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In Episode 100, The Occupational Philosophers chat with Julie Trell, whose career has been an adventurous journey spanning three decades and various corners of the world. She started as an inner-city classroom teacher and later became a middle school technology specialist, where she embraced inner playfulness (as well as fixing - and breaking - the computers and network). Through serendipity and curiosity, she evolved into the VP of All Things Fun, Meaningful, & Rewarding at a (then) startup called Salesforce. Her path then took her through the vibrant landscapes of Atlanta, San Francisco, Singapore, and Sydney, venturing into the realms of technology and corporate foundation leadership with the Salesforce and Workday Foundations. In Australia, she led Telstra's corporate startup accelerator, muru-D - There she managed a team and a portfolio of over 140 companies, focusing on supporting the founders across various cohorts. As the Chief Play Officer of Playful Purpose, she embraces the power of an improv mindset to foster growth and playful spirits among adults. She co-designs and facilitates dynamic workshops for accelerators, portfolio funds, and corporate teams, helping participants unleash curiosity, build confidence, and deepen their understanding of DEI and empathy. My passion for new technologies and continuous learning blends artificial intelligence, AI, with applied improv, AI! In this episode, they explore: Exciting job titles to share at your next dinner party How applied improvisation is the AI we should really be focused on! Using play to help individuals, teams and organisations fire up their creative synapses How Generative applied improv helps us exercise our critical thinking skills How to make people feel heard and feel good when working together What is curiosivity? Julie's work with startups, founders and incubators Techniques to tackle the ‘play skeptcis' And how to create floral bouquets out of old toilet roll tubes! And as ever, enjoy the Thought Experiments …this time it's: Through the port (manteau) hole Listeners questions Learn more about Julie https://www.linkedin.com/in/julietrell/ https://playfulpurpose.com/ References https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c8erpgy727jo https://www.nosuchthingasafish.com/ Toilet paper roll flowers - You can check link here. https://www.themoviedb.org/movie/1163022-act-social https://www.appliedimprovisationnetwork.org/ The quote: "Being heard is so close to being loved that for the average person, they are almost indistinguishable”. (David W. Augsburger) - BOOK:Caring Enough to Hear and Be Heard: How to Hear and How to Be Heard in Equal Communication https://muru-d.com/ https://www.sxswsydney.com/ Clip from Whose Startup Is It Anyway Books: https://www.breakthroughplay.com/playful-rebellion/ https://www.improvwisdom.com/index.html https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/44333271-playful-mindfulness Say Hello to the Occupational Philosophers www.occupationalphilosophers.com Their day jobs: JOHN: www.bowlandconsulting.com SIMON: www.simonbanks.com.au SIMON SHOWREEL: https://youtu.be/YZQdJI6qGvg
Business Blueprint Requests: https://forms.gle/VSVZ8iL8tmtAd817A Have a question you'd like Andrea to answer on the show? Fill out this form: https://forms.gle/nu7EHLUrCwNPXtB68Bite-Size Business Tips Playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLcTUb-2nr-8lh2xqfqzbN-TlKGOpmMM0K There are only three ways to grow a business. First, GET MORE CUSTOMERS. Second: Increase average price. (Get customers to spend more on the thing you're selling) 3rd: Increase frequency of purchase I asked ChatGPT what the top ways to grow a business were. It gave me 13 ideas, but all of them fall under one of the things I just mentioned. Let's take a look at them. Understand Your Market: This falls under GET MORE CUSTOMERS. Enhance Your Online Presence: Falls under GET MORE CUSTOMERS. Build a Strong Brand: This falls under INCREASE FREQUENCY OF PURCHASE and GET MORE CUSTOMERS. Optimize Your Sales Funnel: This falls under GET MORE CUSTOMERS. Leverage Customer Feedback: This falls under GET MORE CUSTOMERS and INCREASE FREQUENCY OF PURCHASE. Expand Your Offerings: This falls under GET MORE CUSTOMERS and INCREASE FREQUENCY OF PURCHASE. Focus on Customer Retention: INCREASE FREQUENCY OF PURCHASE. Customer retention is all about getting them to buy from you again. Invest in Marketing and Advertising: This falls under GET MORE CUSTOMERS. Build Strategic Partnerships: GET MORE CUSTOMERS Improve Operational Efficiency: GET MORE CUSTOMERS. Seek Funding: Falls under GET MORE CUSTOMERS because getting more money means finding more people. It can also apply to INCREASE FREQUENCY OF PURCHASE because it might help you come up with more items to sell. Monitor Key Metrics: This will help you GET MORE CUSTOMERS and INCREASE FREQUENCY OF PURCHASE. Adapt and Innovate: Change as the market changes. Stop trying to sell something that people don't want to buy anymore. Or stop pushing something that no one wants. This will free you up to focus on the things that actually MAKE MONEY, like GET MORE CUSTOMERS and INCREASE FREQUENCY OF PURCHASE. And that's all that ChatGPT mentioned. I'm surprised there's no mention of raising prices in there. It's a pretty basic way of growing a business. But that's okay. :-D Q&A: Tommy: Hi, Andrea. A significant portion of my salary is going toward debt repayment today, and with rising interest rates, I find myself with little left to put into the emergency fund:D The little money I have left each month have to go toward editors and cover designers.So, here's my question - should I reduce my debt payments to the minimum until I've established a $1,000 emergency fund? And do you have any tips on how to do this? And this question is even more relevant when it comes to focusing in on paying off debt one at a time :D Again, thanks! Angelina: You mentioned you would talk a little more about the book side of things for you. (I am a few episodes behind, so if it will come up just ignore this comment). But i was wondering if you'd like to talk a little more about productivity and the writing process. I mean how you outline your book, how in depth, how you prepare a writing session, how often you write and how much in what time. Just your overall process. I am highly interested in that field as I am trying to become an author myself. :) Angelina: You mentioned why or why not it is beneficial to have an email sign up that asks them to confirm. The people in the zoom were not interested but I'd like to know why or why not one should choose that, if you could explain it. :3 Update on our situation:Work with clients going well—have been working on things for two clients. One is at 55 hours per week, the other is 2-3 hours. Finding that working more than full time makes it just as hard to write as being a mom full time. :-D There's just no easy way to work on our passion projects. Luckily, our current situation is forcing me to work on books a bit more.IVF – IndieGoGo. Will be selling ebooks, etc.
That time again where we look at another Pre code film. The crew try to decipher how it is supposed to be a comedy. We discuss the risqué visuals and dialog, how hard it is to get behind a character you really don't like, and how much of this film is why the Hayes Code were created. Yep another one :D There are a lot of red flags for "The Red Headed Woman". Literary License Podcast: https://www.llpodcast.com/Kicking the Seat: https://kickseat.com/ --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/spoilerroompodcast/support
Welcome to this weeks' BullShit- DAYNE'S back :D There's some solid BullShit this week! (3:55) We're starting off hot with some Bad People cards- let's go Who's the most likely to RSVP yes to a party and then never show up? Who has secretly done something *very* illegal and gotten away with it? Who's the *least* effected by "help the kids" ads? Who would eat a handful of live wasps for the least amount of money? (15:35) We revisit a question from a previous episode for Dayne- if you were to play in 8th grade JV football (with the body you have right now) what position would you play and what would your stat line be like? (33:15) Boners- growing up, did you ever have a time where you got one and you were like "Fuck"? Do you have a fast or slow transition in puberty? (45:13) We talk about the wedding we attended :) (56:44) As always... Jon's Bad Joke of the Day!!! Thanks for tuning in- make sure to catch our Facebook Live stream of our weekly Review Time segment. We drop new podcast episodes on all of your favorite streaming apps every Wednesday, so don't miss it! Like drinking a cold one but can never keep it cold? Get your BarTop BullShit koozie today! With that Barflies, there's one last thing: TELL YOUR FUCKIN FRIENDS!!!
Segment 7 – Do the Shit That You Love “I believe the singular reason that I have been financially successful is cause I don't care about financial success. Like, find your process. Find your thing. Live within your means. This goes back to a lot of the things that I'm thinking about. When people do things for other people's affirmation it makes them incredibly emotionally vulnerable. We're in a very special time here. Find the thing that makes you happy doing it. Not because of any other part. And so if you can find something you love, when shit hits the fan you're not going to be looking for the next trend. You're going to be chilling here for the next two, three, four years waiting for it to flip back up. That's a beautiful feeling. It's fun to be in the shit when it's the shit you like being in.” -Gary Vee (Theme music plays, pencil scratching in the background) in a whispered tone P: Transcripts D:Mr. Gary Vee F:Dude, that's pretty profound D:You know, so, he brought up a lot of…OK. He brought up a lot of things that people need to do. You know one…something my grandfather always told us, uh, you know, he said ‘Find what you love doing and people will pay you to do it.' So, it's true. And he's saying ‘Find what you love.' Actually his exact words were ‘Find the shit that you love.' So, now, he also mentioned if you're doing things for other people's approval, my words, well, why are you doing it? Cause you're just making yourself vulnerable to…cause here's the thing: (sighs) when it comes to people's approval, you don't need anyone's approval but your's. F:That's taken many years for me to learn that for myself. D:Um, quick story, cause I like telling stories. F:Everybody on the carpet. Story time. D: (laughs) Um, so, 21, almos…almost 22 years ago, um, I married a young lady. Still married to her, obviously. And, um, went and got married and we eloped. Then we went to go see my parents. F:How did that go over? Or is that part of the story? D:Oh it's coming… F:Sorry. I didn't mean to get ahead (laughs) D:You're like ‘Wait a second' F:Well you kinda looked at me like… D:Yeah…well…so we went to go see my parents and, you know, walked in the house and Shannon came with me, and my parents were…long story short: my parents, I'll, I'll backtrack a little before we got married. My parents received a letter from, I guess, my step-grandma. Yes…Shannon's, Shannon's step-grandma, cause her grandfather remarried. Um, and my step grandmother in law, this is while we were dating, wrote a letter to them saying how bad of a person that my mother…future mother in law…was and then pretty much closes it out in a, in a sense of saying ‘…and Shannon is gonna be just like her.' F:I'm sure that created a lot of stereotypes for your parents. D:There was a rift in the family. Me…and my parents were like ‘You're not marrying her.' F:Oh, really? D:Yes. I was told that I'm not going to marry her. F:They told you that you couldn't do something (laughs) D: (laughs) And you know me. Don't tell me I can't do something, right? So, um, fast forward, um, actually, so we broke it off, actually we, we broke it off for a, for a year and so I could try and figure out how to make everybody happy. And you know what? You can't make everybody happy. It's impossible. Nothing can happen. So, I go in and uh, she's down in Florida and I'm up in Georgia, and then I'm like ‘This is stupid' and I call her up and I'm like ‘Hey. You love me?' She goes ‘Yeah' ‘Well, I love you too. Let's get married.' She's like ‘OK' I literally left… F:Wait, wait, wait. That's how you proposed? D:No I proposed…so I proposed before. F:Oh, so there was a, OK D:So fast forward there…There was a proposal before. We broke it off. She gave me the ring back. Literally, I got the ring back. F:Gotcha D:Everything, and it was like that for a year, and, and then, you know, a year goes by and I'm like ‘This is Stupid.' You know, I'm gonna, you know --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/theyoungbloods/message Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/theyoungbloods/support
(0:00) Moderator: “Why are weak men such a problem?” Jordan Peterson: Well weak people are a problem, in general. And I don't mean physically weak. I mean cowardly, let's say, and deceitful because, I'm thinking it more in terms of moral weakness. Well, there's a variety of reasons, is, first of all if you can't support your own weight, let's say, and someone else has to do it. And that's not good. And then if you don't make your pathway, if you don't pick a forthright and useful and noble pathway through life then you'll become bitter and, and, and too hurt by the tragedy of existence then you tend to seek your revenge wherever you can get it. And that's not good. So, it's a, it's a mistake on all fronts, it's not good for your it's not good for your family, it's not good for the community, um, it's certainly not a good medium to a long term strategy because life is very, very difficult. (Theme music plays, pencil scratching in the background) in a whispered tone P: Transcripts D: (inhales) There was a lot there F:That hit me (pause) to the very core D:Well… F:And it's just because based on that, based on Jordan's words, I look back on my life and Iv'e seen a lot of times where I have been weak. D:Well, I'll go, so… F:And I, I'm not taking judgement out on myself. I'm talking accountability and understanding WOW! D:So, (sighs) we all have weak moments. F:Correct D:Um, you know, it, (sighs) I find it interesting that you know, that the question started off as why are men, weak men such a problem. And I know that this, this conversation went back to that later on, discussing the man side. F:Correct D:And we'll, we'll go to that another time too. But I think Jordan took it in the right direction. You know, He says, you know, weak people are a problem. And then he clarifies that, you know, you know, you know not talking about physical weakness, cause there are a lot more stronger people out there than me when it comes to physical strength. But, he, then he says cowardly. So let's start there. What makes a coward? (2:36) F:A coward is someone who doesn't make the choice to stand up to difficult situations D:You know he… F:They turn tail and run. D:Well he… F:I think that cliché is often used. D:Well, and he…well, yeah. You know he, he talks, he, he, he, he said, you know, deceitful people, um, morally weak people, so let's talk about morally weak. And no, we are not talking about keeping it in your pants. (Laughs) F:Morality I think is something that … D:We've forgotten about. Our society… F:Yeah. Our society has forgotten about it. D:They've pushed it to the side. F:Because morality… D:There's multiple definitions of, of morality and being moral. Different, and, and each one of them are a valid definition. You know… F:Right. In this sense are, I think we are talking about the morality of just the difference between what is right and what's wrong. D:Yeah! That's literally what this is about. And there is a right and there is, well, a wrong. This is not about My Truth versus Your Truth. So then, then we're, so we're separating the truth. I, I, I honed in a lot on the My Truth. That really irritates me, because all you are saying is ‘My Opinion' What this is saying, what is actually morally right? We all, OK, we all know, take religion out of this completely, we all know I have no right to go up to anyone and kill them. That's wrong. We were born knowing that. F:here's another one for ya. Can I walk into a bank and just tell the person at gunpoint that I want the money? D:Yeah, you can. F:No, is that morally right? D:No. That's the, again, so you're taking something that doesn't belong to you. And that's the, that's also the deceit side that he talks about. F:Mm huh D: (sighs) F:Is it morally right to, to tell a lie? --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/theyoungbloods/message Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/theyoungbloods/support
How gullible would you like to be? We wear "tin foil hats" you might say... but even if we did, there would still be less aluminum in our hats than the vacks has put into your veins--so pray, rather than accuse. And did you hear about the toxic spill in East Palestine, Ohio? Perhaps you didn't, the cabal's news would rather you focus on the "UFOs" and "Damar"... and this: Look up the movie "White Noise"... it's about a toxic chemical spill from a derailed train in eastern Ohio. (Not. Even. Kidding.)... look it up... Terry! :D There is a lot of stuff you need to consider in this episode, so try not to miss it. :)
Intro Background Mystique, Raven Darkholme, created by Chris Claremont & Dave Cockrum in Ms. Marvel #16 (April 1978) To this day, Mystique's true origins have never been revealed The earliest stories place her around 1900, where she was presenting as male and in a relationship with Irene Adler (Destiny), an obvious reference to Sherlock Holmes While undercover, she had a short fling with Sabretooth, which led to a child Graydon Creed - despite having 2 mutant parents, Graydon is a normal human who comes to resent all mutants - he grows up to become a powerful politician before being assassinated by a time-traveling version of Mystique #BecauseComics She is later seduced by Azazel., and becomes pregnant with a baby that she abandoned at birth - the baby would be taken in and named Kurt Wagner, aka Nightcrawler Side note - Claremont intended for Mystique & Destiny to be Nightcrawler's parents, but the Code wouldn't allow a lesbian relationship at the time Encounters a young runaway girl from Mississippi, and after Destiny foresees that she will become important to them, she takes in the young Rogue and acts as her foster mother She leads a version of the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants, and trains Rogue to join them and attack Ms. Marvel - Rogue ends up absorbing Carol's powers, memories, and personality for a time #BecauseComics Turns the Brotherhood “legit” as Freedom Force, and they work for the government, while still clashing with the X-Men - during this time, Irene is killed, and this has a serious impact on her Joins X-Factor under duress, but after some time she escapes and flees to Europe, where she becomes a top fashion model Joins the X-Men as a shapeshifter named Foxx, and attempts to seduce Gambit so she can break up Gambit & Rogue and set up Rogue with another mutant - the ploy fails, but she joins the team on a probationary basis - Kurt says he needs time to process, though, which she gives him Works with Gambit & the Marauders to betray Mister Sinister in the fallout of M-Day - Logan is sent to kill her, and he severely wounds her, but does not finish the job She is later actually killed by Logan after she had been posing as Professor X for Norman Osborn's Dark X-Men She was revived by the Hand, and posed as Dazzler, who was a mutant liaison for SHIELD in Madripoor Had a tender moment with Rogue before her wedding to Gambit Serves on the Quiet Council of Krakoa as a Winter representative Issues - Piercing the veil Can't really be herself because of the hatred towards mutants Always distant in her relationships - rare exceptions, like Irene & Rogue Inner self-acceptance isn't always reflected in outer appearance, which is difficult Break (37:27) Plugs for Take a Knee for Marvel vs. DC, Into the Knight, and Chris Claremont Treatment (38:42) In-universe - Become emotions, not people Out of universe Skit (49:34) ***knock at the door*** Come in -***Mrs Issues*** Hey, just stopping by Oh! Um…usually you text me, but ok, I thought you were my next patient -No problem, I figured I hadn't been to your office in a while and I know you've had some rough days. Thanks *pause* I thought you had class tonight. -I do, that's why I brought someone along with me to cheer you up; plus you can keep watch for a bit. I'll be right back but I have to get my stuff from the car. ***door closes*** As always. But where's -***Door opens***Daughter Issues*** Daddy! *pause* Ok Getthef**kout -WHAT? Why? ***fake crying*** Seriously get out or identify yourself or I'm calling the police -***some sort of morphing sound, now Mystique*** M: well you don't have to be so rude, I thought you were a professional. D Professional enough to know my own daughter hasn't called me “daddy” in years. Her choice, not mine. And I guess I can't call the police on my own patient if I haven't given them a chance to explain. Don't expect me to be cheery after a stunt like that. - M You're perceptive, I'll grant you that. But now we have a problem. D I know what my problem is. What's yours? M *sigh* Let's be real. You can't fight me, and I don't necessarily want to fight you. But you're valuable. More than you know. D You were going to kidnap me?! M *laughs* No, nothing as dramatic as that. This was supposed to be a stealth operation. You have information. I need it. D I've already been down that rabbit hole. Secure encryption, magical wards, along with undisclosed offshore servers have made sure I don't make the same mistake ever again. M Doom really hooked you up, then. D HOW…*deep breath*...you are masterful, you know that? Always seeking more information, more leverage. M: It's my currency, it's how I get ahead. D: But do you need that anymore? You don't come across as someone who wants to be at the beck and call of someone else, but you also find ways to put yourself as the center of attention, even if no one else knows it yet. I know those aren't mutually exclusive, but that can get complicated very fast. M: My life is complicated? Hmmm, I would have never thought that in a hundred years…no wait, that is EXACTLY what I've spent every day for the last hundred-plus years thinking about. I have enough baggage to fill an entire airport. I just choose which ones to pick up on various occasions. D: So what set of circumstances would lead you to add me to the mix? It's obvious you don't want therapy. M: I won't divulge my secrets if you won't divulge yours. D: This isn't a negotiation. M: Au contraire. All conversations are negotiations. Most people don't apply the proper context. Or pressure. D: This must be so difficult for you. You're talking to a person that's not of your world, nothing to offer that you couldn't weasel out in some other way, and yet, this is the path you chose. You find me weak, but interesting, and I don't know why. M: *pause* Are you fishing, or trying to sound profound? D: Why not both? My point is, you seem to set up your own challenges without respect to the person, or the emotional consequences even for yourself. I'll give you a hypothetical. What if you learn of someone you DIDN'T want to have on your radar, and they hunt you down after they destroy me? Is that risk worth it? M: It wouldn't be the first time that someone else gets hurt in the crossfire. D: But what if it's someone you actually care about? Are you really going to throw away the opportunity to improve a lasting relationship for the sake of an odd job or morbid curiosity? What if I could offer you that chance and the other person is willing to talk about it…with you and me? M: You can't make promises like that. D: Never said I could. But I can try. That's all I'm saying. M: I know for a fact that you aren't a…family therapist. D: Who said it was family? M: *pause* I… D: *snaps fingers* YOU were fishing! You didn't know! This was a hunch, wasn't it? M: *sigh* There aren't that many psychiatrists that delve into…our type, for lack of a better term. Word spreads fast. I have the background on your services, but things were locked out, as you so eloquently put it, before I could get any good dirt. But still…if there was a chance… D: There's no alternative mission…no monetary gain? You really just want…hmmm…I meant what I said. No guarantees. This may get messy. M: As always. So…you know, I may have wanted someone that is NOT considered a person close to me. If I disclose it, would you be able to set up someone like that, too? D: Nope Nope Nope. This is a one-time deal. You get one person, I contact on my time. If they say no, you don't get another chance. Understood? M: Clearly. Doesn't mean I will stop trying. I have more on you, you know. Think about it. Every person you see in your life could be me, doctor. A. Ny. One. D: And every person you meet is an opportunity for you to stop looking at them as a puppet to mimic, and engage them for who you really are. I guess we'll both have doubts. M: You are learning to negotiate better. Keep at it, and I might consider this…therapeutic. ***for end of show*** No matter how complicated life can be, you'll always have control of your own mystique - M: ***morphing sound*** Oh do you, now? Uhhhhhh…for Anthony I guess? Gah! I'm Doctor Issues thank you so much we'll see you next week! Ending (55:06) Recommended reading: Mystique by Brian K. Vaughan Next episodes: Poison Ivy, Moira McTaggert, Gladiator Plugs for social Transcript References: Carol Danvers episode - Anthony (3:18) Rogue episode - Anthony (3:20) Apple Podcasts: here Google Play: here Stitcher: here TuneIn: here iHeartRadio: here Twitter Facebook TikTok Patreon TeePublic Discord
Thats it! The hiatus is over, our own Flying Insectable Abberation, Daniel returned from his trip to the US, and with him, also our Podcast! Listen to him talking about his journey and his experiences overseas. We also talk about the recent -near- banning in Legacy and our current experiences within the format. Philipp also talks about his recent transition to the dark/darth side of the meta (They got cookies! :D) There is also the last austrian ELM-Qualifier at the 341-Store which Peter will livestream on Saturday 29th of October. Yours Philipp, Daniel and Peter ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- If you like what we are doing consider recommending us to your friends, follow us on social media, join our discord and support us on patreon! >All our Links in One Place< Get Merch here! Greatness at any Cost Patreon Twitter: @Response_Legacy, @PhinekMtG,@FlyingDelver, @UnicornL0rd, @Austrian_Legacy, Facebook Instagram: @Response_Legacy Discord: https://discord.gg/XMYEFBbV9C
Taurus Thing Pod EP.56 - CANTONS & SUPERSTITIONS #TaurusThingPod Support us, buy our Limited Edition Taurus Thing Pod Pins: - https://www.instagram.com/p/CSic0rEB20w/ "ARIES SEASON" Haven't had another house episode in a while. This week we discuss so much important things, like adulting, what superstitions we "kinda" believe, & how our perfect Pancit Canton serving would be :D There's also lots of talk about sewing, because one of us doesn't know how to. See you next "next" Saturday for more continued craziness! The Taurus Thing Podcast serves you your dose of zodiac readings, the best way possible. Just a bunch of friends that constantly talks about random topics & life experiences. Join us every episode, pop a bottle of beer, and have a good laugh. NEW EPISODE EVERY "OTHER" SATURDAY AM's BEFORE LUNCH (Or in a more specific way: 10:00 A.M. GMT+8) FOLLOW US ON: Twitter: https://twitter.com/TaurusThingPod -Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/taurusthingpod/
Why does college have to cost so much? Can the Financial Aid Office really help me sort it out? The office can be a jungle, and super stressful and annoying to navigate. Are they manipulating me, or not telling me the whole truth (like in a cult!?!?)? D: There are some ways to handle talking to Financial Aid to lower cost and not lose track of your award information! Grab your cold brew and TI-89, because class is now in session. Facebook --> Christian College Girl Community ~ Scholarships & Graduate Debt-Free | Facebook Instagram --> @moneyandmentalpeace Connect --＞ info@moneyandmentalpeace.com Scholarships & School Hacks for Christian College Girls to Graduate Debt-Free! Get a debt-free degree, find easy scholarships and money for college, and more tips for Christian college girls! Hang out with me, Kara (Scholarship Coach, College Money Mentor, Get Out of Debt Guru), every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, or connect with me below!
Log in as we dissect CYBORG! What upgrades can Doc offer him that he can't download himself? Listen now to find out! Intro Reminder to send questions for AMA 150 Background (1:34) Cyborg (Victor Stone) created by Marv Wolfman and George Perez in DC Comics Presents #26 (Oct 1980) Victor Stone is the son of two scientists, who use him as a test subject for intelligence experiments - he resents this, and falls in with a dangerous crowd as a way to rebel One of the experiments brings a hostile creature from another dimension into his parents laboratory - the creature kills his mother and gravely injures Victor before his father can return it to its home dimension and close the portal His father then uses bleeding edge experimental technology to save him, at the cost of the majority of his body now being robotic - when Victor awakens, he lashes out at his father, revealing he'd rather be dead than experimented on again without his consent He joins the Teen Titans as a way to find others with common experiences He then merged with an alien artificial intelligence named Technis, which helped him restore his mind, although it turned his body into an entirely cybernetic being named Cyberion, and he had to stay on the Technis planet in order to survive - this experience left him distant from humanity, and when he returned, he assimilated all the technology he could find until he was the size of the moon - he was attacked by the Justice League and the other Titans - Beast Boy was able to reach Victor's humanity and got him to upload his consciousness to another suit, rendering Technis inoperable Gets dismantled during Infinite Crisis, and it takes almost a year to put him back together New 52 - the explosion in his father's office is now related to a Mother Box, and Silas uses the technology to save Victor's life - he now can access the New Gods library and discovers Darkseid is invading Earth in search of the Anti-Life Equation - joins the fight with the Justice League to battle the invaders, and becomes a founding member of the team After the Crime Syndicate (an evil mirror version of the Justice League) invades, Cyborg is taken over by Grid (Earth-3's Cyborg), which expelled all his organic material - Hal Jordan used the Lantern ring to suspend him until Silas could operate on him and revive him again Issues - Theme is tinkering Adjustments to prosthetics Considers acceptance of his form to be equivalent to stagnation (18:59) Relationship with Silas has improved, but still has deep-seated trust issues (28:55) Break (38:41) Plugs for BetterHelp, Not If I Reboot You First, and Phillip Kennedy Johnson Treatment (40:43) In-universe - Learn coding to speak his language - has he ever “gone gold”? Out of universe - Multi-amputee with family issues (44:40) Skit (feat. Karrington from Real Dudes Podcast) (51:17) DOC: Hello Victor, I'm Dr. Issues. VICTOR: Hey Doc. Let's do this. I'm all in. D: *pause* Ooooookaaaay? *excited* OK! V: Here's a list of the last 3 angry outbursts I've had within the past month. I've also included my vitals, my calorie count, and I have a full database of the last 30 years of psychotherapeutic and psychotropic recommendations by the American Psychiatric Association for diagnoses in the DSM and the ICD 10, 11, and 12. D: There is no ICD 12 yet. V: I have my ways. D: But you don't even know what you're diagn V: *interrupting* I have taken the MMPI Inventory and the standard deviation of error after multiple runs is within an acceptable range for any PhD, PsyD, MD, or DO with an acceptable clinical certification. I also cross-referenced any abnormal responses with screening exams for Depression, ADHD, psychosis, addiction, and monitored all of my hormonal levels to make sure there were no underlying physiological causes. D: You don't need to screen yourself for addictions unless someone else V: *interrupting, but actually excited* The Titans say I am addicted to tech. But they don't live with it like I do. I'm showing them that I am in full control of myself, and thanks to this research I've found a way to use Monte Carlo simulations for how likely I am to have any emotional response at any moment. I never thought about the human brain like this before. I can modify my eye to be a functional MRI device…if I could just find the proper shielding against my own body. D: That is dangerous and NOT fully diagnostic yet. I love the enthusiasm but…how do I put this? BACK OFF, CAN'T YA?! V: Hmmm? *confused* I thought my gruntwork would make this easy for you. I am willing to undergo pharmacogenetic testing for the best medication. Isn't this what you do? D: *flustered* NO! Yes, well…it's complicated. V: I know, right? If it took me a few all-nighters to get the reams of data necessary for an introductory session, I can't imagine what you have to do for multiple patients every day of the week! D: You want to know what I do? Honestly? V: Yeah! I'll admit, I thought this was all psychobabble nonsense, but there is some real rigor behind neuroscience. D: I talk to people, and they talk back to me. I make suggestions based on that information, along with the biological and social components, and repeat that process with the patient's input. V: *sound of fuse blowing* That DOES sound like psychobabble nonsense. I mean, I can get you a copy of my last schematic D: PLEASE tone it down. I'm begging at this point. Look, I'm impressed by your efforts, but it's clear to me that you have no other format for viewing yourself. You're incredibly smart. You're laser focused - no pun intended. You realize that others think SOMETHING is up, and you double down on what you know. You're isolating yourself and you don't even know it. V: The hell I am! I've been a key component in some of the most important events in human history...UNIVERSE history. You don't know me. D: There's that anger that you mentioned. V: So my cortisol level- D: Nope…don't care. V: Say whaaaaaaaaat?! D: Dude…just talk to me. How are you? How are those you care about? What's your favorite food? V: This isn't a date. D: Not like that, but it IS a human interaction of getting to know one another. Please, just stick to the basics. V: Nah man, if you don't recognize I'm Linux all the wa- D: SAY SOMETHING NOT RELATED TO RESEARCH OR TECH. NOW. V: *sound of short circuiting* Sorry, doc, gotta reboot a few things D: Ohhhhhhh No, you're not avoiding this. I realize this is all a smokescreen now. Ever heard the phrase, ‘if you can't dazzle them with your brilliance, then baffle them with your bullshit? Well, sir, you have managed to create the ultimate bullshit brilliance hybrid I can fathom. Drop it. V: Well, damn. You cut real deep with that, man. I'm not sure this will work out. D: Why not? Are you willing to do something that doesn't have a treasure trove of data to mine? Actually, I think it's the opposite; you get the chance to look at your own personal black box that's been hardcoded into your psyche. The more you're willing to let go, the greater the likelihood of a new finding. V: *pause* You really want to do this without downloading the latest… D: *interrupting* Don't care unless you talk about your father. V: Weeeeeeell…I'm sure you can google his name…ha ah haha *nervous laugh* *cough* Maaaaaaan, just let it go, will you? That's the problem with practitioners of soft sciences. They fall back on outdated formatting. Are you Freud 2.0 or something? D: Only if you're Cyborg plus. V: I don't understand. I was expecting you to say “Cyborg 2022” or something. D: No, I mean, there's nothing wrong with being…comfortable. I apologize for my frustration. You dig technology. Sweet. It's vital for you. But what else makes you who you are? You don't have to answer that for me just V: *interrupting* Just myself. Yeah. My dad was the same way. Just colder. At least I'm around people that can make me feel good once in a while. That's a nice situation, ya know? Not trying to rain on their parades. I can't sit around watching TV or doing endless workouts or some such. I like making a difference. But I can always be better. I'm not sure anyone understands that. D: That was the best thing you've said this entire time. It seemed really tough. It gets easier over time. V: You're opening my mind, Doc. D: Thanks, I V: Yeah, I should have been downloading Beck and Ellis instead of just philosophical stoics when I was younger. I can do a PubMed search with the proper tags as soon as I leave D: *dramatic cough* AHEM V: Orrrrrrr I could just…journal for 5 minutes tonight? D: You're catching on. I'll see you next session. I trust that you've already logged it on your calendar. V: *confident/satisfied* Booyah. Ending (57:43) Thanks Karrington - Real Dudes Podcast Recommended reading: Blackest Night, JLA/Titans Next episodes: Black Bolt, Echo, 150th Episode Special Plugs for social References: Hamilton: What'd I Miss - Anthony (5:08) Apple Podcasts: here Google Play: here Stitcher: here TuneIn: here iHeartRadio: here Spotify: here Twitter Facebook Patreon TeePublic Discord
Intro Thanks to all our Patrons: Humble Citizens Dan and Kate; Local Officials Frank, Rey, and Jonathan; Mayors Angela, Chad, Devon, Maggie, Matt, Nyan, Ryan, and Tasha; Presidents Ariel, Jeanine, Matt, and Ruby Thanks to Khelan from Homo Superior - explain the show Background (3:30) Wiccan created by Allen Heinberg and Jim Cheung in Young Avengers #1 (April 2005) Billy Kaplan is a magic user recruited by Iron Lad (a time-traveling variant of Kang the Conqueror) to join a team of heroes to replace the disbanded Avengers Initially calling himself Asgardian, he changes his name to Wiccan Begins dating his teammate Teddy Altman, the shapeshifter called Hulkling Meets Tommy Shepherd, who looks identically to him but has different hair and superspeed powers Billy & the Young Avengers join Captain America's anti-registration team in Civil War - an attack on Billy is what kicks off a massive fight that leaves several heroes dead or incapacitated Billy & Tommy come to learn of a possible connection to the Scarlet Witch, who previously had twin boys named Billy & Tommy that vanished when it was revealed that she created them out of chaos magic, but they later vanished after Mephisto wiped them from existence - their souls were “repurposed” into Billy Kaplan & Tommy Shepherd #BecauseComics Children's Crusade: Billy & the Young Avengers seek out Wanda, who had been missing since House of M, to determine parentage - after finding an amnesiac Wanda in Latveria and engaged to Dr. Doom, she has her memory & powers restored, and reveals that she is in fact their mom - a battle with Dr. Doom leaves Cassie dead, but Teddy proposes to Billy Empyre: Thanks to his Skrull-Kree heritage, Teddy becomes Emperor of a new alliance, and they declare war on the Cotati, a plant-like race bent on revenge against former Skrull enslavers - before he leaves, Teddy and Billy get married in Vegas, and then officially once the war is over, combining Skrull, Kree, and Jewish customs Currently serving as prince consort to Teddy Issues (7:32) Uncertainty over parentage causes stress Questions over extent of powers (17:40) Husband's responsibilities pull him off-world (30:14) Not an issue: his family and support system (37:38) Break (47:43) Plugs for BetterHelp, Play Comics, and Al Ewing Treatment (49:23) In-universe - Have Billy say “no more magic” to put aside that aspect of his life for a while Out of universe - Focus on what the patient wants to talk about, and whether they have a good fit with the therapist (51:36) Skit (feat. Khelan) (59:20) DOC: Hello Billy, I'm Dr. Issues. BILLY: Hey Doc. D: How are you? B: I mean, things have been worse. D: That's not exactly a rousing endorsement. B: Sorry, I just mean there were a lot of questions that were driving me crazy, and I don't have nearly as many as I did before. That's a good thing. D: I'm glad to hear that. So what lingers? B: Still a ton of stuff. *pause* This is a bit hard, you know? I get it's your job, but sometimes I think even professionals will misinterpret what I'm saying, so I'm careful with what I let out. D: Totally understandable. Just remember that this is confidential, so even if things don't go as expected, they stay between us as long as no one is put in danger. B: Good to know. D: So, name something you want to discuss. B: Iwanttobecalmiwanttobecalmiwanttobecalm… D: Excuse me? B: Sorry, just wanted to be sure I was in the right headspace before I started. Is it wrong to want your husband to be around more? D: That...sounds like a loaded question. I take it you mean “more than he is now” and that there is some sort of barrier to that? B: Exactly. D: Does he disagree with you? B: NOT exactly. It's more to do with...outside activities. D: Are they activities that you approve of? B: I don't have a choice. D: There's always a choice; it's just a matter of consequences. B: Well, the consequences here involve the wellbeing of a whole empire, so do with that what you will. D: *pause* Heavy stuff. B: And listen, I'm so proud of him taking on this responsibility, and he does it so well and capably. And it doesn't hurt that he looks AMAZING with a crown on his head. I just… I want some more US time, y'know? D: For once when talking to a superhero, I DO know, quite well. How far would you say the scale has shifted? B: Oh, he hasn't packed on weight or anything. He still can bench press D: *interrupting* I'm glad that you're clearly still into him physically...what I meant was, on the work-life balance spectrum of his time with the crown versus his time with you, where is he on that scale? B: Hmmmm...maybe 75-25? No that's too harsh. How about 60-40. D: Your first answer was your gut, and that's ok. Intuition that's unrecognized can lead to dangerous emotional impulse. Your second answer sounds like what you would settle for. But tell me...really. What do you want it to be? B: The selfish side of me would say 5-95, and that's being generous. I just… we're newly married, our honeymoon was interrupted by symbiote dragons attacking the resort, and it seems like he can't make a decision without having to worry about some intergalactic treaty or alliance hanging on his every move. I love him, and I'll be his ride or die until neither of us draw breath, but I confess I did NOT see this as part of the whole “till death do us part” thing when I fell in love with him. So the simple answer is I don't honestly know what a good balance would be, but I know this ain't it. D: That may be one of the most mature answers I've heard in a long time. I'm not going to promise that those outside factors are going to change, but I can vow that it is my ethical duty to help your attempts at discovering a better balance each time we discuss it in each session. My only caution to you is to not expect things to just magically change. B: Except you realize who you're talking to, right? D: Yes, but even still- B: Iwantabetterbalanceiwantabetterbalanceiwantabetterbalance D: As I was saying, I know you want things to get towards total devotion, but the increase in civil unrest may be taking an emotional toll on your partner. Have you talked about that with him? B: Pardon me, but, I don't think it's THAT bad. D: Well, 25-75 isn't your perfect goal, and yet, the attempts on the lives of your fellow heroes must have led to so much anxiety. B: No, no, that's not - D: But you did say he was willing to surrender if it came time to save you. I'm glad that he has made it known how much he loves you. B: Iwantabetterkingdomiwantabetterkingdomiwantabetterkingdom D: You're clearly using your abilities to influence what you can. I've been talking a lot here. Rather than creating more stress for yourself, let me know, what's your take on your husband's pushback? B: *semi-robotic* I want the kingdom to be better. *normal* I thought I made that clear with the spells and the talking and I really thought you would have picked up on this by now oh my gosh have I completely made things worse oh no oh no oh no not again… D: Well, I usually don't jump to this in a session, but your anxiety appears to be through the roof! Have you considered other forms of relaxation, or a discussion on possible medication management? B: Sorry, sorry, I just had a bit of a freakout there...we were talking about acceptable balance. I'm willing to work at it the slow...the NON MAGIC way. D: No problem. 76-24 is not the worst I've ever heard in terms of a ratio B: WHAT? D: Just a bit of humor on my end. Usually the reality is somewhere between your gut and your partner's thoughts. I'm in no position right now to tell what the number is. Only you know that. B: Oh, so the things you said before, with what I cast, and the responses after that, it wasn't so bad I didn't screw everything up there's still a chance oh my god this is amazing! D: You're...welcome? I must say, for someone who knows a lot about things I couldn't begin to understand, you sell yourself short with how much you have in your control. B: Maybe not as much as you think, doctor. D: Ok then, perhaps we'll discuss how much control you have over the situation in our next session. In the meantime, enjoy that makeup honeymoon that your constituents planned for you out of respect for your personal lives. B: Whoa...whoa...then it really made a difference? I did better? I...nevermind. You're right. Let's leave it at that. Iwanttogototeddyiwanttogototeddyiwanttogototeddy... Ending (66:24) Recommended reading: Young Avengers Vol 1 Review read: Tamir “Mad at myself for sleeping on such a unique and engaging podcast, but after binging and catching up in just under 3 months I have two things to say: 1) This podcast is amazing. Just because the characters are fictional doesn't mean the issues they have are and it always surprises me when I get emotionally invested in an episode and have to remind myself that I'm in public. 2) I'm now sad that I have to wait weekly for new episodes when I was knocking out a couple a day while working. Listener for life.” Next episodes: Donna Troy, Homelander, Polaris Plugs for social References: WandaVision episode - Anthony (3:36) Trevor Project - Khelan (55:55) Apple Podcasts: here Google Play: here Stitcher: here TuneIn: here iHeartRadio: here Spotify: here Twitter Facebook Patreon TeePublic Discord
Don Jeffries, author (“Bullyocracy: How the Social Hierarchy Enables Bullies to Rule Schools, Work Places and Society at Large”), talk-show host and critic (of politics, business, and culture), and Kris Millegan (TrineDay publisher) discuss reforms and a paradigm shift.D: The way things are going, our kids will have a lower standard of living than us. Our leaders want us to have lower expectations. We’re going to end up like the Chinese. I think ultimately they’d like to have us living in bunk beds, like some of the Chinese, and paying us $8 a day or whatever.K: Now is the time to demand the truth, hold our government’s feet to the fire, and push them into something they didn’t even know they could be, for our children and the world they will grow up in.D: There are tons of reforms that are needed. Infrastructure hasn’t been touched since the Eisenhower years. Everything’s falling apart. Our woefully outdated power grids go down with a strong wind.K: I say, get rid off the grid. There’s a little box that could give us all the power we need.D: That’s right. Suppressed energy technology. That’s why Tesla’s records were stolen, by Donald Trump’s uncle, sent by the government, by the way. Tesla could have provided free energy for all.K: I’m very hopeful. With the technology we’ve got, the information that’s getting out there, I think good things are going to happen, through talking, through dialogue. There is a worldwide conversation happening. And there has been a lot of change. And more can happen. This pandemic has shown the perfidy of our healthcare system, and the perfidy of what money is. With education over the internet and through dialogue, honest change can happen. The book “Generations: The History of America’s Future” by Strauss and Howe, says after a certain number of cycles, you have a paradigm shift, and those who had the biggest power before the shift, after it, they aren’t in power anymore. And that’s where we’re at right now. The information is out there for a better world. We do not have to live in this [expletive deleted].
REACH FURTHER INTO X,Y,Z,T,D There's a move that sits outside our 3 spatial dimensions and 1 time dimension, in the darkness of space lightning from the Throne is coming forth! Push through your obstacles for this coming event and partner with the Lord and us as we advance project black lightning. THEOLOGY His body was like chrysolite, his face like lightning, his eyes like flaming torches, his arms and legs like the gleam of burnished bronze, and his voice like the sound of a multitude. Daniel 10:6 Then the Lord will appear over them; his arrow will flash like lightning. The Sovereign Lord will sound the trumpet; he will march in the storms of the south. Zechariah 9:14 LITERATURE Now, with a certainty which never after deserted him, he saw the planets — the ‘earths' he called them in his thought — as mere holes or gaps in the living heaven — excluded and rejected wastes of heavy matter and murky air, formed not by addition to, but by subtraction from, the surrounding brightness; And yet, he thought, beyond the solar system the brightness ends. Is that the real void,the real death? Unless...he groped for the idea...unless visible light is also a hole or gap, a mere diminution of something else. Something that is to bright unchanging heaven as heaven is to the dark, heavy earths....Things do not always happen as a man would expect. The moment of his arrival in an unknown world found Ransom wholly absorbed in a philosophical speculation. Out of Silent Planet C.S. Lewis SCIENCE Because light, or energy, in Einstein's theory comes from the interactions of the electromagnetic force, scientists have searched for over 100 years for ways to unite energy or light from the electromagnetic force with the other three forces, which are strong and weak nuclear forces and gravity. Two theories, independently developed and proposed by German mathematician Theodor Kaluza and Swedish physicist Oskar Klein suggested the possibility of a fifth dimension where electromagnetism and gravity unify. Oskar Klein figured that light was something that occured more in the fifth dimension, and what we saw of it was a more diluted version. Think of it like when you swim underwater in a pool, and there are ripples on the still surface. You'd perceive the ripples as shadows, rather than the ripples they actually were. This is how Klein thought of light, having the majority of it occur in the fifth dimension. Since light doesn't travel at an infinitely fast speed, that means it takes time for it to reach wherever it's going. So if I'm at a local displacement the change would be negligible, but far enough away and the times two different observers see an object in the same position would be different. You move far enough away the solar system, stars, even the galaxy would never look the same because all the light takes differing amounts of time to reach you. With enough displacement, the entire universe would begin to look very different from what we see. So for every point “(x,y,z,t)” there is now D, a displaced point in relation to “(x,y,z,t)” and for this displaced position, there would be an infinite number of of “(x,y,z,t)” points they could exist. So one order higher than the last. This is the fifth dimension. Decrease time over target: http://paypal.me/mzhop or Venmo @clastronaut
Tiger and the dragon keeper finally make it to safety, but will Zofvys lead them into the clutches of something more sinister?Some tips we learned in this episode:What age should kids start playing D&D? There's no real 'age', but when they love their characters like Colin loves his, you're going to have a fun time. Magic the Gathering cards mentioned: Dimir MachinationsFollow us on Twitter @dadsndragons for the latest updates. Email ryan@dadsndragons.com to connect. Music credits:Song: Anthem - Color ParadeMusic provided by Ninety9LivesVideo: https://youtu.be/VIWIgQaeQAsDownload: http://99l.tv/anthemYU Song: Contention - Kai EngleDownload available at Free Music Archive
This week on The Podlets Cloud Native Podcast we have Josh, Carlisia, Duffie, and Nick on the show, and are also happy to be joined by a newcomer, Brian Liles, who is a senior staff engineer at VMWare! The purpose of today’s show is coming to a deeper understanding of the meaning of ‘stateful’ versus ‘stateless’ apps, and how they relate to the cloud native environment. We cover some definitions of ‘state’ initially and then move to consider how ideas of data persistence and co-ordination across apps complicate or elucidate understandings of ‘stateful’ and ‘stateless’. We then think about the challenging practice of running databases within Kubernetes clusters, which effectively results in an ephemeral system becoming stateful. You’ll then hear some clarifications of the meaning of operators and controllers, the role they play in mediating and regulating states, and also how important they are in a rapidly evolving but skills-scarce environment. Another important theme in this conversation is the CAP theorem or the impossibility of consistency, availability and partition tolerance all at once, but the way different databases allow for different combinations of two out of the three. We then move on to chat about the fundamental connection between workloads and state and then end off with a quick consideration about how ideas of stateful and stateless play out in the context of networks. Today’s show is a real deep dive offering perspectives from some the most knowledgeable in the cloud native space so make sure to tune in! Follow us: https://twitter.com/thepodlets Website: https://thepodlets.io Feeback: info@thepodlets.io https://github.com/vmware-tanzu/thepodlets/issues Hosts: Carlisia Campos Duffie Cooley Bryan Liles Josh Rosso Nicholas Lane Key Points From This Episode: • What ‘stateful’ means in comparison to ‘stateless’.• Understanding ‘state’ as a term referring to data which must persist.• Examples of stateful apps such as databases or apps that revolve around databases.• The idea that ‘persistence’ is debatable, which then problematizes the definition of ‘state’. • Considerations of the push for cloud native to run stateless apps.• How inter-app coordination relates to definitions of stateful and stateless applications.• Considering stateful data as data outside of a stateless cloud native environment.• Why it is challenging to run databases in Kubernetes clusters.• The role of operators in running stateful databases in clusters.• Understanding CRDs and controllers, and how they relate to operators.• Controllers mediate between actual and desired states.• Operators are codified system administrators.• The importance of operators as app number grows in a skill-scarce environment.• Mechanisms around stateful apps are important because they ensure data integrity.• The CAP theorem: the impossibility of consistency, availability, and tolerance.• Why different databases allow for different iterations of the CAP theorem.• When partition tolerance can and can’t get sacrificed.• Recommendations on when to run stateful or stateless apps through Kubernetes.• The importance of considering models when thinking about how to run a stateful app.• Varying definitions of workloads.• Pods can run multiple workloads• Workloads create states, so you can’t have one without the other.• The term ‘workloads’ can refer to multiple processes running at once.• Why the ephemerality of Kubernetes systems makes it hard to run stateful applications. • Ideas of stateful and stateless concerning networks.• The shift from server to browser in hosting stateful sessions. Quotes: “When I started envisioning this world of stateless apps, to me it was like, ‘Why do we even call them apps? Why don’t we just call them a process?’” — @carlisia [0:02:60] “‘State’ really is just that data which must persist.” — @joshrosso [0:04:26] “From the best that I can surmise, the operator pattern is the combination of a CRD plus a controller that will operate on events from the Kubernetes API based on that CRD’s configuration.” — @bryanl [0:17:00] “Once again, don’t let developers name them anything.” — @bryanl [0:17:35] “Data integrity is so important” — @apinick [0:22:31] “You have to really be careful about the different models that you’re evaluating when trying to think about how to manage a stateful application like a database.” — @mauilion [0:31:34] Links Mentioned in Today’s Episode: KubeCon+CloudNativeCon — https://events19.linuxfoundation.org/events/kubecon-cloudnativecon-north-america-2019/Google Spanner — https://cloud.google.com/spanner/CockroachDB — https://www.cockroachlabs.com/CoreOS — https://coreos.com/Red Hat — https://www.redhat.com/enMetacontroller — https://metacontroller.app/Brandon Philips — https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/authors/brandon-phillipsMySQL — https://www.mysql.com/ Transcript: EPISODE 009 [INTRODUCTION] [0:00:08.7] ANNOUNCER: Welcome to The Podlets Podcast, a weekly show that explores Cloud Native one buzzword at a time. Each week, experts in the field will discuss and contrast distributed systems concepts, practices, tradeoffs and lessons learned to help you on your cloud native journey. This space moves fast and we shouldn’t reinvent the wheel. If you’re an engineer, operator or technically minded decision maker, this podcast is for you. [INTERVIEW] [00:00:41] JR: All right! Hello, everybody, and welcome to episode 6 of The Cubelets Podcast. Today we are going to be discussing the concept of stateful and stateless and what that means in this crazy cloud native landscape that we all work. I am Josh Rosso. Joined with me today is Carlisia. [00:00:59] CC: Hi, everybody. [00:01:01] JR: We also have Duffie. [00:01:03] D: Hey, everybody. [00:01:04] JR: Nicholas. [00:01:05] NL: Yo! [00:01:07] JR: And a newcomer to the podcast, we also have Brian. Brian, you want to give us a little intro about yourself? [00:01:12] BL: Hi! I’m Brian. I work at VMWare. I do lots of community stuff, including sharing the KubeCon+CloudNativeCon. [00:01:22] JR: Awesome! Cool. All right. We’ve got a pretty good cast this week. So let’s dive right into it. I think one of the first things that we’ve been talking a bit about is the concept of what makes an application stateful? And of course in reverse, what makes an application stateless? Maybe we could try to start by discerning those two. Maybe starting with stateless if that makes? Does someone want to take that on? [00:01:45] CC: Well, I’m going to jump right in. I have always been a developer, as supposed to some of you or all of you have who have system admin backgrounds. The first time that I heard the stateless app, I was like, “What?” That wasn’t recent, okay? It was a long time ago, but that was a knot in my head. Why would you have a stateless app? If you have an app, you’re going to need state. I couldn’t imagine what that was. But of course it makes a lot of sense now. That was also when we were more in the monolithic world. [00:02:18] BM: Actually that’s a good point. Before you go into that, it’s a great point. Whenever we start with apps or we start developing apps, we think of an application. An application does everything. It takes input and it does stuff and it gives output. But now in this new world where we have lots of apps, big apps, small apps, we start finding that there’s apps that only talk and coordinate with other apps. They don’t do anything else. They don’t save any data. They don’t do anything. That’s what – where we get into this thing called stateless apps. Apps don’t have any type of data that they store locally. [00:02:53] CC: Yeah. It’s more like when I envision in my head. You said it brilliantly, Brian. It’s almost like a process. When I started envisioning this world of stateless apps, to me it was like, “Why do we even call them apps? Why don’t we just call them a process?” They’re just shifting back data and forth but they’re not – To me, at the beginning, apps were always stateless. They went together. [00:03:17] D: I think, frequently, people think of applications that have only locally relevant stuff that is actually not going to persist to disc, but maybe held in memory or maybe only relevant to the type of connection that’s coming through that application also as stateless, which is interesting, because there’s still some state there, but the premise is that you could lose that state and not lose the functionality of that code. [00:03:42] NL: Something that we might want to dive into really quickly when talking about stateless and stateful apps. What do we mean by the word state? When I first learned about these things, that was what always screwed me up. I’m like, “What do you mean state? Like Washington? Yeah. We got it over here.” [00:03:57] JR: Oh! State. That’s that word. State is one of those words that we use to sound smarter than we actually are 95% of the time, and that’s a number I just made up. When people are talking about state, they mean databases. Yeah. But there are other types of state as well. If you maintain local cache that needs to be persistent, if you have local files that you’re dealing with, like you’re opening files. That’s still state. State really is just that it’s data that must persist. [00:04:32] D: I agree with that definition. I think that state, whether persisted to memory or persisted to disc or persisted to some external system, that’s still what we refer to as state. [00:04:41] JR: All right. Makes sense and sounds about like what I got from it as well. [00:04:45] CC: All right. So now we have this world where we talk about stateless apps and stateful apps. Are there even stateful apps? Do we call a database an app? If we have a distributed system where we have one stateless app over here, another stateless app over there and then we have the database that’s connected to the two of them, are we calling the database a stateful app or is that whole thing – How do we call this? [00:05:15] NL: Yeah. The database is very much a state as an app with state. I’m very much – [00:05:19] D: That’s a close definition. Yeah. [00:05:21] NL: Yeah. Literally, it’s the epitome of a stateful app. But then you also have these apps that talk to databases as well and they might have local data, like data that – they start a transaction and then complete it or they have a long distributed type transaction. Any apps that revolve around a database, if they store local data, whether it’s within a transaction or something else, they’re still stateful apps. [00:05:46] D: Yup. I think you can modify and input data or modify state that has to be persisted in some way I think is a stateful app, even though I do think it’s confusing because of what – As I said before, I think that there are a bunch of applications that we think of, like not everybody considers Spark jobs to be stateful. Spark jobs, for example, are something that would bring data in, mutate that data in some way, produce some output and go away. The definition there is that Spark would generally push the resulting data into some other external system. It’s interesting, because in that model, Spark is not considered to be a stateful app because the Spark job could fail, go away, get recreated, pick up the pieces where it left off or just redo that work until all of the work is done. In many cases, people consider that to be a stateless application. That’s I think is like the crux – In my opinion, the crux of the confusion around what a stateful and stateless application is, is that people frequently – I think it’s more about where you store – what you mean by persistence and how that actually realizes in your application. If you’re pushing your state to an external database, is your application still stateful? [00:06:58] NL: I think it’s a good question, or if you are gathering data from an external source and mutating it in some way, but you don’t need data to be present when you start up, is that a stateful app or a stateless app? Even though you are taking in data, modifying it and checking it, sending out to some other mechanism or serving it in your own way, does that become like a stateless app? If that app gets killed and it comes back and it’s able to recover, is it stateful or stateless? That’s a bit of a gray area, I think. [00:07:26] JR: Yeah. I feel like a lot of the customers I work with, if the application can get killed even if it has some type of local state, they still refer to it as stateless usually, to me at least, when we talk about it because they think, “I can kind of restart this application and I’m not too worried about losing whatever it may have had.” Let’s say cached for simplicity, right? I think that kind of leads us into an interesting question. We’ve talked a lot on this podcast about cloud native infrastructure and cloud native applications and it seems like since the inception of cloud native, there’s always been this push that a stateless app is the best candidate to run or the easiest candidate to run. I’m just curious if we could dive into that for a moment. Why in the cloud native infrastructure area has there always been this push for running stateless applications? Why is it simpler? Those kinds of things. [00:08:15] BL: Before we dive into that, we have to realize – And this is just a problem of our whole ecosystem, this whole cloud native. We’re very hand-wavy in our descriptions for things. There’re a lot of ambiguous descriptions, and state is one of those. Just keep that in mind, that when we’re talking today, we’re really just talking about these things that store data and when that’s the state. Just keep that in mind as you’re listening to this. But when it comes to distributed systems in general, the easiest system is a system that doesn’t need coordination with any other system. If it happens to die, that’s okay. We can just restart it. People like to start there. It’s the easiest thing to start. [00:08:58] NL: Yeah, that was basically what I was going to say. If your application needs to tie into other applications, it becomes significantly more complicated to implement it, at least for your first time and in your system. These small applications that only – They don’t care about anybody else, they just take in data or not, they just do whatever. Those are super easy to start with because they’re just like, “Here. Start this up. Who cares? Whatever happens, it happens.” [00:09:21] CC: That could be a good boundary to define – I don’t want to jump back too far, but to define where is the stateless app to me is part of a system and just say it depends for it to come back up. Does it depend on something else that has state? [00:09:39] BL: I’ll give you an example. I can give you a good example of a stateless app that we use every day, every single one of us, none of us on this call, but when you search Google. You go to google.com and you go to the bar and you type in a search, what’s happening is there is a service at the beginning that collects that search and it federates the search over many different probably clusters of computers so they can actually do the search currently. That app that actually coordinates all that work is a stateless app most likely. All it does is just splits it up and allows more CPUs to do the work. Probably, that goes away. Probably not a problem. You probably have 10 more of them. That’s what I consider stateless. It doesn’t really own any of the data. It’s the coordinator. [00:10:25] CC: Yeah. If it goes down, it comes back up. It doesn’t need to reset itself to the state where it was before. It can truly be considered a stateless because it can just, “Okay. I reset. I’m starting from the beginning from this clear state.” [00:10:43] BL: Yes. That’s a good summary of that. [00:10:45] CC: Because another way to think about stateless – What makes an app stateful app, does it have to be combined or like deployed and shipped together with the part that maintains the state? That’s a more clear cut definition. Then that app is definitely a stateful app. [00:11:05] D: What we frequently talk about in like the cloud native space is like you know that you have a stateless app if you can just create 20 of them and not have to worry about the coordination of them. They are all workers. They are all going to take input. You could spread the load across those 20 in an identical way and not worry about which one you landed on. That’s stateless application. A stateful application is a very different thing. You have to have some coordination. You have to say how many databases can you have on a backend? Because you’re persisting data there, you have to be really careful about that you only write to the master database or to the writing database and you could read of any other memories of that database cluster, that sort of stuff. [00:11:44] CC: It might seem that we are going so deep into this differentiating between stateful and stateless, but this is so important because clusters are usually designed to be ephemeral. Ephemeral means obviously they die down, they are brought back up, the nodes, and you should worry as least as possible with the state of things. Then going back to what Joshua is saying, when we are in this cloud native world, usually we are talking about stateless apps, stateless workloads and then we’re going to just talk about what workload means. But then if that’s the case, where are the stateful apps? It’s like we have this vision that the stateful apps live outside the cloud native world? How does it work? But it’s supposed to work. [00:12:36] BL: Yup. This is the question that keeps a lot of people employed. Making sure my state is available when I need it. You know what? I’m not going to even use that word state. Making sure my data is available wherever I need it and when I need it. I don’t want to go too deep in right now, but this is actually a huge problem in the Kubernetes community in general, and we see it because there’s been lots of advice given, “Don’t run things like databases in your clusters.” This is why we see people taking the ideas of Google Spanner and like CockroachDB and actually going through a lot of work to make sure that you can run databases in Kubernetes clusters. The interesting piece about this is that we’re actually to the point where we can run these types of workloads in our clusters, but with a caveat, big star at the end, it’s very difficult and you have to know what you’re doing. [00:13:34] JR: Yeah. I want to dovetail on that Brian, because it’s something that we see all the time. I feel like when we first started setting up, let’s call them clusters, but in our case it was Kubernetes, right? We always saw that data level always being delegated to like if you’re in Amazon, some service that they hosted and so on. But now I think more and more of the customers that at least I’m seeing. I’m sure Nicholas and Duffie too, they’re interested in doing exactly what you just described. Cockroach is an example I literally just worked with recently, and it’s just interesting how much more thoughtful they have to be about their cluster operations. Going back to what you said Carlisia, it’s not as easy as just like trashing a cluster and instantiating a new one anymore, like they’re used to. They need to be more thoughtful about keeping that data integrity intact through things like upgrades and disaster recover. [00:14:18] D: Another interesting point kind to your point, Brian, is that like, frequently, people are starting to have conversations and concerns around data gravity, which means that I have a whole bunch of data that I need to work with, like to a Spark job, which I mentioned earlier. I need to basically put my compute where that data is. The way that I store that data inside the cluster and use Kubernetes to manage it or whether I just have to make sure that I have some way of bringing up compute workloads close to that data. It’s actually kind of introducing a whole new layer to this whole thing. [00:14:48] BL: Yeah! Whole new layer of work and a whole new layer of complexity, because that’s actually – The crux of all this is like where we slide the complexity too, but this is interesting, and I don’t want to go too far to this one definitely. This is why we’re seeing more people creating operators around managing data. I’ve seen operators who are bringing databases up inside of Kubernetes. I’ve seen operators that actually can bring up resources outside of Kubernetes using the Kubernetes API. The interesting thing about this is that I looked at both solutions and I said, “I still don’t know what the answer is,” and that’s great. That means that we have a lot to learn about the problem, and at least we have some paths for it. [00:15:29] NL: Actually, that kind of reminds me of the first time I ever heard the word stateful or stateless – I’m an infrastructure guy. Was around the discussion of operators, which there’s only a couple of years ago when operators were first introduced at CoreOS and some people were like, “Oh! Well, this is how you now operate a stateful mechanism inside of Kubernetes. This is the way forward that we want to propose.” I was just like, “Cool! What is that? What’s state? What do you mean stateful and stateless?” I had no idea. Josh, you were there. You’re like, “Your frontend doesn’t care about state and your backend does.” I’m like, “Does it? I don’t know. I’m not a developer.” [00:16:10] JR: Let’s talk about exactly that, because I think these patterns we’re starting to see are coming out of the needs that we’re all talking about, right? We’ve seen at least in the Kubernetes community a lot of push for these different constructs, like something called a stateful [inaudible 00:16:21], which isn’t that important right now, but then also like an operator. Maybe we can start by defining what is an operator? What is that pattern and why does it relate to stateful apps? [00:16:31] CC: I think that would be great. I am not clear what an operator is. I know there’s going to be a controller involved. I know it’s not a CRD. I am not clear on that at all, because I only work with CRDs and we don’t define – like the project I worked on with Velero, we don’t categorize it as an operator. I guess an operator uses specific framework that exists out there. Is it a Kubernetes library? I have no idea. [00:16:56] BL: We did it to ourselves again. We’re all doing these to ourselves. From the best that I can surmise, the operator pattern is the combination of a CRD plus a controller that will operate on events from the Kubernetes API based on that CRD’s configuration. That’s what an operator is. [00:17:17] NL: That’s exactly right. [00:17:18] BL: To conflate this, Red Hat created the operator SDK, and then you have [inaudible 00:17:23] and you have a Metacontroller, which can help you build operators. Then we actually sometimes conflate and call CRDs operators, and that’s pretty confusing for everyone. Once again, don’t let developers name anything. [00:17:41] CC: Wait. So let’s back up a little. Okay. There is an actual library that’s called an operator. [00:17:46] BL: Yes. There’s an operator SDK. [00:17:47] CC: Referred to as an operator. I heard that. Okay. Great. But let me back up a little because – [00:17:49] D: The word operator can [00:17:50] CC: Because if you are developing an app for Kubernetes, if you’re extending Kubernetes, you are – Okay, you might not use CRDs, but if you are using CRDs, you need a controller, right? Because how will you do actions? Then every app that has a CRD – because the alternative to having CRDs is just using the API directly without creating CRDs to reflect to resources. If you’re creating CRDs to reflect to resources, you need controllers. All of those apps, they have CRDs, are operators. [00:18:24] D: Yip [inaudible 00:18:25] is an operator. [00:18:26] CC: [inaudible 00:18:26] not an operator. How can you extend Kubernetes and not be qualified [inaudible 00:18:31] operator? [00:18:32] BL: Well, there’s a way. There is a way. You can actually just create a CRD and use a CRD for data storage, you know, store states, and you can actually query the Kubernetes API for that information. You don’t need a controller, but we couple them with controllers a lot to perform action based on that state we’ve saved to etcd. [00:18:50] CC: Duffie. [00:18:51] D: I want to back up just for a moment and talk about the controller pattern and what it is and then go from there to operators, because I think it makes it easier to get it in your head. A control pattern is effectively a way to understand desired state and real state and provide some logic or business code that will allow you to converge those two states, your actual state and your desired state. This is a pattern that we see used in almost everything within a distributed system. It’s like within Kubernetes, within most of the kind of more interesting systems that are out there. This control pattern describes a pretty good way of actually managing application flow across distributed systems. Now, operators, when they were initially introduced, we were talking about that this is a slightly different thing. Operators, when we introduced the idea, came more from like the operational burden of these stateful applications, things like databases and those sorts of stuff. With the database, etcd for example, you have a whole bunch of operational and runtime concerns around managing the lifecycle of that system. How do I add a new member to the cluster? What do I do when a member dies? How do I take action? Right now, that’s somebody like myself waking up at 2 in the morning and working through a run book to basically make sure that that service remains operational through the night. But the idea of an operator was to take that control pattern that we described earlier and make it wake up at 2 in the morning to fix this stuff. We’re going to actually codify the operational knowledge of managing the burden of these stateful applications so that we don’t have to wake up at 2 in the morning and do it anymore. Nobody wants to do that. [00:20:32] BL: Yeah. That makes sense. Remember back at KubCon years ago, I know it was one in Seattle where Brandon Philips was on stage talking about operators. He basically was saying if we think about SysOp, system operators, it was a way to basically automate or capture the knowledge of our system administrators in scripts or in a process or in code a la operators. [00:20:57] D: The last part that I’ll add to this thing, which I think is actually what really describes the value of this idea to me is that there are only so many people on the planet that do what the people in this blog post do. Maybe you’re one of them that listen to this podcast. People who are operating software or operating infrastructure at scale, there just aren’t that many of us on the planet. So as we add more applications, as more people adopt the cloud native regime or start coming to a place where they can crank out more applications more quickly, we’re going to have to get to a place where we are able to automate the burden of managing those applications, because there just aren’t enough of us to be able to support the load that is coming. There just aren’t enough people on the planet that do this to be able to support that. That’s the thing that excites me most about the operator pattern, is that it gives us a place to start. It gives us a place to actually start thinking about managing that burden over time, because if we don’t start changing the way we think about managing that burden, we’re going to run out of people. We’re not going to be able to do it. [00:22:05] NL: Yeah. It’s interesting. With stateful apps, we keep kind of bringing them – coming back to stateful apps, because stateful apps are hard and stateless apps are easy, and we’ve created all these mechanisms around operating things with state because of how just complicated it is to make sure that your data is ready, accessible and has integrity. That’s the big one that I keep not thinking about as a SysOps person coming into the Dev world. Data integrity is so important and making sure that your data is exactly what it needs to be and was the last time you checked it, is super important. It’s only something I’m really starting to grasp. That’s why I was like these things, like operators and all these mechanisms that we keep creating and recreating and recreating keep coming about, because making sure that your stateful apps have the right data at the right time is so important. [00:22:55] BL: Since you brought this up, and we just talked about why a state is so hard, I want to introduce the new term to this conversation, the whole CAP theorem, where data would typically be – in a distributed system at least, your data will be consistent or your data can be available, or if your distributed systems falls in multiple parts, you can have partition tolerance. This is one of those computer science things where you can actually pick two. You can have it be available and have partition tolerance, but your data won’t be consistent, or you can have consistency and availability, but you won’t have partition tolerance. If your cluster splits into two for some reason, the data will be bad. This is why it’s hard, this is why people have written basically lots of PhD dissertations on this subject, and this is why we are talking about this here today, is because managing state, and particularly managing distributed, is actually a very, very hard problem. But there’s software out there that will help us, and Kubernetes is definitely part of that and stateful sets are definitely part of that as well. [00:24:05] JR: I was just going to say on those three points, consistently, availability and partition tolerance. Obviously, we’d want all three if we could have them. Is there one that we most commonly tradeoff and give up or does it go case-by-case? [00:24:17] BL: Actually, it’s been proven. You can’t have all three. It’s literally impossible. It depends. If you have a MySQL server and you’re using MySQL to actually serve data out of this, you’re going to most likely get consistency and availability. If you have it replicated, you might not have partition tolerance. That’s something to think about, and there are different databases and this is actually one of the reasons why there are different databases. This is why people use things like relational databases and they use key value stores not because we really like the interfaces, but because they have different properties around the data. [00:24:55] NL: That’s an interesting point and something that I had recently just been thinking about, like why are there so many different types of databases. I just didn’t know. It was like in only recently heard of CAP theorem as well just before you mentioned it. I’m like, “Wow! That’s so fascinating.” The whole thing where you only pick two. You can’t get three. Josh, to kind of go back to your question really quickly, I think that partition tolerance is the one that we throw away the most. We’re willing to not be able to segregate our database as much as possible because C and A are just too important, I think. At least that’s what I’m saying, like I am wearing an [inaudible 00:25:26] shirt and [inaudible 00:25:27] is not partition tolerant. It’s bad at it. [00:25:31] BL: This is why Google introduced Spanner, and Spanner in some situations can get free with tradeoffs and a lot of really, really smart stuff, but most people can’t run this scale. But we do need to think about partition tolerance, especially with data whenever – Let’s say you run a store and you have multiple instances across the world and someone buys something from inventory, what is your inventory look like at any particular point? You don’t have to answer my question, of course, but think about that. These are still very important problems if fiber gets cut across the Atlantic and now I’ve sold more things than I have. Carlisia, speaking to you as someone who’s only been a developer, have you moved your thoughts on state any further? [00:26:19] CC: Well, I feel that I’m clear on – Well, I think you need to clarify your question better for me. If you’re asking if I understand what it means, I understand what it means. But I actually was thinking to ask this question to all of you, because I don’t know the answer, if that’s the question you’re asking me. I want to put that to the group. Do you recommend people, as in like now-ish, to run stateful workloads? We need to talk about workloads mean. Run stateful apps or database in sites if they’re running a Kubernetes cluster or if they’re planning for that, do you all as experts recommend that they should already be looking into doing that or they should be running for now their stateful apps or databases outside of the cloud native ecosystem and just connecting the two? Because if that’s what your question was, I don’t know. [00:27:21] BL: Well, I’ll take this first. I think that we should be spending lots of more time than we are right now in coming up community-tested solutions around using stateful sets to their best ability. What that means is let’s say if you’re running a database inside of Kubernetes and you’re using a stateful set to manage this, what we do need to figure out is what happens when my database goes down? The pod just kills? When I bring up a new version, I need to make sure that I have the correct software to verify integrity, rebuilt things, so that when it comes back up, it comes back up correctly. That’s what I think we should be doing. [00:27:59] JR: For me, I think working with customers, at least Kubernetes-oriented folks, when they’re trying to introduce Kubernetes as their orchestration part of their overall platform, I’m usually just trying to kind of meet them where they’re at. If they’re new to Kubernetes and distributed systems as a whole, if we have stateless, let’s call them maybe simpler applications to start with, I generally have them lean into that first, because we already have so much in front of us to learn about. I think it was either Brian or Duffie, you said it introduces a whole bunch more complexity. You have to know what you’re doing. You have to know how to operate these things. If they’re new to Kubernetes, I generally will advise start with stateless still. But that being said, so many of our customers that we work with are very interested in running stateful workloads on Kubernetes. [00:28:42] CC: But just to clarify what you said, Josh, because you spoke like an expert, but I still have beginner’s ears. You said something that sounded to me like you recommend that you go stateless. It sounded to me like that. What you really say is that they take out the stateless part of what they have, which they might already have or they might have to change and put the stateless. You’re not suggesting that, “Oh! You can’t do stateful anymore. You need to just do everything stateless.” What you’re saying is take the stateless part of your system, put that in Kubernetes, because that is really well-tested and keep the stateful outside of that ecosystem. Is that right? [00:29:27] JR: I think that’s a better way to put it. Again, it’s not that Kubernetes can’t do stateful. It’s more of a concept of biting off more than you can chew. We still work with a lot of people who are very new to these distributed systems concepts, and to take on running stateful workloads, if we could just delegate that to some other layer, like outside of the cluster, that could be a better place to start, at least in my experience. Nicholas and Duff might have different – [00:29:51] NL: Josh, you basically nailed it like what I was going to say, where it’s like if the team that I’m working with is interested in taking on the complexity of maintaining their databases, their stateful sets and making sure that they have data integrity and availability, then I’m all for them using Kubernetes for a stateful set. Kubernetes can run stateful applications, but there is all this complexity that we keep talking about and maintaining data and all that. If they’re willing to take on their complexity, great, it’s there for you. If they’re not, if they’re a little bit kind of behind as – Not behind, but if they’re kind of starting out their Kubernetes journey or their distributed systems journey, I would recommend them to move that complexity to somebody else and start with something a little bit easier, like a stateless application. There are a lot of good services that provide data as a service, right? You’ve got dataview as RDS is great for creating stateful application. You can leverage it anytime and you’ve got like dedicated wires too. I would point them to there first if they don’t want to take on like complexity. [00:30:51] D: I completely agree with that. An important thing I would add, which is in response to the stateful set piece here, is that as we’ve already described, managing a stateful application like a database does come with some complexity. So you should really carefully look at just what these different models provide you. Whether that model is making use of a stateful set, which provides you like ordinality, ensuring that things start up in a particular order and some of the other capabilities around that stuff. But it won’t, for example, manage some of the complexity. A stateful set won’t, for example, try and issue a command to the new member to make sure that it’s part of an existing database cluster. It won’t manage that kind of stuff. So you have to really be careful about the different models that you’re evaluating when trying to think about how to manage a stateful application like a database. I think because it’s actually why the topic of an operator came up kind of earlier, which was that like there are a lot of primitives within Kubernetes in general that provide you a lot of capability for managing things like stateful applications, but they may not entirely suit your needs. Because of the complexity with stateful applications, you have to really kind of be really careful about what you adopt and where you jump in. [00:32:04] CC: Yeah. I know just from working with Velero, which is a tool for doing backup and recovery migration of Kubernetes clusters. I know that we backup volumes. So if you have something mounted on a volume, we can back that up. I know for a fact that people are using that to backup stateful workloads. We need to talk about workloads. But at any case, one thing to – I think one of you mentioned is that you definitely also need to look at a backup and recovery strategy, which is ever more important if you’re doing stateful workloads. [00:32:46] NL: That’s the only time it’s important. If you’re doing stateless, who cares? [00:32:49] BL: Have we defined what a workload is? [00:32:50] CC: Yeah. But let me say something. Yeah, I think we should do an episode on that maybe, maybe not. We should do an episode on GitOps type of thing for related things, because even though you – Things are stateless, but I don’t want to get into it. Your cluster will change state. You can recover in stuff from like a fresh version. But as it goes through a lifecycle, it will change state and you might want to keep that state. I don’t know. I’m not the expert in that area, but let’s talk about workloads, Brian. Okay. Let me start talking about workloads. I never heard the term workload until I came into the cloud native world, and that was about a year ago or when they started looking in this space more closely. Maybe a little bit before a year ago. It took me forever to understand what a workload was. Now I understand, especially today, we’re talking about a little bit before we started recording. Let me hear from you all what it means to you. [00:34:00] BL: This is one of those terms, and I’m sure like the last any ex-Googlers about this, they’ll probably agree. This is a Google term that we actually have zero context about why it’s a term. I’m sure we could ask somebody and they would tell us, but workloads to me personally are anything that ultimately creates a pod. Deployments create replica sets, create pods. That whole thing is a workload. That’s how I look at it. [00:34:29] CC: Before there were pods, were there workloads, or is a workload a new thing that came along with pods? [00:34:35] BL: Once again, these words don’t make any sense to us, because they’re Google terms. I think that a pod is a part of a workload, like a deployment is a part of a workload, like a replica set is part of a workload. Workload is the term that encompasses an entire set of objects. [00:34:52] D: I think of a workload as a subset of an application. When I think of an application or a set of microservices, I might think of each of the services that make up that entire application as a workload. I think of it that way because that’s generally how I would divide it up to Brian’s point into different deployment or different stateful sets or different – That sort of stuff. Thinking of them each as their own autonomous piece, and altogether they form an application. That’s my think of it. [00:35:20] CC: To connect to what Brian said, deployment, will always run in the pods, which is super confusing if you’re not looking at these things, just so people understand, because it took me forever to understand that. The connection between a workload, a deployment and a pod. Pods contain – If you have a deployment that you’re going to shift Kubernetes – I don’t know if shift is the right word. You’re going to need to run on Kubernetes. That deployment needs to run somewhere, in some artifact, and that artifact is called a pod. [00:35:56] NL: Yeah. Going back to what Duffie said really quickly. A workload to me was always a process, kind of like not just a pod necessarily, but like whatever it is that if you’re like, “I just need to get this to run,” whatever that is. To me that was always a workload, but I think I’m wrong. I think I’m oversimplifying it. I’m just like whatever your process is. [00:36:16] BL: Yeah. I would give you – The reason why I would not say that is because a pod can run multiple containers at once, which ergo is multiple processes. That’s why I say it that way. [00:36:29] NL: Oh! You changed my mind. [00:36:33] BL: The reason I bring this up, and this is probably a great idea for a future show, is about all the jargon and terminology that we use in this land that we just take as everyone knows it, but we don’t all know it, and should be a great conversation to have around that. But the reason I always bring up the whole workload thing is because when we think about workloads and then you can’t have state without workloads, really. I just wanted to make sure that we tied those two things together. [00:36:58] CC: Why can you not have state without workloads? What does that mean? [00:37:01] BL: Well, the reason you can’t have state without workloads is because something is going to have to create that state, whether that workload is running in or out a cluster. Something is going to have to create it. It just doesn’t come out of nowhere. [00:37:11] CC: That goes back to what Nick was saying, that he thinks a workload is a process. Was that was you said, Nick? [00:37:18] NL: It is, yeah, but I’m renegading on that. [00:37:23] CC: At least I could see why you said that. Sorry, Brian. I cut you off. [00:37:28] BL: What I was saying is a workload ultimately is one or more processes. It’s not just a process. It’s not a single process. It could be 10, it could be 1. [00:37:39] JS: I have one final question, and we can bail on this and edit it out if it’s not a good one to end with. I hope it’s not too big, but I think maybe one thing we overlooked is just why it’s hard to run stateful workloads in these new systems like Kubernetes. We talked about how there’s more complexity and stuff, but there might be some room to talk about – People have been spinning up an EC2 server, a server on the web and running MySQL on it forever. Why in like the Kubernetes world of like pods and things is it a little bit harder to run, say, MySQL just [inaudible 00:38:10]. Is that something worth diving into? [00:38:13] NL: Yeah, I think so. I would say that for things like, say, applications, like databases particularly, they are less resilient to outages. While Kubernetes itself is dedicated to – Or most container orchestrations, but Kubernetes specifically, are dedicated to running your pods continuously as long as they will, that it is still somewhat of a shifting landscape. You do have priority and preemption. If you don’t set those things up properly of if there’s just like a total failure of your system at large, your stateful application can just go down at any time. Then how do you reconcile the outage in data, whatever data that might have gotten lost? Those sorts of things become significantly more complicated in an environment like Kubernetes where you don’t necessarily have access to a command line to run the commands to recover as easy. You may not, but it’s the same. [00:39:01] BL: Yes. You got to understand what databases do. Disk is slow, whether you have spinning disk or you have disk on chip, like SSD. What databases do in a lot of cases is they store things in memory. So if it goes away, didn’t get stored. In other cases, what databases do is they have these huge transactional logs, maybe they write them out in files and then they process the transaction log whenever they have CPU time. If a database dies just suddenly, maybe its state is inconsistent because it had items that were to be processed in a queue that haven’t been processed. Now it doesn’t know what’s going on, which is why – [00:39:39] NL: That’s interesting. I didn’t know that. [00:39:40] BL: If you kill MySQL, like kill MySQL D with a -9, why it might not come back up. [00:39:46] JR: Yeah. Going back to Kubernetes as an example, we are living in this newer world where things can get rescheduled and moved around and killed and their IPs changed and things. It seems like this environment is, should I say, more ephemeral, and those types of considerations becoming to be more complex. [00:40:04] NL: I think that really nails it. Yeah. I didn’t know that there were transactional logs about databases. I should, I feel like, have known that but I just have no idea. [00:40:11] D: There’s one more part to the whole stateful, stateless thing that I think is important to cover, but I don’t know if we’ll be able to cover it entirely in the time that we have left, and that is from the network perspective. If you think about the types of connections coming into an application, we refer to some of those connections as stateful and stateless. I think that’s something we could tackle in our remaining time, or what’s everybody’s thought? [00:40:33] JR: Why don’t you try giving us maybe a quick summary of it, Duffie, and then we can end on that. [00:40:36] CC: Yeah. I think it’s a good idea to talk about network and then address that in the context of network. I’m just thinking an idea for an episode. But give us like a quick rundown. [00:40:45] D: Sure. A lot of the kind of older monolithic applications, the way that you would scale these things is you would have multiple of them and then you would have some intelligence in the way that you’re routing connections down to those applications that would describe the ability to ensure that when Bob accesses a website and he authenticates, he’s going to authenticate to one specific instance of this application and the intelligence up in the frontend is going to handle the routing to make sure that Bob’s connection always comes back to that same instance. This is an older pattern. It’s been around for a very long time and it’s certainly the way that we first kind of learned to scale applications before we’ve decided to break into maker services and kind of handle a lot of this routing in a more resilient way. That was kind of one of the early versions of how we do this, and that is a pretty good example of a stateful session, and that there is actually some – Perhaps Bob has authenticated and he has a cookie that allows him, that when he comes back to that particular application, a lot of the settings, his browser settings, whether he’s using the dark theme or the light theme, that sort of stuff, is persisted on the server side rather than on the client side. That’s kind of what I mean by stateful sessions. Stateless sessions mean it doesn’t really matter that the user is terminating to the same end of point, because we’ve managed to keep the state either with the client. We’re handling state on the browser side of things rather on the server side of things. So you’re not necessarily gaining anything by pushing that connection back to the same specific instance, but just to a service that is more widely available. There are lots of examples of this. I mean, Brian’s example of Google earlier. Obviously, when I come back to Google, there are some things I want it to remember. I want it to remember that I’m logged in as myself. I want it to remember that I’ve used a particular – I want it to remember my history. I want it to remember that kind of stuff so that I could go back and find things that I looked at before. There are a ton of examples of this when we think about it. [00:42:40] JR: Awesome! All right, everyone. Thank you for joining us in episode 6, Stateful and Stateless. Signing off. I’m Josh Rosso, and going across the line, thank you Nicholas Lane. [00:42:54] NL: Thank you so much. This was really informative for me. [00:42:56] JR: Carlisia Campos. [00:42:57] CCC: This was a great conversation. Bye, everybody. [00:42:59] JR: Our new comer, Brian Liles. [00:43:01] BL: Until next time. [00:43:03] JR: And Duffie Cooley. [00:43:05] DCC: Thank you so much, everybody. [00:43:06] JR: Thanks all. [00:43:07] CCC: Bye! [END OF EPISODE] [0:50:00.3] ANNOUNCER: Thank you for listening to The Podlets Cloud Native Podcast. Find us on Twitter at https://twitter.com/ThePodlets and on the http://thepodlets.io/ website, where you'll find transcripts and show notes. We'll be back next week. Stay tuned by subscribing. [END]See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Welcome back! I hope you had a good start into the new week! :) Today's episode is a very practical one and focuses on managing your time well, so that you do not get overwhelmed by your workload at some point. I think we are all familiar with the following situation: The semester starts, everything seems very relaxed, a bit too relaxed and from one week to the next we are drowning in work and it seems impossible to get everything done while still having a social life ... or sleep :D There actually is a way to avoid that so that your next semester will be more ... balanced. I hope you will get something useful out of it! Please feel free to get in touch with me and/or leave me some feedback if you want! You can send me a voice note directly over anchor or text me on Instagram @nhowtouni or on Twitter under the same handle. Talk to you soon! -Nabi --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/how-to-uni/message
It has arrived, the hundredth episode of Gaming Fyx! To celebrate, we will be having a giveaway with a lot of games we like and love - listen in to get more details =D There is also a lot of chatting about some of our favourite underrated and underappreciated games of the decade. And a lot of butt talk. Timestamps: 00:05:05 - Show Start 00:05:25 - Owlboy 00:09:55 - The Missing 00:11:40 - Sleeping Dogs 00:15:25 - Star Wars Battlefront 2 00:31:35 - watch_dogs2 01:56:10 - 999 01:08:29 - Dungeons of Dredmor 01:26:56 - News!
It has arrived, the hundredth episode of Gaming Fyx! To celebrate, we will be having a giveaway with a lot of games we like and love - listen in to get more details =D There is also a lot of chatting about some of our favourite underrated and underappreciated games of the decade. And a lot of butt talk. Timestamps: 00:05:05 - Show Start 00:05:25 - Owlboy 00:09:55 - The Missing 00:11:40 - Sleeping Dogs 00:15:25 - Star Wars Battlefront 2 00:31:35 - watch_dogs2 01:56:10 - 999 01:08:29 - Dungeons of Dredmor 01:26:56 - News!
It has arrived, the hundredth episode of Gaming Fyx! To celebrate, we will be having a giveaway with a lot of games we like and love - listen in to get more details =D There is also a lot of chatting about some of our favourite underrated and underappreciated games of the decade. And a lot of butt talk. Timestamps: 00:05:05 - Show Start 00:05:25 - Owlboy 00:09:55 - The Missing 00:11:40 - Sleeping Dogs 00:15:25 - Star Wars Battlefront 2 00:31:35 - watch_dogs2 01:56:10 - 999 01:08:29 - Dungeons of Dredmor 01:26:56 - News!
In this episode of The Podlets Podcast, we are diving into contracts and some of the building blocks of the Cloud-Native application. The focus is on the importance of contracts and how API's help us and fit into the cloud native space. We start off by considering the role of the API at the center of a project and some definitions of what we consider to be an API in this sense. This question of API-first development sheds some light onto Kubernetes and what necessitated its birth. We also get into picking appropriate architecture according to the work at hand, Kubernetes' declarative nature and how micro-services aid the problems often experienced in more monolithic work. The conversation also covers some of these particular issues, while considering possible benefits of the monolith development structure. We talk about company structures, Conway's Law and best practices for avoiding the pitfalls of these, so for all this and a whole lot more on the subject of API's and contracts, listen in with us, today! Note: our show changed name to The Podlets. Follow us: https://twitter.com/thepodlets Website: https://thepodlets.io Feeback and episode suggestions: info@thepodlets.io https://github.com/vmware-tanzu/thepodlets/issues Hosts: Carlisia Campos Josh Rosso Duffie Cooley Patrick Barker Key Points From This Episode: • Reasons that it is critical to start with APIs at the center. • Building out the user interface and how the steps in the process fit together. • Picking the way to approach your design based on the specifics of that job. • A discussion of what we consider to qualify as an API in the cloud-native space. • The benefit of public APIs and more transparent understanding. • Comparing the declarative nature of Kubernetes with more imperative models. • Creating and accepting pods, querying APIs and the cycle of Kubernetes. • The huge impact of the declarative model and correlation to other steps forward. • The power of the list and watch pattern in Kubernetes. • Discipline and making sure things are not misplaced with monoliths.• How micro-services goes a long way to eradicate some of the confusion that arises in monoliths. • Counteracting issues that arise out of a company's own architecture. • The care that is needed as soon as there is any networking between services. • Considering the handling of an API's lifecycle through its changes. • Independently deploying outside of the monolith model and the dangers to a system.• Making a service a consumer of a centralized API and flipping the model. Quotes: “Whether that contract is represented by an API or whether that contract is represented by a data model, it’s critical that you have some way of actually defining exactly what that is.” — @mauilion [0:05:27] “When you just look at the data model and the concepts, you focus on those first, you have a tendency to decompose the problem.” — @pbarkerco [0:05:48] “It takes a lot of discipline to really build an API first and to focus on those pieces first. It’s so tempting to go right to the UI. Because you get these immediate results.” — @pbarkerco [0:06:57] “What I’m saying is, you shouldn’t do one just because you don’t know how to do the others, you should really look into what will serve you better.” — @carlisia [0:07:19] Links Mentioned in Today’s Episode: The Podlets on Twitter — https://twitter.com/thepodlets Nicera — https://www.nicera.co.jp/ Swagger — https://swagger.io/tools/swagger-ui/ Jeff Bezos — https://www.forbes.com/profile/jeff-bezos/ AWS — https://aws.amazon.com/ Kubernetes — https://kubernetes.io/ Go Language — https://golang.org/ Hacker Noon — https://hackernoon.com/ Kafka — https://kafka.apache.org/ etcd — https://etcd.io/ Conway’s Law — https://medium.com/better-practices/how-to-dissolve-communication-barriers-in-your-api-development-organization-3347179b4ecc Java — https://www.java.com/ Transcript: EPISODE 03 [INTRODUCTION] [0:00:08.7] ANNOUNCER: Welcome to The Podlets Podcast, a weekly show that explores Cloud Native one buzzword at a time. Each week, experts in the field will discuss and contrast distributed systems concepts, practices, tradeoffs and lessons learned to help you on your cloud native journey. This space moves fast and we shouldn’t reinvent the wheel. If you’re an engineer, operator or technically minded decision maker, this podcast is for you. [EPISODE] [0:00:41.2] D: Good afternoon everybody, my name is Duffy and I’m back with you this week. We also have Josh and Carlisia and a new member of our cast, Patrick Barker. [0:00:49.4] PB: Hey, I’m Patrick, I’m an upstream contributor to Kubernetes. I do a lot of stuff around auditing. [0:00:54.7] CC: Glad to be here. What are we going to talk about today? [0:00:57.5] D: This week, we’re going to talk about some of the building blocks of a cloud native application. This week we’re going to kind of focus on contracts and how API’s kind of help us and why they’re important to cloud native ecosystem. Usually, with these episodes, we start talking about the problem first and then we kind of dig into why this particular solution, something like a contract or an API is important. And so, to kind of kick that of, let’s talk about maybe this idea of API-first development and why that’s important. I know that Josh and Patrick both and Carlisia have all done some very interesting work in this space as far as developing your applications with that kind of a model in mind. Let’s open the floor. [0:01:34.1] PB: It’s critical to build API-centric. When you don’t build API-centric, most commonly, you’ll see a cross ecosystem building UI centric, it’s very tempting to do this sort of thing because UI’s are visually enticing and they’re kind of eye candy. But when you don’t go to API-centric and you go that direction, you kind of miss the majority of use cases down the line which are often around an SCK, just ended up being more often than not the flows that are the most useful to people but they’re kind of hard to see it to be getting. I think going and saying we’re building a product API-first is really saying, we understand that this is going to happen in the future and we’re making this a principle early, we’re going to enforce these patterns early, so that we develop a complete product that could be used in many fashions. [0:02:19.6] J: I’ve seen some of that in the past as well working for a company called Nicera, which is a network virtualization company. We really focused on providing an API that would be between you and your network infrastructure and I remember that being really critical that we define effectively what would be the entire public API for that product out in front and then later on, we figured out what obviously to learn this semantics of that sort, to be able to build a mental model around what that API might be, that’s where the UI piece comes in. That was an interesting experiment and like, we ended up actually kind of creating what was the kind of creating what was kind of the – an early version of the Swagger UI in which you basically had a UI that would allow you to explore and introspect and play with, all of those different API objects but it wasn’t a UI in the sense that you know, it had like a constrained user story that was trying to be defined, that was my first experience where I was working with a product that had an API-first model. [0:03:17.0] CC: I had to warm up my brain, I think about why do we build API’s to begin with before I could think why API-first is of a benefit and where the benefits are. And I actually looked up something today and it’s this Jeff Bezos mandate, I had seen this before, right? I mean, why do we view the API’s? API what you’re talking about is data transfer, right? Taking data from over here and sending it over there or you’re making that available so somebody can fetch it. It’s communication. Why do we build API? To make it easier to do that so you can automate, you can expose it, you can gate it with some security, right? Authentication, all of those things and with every increasing amount of data, this becomes more and more relevant and I think when Patrick was saying, when you do it API first, you’re absolutely focusing on making it all of those characteristics a priority, making that work well. If you want to make it pretty, okay, you can take that data in. Transforming some other way to make your presentation pretty, to display on the mobile device or whatever. [0:04:26.4] PB: Yeah, I think another thing with inserting the API design upfront in the software development lifecycle, at least in my experience has been – it allows you to sort of gather feedback from who your consumers will be early on before you worry about the intricacies of all the implementation details, right? I guess with Nicera’s instant stuff, I wonder when you all made that contract, were you pushing out a Swagger UI or just general API documentation before you had actually implemented the underlying pieces or did that all happen together? [0:04:58.1] D: With an API-first, we didn’t build out the UI until after the fact so even to the point where we would define a new object in that API, like a distributed logical router for example. We would actually define that API first and we would have test plants for it and all of that stuff and t hen we would surface it in the UI part of it and that’s a great point. I will say that it is probably to your benefit in the long run to define what all of the things that you’re going to be concerned with are out front. And if you can do that tin a contractual basis, whether that contract is represented by an API or whether that contract is represented by a data model, it’s critical that you have some way of actually defining exactly what that is so that you can also support things like versioning and being able to actually modify that contract as you move forward. [0:05:45.0] PB: I think another important piece here, too, is when you just look at the data model and the concepts, you focus on those first, you have a tendency to more decompose the problem, right? You start to look at things and you break it down better into individual pieces that combine better and you end up with more use cases and you end up with a more useable API. [0:06:03.2] D: That’s a good point. Yeah, I think one of the key parts of this contract is kind of like what you’re trying to solve and it’s always important, you know? I think that, when I talk about API-first development, it is totally kind of in line with that, you have to kind of think about what all the use cases are and if you’re trying to develop a contract that might satisfy multiple use cases, then you get this great benefit of thinking of it as you can kind of collapse a lot of the functionality down into a more composable API, rather than having to solve each individual use cases and kind of a myopic way. [0:06:34.5] CC: Yeah, it’s the concept of reusability, having the ability of making things composable, reusable. [0:06:40.7] D: I think we probably all seen UI’s that gets stuck in exactly that pattern, to Patrick’s point. They try to solve the user story for the UI and then on the backend, you’re like, why do we have two different data models for the same object, it doesn’t make sense. We have definitely seen that before. [0:06:57.2] PB: Yeah, I’ve seen that more times than not, it takes a lot of discipline to really build a UI or an API, you know, first to focus on those pieces first – it’s so tempting to go right to the UI because you get these immediate results and everyone’s like – you really need to bring that back, it takes discipline to focus on the concepts first but it’s just so important to do. [0:07:19.5] CC: I guess it really depends on what you are doing too. I can see all kinds of benefits for any kind of approach. But I guess, one thing to highlight is that different ways of doing it, you can do a UI-first, presentation first, you can do an API-first and you can do a model-first so those are three different ways to approach the design and then you have to think well, what I’m saying is, you shouldn’t do one just because you don’t know how to do the others, you should really look into what will serve you better. [0:07:49.4] J: Yeah, with a lot of this talk about API’s and contracts, obviously in software, there’s many levels of contracts we potentially work on, right? There’s the higher level, potential UI stuff and sometimes there’s a lower level pieces with code. Perhaps if you all think it’s a good idea, we could start with talking about what we consider to be an API in the cloud native space and what we’re referring to. A lot of the API’s we’ve described so far, if I heard everyone correctly, they sounded like they were more so API, as describing perhaps a web service of sorts, is that fair? [0:08:18.8] PB: That’s an interesting point to bring up. I’m definitely describing the consumption model of a particular service. I’m referring to that contract as an infrastructure guy, I want to be able to consume an API that will allow me to model or create infrastructure. I’m thinking of it from that perspective. If AWS didn’t have an API, I probably wouldn’t have adopted it, like the UI is not enough to do this job, either, like I need something that I could tie to better abstractions, things like terraform and stuff like that. I’m definitely kind of picturing it from that perspective. But I will add one other interesting point to this which is that in some cases, to Josh’s point, these things are broken up into public and private API’s, that might be kind of interesting to dig into. Why you would model it that way. There are certainly different interactions between composed services that you’re going to have to solve for. It’s an interesting point. [0:09:10.9] CC: Let’s hold that thought for a second. We are acknowledging that there are public and private API’s and we could talk about why their services work there. Other flavors of API’s also, you can have for example, a web service type of API and you can have a command line API, right? You can see a line on top of a web service API which is the crazy like, come to mind, Kubernetes but they have different shapes and different flavors even though they are accessing pretty much the same functionality. You know, of course, they have different purposes and you have to see a light and another one, yet, is the library so in this case, you see the calls to library which calls the web service API but like Duffy is saying, it’s critical sometimes to be able to have this different entry points because each one has its different advantages like a lot of times, it’s way faster to do things on the command line than it is to be a UI interface on the web that would access that web API which basically, you do want to have. Either your Y interface or CLA interface for that. [0:10:21.5] PB: What’s interesting about Kubernetes too and what I think they kind of introduced and someone could correct me if I’m wrong but is this kid of concept of a core generative type and in Kubernetes, it ends up being this [inaudible]. From the [inaudible], you’re generating out the web API and the CLI and the SCK and they all just come from this one place, it’s all code gen out of that. Kubernetes is really the first place I’ve seen do that but it’s really impressive model because you end up with this nice congruence across all your interfaces. It just makes the product really rockable, you can understand the concepts better because everywhere you go, you end up with the same things and you’re interacting with them in the same way. [0:11:00.3] D: Which is kind of the defining of type interface that Kubernetes relates to, right? [0:11:04.6] PB: Obviously, Kubernetes is incredibly declarative and we could talk a bit about declarative versus imperative, almost entirely declarative. You end up with kind of a nice, neat clear model which goes out to YAML and you end up a pretty clean interface. [0:11:19.7] D: If we’re going to talk about just the API as it could be consumed by other things. I think we’re kind of talking a little bit about the forward facing API, this is one of those things that I think Kubernetes does differently than pretty much any other model that I’ve seen. In Kubernetes, there are no hidden API’s, there’s not private API. Everything is exposed all the time which is fascinating. Because it means that the contract has to be solid for every consumer, not just the ones that are public but also anything that’s built on the back end of Kubernetes, the Kublet, controller manager, all of these pieces are going to be accessing the very same API that the user does. I’ve never seen another application built this way. In most applications, what I see is actually that they might define an API between particular services that you might have a contract between those particular services. Because this is literally — to Carlisia’s point, in most of the models that I’ve seen API’s are contract written, this is about how do I get data or consume data or interact with data, between two services and so there might be a contract between that service and all of its consumers, rather than between the course or within all of the consumers. [0:12:21.7] D: Like you said, Kubernetes is the first thing I’ve seen that does that. I’m pulling an API right now, there’s a strong push of internal API’s for it. But we’re building on top a Kubernetes product and it’s so interesting how they’ve been able to do that, where literally every API is public and it works well, there really aren't issues with it and I think it actually creates a better understanding of the underlying system and more people can probably contribute because of that. [0:12:45.8] J: On that front, I hope this is a good segue but I think it would be really interesting to talk about that point you made Patrick, around declarative versus imperative and how the API we’re discussing right now with Kubernetes in particular, it’s almost entirely declarative. Could you maybe expand on that a bit and compare the two? [0:13:00.8] PB: It’s interesting thing that Kubernetes has really brought to the forefront – I don’t know if there’d be another notable declarative API be terraform. This notion of you just declare state within a file and in some capacity, you just apply that up to a server and then that state is acted on by a controller and it brings us straight to fruition. I mean, that’s almost indicative of Kubernetes at this point I think. It’s so ingrained into the product and it’s one of the first things to kind of do that and that it’s almost what you think of when you think of Kubernetes. And with the advent of CRD’s and what not, that’s now, they want to be extended out to really in the use case you would have, that would fit this declarative pattern of just declaring to say which it turns out there’s a ton of use cases and that’s incredibly useful. Now, they’re kind of looking at, in core Kubernetes, could we add imperative functionality on top of the declarative resources, which is interesting too. They’re looking at that for V2 now because there are limitations, there are some things that just do fit in to declarative pattern perfectly that would fit just the standard rest. You end up some weird edges there. As they’re going towards V2, they’re starting to look at could we mix imperative and declarative, which is and even maybe more interesting idea if you could do that right. [0:14:09.3] CC: In the Kubernetes world, what would that look like? [0:14:11.3] PB: Say you have an object that just represents something like on FOO, you have a YAML file and you're declaring FOO to be some sort of thing, you could apply that file and then now that state exist within the system and things noticed that that state of change that they’re acting on that state, there are times when you might want that FOO to have another action. Besides just applying states, you may want it to have some sort of capability on top of the point, let’s say, they’re quite a few use cases that come in where that turns into a thing. It’s something to explore, it’s a bit of a Pandora’s box if you will because where does that end. Kubernetes is kind of nice that it does enforce constraints at this core level and it produces these really kind of deep patterns within the system that people will find kind of easy to understand at least at a high level. Granted, you go deep into it, it gets highly complex but enforcing like name spaces as this concept of just a flat name space with declarative resources within it and then declarative resources themselves just being confined to the standard rest verbs, is a model that people I think understand well. I think this is part of the success for Kubernetes is just that people could get their hands around that model. It’s also just incredibly useful. [0:15:23.7] D: Another way to think about this is like, you probably seen articles out there that kind of describe the RESTful model and talking about whether REST can be transactional. Let’s talk a little bit about what that means. I know the implementation of an API pattern or an interface pattern might be. That the client sends information to the server and that the server locks that client connection until it’s able to return the result, whatever that result is. Think of this, in some ways, this is very much like a database, right? As a client of a database, I want to insert a row into a database, the database will lock that row, it will lock my connection, it will insert that row and it will return success and in this way, it’s synchronous, right? It’s not trying to just accept the change, it just wants to make sure that it returns to a persisted that change to the database before, letting go of the connection. This pattern is probably one of the most common patterns in interfaces in the world like it is way super common. But it’s very different than the restful pattern or some of the implementations of a restful pattern. In which what we say, especially in this declarative model, right? In a declarative model, the contract is basically, I’m going to describe a thing and you're going to tell me when you understand the thing I want to describe. It’s asynchronous. For example, if I were interacting with Kubernetes and I said, cube kettle create pod, I would provide the information necessary to define that pod declaratively and I would get back from the API server 200 okay, pod has been accepted. It doesn’t mean to it's been created. It means it’s been accepted as an object and persisted to disk. Now, to understand from a declarative perspective, where I am in the life cycle of managing that pod object, I have to query that API again. Hey, this pod that I ask you to make, are you done making it and how does this work and where are you in that cycle of creating that thing? This is where I like within Kubernetes, we have the idea of a speck which defines all of the bits that are declaratively described and we have the idea of a status which describes what we’ve been up to around that declarative object and whether we’ve actually successfully created it or not. I would argue that from a cloud native perspective that declarative model is critical to our success. Because it allows us to scale and it allows us to provide an asynchronous API around those objects that we’re trying to interact with and it really changes the game as far as like, how we go about implementing those inputs. [0:17:47.2] CC: This is so interesting, it was definitely a mind bender for me when I started developing against Kubernetes. Because what do you mean you’ve returned the 200 okay, and the thing is not created yet. When does it get created? It’s not hard to understand but I was so not used to that model. I think it gives us a lot of control. So it is very interesting that way and I think you might be right, Duffy, that it might be critical to the success of native apps because it is always like the way I am thinking about it right now just having heard you is almost like with all the models, let’s say you are working with a database in that transactional system. The data has be inserted and that system decides to retry or not once the transaction is complete as we get a result back. With a Kubernetes model or cloud native model, I don’t know what, which is both a proper things to say, the control is with us. We send the request, Kubernetes is going to do its thing, which allows us to move on too, which is great, right? Then I can check for the result, when I want to check and then I can decide what to do with the results when I want to do anything with it if it all, I think it gives us a lot more control as developers. [0:19:04.2] D: Agreed. And I think another thing that has stuck in my head around this model whether it would be declared over imperative is that I think that Go Lang itself has actually really enabled us to adopt that asynchronous model around things that threads are first class, right? You can build a channel to handle each individual request, that you are not in this world where all transactions have to stop until this one is complete and then we’ll take the next one out of queue and do that one. We're no longer in that kind of a queue model, we can actually handle these things in parallel quite a bit more. It makes you think differently when you are developing software. [0:19:35.9] J: It’s scary too that you can check this stuff into a repo. The advent of Git Ops is almost parallel to the advent of Kubernetes and Terra Form and that you can now have this state that is source controlled and then you just apply it to the system and it understands what to do with it and how to put all of the pieces together that you gave it, which is a super powerful model. [0:19:54.7] D: There is a point to that whole asynchronous model. It is like the idea of the API that has a declarative or an imperative model and this is an idea and distributed system that is [inaudible]. It is like edge triggering or level triggering but definitely recommend looking up this idea. There is a great article on it on Hack Noon and what they highlight is that the pure abstract perspective there is probably no difference between edge and level triggering. But when you get down to the details especially with distributed systems or cloud native architectures, you have to take into account the fact that there is a whole bunch of disruption between your services pretty much all the time and this is the challenge of distributed systems in general, when you are defining a bunch of unique individual systems that need to interact and they are going to rely on an unreliable network and they are going to rely on unreliable DNS. And they’re going to rely on all kinds of things that are going to jump in the way of between these communication models. And the question becomes how do you build a system that can be resilient to those interruptions. The asynchronous model absolutely puts you in that place, where if you are in that situation wherein you say, “Create me a pod.” And that pod object is persisted and now you can have something else to do the work that will reconcile that declared state with the actual state until it works. It will just keep trying and trying and trying until it works. In other models, you basically say, “Okay, well what work do I have to do right now and I have to focus on doing this work until it stops.” What happens if the process itself dies? What happens if any of the interruptions that we talk about happen? Another good example of this is the Kafka model versus something like a watch on etcd, right? In Kafka, you have these events that you are watching for. And if you weren’t paying attention when that event went by, you didn’t get that event. It is not still there. It is gone now whereas like with etcd and models like that, what you are saying is I need to reconcile my expectancy of the world with what the desired thing is. And so I am no longer looking for events. I am looking for a list of work that I have to reconcile to, which is a very different model for these sorts of things. [0:21:47.9] J: In Kubernetes, it becomes the informer pattern. If you all don’t know, which is basically at the core of the informer is just this concepts of list and watch where you are just watching for changes but every so often you list as well in case you missed something. I would argue that that pattern is so much more powerful than the Kafka model you’re just going to skin as well because like you mentioned, if you missed an event in Kafka somehow, someway is very difficult to reconcile that state. Like you mentioned, your entire system can go down in a level set system. You bring it back up and because it is level set, everything just figures itself out, which is a lot nicer than your entire system going down in an edge-based system and trying to figure out how to put everything back together yourself, which is not a fun time, if you have ever done it. [0:22:33.2] D: These are some patterns in the contracts that we see in the cloud native ecosystem and so it is really interesting to talk about them. Did you have another point Josh around API’s and stuff? [0:22:40.8] J: No, not in particular. [0:22:42.2] D: So I guess we give into like what some of the forms of these API’s to talk about. We could talk about RESTful API’s versus to TIPC-based API’s or maybe even just interfaces back and forth between modular code and how that helped you architect things. One of the things I’ve had conversations with people around is we spend a lot of our time conditioning our audience when in cloud native architecture to the idea that monliths are bad, bad, bad and they should never do them. And that is not necessarily true, right? And I think it is definitely worth talking through like why we have these different opinions and what they mean. When I have that conversation with customers, frequently a monolith makes sense because as long as you’re able to build modularity into it and you are being really clear about the interfaces back and forth between those functions with the idea that if you have to actually scale traffic to or from this monolith. If the function that you are writing needs to be effectively externalized in such a way that can handle an amount of work that will surpass what the entire monolith can handle. As long as you are really clear about the contract that you are defining between those functions then later on, when it comes to a time to externalize those functions and embrace kind of a more microservices based model mainly due to traffic reload or any of the other concerns that kind of drive you toward a cloud native architecture, I think you are in a better spot and this is definitely one of the points of the contract piece that I wanted to raise up. [0:24:05.0] CC: I wonder though how hard it is for people to keep that in mind and follow that intention. If you have to break things into micro services because you have bottlenecks in your monolith and maybe have to redo the whole thing, once you have the micro services, you have gone through the exercise of deciding, you know this goes here, these goes there and once you have the separate modules it is clear where they should go. But when you have a monolith it is so easy to put things in a place where they shouldn’t be. It takes so much discipline and if you are working on a team that is greater than two, I don’t know. [0:24:44.3] PB: There are certain languages that lend themselves to these things like when you are writing Java services or there are things where it is easy to — when writing even quickly, rapidly prototyping an application that has multiple functions to be careful about those interfaces that you are writing, like Go because it is a strongly type language kind of forces you into this, right? There are some other languages that are out that make it difficult to be sloppy about those interfaces. And I think that is inherently a good thing. But to your point like you are looking at some of the larger monoliths that are out there. It is very easy to fall into these patterns where instead of an asynchronous API or an asynchronous interface, you have just a native interface and you are a asynchronous interface in which you expect that I would be able to call this functional and put something in there. I will get the result back and that is a pattern for monoliths. Like that is how we do it in monoliths. [0:25:31.8] CC: Because you say in there also made me think of the Conway’s Law because when we separate these into micro services and I am not saying micro services is right for everything for every team and every company. But I am just saying if you are going through that exercise of separating things because you have bottlenecks then maybe in the future you have to put them elsewhere. Externalize them like you said. If you think if the Conway’s Law if you have a big team, everybody working on that same monolith that is when things are in depth in the place that they shouldn’t be. The point of micro services is not just to technically separate things but to allow people to work separately and that inter-team communication is going to be reflected in the software that they are creating but because they are forced to communicate and hopefully they do it well that those micro services should be well-designed but if you have a monolith and everyone working on the same project, it gets more confusing. [0:26:31.4] D: Conway’s Law as an overview is basically that an organization will build software and laid out similar to the way the thought musician itself is architected. So if everybody in the entire company is working on one thing and they are really focused on doing that one thing, you’d better build a monolith. If you have these groups that are disparate and are really focused on some subset of work and need to communicate with each other to do that thing then you are going to build something more similar or maybe more capable as a micro service. That is a great point. So actually one of the things about [inaudible] that I found so fascinating with it, it would be a 100 people and we were everywhere. So communication became a problem that absolutely had to be solved or we wouldn’t be able to move forward as a team. [0:27:09.5] J: An observation that I had in my past life helping folks, breaking apart Java monoliths like you said Duffy, assume they had really good interfaces and contracts right? And that made it a lot easier to find the breaking points for their API’s to pull those API’s out into a different type of API. They went from this programmatic API, that was in the JBM where things were just intercommunicating to an API that was based on a web service. And an interesting observation I oftentimes found was that people didn’t realize that in removing complexity from within the app to the network space that oftentimes caused a lot of issues and I am not trying to down API’s because obviously we are trying to talk about the benefits of them but it is an interesting balancing act. Oftentimes when you are working with how to decouple a monolith, I feel like you actually can go too far with it. It can cause some serious issues. [0:27:57.4] D: I completely agree with that. That is where I wanted to go with the idea of why we say that building a monolith is bad and like with the challenges of breaking those monoliths apart later. But you are absolutely right. When you are going to introduce the wild chaos that is a network between your services, are you going to externalize functions and which means that you have to care a lot more about where you store a state because that state is no longer shared across all of the things. It means that you have to be really super careful about how you are modeling that. If you get to the point where this software that you built that is a monolith that is wildly successful and all of its consumers are networked based, you are going to have to come around on that point of contracts. Another thing that we haven’t really talked on so much is like we all agree that maybe like an API for say the consumer model is important. We have talked a little bit about whether private API’s or public API’s make sense. We described one of the whacky things that Kubernetes does, which is that there are no private API’s. It is all totally exposed all the time. I am sure that all of us have seen way more examples of things that do have a private API mainly because perhaps the services are trained. Service A always fact to service B. Service B has an API that it may be a private API. You are never going to expose to your external customers only to service A or to consumers of that internal API. One of the other things that we should talk about is when you are starting to think about these contracts. One of the biggest and most important bits is how you handle the lifecycle of those API’s, as they change right? Like I say add new features or functionality or as I deprecate old features and functionality, what are my concerns as it relates to this contract. [0:29:33.5] CC: Tell me and take my money. [0:29:37.6] D: I wish there was like a perfect answer. But I am pretty convinced that there are no perfect answers. [0:29:42.0] J: I spent a lot of time in the space recently and I have researched it for like a month or so and honestly, there are no perfect answers to try to version an API. Every single on of them has horrible potential consequences to it. The approach Kubernetes took is API evolution, where basically all versions of the API have to be backwards compatible and they basically all translate to what is an internal type in Kubernetes and everything has to be translatable back to that. This is nice for reasons. It is also very difficult to deal with at times because if you add things to an API, you can’t really every remove them without a massive amount of deprecation effort basically moderating the usage of that API specifically and then somehow deprecating it. It is incredibly challenging. [0:30:31.4] PB: I think it is 1-16 in which they finally turn off a lot of the deprecated API’s that Kubernetes had. So a lot of this stuff that has been moved for some number of versions off to different spaces for example deployments used to be extensions and now they are in apps. They have a lot of these things. Some of the older API’s are going to be turned off by default in 1-16 and I am really interested to see how this plays out you know from kind of a chaos level perspective. But yeah you’re right, it is tough. Having that backwards compatibility definitely means that the contract is still viable for your customers regardless of how old their client side looks like but this is kind of a fingernail problem, right? You are going to be in a situation where you are going to be holding those translations to that stored object for how many generations before you are able to finally get rid of some of those old API’s that you’ve have obviously moved on from. [0:31:19.6] CC: Deprecating an end point is not reviewed at all and ideally like better with, you would be able to monitor the usage of the end point and see as you intend deprecating is the usage is going lower and if there is anything you can do to accelerate that, which actually made me think of a question I have for you guys because I don’t know the answer to this. Do we have access to the end points usage, the consumption rate of Kubernetes end points by any of the cloud service providers? It would be nice if we did. [0:31:54.9] D: Yeah, there would be no way for us to get that information right? The thing about Kubernetes is something that you are going to run on your own infrastructure and there is no phone home thing like that. [0:32:03.9] CC: Yeah but the cost providers could do that and provide us a nice service to the community. [0:32:09.5] D: They could that is a very good point. [0:32:11.3] PB: [inaudible] JKE, it could expose some of the statistics around those API end points. [0:32:16.2] J: I think the model right now is they just ping the community and say they are deprecating it and if a bunch of people scream, they don’t. I mean that is the only way to really know right now. [0:32:27.7] CC: The squeaky wheels get the grease kind of thing. [0:32:29.4] J: Yeah. [0:32:30.0] D: I mean that is how it turns out. [0:32:31.4] J: In regarding versioning, taking out of Kubernetes for a second, I also think this is one of the challenges with micro service architectures, right? Because now you have the ability to independently deploy a service outside of the whole monolith and if you happen to break something that cracks contractually you said you would and people just didn’t pay attention or you accidentally broke it not knowing, it can cause a lot of rift in a system. So versioning becomes a new concern because you are no longer deploying a massive system. You are deploying bits of it and perhaps versioning them and releasing them at different times. So again, it is that added complexity. [0:33:03.1] CC: And then you have this set of versions talk to this set of versions. Now you have a matrix and it is very complicated. [0:33:08.7] PB: Yeah and you do somewhat have a choice. You can’t have each service independently versioned or you could go with global versioning, where everything within V1 could talk to everything else than V1. But it's an interesting point around breakage because tools like GRPC kind of enforce you to where you cannot break the API, through just how the framework itself is built and that’s why you see GRPC in a lot of places where you see micro services just because it helps get the system stable. [0:33:33.1] D: Yeah and I will call back to that one point again, which I think is actually one of Josh’s points. If you are going to build multiple services and you are building an API between them then that means the communication path might be service A to service B and service B to service A. You are going to build this crazy mesh in which you have to define an API in each of these points to allow for that consumption or that interaction data. And one of the big takeaways for me in studying the cloud native ecosystem is that if you could define that API and that declarative state as a central model to all of your services then you can flip this model on its head instead of actually trying to define an API between in front of a service. You can make that service a consumer of a centralized API and now you have one contract to right and one contract to standby and all of those things that are going to do work are going to pull down from that central API. And do the work and put back into that central API the results, meaning that you are flipping this model on its head. You are no longer locking until service B can return the result to you. You are saying, “Service B here is a declarative state that I want you to accomplish and when you are done accomplishing it, let me know and I will come back for the results,” right? And you could let me know in an event stream. You can let me know by updating a status object that I am monitoring. There’s lots of different ways for you to let me know that service B is done doing the work but it really makes you think about the architecture of these distributed systems. It is really one of the big highlights for me personally when I look at the way that Kubernetes was architected. Because there are no private API’s. Everything talks to the API server. Everything that is doing work regardless of what data it’s manipulating but it is changing or modifying. It has to adhere to that central contract. [0:35:18.5] J: And that is an interesting point you brought up is that Kubernetes in a way is almost a monolith, in that everything passes through the API server, all the data leaves in this central place but you still have those distributed nature too, with the controllers. It is almost a mix of the patterns in some ways. [0:35:35.8] D: Yeah, I mean thanks for the discussion everybody that was a tremendous talk on contracts and API’s. I hope everybody got some real value out of it. And this is Duffy signing off. I will see you next week. [0:35:44.8] CC: This is great, thank you. [0:35:46.5] J: Cheers, thanks. [0:35:47.8] CC: Bye. [END OF INTERVIEW] [0:35:49.2] ANNOUNCER: Thank you for listening to The Podlets Cloud Native Podcast. Find us on Twitter https://twitter.com/ThePodlets and on the https://thepodlets.io website where you will find transcripts and show notes. We’ll be back next week. Stay tuned by subscribing. [END]See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Piano Parent Podcast: helping teachers, parents, and students get the most of their piano lessons.
The last few shows have mentioned playing chords or pop songs or getting creative at the piano in some way. Talking about it is great and your piano kid might really be interested in playing some pop tunes but getting started can feel a little overwhelming. That’s why I put together this list of 10 songs that are perfect to play along with a YouTube video and I have the videos embedded on the show notes for this episode. I chose these songs because most of them use only a few chords (most of them five chords or less) and those chords occur in a repeating pattern throughout the entire song or through a large portion of the song. The basic formula for playing each chord is to have the right hand play the chord in root position (your piano teacher can share more about this) while the left hand plays the root note only. In most cases, students are holding the chord as a whole note until it's time to play the next chord. Often, after students begin to feel the rhythm pattern and the pulse of the music they choose to try a more complex rhythmic style. Today I’ll tell you the key the song is in and what chords you need to play to match the video. 1. Heart and Soul Heart and Soul by Hoagy Carmichael (Who also wrote “Georgia On My Mind”) and Frank Loesser (who wrote music and lyrics for Broadway musicals “Guys and Dolls” and “How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying”) This is one of the first chord songs I teach my students. Even though it is very old, it still connects with most kids in a way that folk songs and nursery rhymes don’t. Do kids learn Are You Sleeping or Shoo, Fly any more? Play C | Am | F | G in a loop the entire song. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YsIL07eOqOU 2. How Great is Our God How Great is Our God sung by Chris Tomlin I love teaching Heart and Soul and How Great Is Our God to students after they learn "Beach Party" in the Piano Adventures Lesson Book 2B. The video I've included here is long, almost seven minutes, so I don't have students play through the whole thing during their lesson. I love that the tempo is slow and starts with only Chris singing and playing the piano. Sometimes students struggle to know when to change the chord if they aren't counting so I help them. Once the band joins in at 3:05, students have a much easier time feeling the pulse of the music. I love commenting to my students, "You didn't realize you were going to play in a concert with Chris Tomlin when you came to your lesson today!" Loop C | C | Am | Am | F | F | for the verse Loop C | C | Am | Am | F | G | for the chorus https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5pF11qnJ8rw 3. Count on Me Count on Me by Bruno Mars As with any popular music, parents should preview and filter what they allow their children to listen to. Much of Bruno Mars music is catchy and fun to listen to. Unfortunately, a lot of his lyrics are not appropriate for children. This tune, Count on Me, is a nice exception. The lyrics are clean and wholesome and the chords are easy to follow. Loop C | Em | Am G | F for verse and chorus Play Dm | Em | F | G for the pre-chorus https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZMsvwwp6S7Q 4. The Lion Sleeps Tonight The Lion Sleeps Tonight by the Tokens The perfect song for students who have learned their I-IV-I-V7-I chord progressions. Too many students are taught that chord progression to tack onto the end of their scales but they haven't been taught the functionality of the chords. Reinforce those chords with The Lion Sleeps Tonight and watch your piano kid's face light up! I've been using this song with my students who have just learned about intervals of a sixth. After they play "Boxcar Rumble" in their Piano Adventures Lesson Book 2B. Instead of playing the full chords, these students play the two outside notes: For F, they play a fifth from F to C. For Bb, they play a sixth from F to D. For C7, they play a sixth from C to E. Key of F Loop F | Bb | F | C7 | throughout the entire song https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_LBmUwi6mEo 5. Sweet Home Alabama Sweet Home Alabama by Lynyrd Skynyrd If you thought The Lion was easy, get ready for this….. This entire, iconic southern rock anthem is built with three chords in a perpetual loop! (Actually, this is a great lesson for our piano kids. How many years did Lynyrd Skynyrd tour? How many concerts did they do? How many thousands of times must they have played this song? Remind your piano kid of that the next time they grumble about having to practice their music for the tenth time. LOL) Loop D C | G D and C are half note chords and hold the G chord four beats like a whole note https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ye5BuYf8q4o 6. Revelation Song Revelation Song sung by Kari Jobe Fun Fact: Kari's father, Mark Jobe, was invited by my father to come preach a youth event at our church. He and his wife, Sandy, came for the week and brought their two young daughters, Kari and Kristen with them. Kari couldn't have been more than four years old so if you ask her about it, she won't remember. I do remember, though; and I remember how kind and patient her mother was toward me to let me talk to her about my junior high social worries. Sweet memories but enough about me, let's get back to that list.... Since you know D, C, and G, let's add one more chord, A minor. This is another song that goes at a slow enough pace to keep from overwhelming students trying to navigate the piano keys. Loop D | Am | C | G for the entire song https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D-zk-E55dRk 7. Canon in D Pachelbel’s Canon in D There is a running joke among cellists that this tune is like staying after class to write sentences on the chalk board. (Click here to see what I mean) With apologies to all cellists out there, this repetition is the very reason I included this tune on our list. My students start out a little hesitant when they first try to play but gain confidence with each repetition. Very young students could practice piano geography simply by finding each piano key (not the full chord) in succession with the video. You probably already know that you can change the playback speed of YouTube videos. The good news is slowing the playback or speeding it up does not change the pitch or the key of the tune. Slowing the video down is a big help when students are first learning the piece. Loop half note chords D A | Bm F#m | G D | G A | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JNbe34V1nog 8. Stand By Me Stand by Me by Ben E. King This is the one Tony Parlapiano taught one of his young students. We mentioned it in our chat in episode 127. I like the walking bass line in the introduction and continuing throughout the song. I think your piano kid will love the way they sound when they master this pattern! As I was searching out just the right video to share for each of these songs, I found a great YouTube channel, Chords For You. This channel appears to be hosted by a guitar player but chords are chords. A D major chord for guitar is the same D major chord for piano. Chords For You has tons of videos of all kinds of music. Each video has the lyrics with chord symbols, perfect for playing along. When your piano kid is finished with this list, they might enjoy exploring the Chords For You YouTube channel. Loop A | A |F#m | F#m |D |E |A | A for the entire song https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8agdakp9dis 9. I'm Yours I’m Yours by Jason Mraz There is a C#/E# chord at the end of the second verse (1:42) and at the end. I just have my younger piano kids rest and get ready for the chorus. There is also an eight-measure vamp (2:09 - 2:34) where the chords change rather quickly and new inversions are added. I would simply count the eight measures and get ready to jump back in when the third verse starts. Loop B | F# | G#m | E for the most part https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CwakD6GQwPo 10. Hotel California Hotel California by The Eagles My husband knows I love this chord progression. Any time he's playing guitar and walk past him, he stops whatever he was playing and starts the opening chords of Hotel California. (I love that guy!) This video is from the Eagles' induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. If you ever find yourself in Cleveland, Ohio, take a few hours and visit. There is a sixteen measure introduction on this video. This is a great opportunity for piano kids to learn how to count multiple measures, something they don't do playing solo piano. As they are counting four beats per measure, simply change the first beat to the next measure number: count 1-2-3-4, 2-2-3-4-, 3-2-3-4, etc. Verse -play twice: Bm | F# | A | E | G | D | Em | F# Chorus : G | D | F# | Bm | G | D | Em | F# https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_OhUzb9_uEY Thanks for listening! My students and I have had a lot of fun test driving these tunes for you. I hope you and your piano kid will enjoy them as well. What songs do you enjoying playing along with on YouTube? Post a link in the comments below. To share your thoughts: Leave a note in the comment section below Ask a question at pianoparentpodcast@gmail.com Share this show on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and Pinterest To help out the show: leave an honest review on iTunes. Your ratings and reviews help other piano parents and teachers find the show. Subscribe on iTunes, Podbean, or your favorite podcast player. Facebook Instagram Twitter Pinterest
People crack me up. I remember when I first showed my mom a smartphone. “What the hell do I need THAT for?” You should see her now. Getting her off Facebook is like trying to get a politician to quit lying. I remember when Twitter came out. “This is so stupid. Why would anyone care what I'm doing?” We see where that went. And yes, yes… I even remember when the internet came out. (Old jokes will get you BLOCKED! :D) There were people who said it'd never be a “thing”. People are so often horribly, awfully, terribly wrong about technology and what they will and won't use. Like really, really bad. Enter WordPress Gutenberg.
Are you seeing anyone? 你现在有和谁在交往吗？D: There's something I've been meaning to ask you…有一件事我一直想问你...L: Oh? What is it? 哦？是什么？D: Are you seeing anyone at the moment?你现在有和谁在交往吗？L: Not really. Why?没有呢，为什么这么问？D: Because I'd like to ask you out!因为我想要约你！ 最新的节目更新请搜寻订阅“学英语环游世界”专辑，或Fly with Lily系列专辑，喜欢就订阅分享，还有一个五星的评价，会让我继续努力！FB/IG/Line@：flywithlilyWebsite: flywithlily.com公众微信：iflyclub、englishfit
Episode 70 - Dungeons and Dragons (a.k.a. There's this new game called D&D) There's a new hwatness on the streets that you may not have heard of. It's called Dungeons & Dragons and has loads of editions apparently. Who knew? Baz and Gaz have managed a couple of sessions (after finally making a save versus paralysis), and what's more have been on the same side of the DM screen for once. Baz patiently talks a sceptical Gaz through the joys of the Player's Handbook and they finish off with a score out of five scimitars for the game. Join them on a magical journey, and discover the legality of Owlbears, how to fall down a mountain and how to turn a Halfling into Robin Hood. Should the guys talk about the Dungeon Master's Guide? Monster Manuals? More? Give them your view via Facebook, on the Twitters: @the_smart_party or email the guys directly! Deliver copper-painted platinum pieces to the Patreon fund, and you too can get great content - including a fanzine - Smartzine #1. Already a Patreon and want to appear in a scenario? Drop the guys a line via the above methods and they'll make something happen.
Episode 70 - Dungeons and Dragons (a.k.a. There's this new game called D&D) There's a new hwatness on the streets that you may not have heard of. It's called Dungeons & Dragons and has loads of editions apparently. Who knew? Baz and Gaz have managed a couple of sessions (after finally making a save versus paralysis), and what's more have been on the same side of the DM screen for once. Baz patiently talks a sceptical Gaz through the joys of the Player's Handbook and they finish off with a score out of five scimitars for the game. Join them on a magical journey, and discover the legality of Owlbears, how to fall down a mountain and how to turn a Halfling into Robin Hood. Should the guys talk about the Dungeon Master's Guide? Monster Manuals? More? Give them your view via Facebook, on the Twitters: @the_smart_party or email the guys directly! Deliver copper-painted platinum pieces to the Patreon fund, and you too can get great content - including a fanzine - Smartzine #1. Already a Patreon and want to appear in a scenario? Drop the guys a line via the above methods and they'll make something happen.
节目名称：Screen Age 荧屏时代节目主题：Say something about LOVEL: Hello, my dear audience. Welcome back to the Screen Age.This is Lynn.B: Hi, everyone,this is Shinskie. Hey, Lynn, the Double 11 justpassed. I think plenty of people went on massive Internetshopping sprees. Did you chop off your hands, Lynn?L: Well, I bought some books, milk, snacks, lipsticks and...B: Wait, wait, wait, I remember that you just bought a lipsticklast week.L: Yeah, but, haven't you heard that boys can't understand thepersistent of the lipsticks to a girl? It just like when having a artclass in the childhood. Other kids had 32 or 48 color watercolorpens, but what you had was only a 2B pencil. Nothing can beworse than this.B: OK. Don't forget that the Double 11 is a day to celebrate thesingle one ordinary. What about introducing some love stories?L: Em, single and poverty clams me down. Seeing anaffectional film maybe a good choice. Let's do it.B: How about the Double Eleven? As a single dog, how areyou feeling when you walk on the road.I: Life is already hard, so please don't expose the truth. I justwant to change a topic. I have just seen a classic love movierecently.B: Wow, which one?I: Sliver Linings Playbook, directed by David O. Russellandthe film is staring by Jennifer Lawrence andRobert De Niro,and attracted a lot of fans when it was on show.B: What is the film mainly about?I: Well, it is adapted from a novel and the name is also comesfrom the main character's mantra Every Cloud Has A SliverLining. The film tellsa story of two people who have brokenup and rebuilt their lives.B: Which point you considered is the most attractive point.I: Em, when I watched the film, what left me the most waswhen life gives you a powerful blow, bark out what the fuckthen go on fighting like a soldier. And I think the love view inthis movie is the most authentic portrayal of love. “You are justanother one and I was just like you. Even though you were awisdom and my wife betrayed me, it doesn't matter! I am stilllove you”.B: It is amazing! This contrasts sharply with the Chineseattitude toward love.I: Yeah! This is admirable. I think the true love is “let her goand see if she would be return”.B: I just want to talk another style of love, Yes or no, it is aThailand's classical lesbian film in 2011, the film mainly focuson the two heroines who are from resistance to close, finallybreaking through the description of the secular and falling inlove with each other.S: Yeah, Kim and Pie are roommates, but at the beginning, littlemisunderstanding let them get in terrible relationship. In orderto getting along with Pie, Kim changes her bad habitsgradually. No matter how Pie annoyed, Kim always be verygentle to Pie.B: I envy that! And I also want to have such a roommate!But what you can do is just think about it.S: Okay, let's go ahead and see what will Pie does with Kim.Pie also moved by Kim's blandness and begins to open herheart to Kim.B: But it was often worse than wish. When things were goingon the road, the story began to go somewhere disappointing.S: Pie and Kim's admirers try to undermine their relationship.Fortunately with the help of the cafe's hostess, these two littlegirls are reconciled and be together happily.D: After talking about some lesbian film, let's talk about somegay film,"Maurice" is a gay romance film directed by JamesIvory. Two male English school chums found themselvesfalling in love at Cambridge. To regain his place in society,Clive gaveup his forbidden love--Maurice and married. Whilestaying with Clive and his shallow wife, Anne, Maurice finallydiscovered romance in the arms of Alec, the gamekeeper. L: What a beautiful sad love story! Maurice and Clive had aplatonic affair, but the fearful Clive subjugated his sexualityand married. After weathering this rejection, Maurice stayedtrue to his identity, and eventually was rewarded.D: Maurice's and Alec's main strain isn't sex but class.Forthright Alex was from the rural lower class, Maurice was astockbroker. They must met furtively -- in hotel rooms or the boathouse of Clive's country home. The potential for true loveseems limited. But Maurice, at least, was liberated.L:The subject is repressed homosexuality in pre-World War IEngland -- as adapted from E.M. Forster's autobiographicalnovel "Maurice." By showing nonphysical love betweenMaurice and Clive, the film prepares us for Maurice's laterphysical relationship with under-gamekeeper Alec. By the timeit happens, we are relieved for Maurice. The relatively mildsexual scenes seem inevitable and natural. Riching inatmosphere, its leisurely pace dwells on repressed passions inEdwardian society.SE: It's colder than before. Need you get warmth?L: Of course. The weather makes me a little cold. I require onenecessarily.SE: Recently, I have seen a movie which tells about the truthessence of love with ten stories made up. Every of them canmake people feel the temperature of happiness. With the Britishhumor it has, people can't help laughing. I think it's difficult forother ensemble film to be more successful and have no sense ofviolation.Maybe it's suitable for you to let your heart feelwarm.L: Woo, it heard great. Is it the famous film "Love Actually"?My roommate recommended it for me several days ago. Sheconsidered the world as a place filled with true love. Thefamous dialogue is "If you look for it, I've got a sneaky feeling,you'll find that love actually is all around." SE: You're right. The film indicates us to find the love aroundourselves. It's so warm-hearted.L: Sure.If having spare time, would you like to accompanywith me to see it again?SE: OK.D: Today I' ll bring you a warm story, which can comfort yourbroken hearts.垫乐：B: Wow, I'm looking forward to the story.D: There is a loyal dog named Hachikō, and no one knewwhere he came. One day, he was happen to be picked byDr.Parker. Later, their story began...Hachikō seemed to rely onParker, and Parker loved him very much. Such emotionsbetween Hachikō and Parker touched Kate, Parker's wife. B: Day by day, Hachikō grew up, every day he saw Parker offand waited Parker go home. Suddenly, one day, when Parkerwent to work. Hachikō behaved upset and strange. Hachikōstarted to play with the ball that he never played. Thisphenomenon pleased Parker very much.D: However, Parker died suddenly on that day. Parker'sfamilies buried him saddly and Parker's wife moved away. B: Then how about Hachikō ?D: The poor Hachikō still believed that his owner will comeback someday, so he waited for Parker every day on time tillthe end of his life.B: Wow, how loyal Hachikō is ! I am moved by Hachikō.D: So does anyone who has seen the film. B: That' s so moving! I think this film will warm us at coldwinter nights. And all of us should make sense of thearguements the story told.D: Yeah, you' re right. L: How time flies. That's all for today's programme. Hope youlike it.B: Well, don't forget to consume reasonably. I hope you canbrought to your senses when you see an affectional film.L: 最后，感谢制作张雨航。Bye!B: See you~节目监制：赛碧乐编辑：毕鑫屹 邹佳琳播音： 邹佳琳(L) 毕鑫屹(B) 孟萌萌（C）孙晨棣（D）张桐珲（S）王雪莹（SH）姜晓璐(I)制作：张宇航
He didn't have permission. But he did it anyway. And one day Elon Musk called him. "He was either going to make life really horrible on me or he was going to cooperate with the book" said Ashlee Vance, author of the New York Times bestseller and Wall Street Journal's "best books of the year," Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future. Ashlee did 200 interviews before Elon agreed, proving permission is not a starting place. I wish I wrote the book. But I didn't. My "quest" is different. Instead, I mastered curiosity. I called people and recorded. I did a ton of research. I read every book, article, interview and watched every talk. I've spent 10,000 hours interviewing and more than 10,000 hours preparing. I didn't need permission. And neither do you. Here are 5 ways to bypass the gatekeepers: A) Master something Like anybody, Elon is smart in some things and probably stupid in others. But he mastered his interests. Mastery is learning 90% of everything you could learn about a subject. You can't reach 100%. I hope that's comforting. Explore your interests. Combine them and you'll find what works for you. Then improve 1% each day. Along the way, you'll master it. B) Make your own decisions Elon doesn't let people make decisions for him. They'll choose wrong. And he knows it. If you choose for yourself you will choose yourself. C) Play for pay I remember my childhood. Some of it. I read comic books and Dear Abby. Now, at 47? 48? I search for "superhero" stories. And I get to be Dear Abby. "Ask Altucher." Every Thursday at 3:30 PM EST, I have a Twitter Q&A. I answer texts and emails from strangers. 203-512-2161 I answer Quora questions and co-host a podcast with my friend, Stephen Dubner. He wrote the New York Times bestseller, Freakonomics. I wonder if he read Dear Abby growing up, too. We answer questions with questions. But before all of this, I worked in finance. I did what "they" wanted me to do. I got lost. Elon did, too. "He just got swept up in the internet for a little while," Ashlee says, "and then once he made a ton of money (from PayPal), the light went on and he just said, 'Now I can go chase everything I've ever wanted to go do.'" "Elon appears to have some kind of calling to go save humankind," Ashlee says. "When he was 12, he designed a video game that was exactly that concept." But at one point, he changed course. We all do. We forget play. Now he's saving humanity. D) There are always problems When I interviewed Derek Sivers last week, I said "You can always disappear from your problems." And you can. He did. But then what? Derek spends a lot time answering emails and giving advice. And Elon is exploring electric vehicles and life in space. Everyday, I have a choice: find new problems or help others with theirs. Create problems or solve them. When I help people with their problems, I forget about mine. Sometimes. Elon sees extreme problems and extreme solutions. All his basics are covered. He's doesn't worry about his boss or the mortgage. "The weird thing to me," Ashlee says, "was that [when] you started talking [to Elon] about mankind being wiped out, he wells up with emotion." Suffering graces all life. There are always problems. "What I saw with Elon is that he's very clear-eyed. He meditates on what he thinks is important and has a absolute devotion to pursuing these goals" "He gives you a sense of urgency in your life. Maybe I'm just getting older," Ashlee says, "When I finished doing the book, I sat back and I said, 'I need to be much clearer about exactly what I want to do with my life.'" I don't have the same problem as Ashlee or see the same problems as Elon Musk. And I'm grateful. E) Be on the right side of history You only have a certain amount of energy each day. Don't waste it fighting the inevitable. "Going against Elon is the equivalent of going against Steve Jobs these days and you...
He didn’t have permission. But he did it anyway. And one day Elon Musk called him. “He was either going to make life really horrible on me or he was going to cooperate with the book” said Ashlee Vance, author of the New York Times bestseller and Wall Street Journal’s “best books of the year,” Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future. Ashlee did 200 interviews before Elon agreed, proving permission is not a starting place. I wish I wrote the book. But I didn’t. My “quest” is different. Instead, I mastered curiosity. I called people and recorded. I did a ton of research. I read every book, article, interview and watched every talk. I’ve spent 10,000 hours interviewing and more than 10,000 hours preparing. I didn’t need permission. And neither do you. Here are 5 ways to bypass the gatekeepers: A) Master something Like anybody, Elon is smart in some things and probably stupid in others. But he mastered his interests. Mastery is learning 90% of everything you could learn about a subject. You can’t reach 100%. I hope that’s comforting. Explore your interests. Combine them and you’ll find what works for you. Then improve 1% each day. Along the way, you’ll master it. B) Make your own decisions Elon doesn't let people make decisions for him. They’ll choose wrong. And he knows it. If you choose for yourself you will choose yourself. C) Play for pay I remember my childhood. Some of it. I read comic books and Dear Abby. Now, at 47? 48? I search for “superhero” stories. And I get to be Dear Abby. “Ask Altucher.” Every Thursday at 3:30 PM EST, I have a Twitter Q&A. I answer texts and emails from strangers. 203-512-2161 I answer Quora questions and co-host a podcast with my friend, Stephen Dubner. He wrote the New York Times bestseller, Freakonomics. I wonder if he read Dear Abby growing up, too. We answer questions with questions. But before all of this, I worked in finance. I did what “they” wanted me to do. I got lost. Elon did, too. “He just got swept up in the internet for a little while,” Ashlee says, “and then once he made a ton of money (from PayPal), the light went on and he just said, ‘Now I can go chase everything I've ever wanted to go do.’” “Elon appears to have some kind of calling to go save humankind,” Ashlee says. “When he was 12, he designed a video game that was exactly that concept.” But at one point, he changed course. We all do. We forget play. Now he’s saving humanity. D) There are always problems When I interviewed Derek Sivers last week, I said “You can always disappear from your problems.” And you can. He did. But then what? Derek spends a lot time answering emails and giving advice. And Elon is exploring electric vehicles and life in space. Everyday, I have a choice: find new problems or help others with theirs. Create problems or solve them. When I help people with their problems, I forget about mine. Sometimes. Elon sees extreme problems and extreme solutions. All his basics are covered. He’s doesn’t worry about his boss or the mortgage. “The weird thing to me,” Ashlee says, “was that [when] you started talking [to Elon] about mankind being wiped out, he wells up with emotion.” Suffering graces all life. There are always problems. “What I saw with Elon is that he's very clear-eyed. He meditates on what he thinks is important and has a absolute devotion to pursuing these goals” “He gives you a sense of urgency in your life. Maybe I'm just getting older,” Ashlee says, “When I finished doing the book, I sat back and I said, ‘I need to be much clearer about exactly what I want to do with my life.’” I don’t have the same problem as Ashlee or see the same problems as Elon Musk. And I’m grateful. E) Be on the right side of history You only have a certain amount of energy each day. Don’t waste it fighting the inevitable. “Going against Elon is the equivalent of going against Steve Jobs these days and you come out looking kind of foolish,” Ashlee says. Instead, focus on building your idea muscle. Do one thing everyday that makes you physically, mentally, emotionally and spiritually healthy. Elon Musk is changing the state of our future. Of all mankind. Who gave him permission? He did. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
1. Hans Zimmer - Interstellar (The Blizzard Club Remix) [CDR] 2. Markus Schulz - The Creation (Transmission Theme 2015) (Original Mix) [Coldharbour Recordings] 3. Ben Stone & Martin Sand - Diminisher (Original Mix) [Lange Recordings] 4. Mike Saint-Jules & Amy Kirkpatrick - Galaxy (Yang Remix) [AVA Recordings (Black Hole)] 5. Feel & Adara - Disappear (DRYM Remix) [SirAdrianMusic] 6. Arkham Knights - Legacy (Original Mix) [Coldharbour Recordings] 7. Calvin Harris & Disciples - How deep is your love (Nifra remix) [CDR] 8. Above & Beyond - A.I. (Original Mix) [Anjunabeats] 9. Rank 1 - L.E.D There be Light (Slice N Dice Bootleg) [CDR] 10. Fast Distance & Dimension feat. Cami - Promise You (Original Mix) [Air Up There Recordings] 11. Aelyn - Give Love A Try (Formal One Remix) [SirAdrianMusic] 12. Eximinds & Aimoon - Stratosphere (Extended Mix) [Future Sound of Egypt] 13. Armin van Buuren Feat. Kensington - Heading Up High (First State Remix) [Armada Music]
1. Anske - Breathe in (Original Mix) [Coldharbour Recordings] 2. David Gravell Feat. Ruby Prophet - Far From Home (Extended Mix) [Armada Captivating] 3. Suspect 44 x Soar - Fall For You (Extended Mix) [Armada Captivating] 4. Rafael Frost - Electrix (Original Mix) [Frost Recordings (RazNitzanMusic)] 5. Anske - Unleashed (Original Mix) [Coldharbour Recordings] 6. Somna & Amy Kirkpatrick - Volcano (Original Mix) [Go On Air Recordings] 7. Protoculture - Manticore (Extended Mix) [Armada Captivating] 8. Markus Schulz - The Creation (Transmission Theme 2015) (Original Mix) [Coldharbour Recordings] 9. Sebastien Feat. Satellite Empire - Escape (Heatbeat Remix) [Armada Captivating] 10. Stoneface & Terminal & Neev Kennedy - Lost (Original Mix) [RNM (RazNitzanMusic)] 11. Rank 1 - L.E.D There be Light (Slice N Dice Bootleg) [CDR] 12. Armin van Buuren Feat. Kensington - Heading Up High (First State Remix) [Armada Music] 13. First State Feat. Anita Kelsey - Falling (First State 'New Era' Remix) [Magik Muzik]
Player for audio file at end of text. Welcome to Episode III of the Infinite Potential Series. Opening wide the eye of the heart. Episodes I & II discussing Radical Life Extension - slowing the aging process and threats to humanity's existence were both exciting and stressful. How do we have good, better than good, wonderful lives in spite of the worldwide crisis in consciousness, the chaos and turmoil as the old world order fades and something new is being born? A: I assert there are learning experiences that, like a rising tide, has the potential to lift all our ships. And for those who (get the hang of this concept) mindfulness become aware enough - the tide transforms to a creative wind of self actualization beneath our wings. There are simple, powerful, established principles. Self knowledge tools hidden in plain view. Overlooked Jewels just lying around. D: If these concepts are so obvious why don't more people apply them? A: Part of it is conditioning. It is hard to break free of cultural trances. Using media to condition people increases power and profit. D: How does the ordinary human being transform the quality of day to day life? How do we even begin to talk about it? A: One good way might be to recognize that there is a science and art to bringing about healthy change. Self regulation is part of it. Self regulation includes stress science and to learn it and practice it costs nothing. Actually it is profitable. The good news is that the rate of change for all of us is increasing. That is also the bad news. That means we need to learn excellent self regulation skills and we need to apply them on a full time, top priority, emergency basis. D: You have been presenting the notion of radical or extreme self regulation and stress management training for a long time. A: Excellent self regulation skills are necessary in order to reduce suffering, accumulate energy, make thinking more coherent, clarify the mind and increase creativity. Don't you think? D: Of course, but sounds like hard work. It should also be fun. A: It can be. But I think doing the best one can to learn and apply change, that is self regulation mind body strategies is choiceless. What is the alternative? In Episodes I an II we have tried to set the stage for what I think is, perhaps, the greatest adventure of mind, body, spirit a human being can have. Self regulation leads to self knowledge which unfolds life changing potential. D: Everyone wants to understand how to better handle the crises that come to us all. A lot of people find understanding their own minds painfully difficult. A: We all have become discouraged, even depressed at times because getting results with our own minds seems so complicated, illusive. It is possible to help some people discover actions and ways to work which can produce breakthroughs - often amazingly fast. Also, we learn in The Process... D: How far can we go in Episode III? A: We can make a productive, start. If we move too fast some may feel overwhelmed and lost. D: Too slow and some may feel bored. A: It's a delicate dance. We must use language carefully so we all understand the meanings of words that are key to the process of mindfulness - of consciousness. English is a young language and scientists working on consciousness are defining and redefining words that we use all the time but often misunderstand - and assume we know the meanings of. Words like happiness, consciousness, thinking , attention, creativity, meditation, contemplation, mindfulness, mindfitness, awareness, self regulation, stress science, spirituality even words like atheism, agnosticism and religious have different meanings to many people. We can prevent much misunderstanding and gain lots of insight if we are clear about our definitions of words. Older, more mature languages such as Sanskrit, Tibetan, Pali, Greek, Chinese, Aramaic, Hebrew and others have words for describing subtle qualities of consciousness - of mind - which are difficult to translate into English. Scientists and others are working to bring those words and concepts into English and other modern languages. This process is a most beautiful art, science and technology. D: The word is not the thing and the description is not the described. A: Yet words are necessary. We can't assume everyone understands them in the same way. D: You say self regulation and stress management is a critically necessary foundation for improving the quality of life. Some might not agree. Can you explain that better? A: Let me answer briefly and then I'd like to focus on just one critically important word. After that we will probably be out of time for Episode III. We will go more deeply in Episode IV. D: What word would you like to start with? A: How about happiness? D: Great. Now why is radical self regulation and stress management so important? A: To increase the quality of life one must increase the quality of consciousness. Enhancing consciousness takes tremendous energy. A bucket full of holes wastes all the water you pour into it. If a person is not practicing self regulation and stress managment competently then they are like a bucket full of holes and cannot accumulate the quantity and quality of energy necessary to enhance their own mental capabilities - consciousness. Paradoxically, low energy causes psychesthenia which means over thinking and disassociation. Furthermore, psychesthenic thoughts tend to be incoherent and fearful which further drives unhealthy stress and blocks creativity and awareness. Conversely, reducing the maladaptive stress response allows energy to build, the brain to run quieter leading to more coherent thinking. In addition, the alpha theta brain wave mix gets richer causing an increase in creative imagery. Self regulation increases awareness, mindfulness which increases ability to watch thinking more clearly. This causes thinking to become even more coherent. Using Maslow's stages of actualization, I believe we tend to self actualize in proportion to how well we watch ourselves think. So, in a sense, all a person has to do is quiet the voluntary nervous system (muscles), which leads to balancing the autonomic system (emotions) which further leads to quieting the central nervous system which leads to the stabilization of attention which leads to ... D: Learning how to transform the moments of life. Mindfulness? A: Perfect. Being a serial transformer of one's own reality. D: What role does faith play? A: For some people their belief, religious, agnostic or atheistic can be a powerful form of self regulation and stress management. D: Krishnamurti once said, "As we are concerned with the total development of the student and not of any one particular aspect, attention which is all inclusive becomes important. This total development is not conceptual - that is, there is no blueprint of the totality of the human mind. The more the mind uses of itself, the greater is its potentiality. The capacity of the mind is infinite." A: That's inspirational. D: We'll come back to self regulation later but now what is happiness? How do we understand it? Is it an illusion? A: Your joie de vie is one of the greatest gifts life has given me. Through happiness and sorrow, you are the happiest person I've ever known. So what do you think? D: I'm so grateful for my life but I was trying to speak for our listeners. A: In our culture most people like to learn through the medium of science. For example, Martin Seligman one of the most influential psychologists has studied happiness for decades. He is a Fourth Wave psychologist who is advancing the field called Positive Psychology. Since the forties psychology has been almost completely focused on treating disorders. The medical model. To psychology's credit these treatments have reduced the total tonnage of suffering in the world. However, Seligman wants psychologists and educators like us to help people who are more or less functional to focus on unfolding hidden potentials - to increase creativity, the joy in their lives. Rather than helping people go from say a -5 to a -2 he wants us to think in terms of helping people go from a +2 to a +6. Instead of focusing on what's wrong with you and trying to fix it, let's focus on what's right with you and amplify that. To increase the total tonnage of happiness in the world. D: But what, exactly is happiness? A: Happiness is a vague term for many things. Seligman describes three major kinds of happiness which are workable in today's world. It is interesting that they correlate well with Abraham Maslow's hierarchy of needs and stages of actualization. D: You mentioned him before. Who is he? A: A famous psychologist who inspired Seligman. Abraham Maslow taught that humans can actualize their potential and codified some of the stages of actualization which can also be thought about as stages or levels or dimensions of consciousness. D: Decades ago you began suggesting that teaching self regulation to people who were already functional could bring about a greater benefit to society than working with the sick ones. A: Ouch! that sounds pretty cold hearted. Healing the sick is critically important as well. I would have been dead long ago several times over if it were not for expert and timely medical care. As you, know your medical skills saved my life at least once. But I think we have to get both jobs done. The idea is that raising the consciousness of the relatively strong is the best way to raise the consciousness of the electorate and thereby bring improved benefits to everyone including those who are in trouble. For decades I focused on the clinical applications of biofeedback and self regulation and it was a wonderful way to earn a living. But now we have the opportunity to go back to our first love. Positive psychology, life and performance enhancement training is an even greater challenge than clinical treatment. It has been encouraging to see many psychologists and scientists come to similar perspectives. Seligman, for example, has spread these concepts throughout psychology and education with his foundation, books, conferences, website, etc. D: You mentioned three kinds of happiness. A: I think I could make a case for a fourth level. D: Ways of improving one's own mind have been learned by countless people in times past. But somehow mindfulness skills have to be discovered anew within the context of one's own life and culture - as though for the first time ever. The wheel getting rediscovered over and over. A: The fact that we humans can enhance our consciousness and pursue our view of happiness is one of the most interesting, challenging and beautiful aspects of being alive - the essence of being a human being. Upgrading our own mind/bodies is easy to desire but challenging to do. Within the last few decades most scientists including avowed atheists such as Sir Francis Crick and Christopher Koch as well as those of mystical or religious orientations have come to consider the emerging science of consciousness (which includes neuroscience) the most important and most complicated science of our time. One of the science writers, John Horgan said something like "compared to the science of consciousness, particle physics is like a 10 piece jig saw puzzle of Snow White." Leading scientific neurophilosophers including Penrose, Einstein, Bohm, Hammeroff, et al seem to believe that neuroscience, arguably all sciences, emerge from the far more immense and subtler field of consciousness. The debate rages as to what consciousness is and how it arises. However, there is already a great deal known about what ordinary people can do to improve qualities of mind including emotions. D: Happiness? A: Atta girl. Keep me on track. I tend to wander off. D: Happiness!!!! Please. A: The first kind of happiness could be called the pleasant life and consists of having as many positive emotions as you can and learning how to strengthen them. At least six skills have been documented which can help build and amplify positive emotions. Seligman calls this the pleasant life, the Hollywood view of happiness, "the Debbie Reynolds smiley, giggly" view of happiness. D: He is being a bit unfair. She's had plenty of tough times. Besides our younger audience might not know who she is. A: That's right. None the less, there is this upbeat, popular, sometimes superficial notion of happiness. It works for many people who are not yet motivated to go deeper. Of course, suffering and conflict inevitably comes and one must learn more and go deeper than settling for the "pleasant life". D: Hopefully, learning how to transform suffering into something else - wisdom, compassion, a sense of humor. Not taking ourselves too seriously. A: Do you think I take myself too seriously? D: Oh no. Not you dear! A: There is much more to life than pleasure and pleasantness. Yet lots of people are caught up in the pursuit of this form of happiness. D: Then tough times comes in every life, and we have to go deeper inside ourselves while increasing awareness outside at the same time. A: The notion that there is never supposed to be depression and pain and sorrow and fear in life is ridiculous. It happens to all of us. It is part of being a human being. D: It is what one does with emotional trauma and adversity that makes the difference in life isn't it? So, what's the 2nd form of happiness? A: The Greeks had a concept called Eudaimonia. A superficial translation is the good life, the flourishing life. This could be seen as a second stage of happiness which takes a lot of common sense and contact with reality and continuous learning. People like Thomas Jefferson and Aristotle and Plato had Eudaimonia in mind when they referred to the pursuit of happiness. They talked about the pleasures of contemplation and good conversation. They were not talking about raw feeling, thrills, orgasms, smiling and giggling a lot - though they all have their place. They were talking about what Mike Csikszentmihalyi calls "Flow". When one has a good conversation, when one contemplates, meditates well, when one is in eudaimonia you are, at least at that moment, experiencing the good life. There is less self-consciousness, one is one with the music. There is a timeless quality. I've termed this fourth dimensional consciousness because of the shift in time and space orientation and enhanced multi dimensional sensitivity. D: It seems so simple, so obvious - the good life. Why is it so difficult for most to grasp - to learn? A: Probably unhealthy conditioning. Faulty programs running around in the brain. D: So one must decondition oneself? A: Yes. But it might be better if we go a little more slowly as reducing unhealthy conditioning is difficult and mysterious for most people. Although, reducing unhealthy conditioning sometimes happens fast and relatively easily if certain insights are achieved - if the mind is effectively used. But it takes what I call Profound Attention. High quality, sustained attention. Which by itself improves consciousness. D: And thinking. And creativity. And energy. Sustained attention is one of the principles underlying the MindFitness Training, isn't it? A: Yes. We begin very simply, basically and then try to move at whatever speed is appropriate for each individual. Beginning with making sure the learner has excellent skills for reducing unhealthy, maladaptive stress. D: There is healthy stress? A: It is called eustress - from the Greek euphoria. Stress means change. Life is change so life is stress. But some change is good for you and some change is bad for you. My career in biofeedback was largely devoted to learning the best, fastest ways to reduce unhealthy stress or change and increase healthy stress or change. D: So stress management - at least very skillful reduction of unhealthy stress leads to the good, the flourishing life - eudaimonia? A: I say radical or extreme stress science and managment definitely does. The good life emerges as one learns to practice what Csikszentmihalyi calls flow. One must discover what his or her signature strengths are - that is self knowledge. Then, apply those strengths - using them more in work, romance, friendships, play, and parenting. Apparently, the more you deploy your highest strengths the more flow you get in life. I think of this quality of flow as being a property of what I call fourth dimensional consciousness. We all have suffering and pain and adversity. Eudaimonia implies considerable skill at transforming adversity, depression, sorrow, anger, fear - somehow- into the creative process - into living ever more creatively. Which transforms the quality of daily life. I assert this is skill learning. D: It is encouraging to discover that science, psychology is really working on a positive psychology. A: Did you know that the DSM has added a classification of strengths and virtues - sort of the opposite of the classification of the insanities? D: What is the DSM? A: Its the diagnostic manual used by psychologists and other professionals. The DSM now lists six virtues which are supported across virtually all cultures and these break down into 24 strengths. There is a wisdom and knowledge cluster, a courage cluster, a cluster for virtues like love and humanity, a justice cluster, a temperance, moderation cluster and finally a spirituality, transcendence cluster. Seligman has questionnaires on his website that have been devised to help individuals gain insight into their strengths and weaknesses. D: There is a third kind of happiness? A: The third kind of happiness correlates with a rather high order of actualization and I think is a natural outcome of living the good life, eudaimonia. There is a hunger to go further. The power to go even further seems to be fueled by the virtually inevitable increase of energy and resources eudaimonia generates. There is inevitably a sense of gratitude. D: It seems to me gratitude further increases energy and creativity. A: One discovers one is part of something much larger than oneself. An even deeper meaning emerges out of the immensity of life. D: And death. Death really is part of life isn't it? A: Clearly. This Deeper meaning in life can have many manifestations including "prepackaged" ones like organized religion, political parties, etc. And then there are non prepackaged ones like teaching and bringing change of some sort. This is what we are trying to do. There is usually a feeling of service that somehow brings great meaning and profound happiness. You feel truly needed. D: One feels more passionate. The melody needs the note as the note needs the melody. A: Yes. It goes way beyond just doing it for the money. One who has come this far probably doesn't get up in the morning totally focused on making more money; it's more likely in service of something much larger. A lawyer can be a lawyer only so he can make a half million dollars per year. This is not a particularly meaningful life. This lawyer can, on the other hand, be a lawyer in service of good counsel, fairness, and justice. That's an example of a non prepackaged form of meaning. D: And sometimes she might still make a half million a year. A: Sometimes, but it may be more difficult. Positive psychology is leading to a sea change in psychology and education - from a therapeutic model to a coaching model. The therapeutic model is about finding out what's wrong with you and fixing what is broken. The coaching model is about finding out what is right with you - something you may not be aware of - and getting you to use it more and more. D: What role do drugs play in improving the mind? A: Drugs are so complicated. What is a drug? In general the technique most used to determine the effectiveness of a drug are the changes a drug produces in brain wave patterns. Gambling, alcohol, many illegal drugs, sexuality, music, sports, produce as much or greater changes in brain wave patterns than most prescribed drugs. Because time is short, let's focus on what we usually mean by legal drugs - particularly those that must be prescribed by an MD as treatment for mental problems. D: Many people feel their drugs or medications make them feel happier. A: Seligman points out that there are clearly some drug short cuts for bringing about the pleasant life. But he feels if there are short cuts for bringing about the good life - eudaimonia they are probably not drug related. And he thinks high levels of meaningfulness require mind powers that are way beyond what drugs can do. D: What about psychogens, alcohol, marihuana, cocaine, etc. Some feel they can stimulate the creative process. A: That is a huge question which I would like to look into in a later Episode. Staying with prescribed drugs for now, there are two kinds of medications. There are palliatives, cosmetics like quinine for malaria which suppresses the symptoms for as long as you take them. When you stop taking quinine the malaria returns full force. Then there are curative drugs like antibiotics for bacterial infection. When you stop taking those the bacteria are dead and don't recur. Seligman says the dirty little secret of biological psychiatry is that every single drug in the psychopharmia is palliative. That is they are all symptom suppressers, and when you stop taking them you are back at square one. For example, serotonin and the earlier trycyclic antidepressants work about 65% of the time. Interestingly, the two major forms of psychotherapy for depression - cognitive therapy and interpersonal therapy - are a tie. They work about 65% of the time. The difference is in relapse and recurrence. In psychotherapy you actually learn a set of skills that you remember, so three years later when depression comes back you can apply those skills again. But if you had serotonin or trycyclic antidepressants, three years later when it comes back it comes back in full force. So that's part one - the psychoactive drugs are palliative only, not curative....so the question is, are we likely to find drugs that work on the pleasant life, the good life and the meaningful life? Probably yes for the pleasant life. Obviously there are drugs that can affect positive emotions. Richard Davidson and other researchers are beginning to identify parts of the brain that influence emotion. There are already recreational drugs some of which I have experimented with. Antidepressants don't usually stimulate pleasure but recreational drugs do. The drug companies have been exploiting this for a long time. Clearly there are drug shortcuts to pleasure. But eudaimonia - flow - the good life probably doesn't have short cuts unless we call profound learning experiences a short cut. There is this notion that the more one uses the brain the greater its capacity. And no one can prove so far that it's capacity is not relatively infinite. Profound learning can be fast - in a flash as insight. So that's what contemplation and meditation are all about. I don't see a shortcut to learning flow. We have to use our highest strengths in order to enter into eudaimonia. I doubt that there are drugs that can bring this about. Of course, that is controversial. Unless, we are talking about nootropics. D: Nootropics? A: Smart Drugs. The third form of happiness, which is bringing more meaning into your life requires knowing yourself even better and using your strengths in the service of something you believe is larger than you are. There are clearly drugs which can enhance sensual pleasure - at least temporarily and there seems to be a pharmacology of positive emotion. But it is unlikely there'll be an interesting pharmacology of flow or eudaimonia and I agree with Seligman's notion that a true pharmacology of meaning seems impossible. Unless we are talking about vitamins, nootropics and the like. I assert the secret to eudaimonia, flow and bringing ever deeper meaning to life naturally unfolds from living mindfully. The greater percentage of time one can be mindful the greater the natural unfolding of higher orders of happiness. Living mindfully is the goal of Mindfitness. Learning how to do this is what you and I mean by contemplation and meditation. But to make these principles usable and understandable for more people I think requires innovative use of language and creative coaching. That is what we and others are trying to do. D: Earlier, you mentioned that you think there might even be a fourth form of happiness. A: I don't think there is any purpose in discussing it at this point. Maybe at a later Episode. D: Why not now? A: We have so much, maybe several episodes to go to do even a minimal job with Eudaimonia and the meaningful life - something much larger than oneself. After all, we are focused on being practical. That means anchoring the basics first. D: Does working on the Infinite Potential Series add meaning to your life? A: It does. D: How so? A: Two ways. First I get to research, absorb myself in learning about the mind, my own mind - the bigger Mind. Second, this is a chance to be of service to something bigger than I am - infinitely bigger. What about you? D: You do the work and research. A: You make my life work so all I have to do is what I love to do - this is play - as the Greeks would say, Layla. D: Thanks for the acknowledgment and I'd like to thank our audience for listening. We will go further with Episode IV. Until then relax as much as you can and use your signature strengths to unfold the flourishing life for yourself. May you find yourself in flow - Eudaimonia. A: Thanks for the help, Dagne. D: Thank you, Adam.
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