Podcasts about dc well

Dawson and I go deep on meditation and emotion regulation.  He discusses the attention network, empathy network, and the self-centeredness suppression network.  He is a PhD and an award-winning science writer with three best-selling books to his credit. The Genie in Your Genes was the first book to demonstrate that emotions drive gene expression. Mind to Matter, showed that the brain creates much of what we think of as objective reality. And Bliss Brain which we discuss in the interview.  And he has conducted dozens of clinical trials and founded the National Institute for Integrative Healthcare, www.niih.org, to promote groundbreaking new treatments. Its largest program, the Veterans Stress Project, has offered free treatment to over 20,000 veterans with PTSD over the last decade.Administrative: (See episode transcript below)Get Dawson Church's books hereGenie in Your Genes at www.yourgeniusgene.com.Mind to Matter here www.mindtomatter.com.Bliss Brain where www.blissbrain.com,Check out the Tools For A Good Life Summit here: Virtually and FOR FREE https://bit.ly/ToolsForAGoodLifeSummitStart podcasting!  These are the best mobile mic's for IOS and Android phones.  You can literally take them anywhere on the fly.Get the Shure MV88 mobile mic for IOS,  https://amzn.to/3z2NrIJGet the Shure MV88+ for  mobile mic for Android  https://amzn.to/3ly8SNjGet A Course In Miracles Here! https://amzn.to/3hoE7sAAccess my “Insiders Guide to Finding Peace” here: https://belove.media/peaceSee more resources at https://belove.media/resourcesEmail me: contact@belove.mediaFor social Media:      https://www.instagram.com/mrmischaz/https://www.facebook.com/MischaZvegintzovSubscribe and share to help spread the love for a better world!As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.Transcript:0:00:06.8 Mischa Zvegintzov: Welcome back everybody to the Tools For A Good Life Summit. And right now, I would like to introduce to you Dawson Church, PhD. I'm so excited to have you on board. We just had an amazing moment, a big breath of joy, and hope for this for everybody. But a... Quick, I'm gonna read your bio if that's okay.0:00:28.6 Dawson Church: Go for it. And I hope everyone is breathing with us.0:00:32.2 MZ: Yes. Yes.[laughter]0:00:36.3 MZ: So good. All right. Fantastic. Dawson Church, PhD is an award-winning science writer with three best-selling books to your credit. The Genie in Your Genes was the first book to demonstrate that emotions drive gene expression. You can find that book at www.yourgeniusgene.com. We've got, Mind to Matter, showed that the brain creates much of what we think of as objective reality. You can find that at www.mindtomatter.com, and we've got Bliss Brain, which you can find at www.blissbrain.com, which we'll be discussing in a minute. Very excited for that. Which demonstrates that peak mental states rapidly remodel the brain for happiness. You have conducted dozens of clinical trials and founded the National Institute for Integrative Healthcare, niih.org, to promote groundbreaking new treatments. Its largest program, the Veterans Stress Project, has offered free treatment to over 20,000 veterans with PTSD over the last decade. Thank you so much for that. And you share how to apply these health and performance breakthroughs through EFT Universe at eftuniverse.com. One of the largest alternative medicine sites on the web. Welcome, Dawson Church.0:02:09.8 DC: I'm having fun doing it all, Mischa.0:02:12.1 MZ: I'm having fun doing it all.[laughter]0:02:13.8 MZ: I love it. That is so... Yes, so good and so powerful. I just watch... I'm looking over here 'cause I have another screen but watching some of your content and just your joy and your enthusiasm and your passion for life. It is infectious. And I have a note here, "learned." We can learn this, learned happiness.0:02:38.7 DC: Learned happiness. Absolutely. And it's like, use it or lose it and the neural circuits that we use the most, the habits and behaviors through which we send signals through our brain, those things are what grow and circuits we don't use shrink. So absolutely, we can learn these things as we practice them. Our bodies, our brains are literally changing with every thought in our minds and consciousness.0:03:03.9 MZ: Yes. Which I think is so hopeful. If we are willing to just take a little bit of positive action, the results can be massive. Before we get to that, however, I wanted to discuss... I wrote down some notes. You were asked to speak before Congress a couple of times, correct?0:03:25.4 DC: Yes.0:03:26.1 MZ: And did you actually do... Go ahead, tell me.0:03:29.1 DC: Well, it was exciting because I've been to Washington DC several times. And when I began to get reports back from therapists working with veterans coming back from Iraq and Afghanistan, and they said, "We're working with these veterans spending just a few sessions, five, 10 sessions with them. And they're recovering from flashbacks, nightmares, PTSD." I was like... I was pretty skeptical because that's a big claim. And the American Psychiatric Association had just commissioned a survey which showed that basically PTSD just gets worse over time. Maybe you can manage it with drugs. That's the best you can do. So I heard these accounts, then we had to actually put some numbers to them and do some pilot research on the methods these therapists were using. And it was true that veterans really were recovering really quickly using these advanced psychotherapeutic methods. And so we eventually got that work in front of several Senators and Congress members.0:04:25.7 DC: We then were able to advocate for them in Congress. And then, I was invited to testify before the House Armed Services Committee and the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee. And those are powerful moments to sit there in this room full of Members of Congress and share about the potential of these methods and then really see if we can get these to veterans who are suffering. And that was a really profound experience. And what I found is that we have these tools now in our hands, in our toolboxes. And it's true that we really can shift most cases of PTSD. About nine out of 10 is what research shows us most cases of anxiety and depression. And after six, seven, eight sessions, these veterans just leave their therapy sessions, and they're free of flashbacks and nightmares, intrusive thoughts, all of the other things that would have otherwise have bothered them the rest of their lives. So, it's amazing to watch that happen.0:05:21.3 MZ: Yeah, that's incredible, I think. Well, two things, one, the palpable experience of the energy in front of when you're testifying, I guess testifying sounds aggressive, but when you're having an opportunity to speak to the... What did you call it? The joint say it again. The Joint Commissioner, what...0:05:45.8 DC: Yeah, the Veterans Affairs Committee and the Armed Services Committee.0:05:48.7 MZ: Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So did you feel a palpable energy shift of awareness with these Senators and things? I'm looking for some visceral experience there.0:06:01.5 DC: You know, it's really interesting question, Mischa. And one of the things that I found interesting was that what made the most impact on the Members of Congress was the stories of veterans themselves. Like we had one Vietnam veteran, and he said he was due to have six sessions. After the first session, he emailed his therapist and said, "After that very first session with you, I got my first full night's sleep since Vietnam, 35 years earlier." And so, the members of Congress would hear from veterans.0:06:37.2 DC: Another veteran was a young veteran. He'd done four tours in Iraq. And he had this terrible PTSD, nightmares, and flashbacks. Because one of the first things he had to do when he got there... Almost immediately, he arrived in Iraq as a medic, one of his best friends was killed. And one of his jobs is he had to prepare the uniform of his dead friend to send back to the family in the US with all the other personal effects. And so this young man was so traumatized, remembering, having to clean the blood and body fluids off the uniform. And it also smelled really bad because it'd been sitting in the Iraqi sun for a few days. And he literally had to run outside the hut, take a deep breath of air, run back inside, do a little bit of cleaning, run back outside just to breathe. 'Cause, it smelled so bad in there. So here he was. His emotions were 10 out of 10 as he recalled that event. After we worked with him in just one session, he was at a zero. He had no more emotion around it. He had only positive feelings. He said, "You know that, I realize now that was an act of love. And I felt now the love that I was giving his family and him by that act of service."0:07:47.6 DC: And so it shifted in his mind. So when you've seen, as you mentioned, over 20,000 veterans have this experience and a randomized controlled trial shows that these effects are true for most people, it just affects you profoundly. And that's what we thought made the biggest impact on those Senators, and Congress Members was that when they heard stories by real people, it was even more impactful than the research numbers data.0:08:13.3 MZ: Thank you so much for sharing that. I mean, I love that. I... Obviously circumstance to get there, not so excited about. But the result and the service aspect of that too. So for yourself...0:08:26.8 DC: Yeah, we all have stuff leftover from our past Mischa, we all have stuff leftover from our past, like childhood, really experiences that will otherwise stay with us. And so when you see people shed these past burdens of trauma and then claim the lives they can live, it's just powerful.0:08:44.1 MZ: It's amazing. I was gonna ask. I imagined seeing that again and again, and to be a part of that and to be able to be a part of that and help grow that is just gotta be insanely gratifying.0:09:00.2 DC: They call it a job.[laughter]0:09:03.7 MZ: Oh my gosh.[chuckle]0:09:06.2 DC: It's not hard work. It's wonderful.0:09:08.4 MZ: Thank you.0:09:08.4 DC: It also really works for you because when you're helping people heal like that, we call it... There's a term for it. We call it "borrowing benefits." And you literally, as you work with other people, seeing them heal, it heals you as well.0:09:20.0 MZ: That's beautiful. And then I think, I am... As I was digging and looking, and I'm like the amount of hours that you have put into this. And I say that in a good way, just in a massive way. I wrote down, "How many hours do you think you've put into this?"0:09:41.6 DC: No, it's a bad way, Mischa. When I was 15 years old, when I was a teenager, I was so depressed, I was so anxious. I had all the symptoms of PTSD myself; flashbacks, intrusive thoughts, hyper-vigilance. And so, I just fled into a spiritual community when I was 15 to try and get over my own inner demons. And I then spent... What I write about in... There's a section of my book, Bliss Brain. It's called "From 50 Years to 50 Seconds." And it took me 50 years to figure out how the brain works, how the neurochemistry of all this works. How our genes are being affected epigenetically by these positive and negative experiences, how we can use these methods for healing.0:10:26.2 DC: And then what I've been doing for the last few years is hooking people up to EEGs. And so we literally read their brain information processing ability and how their brains are running information, especially when they think about trauma or think about bad events in their lives. And we found that now within four minutes or so, we can bring people from that intense emotionally triggered state back down to deep peace, inner calm. And we had one lady in our seven-day retreat. By the end of the seven days of practicing these methods, she was down to 47 seconds between sitting down, closing her eyes, entering that state. And in 47 seconds, under 50 seconds, she was having a full-blown mystical, elevated what we call the awakened mind, Bliss Brain experience. So we now have figured out, with the aid of neuroscience, how to train people into doing this, not 50 years like me, but 50 seconds. [chuckle] 50 seconds or less.[chuckle]0:11:30.8 MZ: You know what? Thank you for taking the pain, Dawson.[laughter]0:11:35.9 DC: Don't do what I do... Did. Go to an ashram and sit there for 10 years, trying to control your breathing and your thoughts. It won't work.[chuckle]0:11:43.6 MZ: It's so good. I don't wanna give away the ghost here, and we're gonna get to this in a second. But I took a couple of notes, some other notes, and one was, "Remodel your brain in as little as eight weeks," but... Or no buts, but... And then this other part, "It's important to turn those temporary states into long term enduring traits." Turn a state into a trait. And when I came across where you said that, I was like, "That is awesome." And so we can... Let me... Go ahead. You can say something to that if you want. But...0:12:26.0 DC: Yeah, that really is the goal here on meditation, of EFT acupressure tapping, of the various other techniques I advocate in my books. And what you wanna do is not have a temporary state of wellbeing. 'Cause it feels good to feel good, and it feels good to be happy. It feels good to be content and have inner peace. But it's a state, and it'll pass. And then you hear some bad news. You stub your leg on a piece of furniture. You have a financial reverse. And suddenly you lose your state. And so those states are nice, but they're just transient. What you wanna do is fire those neurons repeatedly over and over and over again. And then as your neural bundles get bigger and thicker, and research shows that in just one hour of repeat stimulation, that the number of synaptic connections in a neural bundle can double. So, you can double the number of connections in a neural bundle in an hour. So now you're turning the software of a state into the hardware of a trait. And then you are not just feeling happy, sometimes, you are a happy person. You aren't just feeling creative, sometimes, you are a creative person. So you've now got the trait of creativity, the trait of resilience, the trait of joy, and then no one could take that away from you because it's hard-wired into your brain.0:13:48.6 MZ: Love that. That's a vision of hope. That is so good. Thank you for that. Alright, let's get to the good, good stuff. I'm gonna pose a scenario to you and then ask you a question. Okay? Fantastic. So, given this scenario, think of life as a three-legged stool of relationships, finances, and health. And now think of someone who is or was successful and who has had two of those legs fall out from under them. This could be a combination of divorce, career upheaval, financial stress, kids acting out, or not going the direction that the parents want. It could be physical health challenges for themselves or a loved one. Maybe a death in the family and continued failed relationships. For me, it was divorce. My kids started to veer a little bit, I felt. Like career upheaval. And then both my parents died in rapid succession. It really shook some foundations that I had. And to top it off, my "pull myself up from my bootstraps" mentality, that "fix it or push my way through it," was no longer working. I needed some new tools. And by the grace of God, I was open to some new tools. So, this is my question to you. Thinking of your Bliss Brain work and your book, what are the exact next steps you would offer this person, so they know they are headed in the new right direction, that they will have positive momentum towards getting their life back on track.0:15:38.9 DC: This is gonna sound really counterintuitive and odd. [chuckle] But it starts with self-acceptance. And self-love and accepting yourself just the way you are. And if circumstances; the way they are. And research into healing shows that acceptance is where you have to start. Like... I'm trying to think of a good example to use here. There are a whole bunch of them, they are crowding together in my brain, to mention. But when you have multiple challenges like that, just breathing and remaining centered and accepting and loving yourself is the first thing. In your loss, in your confusion, in your difficulty, and it's hard to be in that state, and yet, if you're trying to get out of it, if you're trying to... Now, you said, "pushing my way through." That works up to a point until it doesn't. [chuckle] So the first thing is just love and compassion. Just self-love, self-compassion.0:16:38.0 DC: The phrase we use in EFT acupressure tapping is, "Even though I have this problem, I deeply and completely love and accept myself." And that's really reassuring to you when you hear that when we're working, say, with a man who is 200 pounds overweight. Now, the last thing he wants to accept is being 200 pounds overweight. And yet, if we can train him to love and accept himself in that state, that unlocks all of the tension in the psyche between the part of yourself that's the inner coach, inner critique, inner CEO saying, "You should lose weight, you should quit smoking, you shouldn't drink so much, you should eat healthy, you should take more vacations, you should just save more money, blah, blah, blah, bloody blah." It's just yelling at us all the time, and that top-dog coercive inner voice is just keeping the energy pattern of what we've got going on, stuck and in place. And the moment you relax and say, "You know, I just accept myself the way I am."0:17:40.5 DC: We did an MRI study, some colleagues made an MRI study of obese women. Women who are overweight. When they put them in the MRI and showed them images of chocolate cake, and strawberry pie, and vanilla ice cream, and all these things, their mid-brains, their limbic system, the emotional part of the brain, was totally lit up. In other words, they weren't seeing food as food or nutrients. They were seeing food as a highly emotional event. After those five or six sessions of these simple therapies, we put them back in the MRI. They were getting exposed to all those emotive images, and they had no response at all. In fact, the guy running the MRI, the neuroscientist, said to my colleague, "What have you done to these women that they just have no emotional response to food anymore?"0:18:31.2 DC: So again, now they don't have that huge emotional response, and they love and accept themselves the way they are. Then all of the energy that's trapped in that top dog-underdog kind of struggle, "You should fix yourself, you should improve, you should be better." And underdog saying, "Oh yes, I will, top dog, I will improve, I will quit smoking, blah, blah, blah." And then underdog runs out behind the shed when top dog's back is turned and smokes the cigarette. And so, all of the tension behind these weird psychological struggles is just removed when you love and accept yourself. So love and acceptance is the first step. So that's number one. Accepting where you are, and admitting it, and acknowledging it just as a fact, and then you look at what you can do to shift and then you practice it.0:19:20.6 MZ: Now I can't over-stress the value of practice. What I try and do in my own work, so I try to get people addicted. So I wanna get them addicted to their own dopamine, serotonin, anandamide, oxytocin, nitric oxide all these wonderful neuro chemicals that happen in your brain spontaneously when you meditate and when you do that, people have a habit of meditating, so if I can get people hooked one time on high serotonin, high dopamine then they'll stay hooked and they'll keep on meditating so I can't over-stress the importance of getting yourself addicted to the right stuff to meditation, and then day after day, you meditate, and within a month, our MRI research shows your brain patterns are already changing. Your brain, the way your brain processes information is already shifting, and then you start to turn those temporary states into traits. And that's the value of practice. It doesn't take long. In one MRI study, it took just 30 days of practice 20 minutes a day, and people's brains were processing information totally differently.0:20:33.1 MZ: That's amazing. Can I ask you, what I wanna ask you and I look at... And I was checking out your Bliss Brain book and such. You say you teach seven simple steps. Is this part of that? Is this literally part of what we're talking about right here?0:20:49.8 DC: Yeah. That technique is called Eco-meditation. E-C-O meditation and is just a seven-step process, we do the acupressure, we do mindful breathing, we do a little bit of self-hypnosis, we do heart coherence, and we do neuro-feedback all in a certain order, and there's seven of these things we practice... And when you do that, suddenly you just, your brain flips into ecstasy with its elevated emotional state, no 10,000 hours, no spiritual master, no special training, no spiritual belief required. You can be an atheist. [laughter] You can be Jewish, you can be episcopalian you can be anything and it's just gonna work, it's a mechanical neurological event you're triggering in your body and you feel great.0:21:35.5 MZ: Okay, fantastic, fantastic. I didn't mean... Alright, I was just curious. So we'll go back to the self-acceptance, what you can do to shift, so that would be like in this particular case, it sounds like meditation would be a specific tool you're talking about, but it could be many different things for somebody.0:21:56.3 DC: In my earlier book, Mind Matter, I list about 30 things you can do, there's grounding, there's time in nature, social support, but two I recommend though that are fundamental and easy, one Mischa is that style meditation that puts you in those elevated emotional states and doing it first thing in the morning. That's a number one, and that's I think should be universal, just the benefits. One of my doctor friends said, "If meditation were a drug, it would be medical malpractice to fail to prescribe it." [laughter] So it's just the foundation as a frame for a good life. So you wanna do it in the morning, doesn't have to be an hour or two hours, half an hour is plenty. And then if you use a guided meditation that'll guide you into that elevated state. And then the second thing I recommend as having everyone should have this in their Personal Growth Tool Kit is EFT acupressure tapping, that's just somebody tapping on a series of 13 acupressure points.0:23:03.4 DC: It regulates the body's energy, that's what helped those women get over their emotional attachment and projection to food. So you wanna get over your high cortisol, you wanna get over your stress and EFT within two minutes, it'll just crash your cortisol, crash your adrenalin, your level of all of these stress neurotransmitters and hormones will go way, way, way down. And then all kinds of beneficial things increase including immunity and cell repair, all kinds of good things go up when those molecules become available to your body for building healthy cells. So those are the two things I think that are great, then layer in time in nature and layer in a spiritual practice, layer in... There's a wonderful medieval term called lectio divina reading inspirational material, fill your mind with this stuff, don't fill your mind with all the crap in the mass media and whatever you do, don't turn on your phone and start looking at it first thing in the morning when you wake up because you're gonna get then stuck in the lateral level of everything going on in the world, which is not in your best interest, instead, orient yourself meditation to what I call in my books, non-local mind and non-local reality in meditation, and then you can deal with the world through the framing of being one with the universe.0:24:20.3 DC: But that's the order to do it in. Hook up to the universe, then deal with the outside world, don't open your eyes and look at your phone and get sucked into the outside world and then try and meditate because you've blown it at that point, and it's hard to get back to that good space.0:24:35.0 MZ: Too little too late.0:24:36.6 DC: Oh, yes.0:24:37.6 MZ: Yes. I love meditation myself. I have had a committed practice for a while, and so I think it's so, so powerful, and I think oftentimes the results are evident later, or I'll notice too, just getting that nice breathing going even with the monkey mind, it's almost like the monkey mind is irrelevant, but...0:25:03.6 DC: It is.0:25:03.7 MZ: Yeah. Just carrying that nice breath, that connection to the universe you're talking about through the day is... Before you look at the phone is so good. Thank you for that.0:25:15.5 DC: And you're right about the monkey mind being irrelevant because we can't still our minds, we can't quiet our minds, our brains were meant to be highly active and highly involved with everything around us, think about... I was just thinking about just the ancestors, and I was going down a path in the forest near me a couple of days ago, and there was a stick lying in the path, and I thought, "You know my ancestors 100,000 years ago, when they see us that long brown skinny thing lying on the path. It might be a snake." So the optimist says, "Oh no, it's a stick. It's fine." And 99 times out of a 100, 100,000 years ago, it was a stick and nothing bad happened. The pessimist is seeing every stick and saying, "It's a snake. It's gonna bite me."0:26:00.2 MZ: Yes.0:26:00.8 DC: And so the pessimist is... The one time it is a snake, the pessimist says, "You see? It was a snake. It didn't bite me because I was so paranoid and suspicious, and now I'm safe." The optimist, unfortunately, at one time in a 100 gets bitten and dies. So he gets weeded from the gene pool, and only the pessimist lives to perpetuate his genes to the next generation. Multiply this by 10,000 generations and you have you, Mischa and me Dawson. And we are capable of the monkey mind like you wouldn't believe. Always looking around for the baddest stuff in our environment. We've just been bred that way for tens and of thousands of generations. And now we sit there and close our eyes and try and be happy? [laughter] Isn't gonna happen. [laughter]0:26:45.7 MZ: Oh, my God. That's amazing. Okay, so then you said... What can we do to shift? You have, in your book, one of your books, which you referenced, you've got 30 great tools, but start with the some sort of meditation and some EFT style of tapping in and then layer in more as time goes by. And then practice, so practice, practice. Find some consistency, yes?0:27:18.9 DC: Build those neural bundles, turn those states to traits, and that's what consistency will do. So then when one or more of the legs of your stool is gone, you're still totally serene, have total inner peace, and you have something that outside tragedy can't take away. You've now built the neural wiring or resilience in your brain, and that's just who you are. So when the pandemic strikes, when the economic crash happens, when you get divorced, when your kids are acting out, you are this highly resilient person. The research that I cover in both Bliss Brain and Mind to Matter shows that not only are you that person during meditation. Research by a wonderful neuro-scientist called Teresa Amabile at Harvard shows you reach that state mentally for that 30 minutes or so in the morning... Meditation, flow states, they then perpetuate themselves for 48 hours of increased productivity, creativity and problem solving ability.0:28:22.9 DC: And in one US government study, they showed that people in those states have five times the ability to solve complex problems. So now, even if you have had two of the three supports, legs knocked off out from under your stool, you have five times the ability to solve complex problems. You are gonna can put your stool back together again far quicker than somebody who doesn't have those. And in fact, there is this whole field, I talk about in Bliss Brain called post-traumatic growth. Not only do you wind up okay, you wind up better. You've actually used disaster as a springboard for personal transformation, so that's the potential of that practice.0:29:05.0 MZ: Yeah, fantastic. I love that. So many cool thoughts just were going through my brain as you were talking about that. And now they've all escaped me, but they will come back to me in a second, I'm sure. So after practice, was there anything else or were you... I don't mean to cut you off with the sort of the steps.0:29:31.5 DC: Yeah. So self-love, practice, at least, meditation and learn tapping, 'cause tapping takes you all of two minutes to learn. Takes you all of 30 seconds to do, and then you quickly are gonna regulate your emotions. And I cover in Bliss Brain, there are four circuits to the brain that start to change. Now, this is the absolute miracle of neuroplasticity. 20 years ago, we had no idea the brain was remodeling itself that way, but I have case studies in Bliss Brain showing that if you practice in this way, the emotion regulation network in your brain, the little hub that governs emotional network, emotional regulation in your brain, grows by, get this, 10% a month. So in three months, that part of the brain can be 30% larger. So now you can regulate your irritation, your annoyance, your resentment, your negative emotion, and that opens the door to a much happier life. So that's why in Bliss Brain I say there are four networks to develop, but develop emotion regulation first.0:30:43.7 DC: The next network is the one that controls the self, and so we have these elaborate stories about who we are. "I was born at such and such a time. This is my biography. This is what my job is like, my life is like, my money is like." That's all the self, and unfortunately, that is the part of the brain that draws us into suffering. That's called the default mode network. Our brain defaults to that suffering network automatically when we aren't engaged in a task. And so we need to dial that part of the brain down. Tibetan monks, with 10,000 hours of meditation practice, they can dial down the default mode network. Literally, they close their eyes, and in a second they shut it down. You and I, maybe five minutes if we are able to practice. So you wanna shut down the self-absorbed chatter.0:31:32.6 MZ: On a good day. Yes...0:31:33.5 DC: About your life that we're all doing, the monkey mind, and the self-critical part of the brain, especially. So that's the next thing you wanna develop. You wanna develop compassion and feel compassion for other people. Not just be thinking about yourself but loving other people, loving everything the way it is, loving every... It will actually guide you to loving every atom in the universe. So we develop developed these networks, the empathy network, and then the attention network. We learn to... It's part of the brain, called the orbital prefrontal cortex. We develop that part of the brain, so it grows, becomes better at firing, and then we can pay attention to what's important and we can screen out irrelevant information. Our work productivity goes through the roof, we're far more productive at work, we're far better at solving problems. Our creativity at least doubles with these methods in a very short order. So the benefits to your regular life are immense.0:32:29.9 MZ: That's amazing. And one of the thoughts that I had, which I love, and you're just verifying with data, with research, is this idea that I don't have time. I don't have time, right? And if we take the time, it will make us that much more efficient, that much more productivity... Or more productive. And it sounds like that... And I would verify this for myself, but maybe you can validate it for me. Time taken for the meditation, the simple practices, the rewards far... The productivity rewards, happiness rewards, time rewards, efficiency rewards far outweigh the limited amount of time we need to put in to achieve those results.0:33:24.3 DC: Some people say, "I don't have time to meditate." My retort is, "You don't have time not to meditate." In one study done by a huge consulting firm called McKinsey, they found that executives who are already high performers and are entering these flow states via meditation, their productivity goes up five-fold. So you get done now in one day what used to take you five. Now, those are the peak performers. And we're now measuring this in ordinary people. We're measuring how much productivity goes up. But even if it goes up 20%, that's like an extra day a week you have available to you. And you won't be using that week to do email and that extra day of the week to work. You'll be using it to go play, be creative and have fun. So it changes your whole life game plan to have that huge increase in productivity.0:34:16.0 MZ: Perfect. Before... I wanna do one thing, if you would, for me really quick. You were talking about in the Bliss Brain book; there's the four neural networks that you're effecting change in, correct?0:34:26.6 DC: Yes.0:34:26.9 MZ: I think that's what you said. And so the first one was...0:34:29.8 DC: Emotion regulation.0:34:31.3 MZ: Say it again?0:34:32.8 DC: Emotion regulation.0:34:33.8 MZ: Emotion regulation. And so that would be, for example, the meditation, the stuff like that, right?0:34:39.0 DC: Yes.0:34:39.2 MZ: And then the second one was...0:34:43.4 DC: There's also the attention network.0:34:47.7 MZ: Intent... So, what would be a...0:34:47.8 DC: The empathy network and the...0:34:48.1 MZ: Oh, go ahead.0:34:48.5 DC: So yeah, the attention network, empathy network, and the self-centeredness suppression network. There's a part... Parts of the brain that take that self-absorbed mental chatter and switch off that project.0:35:02.0 MZ: Perfect. Okay. For the second one, could you give a simple tip or tool to help with that, to give someone a vision, so the... I can't read my own writing. [chuckle]0:35:17.5 DC: For the attention network, for example...0:35:21.2 MZ: Yes.0:35:21.5 DC: That's why a guided meditation is so useful.0:35:24.7 MZ: Okay.0:35:24.9 DC: There's dozens of guided meditations free on the web. Both at ecomeditation.com and also Insight Timer has them. A bunch of websites have my meditations for free. Blissbrain.com has them. Mind to Matter has unique ones for manifestation. And so these guided meditations give your attention network a voice, some music to focus on. That's good for you for maybe six months, maybe two or three years. At that point, you wanna graduate from that, and you'll be doing meditations yourself. You'll be able to focus your attention without the words. But for novices, it's really hard to do. You need something to focus on, like that voice and that music, so that's a second...0:36:06.0 MZ: I love it. Fantastic! And why not take advantage of those tools? Especially, since a ton of them are out there for free. Right?0:36:14.6 DC: Yep. Yep.0:36:14.6 MZ: Okay, so the empathy network, what... Tell me a tip, trick, tool for that. Is that more meditation, or is that... Is that basically... And what I'm hearing you say is that meditation is gonna fire all four of those. [chuckle]0:36:29.3 DC: Yes. It will. So empathy, like the guided meditations, we have you focus on a source of unconditional love. A person or being with whom you feel that some sort of connection. And when you do that, that activates a part of the brain called the insula, which has to do with pro-social emotions. So empathy, altruism, love, gratitude, all of those things are activated. And all of those are part of what the insula runs. And so, when you activate the insula, all of these pro-social emotions kick in, and then you can feel this immense compassion. Your heart rate slows down then, your heart rhythm becomes very regular. All kinds of good things happen in your body. So you deliberately activate the insula during the compassion part of EcoMeditation.0:37:19.1 MZ: Fantastic, thank you. And then the self-centeredness.0:37:24.7 DC: Yeah. And so in Chapter 1 and Chapter 7, beginning at the end of my book, Mind to Matter, I talk about local reality and non-local mind. And we all have to navigate local reality. I have to keep my car tuned up, and I have to keep my mortgage and rent paid, and I have to take care of my children, and I have a whole local reality I have to attend to. And then, what meditation allows you to do is step into non-local reality. And so when I sit there in the morning and meditate, I find myself being drawn up into this whole other world of just pure being. And then you're merging with non-local love, non-local information fields. And when you then end meditation and move back into your work world, you're drawing down all of the information into your local reality. That's what makes it so productive. Like, Albert Einstein said that that's the way all great scientific discoveries are made by people in altered states of consciousness where they're in tune with these global reality fields. And he'd been trying to figure out the theory of relativity for a long time. And then, one night, he fell asleep. He was really depressed and frustrated at the time. He just was... It was like beating his head against the wall. And he just saw the whole theory of relativity in a dream, in his vision. And then woke up in the morning and then spent four years working out of mathematics bit.[chuckle]0:38:52.9 MZ: That is amazing. Dawson, this has been amazing. Everybody who's watching and listening. If this interview with Dawson has been fantastic and you want to get even more content from Dawson, upgrade to the All-Access Pass for the bonus interview, which we're gonna be doing right after this. And I've got great questions there, and Dawson's obviously amazing so you won't wanna miss it. So be sure to upgrade to the All-Access Pass for that. And then any final thoughts to share that we did not get a chance to cover, Dawson?0:39:28.2 DC: Lots. [chuckle] We can't covered them all now. I would encourage you to just fill your life with everything that you can to support yourself. So it's meditation in the morning. Again, first thing in the morning, before you get involved in the outside local reality of your life, tapping to bring you back to that baseline during the day only takes a minute or two to tap, and then you feel better right away. And then nurture yourself with great friendships, people who support and love you. Nurture yourself with great media, just read books, read my books, read other people's books, there's so much information out there. Some free information out there, or even the cost of a book now 10, $20, it's amazing how much you can get. And then you start to fill your mind, inner reality with all of this. And when you filled your inner reality with such good inputs, the good outputs just appear all around you in friendships, in money insights, in well-being, in massive epigenetic shift in your cells.0:40:27.6 DC: So just doing all those things to truly love, nurture yourself and create a good life for yourself. You can create a good life for yourself. Research shows that you can be dramatically happier than you are today. In some of these MRI studies, we've seen these monks and they close their eyes, meditate, and their waves, the brainwaves of happiness go up 700% over baseline. So the bottom line is you can be like seven times as happy as you could even imagine. What neuroscience is doing meditation said to me, "Dawson. I thought it was a 10 out of 10 happiness before, but now I'm like a 15. I'm having like transcended happiness." And that is what anyone can learn to cultivate in their own brains.0:41:11.6 MZ: It's amazing, Dawson. This has been amazing, and anybody can go to blissbrain.com and download that ebook for free, I believe. Correct?0:41:23.9 DC: Yeah.0:41:24.8 MZ: Yeah. So absolutely everybody should go do that. No matter what, you've just reinforced as well in me that the choice is mine. Like more happiness is there for me if I choose to go grab it. And that's outside of the shiny object so thank you for that. And then there was another thought, but it's fleeting and gone, but thank you so much. I'm gonna hit stop here and then we'll come back in a minute for round two.[music]

Alright everyone. So this was not the episode you were expecting. But, in light of everything going on in the world, we chose to forgo our Space Force episode until next week. But, in order to still keep the internet world afloat, we are releasing this back up episode that we recorded back when everything was still open, civilization was still normal, movies theaters were still open, and the most important thing on people's minds was what studio was better, Marvel or DC? Well, we're here to answer that question, as myself, Chris, and our new guest NY Average Joe sit down to discuss what each studio has over each other, the different approaches they've taken to their movies, and whether it means anything when it comes to getting good superhero content. Tune in to find out! --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app

The question of diving into Kubernetes is something that faces us all in different ways. Whether you are already on the platform, are considering transitioning, or are thinking about what is best for your team moving forward, the possibilities and the learning-curve make it a somewhat difficult question to answer. In this episode, we discuss the topic and ultimately believe that an individual is the only one who can answer that question well. That being said, the capabilities of Kubernetes can be quite persuasive and if you are tempted then it is most definitely worth considering very seriously, at least. In our discussion, we cover some of the problems that Kubernetes solves, as well as some of the issues that might arise when moving into the Kubernetes space. The panel shares their thoughts on learning a new platform and compare it with other tricky installations and adoption periods. From there, we look at platforms and how Kubernetes fits and does not fit into a traditional definition of what a platform constitutes. The last part of this episode is spent considering the future of Kubernetes and how fast that future just might arrive. So for all this and a bunch more, join us on The Podlets Podcast, today! Follow us: https://twitter.com/thepodlets Website: https://thepodlets.io Feeback: info@thepodlets.io https://github.com/vmware-tanzu/thepodlets/issues Hosts: Carlisia Campos Josh Rosso Duffie Cooley Bryan Liles Key Points From This Episode: The main problems that Kubernetes solves and poses. Why you do not need to understand distributed systems in order to use Kubernetes. How to get around some of the concerns about installing and learning a new platform. The work that goes into readying a Kubernetes production cluster. What constitutes a platform and can we consider Kubernetes to be one? The two ways to approach the apparent value of employing Kubernetes. Making the leap to Kubernetes is a personal question that only you can answer. Looking to the future of Kubernetes and its possible trajectories. The possibility of more visual tools in the UI of Kubernetes. Understanding the concept of conditions in Kubernetes and its objects. Considering appropriate times to introduce a team to Kubernetes. Quotes: “I can use different tools and it might look different and they will have different commands but what I’m actually doing, it doesn’t change and my understanding of what I’m doing doesn’t change.” — @carlisia [0:04:31] “Kubernetes is a distributed system, we need people with expertise across that field, across that whole grouping of technologies.” — @mauilion [0:10:09] “Kubernetes is not just a platform. Kubernetes is a platform for building platforms.” — @bryanl [0:18:12] Links Mentioned in Today’s Episode: Weave — https://www.weave.works/docs/net/latest/overview/ AWS — https://aws.amazon.com/ DigitalOcean — https://www.digitalocean.com/ Heroku — https://www.heroku.com/ Red Hat — https://www.redhat.com/en Debian — https://www.debian.org/ Canonical — https://canonical.com/ Kelsey Hightower — https://github.com/kelseyhightower Joe Beda — https://www.vmware.com/latam/company/leadership/joe-beda.html Azure — https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/ CloudFoundry — https://www.cloudfoundry.org/ JAY Z — https://lifeandtimes.com/ OpenStack — https://www.openstack.org/ OpenShift — https://www.openshift.com/ KubeVirt — https://kubevirt.io/ VMware — https://www.vmware.com/ Chef and Puppet — https://www.chef.io/puppet/ tgik.io — https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL7bmigfV0EqQzxcNpmcdTJ9eFRPBe-iZa Matthias Endler: Maybe You Don't Need Kubernetes - https://endler.dev/2019/maybe-you-dont-need-kubernetes Martin Tournoij: You (probably) don’t need Kubernetes - https://www.arp242.net/dont-need-k8s.html Scalar Software: Why most companies don't need Kubernetes - https://scalarsoftware.com/blog/why-most-companies-dont-need-kubernetes GitHub: Kubernetes at GitHub - https://github.blog/2017-08-16-kubernetes-at-github Debugging network stalls on Kubernetes - https://github.blog/2019-11-21-debugging-network-stalls-on-kubernetes/ One year using Kubernetes in production: Lessons learned - https://techbeacon.com/devops/one-year-using-kubernetes-production-lessons-learned Kelsey Hightower Tweet: Kubernetes is a platform for building platforms. It's a better place to start; not the endgame - https://twitter.com/kelseyhightower/status/935252923721793536?s=2 Transcript: EPISODE 18 [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] [0:00:41.9] JR: Hello everyone and welcome to The Podlets Podcast where we are going to be talking about should I Kubernetes? My name is Josh Rosso and I am very pleased to be joined by, Carlisia Campos. [0:00:55.3] CC: Hi everybody. [0:00:56.3] JR: Duffy Cooley. [0:00:57.6] DC: Hey folks. [0:00:58.5] JR: And Brian Lyles. [0:01:00.2] BL: Hi. [0:01:03.1] JR: All right everyone. I’m really excited about this episode because I feel like as Kubernetes has been gaining popularity over time, it’s been getting its fair share of promoters and detractors. That’s fair for any piece of software, right? I’ve pulled up some articles and we put them in the show notes about some of the different perspectives on both success and perhaps failures with Kub. But before we dissect some of those, I was thinking we could open it up more generically and think about based on our experience with Kubernetes, what are some of the most important things that we think Kubernetes solves for? [0:01:44.4] DC: All right, my list is very short and what Kubernetes solves for my point of view is that it allows or it actually presents an interface that knows how to run software and the best part about it is that it doesn’t – the standard interface. I can target Kubernetes rather than targeting the underlying hardware. I know certain things are going to be there, I know certain networking’s going to be there. I know how to control memory and actually, that’s the only reason that I really would give, say for Kubernetes, we need that standardization and you don’t want to set up VM’s, I mean, assuming you already have a cluster. This simplifies so much. [0:02:29.7] BL: For my part, I think it’s life cycle stuff that’s really the biggest driver for my use of it and for my particular fascination with it. I’ve been in roles in the past where I was responsible for ensuring that some magical mold of application on a thousand machines would magically work and I would have all the dependencies necessary and they would all agree on what those dependencies were and it would actually just work and that was really hard. I mean, getting to like a known state in that situation, it’s very difficult. Having something where either both the abstractions of containers and the abstraction of container orchestration, the ability to deploy those applications and all those dependencies together and the ability to change that application and its dependencies, using an API. That’s the killer part for me. [0:03:17.9] CC: For me, from a perspective of a developer is very much what Duffy just said but more so the uniformity that comes with all those bells and whistles that we get by having that API and all of the features of Kubernetes. We get such a uniformity across such a really large surface and so if I’m going to deploy apps, if I’m going to allow containers, what I have to do for one application is the same for another application. If I go work for another company, that uses Kubernetes, it is the same and if that Kubernetes is a hosted Kubernetes or if it’s a self-managed, it will be the same. I love that consistency and that uniformity that even so I can – there are many tools that help, they are customized, there’s help if you installing and composing specific things for your needs. But the understanding of what you were doing is it’s the same, right? I can use different tools and it might look different and they will have different commands but what I’m actually doing, it doesn’t change and my understanding of what I’m doing doesn’t change. I love that. Being able to do my work in the same way, I wish, you know, if that alone for me makes it worthwhile. [0:04:56.0] JR: Yeah, I think like my perspective is pretty much the same as what you all said and I think the one way that I kind of look at it too is Kubernetes does a better job of solving the concerns you just listed, then I would probably be able to build myself or my team would be able to solve for ourselves in a lot of cases. I’m not trying to say that specialization around your business case or your teams isn’t appropriate at times, it’s just at least for me, to your point Carlisia, I love that abstraction that’s consistent across environments. It handles a lot of the things, like Brian was saying, about CPU, memory, resources and thinking through all those different pieces. I wanted to take what we just said and maybe turn it a bit at some of the common things that people run in to with Kubernetes and just to maybe hit on a piece of low hanging fruit that I think is oftentimes a really fair perspective is Kubernetes is really hard to operate. Sure, it gives you all the benefits we just talked about but managing a Kubernetes cluster? That is not a trivial task. And I just wanted to kind of open that perspective up to all of us, you know? What are your thoughts on that? [0:06:01.8] DC: Well, the first thought is it doesn’t have to be that way. I think that’s a fallacy that a lot of people fall into, it’s hard. Guess what? That’s fine, we’re in the sixth year of Kubernetes, we’re not in the sixth year of stability of a stable release. It’s hard to get started with Kubernetes and what happens is we use that as an excuse to say well, you know what? It’s hard to get started with so it’s a failure. You know something else that was hard to get started with? Whenever I started with it in the 90s? Linux. You download it and downloading it on 30 floppy disks. There was the download corruption, real things, Z modem, X modem, Y modem. This is real, a lot of people don’t know about this. And then, you had to find 30 working flopping disk and you had to transfer 30, you know, one and a half megabyte — and it still took a long time to floppy disk and then you had to run the installer. And then most likely, you had to build a kernel. Downloading, transferring, installing, building a kernel, there was four places where just before you didn’t have windows, this was just to get you to a log in prompt, that could fail. With Kubernetes, we had this issue. People were installing Kubernetes, there’s cloud vendors who are installing it and then there’s people who were installing it on who knows what hardware. Guess what? That’s hard and it’s not even now, it’s not even they physical servers that’s networking. Well, how are you going to create a network that works across all your servers, well you’re going to need an overlay, which one are you going to use, Calico? Use Weave? You’re going to need something else that you created or something else if it works. Yeah, just we’re still figuring out where we need to be but these problems are getting solved. This will go away. [0:07:43.7] BL: I’m living that life right now, I just got a new laptop and I’m a Linux desktop kind of guy and so I’m doing it right now. What does it take to actually get a recent enough kernel that the hardware that is shipped with this laptop is supported, you know? It’s like, those problems continue, even though Linux has been around and considered stable and it’s the underpinning of much of what we do on the internet today, we still run into these things, it’s still a very much a thing. [0:08:08.1] CC: I think also, there’s a factor of experience, for example. This is not the first time you have to deal with this problem, right Duffy? Been using Linux on a desktop so this is not the first hardware that you had to setup Linux on. So you know where to go to find that information. Yeah, it’s sort of a pain but it’s manageable. I think a lot of us are suffering from gosh, I’ve never seen Kubernetes before, where do I even start and – or, I learned Kubernetes but it’s quite burdensome to keep up with everything as opposed to let’s say, if 10 years from now, we are still doing Kubernetes. You’ll be like yeah, okay, whatever. This is no big deal. So because we have done these things for a few years that we were not possibly say that it’s hard. I don’t’ think we would describe it that way. [0:09:05.7] DC: I think there will still be some difficulty to it but to your point, it’s interesting, if I look back like, five years ago, I was telling all of my friends. Look, if you’re a system’s administrator, go learn how to do other things, go learn how to be, go learn an API centric model, go play with AWS, go play with tools like this, right? If you’re a network administrator, learn to be a system’s administrator but you got to branch out. You got to figure out how to ensure that you’re relevant in the coming time. With all the things that are changing, right? This is true, I was telling my friend this five years ago, 10 years ago, continues, I continue to tell my friends that today. If I look at the Kubernetes platform, the complexity that represents in operating it is almost tailor made to those people though did do that, that decided to actually branch out and to understand why API’s are interesting and to understand, you know, can they have enough of an understanding in a generalist way to become a reasonable systems administrator and a network administrator and you know, start actually understanding the paradigms around distributed systems because those people are what we need to operate this stuff right now, we’re building – I mean, Kubernetes is a distributed system, we need people with expertise across that field, across that whole grouping of technologies. [0:10:17.0] BL: Or, don’t. Don’t do any of that. [0:10:19.8] CC: Brian, let me follow up on that because I think it’s great that you pointed that out Duffy. I was thinking precisely in terms of being a generalist and understanding how Kubernetes works and being able to do most of it but it is so true that some parts of it will always be very complex and it will require expertise. For example, security. Dealing with certificates and making sure that that’s working, if you want to – if you have particular needs for networking, but, understanding the whole idea of this systems, as it sits on top of Kubernetes, grasping that I think is going to – have years of experience under their belt. Become relatively simple, sorry Brian that I cut you off. [0:11:10.3] BL: That’s fine but now you gave me something else to say in addition to what I was going to say before. Here’s the killer. You don’t need to know distributed systems to use Kubernetes. Not at all. You can use a deployment, you can use a [inaudible] set, you can run a job, you can get workloads up on Kubernetes without having to understand that. But, Kubernetes also gives you some good constructs either in the Kubernetes API's itself or in its client libraries where you could build distributed systems in easier way but what I was going to say before that though is I can’t build a cluster. Well don’t. You know what you should do? Use a cloud vendor, use AWS, use Google, use Microsoft or no, I mean, did I say Microsoft? Google and Microsoft. Use Digital Ocean. There’s other people out there that do it as well, they can take care of all the hard things for you and three, four minutes or 10 minutes if you’re on certain clouds, you can have Kubernetes up and running and you don’t even have to think about a lot of these networking concerns to get started. I think that’s a little bit of the thud that we hear, "It’s hard to install." Well, don’t install it, you install it whenever you have to manage your own data centers. Guess what? When you have to manage your own data centers and you’re managing networking and storage, there’s a set of expertise that you already have on staff and maybe they don’t want to learn a new thing, that’s a personal problem, that’s not really a Kubernetes problem. Let’s separate those concerns and not use our lack or not wanting to, to stop us from actually moving forward. [0:12:39.2] DC: Yeah. Maybe even taking that example step forward. I think where this problem compounds or this perspective sometimes compounds about Kubernetes being hard to operate is coming from of some shops who have the perspective of are operational concerns today, aren’t that complex. Why are we introducing this overhead, this thing that we maybe don’t need and you know, to your point Brian, I wonder if we’d all entertain the idea, I’m sure we would that maybe even, speaking to the cloud vendors, maybe even just a Heroku or something. Something that doesn’t even concern itself with Kube but can get your workload up and running and successful as quickly as possible. Especially if you’re like, maybe a small startup type persona, even that’s adequate, right? It could have been not a failure of Kubernetes but more so choosing the wrong tool for the job, does that resonate with you all as well, does that make sense? [0:13:32.9 DC: Yeah, you know, you can’t build a house with a screwdriver. I mean, you probably could, it would hurt and it would take a long time. That’s what we’re running into. What you’re really feeling is that operationally, you cannot bridge the gap between running your application and running your application in Kubernetes and I think that’s fair, that’s actually a great thing, we prove that the foundations are stable enough that now, we can actually do research and figure out the best ways to run things because guess what? RPM’s from Red Hat and then you have devs from the Debian project, different ways of getting things, you have Snap from Canonical, it works and sometimes it doesn’t, we need to actually figure out those constructs in Kubernetes, they’re not free. These things did not exist because someone says, "Hey, I think we should do this." Many years. I was using RPM in the 90s and we need to remember that. [0:14:25.8] JR: On that front, I want to maybe point a question to you Duffy, if you don’t mind. Another big concern that I know you deal with a lot is that Kubernetes is great. Maybe I can get it up no problem. But to make it a viable deployment target at my organization, there’s a lot of work that goes into it to make a Kubernetes cluster production ready, right? That could be involving how you integrate storage and networking and security and on and on. I feel like we end up at this tradeoff of it’s so great that Kubernetes is super extensible and customizable but there is a certain amount of work that that kind of comes with, right? I’m curious Duff, what’s your perspective on that? [0:15:07.3] DC: I want to make a point that bring back to something Brian mentioned earlier, real quick, before I go on to that one. The point is that, I completely agree that yo do not have to actually be a distributed systems person to understand how to use Kubernetes and if that were a bar, we would have set that bar and incredibly, the inappropriate place. But from the operational perspective, that’s what we were referring to. I completely also agree that especially when we think about productionalizing clusters, if you’re just getting into this Kubernetes thing, it may be that you want to actually farm that out to another entity to create and productionalize those clusters, right? You have a choice to make just like you had a choice to make what when AWS came along. Just like you had a choice to make — we’re thinking of virtual machines, right? You have a choice and you continue to have a choice about how far down that rabbit hole as an engineering team of an engineering effort your company wants to go, right? Do you want farm everything out to the cloud and not have to deal with the operations, the day to day operations of those virtual machines and take the constraints that have been defined by that platformer, or do you want to operate that stuff locally, are you required by the law to operate locally? What does production really mean to you and like, what are the constraints that you actually have to satisfy, right? I think that given that choice, when we think about how to production Alize Kubernetes, it comes down to exactly that same set of things, right? Frequently, productionalizing – I’ve seen a number of different takes on this and it’s interesting because I think it’s actually going to move on to our next topic in line here. Frequently I see that productionizing or productionalizing Kubernetes means to provide some set of constraints around the consumption of the platform such that your developers or the focus that are consuming that platform have to operate within those rails, right? They could only define deployments and they can only define deployments that look like this. We’re going to ask them a varied subset of questions and then fill out all the rest of it for them on top of Kubernetes. The entry point might be CICD, it might be a repository, it might be code repository, very similar to a Heroku, right? The entry point could be anywhere along that thing and I’ve seen a number of different enterprises explore different ways to implement that. [0:17:17.8] JR: Cool. Another concept that I wanted to maybe have us define and think about, because I’ve heard the term platform quite a bit, right? I was thinking a little bit about you know, what the term platform means exactly? Then eventually, whether Kubernetes itself should be considered a platform. Backing u, maybe we could just start with a simple question, for all of us, what makes something a platform exactly? [0:17:46.8] BL: Well, a platform is something that provides something. That is a Brian Lyles exclusive. But really, what it is, what is a platform, a platform provides some kind of service that can be used to accomplish some task and Kubernetes is a platform and that thing, it provides constructs through its API to allow you to perform tasks. But, Kubernetes is not just a platform. Kubernetes is a platform for building platforms. The things that Kubernetes provides, the workload API, the networking API, the configuration and storage API’s. What they provide is a facility for you to build higher level constructs that control how you want to run the code and then how you want to connect the applications. Yeah, Kubernetes is actually a platform for platforms. [0:18:42.4] CC: Wait, just to make sure, Brian. You’re saying, because Kelsey Hightower for example is someone who says Kubernetes is a platform of platforms. Now, is Kubernetes both a platform of platforms, at the same time that it’s also a platform to run apps on? [0:18:59.4] BL: It’s both. Kelsey tweeted that there is some controversy on who said that first, it could have been Joe Beda, it could have been Kelsey. I think it was one of those two so I want to give a shout out to both of those for thinking in the same line and really thinking about this problem. But to go back to what you said, Carlisia, is it a platform for providing platforms and a platform? Yes, I will explain how. If you have Kubernetes running and what you can do is you can actually talk to the API, create a deployment. That is platform for running a workload. But, also what you can do is you can create through Kubernetes API mechanisms, ie. CRD’s, custom resource definitions. You can create custom resources that I want to have something called an application. You can basically extend the Kubernetes API. Not only is Kubernetes allowing you to run your workloads, it’s allowing you to specify, extend the API, which then in turn can be run with another controller that’s running on your platform that then gives you this thing when you cleared an application. Now, it creates deployment which creates a replica set, which creates a pod, which creates containers, which downloads images from a container registry. It actually is both. [0:20:17.8] DC: Yeah, I agree with that. Another quote that I remember being fascinated by which I think kind of also helps define what a platform is Kelsey put on out quote that said, Everybody wants platform at a service with the only requirement being that they’ve built it themselves." Which I think is awesome and it also kind of speaks, in my opinion to what I think the definition of a platform is, right? It’s an interface through which we can define services or applications and that interface typically will have some set of constraints or some set of workflows or some defined user experience on top of it. To Brian's point, I think that Kubernetes is a platform because it provides you a bunch of primitive s on the back end that you can use to express what that user experience might be. As we were talking earlier about what does it take to actually – you might move the entry point into this platform from the API, the Kubernetes API server, back down into CICD, right? Perhaps you're not actually defining us and called it a deployment, you’re just saying, I want so many instances off this, I don’t want it to be able to communicate with this other thing, right? It becomes – so my opinion, the definition about of a platform it is that user experience interface. It’s the constraints that we know things that you're going to put on top of that platform. [0:21:33.9] BL: I like that. I want to throw out a disclaimer right here because we’re here, because we’re talking about platforms. Kubernetes is not a platform, it’s as surface. That is actually, that’s different, a platform as a service is – from the way that we look at it, is basically a platform that can run your code, can actually make your code available to external users, can scale it up, can scale it down and manages all the nuances required for that operation to happen. Kubernetes does not do that out of the box but you can build a platform as a surface on Kubernetes. That’s actually, I think, where we’ll be going next is actually people, stepping out of the onesy-twosy, I can deploy a workload, but let’s actually work on thinking about this level. And I’ll tell you what. DEUS who got bought by Azure a few years ago, they actually did that, they built a pass that looks like Heroku. Microsoft and Azure thought that was a good idea so they purchased them and they’re still over there, thinking about great ideas but I think as we move forward, we will definitely see different types of paths on Kubernetes. The best thing is that I don’t think we’ll see them in the conventional sense of what we think now. We have a Heroku, which is like the git-push Heroku master, we share code through git. And then we have CloudFoundry idea of a paths which is, you can run CFPush and that actually is more of an extension of our old school Java applications, where we could just push [inaudible] here but I think at least I am hoping and this is something that I am actually working on not to toot my own horn too much but actually thinking about how do we actually – can we build a platform as a service toolkit? Can I actually just build something that’s tailing to my operation? And that is something that I think we’ll see a lot more in the next 18 months. At least you will see it from me and people that I am influencing. [0:23:24.4] CC: One thing I wanted to mention before we move onto anything else, in answering “Is Kubernetes right for me?” We are so biased. We need to play devil’s advocate at some point. But in answering that question that is the same as in when we need to answer, “Is technology x right for me?” and I think there is at a higher level there are two camps. One camp is very much of the thinking that, "I need to deliver value. I need to allow my software and if the tools I have are solving my problem I don’t need to use something else. I don’t need to use the fancy, shiny thing that’s the hype and the new thing." And that is so right. You definitely shouldn't be doing that. I am divided on this way of thinking because at the same time at that is so right. You do have to be conscious of how much money you’re spending on things and anyway, you have to be efficient with your resources. But at the same time, I think that a lot of people who don’t fully understand what Kubernetes really can do and if you are listening to this, if you maybe could rewind and listen to what Brian and Duffy were just saying in terms of workflows and the Kubernetes primitives. Because those things they are so powerful. They allow you to be so creative with what you can do, right? With your development process, with your roll out process and maybe you don’t need it now. Because you are not using those things but once you understand what it is, what it can do for your used case, you might start having ideas like, “Wow, that could actually make X, Y and Z better or I could create something else that could use these things and therefore add value to my enterprise and I didn’t even think about this before.” So you know two ways of looking at things. [0:25:40.0] BL: Actually, so the topic of this session was, “Should I Kubernetes” and my answer to that is I don’t know. That is something for you to figure out. If you have to ask somebody else I would probably say no. But on the other side, if you are looking for great networking across a lot of servers. If you are looking for service discovery, if you are looking for a system that can restart workloads when they fail, well now you should probably start thinking about Kubernetes. Because Kubernetes provides all of these things out of the box and are they easy to get started with though? Some of these things are harder. Service discovery is really easy but some of these things are a little bit harder but what Kubernetes does is here comes my hip-hop quote, Jay Z said this, basically he’s talking about difficult things and he basically wants difficult things to take a little bit of time and impossible things or things we thought that were impossible to take a week. So basically making difficult things easy and making things that you could not even imagine doing, attainable. And I think that is what Kubernetes brings to the table then I’ll go back and say this one more time. Should you use Kubernetes? I don’t know that is a personal problem that is something you need to answer but if you’re looking for what Kubernetes provides, yes definitely you should use it. [0:26:58.0] DC: Yeah, I agree with that I think it is a good summary there. But I also think you know coming back to whether you should Kubernetes part, from my perspective the reason that I Kubernetes, if you will, I love that as a verb is that when I look around at the different projects in the infrastructure space, as an operations person, one of the first things I look for is that API that pattern around consumption, what's actually out there and what’s developing that API. Is it a the business that is interested in selling me a new thing or is it an API that’s being developed by people who are actually trying to solve real problems, is there a reasonable way to go about this. I mean when I look at open stack, OpenStack was exactly the same sort of model, right? OpenStack existed as an API to help you consume infrastructure and I look at Kubernetes and I realize, “Wow, okay well now we are developing an API that allows us to think about the life cycle and management of applications." Which moves us up the stack, right? So for my part, the reason I am in this community, the reason I am interested in this product, the reason I am totally Kubernetes-ing is because of that. I realized that fundamentally infrastructure has to change to be able to support the kind of load that we are seeing. So whether you should Kubernetes, is the API valuable to you? Do you see the value in that or is there more value in continuing whatever paradigm you’re in currently, right? And judging that equally I think is important. [0:28:21.2] JR: Two schools of thoughts that I run into a lot on the API side of thing is whether overtime Kubernetes will become this implementation detail, where 99% of users aren’t even aware of the API to any extent. And then another one that kind of talks about the API is consistent abstraction with tons of flexibility and I think companies are going in both directions like OpenShift from Red Hat is perhaps a good example. Maybe that is one of those layer two platforms more so Brian that you were talking about, right? Where Kubernetes is the platform that was used to build it but the average person that interacts with it might not actually be aware of some of the Kubernetes primitives and things like that. So if we could all get out of our crystal balls for a second here, what do you all think in the future? Do you see the Kubernetes API becoming just a more prevalent industry standard or do you see it fading away in favor of some other abstraction that makes it easier? [0:29:18.3] BL: Oh wow, well I already see it as I don’t have to look too far in the future, right? I can see the Kubernetes API being used in ways that we could not imagine. The idea that I will think of is like KubeVirt. KubeVirt allows you to boot basically pods on whatever implements that it looks like a Kubelet. So it looks like something that could run pods. But the neat thing is that you can use something like KubeVirt with a virtual Kubelet and now you can boot them on other things. So ideas in that space, I don’t know VMware is actually going on that, “Wow, what if we can make virtual machines look like pods inside of Kubernetes? Pretty neat." Azure has definitely led work on this as now, we can just bring up either bring up containers, we can bring up VM’s and you don’t actually need a Kube server anymore. Now but the crazy part is that you can still use a workloads API’s, storage API’s with Kubernetes and it does not matter what backs it. And I’ll throw out one more suggestion. So there is also projects like AWS operators in [inaudible] point and what they allow you to do is to use the Kubernetes API or actually in cluster API, I'll use all three. But I use the Kubernetes API to boot things that aren’t even in the cluster and this will be AWS services or this could be databases across multiple clouds or guess what? More Kubernetes services. Yeah, so we are on that path but I just can’t wait to see what people are going to do with that. The power of Kubernetes is this API, it is just so amazing. [0:30:50.8] DC: For my part, I think is that I agree that the API itself is being extended in all kinds of amazing ways but I think that as I look around in the crystal ball, I think that the API will continue to be foundational to what is happening. If I look at the level two or level three platforms that are coming, I think those will continue to be a thing for enterprises because they will continue to innovate in that space and then they will continue to consume the underlying API structure and that portability Kubernetes exposes to define what that platform might look like for their own purpose, right? Giving them the ability to effectively have a platform as a service that they define themselves but using and under – you know, using a foundational layer that it’s like consistent and extensible and extensive I think that that’s where things are headed. [0:31:38.2] CC: And also more visual tools, I think is in our future. Better, actual visual UI's that people can use I think that’s definitely going to be in our future. [0:31:54.0] BL: So can I talk about that for a second? [0:31:55.9] CC: Please, Brian. [0:31:56.8] BL: I am wearing my octant hoodie today, which is a visual tool for Kubernetes and I will talk now as someone who has gone down this path to actually figure this problem out. As a prediction for the future, I think we’ll start creating better API’s in Kubernetes to allow for more visual things and the reason that I say that this is going to happen and it can’t really happen now is because for inside of an octant and whenever creating new eye views, pretty much happened now what that optic is. But what is going to happen and I see the rumblings from the community, I see the rumblings from K-native community as well is that we are going to start standardizing on conditions and using conditions as a way that we can actually say what’s going on. So let me back it up for a second so I can explain to people what conditions are. So Kubernetes, we think of Kubernetes as YAML and in a typical object in Kubernetes, you are going to have your type meta data. What is this, you are going to have your object meta data, what’s name this and then you are going to have a spec, how is this thing configured and then you are going to have a status and the status generally will say, “Well what is the status of this object? Is it deployment? How many references out? If it is a pod, am I ready to go?" But there is also this concept and status called conditions, which are a list of things that say how your thing, how your object is working. And right now, Kubernetes uses them in two ways, they use them in the negative way and the positive way. I think we are actually going to figure out which one we want to use and we are going to see more API’s just say conditions. And now from a UI developer, from my point of view, now I can just say, “I don’t really care what your optic is. You are going to give me conditions in a format that I know and I can just basically report on those in the status and I can tell you if the thing is working or not.” That is going to come too. And that will be neat because that means that we get basically, we can start building UI’s for free because we just have to learn the pattern. [0:33:52.2] CC: Can you talk a little bit more about conditions? Because this is not something I hear frequently and that I might know but then not know what you are talking about by this name. [0:34:01.1] BL: Oh yeah, I will give you the most popular one. So everything in Kubernetes is an object and that even means that the nodes that your workloads run on, are objects. If you run KubeControl, KubeCuddle, Kube whatever, git nodes, it will show you all the nodes in your cluster if you have permission to see that and if you do KubeCTL, gitnode, node name and then you actually have the YAML output what you will see in the bottom is an object called 'conditions'. And inside of there it will be something like is there sufficient memory, is the node – I actually don’t remember all of them but really what it is, they’re line items that say how this particular object is working. So do I have enough memory? Do I have enough storage? Am I out of actual pods that can be launched on me and what conditions are? It is basically saying, “Hey Brian, what is the weather outside?” I could say it's nice. Or I could be like, “Well, it’s 75 degrees, the wind is light but variable. It is not humid and these are what the conditions are.” They allow the object to specify things about itself that might be useful to someone who is consuming it. [0:35:11.1] CC: All right that was useful. I am actually trying to bring one up here. I never paid attention to that. [0:35:18.6] BL: Yeah and you will see it. So the two ones that are most common right now, there is some competition going on in Kubernetes architecture, trying to figure out how they are going to standardize on this but with pods and nodes you will see conditions on there and those are just telling you what is going on but the problem is that a condition is a type, a message, a status and something else but the problem is that the status can be true of false — oh and a reason, the status can be true or false but sometimes the type is a negative type where it would be like “node not ready”. And then it will say false because it is. And now whenever you’re inspecting that with automated code, you really want the positive condition to be true and the negative condition to be false and this is something that the K-native community is really working on now. They have the whole facility of this thing called duck typing. Which they can actually now pattern-match inside of optics to find all of these neat things. It is actually pretty intriguing. [0:36:19.5] CC: All right, it is interesting because I very much status is everything for objects and that is very much a part of my work flow. But I never noticed that there was some of the objects had conditions. I never noticed that and just a plug, we are very much going to have the K-native folks here to talk about duck typing. I am really excited about that. [0:36:39.9] BL: Yeah, they’re on my team. They’ll be happy to come. [0:36:42.2] CC: Oh yes, they are awesome. [0:36:44.5] JR: So I was thinking maybe we could wrap this conversation up and I think we have acknowledged that “Should I Kubernetes?” is a ridiculously hard question for us to answer for you and we should clearly not be the ones answering it for you but I was wondering if we could give some thoughts around — for the Podlet listener who is sitting at their desk right now thinking like, “Is now the right time for my organization to bring this in?” And I will start with some thought and then open it all up to you. So one common thing I think that I run into a lot is you know your current state and you know your desired state to steal a Kubernetes concept for a moment. And the desired state might be more decoupled services that are more scalable and so on and I think oftentimes at orgs we get a little bit too obsessed with the desired state that we forget about how far the gap is between the current state and the desired state. So as an example, you know maybe your shop’s biggest issue is the primary revenue generating application is a massive dot-net framework monolith, which isn’t exactly that easy to just port over into Kubernetes, right? So if a lot of your friction right now is teams collaborating on this tool, updating this tool, scaling this tool, maybe before even thinking about Kubernetes, being honest with the fact that a lot of value can be derived right now from some amount of application architecture changes. Or even sorry to use a buzzword but some amount of modernization of aspects of that application before you even get to the part of introducing Kubernetes. So that is one common one that I run into with orgs. What are some other kind of suggestion you have for people who are thinking about, “Is it the right time to introduce Kube?” [0:38:28.0] BL: So here is my thought, if you work for a small startup and you’re working on shipping value and you have no Kubernetes experience and staff and you don’t want to use for some reason you don’t want to use the cloud, you know go figure out your other problems then come back. But if you are an enterprise and especially if you work in a central enterprise group and you are thinking about “modernization”, I actually do suggest that you look at Kubernetes and here is the reason why. My guess is that if you’re a business of a certain size, you run VMware in your data center. I am just guessing that because I haven’t been to a company that doesn’t. Because we learned a long time ago that using virtual machines in many cases is way more efficient than just running hardware because what happens is we can’t use our compute capacity. So if you are working for a big company or even like a medium sized company, I don’t think – I am not telling you to run for it but I am telling you to at least have someone go look at it and investigate if this could ultimately be something that could make your stack easier to run. [0:39:31.7] DC: I think I am going to take the kind of the operations perspective. I think if you are in the business of coming up with a way to deploy applications on the servers and you are looking at trying to handle the lifecycle of that and you’re pretty fed up with the tooling that is out there and things like Puppet and Chef and tooling like that and you are looking to try and understand is there something in Kubernetes for me? Is there some model that could help me improve the way that I actually handle a lifecycle of those applications, be they databases or monoliths or compostable services? Any which way you want to look at it like are there tools there that can be expressed. Is the API expressive enough to help me solve some of those problems? In my opinion the answer is yes. I look at things like DaemonSet and the things like scheduling [inaudible] that are exposed by Kubernetes. And there is actually quite a lot of power there, quite a lot of capability in just the traditional model of how do I get this set of applications onto that set of servers or some subset they’re in. So I think it is worth evaluating if that is the place you’re in as an organization and if you are looking at fleets of equipment and trying to handle that magical recipe of multiple applications and dependencies and stuff. See what is the water is like on this side, it is not so bad. [0:40:43.1] CC: Yes, I don’t think there is a way to answer this question. It is Kubernetes for me without actually trying it, giving it a try yourself like really running something of maybe low risk. We can read blogposts to the end of the world but until you actually do it and explore the boundaries is what I would say, try to learn what else can you do that maybe you don’t even need but maybe might become useful once you know you can use. Yeah and another thing is maybe if you are a shop that has one or two apps and you don’t need full blown, everything that Kubernetes has to offer and there is a much more scaled down tool that will help you deploy and run your apps, that’s fine. But if you have more, a certain number, I don’t know what that number would be but multiple apps and multiple services just think about having that uniformity across everything. Because for example, I’ve worked in shops where the QA machines were taking care by a group of dev ops people and the production machines, oh my god they were taken care by other groups and now the different group of people and the two sides of these groups used were different and I as a developer, I had to know everything, you know? How to deploy here, how to deploy there and I had to have my little notes and recipes because whenever I did it – First of all I wasn’t doing that multiple times a day. I had to read through the notes to know what to do. I mean just imagine if it was one platform that I was deploying to with the CLI comments there, it is very easy to use like Kubernetes has, gives us with Kubes ETL. You know you have to think outside of the box. Think about these other operations that you have that people in your company are going to have to do. How is this going to be taught in the future? Having someone who knows your stack because your stack is the same that people in your industry are also using. I think about all of these things not just – I think people have to take it across the entire set of problems. [0:43:01.3] BL: I wanted to mention one more thing and this is we are producing lots of content here with The Podlets and with our coworkers. So I want to actually give a shout out to the TGIK. We want to know what you can do in Kubernetes and you want to have your imagination expanded a little bit. Every Friday we make a new video and actually funny enough, three fourths of the people on this call have actually done this. Where, on Friday, we pick a topic and we go in and it might be something that would be interesting to you or it might not and we are all over the place. We are not just doing applications but we are applications low level, mapping applications on Kubernetes, new things that just came out. We have been doing this for a 101 episodes now. Wow. So you can go look at that if you need some examples of what things you could do on Kubernetes. [0:43:51.4] CC: I am so glad to tgik.io maybe somebody, an English speaker should repeat that because of my accent but let me just say I am so glad you mentioned that Brian because I was sitting here as we are talking and thinking there should be a catalog of used cases of what Kubernetes can do not just like the rice and beans but a lot of different used cases, maybe things that are unique that people don’t think about to use because they haven’t run into that need yet. But they could use it as a pause, okay that would enable me to do these thing that I didn’t even think about. That is such a great catalog of used cases. It is probably the best resource. Somebody say the website again? Duffy what is it? [0:44:38.0] DC: tgik.io and it is every Friday at 1 PM Pacific. [0:44:43.2] CC: And it is live. It’s live and it’s recorded, so it is uploaded to the VMware Cloud Native YouTube and everything is going to be on the show notes too. [0:44:52.4] DC: It’s neat, you can come ask us questions there is a live chat inside of that and you can use that live chat. You can ask us questions. You can give us ideas, all kinds of crazy things just like you can with The Podlets. If you have an idea for an episode or something that you want us to cover or if you have something that you are interested in, you can go to thepodlets.io that will link you to our GitHub pages where you can actually open an issue about things you’d love to hear more about. [0:45:15.0] JR: Awesome and then maybe on that note, Podlets, is there anything else you all would like to add on “Should I Kubernetes?” or do you think we’ve – [0:45:22.3] BL: As best as our bias will allow it I would say. [0:45:27.5] JR: As best as we can. [0:45:27.9] CC: We could go another hour. [0:45:29.9] JR: It’s true. [0:45:30.8] CC: Maybe we’ll have “Should I Kubernetes?” Part 2. [0:45:34.9] JR: All right everyone, well that wraps it up for at least Part 1 of “Should I Kubernetes?” and we appreciate you listening. Thanks so much. Be sure to check out the show notes as Duffy mentioned for some of the articles we read preparing for this episode and TGIK links and all that good stuff. So again, I am Josh Russo signing out, with us also Carlisia Campos. [0:45:55.8] CC: Bye everybody, it was great to be here. [0:45:57.7] JR: Duffy Coolie. [0:45:58.5] DC: Thanks you all. [0:45:59.5] JR: And Brian Lyles. [0:46:00.6] BL: Until next time. [0:46:02.1] JR: Bye. [END OF EPISODE] [0:46:03.5] 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.

If you work in Kubernetes, cloud native, or any other fast-moving ecosystem, you might have found that keeping up to date with new developments can be incredibly challenging. We think this as well, and so we decided to make today’s episode a tribute to that challenge, as well as a space for sharing the best resources and practices we can think of to help manage it. Of course, there are audiences in this space who require information at various levels of depth, and fortunately the resources to suit each one exist. We get into the many different places we go in order to receive information at each part of the spectrum, such as SIG meetings on YouTube, our favorite Twitter authorities, the KubeWeekly blog, and the most helpful books out there. Another big talking point is the idea of habits or practices that can be helpful in consuming all this information, whether it be waiting for the release notes of a new version, tapping into different TLDR summaries of a topic, streaming videos, or actively writing posts as a way of clarifying and integrating newly learned concepts. In the end, there is no easy way, and passionate as you may be about staying in tune, burnout is a real possibility. So whether you’re just scratching the cloud native surface or up to your eyeballs in base code, join us for today’s conversation because you’re bound to find some use in the resources we share. Follow us: https://twitter.com/thepodlets Website: https://thepodlets.io Feeback: info@thepodlets.io https://github.com/vmware-tanzu/thepodlets/issues Hosts: Carlisia Campos Josh Rosso Duffie Cooley Olive Power Michael Gasch Key Points From This Episode: Audiences and different levels of depth that our guests/hosts follow Kubernetes at. What ‘keeping up’ means: merely following news, or actually grasping every new concept? The impossibility of truly keeping up with Kubernetes as it becomes ever more complex. Patterns used to keep up with new developments: the TWKD website, release notes, etc. Twitter’s helpful provision of information, from opinions to tech content, all in one place. How helpful Cindy Sridharan is on Twitter in her orientation toward distributed systems. The active side of keeping up such as writing posts and helping newcomers. More helpful Twitter accounts such as InfoSec. How books provide one source of deep information as opposed to the noise on Twitter. Books: Programming Kubernetes; Managing Kubernetes; Kubernetes Best Practices. Another great resource for seeing Kubernetes in action: the KubeWeeky blog. A call to watch the SIG playlists on the Kubernetes YouTube channel. Tooling: tab management and Michael’s self-built Twitter searcher. Live streaming and CTF live code demonstrations as another resource. How to keep a team updated using platforms like Slack and Zoom. The importance of organizing shared content on Slack. Challenges around not knowing the most important thing to focus on. Cognitive divergence and the temptation of escaping the isolation of coding by socializing. The idea that not seeing keeping up to date as being a personal sacrifice is dangerous. Using multiple different TLDR summaries to cement a concept in one’s brain. Incentives for users rather than developers of projects to share their experiences. The importance of showing appreciation for free resources in keeping motivation up. Quotes: “An audience I haven’t mentioned is the audience that basically just throws up their hands and walks away because there’s just too much to keep track of, right?” — @mauilion [0:05:15] “Maybe it’s because I’m lazy, I don’t know? But I wait until 1.17 drops, then I go to the release notes and really kind of ingest it because I’ve just struggled so much to kind of keep up with the day to day, ‘We merged this, we didn’t merge this,’ and so on.” — @joshrosso [0:10:18] “If you find value in being up to date with these things, just figure out – there are so many resources out there that address these different audiences and figure out what the right measure for you is. You don’t have to go deep on the code on everything.” — @mauilion [0:27:57] “Actually putting the right content in the right channel, at least from a higher level, helps me decide whether I want to like look at that channel today, and stuff that should be in the channel is not kind of in a conversation channel.” — @opowero [0:32:21] “When I see something that is going to give me the fundamentals, like I have other priorities now, I sort of always want to consume that to learn the fundamentals, because I think in the long term phase of, but then I neglect physically what I need to know to do in the moment.” — @carlisia [0:33:39] “Just do nothing, because our brain needs that. We need to not be listening, not be reading, just nothing. Just sit and look at the ceiling. Our brain needs that. Ideally, look at nature, like look outside, look at the air, go for a walk. We need that, because that recharges the brain.” — @carlisia [0:42:38] “Just consuming and keeping up, that doesn’t necessarily mean you don’t give back.” — @embano1 [0:49:32] Links Mentioned in Today’s Episode: Chris Short — https://chrisshort.net/ Last Week in Kubernetes Development — http://lwkd.info/ 1.17 Release Notes — https://kubernetes.io/docs/setup/release/notes/ Release Notes Filter Page — https://relnotes.k8s.io/ Cindy Sridharan on Twitter — https://twitter.com/copyconstruct InfoSec on Twitter — https://twitter.com/infosec?lang=en Programming Kubernetes on Amazon —https://www.amazon.com/Programming-Kubernetes-Developing-Cloud-Native-Applications/dp/1492047104 Managing Kubernetes on Amazon — https://www.amazon.com/Managing-Kubernetes-Operating-Clusters-World/dp/149203391X Brendan Burns on Twitter — https://twitter.com/brendandburns Kubernetes Best Practices on Amazon — https://www.amazon.com/Kubernetes-Best-Practices-Blueprints-Applications-ebook/dp/B081J62KLW/ KubeWeekly — https://kubeweekly.io/ Kubernetes SIG playlists on YouTube — https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCZ2bu0qutTOM0tHYa_jkIwg/playlists Twitch — https://www.twitch.tv/ Honeycomb — https://www.honeycomb.io/ KubeKon EU 2019 — https://events19.linuxfoundation.org/events/kubecon-cloudnativecon-europe-2019/ Aaron Crickenberger on LinkedIn — https://www.linkedin.com/in/spiffxp/ Stephen Augustus on LinkedIn — https://www.linkedin.com/in/stephenaugustus Office Hours — https://github.com/kubernetes/community/blob/master/events/office-hours.md Transcript: EPISODE 17[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][0:00:41.5] DC: Good afternoon everybody and welcome to The Podlets. In this episode, we’re going to talk about, you know, one of the more challenging things that we all have to do, just kind of keep up with cloud native and how we each approach that and what we do. Today, I have a number of cohosts with me, I have Olive Power.[0:00:56.6] OP: Hi.[0:00:57.4] DC: Carlisia Campos.[0:00:58.6] CC: Hi everybody.[0:00:59.9] DC: Josh Rosso.[0:01:01.3] JR: Hey all.[0:01:02.8] DC: And Michael.[0:01:01.1] MICHAEL: Hey, hello.[0:01:04.8] DC: This episode, we’re going to do something a little different than we normally do. In most of our episodes, we try to remain somewhat objective around the problem and the potential solutions for it, rather than prescribing a particular solution. In this episode, however, since we’re talking about how we keep up with all of the crazy things that happen in such a fast ecosystem, we’re going to probably provide quite a number of examples or resources that you yourself could use to drive and to try and keep up to date with what’s happening out there.Be sure to check out the notes after the episode is over at thepodlets.io and you will find a link to the episodes up at the top part, click down to this episode, and check out the notes. There will be tons of resources. Let’s get started.One of the things I think about that’s interesting about keeping up with something like, you know, a Kubernetes or a fast-moving project, regardless of what that project is, whether it’s Kubernetes or, you know, for a while, it was the Mesos that I was following or OpenStack or a number have been big infrastructure projects that have been very fast moving over time and I think what’s interesting is I find that there’s multiple audiences that we kind of address when we think about what it means to ‘keep up,’ right?Keeping up with something like a project is interesting because I feel like there’s an audience that it’s actually very interested in what’s happening with the design goals or the code base of the project, and there’s an audience that is very specific to wanting to understand at a high level – like, “Give me the State of the World report like every month or so just so I can understand generally what’s happening with the project, like is it thriving? Is it starting to kind of wane? Are there big projects that it’s taking on?”And then there’s like, then I feel like there’s an audience somewhere in the middle there where they really want to see people using the project and understand, and know how to learn from those people who are using it so that they can elevate their own use of that project. They’re not particularly interested in the codebase per se but they do want to understand, are they exploring this project at a depth that makes sense for themselves? What do you all think about that?[0:03:02.0] CC: I think one thing that I want to mention is that this episode, it’s not so much about on-boarding people onto Kubernetes and the Kubernetes ecosystem. We are going to have an episode soon to talk specifically about that. How you get going, like get started. I think Duffy mentioned this so we’re going to be talking about how we all keep up with things. Definitely, there are different audiences, even when we’re talking about keeping up.[0:03:32.6] JR: Yeah, I think what’s funny about your audience descriptions, Duffy, is I feel like I’ve actually slid between those audiences a bit, right? It’s funny, back in the day, Kubernetes like one-four, one-five days, I feel like I was much more like, “What’s going on in the code?” Like trying to keep track of like how things are progressing.Now my role is a lot more focused with working with customers and standing up cube and like making a production ready. I feel like I’m a lot more, kind of reactive and more interested to see like, what features have become stable and impact me, you know what I mean? I’m far less in the weeds than I used to be. It’s a super interesting thing.[0:04:08.3] OP: Yeah, I tend to – for my role, I tend to definitely fall into the number three first which is the kind of general keeping an eye on things. Like when you see like interesting articles pop up that maybe have been linked internally because somebody said, “Oh, check out this article. It’s really interesting.”Then you find that you kind of click through five or six articles similar but then you can kind of flip to that kind of like, “Oh, I’m kind of learning lots of good stuff generally about things that folks are doing.” To actually kind of having to figure out some particular solution for one of my customers and so having to go quite deep into that particular feature.You kind of go – I kind of found myself going right in and then back out, right in, going back out depending on kind of where I am on a particular day of the week. It’s kind of a bit tricky. My brain sometimes doesn’t kind of deal with that sort of deep concentration into one particular topic and then back out again. It’s not easy.I find it quite tough actually some of the time.[0:05:05.0] DC: Yeah, I think we can all agree on that. Keeping track of everything is – it’s why the episode, right? How do we even approach it? It seems – I feel like, an audience I haven’t mentioned is the audience that basically just throws up their hands and walks away because there’s just too much to keep track of, right? I feel like we are all that at some point, you know?I get that.[0:05:26.4] OP: That’s why we have Christmas holidays, right? To kind of refresh the brain.[0:05:31.4] CC: Yeah, I maybe purposefully or maybe not even – not trying to keep up because it is too much, it is a lot, and what I’m trying to do is, go deeper on the things that I already, like sort of know. And things that I am working with on a day to day basis. I only really need to know, I feel like, I really only need to know – because I’m not working directly with customers.My scope is very well defined and I feel that I really only need to know whenever there’s a new Kubernetes release. I need to know what the release is. We usually – every once in a while, we update our project to the – we bump up the Kubernetes release that we are working against and in general, yeah, it’s like if things come my way, if it’s interesting, I’ll take a look, but mostly, I feel like I work in a spiral.If I’m doing codes related to controllers and there’s a conference talk about controllers then okay, let me take a look at this to maybe learn how to design this thing better, implement in a better way if I know more about it. If I’m doing, looking at CRDs, same thing. I really like conference talks for education but that’s not so much keeping up with what’s new. Are we talking about educating ourselves with things that we don’t know about?Things that we don’t know about. Or are we talking about just news?[0:07:15.6] JR: I think it’s everything. That’s a great question. One of my other questions when we were starting to talk about this was like, what is keeping up even mean, right? I mean, does it mean, where do you find resources that are interesting that keep you interested in the project or are you looking for resources that just kind of keep you up to date with what’s changing? It’s a great question.[0:07:36.2] MICHAEL: Actually, there was some problem that I faced when I edit the links that I wanted to share in the show. I started writing the links and then I realized, “Well, most of the stuff is not keeping up with news, it’s actually understanding the technology,” because I cannot keep up.What does help me in understanding specific areas, when I need to dig into them and I think back five or four years into early days of Kubernetes, it was easy to catch up by the time because it was just about Kubernetes. Later right, it became this platform. We realized that it actually this platform thing. Then we extended Kubernetes and then we realized there are CICD-related stuff and operations and monitoring and so the whole ecosystem grew. The landscape grew so much that today, it’s impossible to keep up, right?I think I’m interested in all those patterns that you have developed over the years that help you to manage this, let’s say complexity or stream of information.[0:08:33.9] DC: Yeah, I agree. This year, I was thinking about putting up a talk with Chris Short, it was actually last year. That was about kind of on the same topic of keeping up with it. In that, I kind of did a little research into how that happens and I feel like some of the interesting stuff that came out of that was that there are certain patterns that a project might take on that make it easier or more approachable to, you know, stay in contact with what’s happening.If we take Kubernetes as an example, there are a number of websites I think that pretty much everybody here kind of follows to some degree, that helps, sort of, kind of, address those different audiences that we were talking about.One of the ones that I’ve actually been really impressed with is LWKD which stands for Last Week in Kubernetes Development, and as you can imagine, this is really kind of focused on, kind of – I wouldn’t say it’s like super deep on the development but it is watching for things that are changing, that are interesting to the people who are curating that particular blog post, right?They’ll have things in there like, you know, code freezes coming up on this date, IPV6, IPV4, duel stack is merging, they’ll have like some of the big mile markers that are happening in a particular release and where they are in time as it relates to that release. I think if that’s a great pattern and I think that – it’s a very narrow audience, right? It would really only be interesting to people who are interested in, or who are caught up in the code base, or just trying to understand like, maybe I want a preview of what the release notes might look like, so I might just like look for like a weekly kind of thing.[0:10:03.4] JR: Yeah, speaking of the release notes, right? It’s funny. I do get to look at Last Week in Kubernetes development every now and then. It’s an awesome resource but I’ve gotten to the point where the release notes are probably my most important thing for staying up to date.Maybe it’s because I’m lazy, I don’t know, but I wait till 1.17 drops, then I go to the release notes and really kind of ingest it because I’ve just struggled so much to kind of keep up with the day to day, “We merged this, we didn’t merge this,” and so on. That has been a huge help for me, you know, day to day, week to week, month to month.[0:10:37.0] MICHAEL: Well, what was also helpful just on the release notes that the new filter webpage that they put out in 1.15, starting 1.15. Have you all seen that?[0:10:44.4] JR: I’ve never heard of it.[0:10:45.4] DC: Rel dot, whatever it is. Rel dot –[0:10:47.7] MICHAEL: Yeah, if you can share it Duffy, that’s super useful. Especially like if you want to compare releases and features added and –[0:10:55.2] DC: I’ll have to dig it up as well. I don’t remember exactly what –[0:10:56.7] CC: I’m sorry, say? Which one is that again?[0:10:59.1] MICHAEL: The real notes. I’ll put it in the hackMD.[0:11:02.8] DC: Yeah relnotes.k8s.io which is an interesting one because it’s sort of like a comparison engine that allows you to kind of compare what it would have featured like how to feature relates to different versions of stuff.[0:11:14.4] CC: That’s great. I cannot encourage enough for the listeners to look at the show notes because we have a little document here that we – can I? The resources are amazing. There are so many things that I have never even heard about and sound great – is – I want to go to this whole entire list. Definitely check it out. We might not have time to mention every single thing. I don’t want people to miss on all the goodness that’s been put together.[0:11:48.7] DC: Agreed, and again, if you’re looking for those notes, you just go to the podlets.io. Click on ‘episodes’ at the right? And then look for this episode and you’ll find that it’s there.[0:11:58.0] CC: I can see that a lot of the content in those notes are like Twitter feeds. Speaking personally, I’m not sure I’m at the stage yet where I learn a lot about Twitter feeds in terms of technical content. Do you guys find that it’s more around people’s thoughts around certain things so thought-provoking things around Kubernetes and the ecosystem rather than actual technical content. I mean, that’s my experience so far.But looking at those Twitter feeds, maybe I guess I might need to follow some of those feeds. What do you all think?[0:12:30.0] MICHAEL: Do you mean the tweets are from those like learn [inaudible 0:12:32] or the person to be tweets?[0:12:35.3] OP: You’ve listed some of there, Michael, and some sort of.[0:12:37.6] MICHAEL: I just wanted to get some clarity. The reason I listed so many Twitter accounts there is because Twitter is my only kind of newsfeed if you will. I used Feedly and RSS and others before and emails and threads. But then I just got overwhelmed and I had this feeling of missing out on all of those times.That’s why I said, “Okay, let’s just use Twitter.” To your question, most of these accounts are people who have been in the Kubernetes space for very long, either running Kubernetes, developing on Kubernetes, having opinions about Kubernetes.Opinions in general on topics related to cloud native because we didn’t want to make the search just about Kubernetes. Most of these people, I really appreciate their thoughts and some of them also just a retweet things that they see which I missed somewhere else and not necessarily just opinions. I think It’s a good mix of these accounts, providing options, some guidance, and also just news that I miss out on because not being on the other channels.[0:13:35.6] OP: Yeah, I agree because sometimes you can kind of read – I tend to require a lot of sort of blog posts and sort of web posts which, you know, without realizing it can be kind of opinionated and then, you know, it’s nice to then see some Twitter feeds that kind of actually just kind of give like a couple of words, a kind of a different view which sometimes makes me think “Okay, I understand that topic from a certain article that I’ve read, it’s just really nice to hear a kind of a different take on it through Twitter.”[0:14:03.0] CC: I think some of the accounts, like fewer of the accounts – and there are a bunch of things that – there are listed accounts here that I didn’t know before so I’ll check them out. I think fewer of the accounts are providing technical content, for example, Cindy Sridharan, not pronouncing it correctly but Cindy is great, she puts out a lot of technical content and a lot of technical opinion and observations that is really good to consume. I wish I had time to just read her blog posts and Twitter alone.She’s very oriented towards distributed systems in general, so she’s not even specific just Kubernetes. Most of the accounts are very opinionated and the benefit for me is that sometimes I catch people talking about something that I didn’t even know was a thing. It’s like, “Oh, this is a thing I should know about for the work that I do,” and like Michael was saying, you know, sometimes I catch retweets that I didn’t catch before and I just – I’m not checking out places, I’m not checking – hash tagging Reddit.I rely on Twitter and the people who I follow to – if there is a blog post that sounds important, I just trust that somebody would, that I’m going to see it multiple times until like, “Okay, this is content that is related to something and I’m working on, that I want to get better at.” Then I’ll go and look at it. My sources are mainly Twitter and YouTube and it’s funny because I love blog posts but it’s like I haven’t been reading them because it takes a long time to read a blogpost.I give preference to video because I can just listen while I’m doing stuff. I sort of stopped reading blog post which is sad. I also want to start writing posts because it’s so helpful for me to engrain the things that I’m learning and hopefully it will be helpful to other people too. But in any case, go Duffy.[0:16:02.8] DC: A number of people that I follow – I have been cultivating my feed pretty carefully, trying to get a broad perspective of technical stuff that’s happening. But also I’ve been trying to develop my persona on Twitter a bit more, right? I’m actually trying to build my audience there. What’s interesting there is I’ve been trying to – to that end, what I’ve been doing is like trying to amplify voices that I think aren’t heard enough out there, right?If I see an article by somebody who is just coming into Kubernetes. or just coming into distributed systems and they’ve taken an effort to really lay out something that they found really interesting about pretty much anything, right? I’m like, “Okay, that’s pretty awesome,” and I’ll try to amplify that, right? Sometimes I even get involved or I’ll, not directly in public on Twitter but I’ll offer to help edit or help provide whatever our guidance I can provide around that sort of stuff.If I see people like having a difficult time with a particular project or something like that, I’ll reach out privately and say, “Hey, can I help you with it so you can go out there and do a great job,” you know? That is something I love to do. I think your point about like not necessarily going at Twitter for the deep knowledge stuff but more just like making sure that you have a broad enough awareness of what’s happening in different ecosystems that you’re not surprised by the things when the things change, right?A couple of other people that I follow are Akira Asuta, I can’t say enough about that person. They are amazing, they have been doing like, incredibly deep security stuff as it relates to containerization and stuff like that for quite a while. I’m always like, learning brand new things to me when following folks like that. I’ve been kind of getting more interested in InfoSec Twitter lately, learning how people kind of approach that problem.Also some of the bias arounds that which has been pretty interesting. Both the bias against people who are in InfoSec which seems weird to me. Also, how InfoSec approaches a problem, like do they put it like a learning experience or they approach it like an attack experience.It’s been kind of fascinating to get in there.[0:18:08.1] OP: You know, I kind of use Twitter as well for some of this stuff but you know, books are kind of a resource as well but in my head, kind of like at the opposite scale. You know, I obviously don’t read as many books as I read twitter feeds, right? It’s just kind of like, with Twitter, you can kind of digest the whole of the stuff and with books, it’s kind of like – I tend to be trying – because I know, I’m only going to read – like I’m only going to read maybe one/two books a year.I’ve kind of like – as I said before, blog posts seem to take up my reading time and books kind of tend to be for like on airplanes and stuff. So if – they’re just kind of two opposite resources for me but I find actually, the content of books are probably stuff that I digest a bit more because you know, it’s kind of like, I don’t know, back to the old days. It’s kind of a physical thing on hand and I can kind of read it and digest it a bit more than the kind of throwaway stuff that kind of keeps on Twitter.Because to be honest, I don’t know what’s on Twitter. Who is kind of a person to listen to or who is not or who is – I just try and form my own opinions and then, again, it kind of gets a bit overwhelming, because it’s a lot of content just streaming through continuously, whereas a book, it’s kind of like just one source of information that is kind of like a bit more personal that I can digest a bit more.[0:19:18.1] JR: Any particular book recommendation in 2019, Olive, that you found particularly interesting?[0:19:23.5] OP: I’m still reading, and it’s on the list for the episode notes actually, Programming Kubernetes. I just want to kind of get into that sort of CRD sort of mindset a bit. I think that’s kind of an area that’s interesting and an area that a lot of people will want to use in their organizations, right, because it’s going to do some of the extensibility to Kubernetes that’s just not there out of the box and everybody wants something that’s not out of the box or always in my experience.[0:19:47.4] MICHAEL: I found the Managing Kubernetes, I think was it, by – from Brendan Burns and some other folks which was just released I think in the end of last year. Super deep and that is kind of the opposite to the Programming Kubernetes, because I like that as well. That is more geared towards understanding architecture and operations.Operational concepts –[0:20:05.0] OP: They’re probably the two books I’ve read.[0:20:08.4] MICHAEL: Okay.[0:20:08.9] OP: One a year, remember?[0:20:11.4] MICHAEL: Yeah.[0:20:14.6] OP: Prolific reading.[0:20:19.6] CC: I think if you know what you need to learn about cloud native or Kubernetes, there’s amazing books out there, and if you are still exploring Kubernetes and trying to learn, I cannot recommend this book enough. If you are watching this on YouTube, you’ll see the cover. It’s called Kubernetes Best Practices because it’s about Kubernetes best practices but what they did simultaneously and maybe they didn’t even realize is just they gave a map for the entire thing.You go, “Oh, these are all the elements in Kubernetes.” Of course, it’s saying, “Okay, this is the best way to go about setting the stuff up,” and this is relatively thin but I just think that going through this book, you get really fast overview of the elements in Kubernetes. Then you can go to other books like Managing Kubernetes to go deep and understand all of the knobs and switches.[0:21:24.6] DC: I want to bring it back to the patterns that we see successful projects. Projects that you think are approachable but, you know, projects that are out there that make it easy for you to kind of stay – or easier at least to stay up to date with them, what some of those patterns are that you think are useful for projects.We’re talking about like having a couple of different entry points from kind of a weekly report mechanism, we’ve talked about the one that LWKD is, I don’t think we got to talk about KubeWeekly which is actually a weekly blog that is actually curated by a lot of the CNCF ambassadors. KubeWeekly is also broken up in different sections, so like sometimes they’ll just talk about – but they’re actually going out actively and trying to find articles of people using Kubernetes and then trying to post those.If you’re interested in understanding how people are actually out there using it, then that’s a great place to go find articles that are kind of related to that. What are some other patterns that we see that are out there that are useful for books?[0:22:27.6] DC: One that I really like. Kubernetes, for everyone listening has this notion of special interest groups, SIGs oftentimes. They’re focused on certain areas of the project. There’s some for networking and storage and life cycles of clusters and what’s amazing, I try to watch them somewhat weekly, I don’t always succeed.They’re all on YouTube and if you go to the Kubernetes project YouTube, there’s playlists for every SIG. A lot of times I’m doing work relating to life cycles of clusters. I’ll open up the cluster life cycle playlist and I’ll just watch the weekly meetings. While it doesn’t always pertain to completely to me, it lets me understand kind of where the developers and contributor’s heads are at and where they’re kind of headed with a lot of different things.There’s a link to that as well if anyone wants to check it out.[0:23:15.9] MICHAEL: Exactly, to add to that. If you don’t have the time to watch the videos, the meeting notes that these gentlemen and women put together are amazing. Usually, I just scroll through and if it’s something to triggers, I go into the episode and watch it.[0:23:28.7] OP: I almost feel like we should talk about tooling to handle all of this stuff, for example, right now, I think I have 200 tabs opened. I just started learning about some chrome extensions to manage tabs. I haven’t started really using them but I need. I don’t have a good system. My system is open a video that I’m pretty sure I want to watch and just get to that tab eventually until something happens in my chrome goes bust and I lose everything.I wanted to mention that when we say watch YouTube, some things you don’t need to sit there and actually watch, you can just listen to it and if you pay for the five bucks for YouTube premium – I don’t get a commission you people, but I’m just saying, for me, it’s so helpful. I can just turn off you know, put my phone on my pocket and keep listening to it without having to have the phone open and on the whole time. It’s very handy.It’s just like listening to a podcast. I also listen to podcasts lots of days.[0:24:35.1] MICHAEL: For tooling, since I’m just mostly on Twitter and by the time I was using or starting to use Twitter, they didn’t have this bookmark function, so I was basically abusing likes or favorites at the time, I think, to bookmark. What I realized later, my bookmarks grew, well, my likes grew.I wanted to go back and find something but that through the Twitter search was just impossible. I blew the tiny little go tool, kind of my first exercise there to just parse my likes and then use JQ because it’s all JSON to query and manipulate the stuff. I almost use it every day because I was like, that was a talk or blog post about scheduling and just correct for scheduling and the likes.I’m sure there’s a better tool or way of doing that but for me, that’s mine too. Because that’s my workflow.[0:25:27.6] DC: Both of the two blogs that you mentioned both KubeWeekly and LWKD, they both have the ability to take – you can submit stories to them. If you come across things that are interesting and you’d like to put that up on an aggregator somewhere, this is one of the ways to kind of solve that problem because at least if it gets cleared up on an aggregator, you know that you go back to the aggregator to see it, so that helps.Some other ones I’ve seen out there, I’ve seen people, I’ve seen a number of interesting startups now, starting to kind of like put out a podcast or – and I have started to see a number of people like you know, engaging with Twitch and also doing things like what we do with TJK.io which is like have sort of some kind of a weekly thing where you are just hacking on stuff live and just exploring it whether that is related to – if you think of about TJK is we’re going to do without being related necessarily to anything that we are doing at VMware just anything to do with the community but obviously if you are working for one of the small companies like Honeycomb or some other company.A smaller kind of startup, you can really just get people more aware of that because for some reason people love to watch others code. They love to understand how people go through that, what are their thought process is and I find it awesome as well. I think it is amazing to me how big a draw that is, you know?[0:26:41.1] OP: And is there lots of them out there Duffy? Is that kind of an easy searchable thing or is it like how do you know those things are going on?[0:26:48.4] DC: Oddly enough Twitter, most of the time, yeah. I mean, most of the time I see that kind of stuff happening on Twitter, like somebody will like – I will scope with this or a number of other people will say, “Hey, I am going to do a live stream during this period of time on this,” and I have actually seen a number of people doing live streams on CTFs, which are capture the flags. That one’s really been fascinating to me because it has been how do people think about approaching the security of an application.Like where do they look for weak spots and how do you determine, how do you approach that kind of a problem, which is fascinating. So yeah, I think it is important to remember that like you know, you are not the only one trying to keep up to date with all of this stuff, right? The one thing we all have said pretty consistently here is that it is a lot, and it is not just Kubernetes, right? Like any fast moving project. It could be your favorite Ruby module that has 200 contributors, right?It doesn’t matter what it is, it is a lot to keep a track of, and it represents some of that cognitive overheads that you have to think about. That is a lot to take on. Even if it is overwhelming, if you find value in being up to date with these things, just figure out – there are so many resources out there that address these different audiences and figure out what the right measure for you is. You don’t have to go deep on the code on everything.Sometimes it might be better to just try and find a source of information that gives you a high enough of a view. Maybe you are looking at the blog posts that come out on Kubernetes.io every release and you are just looking at the release notes and if you just read the release notes every release, that is already miles ahead of what I have seen a lot of folks out there when they are starting to ask me questions about how do you keep up to date.[0:28:35.9] JR: I’m curious, we have been talking a lot about keeping up as an individual. Do you all have strategies for how you help, let’s say your overall team, keep up with all the things that are going on? To give an example, Duffy, Olive and myself, at least at one point, were on the same team and we’d go out to disparate customers and see all of these different new things that they are trying to do or new projects that they are using.So we’d have to think about how do we get together and share that internally to make sure we are bringing the whole team along with what is going on in the ecosystem especially from a customer perspective. I know one of the ways that we do that is having demos and things of that nature that we share weekly. Are there other strategies that you all use with your teams to kind of share interesting information and news?[0:29:25.5] M: So what we do is mostly the way we share in our team, and we are a small team. We use Slack. We pre-filter in terms of like if there is stuff that I think is valuable for me and probably not for the whole team – obviously we are not going to share, but I think if it is related to something that the team has or to come grant and then I will share on Slack but we don’t have any formal way. I know people use some reports, weekly reports, or other platforms to distribute but we just use Slack.[0:29:53.0] DC: I think one of the things – one of the patters that we had at [inaudible 0:29:54] that I thought was actually super helpful was that we would engage a conversation. “I learned a cool new thing about whatever today,” and so we would say, “I am going to – ” and then we would start a Zoom call around that and then people could join if they wanted to, to be a part of the live discussion or not, and if they didn’t, they would still be able to see a recorded Zoom pop up in the channel later on.So even if your time zones don’t line up, like I know it is 2 AM or 3 AM or something like that for Olive right now, you can still go back to those recorded sessions and you’ll just see it on your daily Slack stuff. You would be able to see, “Oh there was a conversation about whether you should deploy Kubernetes crossed availibility zones or not. I would like to go see that,” and see what the inputs were, and so that can be helpful.[0:30:42.5] JR: Yeah, that is a super interesting observation. It is almost like remote-first teams that are used to these processes of recording everything and putting it in a Google doc. They are more equipped for that information sharing perhaps than like the water cooler conversations you’d have in the office.[0:30:58.5] OP: And on the Slack or any of the communication tool, we have different channels because we are all in lots of channels and to have channels dedicated to a particular subject is absolutely the way to go because otherwise in my previous company that seem to be kind of one main channel that all the architect used to discussed everything on and you know sometimes you join and you’re like, “What is everybody talking about?”There would be literally about a hundred messages on some sort of theme that I have never heard of. So you come away from that thinking that, “That is the main channel. Where is the bit – is there messages in the middle that I missed that were just normal discussions as opposed to in around the technical stuff,” and so it made me a bit sad, right? I would be like, “I haven’t understood something and there is a whole load of stuff on this channel that I don’t understand.”But it is the kind of central channel for everyone. So I think you end up then start looking up things that they are discussing and then realizing actually that is not really anything related to what I need to know about today or next week. It might be something for the future but I’ve got other stuff to focus on. So my point is that those communication channels for me sometimes can make me feel a little bit behind the curve or very much sort of reactive in trying to jump on things that are actually not really anything to do with me for me now and wasting my time slightly and kind of messing with my head a little bit in that like, “I really need to try and focus out stuff,” and actually putting the right content in the right channel, at least from a higher level, helps me decide whether I want to like look at that channel today, and stuff that should be in the channel is not kind of in a conversation channel. So organization of where that content is, is important to me.[0:32:37.6] CC: I am so in the same page with you Olive. That is the way my brain works as well. I want to have multiple channels, like if we are talking about Slack or any chat tool, but some people have such aversion to multiple channels. They really have a hard time dealing with too many – like testing their threshold of what they think is too many channels. So I am always mindful too, like it has to work for everybody but if it was up to me, there will be one channel per topic. So I know where to focus on.But you said something that is so interesting. How do we even just – like you were saying in the context of channel, multiple channels, and I go, if I need to pay attention to this this week as oppose to like, I don’t need to look at this until some time in the future. How do we even decide what we focus on that is useful for us in the moment versus it would be good for me to know but I don’t need to know right now.I am super bad at this. When I see something that is going to give me the fundamentals, like I have other priorities now, I sort of always want to consume that to learn the fundamentals because I think in the long term phase of, but then I neglect physically what I need to know to do in the moment and I am trying to sort of fish there and get focused on in the moment things. Anybody else have a hard time?[0:34:04.5] DC: You are not alone on that, yeah.[0:34:06.7] CC: It is terrible.[0:34:08.3] MICHAEL: Something that I wish I would do more often as like being a good citizen is like when you read a lot, probably 90% of my time is not writing but reading, maybe even more and then I share and then on Twitter, the tweet for them the most successful ones in terms of retweets or likes are the ones where I do like TLDR’s or some screen captures like too long to read. Where people don’t have the time, they might want to read the article but they don’t have the time.But if you put in like a TLDR like either a tweet or a thread on it, a lot of people would jump onto it because they can just easily capture it and they can still read the full article if they want but that is something that I learned and it is pretty – what is the right word? Helpful to my followers and the community but I just don’t do it that often unfortunately. If I am writing, summarizing, writing, I kind of remember. That is how the brain works. It is a nice side effect.[0:35:04.9] DC: I was saying, this is definitely one of those things where you can be the change you want to see if you, you know?[0:35:08.6] M: Yeah, I know.[0:35:10.0] DC: This is awesome. I would also say that what you just raised Carlisia is like a super valid point. I mean like not everybody’s brain works the same way, right? There are people who are neuro-divergent. There are people who think very linearly and they are very comfortable with that and there are people who don’t. So it is a struggle I think regardless of how your brain is wired to understand to how to prioritize the attention you will give any given subject.In some cases, your brain is not wired – your brain is almost wired against that whole idea, like you are just not set up for success when it comes to figuring out how to prioritize your attention.[0:35:49.0] CC: You hit the nail on the head. We are so set up for failure in that department because there are so many interesting conversations and you want to hop in and you want to be a part of the conversation and part of the group and socialize. Our work is so isolating to really put our heads down and just work, it can be so isolating. So it is great to participate in conversations out there even if it is for only via Twitter. I mean, obviously we are very biased towards Twitter here in this group.But I am not even this on Twitter so just keep that in mind that we are cognizant of that but in any case, I don’t know what the answer is but what I am trying always to cut down on that, those social activities that seem so appealing. I don’t know how to do that from working out.[0:36:43.9] JR: I am in the same boat. 2020, I am hoping to let more of that go and to your point, it is not that there is no value in it. It is just, I don’t know, I am not deriving the same amount of quality out of it because I am so just multiplexed all over the place, right? So we’ll see how it goes.[0:36:59.9] CC: Oh if any listener has opinions and obviously it seems that all of us are helpless in that department. Share with us, please.[0:37:12.5] DC: It is a tricky one. I think it is also interesting because I find that when we talk about things like work-life balance, we think of the idea of maybe work-life balance is that when you come at the end of the day and you go home and you don’t think about work, right? Sometimes we think that work-life balance means that you have a certain amount of time off that you can actually spend with your family and your friends or your community, what have you, and not be engaging on multiple fronts.Just be that – have that be your focus, but when it comes to things like keeping up, when it comes to things like learning or elevating your education and stuff, it seems like, for the most part, and this is just my own assumption, I am curious how you all feel about this, that we don’t – that that doesn’t enter into it, right? Your personal time is totally on the table when it comes to how do you keep up with these things. We don’t even think about it that way, right?I know I personally don’t. I definitely have to do more and cut back on the amount of time that I spend reading. I am right there with Michael on 90% of my time when my eyes are open, they are either reading or staring up on the sky while I try to think about what I am going to write next. You know one way or the other it is like that is what I am doing.[0:38:24.0] CC: Yeah.[0:38:25.1] MICHAEL: I noticed last year on my Twitter feed, more people than the years before will complain about like personal burn out. I saw a pattern, like reading those people’s tweets, I saw a pattern there. It wasn’t really like a spiral and then they realized and they shot down like deleted Twitter from their phones or any messaging and other stuff, and I think I am at the point where I also need to do that when it comes to vacation PDO, or whatever.Because I am just like, as you said Duffy, my free time is on the table when it comes to Twitter and catching up and keeping up because work-life balance in my mind is not work but what is not work for like – Kubernetes is exciting, adding in all the space, like what is not work there? I need to really get better at that because I think I might end in the same spiral of just soaking in more until I just –[0:39:17.7] CC: Yeah and like Josh said, it is not that there isn’t a value. Obviously we derive a huge value, that is why we’re on it, but you have to weigh things and what are your goals and is that the best way to your goals from where you are right now, and maybe you know, Twitter you use for a while, ramp up your knowledge, ramp up the connections because it is great for making connections, and then you step back and focus on something else, then to go on a cycle.This is how I am thinking now. It is just like what Olive was saying, you know, books are great, blog posts are great, and I absolutely agree with that. It is just that I don’t have even the time and when I have the time, I would be reading code and I would be reading things all day long, it is just really tiring for me at the end of the day to sit down and read more. I want to invest in learning how to speed read to solve that problem because I read a lot of books and blog posts. So something on my list.[0:40:22.8] DC: One of the biggest tips on speed reading I ever learned is that frequently when you read you think of saying the word and if you can get out of that habit, if you get out of the habit of saying the word even with your mouth or you just get out of that habit that will already increase the quickness of what you read.[0:40:39.5] CC: That is so interesting.[0:40:41.4] DC: Yeah, that is a trippy one.[0:40:43.1] CC: Because I think being bilingual, I totally like – that really helps me understand things, by saying the words.[0:40:52.9] DC: I think the point that we are all working around here is, there is a great panel that came out at KubeCon EU in 2019 was put on by Aaron Crickenberger, Esther McNaMara, Steven Augustus, these folks are all very high output people. I mean, they do a lot of stuff especially with regard to community and so they put on a panel that was talking about burn out and self-care and I think that it is definitely worth checking that one out.And actually also thinking about what keeping up means to you and making sure that you are measuring that against your ability to sustain, is incredibly important, right? I feel like keeping up is one of those subjects where we end up – it is almost insidious in its way to – it is a thing that we can just do all the time. We can just spend all of our time, any free moment that you have, you are sitting on the bus, you are trying to keep up with things.And because that happens so much, I feel like that is sort of one of the ways that we can feel burnt out as you are seeing today. We can feel like we did a lot of things but there was no real result to it and keep in mind that that’s part of it, right? Like when you are thinking about how we are keeping up with it, make sure that the value to your time is still something that you have some cognizance about, that you have some thought about, like is it worth it to me to just spend this six hours reading everything, right?Or would it be better for me to spend some amount of time just not reading, you know? Like doing something else, you know? Like bake a cake for crying out loud, you know?[0:42:29.5] CC: Something that a lot of times we don’t allow ourselves to do and I decided to speak for everybody I am sorry, I just do nothing, because our brain needs that. We need to not be listening, not be reading, just nothing. Just sit and look at the ceiling, our brain needs that. Ideally, look at nature, like look outside, look at the air, go for a walk. We need that, because that recharges the brain. Anyway, one thing also that I want to bring up, maybe we can mention real quick because we are coming up at the top of the hour.How do people, projects, how do we really help the users of those projects to be up to date with what they are doing?[0:43:18.4] DC: Well yeah I mean this is the different patterns that we are talking about. So I think the blog posts help. I like the idea of having blogs that are targeted towards different audiences. I like the idea of having an aggregate here for putting up a big project. I mean obviously Kubernetes is such a huge ecosystem that if you have things like KubeWeekly and I know that there are actually quite a number of things out there that try and do this.But if we can kind of agree on one like KubeWeekly I think is a pretty good one because it is actually run by the CNCF. So it kind of falls within that sort of governance as a model but having an aggregator where you can actually produce content or curate content as it relates to your project that’s helpful, and then office-hours I think is also helpful to Josh’s point. I mean office-hours and SIG hours are very similar things. I mean like office-hours there like how to developers think about what’s happening with the space.This is an opportunity for you as an end user to show up and ask questions, those sorts of patterns I think all are incredibly helpful as a project to figure out there to those things.[0:44:17.8] OP: Yeah, I know summary articles or the sort of TLDRs that Michael mentioned earlier, I think I need more of those things in my life because I do a lot of reading, because I think my brain is a bit weird in that I need to read something about five or six different times from five or six different articles for it to sort of frame in my head.So what I am trying to – like for 2020, I have almost tried to do this, is like if I think somebody knows all about this and it would save me reading those five, six, seven articles and if that person has the time, I try and sort of reach out to them and say, “Listen, have you got 20 minutes or so to explain this topic to me? Can I ask you questions about it?” It just saves me, saves my eyes reading the screen, and it just saves me time. I just need a TLDR summary of a project or a feature or something just so I can know what it is all about in my head and talk fairly sort of confidently about it.If I need to get in front and down under the weeds then there is more reading to kind of do for me maybe the coding on the technical side, but sometimes I can’t figure out what this feature sort of means and what is its use case in the real world and I have to read through lots of articles and sometimes kind of vendor specific ones and they’ve got a different slant than maybe an independent one and trying to marry those bits up my head is a bit hard for me and there is sort of wealth of information.So if you are interested in a topic and there is hundreds of articles and you start reading four or five and they are all slightly different, eventually you figure out that – you are confident and I understand what that product is about but it has taken a long time to get there and it is taken a lot of reading time. So TLDRs is like really work and I think as Josh mentioned before, we have this thing internally where we do bench demos.And that is like a TLDR and a show and tell really quickly, like, “This is what this does and this is why we need to know about it and this is why our customers needs to know about it, the end,” you know? And that’s really, really useful because that just saves a whole bunch of people a whole bunch of time figuring out A, whether they need to know about it and B, actually now understanding that product or feature at the end of the five, 10 minutes which is what they typically are. So they are very useful short snippets of information. Maybe we are back to Twitter.[0:46:37.8] JR: Similar to the idea of giving a demo Olive, you made me think of something and that is that I think one of the ways that I keep up with the space is actually through writing along with reading and I think the notion of like – and this admittedly takes up time and the whole quality of life conversation comes in but using writing to help develop your thoughts and kind of aggregate all of these crazy inputs and try to be somewhat concise, which I know I struggle with, around something I’ve learned.It’s helped me a ton and then that asset kind of becomes reusable to share with other people the thing that you wrote. So for people listening to this I guess maybe a call to action for 2020 if that is your style as well, consider starting to write yourself and becoming a resource, right? Because even if you are new to this space, you’d be amazed at just how writing from your perspective can help other people.[0:47:26.3] DC: I think another one that I actually have been impressed with lately is that a number of consumer companies like people out there like Lyft and companies like that have actually started to surface engineering blogs around how they are using technology and how they are using technology to solve things, which I think, as a service provider, as somebody who is involved in the community of Kubernetes, I find those to be incredibly valuable because I get to actually see how those things are doing.I mean at the same time, I see things like – we talked about KubeCon, which is a convention that they have every year. Obviously the project is large enough to support it but there is actually an incentive if you are a consumer of that project to go and talk about how you are using it, right? It is incentivized in that it is more likely your talk will be accepted if you are a consumer of the product than somebody building it, right? We hear from people building it all the time.I love that idea of incentivizing people who are using this thing get out there and talk about it or share their ideas about it or how they are using it, what problems did it solve for them. That is critical I think.[0:48:31.0] CC: Can I also make a suggestion – is to not so much following on the thread that we are talking about just now but kind of on the general thread of this episode. If you have resources that you do use to keep up with things, stop this recording right now and go and give them a like, give them a follow, give them a thumbs up, show somehow appreciation because what Duffy said just now, he was saying, “Oh it is so helpful when I read a blog post.”But people who are writing, they want to know that. So give them some indication, it counts a lot. It takes a lot of effort to sit down and write something or produce a podcast and if you take any, derive any benefit from it, show appreciation. It motivates people to keep doing it.[0:49:26.4] DC: Yeah, agreed.[0:49:27.9] M: I think that is a great bind maybe to close off this episode because it reiterates that just consuming and keeping up that doesn’t necessarily mean you don’t give back, right? So this is a way of giving back, which is really important to keep that flow and creativeness.[0:49:41.8] CC: I go through a lot of YouTube videos and sometimes I just play one after the other but sometimes, you know, I have been making a point of going back and liking it. Liking the ones that I like – obviously I don’t like everything. I mean things that I don’t like I don’t listen in but you know what I mean? It takes no effort but just so people know, “OK, you did a good job here.” By the way, go to iTunes and rate us. So we will know that you liked it and it will help people find our show, our podcast, and if you are watching us on YouTube, give us a like.[0:50:16.1] DC: All right, well unless anybody has any final thoughts, that is what we wanted to cover this session. So thank you all very, very much and I look forward to seeing you next week.[0:50:25.3] M: Bye-bye.[0:50:26.3] CC: Thank you so much.[0:50:27.4] OP: Bye.[0:50:28.1] JR: Bye.[END OF EPISODE][0:50:28.7] 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.

Replay of my interview with the engaging storyteller Liz Carlisle from December 2015 because she asks the important question if we know these are best farming practices why aren’t we following them? I am very excited to introduce my guest today who has written the (http://lentilunderground.com) , one of the best books I have read this year about some amazing Montana Farmers. A great story teller, I think you will be inspired not just by the tale of these visionary and dedicated farmers who stuck with growing organic lentils against some amazing odds, but you will also learn about how simply adding a new food like lentils to your diet can help change the world! (http://amzn.to/1QDkvgG) Liz Carlisle is a fellow at the United States Senator Jon Tester (http://www.tester.senate.gov) . (https://organicgardenerpodcast.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Liz-Carlisle-Portrait.jpg) Tell us a little about yourself. My name is Liz, I am originally from Montana, I didn’t grow up in a farming family but my dad had this great garden, and my grandma was a farmer and she had lost her family farm in the dust bowl. So grew up in Montana hearing these stories about why its so important to make our agriculture sustainable. So that’s how we got interested in Organic Farming, I didn’t even know it was called organics then. Fast forward a few years, my first career was as a country singer, so I was traveling around the country, and meeting farmers from all over the place and I realized people were having some of the same problems actually my grandmother’s family had in the dust bowl with the industrialization of agriculture essentially. Using too many chemicals, and soil health was declining and farmers were seeing those problems and having other kinds of problems with the industry associated with conventional agriculture as well, so I wanted to try to be part of the solution. I heard about Jon Tester of course when he ran for senate that made a lot of news, this organic farmer, made his ways in the halls of government. I went to work for him, so I quit my job as a country singer. And though that work, met all of the innovative farmers from around Montana. ‘Cause my job was as liaison for the state and get ideas for a policy team. I realized we had such an innovative group of or organic farmers and gardeners in Montana who took it upon themselves to find more sustainable systems and that was the inspiration for me to go back to grad school and do this book project to write the origins about the organic movement in Montana. In case listeners don’t know or didn’t catch it, Jon Tester is our Senator from Montana and he grew up and has a huge farm in Big Sandy and is still our Senator from Montana today. So how do you go from country singer to lisason out of Washington, DC? Well i pretty much told them the story I told you. So I quit my job as a country singer, and knew I wanted to go to work in sustainable agriculture and I came home to Montana and this position was advertised it was called legislative correspondent for department of ag and natural resources for the office of Jon Tester. I didn’t realize based in DC at first, I thought it was a position in the state and I went in for an informational interview and I was sold on the job before I realized I’d be moving back to the East Coast. I think they heard the honesty and motivations for doing it. I had a college education and I knew about writing and story telling. It just worked out, it was a great education for me in addition to the senator he had a lot of incredible Montanans, with a long history of doing natural resources collaborative work. It’s kind of like a masters degree just working in that office. What did you end up getting your masters in? So I went straight from that to a PhD program in Geography at UC Berkeley. What I really liked about geography was I could study both natural science... Support this podcast

On this episode Laura and I spent over one hour and half in the Sky Lounge on my building talking about everything. We talked about Laura’s different phases as an employee for IBM, Legal Assistant in Washington DC, the time she overcome her stage fright, her lyrics composition, her experience in open mikes; I even opened to her about my time in college when I used to write songs and I lost all of them in a chest. We cruise thru memory lane talking about MTv, computers, cell phones and printers. You should listen to her. The first song is I Cannot Control, followed by Dig, and the last one is To Sleep Is To Dream. If you want to know more about Laura visit her website: www.lauratsaggaris.com To learn more about my podcast, you can follow me on Twitter @Music2Flavors and Facebook https://www.facebook.com/Musicin2Flavors/, or at my website at www.musicin2flavors.com If you know a friend or acquaintance that works in the music industry and think that he should be an ideal person to chat and record his conversation, please contact me at Music in 2Flavors@gmail.com Thank you for listening and see you on our next episode. If you would like to be a patreon of my podcast, you can go to my website and click on the Patreon banner or visit https://www.patreon.com/musicin2Flavors where you can choose the amount of money that you want to pledge. Thank you for listening to Music in 2Flavors and thank you for being a loyal listener of my music adventure.

On this episode Laura and I spent over one hour and half in the Sky Lounge on my building talking about everything. We talked about Laura’s different phases as an employee for IBM, Legal Assistant in Washington DC, the time she overcome her stage fright, her lyrics composition, her experience in open mikes; I even opened to her about my time in college when I used to write songs and I lost all of them in a chest. We cruise thru memory lane talking about MTv, computers, cell phones and printers. You should listen to her. The first song is I Cannot Control, followed by Dig, and the last one is To Sleep Is To Dream. If you want to know more about Laura visit her website: www.lauratsaggaris.com To learn more about my podcast, you can follow me on Twitter @Music2Flavors and Facebook https://www.facebook.com/Musicin2Flavors/, or at my website at www.musicin2flavors.com If you know a friend or acquaintance that works in the music industry and think that he should be an ideal person to chat and record his conversation, please contact me at Music in 2Flavors@gmail.com Thank you for listening and see you on our next episode. If you would like to be a patreon of my podcast, you can go to my website and click on the Patreon banner or visit https://www.patreon.com/musicin2Flavors where you can choose the amount of money that you want to pledge. Thank you for listening to Music in 2Flavors and thank you for being a loyal listener of my music adventure.

What's the difference between Marvel and DC? Well find out. If you still have question contact me and I'll be happy to help. Sorry I wasn't able to upload this sooner my power went out and I couldn't access the internet. Email me at theteenageidea@gmail.com Click the link to go to my Facebook Click the link to go to my Twitter Click the link to go to my Instagram

Baby MommaAnna and Hughes cleaning out Edith’s room after the fire, find a picture of a small childTim Drewe suggests Edith be Marigold’s godmother - sort of. Mrs. Drewe doesn’t look very pleased.Edith asks Robert if she can “take an interest” in Marigold.Get Away With YouThe committee/village is trying to find the best place for the memorial. Robert says center of the village, but they want somewhere quiet: the old cricket pit.Hughes agrees with Robert - memorial should be in town. Carson: I was disappointed in his Lordship, but I’m more disappointed in you. Hughes: Every relationship has its ups and downs.Carson to Hughes: I don’t like it when we’re not on the same side. Hughes: We’re different people. We can’t always agree. C: I know, but I don’t like it. A widow convinces Carson about the memorial site. Her son pays respects to her husband on their day.Carson tells Hughes he decided on the village for the memorial. He only wanted to be convinced. His walk convinced him. Carson: There’s a bonus. It puts us back in agreement. I’m not comfortable when you and I are not in agreement.Hughes: You’re very flattering. You talk like that, you make me want to check the looking glass to make sure my hair is tidy. Carson: Get away with you.Hughes: I mean it.Stop Flirting with the DogMary says she’s going away with Annabelle Portsmith to drive around.Anna tells Mary to choose clothes carefully that she won’t need help taking off. Mary: Well, I’ll have his help. Anna nervous about if they call Lady Portsmith.Anna: Honestly, m’lady. You should hope I never write my memoir.Mary asks Anna to buy contraception.Blake is coming before Mary leaves.At the shop, Anna takes off her glove to reveal that she’s married.She lets a gentleman go first. Points to what she needs in the book. The shop keeper gives her a hard time. “I can see you’re married. But you don’t want any more children. There’s always abstinence.” Anna pays quickly and leaves without instructions.  Bates asks Anna why she’s not going with Mary.Anna says it seems unfair that they treated her like that at the shop. Suppose she was a working woman with 8 kids and isn’t want any more. Wouldn’t I have the right? I feel like going back and ordering a baker’s dozen. Mary: One’s enough for now.Blake tells Mary she should have told him he wasn’t the lucky winner. Mary: Well, I don’t seem to have broken your heart. I’m sorry if I’ve hurt you. It’s only lately that I’ve begun coming out of the mist. Blake: That’s why I came here. To wish you luck in person.Brixton is flirting with Cora.Cora showing Simon painting. Robert sees them.Blake tells Mary to be sure before she makes a decision. But that she is cleverer than Gillingham, and that won’t work anymore in this century.Mary says she’s not a housemaid drooling over him. Blake says Plantagenets are as susceptible as housemaids when it comes to sex.Mary tells Anna she wants to marry again, and she absolutely does not want to divorce. Her grandparents lived in vast quarters, but things are going to be closer for her. She wants to be sure she wants Gillingham as a friend, lover and husband.Stirring the PotClarkson tells Isobel about insulin.DC: I’m glad you’re back to your old interests.Clarkson: Why do you say that?DC: Mrs. Crawley’s been distracted lately.Isobel: You make too much of it. DC: Do I?Mama PatmorePatmore asks Rose to ask Sarah Bunting if she would tutor Daisy.Sarah agrees to tutor Daisy.Robert: So every time we entertain, we must invite this Tin Pot Rosa Luxenbourg?Sarah turns down dinner because she doesn’t want to put herself or Robert through another test of strength. She tells Branson he may have been in Rome too long. “You can do anything you want if you put your mind to it.” She tells him he can’t have a future there with those people. He tells Robert she couldn’t stay, and he says, “What a relief.”Mary: I have a feeling Branson is turning back into who he really is. What will happen with Sibby? Branson can’t stay there.Robert says that Tom is a ventriloquist dummy. Cora: If he feels he has to go… Robert: He’s not taking Sibby.Mopey MoleslyMolesly asks if he is first footman now that Jimmy is gone. Hughes tells him there’s coming a time when a house will not boast any footmen. We’re coming to the end of those distinctions. Carson: You are first, second, third and last. Make what you will of it.Thomas tells Molesly that Baxter is a thief.Baxter tells Molsely that she was a common thief.Baxter tells Molsely she’s changed. And she won’t tell Molesly who she was working with. Baxter: I’d give a limb to rewrite that whole chapter of my life.What’s Rose For?Robert says a wireless (radio) is a fad, and it won’t last.Rose is talking about helping the Russians. Robert says Bunting would have lectured them. Branson defends her.Rose tells Robert that the king is speaking on the wireless. He can’t believe her.Robert: If the king wants to use the wireless to speak to his people, maybe we have to listen. Carson: I wouldn’t say that.Daisy: Why is it called a wireless when there are so many wires?Hughes: Downton is catching up with the times we live in. Carson: That is exactly what I am afraid of.CliffhangerThomas brings in a policeman to see Carson. Announces it. Carson: Thank you, Mr. Barrow. Your scaremongering has not succeeded. That will be all. Thank you.The policeman tells them that a witness has turned up that has to do with Mr. Green’s death.Dowager Countess' LinesDC: I’m glad you’re back to your old interests.Clarkson: Why do you say that?DC: Mrs. Crawley’s been distracted lately. With Lord Murton frisking around her skirts and getting in the way.Isobel: You make too much of it. DC: Do I?Isobel: Maybe you’re the real quarry. And he’s only including me to throw off the scent.DC: I may be older than I was, but I can still tell when a man is interested.Clarkson tries to change the subject to gardens.DC: The promise of gardens in the summer will be the final worm on the hook.Isobel: Hearing the king’s voice makes him more real.DC: Is that a good thing? The monarchy has thrived on magic and mystery. Strip that away, and people may think the royal family is just like us.Isobel: Would that be so wrong? DC: Well, only if they want to stay at Buckingham Palace.