan: I, I gotta tell you, I, I like garbage collection to me is an embodiment of this like, larger problem of where do you put cognitive load in the software development process. And what garbage collection is saying to me it is right for plenty of other people and the software that they wanna develop. [00:51:21] Bryan: But for me and the software that I wanna develop, infrastructure software, I don't want garbage collection because I can solve the memory allocation problem. I know when I'm like, done with something or not. I mean, it's like I, whether that's in, in C with, I mean it's actually like, it's really not that hard to not leak memory in, in a C base system. [00:51:44] Bryan: And you can. give yourself a lot of tooling that allows you to diagnose where memory leaks are coming from. So it's like that is a solvable problem. There are other challenges with that, but like, when you are developing a really sophisticated system that has garbage collection is using garbage collection. [00:51:59] Bryan: You spend as much time trying to dork with the garbage collector to convince it to collect the thing that you know is garbage. You are like, I've got this thing. I know it's garbage. Now I need to use these like tips and tricks to get the garbage collector. I mean, it's like, it feels like every Java performance issue goes to like minus xx call and use the other garbage collector, whatever one you're using, use a different one and using a different, a different approach. [00:52:23] Bryan: It's like, so you're, you're in this, to me, it's like you're in the worst of all worlds where. the reason that garbage collection is helpful is because the programmer doesn't have to think at all about this problem. But now you're actually dealing with these long pauses in production. [00:52:38] Bryan: You're dealing with all these other issues where actually you need to think a lot about it. And it's kind of, it, it it's witchcraft. It, it, it's this black box that you can't see into. So it's like, what problem have we solved exactly? And I mean, so the fact that go had garbage collection, it's like, eh, no, I, I do not want, like, and then you get all the other like weird fatwahs and you know, everything else. [00:52:57] Bryan: I'm like, no, thank you. Go is a no thank you for me, I, I get it why people like it or use it, but it's, it's just, that was not gonna be it. Choosing Rust [00:53:04] Bryan: I'm like, I want C. but I, there are things I didn't like about C too. I was looking for something that was gonna give me the deterministic kind of artifact that I got outta C. But I wanted library support and C is tough because there's, it's all convention. you know, there's just a bunch of other things that are just thorny. And I remember thinking vividly in 2018, I'm like, well, it's rust or bust. Ownership model, algebraic types, error handling [00:53:28] Bryan: I'm gonna go into rust. And, uh, I hope I like it because if it's not this, it's gonna like, I'm gonna go back to C I'm like literally trying to figure out what the language is for the back half of my career. Um, and when I, you know, did what a lot of people were doing at that time and people have been doing since of, you know, really getting into rust and really learning it, appreciating the difference in the, the model for sure, the ownership model people talk about. [00:53:54] Bryan: That's also obviously very important. It was the error handling that blew me away. And the idea of like algebraic types, I never really had algebraic types. Um, and the ability to, to have. And for error handling is one of these really, uh, you, you really appreciate these things where it's like, how do you deal with a, with a function that can either succeed and return something or it can fail, and the way c deals with that is bad with these kind of sentinels for errors. [00:54:27] Bryan: And, you know, does negative one mean success? Does negative one mean failure? Does zero mean failure? Some C functions, zero means failure. Traditionally in Unix, zero means success. And like, what if you wanna return a file descriptor, you know, it's like, oh. And then it's like, okay, then it'll be like zero through positive N will be a valid result. [00:54:44] Bryan: Negative numbers will be, and like, was it negative one and I said airo, or is it a negative number that did not, I mean, it's like, and that's all convention, right? People do all, all those different things and it's all convention and it's easy to get wrong, easy to have bugs, can't be statically checked and so on. Um, and then what Go says is like, well, you're gonna have like two return values and then you're gonna have to like, just like constantly check all of these all the time. Um, which is also kind of gross. Um, JavaScript is like, Hey, let's toss an exception. If, if we don't like something, if we see an error, we'll, we'll throw an exception. [00:55:15] Bryan: There are a bunch of reasons I don't like that. Um, and you look, you'll get what Rust does, where it's like, no, no, no. We're gonna have these algebra types, which is to say this thing can be a this thing or that thing, but it, but it has to be one of these. And by the way, you don't get to process this thing until you conditionally match on one of these things. [00:55:35] Bryan: You're gonna have to have a, a pattern match on this thing to determine if it's a this or a that, and if it in, in the result type that you, the result is a generic where it's like, it's gonna be either the thing that you wanna return. It's gonna be an okay that contains the thing you wanna return, or it's gonna be an error that contains your error and it forces your code to deal with that. [00:55:57] Bryan: And what that does is it shifts the cognitive load from the person that is operating this thing in production to the, the actual developer that is in development. And I think that that, that to me is like, I, I love that shift. Um, and that shift to me is really important. Um, and that's what I was missing, that that's what Rust gives you. [00:56:23] Bryan: Rust forces you to think about your code as you write it, but as a result, you have an artifact that is much more supportable, much more sustainable, and much faster. Prefer to frontload cognitive load during development instead of at runtime [00:56:34] Jeremy: Yeah, it sounds like you would rather take the time during the development to think about these issues because whether it's garbage collection or it's error handling at runtime when you're trying to solve a problem, then it's much more difficult than having dealt with it to start with. [00:56:57] Bryan: Yeah, absolutely. I, and I just think that like, why also, like if it's software, if it's, again, if it's infrastructure software, I mean the kinda the question that you, you should have when you're writing software is how long is this software gonna live? How many people are gonna use this software? Uh, and if you are writing an operating system, the answer for this thing that you're gonna write, it's gonna live for a long time. [00:57:18] Bryan: Like, if we just look at plenty of aspects of the system that have been around for a, for decades, it's gonna live for a long time and many, many, many people are gonna use it. Why would we not expect people writing that software to have more cognitive load when they're writing it to give us something that's gonna be a better artifact? [00:57:38] Bryan: Now conversely, you're like, Hey, I kind of don't care about this. And like, I don't know, I'm just like, I wanna see if this whole thing works. I've got, I like, I'm just stringing this together. I don't like, no, the software like will be lucky if it survives until tonight, but then like, who cares? Yeah. Yeah. [00:57:52] Bryan: Gar garbage clock. You know, if you're prototyping something, whatever. And this is why you really do get like, you know, different choices, different technology choices, depending on the way that you wanna solve the problem at hand. And for the software that I wanna write, I do like that cognitive load that is upfront. With LLMs maybe you can get the benefit of the robust artifact with less cognitive load [00:58:10] Bryan: Um, and although I think, I think the thing that is really wild that is the twist that I don't think anyone really saw coming is that in a, in an LLM age. That like the cognitive load upfront almost needs an asterisk on it because so much of that can be assisted by an LLM. And now, I mean, I would like to believe, and maybe this is me being optimistic, that the the, in the LLM age, we will see, I mean, rust is a great fit for the LLMH because the LLM itself can get a lot of feedback about whether the software that's written is correct or not. [00:58:44] Bryan: Much more so than you can for other environments. [00:58:48] Jeremy: Yeah, that is a interesting point in that I think when people first started trying out the LLMs to code, it was really good at these maybe looser languages like Python or JavaScript, and initially wasn't so good at something like Rust. But it sounds like as that improves, if. It can write it then because of the rigor or the memory management or the error handling that the language is forcing you to do, it might actually end up being a better choice for people using LLMs. [00:59:27] Bryan: absolutely. I, it, it gives you more certainty in the artifact that you've delivered. I mean, you know a lot about a Rust program that compiles correctly. I mean, th there are certain classes of errors that you don't have, um, that you actually don't know on a C program or a GO program or a, a JavaScript program. [00:59:46] Bryan: I think that's gonna be really important. I think we are on the cusp. Maybe we've already seen it, this kind of great bifurcation in the software that we writ

Send us a textA father, husband, leader, and retired BMCS - Mike Carola, Surfman #377 and Officer in Charge of station Quillayute River tells his story of service and makes a solid recommendation for change. Tune in to hear a few stories of service from one of the real ones.To contact the E9 Mafia email:E9_A_Team@proton.meInstagram:http://www.instagram.com/the_real_exit_interviewSponsor Fierce Heart Development:https://fierceheartdev.com/

This week Jeff is accompanied by Jon (the Hoppy Bunny Beer Tech Man) and they are discussing everything happening in the world of tech, computers, gaming, craft beer and cocktails.

Al Naeem Mall in Ras Al Khaimah is set to be relaunched on May 20, 2023. Joining Kitch in the studio was Priyanka Sarkar, the Chief Strategy Officer & Rekha Ramchandran, the Business Communications Manager from Biori Management. Together they discussed:Why Al Naeem Mall differs from Malls in Dubai and the Abu DhabiVisitor DemographicsThe art challenge for students, with winners being announced on May 20.https://alnaeemmall.com/. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Today I'm here with Senior Chief Boatswain's Mate Josh Smith who is here to speak about his career, the BM job rating, and what a career as a BM in the Coast Guard can look like.  https://www.gocoastguard.com/

Roya Gordon from Nozomi Networks sits down with Dave to discuss their research on "Vulnerabilities in BMC Firmware Affect OT/IoT Device Security." Researchers at Nozomi Networks has revealed that there are thirteen vulnerabilities that affect BMCs of Lanner devices based on the American Megatrends (AMI) MegaRAC SP-X. The research states "By abusing these vulnerabilities, an unauthenticated attacker may achieve Remote Code Execution (RCE) with root privileges on the BMC, completely compromising it and gaining control of the managed host." As well as mentioning what patches could be in the future to help fix these vulnerabilities. The research can be found here: Vulnerabilities in BMC Firmware Affect OT/IoT Device Security – Part 1

Roya Gordon from Nozomi Networks sits down with Dave to discuss their research on "Vulnerabilities in BMC Firmware Affect OT/IoT Device Security." Researchers at Nozomi Networks has revealed that there are thirteen vulnerabilities that affect BMCs of Lanner devices based on the American Megatrends (AMI) MegaRAC SP-X. The research states "By abusing these vulnerabilities, an unauthenticated attacker may achieve Remote Code Execution (RCE) with root privileges on the BMC, completely compromising it and gaining control of the managed host." As well as mentioning what patches could be in the future to help fix these vulnerabilities. The research can be found here: Vulnerabilities in BMC Firmware Affect OT/IoT Device Security – Part 1

Is there still a network or has it slipped away from us entirely? What about efforts for localization because people do not trust the cloud, its providers or its reliability (ala Twitter vs. the Fediverse?). Do you still need actual hardware firewalls? What about VPNs? How long will these devices still be around as everyone goes to the cloud and SDWAN technologies? And what about identity? If you can nail identity, doesn't that set you up to be a cloud-first organization? Join us for a discussion with Sinan and the security weekly hosts as we tackle these questions! This segment is sponsored by Barracuda. Visit https://securityweekly.com/barracuda to learn more about them!   Eclypsium's research team has discovered 3 vulnerabilities in BMCs. Nate Warfield comes on the show to tell the full story! This has garnered much attention in the press: * Original research post: https://eclypsium.com/2022/12/05/supply-chain-vulnerabilities-put-server-ecosystem-at-risk/ * https://www.securityweek.com/security-flaws-ami-bmc-can-expose-many-data-centers-clouds-attacks * https://thehackernews.com/2022/12/new-bmc-supply-chain-vulnerabilities.html * https://therecord.media/three-vulnerabilities-found-in-popular-baseboard-software/ * https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/severe-ami-megarac-flaws-impact-servers-from-amd-arm-hpe-dell-others/ * https://duo.com/decipher/trio-of-megarac-bmc-flaws-could-have-long-range-effects * https://www.csoonline.com/article/3682137/flaws-in-megarac-baseband-management-firmware-impact-many-server-brands.html   In the Security News: ping of death returns, remembering when the Internet disconnected if your Mom picked up the phone, a 500-year-old cipher is cracked, VLC is always up-to-date, SIM swapper goes to prison, Rust is more secure but your supply chain is not, if you pwn the developer you win, you have too many security tools, Chrome zero days are not news, Log4Shell what changed?, Hive social again, ChatGPT, there's a vulnerability in your SDK, and it takes 3 exploits to pwn Linux, All that, and more, on this episode of Paul's Security Weekly!   Visit https://www.securityweekly.com/psw for all the latest episodes! Visit https://securityweekly.com/acm to sign up for a demo or buy our AI Hunter! Follow us on Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/securityweekly Like us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/secweekly   Show Notes: https://securityweekly.com/psw766

Is there still a network or has it slipped away from us entirely? What about efforts for localization because people do not trust the cloud, its providers or its reliability (ala Twitter vs. the Fediverse?). Do you still need actual hardware firewalls? What about VPNs? How long will these devices still be around as everyone goes to the cloud and SDWAN technologies? And what about identity? If you can nail identity, doesn't that set you up to be a cloud-first organization? Join us for a discussion with Sinan and the security weekly hosts as we tackle these questions! This segment is sponsored by Barracuda. Visit https://securityweekly.com/barracuda to learn more about them!   Eclypsium's research team has discovered 3 vulnerabilities in BMCs. Nate Warfield comes on the show to tell the full story! This has garnered much attention in the press: * Original research post: https://eclypsium.com/2022/12/05/supply-chain-vulnerabilities-put-server-ecosystem-at-risk/ * https://www.securityweek.com/security-flaws-ami-bmc-can-expose-many-data-centers-clouds-attacks * https://thehackernews.com/2022/12/new-bmc-supply-chain-vulnerabilities.html * https://therecord.media/three-vulnerabilities-found-in-popular-baseboard-software/ * https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/severe-ami-megarac-flaws-impact-servers-from-amd-arm-hpe-dell-others/ * https://duo.com/decipher/trio-of-megarac-bmc-flaws-could-have-long-range-effects * https://www.csoonline.com/article/3682137/flaws-in-megarac-baseband-management-firmware-impact-many-server-brands.html   In the Security News: ping of death returns, remembering when the Internet disconnected if your Mom picked up the phone, a 500-year-old cipher is cracked, VLC is always up-to-date, SIM swapper goes to prison, Rust is more secure but your supply chain is not, if you pwn the developer you win, you have too many security tools, Chrome zero days are not news, Log4Shell what changed?, Hive social again, ChatGPT, there's a vulnerability in your SDK, and it takes 3 exploits to pwn Linux, All that, and more, on this episode of Paul's Security Weekly!   Visit https://www.securityweekly.com/psw for all the latest episodes! Visit https://securityweekly.com/acm to sign up for a demo or buy our AI Hunter! Follow us on Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/securityweekly Like us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/secweekly   Show Notes: https://securityweekly.com/psw766

Eclypsium's research team has discovered 3 vulnerabilities in BMCs. Nate Warfield comes on the show to tell the full story! This has garnered much attention in the press: * Original research post: https://eclypsium.com/2022/12/05/supply-chain-vulnerabilities-put-server-ecosystem-at-risk/ * https://www.securityweek.com/security-flaws-ami-bmc-can-expose-many-data-centers-clouds-attacks * https://thehackernews.com/2022/12/new-bmc-supply-chain-vulnerabilities.html * https://therecord.media/three-vulnerabilities-found-in-popular-baseboard-software/ * https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/severe-ami-megarac-flaws-impact-servers-from-amd-arm-hpe-dell-others/ * https://duo.com/decipher/trio-of-megarac-bmc-flaws-could-have-long-range-effects * https://www.csoonline.com/article/3682137/flaws-in-megarac-baseband-management-firmware-impact-many-server-brands.html   Visit https://www.securityweekly.com/psw for all the latest episodes! Show Notes: https://securityweekly.com/psw766

Eclypsium's research team has discovered 3 vulnerabilities in BMCs. Nate Warfield comes on the show to tell the full story! This has garnered much attention in the press: * Original research post: https://eclypsium.com/2022/12/05/supply-chain-vulnerabilities-put-server-ecosystem-at-risk/ * https://www.securityweek.com/security-flaws-ami-bmc-can-expose-many-data-centers-clouds-attacks * https://thehackernews.com/2022/12/new-bmc-supply-chain-vulnerabilities.html * https://therecord.media/three-vulnerabilities-found-in-popular-baseboard-software/ * https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/severe-ami-megarac-flaws-impact-servers-from-amd-arm-hpe-dell-others/ * https://duo.com/decipher/trio-of-megarac-bmc-flaws-could-have-long-range-effects * https://www.csoonline.com/article/3682137/flaws-in-megarac-baseband-management-firmware-impact-many-server-brands.html   Visit https://www.securityweekly.com/psw for all the latest episodes! Show Notes: https://securityweekly.com/psw766

This week Randall and Craig open up the floor to questions from The Ridership. Support the Podcast Join The Ridership  Automated Transcription, please excuse the typos: In the Dirt 32 [00:00:00] Craig Dalton: Hello, and welcome to the gravel ride podcast, where we go deep on the sport of gravel cycling through in-depth interviews with product designers, event organizers and athletes. Who are pioneering the sport I'm your host, Craig Dalton, a lifelong cyclist who discovered gravel cycling back in 2016 and made all the mistakes you don't need to make. I approach each episode as a beginner down, unlock all the knowledge you need to become a great gravel cyclist. I'm going to be joined Really By my co-host randall jacobs for another episode of in the dirt [00:00:34] Craig: randall, how you doing today? [00:00:36] Randall: I'm doing well, Craig, good to see you, bud. [00:00:39] Craig: Yeah. Great to see you too. I mean, I've been looking forward this just a, a little bit of reprieve from everything else that's going on in life. It's just nice to connect with you and just purely have a half hour an hour conversation about bikes. [00:00:51] Randall: Yeah. Yeah. I know you've been going had a lot going on with your mom and so on. So, you know, definitely sending a lot of love and good vibes to you and your family going through some challenging times. [00:01:01] Craig: Yeah, I appreciate that. I mean, we it's the conversations we've had on the podcast and certainly within the ridership community, just about the value of this pursuit of gravel cycling and just kinda getting outta your head. I I've always loved it in that, like when you're on a, a gravel trail, particularly a technical gravel trail, like I ride you can't really think about anything else, but what's in front of you. And it's just so, so helpful for me to just sort of think about the bike and performance and riding. Rather than thinking about everything else going on all the time. [00:01:32] Randall: Yeah. Yeah, I can, I can relate. I've been processing some heavy things in my own life these days. And at the same time returning to the bike, I've been doing a lot more walking, hiking trail running lately as well as like canoeing and kayaking the canoes great with the kids. But there's. There's that flow state that you can get into on the bicycle that is, you know, people talk about runners high. I've never really had that. I don't think I can run long enough to get to that head space, but on the bicycle, there's just a place where everything is just in sync and the it's. I just feel very connected to everything, but not overwhelmed by it. If that makes sense. [00:02:13] Craig: yeah. You know, I was up in lake Tahoe last weekend and did a bunch of standup paddle boarding. I got some good recommendations from people on the ridership as to where I should explore to ride. And I had a bike, but honestly I just left it on the patio because I, it was just enjoying the lake so much. And to your point, like with standup paddle boarding, I found, you know, I just have to focus on the balance piece. So I, I, it sort. Took me to that same place. I just got in the rhythm of stroking on either side of the standup paddle board and, and being focused on the physicality of it. And, and the moment that I was experiencing, which, which I also really enjoyed. [00:02:49] Randall: Yeah, standup paddleboards are great. I actually like them. I use them occasionally standing up, but having them as like your own little floating island in the middle of a lake or a pond you know, you can have two adults. I've had, you know, another adult and a, a toddler on one. And so one adult is in the water swimming and the toddler is kind of jumping on and off and, and it's, it's just so much fun. Yeah, [00:03:12] Craig: but you've got, you've got something coming up. That's kind of probably forcing you a little bit to get back on the bike. Right. [00:03:17] Randall: Well, so, well, one I'm wanting to start coordinating more group rides. We've talked about this quite a bit and just life has gotten in the way you know, the logo launch and some things in, in my personal life and so on. So there's that the O positive festival. In Kingston, New York is coming up. That's the seventh through the 9th of October and community member, Joe conk in the ridership. He is the founder of that festival. And once again, we're gonna be coordinating a gravel ride. Together with a road ride and a a mural tour ride, which will be through the, the city of Kingston and is very family friendly. As part of that weekend, I believe it's gonna be on the eighth. So we'll be posting more information about that in the ridership and would love to have people come out and join. [00:04:00] Craig: That's super cool. I remember you talking about the festival last year and some of the riding that you've done with Joe up there. So that sounds awesome. So for anybody on the east coast, that's within range of that, we're able to travel, as Randall said, it'll definitely put some notes out there. Maybe we can talk about it again, more specifically when you lock down the details. [00:04:17] Randall: Yeah, we're, we're finalizing the route right now and we'll create a page for the event. So if you're interested in staying in touch, we'll definitely announce it here on the pod. I might even bring Joe on for a few minutes to share some more details, but the festival itself, it's, it's arts, it's music, it's community, it's great food and just a wonderful vibe right outside the Catskills and the riding out there is great. I've done quite a bit of riding out there with him and others. So if you're in that area, definitely come out and join us. We'd love to see you. The, the event is it'll be, the ride will be you know, we may ask like for a recommended donation, which doesn't have to be provided, and that goes towards the artist community in Kingston. And then, you know, there'll also be an option to get a wristband for the entire festival too. So. So, yeah. And if you wanna be participate in the conversation, definitely join the the Hudson valley channel in the ridership. That's where, where we'll be talking about this [00:05:07] Craig: Cool. I similarly am trying to get my act together. Cause I signed up to support the Marin county bike coalition and the NorCal NACA league for the eventual adventure revival ride. I think it started three, maybe four years ago. They did had one year that was virtual during the pandemic, but I missed last year cause it sold out. So I was sure to get on it this year. And it's a great route starting out of Fairfax, California. So super fun route , very technical it's only 60 miles, but it's got a decent amount of climbing, particularly up the aply named Randall trail. Off of highway one is a, is a grind at the end. And then you're coming across Fairfax BOS Ridge, but it's a lot of fun. And I believe I saw that Rebecca Rush is joining. [00:05:51] Randall: oh, great. [00:05:52] Craig: So that's gonna be cool. She's so nice. Former podcast guest couldn't have been more friendly when I've connected with her and subsequent times when I've ran into her, it's been awesome. So looking forward to seeing her again. [00:06:04] Randall: I got to meet her at a dinner hosted around sea Oder some years back. And yeah, she's, she's a rad woman. And a great rider. Very, very cool. Is it the same route as the original cause I did the original one some years back living in the bay. [00:06:18] Craig: Yeah, I don't, I don't think they've changed anything. I mean, I'll tell you after the 17th, but I I'm pretty sure it's the same route [00:06:24] Randall: Well, if anyone's considering doing this run higher volume tires and have a properly low gear, cuz you will want both and maybe a suspension stem. [00:06:34] Craig: and maybe a suspension for Randall. [00:06:36] Randall: Yeah. And maybe a suspension fork sacrilegious. But yeah. [00:06:39] Craig: No. Yeah, no, it's a great route and, and totally perfect recommendations Randall, cuz it's, it's, it's technical. It'll push your limits. I mean, I loved it. I just thought it was like one of those roots that favored adventure, like the name, the name is perfect, cuz you're just out there on the mountain. They're carving the route through rugged terrain, you know, basic fire roads and just this awesome part of the north side of Marin. [00:07:06] Randall: I mean, it's the location where mountain biking got ITSs start. And frankly, the gravel bikes that we ride are far superior mountain bikes than they were riding back in those days. So [00:07:14] Craig: Yeah, a hundred percent. I think I recently was at the, at the, the museum up in Fairfax, the mountain Mike museum, and looking at a clunker. And I was just [00:07:23] Randall: Mm-hmm [00:07:24] Craig: I can't even imagine with a kickback break, how they even survived going down Mount. [00:07:29] Randall: well, they had to rebuild those hubs pretty much. Every run is my understanding. So. [00:07:34] Craig: he hence the name repack downhill. [00:07:38] Randall: Yeah. I've ridden with a few of the, the OGs of the mountain biking scene and it, it wasn't the good old days. We definitely have it better now speak speaking of which we have a new bike to nerd about. [00:07:49] Craig: Yeah, not may not maybe a bike that I would take on adventure revival per se, but a very interesting bike for people to take a look at it. It's the BMC now, how do we decide that? It would say pronounce it [00:08:02] Randall: CAS say it with confidence. It's gotta be KIS, maybe [00:08:05] Craig: Kay. [00:08:06] Randall: Ks. Yeah. Something like that. [00:08:08] Craig: Super racey bike, actually, what I would've thought that BMC would've introduced to begin with kind of in the vein of the Cervelo ESP Sparrow, this bike looks, I mean, this bike could have been a road bike. When, when you see a picture of it. [00:08:23] Randall: It's stunning. I love they, there's some unique design elements on the top tube that are very BMC. I like how the, you know, the chains, the seat stays are perfectly paralleled with the down tube and it's just a very elegant bike. The, the paint schemes, particularly on that top end model are quite striking and definitely a gravel race bike. And in fact, I would say a dedicated gravel race bike, which is a little bit different than that as Sparrow. [00:08:48] Craig: Yeah. Yeah. I mean it's seven dedicated 700 C. But it still manages a fairly tight change stay and fairly good tire clearance. I mean, 700 by 45 is nothing to sneeze. [00:09:00] Randall: Yeah, especially in such a, a, you know, a tight change stay. And it's, it's optimized for that. It has 80 milli BB drop, which is to say like the bottom bracket drop relative of relative to the axles. And that's quite a bit, so anyone running longer cranks is. Going to have say like a pedal strike issue. If they try to run smaller tires, which is why I say, like, it's not quite like the Aspero, the Aspero is much more of a one bike. Like you could use it as a dedicated road bike as well. And it would be great for that sounds like bikes like that or ours, or you know, the, the open up that I always call out. So this is. The the bottom bracket drop the fact that it's a, a longer top tube, so longer reach relative to the stack, just make it a bike that is very much optimized for bigger 700 seat tires, shorter stems. And all of this works really well. Well, offroad, but kind of takes away from its versatility as a, as a road bike which [00:09:56] Craig: I also, [00:09:57] Randall: for what it's designed for. [00:09:58] Craig: yeah, I mean, it's very intentional, right. I also saw that they speck like a fairly narrow handle bar on there with a wide flare. So like keeping again, keeping that body tight in that race, race position. Yeah. [00:10:12] Randall: Yeah. Which I, I'm not sure how much I like that. I think it makes a ton of sense on the road. But I, I feel like often, well, we'll, we'll see I think there's, I think there's a place for it. I would probably want if I was gonna go so narrow, I'd probably wanna do a compound flare in order to get even more flare in the drops without having the hoods super kicked out. Because that, you know, that that extra leverage in the drops is, is nice to have, and it's kind of, but, you know, interesting to see some some difference of perspective there, [00:10:43] Craig: Yeah, let me be clear. Like I would be terrified to ride. I think it was a 37 millimeter bar hood to hood. I would be terrified to ride that. I mean, that just seems really tight. I have heard of some of the pros kind of going super narrow and maybe on a, a non-technical course, like a S B T gravel, or if you live in a part of the country where it's, you know, you're just basically on dirt roads that might, that might work. But yeah, for me, I think I'd be terrifi. [00:11:10] Randall: I think that there's a, a place for this. And you, you see it on, on the road. You've seen some road pros go towards more narrow up top and it does improve arrow. And there a lot of gravel races are not that technical. And so that arrow benefit is meaningful. I just think that there's a little bit more evolution to happen in terms of one getting even more arrow on those narrower hoods. So maybe like something to support the forearm a little bit. So you can be grabbing the, the top of the, of the hoods, but, and, and have your your forearms perpendicular the ground at parallel the ground in your upper arm perpendicular. So you really get that arrow benefit, but then, you know, again, compound flare to get that, maintain that extra leverage in the drops when you need it. Nonetheless we're we're getting into deep handlebar nuance here. Let's let's back out and look at the rest of this machine. [00:11:56] Craig: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I do think it's, it is just sort of interesting as you pointed out, like this is for a very specific rider and it's pretty natural. Companies are gonna continue to evolve around speed and ultra performance for one side of the market, not the side of the market, that's gonna attract me per se, but as more and more dollars going into racing and more and more people are looking for super high performance, like it's natural that bike companies are gonna do this type of thing. [00:12:24] Randall: There's also an element of like, you know, the bike industry likes N plus one. And so this is distinct enough from a, a road bike where you would have your road bike and, and this bike and the type of person who has this bike probably has multiple bikes. I mean, it is a dedicated race bike so that, you know, it makes sense. [00:12:46] Craig: Yeah, yeah. Yeah. You pointed out a few other interesting things about the design as well. [00:12:50] Randall: Yeah, so I like, I like how they did the inter I'm not a huge fan of integrated cabling through handlebars and stems. And I like how it seems that they kept the, the cabling external to the handlebar and then ran it underneath that new rock shop. That new shock stop stem. I think they're calling it some something different. They, they built it in using RedShift's suspension, stem tech. And so it stays external until it drops into the upper headset bear. So that could be a lot worse in terms of serviceability and adjustability and so on. The top end model is a one piece HBAR and stem that has fully internal routing looks stunning, looks really, really beautiful but an absolute nightmare to set up and service. And I wouldn't recommend going that route on any sort of bike period, because even a pro rider needs to be able to get their fit adjusted properly. [00:13:45] Craig: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you and I share the same opinion on like, on elements of bike design that make it constrained from modification, easy modification. So yeah, I'm I'm with you on that. It absolutely looks gorgeous, but knowing me, like, I think I'd be frustrated at the limitations of it. [00:14:03] Randall: yeah, yeah. But kudos to them on the keeping the, the cabling outside the bars on the Lower end models, which I say lower end, they start at six grand, which is another thing about this bike, which is on trend. Everything is so expensive. It's remarkable. How expensive bikes are these days? [00:14:19] Craig: Yeah, we gotta, we got a question about that in the, in the ridership, right? Just sort of, why are bikes so expensive and it's yeah, I don't know. You know, when you look at a $10,000 bike or $6,000 bike, it's just that's. I mean, that's a hell of a lot of money. Yeah. [00:14:33] Randall: I mean, there's, I think there's a few things that go into that. So this was we, we put out some, you know, we asked the, the ridership community for some questions in comments. So this was Matthew Kramer chiming in, you know, asking about why bikes have gotten so expensive. I think a, a big part of it. I mean, of course there's inflation, right? And one of the major drivers of inflation in recent years are COVID related supply chain constraints. Right. So it's harder to get, it's hard to get parts and it's hard to get complete bikes, which means there's, you know, Up until recently. And there was a flood of, of like stimulus money for example, into the market. So you had all these dollars chasing less available product. And so by companies focused on the higher end, I mean, we did the same thing. We, we, you know, we actually kind of regret having eliminated the mechanical model cuz but it was because we couldn't get parts and we went with all access, which is really great, but puts it at a, a more premium point. But. [00:15:27] Craig: you're layering. You're layering in increased fuel costs for transportation. There's a lot of things that have gone into it. [00:15:34] Randall: Yeah, that is a factor. But I, I don't think that that's a major driver for this. I think it's more well, honestly, a, a significant part of it is people are paying it. Right. And there's some R and D that goes in here, like the, you know, this, some of these bikes that you see coming out. On the really high end, you know, the volumes are not that great. And so that R and D has to be incorporated somewhere and with bike companies focusing on the higher end, cuz that's where the bigger margins and dollars are and riders having limited options in the more affordable end of the market, because that's not where bike companies are focusing. I mean, I think it's, it's kind of like the automotive industry right now where, you know, I bought, I bought a used Prius for like seven grand and I've put a bunch of miles into it and like, Like scrape the bumper and things like that. And I could probably sell it for 11 [00:16:24] Craig: Right. [00:16:25] Randall: like, you, you just see that in a number of different domains. And I think the B the, the bike space is no different. But you do get bikes are improving in incremental ways. But I, I, it has been a pretty radical shift towards the top of the market. It's is hard to find middle end products that is frankly, just as good in many ways. [00:16:45] Craig: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you hope over time. We know historically it does trickle down and there's, I mean, don't get us wrong. I, I think there's a lot of good entry level bikes out there. It's just getting your hands on one and finding one today is a challenge. [00:16:59] Randall: When supply chains go from 30 to 60 day lead times to, you know, at one point you know, there were like, you have very limited options for your levers and, and Dils and so on. Right. We have a duopoly in our industry, you know, and can't be is now, you know, they have a, a good product a competitive product in gravel now with their 13 speed stuff ECAR groups. But you know, that stuff was like one to two years. So when that's the case, you know, if you have a limited buy, where are you gonna focus? You're gonna focus on the higher end and that's that? I think that's part of it too. [00:17:32] Craig: Yeah, that makes sense. And I also remember you mentioning on an earlier podcast, just the amount of commitment level the component manufacturers are expecting from you. So, you know, in order to get a, a seat at the table, maybe you have to buy 50 of something, which as a small builder, you know, that could, that's a, that's a lot of dollars out of pocket. [00:17:50] Randall: Well, and the, the smaller builders generally are like, if you're a domestic builder and you're assembling domestically, it's a different supply. You're paying, you're paying more from say like STR for their domestic distributor versus the, you know, their Taiwan based distributor, just because they're manufacturing a lot of that stuff in Taiwan. But yeah, there were greater constraints. Sometimes you had to put a deposit up front and, you know, you put a deposit on something that is not going to, you're not gonna have for a year and you can't get that deposit back. So the, the risks associated with, you know, well, is something else new gonna come out or what's the market gonna look like in a year? So there's, there's all these you know, it, it really drives home, just re how remarkable it was prior to the pandemic that supply chains worked so well. I mean, truly it is a miracle of a whole lot of very complex decentralized coordination that, you know, any of this works at all. As a supply chain nerd, it's, it's something that, that is, is is not lost on me. And yeah, even the current circumstance, it's still pretty amazing what humans do. [00:18:52] Craig: Yeah. [00:18:53] Randall: All right. So where do we want to go from here? [00:18:55] Craig: Yeah. I mean, one thing I did did I thought was interesting that you pointed out about that BMC is that they do have an integrated suspension stem offering from that they've worked with, it sounds like Redshift on [00:19:05] Randall: Yep. [00:19:06] Craig: yeah. [00:19:07] Randall: I thought that was well executed. One downside I believe is that you can't flip the stem and with that beat bike being relatively long and, and on the lower side, like, you know, it's a race bike you know, it's, again, you have more constrained fitment options. I think the standard shock stop, then you can run in the up upward pointing direction. [00:19:28] Craig: Yeah, you can. I think what's interesting to point out there though. So if this in BMCs designer's mind, this is a flat out thoroughbred race, bike. To have that be an option suggests that designers are coming around to the fact that suspension and suppleness can, can be a performance benefit, like put putting, I mean, you and I have talked about that and obviously I'm sold on it, but it just struck me as like this incredibly arrow stretched out race bike is offering that they must have determined that this is gonna help people win races. [00:20:02] Randall: Yeah. Yeah. Fatigue and control it's material. And they've also done a few things with the frame design, which you see on other bikes like the really the, the seat tube towards the bottom gets really narrow. It gets really thin. So it has a lot more flex built in you saw that with bikes, like, you know, the GT grade is, is kind of an extreme example of that, but compliance is, is a great thing. That's the reason why we have one of the reasons we have such wide rims now, too. And what's so great about, you know, high volume, supple tubus tires, you know, it, it all, it all improves speed as a system. [00:20:35] Craig: Yeah. I mentioned this when I had someone from BMC on talking about the S and the S LT. I have a, I have a hard tail BMC, 20 Niner mountain bike from back in the day, like at least a decade ago. And I remember getting on that bike, I came off of a, a similar Niner. Coming to that bike, the back end definitely had a supplement to it. It had that, that exact drop stay design that you're kind of talking about and it really worked. And I was super impressed. I remember when I got on that bike, it just felt so fast and I could control it so well. [00:21:10] Randall: Yeah, well, I had you know, you probably heard the conversation I had on the pod with Craig Cal talking about suspension on road bikes and whether or not you fully agree with that thesis. I think it's, I think it's fairly compelling. Definitely higher volume tires. Like I don't see, even, even in Marin, I would be running minimum 28 mill tub plus tires. Nice low pressures on wide rims. There's no reason to run narrower than that. And you see a lot of the new arrow wheel options for road being built to a width where you can actually get an arrow benefit with those tires, you know, adhering to the rule of one oh 5%, which we had talked about in the wheel episode. So, so yeah, all of these things are, are good developments. [00:21:53] Craig: Yeah. You know, speaking of good developments, I managed actually to hook up with Matt Harvey from Enduro Barings, they did a ride. Out of Fairfax, California, a few weeks back. And I, I joined probably 50 people up there, Yuri, Oswald and other podcast guests was on there. And I think a couple others, I, I think I counted four old podcast guests on that ride, which was great, but a hell of a lot of fun. You had some conversation, some great conversation with him about Enduro Barings, which I hope people will go back in reference. But I think there was a question or a comment about from the ridership about. [00:22:27] Randall: Yeah. So, you know, one of the things that we covered in that episode, which I had so much fun with Matt he's just has a wealth of knowledge about the bicycle industry. He's an engineer, an engineering mindset clearly cares a lot about what he does. And you know, talking about the merits or lack thereof of a lot of ceramic bearings and long story short, most ceramic bearings. Rubbish, the ones that are of those that are good, the majority of them require a lot more maintenance to stay. And the, and the benefit is pretty trivial. And then there's this XD 15 bearing that Enduro makes. And I'm sure, you know, others probably have some, some equivalent, but I haven't looked into it, but that I find really interesting. And this is an Aeros, you know, a, I think a French aerospace alloy used for steel alloy used for the races. And then they have these high, very high grade ceramic ball. And because of this particular steel, which is very expensive and they have to buy it they don't, they can't buy it in tube form. They have to, you know, buy it in sheets and, and take it from there, I believe. But because of the unique properties of this material You can get you can use ceramic bearings and if it gets any contamination, essentially the contamination gets like pulverized and kicked out as opposed to pitting and, and starting to, to damage the the metal, because in many cases, the ceramic bearings, that metal is a lot less hard than the bearing itself. And thus, as a consequence, it's the thing to give. We go into a lot more detail in that episode, but yeah, Hans, I'm gonna, I might butcher this. So, bear with me here. Lale I'm guessing L E L L E I L I D he, he brought up this article that James Wong, why admire immensely? He's at cycling tips now wrote about an Enduro bottom bracket with this XD 15 bearing set. And what James said was incredibly low friction feel phenomenal toughness. We did everything we could to kill it, but this thing is simply incredible. And like that is coming from someone like James Wong. It makes me really think, okay, this is something that we're gonna still do a little bit more investigation and Matt's gonna be sending us some data, but we'll probably, we're strongly considering this in incorporating these into a, a higher end version of our, the logos wheels in the. [00:24:36] Craig: Got it. Nice. Yeah. I mean, I had enough smart people tell me that that was the way to go and happy that I've got that in my bottom bracket of my, my unicorn. That I've started riding. [00:24:47] Randall: Oh, it's an XD 15. [00:24:49] Craig: Yeah, I believe so. [00:24:49] Randall: Oh, sweet. Yeah. Yeah. Genuine benefits that you don't have to spend a lot of time servicing. In fact, the service, it should essentially be zero service. That's pretty cool. [00:25:00] Craig: that's what I'm looking for. [00:25:02] Randall: Not cheap though. Not cheap. So everyone else, high quality steel bearings. [00:25:07] Craig: Yeah. And I think Hans was also leading the conversation around just kind of, like flared bars, flat pedals, different kinds of like, you know, We're just out there for enjoying the ride kind of features of a bike or ways in which you could set up a bike. [00:25:22] Randall: Yeah. I mean, I think flare borrows are de rigor. I. Would run flared bars on every drop bar bike, including a pure road performance bike, just with a, maybe a different philosophy on my road bike, I'd go super narrow and get the flares to have more control in the drops for aerodynamics. But flare is here to stay. You see levers being designed with a little bit of flare. So with flare in mind and you know, any sort of, you know, is there an arrow cost? I have no idea. I, I don't think so. As long as the lever is aligned with. The bar behind it, it should sit in its wake, but if, even if there was the control benefits more than outweigh it. [00:25:58] Craig: Yeah. I think that co that the arrow part might come into play on the trend towards super wide bars. And as the, as you know, I've played around with that, I mean, I've got, I think I've. A 48 on one of my bikes and my fitter kind of brought me back to a 44. I, I do miss kind of the offroad control the way to rip the bike around that I got out of the wider bars, but I'm, I'm fairly comfortable at 44 as well. So I, I think I just need to play around with the flare on the bar that I'm running right now. And then it will be the right, right mix for. [00:26:37] Randall: Well, we've talked about in the the, in the ridership that we're thinking about developing a bar that has a compound flare. So you can get, say like eight degrees on the hoods and then 16 to 20 in the drop. So you kind of get the best of both worlds in that you still get that. You know, that roady fit up top, but then the extra control the, the first bar to do this, I believe was the three T a GI. And, and I don't even know if I'm pronouncing that right. We've talked about it on the pod [00:27:02] Craig: Yeah. And I think there was the other one that was like the Whis whiskey components has something similar [00:27:07] Randall: also does a compound. Yeah, I think compound flare makes a ton of sense for, for all of these bikes. [00:27:15] Craig: I wish it wasn't so costly. And you, you didn't have to sort of go all in to create a bar, like cuz you can't 3d print, something like this, right? [00:27:23] Randall: no, but it, it would be easy enough for somebody to create, say a, a high quality aluminum version. It's just another bending process plus testing regime to make sure that it, you know, it doesn't, it doesn't break on you. [00:27:38] Craig: yeah. I'm gonna keep exploring that. I'm I'm not sort of locked and loaded on my handlebar and stem right now. Still just wanted to make sure that the bike was fitting me correctly. And I feel like I've got enough inputs to figure out which way I wanna go with any one of the cockpit components. [00:27:55] Randall: Well, depending on your, what your timeframe is, I may have a prototype for you in time, so let's [00:28:00] Craig: All right. Many, many reasons why you're a good friend Randall and that's just one of 'em [00:28:04] Randall: you know, a guy, you know, a guy who can get you stuff. [00:28:07] Craig: yeah. [00:28:09] Randall: Tom SHEEO was asking about suspension seat posts. What's your take here? [00:28:14] Craig: I I'm a yes. So, I mean, I've been running on the thesis. I have a, a, a P N w coast dropper that has both a drop and a suspension, and I found that it's air tuned. So. Very tuneable very predictable. And I came to the conclusion, like anytime it moved, when my first inclination was like, oh crap, I'm losing performance. Anytime it moved, I wasn't in a fluid pedal stroke. Like I had hit something unexpectedly and it was just saving me. Similarly, although I think it's less active rock shock on the wireless. Their wireless dropper post does have what they call active ride. And I'm probably not tuned correctly on it right now. Cause I don't feel a lot of movement. The big difference between the two is on the PWC PMC. What am I saying here? Pacific PM. Yes. That one moves when you're fully extended. So it doesn't matter whether you're dropped or not. Like it it'll move. If the amount of pressure applied to it from your, your backside is, is forcing it to move. Whereas the rock shock post, it has to be lowered a little bit. So if you're in the full position, you're who locked out. It's only active when you're down a little [00:29:30] Randall: I wonder if that's a design constraint, because meaning something inherent in how they architected it as a dropper post, because from a product standpoint, that's exactly the opposite of what I would want. [00:29:41] Craig: I'm kind of with you and, and I, you know, in talking to rock shock, they did say some of their riders will actually set it up a little bit high so that they can basically constantly ride it with it on. [00:29:53] Randall: Yeah. I think that makes sense, especially adjustability. So to, to answer Tom's question, I think we both agree that suspension has its merits. I would definitely get a dropper first though. I like the best suspension you have is your arms and legs. And the, the float between your body and the bike. That's, that's my strong opinion. And from there you have pneumatic suspension from the tires you can do, you know, a slightly cushier saddle, like, you know, you can have some, some compliance in the frame. There's a whole bunch of things you do before you do a suspension seat, post primary amongst those being a dropper. [00:30:28] Craig: A hundred percent dropper. Number one, upgrade for gravel bikes, period. You'll never go. I don't know if I've ever met anybody who went back. Honestly, once they had a dropper. [00:30:37] Randall: Yeah, I mean, I occasionally talk to people, looking at our bikes who are like, oh, well, you know, can I swap in a rigid post? And I was like, well, if that's what you wanna do, get the, you know, the access wireless droppers are really expensive and they're heavy. But you could have a saddle on one of those and, and, you know, a standard post and swap it in, in and out with a single bolt. So that that's an option. [00:30:58] Craig: I've got that set up now. And I will tell, I will tell you, I will tell our friends in the community if I ever swap it. [00:31:05] Randall: Yeah. Yeah, yeah, [00:31:07] Craig: I don't think, I don't think I will, but [00:31:09] Randall: yeah. I can see on a city bike or like a burning man rig not having a dropper. That's that's about it. that's a whole, that's a whole separate conversation though. [00:31:18] Craig: I will argue with you on the city bike, but anyway, you still wanna drop her on the city bike? [00:31:22] Randall: Let's see. Luke Lopez and Larry Rose were commenting about non-competitive gravel setups, you know, alternative handlebars, flat pedals bags, and fun rides, and so on. Inspired by our friends over at pathless pedals who very much do a lot to create content around the non-competitive side of cycling. So what are your [00:31:41] Craig: Yeah. I mean, I think whether or not you set your bike up in a specific way to go out and have this non-competitive experience, or it's just a mindset. I think we're aligned in that gravel, gravel is for everyone. Right. And whatever your jam is going fast, going slow. Just getting out there is important. I mean, for me, I often change my clothing. [00:32:04] Randall: Mm-hmm [00:32:05] Craig: When I'm out there for just a fun ride, like, like I've got some, some, you know, great baggies that I can wear and different things. And it's definitely a different mindset rolling out the door. Not that I'm out there hammering on a general basis, but it's definitely a different mindset when I'm just out there to stop and smell the roses. [00:32:21] Randall: Yeah. Yeah. And I, I appreciate that mindset, but I still vastly prefer Lyra and, and being clipped in and, and, you know, and so on. [00:32:35] Craig: And I've got a, I've got a mountain bike. So like having a flat bar on a gravel bike, like I I've had that set up on an old cross bike. I loved it. Super fun, nimble, but for me, like if I'm gonna go flat bar right now, it's definitely gonna be more on a mountain bike than a, a traditional gravel bike setup. [00:32:52] Randall: But at the same time, you see, I can't recall if it was Luke, but you see folks with like an old Bridgestone mountain bike that they've converted into, you know, a flat bar or a drop bar, gravel bike. And it's, you know, they got a, you know, a handlebar bag on there and it's much more of like a let's go out and get lost and have an adventure, maybe do coffee outside or things like this party pace as you know, as Russ likes to say over. You know, PLP. [00:33:18] Craig: Yeah. If you've got a quiver by all means like, I, I love all bikes and I'm one who appreciates the nuances between them. So, you know, I just don't have a garage big enough for all these things. [00:33:28] Randall: yeah, yeah, no, I, I like I like the, I like being able in the middle of a ride to decide that I feel like throwing down a little bit. Sometimes I get that, that little jolt of energy less. Now that I'm 40, I suppose, but, but still [00:33:41] Craig: I I've seen you have those jolts Randall. I know it's there. [00:33:45] Randall: Let's see, what else? Oh, Matthew Kramer turned me on to something that I thought was really cool in the ridership, which was E 13. Now has a 12 speed, 9 45 cassette that is compatible with standard 12 speed chains. So you don't need that funky flat top chain. That's fair. Still, you know, pretty proprietary to Ram in order to run a tighter cluster. [00:34:07] Craig: So is that, is that 12 speed cassette from shrimp? Something you have to run on their product. [00:34:15] Randall: So the way that SW has set it up, they have migrated all their road. And then now they're dedicated gravel drive trains to this 12 speed flat top chain which is, you know, it, it has a slight benefit in terms of like, You, you get the same cross sectional area of the side plates with a thinner side plate so they can make the chain a little bit thinner. And that helps with the, the already very tight spacing of those cogs and like, but also makes it so that it's something proprietary. And so they've been expanding that I, I suspect that you'll see it on their mountain bike groups soon enough. And, you know, I really like to adopt, you know, proven open standards and non-pro proprietary stuff whenever possible. And the fact is that standard 12 speed works really well and nobody was making a tighter cluster for Eagle, like, you know, or for, for like, you know, a mullet set up where you have. A mountain bike rear derailer, but maybe you want a little bit tighter cluster a little bit tighter cassette for your road or your, your certain gravel applications. [00:35:17] Craig: when you talk about tighter cassette. I remember seeing this pop up and I was like 9 45. Okay. Why do I really care? Talk about the tighter cluster? Cause I think that's an important maybe nuance beyond just like, oh, you got a 45 and a nine. [00:35:30] Randall: Yeah. So the, the biggest knock that people have against one by drive trains is the jumps between cogs. Right. And yeah, I get it. A lot of this can be mitigated by proportional, crank length, and by having a proper bike fit. Because it allows you to spin at a wider range of cadences without, you know, while still maintaining a smooth pedal stroke. And I've, I've been fine with my setups. This 9 45 is it's the same as a, a 10 speed, 1138. Which is, you know, a, a larger road cassette from, from a few years ago. And it just adds a, a taller cog and a bigger cog you know, on that same cassette. And so you get, you know, jumps that I think are probably tight enough for the vast majority of roadies to say like, okay, well, if I had any concerns about jumps, now those are mitigated some. Want it to be like one tooth jumps between cogs and you know, okay. Go ride your road bike. That that's fine. But but yeah, I like, I like to see this. I was actually considering having us develop something if someone else didn't. So I'm glad to see this in the market, I think is a real gap for it. [00:36:35] Craig: Yeah, it's interesting. I wonder why, like SHA doesn't go to a nine cause you think like, I understand why smaller companies kind of pop up and they see an opportunity like this gap, but E thirteen's been doing this kind of thing for a while. [00:36:49] Randall: The nine tooth is so it it's gonna wear all else equal same material and everything it's gonna wear itself and the chain more quickly than a 10 tooth or an 11 tooth. Right. And so the, the entire philosophy of the drivetrain changes with a nine tooth in that. You know, I like to think of the nine tooth as an overdrive gear, plus the jump between the nine and the 11 is significant. Right? So if you're spending a lot of time at the top end of the range, you know, you might not love that, but for me, you pair it with a 42 chain ring and that 42 9. With a, you know, a, a 700 by 28 or 700 by 30 tire is the equivalent of, of a road bike with, you know, 51 11, which is to say, you have plenty of top end. You're not gonna spin out all the time on, on a high speed descent, but it's not all that often that I'm descending at those sorts of speeds. And so that jump from the 11 to the nine is not a problem for me on that end of the cassette. And so in turn, when you have that nine tooth that also informs the chain ring that you pair. Because you, you know, you kind of need to set your chain ring based on how you wanna calibrate that range that the cassette has. So yeah, I'm not surprised that Ram didn't go that didn't go that route. But I do think it makes a ton of sense and I love one by drive trains and I'm all about one bikes as well with one by drive trains. And so the nine two really facilitates that. [00:38:08] Craig: Yeah. Yeah. Super interesting. And Eli Bingham who often chimes in, in the ridership about some real technical stuff and tends to explore a lot of components. He had a kind of note on this didn't. [00:38:18] Randall: Yeah. So, one thing you gotta make sure, because of, and again, this gets into like proprietary standards and so on. So like the free hub, the XD XDR free hub standard that this cassette is compatible with is a proprietary standard that you know, Sam made it. So any. It's really easy for a wheel company to create a wheel with a free hub that, that uses the, you know, XD XDR. But they patented every possible way. They could think of, of attaching a cassette to that so that only they could produce the cassettes. And so E 13 has a came up with a really clever solution, but it requires like a cinch bolt. That clamps around the free hub body. And if that comes loose, it can affect the shifting. So that's kind of like the one issue that these can have. I've never had that issue with E 13 cassettes and I've run them exclusively for several years now. But it's just something to keep in mind. I find that they shift shift really excellent and they're light and they hold up well, cause they're, you know, most of the cogs or steel. [00:39:11] Craig: Right. Yeah, right on. And then I think we should end with, I think, which, which was one of my favorite questions coming out of the ridership from our friend, Silas, pat love is the pursuit of a quiet bike without creeks, an achievable goal or a pipe dream. [00:39:27] Randall: , it depends on what you're starting with. Unfortunately. I think in general I mean, this should AF absolutely be the standard. It, there's no reason why things should be rattling around. And you know, there are ways to get around it. So there, you know, wireless shifting and so on helps. But also like in our case, we run full housing through the frame and then we put it in a, we put it in a foam sleeve and we do that with. Hydraulic hoses too. And every bite company should be doing that because rattles suck bottom bracket Creek, again, like any bottom bracket will Creek if it gets contaminated. But you know, having a bottom bracket set up that aligns and supports the bearings sufficiently. You know, should eliminate the vast majority of those creeks. Yeah, it, this, this should entirely be possible. Unfortunately, there are a lot of bikes that, mm let's just say that this sort of thing was an afterthought. So it may cost, it may cost some money and require some expertise to chase out the, you know, all those creeks. [00:40:25] Craig: I think that's gotta be the worst task as a bike mechanic to be tasked with is when someone comes in and says, my, my bike is creaking. Help me resolve it. [00:40:34] Randall: Yeah. And, and honestly my experience, it it's a special mechanic. Who's who's really good at. I've had bikes that you know, our, our bikes will have a Creek here and there. And we'll say like, you know, bring it to a mechanic, have them take a look and they can't chase it. And I've actually had an instance where I had the bike shipped to me personally, and I chased it, but I chased it in a way that like, you know, it's I'm trying to remember what it was. Oh, it wasn't even a Creek. It was just that. Axis rear derailer the hanger on the was ever so slightly misaligned. And then the axis derailer was harder. When it's miscalibrated it makes a lot of noise on the cassette and that was the noise. So we're like, they were looking at the bottom bracket, they were looking at the seat post. They were looking at the, the headset interface and, and so on. And unless you have that, like the time and that deductive mindset and some experience of like, what things sound like, it's really hard to, to chase. So if you have a mechanic, who's a good chaser. That that's that's someone who really knows their stuff and [00:41:39] Craig: Yeah. A hundred percent. Yeah, my, my go to, I mean, as a non methodical bad mechanic, definitely like I clean my bike when a Creek arrives and that usually, like, it's say 85% of the time solves the problem. And then if, if I need to go further, it's about. You know, greasing things, making sure, just kind of being a little more I inspect of, of what's going on. I I've generally been pretty lucky that I haven't had creeks that I weren't, that I wasn't clear on how to resolve. [00:42:10] Randall: Yeah. Yeah. Well, I'd like to end with a with something that I'm excited about, which is I haven't nailed it down yet, but I had pinged you about coming out west for a bit. And so once those dates are locked down you know, getting a big group ride in the bay area and potentially in a couple other parts of the us. Something I'm super excited about and to meet some of the riders that are in the forum and that are, are regular listeners and so on. So more on that as we approach. But that would probably be Denver, Boulder, maybe San Diego, and then definitely the bay area. [00:42:40] Craig: That's super exciting. I feel like, you know, before the pandemic we had kicked off some really amazing group rides and [00:42:47] Randall: I miss it. [00:42:48] Craig: you. Yeah. And you and I have been longing for, we've had a lot going on to not kind of be putting that out there ourselves personally, but I think it's, it's a great time to do that and hopefully we can get some knocked out by the end of the year and super excited to see you when you're in the bay area. [00:43:04] Randall: Likewise. It's been too long. [00:43:06] Craig: We're good to catch up. My friend, [00:43:08] Randall: Likewise. All right, my friend. [00:43:09] Craig: take, take care. [00:43:10] Randall: See it. [00:43:11] Craig Dalton: That's going to do it for this week's edition of in the dirt. From the gravel ride pod cast How's a bit of a postscript. I did attend the adventure revival ride up in Marine county, out of Fairfax this past weekend. Quite a lovely event, benefiting Nika. The course is amazing and difficult as I imagined and remembered from the last time I did it such a great route put together by the Marine county bike coalition. Super challenging on a gravel bike. I remember thinking about halfway through. Wow. I'm about halfway through feeling quite beat up. And I was riding my unicorn with a front suspension fork on it. I certainly saw a number of riders out there on mountain bikes, which would not have been a bad choice. Anyway, phenomenal event, definitely something to have on your radar, down the line. If you're interested in connecting with myself or Randall, please join the ridership. Simply visit www.theridership.com. That's a free online, global cycling community where you can connect and discuss gravel, cycling with athletes from all over the world. If you're interested in supporting the podcast, please visit buy me a coffee.com/the gravel ride. And remember, ratings and reviews are always hugely appreciated. Until next time. Here's to finding some dirt onto your wheels

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Co-hosts, Randall and Craig put a bow tie on 2021 with a look back at a few of their favorite bikes and gravel riding experiences. Episode Sponsor: Competitive Cyclist (Promo Code: TheGravelRide) Support the podcast Join The Ridership Episode transcription, please excuse the typos: In the Dirt 27 [00:00:00] Craig Dalton: Hello and welcome to in the dirt from the gravel ride podcast. I'm your host Craig Dalton. I'm going to be joined shortly by my cohost Randall Jacobs. This is going to be our final in the dirt episode for the year. And we take a look back. At 2021 and a look forward to 2022. Before we jump in, I needed to thank this week. Sponsor a competitive cyclist.  [00:00:23] Competitive cyclist is the online retailer of road. Gravel and mountain bikes, components, apparel, and accessories.  [00:00:30] Perhaps you've got a holiday gift card, burning a hole in your pocket at this point. Competitive cyclist features cycling standout brands like pock Castelli, Pearl Izumi and five 10, and an unrivaled in-house bike assembly operation. They bring personal attention of your local bike shop with the selection and convenience only possible by shopping online.  [00:00:52] I can't talk about competitive cyclists without talking about the gearheads they're equal part customer service and cycling fanatic. Gear heads or former pro athletes. Olympians and seasoned cyclists with years of experience, all available by phone, email, or chat for product recommendations. And hard won advice.  [00:01:12] I know, after my conversation with my personal gearhead, Maggie, I came away with a few ideas on how to fill my personal Christmas basket. Those hard to think of items that I knew I couldn't get family or friends to purchase for me, but I needed in the garage. As I mentioned before, I got a full setup of SRAM replacement, brake pads that I couldn't find elsewhere.  [00:01:35] I found them at competitive cyclist. And now I'm ready for all those dissents here in mill valley. Competitive cyclist has a hundred percent. Return guarantee. So anything you can get, if it doesn't look like what you needed, feel free to send it back to them. And they'll take care of you. I know I appreciate that. As I've often ended up purchasing the wrong item for my bike, something that didn't fit or was too hard to figure out how to install.  [00:02:01] And being able to send it back is a great benefit.  [00:02:05] So go now to competitive cyclist.com/the gravel ride and enter promo code the gravel ride to get 15% off your first full priced order. Plus free shipping on orders of $50 or more some exclusions apply. [00:02:20] Go right now and grab that 15% off and free shipping@competitivecyclists.com slash the gravel ride. And remember once again, that promo code is the gravel ride.  [00:02:31] The sponsors of this broadcast are very much appreciated. So be sure to go check them out. Would that business out of the way let's dive right in to my episode of in the dirt with randall jacobs Hey Randall, how you doing?  [00:02:43] Randall Jacobs: I am well, Craig happy holidays [00:02:46] Craig Dalton: Yeah, same to you. It's good to see you. It's hard to believe. This is our last episode of the  [00:02:51] Randall Jacobs: last episode of the year, indeed. So we have a lot of fun topics for today. How would you like to dive in? [00:02:57] Craig Dalton: Yeah, I think first off, I'd just like to put out a little public apology. I feel like we've had some audio issues on the podcast recently. Both on the editing side and more recently just voice levels. So I just want to shout out one, I acknowledge that those things have happened. and two, just to note of appreciation to the listeners who reached out with a lot of kindness to just say, Hey, Do you need any help? [00:03:24] Do you have any, can I offer any suggestions? Cause it's, it's well received and noted. And in fact, we're trying a different platform today, which comes super well-regarded. I know it's used by NPR and a bunch of other broadcast podcasts. Um, so hopefully the audio turns out great. And it's definitely a goal of mine in 2022 to just make sure that the audio levels don't distract from the conversation. [00:03:47] Obviously to the listener. I never do any fancy editing. I don't do a lot of stuff around that, given our, my personal capabilities, but we do want the conversation to be enjoyable, to listen to. And just for you to be able to get to know the guests or hear the conversation without anything getting in the way [00:04:06] Randall Jacobs: Yeah, and I certainly want to own my part in being a little bit overzealous with the editing capabilities of the last software platform we were using. We were using, there's a certain perfectionist tendency that I've been working through in public as a consequence of being a, you know, a part of this podcast. [00:04:24] Uh, so the other feedback that we received and the ridership was super helpful and. I will be, well, this platform doesn't allow so much, but then also just recognizing that it doesn't have to be perfect to be really good.  [00:04:36] Craig Dalton: Yeah, I think, I think, you know, part of the feedback and I had gotten this early on and it was intentional on my part to just people speak the way they speak. Right. And it's not up to me or us to edit out too much of the conversation, obviously. dog barking or fire alarm. I want to address that. But if someone says like, or as are needs of a couple of minutes or repeats a word, I don't want to feel overly compelled to edit that out because at the end of the day, the gravel ride podcast is just talking about connecting with humans and talking about the subject to gravel cycling. [00:05:10] So I think there's just some good notes for, us to take for 2020.  [00:05:15] Randall Jacobs: Yeah, well, you know, um, like, uh, I guess that's okay. Sounds good to me. [00:05:22] Craig Dalton: um, maybe.  [00:05:25] Randall Jacobs: Yeah,  [00:05:27] Craig Dalton: But otherwise, you  [00:05:27] Randall Jacobs: keep that in there.  [00:05:28] Craig Dalton: it's been a fun year. I mean, I'm, I'm personally proud that we've published episodes every single week of the year. It was a lot of effort to get to that point. I think certainly a lot of listeners have acknowledged that And I, I would be remiss in not thanking those who have become members of buy me a coffee.com or supported the podcast in any other ways, because it, it has taken a lot of effort to achieve this goal. [00:05:54] A couple of years back, I was just doing two episodes a month. So this seems like a pretty big momentous year that we should celebrate  [00:06:02] Randall Jacobs: yeah. And just looking every so often, I'll go and buy me a coffee and read the comments. Uh, just when I need to pick me up and just the, the, you know, the appreciation there really makes the effort worth it. So thank you for that as well. [00:06:13] Craig Dalton: Yeah. I mean, obviously like this isn't a money-making venture, so it's really the kind of kudos and kindness that, uh, you know, really propelled me forward.  [00:06:22] Randall Jacobs: You're not the Joe Rogan of the gravel cycling world. [00:06:26] Craig Dalton: Yeah. You know, I don't think Spotify is going to be coming, knocking on the door to purchase the gravel ride, but, uh, I'm proud of the community we have and what we do every week.  [00:06:34] Randall Jacobs: Yeah, absolutely. [00:06:36] Craig Dalton: Yeah. A couple of ones I just wanted, you know, we've had so many great episodes this year and fun ones for me. Like this has always been a journey of discovery and just these conversations I'm following my personal interests and, And hope. [00:06:50] That aligns with what the listeners are looking for. But a couple of my favorites I really did enjoy having Patrick carry on doing gravel bike skills, 1 0 1, I think that was a super useful episode. And he did a great job. Just sort of breaking down some fundamentals that newer riders may not be aware of or need to work on. [00:07:10] So that was a lot of fun. And then a couple product ones really enjoyed John Freeman from Rafa talking about shooting. Just getting into kind of the ins and outs of the construction of the shoe was an area that as, as you know, a hardware guy hadn't really explored that much. So it was pretty fascinating. [00:07:26] And then have to give a shout out to my buddy Whitman for cab helmets, just doing 3d printed helmets, I think is really interesting. And I do think is one of those trends that it's going to continue to be present in cycling gear, going for. [00:07:42] Randall Jacobs: And I particularly like the, kind of the more foundational episodes that we've done. Uh, another example, being the conversation I also had with Patrick on bike fit 1 0 1. Uh, it's great to be able to point people to a resource that was very carefully structured. But, uh, it's also digestible, uh, to help people understand an important topic that affects how we ride. [00:08:05] Craig Dalton: Yeah, a hundred percent. I wanna, I wanna, um, kind of partition those off because I do think over the course of the last three years, there's been a handful of just critical episodes that I think if you're only going to listen to five episodes of the gravel ride podcast, you should be hitting bike fit 1 0 1. [00:08:22] You should revisit our gravel bike 1 0 1 episodes. If you're thinking about purchasing a bike, the gravel bike skills episode, and there'll be a few more that I'll kind of package in there and I'll find a way in 20, 22 to point people to that to say, Hey, if you're looking to have a starting point, grab these episodes first and then. [00:08:40] get into the flow and go through the, you know, over a hundred episodes in the backcountry.  [00:08:46] Randall Jacobs: Yeah. And you know, that brings us into kind of the next phase and being part of this experience, which is community. Um, another episode I want to call out is the one I recently did with Ryan. Uh, Russ Roca over at pathless pedals. Uh, his content is very much about, uh, you know, the non-competitive aspects of cycling and makes the sport much more accessible. [00:09:09] Uh, and that's a value that you and I hold very dear and is a big value of the ridership. And, uh, you know, was the primary motivation for getting the ridership off the ground, you know, uh, uh, community of riders helping. [00:09:22] Craig Dalton: Yeah. Yeah, exactly. I mean, I think that's been a theme that we've brought up in the end of dirt episodes And constantly encouraging and reminding people to join the ridership. it's something that, you know, we've depended a little bit of energy, but not as much as we would want, would have wanted to in 2021. [00:09:38] I think some of our desires were hamstrung by the ongoing pan down. The idea of getting people together and using the ridership to facilitate, you know, regional ride events and things like that. But the kernel is there and the interactions of, you know, continue to be positive and improve. [00:09:56] Randall Jacobs: Yeah. And it's at a point where. It has a certain degree of validation that allows us to access resources that might not be, uh, accessible early on in terms of partnerships with technology partners or adding new functionality and things like this. And these are conversations that we have been deeply involved in behind the scenes and hope to start seeing, uh, implementation in 2022. [00:10:19] It'll be a significant focus for me, uh, now that, uh, you know, I'm in a very good shape, uh, with, with my primary business. [00:10:27] Craig Dalton: Yeah, I think community is such an interesting topic and it's so, you know, I've always, in retrospect, always looked back at communities I've joined and discovered how much more value you get when you put in. And I think that's sort of the core of the ridership, right? The expectation it's not. Uh, Randall and correct conversation by any means. [00:10:47] In fact, there's weeks at a time that I'm just lurking and watching conversations happen. And, you know, I just encourage people to get in there. And whether it's the ridership or other communities in your life, it's just important to put yourself out there. Because you get so much more in return when you find out that, I mean, maybe it's selfish and you get a question answered that you need answered. [00:11:09] But if you can answer a question for someone else or point them in the right direction, I don't know about you, but I just get such extreme satisfaction out of that. That are really just fills me up. [00:11:19] Randall Jacobs: Yeah, it think if we're doing this right. Um, increasingly people don't know who we are when they sign up and it's, it's, it's its own thing and the ownership and the governance is decentralized and so on, and that's kind of the vision going forward, but we can learn about that a little bit later. [00:11:36] Craig Dalton: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. I think you sign up and you bring your friends in and it becomes, it becomes something that you can use to connect with your local riders, your friends that you ride with every week. But then, you know, the goal has always been to just have this, this forum where people can communicate. [00:11:52] Any question they have. So obviously bike related questions, tire related questions. These can all happen at a super high level, but these regional questions and those group rides you're arranging every month will happen at an interpersonal. [00:12:05] Randall Jacobs: Yeah, who do I ride with? Also, another thing that's been really heartening to see is, uh, we have a channel in there that's just for, you know, buy, sell, gift, seek whatever. Um, and yeah, people just putting stuff up saying, I have these things that I'm not using. If anyone wants them come pick them up or pay for shipping. [00:12:22] And that like really just speaks to the ethos. Um, and, and is, is, is something that, um, I wouldn't say I'm proud of. It's something I feel grateful to be a part of and that's happening.  [00:12:33] Craig Dalton: Yeah. [00:12:33] a hundred percent, a hundred percent. And it's only gonna get better as it grows. I think this community has self-selected towards kindness and generosity, which is really, really great to see and something that I know it's important for both of us, that, that those values continue to get fostered going forward.  [00:12:51] Randall Jacobs: Hmm. Yes, yes. Yes.  [00:12:53] So bikes of the. [00:12:56] Craig Dalton: Yeah. I mean, seeing that we're at the end of the year, I just thought it, it would be cool to kind of, um, talk about bikes that caught our eye, just the bike each to kind of set the stage for maybe what we hope to see the. [00:13:09] industry doing next year.  [00:13:11] Randall Jacobs: Yeah, and I know we have very different perspectives on this, so why don't you go ahead with yours for. [00:13:16] Craig Dalton: Yeah. I mean, I still have my vision for what the perfect bike is and I don't think anything out there necessarily matches that just yet. I think there are a lot of trends. By companies are capitalizing on and they may grab one trend, I think is on point, but not another. So I'm still holding my breath for. [00:13:34] that. [00:13:35] Perfect Nash. Next gen model that'll come out. But one that I did want to highlight is the BMC ERs, L T um, I think it's unrestricted, something or other I'm kind of forgetting what the acronym was, but it was a  [00:13:51] Randall Jacobs: something that looks about right. [00:13:52] Craig Dalton: yeah, exactly. I had the S right. So it's, uh, the BMC ERs has been around for actually a couple of years and, and, uh, Tom boss over at, uh, Marine county bike coalition has one, and he's always raved about it as did, um, a contact of mine over at SRAM and RockShox, and it's a bike that has built in some suppleness into the rear. [00:14:17] I have experience with BMCs on the mountain bike side, as I was riding a 29 or hard tail for quite some time, and all is found that did a really great job of matching suppleness with performance. So it was quite interesting when this year they came out with the LT model, the LT is actually adding a micro suspension fork on the front end. [00:14:41] It's from a company called high ride over in Europe. It's only 20 millimeters of track. But I think they've matched that delicately with the amount of travel on the rear end. The suspension is right in the steer column, so it's not telescoping. So my imagination suggests that it's a fairly rigid front end, and I know they do have a lockout on it as well, but more and more, and it could be a sign of my age. [00:15:05] I'm just appreciating. Anything or any bike that can add a little suppleness to the ride. As You know, from riding out here in Marin, I'm riding the rough stuff all the time. So as we've talked about on previous episodes, there's sort of a bunch of different ways, including your body that creates suspension parts. [00:15:27] You can add the frame and it's just been interesting to me to look at the. This manifestation of those ideas in the BMC ERs LT. Uh, and I think it would be a really great bike to ride around. One thing I don't like about it, which we rant about on the show all the time is it's got a proprietary seat, post shape. [00:15:47] They did have the force forethought of this DC D shaped seed posts to add a, a shim mechanism. So you can easily go to a standard 27 2, but if you're a bike manufacturer out there and listening to me, just give me around 27 to that's fine. I need to put a dropper post in it. I don't need a fancy arrow shape and my seat posts. [00:16:09] Thank you very much.  [00:16:11] Randall Jacobs: Yeah. And the arrow shape doesn't really do anything though. D just, um, the D shaped seat post is not about arrow. It's generally about compliance. So you get a little bit more flex in the, after the post, but if you're running a 27 2 posts, that is, you know, with a decent carbon layup, that's designed for some compliance, you can achieve the same thing. [00:16:30] Uh, so it's kind of separate fluid. Um, but at least they had the forethought yeah. To, to do the, the adapter. Uh, so I don't have a huge problem with that being, being a, an avid, uh, advocate for round posts. [00:16:43] Craig Dalton: Yeah. I remember talking to you, gosh, you know, a year And a half, two years ago, just about your experience working for a bigger manufacturer. And there's so many constraints along the way that, um, get, get hoisted into the conversation. It's it's often not necessarily about is this the thing that ultimate thing that I can make. Is this thing hitting the right product life cycle, the component availability, blah, blah, blah, that that often kind of shaped the design. [00:17:12] Randall Jacobs: Yeah. And there's also, can we tell a story around this? And I've seen a number of examples. Um, one is a candy called certs. That was, there was a technology that I think rhymed with that, that ultimately was just a bolt on Alaska. Um, literally was compromising the structure of the bike and adding weight in order to give a cosmetic thing that told an untrue story about compliance. [00:17:38] Uh, so, you know, you see these things less and less, uh, fortunately, but there's still some of them D shape posts. I definitely include in there. [00:17:46] Craig Dalton: Yeah. Yeah. How about you? I know you struggle. Whenever I ask you to tell me about your favorite bikes out on the market, other than thesis, obviously, you know, what do you think, what was short of your bike of the year?  [00:18:00] Randall Jacobs: Honestly, so my bike of the year. So, so my philosophy is I want a one bike. I don't want suspension. Um, that is compromising the road experience. Uh, I want a bicycle that can do all the things really well. And the bike, you know, I looked at the allied echo and I thought that there were some really cool things happening there. [00:18:20] It's got flipped chips, front and rear. You can get a true performance road geo with a 73 head angle on the larger sizes. Um, but the first off, I don't think it's necessary to have a flip chip in the rear go with four 20 mils. Jane stays that'll work fine for an endurance road G. And if I was to do a flip chip, but just do it in the fork and have it be one that uses two different rotor sizes. [00:18:43] So you get more braking and off-road in the more upright position and I'm a smaller one 60 rotor for on-road with a more aggressive position. Um, my bike of the year is actually a bike that's been around for a long time and is still in my opinion, um, though it's expensive, uh, the category leader and that's, that's the open up, uh,  [00:19:03] Craig Dalton: And would you, would you call out the up or the, uh, or the, um, the one with the dual drops stay stays.  [00:19:10] Randall Jacobs: Um, not the upper, because I think the upper is a great bike for people who want a dedicated dirt only. And who are okay with a, you know, a less spirited on-road experience, but the, the head angle is pretty slack. You don't have enough weight over the front axle with that amount of, you know, with the head angle. [00:19:27] That's that slack, um, it's not built around the, the road wheel size. Really? You, you run 700 by 35.  [00:19:34] Uh,  [00:19:35] the open  [00:19:35] Craig Dalton: that's actually the wide, sorry, sorry to throw you off. That was The wide, that  [00:19:39] Randall Jacobs: Oh, correct? Correct. Yeah. the  [00:19:40] wide, right? Yeah. [00:19:41] Craig Dalton: lighter weight  [00:19:42] Randall Jacobs: the lighter weight one. Yeah. Yeah. Lighter paints, maybe nominally lighter layup.  [00:19:48] Um, I, yeah, I like that bike because of the geometry. [00:19:51] It's a proper endurance road, geometry generous tire clearance. I think it's 2.1 at least. Uh, I think the tire volume on wide rims run tubeless is the best way to do suspension if you want. Um, I have a design for like a, a handlebar with a little bit of suspension built into it. I like suspension stems, if you want even more. [00:20:11] And then you don't compromise the on-road experience and add all that weights and slop. Uh, so yeah, an external cable. That's easier to set up, easier to service, easier to adjust. If you need to ship your bike or pack it up for a flight, uh, it's going to be much less of a hassle. I find internal routing the way that it's done by most companies to be. [00:20:35] A very expensive weight, adding complexity, adding experience, ruining technology to make it look, um, look a certain way. And to be able to tell a story about saving half a watt or a watt of power, I find it quite silly, uh, the way it's done. So, yeah, that's my, that's my bike of the year, uh, is the open up. I do a few things differently and I will do a few things differently in a, in a future generation, but that's a great starting point. [00:21:01] It really. Uh, drug room and did it right initially. [00:21:05] Craig Dalton: Yeah. it's so funny. I mean, that was my, my second gravel bike. The one that I decided I was going to sell my road. It was going to go all in on gravel, sold the original Niner that I had, that just kind of wasn't fitting, fitting the bill for me and people ask me why I sold that. Like, you know, I loved it. I think it's great. [00:21:25] I think it ticks all those boxes that you, that you've described. You know, I, I didn't, and I've told this, I probably said this publicly and I've certainly said it privately. I didn't find, I found going to the thesis was very similar to writing. [00:21:39] Randall Jacobs: exactly. [00:21:40] Craig Dalton: You're not paying me to say this, but it's my personal opinion.  [00:21:44] Randall Jacobs: Yep. [00:21:44] Craig Dalton: Yeah. [00:21:45] I mean, it sort of slightly different intention on the bike from a design perspective, not maybe as lightweight as the, the open was or is, but very comparable in kind of performance. And, and for me, what was critically important was the fit. I am concerned about some of the trends around geometry and two blunts that. [00:22:05] Becoming popularized in the gravel bike market right now. And I'm concerned. And I had the same concern when this happened on mountain bikes. That it's actually not favoring me like where we are today from a certainly too blunt that I'm talking about the trend towards going longer, top tube slacker, head tube, short stem, and longer top tubes just never, never worked for me. [00:22:29] I've sort of in. You know, on my thesis, on the open, I would tend to ride a little bit shorter stem. [00:22:34] than maybe was customary. Um, given my height, just cause of my torso and now not to get into this trend too much. Cause I'm sure we'll cover it in 2022, but I'm a little bit concerned about getting my fit right on some of these newer.  [00:22:48] Randall Jacobs: Mm. Yeah. And where is this significant? There, there are benefits on the mountain side and really no downside, assuming you can fit to the bike properly because a mountain bike is generally. You know, the range of applications that you use a given mountain bike for is generally narrower than say, you know what I'm describing as a one bike where you'd have, you know, performance road experience all the way to a borderline cross country mountain bike experience, to a bike packing experience. [00:23:13] Um, I find that the, you know, the argument for going with a longer top tube, shorter stem is so you can fit bigger 700 C type. Um, I find it kind of silly because you could go higher volume six 50 B. You could still fit big enough, 700 C for certain applications and not compromise the on-road experience with a front end that doesn't have enough weight kids to leave it over, over the front axle for control and cornering and descending and so on. [00:23:40] I think it has as much to do with trying to differentiate. Gravel bikes enough from road bikes to justify people owning both. Uh, I think it has as much to do with that as it does to do with any sort of ostensible benefits, um, to a very, you know, increasingly narrow set of applications that such a bike is useful for. [00:24:01] Craig Dalton: yeah. I mean, you would think for me being like an entirely off-road rider for. [00:24:04] the most. This new trend would be helpful. And I am curious, try kind of these bikes. I've, I've got a couple in the garage of the haven't been a good fit. Um, I am looking to get one with a better fit just to sort of see if it, if it fits the bill for me, but I think you're right. [00:24:19] I think it is creating a greater amount of separation between the road and the gravel bikes. And to me, I don't necessarily strive for that since I don't have a road bike in the garage. Right.  [00:24:31] Randall Jacobs: Difference without distinction. It's I see it as all down. Um, that, that that's obviously I have, I have a horse in this, in this race, but, uh, that's, that's my perspective in anything I do in the future will not use that geometry philosophy.  [00:24:44] Craig Dalton: Yeah. Okay. Well, that's interesting to hear Rondo, you got an a on that, on that front. I was gifted for my wife, a bike fit this this year, and it was something that I obviously put on my Christmas list. Um, I'm increasingly concerned and, you know, should I go down the route of getting a custom bike or should I have a demo bike be offered to me in 2022? [00:25:06] I just sort of want to understand my personal parameters a little bit more and with a little bit more confidence. I know. And I appreciate you being a friend and ally on my journey. Trying to explore fit and understanding of frame geometries. Um, I'm much better equipped today at the end of 2021 than I was earlier in the year. [00:25:26] And I do think going through this fit exercise is just going to be another step forward in my understanding of, of my personal body and how it's changing over time with the.  [00:25:36] Randall Jacobs: Hmm. Yeah. Yeah. Well, um, I refer you to the bike fit episode and, uh, you know, my phone number. [00:25:43] Craig Dalton: yeah, yeah, yeah. For sure. So I've got it. I'll go through it locally and you know, I've listened to that episode again, just to get some more thoughts in my mind. And, uh, yeah, I know you're always there when I need to riff on bike stuff. [00:25:56] Randall Jacobs: So when we got coming up next, [00:25:58] Craig Dalton: Yeah. I mean, I think it'd be cool to just highlight maybe your favorite ride of the year.  [00:26:03] Randall Jacobs: Sure. Uh, so this is a ride that my, my dear friend Marcus Gosling invited me on. It was a group of us, I think, uh, uh, three men, two women, uh, rode from top of skyline in the Santa Cruz mountains above San Mateo, south of San Francisco. Um, where I was actually living with Marcus for a few months during the pandemic, amongst the redwoods, uh, up on the Ridge there, it was a great place to be. [00:26:29] When it wasn't, you know, when, when everyone was staying in and we went through, let's see, we went down to the coast and to Aptos, and then up through 19 marks, uh, along summit coming back north, uh, was near Mount Nominum. And so on 130 kilometers, a lot of climbing, some fun stops along the way, really wonderful conversation, uh, with people that, uh, Uh, a couple of people I hadn't met before, and then one woman I had met, but not really, uh, connected with in that sort of way. [00:27:02] And when you have that many miles, you can really get into it. And, uh, that's one of my favorite things about the ride experience. The train was fantastic too, and very varied. Uh, but it's, it was the people that really made that. So that was my ride of the year.  [00:27:14] It was called, it was called the business meeting by the way. [00:27:17] Cause, cause I think it was a weekday, I think I took the day off. So, uh, yeah, when you work in the industry that that can, that can qualify.  [00:27:24] Craig Dalton: A hundred percent. Yeah, [00:27:25] I might have to coerce you into sharing that link with me, or maybe even putting it in our ride with GPS club for the ridership. Cause that sounds like a neat loop.  [00:27:34] Randall Jacobs: sure. Yeah. Happy to. [00:27:35] Craig Dalton: Yeah. I have to say like, um, I guess it's a factor of me being limited for time, but I typically don't ever get in my car to drive and there's so much interesting stuff that I've seen in the ridership, um, in that neck of the woods and out in Pacifica that I really. [00:27:51] Get down there because it doesn't, you know, they don't have to get on an airplane to go do something interesting.  [00:27:57] Randall Jacobs: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So how about yourself? What was your ride of the year? [00:28:00] Craig Dalton: Well, speaking of airplanes, it was the one solitary time I got on an airplane with my bike this year? [00:28:07] Do you remember in the June July timeframe when it felt like we were getting a hold of the pandemic, we were on top of things, boosters or, you know, shots were getting rolled out vaccination shots and it felt like things might be getting back to that.  [00:28:21] Randall Jacobs: um, it felt like things were normal for a period. I always expected it to just be a low so, but yes, I do remember that time. [00:28:29] Craig Dalton: so I was leaning into that moment in time and our friends at envy composites out in Utah, we're putting. Uh, together an event called the , which was a ride combined with their builders, Roundup, which they bring, I forget how many, like 20 different frame builders out to Ogden, Utah, and kind of display their bicycles throughout Envy's facility. [00:28:54] So it was, I, it was too much to her exist, um, going on.  [00:28:59] Randall Jacobs: um, with NABS not happening this year. [00:29:01] Craig Dalton: Yeah, exactly. Which was so fun when we went to NABS a few years ago, just to, I mean, to stand next to someone with their creation, their hard work is just something special. Like if you, as a listener, if you ever get a chance to go to a bike show, do it, like, it's just, I mean, for the eye candy alone, it's worth walking the Isles  [00:29:20] Randall Jacobs: well I'm for reference north American hand-built bicycle show is what NABS is. And a lot of what you see from the big brands, a lot of ideas and concepts, uh, emerge from small builders, doing cool things in basements and garages, uh, which is one of the great aspects of those shows. [00:29:38] Craig Dalton: yeah, exactly. When you get a, a fabricator with a torch and some tubes, they can, they can just try different things. And it's really, what does help propel the industry for?  [00:29:48] Randall Jacobs: Very much, so very  [00:29:49] Craig Dalton: so. [00:29:49] I saw some great bikes out there. It's, you know, as far as the builder Roundup goes and I've published a bunch of episodes and, and, uh, and a summary episode that kind of has some quick hits from a number of the people I talked to, but that ride, since we're talking about favorite rides of the year, Every year, I tend to sign up for an event that probably pushes my personal fitness capabilities. [00:30:10] And I love to do that just to kind of keep me honest and keep me getting out there and finding the time to ride the bikes. And I definitely wasn't feeling prepared for a 92 mile ride and 8 8300 feet of climb. At some elevation above sea level already out there in Ogden, Utah. But I set out on the course, pretty small event, maybe 200 people, um, got to the first aid station and there was talk amongst some of the builders of flipping it around right there. [00:30:38] But when I got there, I learned that I was just going to be a straight out and back if I did that and I just couldn't resist it. If you haven't written in Utah, it's beautiful in the Wasatch mountains out there. Uh, so I kept going and like every great gravel event that I've ever participated in. You end up linking up with riders, um, out there on the course that you just share the pace with. [00:31:02] And I met a guy from contender cycles out in Utah, which was actually where I bought my open from originally. So that was cool. We chatted for many, many miles. Yeah. Very late in the day, I managed to connect with Dave from gravel stoke. And I can't remember whether he caught him. He caught me or I caught him, but we ended up together and we'd separate on the climbs. [00:31:23] And we both look at each other miserably tired at times, but we, we crusted the final climb and hit the aid station together And um, rode maybe the last. 20 miles or so together, we were staying in the same hotel room. So it was like, it was just like a great experience to have, to, you know, to connect with a friend and be able to ride. [00:31:45] And it just happened serendipitously because I don't think, you know, when you're signing up for a 90 mile ride or a hundred mile ride, it's foolish to think that you're going to ride with your friend the entire time. Like you just need to take care of your own needs. And that, for me, it's all about. I've got a ride, the climbs, my own pace. [00:32:03] I want to descend at my own pace. So it's really got to happen naturally. And when it does to me, man, it's just magic. [00:32:10] Randall Jacobs: Yeah. And Dave, uh, for anyone in Soquel, uh, gravel. Puts on some of the best rides I've been a part of as well, a really great routes, really good people. Um, you know, a lot of, a lot of social interaction and so on and just a really great ethos. Uh, so if you're in the SoCal area, check out the gravel stoke and by the way, this is, um, you know, gravel. [00:32:30] Those, a lot of those folks are in the ridership too. So if you want to connect with Dave or others, that's a great place to do it. [00:32:35] Craig Dalton: Yeah. Yeah, exactly. So hopefully more of this for 2022, speaking of which, what are you, what are your hopes for 2022? I mean, I don't think we need to go into a laundry list, but what are a couple of things that are, you know,  [00:32:49] Randall Jacobs: So with regards to what we do here. Uh, so I moved to new England and living outside of Boston with, uh, with family. And I want to build out this region. I, we hosted a couple of group rides, uh, before the, the season changed to ski season. Uh, and as. The spring approaches. I want to build out this region and I want to facilitate more in-person connection and an experience like this, what the ridership is about and have that be, um, you know, something that, uh, extends to other regions as well, where there's a critical mass where people can actually meet people in person and have real in the flesh experiences and maybe. [00:33:28] Craig Dalton: I'm really excited for you to do that. I know when I spent my sort of formative years as a mountain biker in the mid Atlantic, I always looked to new England and it was a place that I would go up and race every once in a while when I can make a trip. And it. At that time, there were so many great new England bike builders. [00:33:47] And I know like Boston has just an incredible cycling community and history behind it. And that whole region up through Vermont, like I'm super excited to hopefully get out there at some point this year and ride.  [00:34:00] Randall Jacobs: You can have come, come by. You can have my apartment.  [00:34:04] Craig Dalton: I can, I can see a couch behind you where I could be sleeping. Right.  [00:34:07] Randall Jacobs: Now I'll set you up properly and I'll, I'll stay. I'll stay in a different part of the place. [00:34:14] Craig Dalton: Nice. Speaking of travel. I mean, for me, like I've been longing to ride my bike internationally. I've been fortunate that I've, I've raised my mountain bike overseas. I've also done some road touring over in France on a couple occasions and a little bit in Italy, but I really got my eye on riding gravel and specifically out in general. [00:34:35] I've been talking about a trip in March, uh, that I'm going to certainly extend to the ridership community to join me on. So if I can work out the details on that in January and obviously pandemic willing, um, I'd love to pull that off because there's just something about putting your bike on international territory that, that makes any riding fields.  [00:34:57] Randall Jacobs: yeah, Jarana keeps coming up in my conversations with these bay area folks who are of a certain means and, um, certain level of obsession with writing. Uh, you know, I have friends who've, uh, we're looking to move there and things like that. Uh, so definitely on the agenda for me as well, keeping in the loop. [00:35:15] Craig Dalton: Yeah. [00:35:15] I feel like if it's a, if you're a cyclist, it's just one of those destinations in your life that you need to get to, to find out why the pros are living there. And I did do an episode with our friends at Trek, travel about their trip to Jarana, which is the one I'm kind of eyeing. And you, you, you hear about all the great road riding there, but then to talk to the team over there. [00:35:36] How much dirt there is available and how special it can be. I'm just super stoked and excited to explore that possibility.  [00:35:44] Randall Jacobs: Very cool. Very  [00:35:45] cool. Yeah. And it's I want to do, I think that speaks to a theme generally of more, more group rides with the community in, in a general sense, wherever  [00:35:54] Craig Dalton: yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Like you, I mean, in 2021, early in the year, I like, I definitely had high hopes. Getting our bay area, ridership community together more and getting some routine and having it, frankly not involve me as much. Like I'm happy to facilitate rides, but I also want others to feel compelled, to raise their hand and say, Hey, just, you know, meet me in Fairfax, California. [00:36:16] And we're going to do this route or meet me in mill valley, whatever it is.  [00:36:20] Randall Jacobs: Wait, which brings us to our shared goals for the year. [00:36:24] Craig Dalton: Yeah, exactly. Like as we talked about earlier, I think we've got a lot of big goals for the ride.  [00:36:31] Randall Jacobs: Yeah, I think, uh, building a critical mass in the region so that you can have those in-person interactions, um, you know, talking about having other people, being able to facilitate group rides and so on. Well, there's, we, we need certain features. We need, uh, we need to update our technology stack, potentially migrate away from slack to something more powerful. [00:36:51] Uh, we have a technology partner that we're talking about. Some tools that if realized, could be very helpful in coordinating rides and having, you know, being able to verify vaccination status or have a waiver or, you know, other things that are essential to, uh, making this a good tool, not just for impromptu. [00:37:10] Group rides amongst people, but also like your shop ride and things like this. They need certain tools for these, these events as well. Uh, amongst other features. [00:37:18] Craig Dalton: Yeah. [00:37:18] Yeah. exactly. I mean, it's, it's tough to even consider leaving the platform around on today just because. Everybody's comfortable there, but I do think the only reason we would leave is to add more features And add more things that I think can be beneficial to the rider community. Cause it's going to be a bit of a pain in the ass. [00:37:38] Let's call it like it is. If we ask people to move and there's going to be a little bit of effort and undoubtedly, we're going to lose a few people, but I am optimistic that if, and when we make that decision, that the types of things we're able to offer. Are going to be so next level, whether it's, you know, group conversations or tea times we can have with people or different sort of more high tech features that you were just discussing. [00:38:02] I think that can be a meaningful step forward and really something that we can lean into. [00:38:07] Randall Jacobs: Yeah. And marketplace features having a wallet that facilitates exchange between people, um, and having a different way of establishing trust on the. Like being able to look not at, not just somebody's, you know, score on eBay, how many stars they have, but look like how does this person contribute to the community? [00:38:27] Um, how have I seen them engage? Uh, and having that be part of what provides safety and say like, you know, buying a bike and having it shipped across the country,  [00:38:37] you  [00:38:37] know, this sort of thing.  [00:38:38] Craig Dalton: I think there's a lot of interesting things there. And then on the podcast, you know, I think, you know, I just want to continue the journey I'm on. I would, I would stop if I didn't feel like as a, as an individual, I was not learning every time I have these conversations. And, um, I'm looking forward to talking with more event organizers, because I think as hopefully 20, 22 kicks up and we can have more and more events again, I can highlight them because I think events are a way of highlighting regions. [00:39:07] And their events happened in a moment in time, but the, the legacy of the course creation carries on and people can go out there and commune and ride together on those type of things. So I think there's a lot there. Obviously we're going to continue to see new products come to market, and I also want to continue talking to interesting athletes alone.  [00:39:29] Randall Jacobs: Yeah. [00:39:30] And for me, I think my, you know, my next few episodes, uh, I'm quite excited about, I won't say share who they are yet. Uh, but one is a woman who started a community that I admire. Uh, both her story and her ethos and what she's doing and the scale that she's achieved with it. Uh, and then another, who's one of the key innovators in our industry, like in the early days of carbon fiber and has, has, uh, uh, created a lot of things that have seen diffuse use throughout the year. [00:39:57] And then diving more into kind of the psycho-spiritual aspects of cycling, um, with, with guests who can speak to that more deeply, I've done, uh, you know, you and I have had a couple of conversations that have delved into that a bit. And I did one episode with, uh, Ted klong, a sports psychologist early on. [00:40:14] So exploring those seems a lot more, uh, things that I'm quite excited about in 2022. [00:40:20] Craig Dalton: Yeah, well, it's going to be an exciting year. It's a lot of work doing what we do. We wouldn't do it. If we didn't get great feedback and support from the listener community. So as always keep that feedback coming, keep out there, riding and. I appreciate the time as always Randall and look forward to doing more of these in the dirt episodes and 2022. [00:40:39] Randall Jacobs: appreciate you much, my friend, and to everyone listening. Thank you for being a part of this with us.  [00:40:44] Craig Dalton: Jaris. [00:40:46] So that's going to do it. My friends for this week's edition of in the dirt from the gravel ride podcast. It's our final edition of the year, 2021. I very much appreciate you joining us each week for this journey. As we explore gravel cycling and how it fits into our lives. Big, thanks to competitive cyclist.  [00:41:06] For supporting the podcast. I remember competitive cyclists.com/the gravel ride and promo code. The gravel ride. We'll get you 15% off your order. If you're looking for information about our global cycling community called the ridership, simply visit www.theridership.com. And if you're interested in able to support the podcast financially, please visit buy me a coffee.com/the gravel ride. I love seeing the comments and your support for the podcast over the years.  [00:41:39] Is greatly appreciated. Until next time here's to finding some dirt onto your wheels

BMCS with Suba Priya

BMCS with SUBA

Join me as I sit down with BMCS Theresa Joyce of Personnel Service Center to discuss the Parental Leave Program. This program ensures our shipmates can focus on the care of a newborn or adopted child while enabling the unit to remain operationally effective in their absence. We discuss how the Coast Guard Reserve bridges these gaps for us and the outstanding value our reservists bring in general. BMs are in the leadership business and a working knowledge of programs such as these makes us more effective in that art. I hope this episode is enjoyable and informative!  Submit show show suggestions to cgbmrfmc@gmail.com Disclaimer: The views, information, or opinions expressed during the Course Made Good podcast series are solely those of the individuals involved and do not represent those of the United States Coast Guard or any other government agency.  The primary purpose of this podcast series is to educate and inform. This podcast series does not constitute official policy guidance from the speakers nor the United States Coast Guard.

As we continue to celebrate the centennial of Coast Guard Chief Petty Officers we talk with Senior Chief Boatswain’s Mate Jim Rambus (Ret.) who tells of the dangers of logistic runs to the shoals and reefs of the Great Lakes where manned lighthouses once stood, including a lesson in confidence for a new coxswain after swamping a 40 footer during a personnel transfer and the near loss of a crew when their boat’s engines died in icy waters, the dangers of lightship duty during hurricanes and heavy fog, commanding three boat stations as an enlisted Officer in Charge, a fatal snap back after the service’s boats first transitioned from manila to nylon towlines, the service’s move from Treasury to Transportation, and what it means to be a Chief Petty Officer. --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/theyhadtogoout/support

Retired Senior Chief Boatswains Mate Jon Ostrowski talks deploying for Operation Iraqi Freedom with a Reserve Port Security Unit, the centennial of Coast Guard Chief Petty Officers, the unique role of Chiefs in the service, leading the Chief Petty Officers Association (CPOA) at the national level, the volunteer work of the CPOA’s local chapters during recent crises including the federal government shutdown and the COVID-19 pandemic, and his dramatic introduction to Coast Guard operations aboard his first cutter. --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/theyhadtogoout/support

Carlos Gil is CEO of Gil Media, a digital media company that specializes in video production, influencer marketing, social media community management, talent management, and content marketing. Carlos is a first generation Latino marketing executive, award-winning Snapchat storyteller, and author of a recent bestseller: “The End of Marketing: Humanizing Your Brand in the Age of Social Media and AI,” available on Amazon. He presents bilingual keynotes at major marketing industry events. In this interview, Carlos reviews his unconventional path to success, the importance of passion, and the long-term humanizing person to person linkage that creates business opportunities. There are no shortcuts. He believes the strength of a company is in its employees. He hopes his book will help companies future-proof their brands and their businesses for the long term. In 2008, Carlos lost his job in the financial industry – the same day that he joined LinkedIn. A couple of days later, he started an online LinkedIn group job board, JobsDirectUSA.com., and promoted awareness through social media (which was in its infancy). He learned how to build relationships through social media and enabled thousands of mid- to senior-level career professionals to find jobs. Harvard Business Review, Inc. Magazine, Mashable, Social Media Examiner and numerous trade publications featured his work with this startup. In 2010, Fast Company recognized him as one of the Top 50 “Most Influential People Online”. Carlos worked for a couple of grocery stores chains, developing their social media platforms, before joining LinkedIn to run social media for their Sales Solution business unit. His personal brand grew as he was repeatedly tapped to speak at marketing industry conferences.  Carlos took one final corporate job with BMC Software because he wanted the opportunity to work with Nick Utton. Used to battling the status quo in highly-structured hierarchies, Carlos had been frustrated by bureaucratic foot-dragging when he tried to get things done. Nick taught Carlos to “Fail fast, learn from that failure, and keep moving forward to what does work.” Carlos says that it is important, wherever you are in your career, that you have a leader who really supports you. Today? A best selling book . . . A résumé showing over a decade of experience running digital and social media marketing for enterprise brands . . . A highly-successful agency working with an amazing roster of enterprise clients . . . Worldwide speaking engagements. For a man who dropped out of high school, got his GED, and jumped into an MBA program at age 30, Carlos has far exceeded expectations. He credits getting laid off in 2008 as the springboard for what has become an amazing track record of accomplishments. In the face of Covid-19, Carlos is one more entrepreneur re-inventing himself for these challenging times. For those who have questions, Carlos can be reached at @carlosgil83 on Twitter and on Instagram. (Just let him know you heard him on Rob's podcast), on LinkedIn, or by email . . . at carlos@gilmedia.co. To view Carlos interviewing his mentor, Nick Utton, (9/25/2018, topic  “How to Sell to a CMO and Marketing Truths with Nick Utton.”), see this link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ql733a53xa0   Transcript Follows: ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I'm your host, Rob Kischuk, and I am joined today by Carlos Gil, CEO of Gil Media. He's a keynote speaker, an author of the recent bestseller, The End of Marketing: Humanizing Your Brand in the Age of Social Media and AI, and he's based in Miami, Florida. Welcome to the podcast, Carlos. CARLOS: Hey, Rob. It's great to be here. Thanks for having me on the show. ROB: Sure, glad to have you here. Wish we were in person in Austin, Texas as we had planned, but the coronavirus had other plans. Why don't you start off by telling us a little bit about yourself and your own journey into the world of marketing agency speaking origins? CARLOS: My career in marketing actually started in 2008. I started my career in the early 2000s working in the finance and banking industry. It was right around the fall of 2008 that the banking industry took a turn for the worse. I was laid off. I was working for AIG at the time. The same day I lost my job is the same day that I joined LinkedIn. To put it into context for everyone listening out there, the moment I lost my job, hundreds of thousands of other Americans lost their jobs too, and the irony with what we're seeing happening today in this current crisis is – It reminds me a lot of what I went through about 12 years ago, early on in my career. I joined LinkedIn the same day I lost my job, and I became really inspired to help others find work. I knew that the likelihood of my finding a job in banking any time soon was probably not going to happen. It was looking really bleak. Within just a few days of joining LinkedIn, I became inspired to help others find jobs, so I started my first business, and that was an online job board. Now, to put this in perspective for you, I was 25 years old at the time. I had no experience running a business. My parents are serial entrepreneurs, so I knew that entrepreneurship and running a business isn't easy by any means. But the point where I was at in my career, where I didn't have experience running a business, I didn't have any seed money or real savings, and I definitely didn't have experience building websites or coding – or marketing, for that matter – the cards were really stacked against me. But I was really passionate about helping others find work. The first thing I did was I started up a group on LinkedIn called Jobs Direct USA, and then that group morphed into what was the basis for my online job board, and then eventually an events business. For about 3 years, I forced myself to learn how to use social media. Again, to put it in perspective, not having any real experience in corporate marketing at that point, social media was really new. We're talking about the years of 2008, '09, and '10, when businesses weren't really using Facebook and Twitter and even LinkedIn like they are today. I really learned how to use social media to form relationships, and it was those relationships that eventually helped me gain clients and grow my business and led me down this path of corporate marketing. I ended up getting hired by one of my clients, Winn-Dixie, which is a supermarket chain based in Jacksonville, Florida, which is where I lived at the time. They ended up hiring me to start up social media for them in 2011. I was at Winn-Dixie for a couple of years; ended up going to another supermarket chain called Save-A-Lot in the Midwest, where I was the Director of Digital. Then things really skyrocketed for me when I was hired by LinkedIn and relocated out to San Francisco to run social media for one of their business units. It was around that time that I worked for LinkedIn that I started getting hit up to speak at different conferences, Social Media Marketing World, South by Southwest, various industry conferences, and I started investing more into building a personal brand. Fast forward to where I'm at today, which is 2020, like you mentioned before, I've got the bestselling book The End of Marketing, which came out at the end of 2019. I have an agency, Gil Media Co., and I have this great résumé which spans now over a decade running digital and social media marketing for various enterprise brands – and now I have the pleasure of working with an amazing roster of enterprise clients. None of it would've been possible, Rob, without first of all losing my job in 2008 during a crisis and really turning to social media to brush myself off and build the brand that you see today, which is Carlos Gil.  ROB: It's quite a personal brand. A lot of people have probably heard you speak, seen you on conference rosters. It seems a fascinating theme in your journey is that when you have your back against the wall, you're a guy that finds your way out. One of the times I became aware of you was when you were running social media for BMC Software. BMC Software doesn't resonate in most people's minds as a titan in social media, but you had a lot of interesting things to talk about, and they probably to an extent had their back against the wall to figure out how to do something in social media. Not engaging was not an option, but I imagine figuring out how to engage was a real challenge for them. CARLOS: I'm so glad that you brought up BMC, because BMC Software is the last corporate brand I worked for full-time as an employee. When I got hired by BMC, I was at this crossroads in my career. I went to go work for LinkedIn; LinkedIn was a great opportunity, but ultimately it wasn't going to be the end-all, be-all for me. I was at this crossroad where I was like, do I go out on my own? Do I go work another gig? The reality is that when you run social media for a brand – an enterprise brand like the Winn-Dixies, Save-A-Lots, BMCs of the world – it's all the same job. Creating content, managing a community, influencer relationships. It's all the same gig. It doesn't really change outside of the logo that you represent. What really steered me to go work for BMC was the CMO that hired me, Nick. He was a former CMO of MasterCard, worked for E-Trade, JP Morgan Chase – this is a guy that lives, breathes, and eats marketing, and I think it's really important, regardless of what stage you're at in your career, that you have a leader that really supports you. If you have a boss, you should have a boss that supports your growth, supports your endeavors, and really is your champion internally. One of the challenges is there's always this hierarchy that you have to work against. You're constantly swimming against the current. You have all these ideas, like right now, a lot of clients are coming to me and they're asking me about TikTok. So, I'm advising them on what they should or shouldn't do. Any time there's this emerging new channel, a lot of marketers are eager to jump on that channel, and then they're met with resistance. Whereas my boss at BMC, Nick, understood that if you want to constantly evolve, you need to be trying new things, and if it doesn't work, it doesn't work. You fail fast was his mantra, and you learn from that failure and then you keep moving forward to what does work. What I enjoyed about working at BMC in the 2 years I was there is that as an employee, they really gave me full autonomy to do my job. And now, as a business owner, it's that autonomy that was given and that leadership that I was surrounded with that's really helped me and my business, imagining the employees that I have and really growing my business with the mindset that employees are our greatest asset. It's not the products, it's not the services, it's not the logo, but it's the employees that make us who we are. Going back to at BMC, which is very much B2B focused from a marketing standpoint, relationships are paramount. My mantra, Rob, before I turn it back over to you, is in this world of marketing that we're in today, you don't need to have the most followers. You don't need to have the most engagement. But what you do need to have is an engaged community of customers, clients, and fans – even if it's five people. ROB: Indeed. That's quite a range, going from Winn-Dixie, which is a consumer brand that is for everybody within the region of that grocery store chain – I spent middle and high school in Tampa, Florida; I know Winn-Dixie well, a lot of my high school friends worked there – to BMC, which is enterprise software. And it's not even – Zoom is having this moment because everybody needs to talk to everybody. BMC is not in a moment where everybody is still going to need it. Certain people are still going to need it. I think it flows nicely into your book. One of the themes of your End of Marketing book is really knowing where your target customer is. I think you've taken this lesson you learned in going so far between consumer and enterprise and taken a really good general lesson. It seems like maybe the book itself is some of these general lessons you've extracted that can apply to anyone. How do you think about that book in our current moment? CARLOS: I don't want this to come off as a cheap plug for The End of Marketing, but I think right now, humanizing your brand is going to be what keeps your brand in business. It's something that throughout my book and even throughout my keynotes now, I state upfront the reason why I wrote the book in the first place is to help future-proof your brand and your business for the long term. When I started writing The End of Marketing at the beginning of 2019, at no point did I ever think a year into being a published author, there would be coronavirus or I'd be quarantining and staying at home. But the premise of The End of Marketing and the methodology behind how you market as a human versus as a brand is that at the end of the day, people relate to people. Since the beginning of time, people do business with who they want to do business with, who they like, who they trust. For example, you had never heard of me, seen me speak, or even like what I have to say, you wouldn't invite me on your podcast. It's that basic. It's that simple. And it's not a hard methodology, but I think marketing has become so fragmented and marketers themselves have gotten so far away from the basics, and we get so wrapped up with having that content constantly flowing out – I refer in The End of Marketing, my book, to social media and the internet being this noisy digital ocean. And it is, because we're constantly facing this pressure to have to push out content. We're constantly looking at metrics. We're constantly comparing our wins and our highlights to someone else's wins and highlights. At the end of the day, if you focus on reaching individual people like a human being, not as a brand, over time they will show love for you. They will show an affinity for you. And that is how you grow your business. It's one person at a time. It's one-to-one marketing; it's not one-to-many. ROB: It's awesome how that probably ties straight back to that job board that you built, because you didn't set out to build a job board for the world. You were in a moment – and you were in finance; people may not remember just how bad it was to be in finance in 2008. It would be like being in a restaurant for this month when everything's shut down. You can't go out and get a restaurant job right now in this coronavirus pandemic. But you started block by block, person by person, connecting people to each other, connecting people to jobs, also in a very human business in Winn-Dixie. It now probably is tying right into the work you're thinking about for brands now, helping them realize how human they need to be in this moment. CARLOS: Yeah. I'm so glad that you brought that up. It's funny because I'm here thinking, maybe I need to dust the cobwebs off my Jobs Direct USA business plan and maybe bring it back. It's hard times right now. You've got a lot of people in hospitality that are being hit hard by this crisis. You've got a lot of people all over the board – I was just sharing this with you before we jumped on here; as a speaker, my entire business has been wiped out for probably all of 2020. Yes, conferences are saying they're going to reschedule, yes, they're saying they're looking into other plans, but the reality is that we're in this for the long haul. I think what's most important for anyone that's sitting out there listening to this is that you start thinking about how you're going to get to the other side. I will tell you this: the Great Recession, 2008, '09, '10, were some of the worst years of my life financially speaking, but what it did help me do is first of all build character because I was able to survive it and get through it, and that in itself helps you build tough skin in other scenarios throughout life. But really what it helped me do is acquire knowledge, and it helped me acquire experience. I think that's one thing that a lot of people don't realize. Right now, even though times are bleak and tough, you have all this time on your hands that you can be using to learn something, whether it's reading a book, whether it's going on LinkedIn Learning – if you want to look me up there, I have courses on LinkedIn Learning – whether its going on YouTube and watching and consuming. This is a prime opportunity for you to enrich your mind and allow that enrichment to be able to carry you on to what you're going to do on the flipside of this crisis. ROB: Indeed. It's hopefully a time where people figure out to watch more than just Netflix. Now, we were originally scheduled to meet up in person in Austin. You were going to be at South by Southwest as a mentor and also at the LinkedIn Studio there, providing a talk on the future of work. Share with us a little bit what you were intending to speak of in that talk, and even maybe some additional things – how you're thinking it may have evolved since then. CARLOS: I was going to be first of all doing mentor sessions at South by Southwest. Throughout this recording, I want to make myself available to anyone out there, whether you were going to attend South by Southwest or not. If you want to meet with me one-on-one, if you've got any questions, I'm really easy to find. You can go to @carlosgil83 on Twitter as well as on Instagram. Just let me know that you heard me on Rob's podcast. Again, any questions I can answer for you, any advice that you need, marketing-related, crisis-related, whatever it might be, let me know. But going back to South by Southwest, besides the mentor sessions I was going to do, I was also going to speak at LinkedIn's activation there called the LinkedIn Studio. It was going to be on the future of work. A lot of what I was going to talk about wasn't so much the technology aspect, because I think we all get it that work, whether coronavirus happened or not, eventually was going to move more to this virtual world that we're seeing happening right now, using tools like Zoom and Skype and Slack and other tools out there. But I think, again, my piece is you don't need a college degree from Harvard in order to get the really sexy brand marketing job or agency job. You don't need to have all this formal education in order to be able to run your own business, because I myself am a high school dropout that has a GED. I myself didn't go to college until I was 30 years old and I got into an MBA program. My point that I'm trying to make, Rob, is that you need to be able to get the basics and actually implement the basics and keep moving forward and keep learning and keep growing, and you do that by getting the opportunities that come your way and making the best of them. Relationships are paramount. I wouldn't be on this podcast right now, I wouldn't have the career I have, if it wasn't for the relationships I started building in 2008 as a result of a job loss. Again, when I think of future of work, I think it's not going to be based on where you went to school. It's going to be based on not just who you know, but who knows you. That's where personal branding is paramount. It's funny because I am a big proponent of personal brand, hence why I've invested so much into my own personal brand. Your personal brand is your new résumé. When people think about doing business with you, what they're going to do is google you, and within a few seconds they're going to learn everything that they need to know based on what Google gives them. And if you don't have a presence online, it's going to make it hard for people to be able to find you. Case in point, going back to the agency world, I run a successful agency that I started 3 years ago when I left my corporate job. I do very little business development. I do zero traditional business development from the standpoint of cold calling, pitching, RFPs. I participate in zero RFPs. The way that I've been able to grow Gil Media is through the content I create that lives through my personal brand channels. So think of my personal brand. Everything that you see on my Instagram, my YouTube, Twitter, even Facebook and LinkedIn – it's all funnel. That's to create that top of the funnel awareness, as we call it in the B2B world, and then as you subscribe to my content – and you subscribe by hitting a “follow” button – then at that point, I'm able to get you hooked. You're able to see who I am as a real person. You're able to see how I speak. You're able to learn a couple nuggets from me. That is something I've found is the way to circumnavigate the traditional business development activities to be able to get business. ROB: Perfect. One thing I wonder about a little bit – a lot of the people listening who are in the marketing agency world, and even with our own clients, when I think about our clients, I think about a person, I think about a name, I think about a relationship. And I think that's true easily on the consumer side and easily on the enterprise side, where the deals are large. Then there's I think this middle that can be somewhat mechanistic, the world of hundreds of outbound cold emails and SDRs and that small- to mid-scale SaaS play. When you're thinking about a brand in that kind of market, where people show up and put in the credit card, how do you think about humanizing and making that sort of brand personal in marketing? CARLOS: I think you still need the emails just to keep your name on the radar and stay in front of people. You still need to be out there, all over social media. Again, like I said before, social media and the internet is a noisy digital ocean. These aren't my rules; I just play by the rules of the house, if you will. But I'd say one-to-one interaction is where it's at. If you have someone that you want to do business with right now, or if you have a general idea of the type of client it is that you're trying to reach, your objective is to get in front of that person, one way or another – whether it's an email, a Facebook ad, or a direct message on Twitter or Instagram. Where most people mess up is they're relying on LinkedIn and they're running ads and pumping out content on LinkedIn, and they're spamming, quite frankly, through direct message, everyone that they can on LinkedIn. Here's what I can tell you as someone that has worked at LinkedIn as an employee and teaches on LinkedIn's platform: LinkedIn is a phenomenal directory to find who it is that you want to do business with. But it's not where you go to actually network. What you need to do is to see if the individual that you're looking to do business with is on Twitter or if they're on Instagram. If they're on one of those platforms, or both, follow them. Consume their content for a period of time so you know what they're into. You want to know what their hobbies are, what their interests are, and you want to organically form a relationship with them. The reality is that when you talk about any sizable business deal, whether it's SaaS, agency work, whatever it might be, people are not going to meet you on the first date and agree to do business with you. And they're definitely not going to sign off on a high 5- or 6-figure or 7-figure deal with you just because you direct messaged them on a social network. It takes time to build that relationship. That's real talk. And I can tell you for a fact that I've never messaged someone out of the blue and all of a sudden they're like, “Hey, here's a 6-figure deal for Gil Media!” It just doesn't work that way. But what I will tell you is a good strategic path is think of all your prospects as seeds in a garden. Right now, I can tell you that I've got dozens of seeds that have been planted over the last several years, and even before that, when I was still working in corporate marketing and I knew eventually I was going to go out on my own. Those seeds you plant in the garden, and as you engage, as you mature the relationship, that harvest starts to bloom. Some of those trees grow bigger than others. Some of those trees sprout dollars on the branches. Some of them just stay as little buds, little bushes. But my whole point I'm trying to make is that you need to really think about going wide and also going deep – going wide in terms of you want to be able to have a lot of prospects, but you also want to go very deep with the relationships and not think about relationships as being transactional. When you start thinking about relationships as being about money and transactions, at that point you don't have a relationship. You just have a transaction. In this market, especially this market now where people are going to be tighter with budgets, I'm telling you, the relationship is going to be worth gold. ROB: So true. I think sometimes the thought leadership we get is from companies that are in a hot category. If you are out there selling marketing automation and everyone feels like they have to have a marketing automation or maybe two of those, then maybe you can get by with being a little bit transactional. But unless you're selling toilet paper right now, you probably can't be very transactional. It seems like very much a time to plant rather than to harvest, except in very rare situations. But as you're talking, I'm listening and it sounds like – I get what you're saying about planting seeds, but casting a wide net while planting seeds sounds overwhelming. How do you think about relationship across a wide range of people that you're working to build real, authentic relationships with, but recognizing that it's going to take some time? CARLOS: It's removing the transaction out of the relationship altogether. It's actually connecting and forming an authentic and organic relationship, asking someone, “How are you? How are you weathering the storm? How's your company doing? Is there anything that I can do for you? Hey, I work for this company; I'm not really trying to sell you anything, but I just want you to know that I exist.” The irony in all this is that since we started this crisis, since work from home became a thing, I haven't sent out one email yet. I haven't sent out any piece of communication selling anything to anyone. Yes, I had an email that went out letting people know that my book is on sale on Amazon, and yes, I've got this course on LinkedIn that you can watch, but in terms of actually selling agency services, nothing's gone out. I told my team, “You know what? Let's chill. Let's not be aggressively pitching to anyone, and let's let the game come to us.” No kidding, in the last 2 weeks, I can't tell you how many CMOs, CEOs, C-suite executives have been hitting me up personally to help them with their crisis comms plan on social – what to say on social, do an audit, review. It's crazy what happens when people don't perceive you as being the cheesy salesman and instead they perceive you as the good guy, the advocate that's here to help them. I think regardless of where you sit in an organization, whether you're an account executive, a sales rep, a CMO, owner – whatever your role is, make business about the relationships and the people that you're truly trying to serve and not about the transaction. When you start operating with that mentality, you're going to see how business is going to start coming your way when you least expect it. ROB: That's perfect. When I think about what you have done yourself, when your name shows up in their inbox, without you saying a thing about your business, they already know who you are and what you can do for them. They have a sense of brand, of what you can do there. But it's also worthless without the staying on their radar part. I know for myself, when I think about partners we have, people we work with, people we go in together on deals and help serve customers – the ones I think about are the ones who have spoken to us most recently, and it's not the folks that say, “Hey, just checking in.” It's the folks I've built a relationship with but have also stayed on my radar so that I remember them, so that when an opportunity crosses the path that I can't do myself, I pick up the phone and I talk to them. So it is that planting and that harvesting. It really makes sense. How do you think about avoiding that “just checking in” dynamic? I think right now, “How are you?” is perfect. We are all I think looking for someone to tell how we are with trust. How do you think about that when it's less obvious? How do you keep that relationship? Because people will tell you, “Find this article, send it to them” – sometimes it still I think feels kind of fake, cheesy, and forced. CARLOS: That's such a good question. I think in this market right now, we operate with a servant mindset. It's about giving, not taking. The more that you give, the more it'll pay itself off tenfold. It's using social media to listen to what people are saying. It's going in the right groups, running the right searches, paying attention and swooping in with solutions to people's problems. I'll give you an example. I have a lot of downtime right now. Because I have that downtime, I'm looking to make use of that downtime. One of the objectives on my plate is getting on more podcasts. I didn't go out and run an ad on Indeed or LinkedIn or even post some looking for a virtual assistant; instead, I just went on Twitter and I ran a search for people that do VA work. I was able to connect with someone right away – and again, it's different because I'm not selling anything to them. On the flipside, I want to give them money so they can do work for me. What I'm trying to say is those are the type of opportunities that happen when you, in this case, have a solution to someone's need or someone's problem. ROB: And you're probably also getting more inbounds right now, which probably helps tip your own brain on what to be thinking about. When there's an uptick in the data on something technical, there's an uptick in the human factor of that as well. CARLOS: Yeah, 100%. It goes back to what I said earlier. We're all people, we're all in this together, and at the end of the day, people do business with who they like and who they trust. Regardless of what services it is that you sell, your objective as a salesperson, as someone who's trying to drive and increase revenue, is to be able to connect your buyers with solutions to their problems. This is probably not the best time to be cold calling and cold pitching and hard selling, but this is the time to be connecting with those individuals and just get on their radar. ROB: Absolutely. One thing we're definitely seeing, if you look in the tea leaves – we'll email a certain number of people every week to look at future bookings for the podcast, and I can tell you, it's typically cold contact. A lot of people will say yes because they want these conversations, they want to share their journey, they want the exposure. But I'll tell you, the accept rate is basically double what it was 3 weeks ago. The information is there in the detail. I like how you talk about these searches and these platforms and LinkedIn as the tools to help you understand how to be a better human to other humans. CARLOS: Yeah, 100%. Podcasting especially right now, it's really high. I'm sure that between last month and this month, you're going to see a big increase in downloads, subscribers, and listens because you've got more people that are tuning in. You've got more people that need content to consume that's not just news and doom and gloom. I think right now, podcasting is a blue ocean. If you can find your niche, you can carve a lane for yourself in that niche, and you can find ways to monetize with, again, brands or advertisers that normally are trying to get in front of a certain audience, and they're finding ways to pivot or reallocate their budget. If you're able to bring a specific audience, then man, a podcast could actually be quite beneficial from a revenue standpoint. ROB: Absolutely. Carlos, you shared earlier a very generous offer to connect with listeners. Remind us all, when we want to go out there and find you – other than obviously your immediately findable personal brand – what's the best way for folks to connect with you? You said @carlosgil83 on Instagram, Twitter. Google you, I'm sure they'll find you. Anything else? CARLOS: You can connect with me on LinkedIn. You can also send me an email, which is carlos@gilmedia.co. ROB: Perfect. Thank you so much, Carlos. You have dropped gold. I know you're sowing seeds for a tremendous future already in the midst of all this, so congrats on being ahead of the game there. CARLOS: Thank you so much for the opportunity. ROB: Thank you. Thank you for listening. The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast is presented by Converge. Converge helps digital marketing agencies and brands automate their reporting so they can be more profitable, accurate, and responsive. To learn more about how Converge can automate your marketing reporting, email info@convergehq.com, or visit us on the web at convergehq.com.

När nästan allt kretsar kring Corona-viruset hoppas vi kunna bjuda på en stunds avkoppling och lättsamt snack. Visserligen berör vi konsekvenserna viruset har för cykelsporten men vi laddar också på med ett riktigt fett prylsvep, ett ordentligt test av BMCs nya gravelhoj URS och ett helt gäng lyssnarfrågor. Dessutom blir det premiär för det nya segmentet "Legenden". Först ut är den största av de alla...

Ever wondered what you're supposed to be writing in the future potential block? Why are there character limits? And why can't we use gender pronouns anymore?!? We discuss all these topics and more in an info-packed episode with the chief of EPM-3, LCDR Justin Vanden Heuvel (prior BMC/BOSN), BM1 Garrett Dailey, and BMCS Eric Silvoy.   The Enlisted Evaluations System has recently seen the biggest revision in decades, and the quality of the content has never been more important. Don't miss this one! Submit show show suggestions to cgbmrfmc@gmail.com Disclaimer: The views, information, or opinions expressed during the Course Made Good podcast series are solely those of the individuals involved and do not represent those of the United States Coast Guard or any other government agency.  The primary purpose of this podcast series is to educate and inform. This podcast series does not constitute official policy guidance from the speakers nor the United States Coast Guard.

A massive 85 CVEs addressed this week, including updates for Exim, the Linux Kernel, Samba, systemd and more, plus we discuss hacking BMCs via remote USB devices and password stashes.

Senior Chief (Ret.) Mark Engle talks the tragic loss of a tanker off the Maryland coast, the final words of her captain, and the lessons on duty and attention to detail he’s carried ever since. --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/theyhadtogoout/support

It's the Gestalt IT Rundown, your weekly look at the IT news of the week. This week, Tom Hollingsworth and Ken Nalbone discuss Microsoft's new enterprise AR hardware, the Spectre of Spectre, US-Huawei tensions at MWC, and the security implications of BMCs on bare metal. "News Theme" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

Senior Chief (Ret.) Tom Rooks talks a helicopter crash on the flight deck of an underway cutter and the intense levels of the responsibility the USCG places on even its most junior personnel. --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/theyhadtogoout/support

I det här avsnittet är vi stolta att presentera en gäst. Ingen mindre än Glenn Thejl som är Country Manager för Sverige på cykelmärket BMC... Vi frågar honom om hur det är med cyklar, trender om det och vad BMC gör, står för och är.Det blir såklart en och annan anekdot och Glenn får presentera sig själv litegrann också.Allt detta gör att avsnittet är lite längre än vanligt, men vi kan ju knappast vara ofina och avbryta våra gäster! BMCs cyklar kan ni kolla in på deras hemsida, och via den hittar ni även deras återförsäljare runt om i landet. Mycket nöje!

Steve's lager tasting. BMCs milking the US beer market?

Steve's lager tasting. BMCs milking the US beer market?

Rise above Hate with Rob & Sean as they review "You Can't Scare Me!". Mud Monsters have BMCs. This episode brings back a familiar face in Dylan Provencher. He's so cool. This episode is brought to you by the Shaq Pack from Burger King.

The therapeutic potential of systemically or locally injected bone marrow cells (BMC) or mesenchymal stem cells in myocardial infarction (MI) is a very controversial issue. Using human placental alkaline phosphatase (hPLAP) as a genetic marker for cell tracking, we examined the therapeutic efficacy and the homing of intravenously administered, hPLAP labeled cells in marker tolerant, immunocompetent rats after induction of MI. The marker enzyme hPLAP provides superb histological detection quality in paraffin and plastic sections. The influx of bone marrow-derived cells during tissue repair was monitored in wild-type inbred Fischer 344 rats reconstituted with bone marrow from transgenic F344 rats expressing hPLAP under the control of the ubiquitous R26 promoter. Four months post-MI, we found that the mesenchymal cells in the scar tissue were almost exclusively of local origin. Intravenous administration of 1x107 BMC from hPLAP transgenic donors administered 1 week post-MI profoundly reduced the infiltration of the infarction site by bone marrow-derived cells, and also the infarction area. No differentiation of endogenous nor exogenous BMCs was observed. To examine the homing of intravenous hPLAP labeled BMC in MI we established a background-free syngeneic model for long-term histological cell tracking in the absence of immune-mediated rejection of labeled cells in immunocompetent animals. Skin grafts showed that neonatal exposure of wild-type F344 rats to hPLAP transgenic F344 cells results in lifelong tolerance to hPLAP expressing tissues and cells. Using this model of neonatally tolerized marker tolerant rats, we showed that only very few hPLAP labeled BMC injected intravenously one week post-MI homed to the infarction site. Therefore, we hypothesize that the beneficial effect of intravenous BMC on left ventricular remodeling after MI is caused by systemic immunomodulation.