I was going to run through a quick intro of what Helm is, but we have a great demo that Andy's put together about signing and stuff, so my name is Karina Angel. I'm with Red Hat, and Red Hat does love Helm. I know there have been rumors out there. We do like Helm. All right, so we're going to run through Quick Intro, which, and then Paul's going to get into building charts, and then we're going to talk about publishing. And if you want to get involved, go to Helm.sh, go read through what Helm really is, and all the community stuff is there, enjoying the community, they're actually really nice. There's rumors about that, too. All right, so we all know Kubernetes can be difficult because now you have so many different resources to think about, your deployments, your config maps, your persistent volume claims, really any resource, any Kubernetes resource you can think of. And now your applications are not only containerized and hopefully in a cloud-native manner, and hopefully it's not just the lift and shift, but they're highly distributed. And while deploying your containerized applications in a cloud environment yields so many benefits, and that's where we're all here, right, you have an increased level of ownership and your work required to manage this entire set of components. And Kubernetes also contains a vast ecosystem. You've all seen the ecosystem page. It's kind of crazy how many different projects and resources we can all use now, and it's amazing, but how do you manage all of this effectively? And, of course, wouldn't it be nice to be able to just do a brew install or just use app, and that's what Helm really is for. It's a package manager designed to pull all of those resources in together, and it is a cloud-native, or it is a graduated project. It graduated in 2020, joined the CNCF in 2016, and very active, I think we all love all the AV stuff going on. Okay. Thank you, Scott. Okay. So, Helm, let's talk about the primary components of the package manager for Kubernetes. There are other package managers, too, so we don't want to say use one or the other, because you have to decide for yourself what works for your environment. However, your Helm charts is an amazing package manager, and we'll talk about the primary components that we have. So your Helm charts are packages that represent your Kubernetes deployable resources. We just talk about all the different resources that you have to worry about, and your values are the configuration variables that are injected into your templated resources, and your release is a consolidation of those resources, and it's, and your values, and is your deployable resource into Kubernetes. So there's your very brief intro to Helm, and now we're going to have this talk. We're talking about Helm charts, and so are the user profile, I'm not going to say persona because it's a user profile. It's your application distributor.  And now, Paul is going to walk us through the building. A chart. Hi, everyone. My name is Paul Czakowski, and I also work at Red Hat, and I kind of just want to get going. So we want to create a chart. How do we do it? Like, when you're creating a new project, there's a ton of boilerplate, and you're doing copying and pasting and stuff. And we didn't want everyone to have to worry about boilerplate. And so we built what we call, well, actually, let's talk about the actual anatomy of a chart. I forgot about this one. So we have the chart.yaml file, and that is where the metadata for your chart lives. So it's name, it's version, any dependencies it might have, et cetera. There is a templates directory, which is where your templates live. And inside of that is a couple of special things. You have your helpers file, and that's where you can create reusable blocks of code to use as functions inside of your charts. And you have the notes.txt file, and that doesn't get rendered into your cluster. It gets rendered into the CLI when someone does helm install or helm upgrade. So you can provide breadcrumbs and hints to your application users on how they can access the app once it's deployed based on the various decisions they made when they were creating the values file that says how they wanted to look. And that leads into the values file, which is kind of a well-written values file as the contract between the helm, like the chart creator and the chart deployer. So it contains, it's a YAML file, it's a list of keys and values that are rendered into the templates and contains the defaults. And so the user will then change those defaults to suit their environment. And if you document that really well, it does really become that contract between the person who writes the chart and the person that runs the chart.  We just want you to be able to get to a running chart that you can modify. So we have helm create, and this will give you that functional chart. And that's what gives you this directory structure that is your chart.  So you can do helm create, helm install, and you'll get a running application in your cluster. So then you just start changing things in the template, like the image name, you'll change some ports. You might add some resources like a config map or a secret, but you'll just use the same boilerplate at the front of the other templates and copy them across. So there's still going to be some boilerplating, but it's a lot less. So, yeah. So this is kind of what the templating looks like. It uses the Go templating language, and there's a series of functions in sprig, which I've brought in. And there's a couple of helm specific functions as well. So the double curly braces is the templated bits. It is pretty straightforward, but also is templating. So it's also incredibly complicated when you do complicated things. And that's just the nature of this. I have discovered that GitHub Copilot is really good at filling in these sections for you if you happen to have access to GitHub Copilot. So I do recommend it. It has made my life easy. Okay, I'm going to give you up on that. And so this default set of templates are really good, but chances are you have your own opinions. You have your own processes. You have things that are unique to your organization that you want to embody into your templates. And it's the same pieces in all of your charts, right? And so we have a couple of ways you can do this. You can create starter charts, and then you can have library charts. And we'll talk about the library charts in a bit. Let's start with the starters. So Helm starters lets you create your own boilerplate templates. So instead of doing Helm create, you do Helm create and specify your starter. And that is more or less just a regular chart that has all of your opinions in it. Say you always have a specific set of, like, Prometheus service monitors, or you have a specific way you want everything to have Istio endpoints. You would put those into your starter, and that way any time you create a new chart, those bits would show up and just be part of the chart. And that saves you a lot of copying and pasting. And the Helm ecosystem has some really good examples of starters if you want to figure out how to get going. And then out of Salesforce, we have a really good Helm plugin for managing Helm starters. So it becomes pretty easy and quick to, you know, embody your own thoughts and processes and best practices into the defaults for whenever you do a Helm create. So I mentioned library charts as an alternative to provide opinions. So let's talk about our two chart types. So this is a chart.yaml file, which I kind of mentioned earlier. The Helm 3 chart spec, apart from the name, version, dependencies, has added a type. And that type is either application, which is the default, or it is library, which is this type of library chart. So the library charts define primitives or definitions that can be shared in other charts. So library charts don't render into templates that get applied to Kubernetes. They become things that your chart can consume to make your life a little bit easier. And so you can use them across charts like I have these opinions about PVCs. So instead of writing this massive block about PVCs, I can just call it my own PVC function and let it kind of build that out. And so you're able to start codifying your own opinion standards into your charts. And Bitnami, any time I'm like, how should I do this? I go and look at the Bitnami Helm charts because they're kind of, in my mind at least, the way to do charts right is the way Bitnami does them. And they have an excellent common library chart. So if you want to get a better idea of good ways to do library charts, I highly recommend looking at the Bitnami chart, library chart and how they do it. And also any other things, you're thinking about best practices. Reading documentation is great, but sometimes seeing really well-written charts like in practice is better. So I always look to the Bitnami charts. Any time I have questions myself about a particular way I should be doing something. So back to our chart.yaml file. So this is a chart.yaml from a Bitnami chart that is using both a library chart and an application chart as dependencies. So basically you write your chart, you want to use your library chart, add that as a dependency. And then if you want to have something else like MySQL database, you could add a bunch of templates to run MySQL inside of your chart, but chances are someone else has already done that for you. Chances are your vendor has done that for you if you're getting a database from a vendor. And so you can include their chart as a dependency and take all of their best practices and all the things they do and have it deployed. And then you can also say no thanks to the dependencies. You can see the database chart there has it enabled through. You can set that default in your values and that will allow you to use your own MySQL chart if it's MySQL or whatever that's in there, or MariaDB. So that's still giving a lot of power to your end user, but it's also sick giving them a lot of good, sane defaults and you don't have to redo a bunch of work. A couple of Helm lifecycle features I want to talk about, hooks and lookups. So hooks allow you to provide some control over the order in which things happen when you're deploying a chart or upgrading a chart. But Helm is not an orchestrator, right? So don't think you get full orchestration. You're getting some ability to say, oh, I need to make sure this config map needs to be created by God does, or more importantly, I'm about to do an upgrade and therefore I need my database to be, like, migrated to the new schema so I can have a hook to say, before I actually do the upgrade, run a job to migrate the schema, then do the upgrade. And they are defined as annotations in the templated resources, so they're pretty easy to slip in there and they can be done pre and post certain events through the lifecycle. They're pretty straightforward and there's not a ton of them. That's kind of the list. One here quick mention is there's a test one and so when you want to do integration tests, if you annotate resources with the test, they won't be rendered unless you run a Helm test and that way you can deploy your app and then you can run a Helm test and it will run jobs, pods, whatever you've asked for to actually validate that what you've got is what you asked for. And that's how we can then look at doing integration tests when we're actually wrapping it into our, like, software delivery pipelines. Now, lookups, maybe they're not exactly lifecycle-specific, but they provide a way for you to actually look at your Kubernetes cluster and find information on it. So there are times where maybe you need something that's in a config map but you need to actually put it in a manifest because your app doesn't know how to read a config map, so you can look up a particular key in a config map or you can look up anything else in Kubernetes and then render that into the template. And that can be incredibly useful at times, but it's kind of a last resort thing if you can't do it another way because if someone runs Helm template and just applies that, they might not have a Kubernetes cluster like that they're connecting to and so there's nothing to look up against and you'll get an error, right? So if you do something like, if you do lookups or you do hooks, you want to really think about that and use this use case and if they may be doing just a Helm template, make sure that they can still get a fully functioning application even if the hooks and the lookups don't function if you have them. So it's just something to keep in your mind. If you know that your users will never use Helm template, then of course you can get really deep into your hooks and lookups. And then of course we all want to be secure. None of us are security experts. Well, some of you might be, but I'm not. But I do know some things, right? I know that every pod should have a security context that says, don't run this container as root. So we should think about how we can integrate that with our charts to give users the ability to turn those on and off because some people will be deploying into insecure Kubernetes clusters and they won't care if it's root or not. Some people will be deploying into clusters that are inside of their enterprise that have very strict rules. They're running OPA, they're running Gatekeeper. They're running something that will actually break the chart from running, but they also have a good security context. So you want to provide that way for those people to use your chart. Otherwise it's going to fail and they're going to move on and they're not going to use your chart and they're not going to get the opportunity to use your work. And then things like config map secrets think about which values should be in which and also think about how people might use external sources like Mozilla SOPs, sealed secrets, or Hashicob Vault. So if you're providing secrets, provide them an alternative way to use something else so that they can use your app even if they're using, say, Hashicob Vault. Operators. So we're not at war with operators. There's not this big, like, operator-versed Helm thing. Deploying operators and their operands with Helm is such a common use case that if you go to Artifact Hub which Scott will talk about in a bit, you'll see a ton of operators and then operands in there that you can deploy using Helm. So Helm works pretty hard to support operators and that workflow. But as I said earlier, Helm is not an orchestrator and so it can't really be aware of the special activities that you might be done to upgrade, say, your specific operators' CRDs and the resources they manage, because sometimes when you're upgrading an operator, you have to do things in very specific order and Helm isn't really built to be that orchestrator. So we took a fairly naive approach and we said you can have a CRDs folder and anything you put in there is a straight Kubernetes file that is holding your CRDs. They're not even templates and we will deploy them before we render the templates and apply the templates to your Kubernetes cluster. If you need something more than that, you may need to reach outside of Helm and that's okay because we should be able to pipe these tools together. Some chart authors will actually put the CRDs into templates and just hope that they happen in the right order. Some people will do their CRDs as dependencies and, again, hope they happen in the right order. So you can do that but your mileage may vary and think about what you're doing when you're doing it and if it makes sense for you. So quickly under testing before I hand over to Andy and Scott, so we can do some basic testing locally and then we really want to push most of our testing to GitHub actions or to CircleCI or whatever. We've got Helm Lint which is going to basically check for templating errors and anti-patterns, anti-recommendations. So it'll shoot errors and warnings depending on how egregious your mistakes are. And then you can act on those and then we also have our mentioned Helm tests. So that's where you do integration tests. So you can deploy your chart, run tests, make sure everything is there and everything is how you want it to be and, again, you do that locally but you also want that to be part of your software which Scott will talk about. And I think that is about all I want to talk about. Oh, no, there was one other thing. Don't make clever charts, right?  So they need to be easy to read, easy to understand and easy to customize. Otherwise you'll lose people. So always think about any time you're getting some complicated logic in there think about if that's really necessary or if it can be solved another way. So that is the end of my section. He has my mic on if you want to take my mic. So anyways, now you can all hear me. Let's start over. So once you go ahead and you have your file system with all your chart contents how do we go ahead and publish it and package it appropriately? We can use the Helm package command to take all those artifacts and put it into a compressed archive. That archive is very good, very simple but it's only step one. Step two is looking towards the future. The future is adopting a lot of the paradigms that are out there in the Kubernetes and cloud-needed ecosystem and being able to publish it using OCI content. How many of you have heard of image registries or registries at all that support additional content aside from traditional container images? How many of you are actually publishing any content whether it be Helm charts or any other content? How many of you are using the experimental feature of Helm? Okay, once again, it's experimental not quite ready for prime time it's closed, it's almost to the big leagues but not quite there yet. So the bigger question is for security, I'm very security minded I'm sure you're going to hear a lot about security in this little conference how many of you are signing your Helm charts? That's about right? For those of you who aren't signing your Helm charts is it either because you didn't know that there's a feature in them or is there another reason? Yes, it's hard It is hard because PGP the only supported mechanism for signing Helm charts is a pain, it really is I'll be honest I did struggle a little bit when I was preparing the demo on the show getting the keys set up, it's a pain it's okay to use the supported mechanisms of signing charts now all you have to do when you're packaging a chart is pass in the dash-sign flag point to where your key store is and you get a brand new signed Helm chart what it will do is it will create a providence file it's a separate file right next to your artifact a .prov file it's going to contain your detached PGP signature and some metadata about your chart check some as well as the chart.yaml file that's step one that's what's supported right now let's go ahead and glaze into the magic future, the future is going to be how do we make signing content easier and one project that aims to do so is called SigStore, how many of you have heard of SigStore? SigStore is a Linux foundation sponsored project that aims to make signing and verifying content easier and the Helm community has a plugin available for you to go ahead and take a signed chart that you use with Helm package dash-sign and upload it to what they call a transparency log, a transparency log allows anyone to go ahead and see if any content has been signed and verify it in a supportive way this is very common in the certificate world we want to extend it beyond certificates to artifacts as well so we can go ahead and take the Helm package that you created and publish it up to Recore Recore is the SigStore project that is a transparency log and we're going to walk through that in a demo in a second it is currently a first version of it right now out there in the community we're going to be working with the entire community as a whole to talk about how we can adapt, enable and advance the technology to potentially support additional mechanisms of signing content that's the goal so we might be able to get away from the pain of PGP let's go ahead and try to do a quick demo and the question is, we'll play there we go, I'm going to go out here because I can't see it so this is a little sample that is a tecton pipeline that enables you to publish, release and then use tools like chartrelease which we'll talk about to sign a content this is just a tecton pipeline that will do a complete release process basically take an existing chart package it up go ahead and push it out to github which is going to be our hosted chart repository and then use salm6 store to publish to the recore transparency log as you see we've gone ahead and published it out we have a release out in github we now have our chart repository using github pages so it's now available for verifying the helm chart there are two ways to do it, one is the supportive mechanism first thing we need to do is add that helm repository that we now have published to github we'll go ahead and add that we'll then pull in the latest updates to our local cache we'll then pull in that chart as you see we have the two files the helm archive and the provenance file then we can go ahead and verify that chart we'll go ahead and use the helm verify command that's built in supportive tool to verify the chart now let's go ahead and let's look into the future and see how we can do it with sigstore the first thing we need to do to enable sigstore verification is to add the helm sigstore plugin so we'll go out add the helm sigstore plugin we'll then go ahead and use the helm sigstore verify command and point it at our archive that we have locally it's going to go to record say is there content up there if there is great see if it's there and then do a quick verification of it using a lot of the same things that helm does we can then go ahead and take that uuid that came out from it this is a universal id in record and go ahead and actually see the data in record in record we capture the signature the public key and other key content so you can really understand what content out there so you can verify so nothing's been tampered with or modified as part of your software supply chain this is key being able to do this extend it to because we've already done it for images let's go ahead and extend it to helm content as well so as you see we went ahead and provided an automated packaging signing and release process using tecton we populated a helm chart repository we've published that to record we've gone ahead and used this helm sigstore plugin to be able to verify this as well as using the integrated helm solutions I'm going to pass it over to Scott who's going to talk a little bit more about testing as well as some publishing mechanisms awesome thanks Andy Scott take your mask off um okay is that a little bit better how about I try no it's not better is that better okay mini mic mini mic time okay I'll just hold it like this we'll just we'll just move on because I know we have five minutes thank you Allison um hybrid events are weird um what happened here is it still okay no here we go ah alright um uh hello hello hello okay thank you Allison let's give Allison a big hand and the tech people oh my gosh okay perfect alright so um Andy was just talking about sigstore this is our transition slide uh Paul earlier talked about chart testing that you do during your chart building and just for a time check I think we have five minutes I'll try to keep it under that so that we might be able to squeeze in a question to and also if we don't get to that just remember we are here we can chat with you afterwards there's also Helm folks online but everybody in the room come chat with us if we don't get to too many Q&As questions okay so um basically uh that's the that's the stage you want to use helm testing you want to make sure to do that it's really great um just remember uh you know even if you don't have helm tests even if you haven't written helm tests you can still use helm testing because it's a great it's a great tool um there is once you get past the just the helm test command that you run locally uh there is a great project out there um that members of the helm charts and chart tooling team have been managing all this time including Reinhardt and and other fine folks here uh called helm slash chart dash testing use that when you get to you can actually use that locally not just for automation but especially once you get to the automation phase it will run other it will do other things besides just run tests you may not have written so if your charts don't have tests which many don't it will actually help by installing those charts like you know spinning up a kind cluster installing those chart or at least the action does you can do this yourself in any way you want it's try to install those charts um it even has flags to help you um if you have any values in the values file that are uh uh star dash values it will it will automatically run those sequentially so you can actually have dev dot values uh or any other test cases that you want and the helm testing tool automatically run those for you um and the last thing is really important that I wanted to just mention before moving quickly from from testing is um uh the helm chart testing tool can allow can help you make sure to automate that upgrading between versions of charts works so you can pass that flag and it won't be the ability to upgrade and it will do that just go to helm chart testing uh github repo all the commands are there all the flags are there um I won't like get to into the details here but please just like if you walk away with anything around testing do it please it's really awesome um okay uh so um uh let's see wait did I actually mention um the github action I did okay so so here just some links and we'll make these slides available to everyone but um that's where you find the stuff and then also there are there is a demo I want to point you all to that some people haven't noticed that's in the helm uh github org called um charts repo actions demo and uh yeah so that is something that we wrote to be able to help people just see an exact working example um if you find it's behind open a PR but it's usually kept pretty up to excuse me pretty up to date um and uh you can pretty much just emulate that and you're already on your way so there are lots of other cool tips and tricks you can do Paul mentioned annotations earlier the the um the hook the helm hooks for testing um just one tiny tip I want to mention before we move on is that um you can use Helms post-delete hook to uh mixed with the test annotation to have specific things that you want to as Paul was mentioning you can have specific uh resources that you only need for testing if you use both of those uh with or without chart testing tool it will automatically clean up for you when you run your test so that is a really sweet thing to do okay um so just let's see you turn check here 1134 okay we got one more minute so publishing charts uh I just want to mention what it is it's a core concept for Helm um this was already discussed a bit packages were discussed um I think the most common thing is using well what we're seeing is using github pages to package them uh but there's other methods there are just the main thing you need to keep in mind is it's just an index file with metadata that points to a chart excuse me a helm uh repo it's just an index file with metadata that points to locations of your packages that's it um and so it can just be an HTTP server it can be uh there are other awesome projects in the ecosystem like chart museum um the still experimental OCI um hopefully not for very long um you can have public repose private repose etc it's just a matter of controlling access to those um uh HTTP web servers basically however you have you make them work so um uh the nice thing that to keep in mind is that we have um we have another tool that's very similar to chart chart testing for the releasing site called chart releaser and that can that right now integrates with github because let's face it when you when you uh one of the old ways as you you upload your index file uh you also upload a ton of binaries um you can see that on um if you go for an example to the Prometheus community helm charts repo you'll see that there's a lot of chart binaries in the github pages branch that's not the way it's working now that's just for backwards compatibility with older with older charts before we move to that we now use a whole chart releaser which also has an accompanying wrapping action that will uh use the concept of releases you know github releases where you download each release for for software we attach that excuse me that tool attaches the binaries the tar balls to the release that it creates for that version of that chart for each chart so even if you have a repo with multiple charts there will be releases prefixed by default with the name of the chart the version of the chart and that release will have the the chart artifacts connected to it so this will do it for you again we're talking not to chart consumers right now or you you all are people who are interested in publishing charts and distributing them so this will help you a lot if you're not already using it um yeah and uh yeah so i just want to uh end i think by saying um i'm sorry we are over time aren't we okay do we have a moment okay we'll just end by saying that what do you do when your your chart repos are distributed right please check out and use artifact hub it's a central cncf project that is there um to uh what do they say to find install and publish kubernetes packages of various kinds so it includes support for helm charts and plugins it also has many other types of artifacts including excuse me including cube control plugins etc so please check that out and there are really great features that as chart publishers and chart distributors you really want to make use of um the only few that i want to mention that you just want to have in your brain is um uh there there are artifact hub supported annotations that you can add to your chart.yaml file under the annotation section and that really can help you drive your users to important information about your charts for example where's the source code and things like that uh related packages and other and other such things um i'd be really remiss in not saying that uh if you all remember the the github.com helm slash charts repo that's now archived a lot of people were concerned where did all that stuff go well all the history is there if you read the helm blog posts uh luckily github has been very generous picked up the baton from google and is now hosting all of those all that chart package history but uh for ongoing chart work new charts the way to find it is artifact hub and so as chart distributors it's your responsibility to make sure to list that in the centralized cncf artifact hub just like you would if you were supporting um a yum or an apt package you would have to make sure that that is listed um and aggregated for discoverability um there's a lot of great features uh for end users that i will not mention but things that are extremely important for owners is if you are or want to be an owner of one of the helm charts that is currently archived in the chart the helm slash charts repo it doesn't yet have a home right you want to work on it your company is working on it you use it all the time you're making improvements maybe you even have a fork of that consider owning that and consider making that available for others and if you if you want to take ownership of that there is a feature in artifact hub to claim ownership because we migrated all of those old packages to artifact hub but most of those are under the helm org right now because no one wanted to claim them um i mean many of them did but there there's still a lot that haven't yet to be claimed so please do that talk with your colleagues talk with people who are supporting those applications that those charts are distributing and make sure if you can please to contact us ping and slack whatever you need to do but let's just keep that ecosystem rolling because the reason helm is so important is because of people like you um obviously the end user is the most important user but if we don't continue to keep the momentum of the charts in this ecosystem then they won't have anything to install it'll just be a cool templating tool for most people and not really a package management system so thank you all very much and um let's see i think that's it thank you


Hi, and welcome. I'm Avi Arditi. And I'm Carolyn Pursuti from Central News at Voice of America. And welcome to talk to us. Actually, we are preparing to launch in the next few weeks a weekly call-in show on Skype. We've done several of these already, and there's been a lot of interest people calling in from around the world. And so we're actually going to do this from a from a real studio, and we've got some exciting plans coming up at the most exciting event right now is Valentine's Day. It's coming up tomorrow. Every week we'll have a different topic. We'll let you know ahead of time so that you can get your thoughts together, maybe practice your English for when you want to call in, and we'll tell you what the topic is so then you know what you're going to say or maybe some questions that you might have for us. And of course tomorrow, being the big holiday in the United States, Valentine's Day. And we've got with us on Skype from Rawalpindi in Pakistan. We've got Usama.  Tell us a little bit about yourself. Here, thank you. I'm from Pakistan and I'm living exactly in Rawalpindi, a city near to Usamaabad. And I have completed my computer engineering from Comsex. And now I'm planning to move to Australia for Masters. But the reason why you're moving to Australia is fascinating, especially because of Valentine's Day. Tell us the real reason you're moving to Australia. Exactly. The real reason, of course, my half is living there. My loved one, of course. And you know, so, of course I will learn also because we have to put the food on the table. So we have to do something.  Your what? Your other half? Yeah. Yes, very well said. Now, does she celebrate Valentine's Day? I'm sorry to say that. In Muslim, you know, we are teach to discourage that because, you know, it's different. It's very important to bring out. It actually started out as a religious holiday saying to Valentine. That's right. That's right. Can I explain, please? Because, you know, in our culture, it's like every day is your Valentine's Day. What I think that, I think that only one day is not enough to express your emotions for your loved one. He's a good husband. That's great. There have been many Muslim countries that have banned Valentine's Day. Saudi Arabia, one of them. The printing unions have banned it in Malaysia. So different Muslim countries. It's not only Muslim countries. As I understand from what I've been, you know, I've been reading because I think some people think it's frivolous or, and it originally did have, as Carolyn pointed out, you know, religious basis. But today, you know, when people in the U.S. as Americans celebrate Valentine's Day, often it's with something like Carolyn brought in some, some props here, like these little candies. The, what are these called again? The, wait. They're just candy hearts. But if you can read them, see, they'd have different, yeah, that one says awesome. They're almost like fortunes and you hand them to people that you want to be romantically involved with or just friends with. Like that one says, too cool. And I like the one that you showed email me. That's a new one. That's right. I was growing up. That was not on these candy hearts, of course. And you give these. This one says you rock. And inside, of course, are chocolate chocolates. So, oh man, those look good. We'll have these later. But this is the tradition that you give chocolate. Yes? Oh. Osama, what did you say? I said, I said it's a day in which, I mean, a loved one have to wait. Or I mean, he can express his feeling for her loved one, huh? Exactly. And it's, and then Carolyn also brought in roses. I feel like I should have brought this. This is a biggie, different roses. And the colors mean something, too. Like this is a red rose and that means true love. That's right. That's right. Okay, so the yellow one right here is friendship. So you can give this to anybody. The white one is innocence. Usually white roses are used for our weddings here. And this one you should never give. Do you know why? Which one? See, Bobby knows. Wait, what is this? It's artificial. Never give your loved one an artificial rose. Oh, I see. It's made out of, it's made out of polyester. It's silk. Yeah, it's silk rose. And don't do that on Valentine's Day. So that's kind of really funny. Okay. Of faux pas. You should never do that. It's a French term, but it means something negative that you do. Yeah, but I knew the, yeah, yellow I knew is friendship. And red is love. And then the white is, is doesn't really have, yeah, it's just nice. Innocence. Yeah, yeah. Young youth, maybe you could give those to children. No, so Osama, what does your wife do in Australia? Oh, yeah, she just started his, you know, bachelor's. She just started his bachelor's in Taffy, TFE, Institute in Gold Coast. So she's just starting there. I forgot what exactly she's studying. I forgot the name of her program. So she's also starting her, her family's there. So yeah, I will join her. And you're studying computers? Is that right? Yeah, I'm computer engineer. I'm computer engineer. Great. Great. Well, Osama, yeah, we've got, we've got other calls lining up here. So it's, it's been great talking to you and we wish you the best in, in getting to Australia and, and, and you're schooling. And I need your prayers. No, you've got them. Thank you. Okay, we'll talk to you later. So now we're going to go to Rafiullah. Rafiullah, are you there? Oh, yeah, this is Rafiullah. Hi, welcome. Nice to see you. Nice to talk to you and see you. Welcome to talk to us. And so tell us a little bit about yourself. Where do you live? Thank you. This is Rafiullah from Kabul, Afghanistan. Afghanistan. Welcome. And what do you do in Afghanistan? I'm working in an office ministry of education. Excellent. Yes. I've, I've, I've met actually English teachers and I think an English teacher who worked with the Ministry of Education in Afghanistan. And we have a lot of listeners there. I know that we have a good, good audience, good size audience for the VOA special English programs. And Rafiullah, we, Afghanistan has been in our news just in the past two days. You know, our president gave the State of the Union last night. And one of the feature topics to come out of that speech was the fact that we're pulling out a lot of our troops. About half of them. Carolyn did the main story for VOA last night on the president's speech. So, so what, what did you think? Did you, did you watch the, the President Obama State of the Union? No, exactly. I didn't see, and I didn't watch that. But I just hear about the Obama speed that they want to bring out the troops from Afghanistan. And on my opinion, it's good for Afghanistan people that the troops go back to their country. By this time next year, they'll be back here. What, like 34,000 out of the 68,000 are going to be, are going to be leaving our, so are you optimistic? What, what do you think for the, for the future for your country? For the future of my country, I think here must some troops remain here in Afghanistan. Because when they go out completely from here, then the situation will go back to 12 or 13 years back, like the Mujahideen time. It's good that they remain some troops like 20 or 40,000 troops, and they can control the situation. Raffiella, how often do you see American troops? Just when you're going about your everyday life, do you see them daily, weekly, and how many are on the streets? From the ISAF, what the International Security Assistance Force in Kabul? Usually I, I just see them only once a week in Kabul City. And in other provinces, I'm going to Jalalabad, usually see that two days after. In the troops? We want to ask you a question. In Kabul now they are not, okay. They are not, one more time? The troops in Kabul you were mentioning? Yeah, the troops in Kabul, they are not going outside in the cities mostly. Before one year or two years coming out from here bases and going out farther into the West and were walking in the roads and cities, and now they are not doing like that. Right. They're saying more within the bases. Saying more within their bases, they're saying. Well, Raffiella, thank you for calling. We've got other callers waiting, but we want to wish you the best and thanks for calling. Take care. Take care. Thanks. Thank you for calling. Okay, our next caller is Nguyen. And Nguyen, can you hear us? Hi, Nguyen. We can see you. Oh, can you hear us? You can't see us, but you might be able to hear us. Okay, well, let's go, we'll go to Mohammed here. He's calling. Hello, Mohammed. Hello, Mohammed. Hi, where are you calling from? I'm calling from Afghanistan. Another caller from Afghanistan. Where in Afghanistan? Yes, I got this ID from Facebook, and I'm now learning English. I'd like to improve my English knowledge, and I am very happy for this program, especially for the U.S. special English, that they provide a good program for those students that they want to get improved in their English knowledge. It sounds like you're doing well. Yes, thank you for your kind words about special English at our programs. You can find them on the Internet. If people watching right now aren't familiar with them, you can find them at voaspecialenglish.com, which is also learningenglish.voanews.com, either address. You can get daily news and information programs for people learning English, just like Mohammed, to slower speed kinds of programs. Mohammed, what do you do? Do you have a job, or are you a full-time student? I'm a student at the Polytechnic University of Kabul, Afghanistan, in Engineering University, and I'd like to post TOEFL or IELTS, since because of that, I'm very learning English, because I want to get six health or seven number in IELTS examination, or I want to post TOEFL examination. Because of that, I'd like to learn English, and sometimes I'm using from VUA, Learning English, especially from YouTube. From YouTube side, and it's very good news, very useful news. I'm proud, I'm proud for this. I'm very happy from this system. I'd like to ask from you, how's my English knowledge, how's my speaking? It's great, yes. Very good. I've understood every word you've said. I think you're well on your way to doing well on the listening and speaking parts of the TOEFL and the IELTS. And I do want to point out, we actually have a partnership with TOEFL. They recognize that the special English programs can help people prepare to take the TOEFL. It's reading and listening comprehension. You mentioned you watched the captioned videos on YouTube at the VUA Learning English Channel, and Carolyn is the host of some of those videos. And very happy to have you doing those, and with a lot of fans. And we have a lot of topics for those. And we have a lot of technology, agriculture, health. Yes, because I'm using from these subjects. And I have one problem, especially in reading. Because when I face some examinations in some courses, there are some problems during the reading, especially, there are very difficult passages. And how can I learn that, because I know that in international examination, special and TOEFL examination, there are very difficult passages, I know that. But if you guide me, that will be good for me. How can I improve my reading knowledge? From which books I can use that I want to prepare for international examination? Can you guide me? Well, here, Mohammed, do you go to the special English website, the main website? We have everyday texts and audio files of our stories. I mean, there are a lot of websites now where you can find reading materials, newspaper websites. But if you're looking for materials written for English learners, intermediate and upper beginner, I think you certainly would fit within those to go to the special English stories and read the texts. And you can listen to the words, the recordings, while you're reading along. But really, I think practice. I'm sure you've heard teachers tell you this. But the more you can practice with real materials that interest you, that you can find on the internet, it's going to help you improve your reading comprehension. And another idea, Mohammed, you talked about watching us for those caption videos. Remember, the words are right here underneath my chin, literally. And so if you turn down the volume and you just read the words, you air it one time that way. You play it that time one way. And then the next time, go ahead and play it full and see if you understood it the first time. So it's kind of like your practice. You look at it both ways. All right. Well, Mohammed, thank you so much for calling. And we're going to go on to the next caller. But good luck to you on your testing. So take care. Take care. We're going to talk to Nguyen now. And I think this was, let's see, go back to... Hi, Nguyen. Can you hear us this time? Nguyen, can you hear us? Can you hear us now? We see you. We see you, but we don't hear you. Okay. We're going to go to Ahmed. Hi, Ahmed. No. Can you hear us? Oh, we hear you. We hear someone. Yes. All right. Then let us do this. We're going to call this person you tried to call us. Translator. Translator. Is their name. Well, that will be interesting. Yeah. And we need to ask somebody, what's your favorite date? That's there. There you go. That was we were going to do that. Expression. We've been hearing all from men. So we want to hear from... Hey, translator. Hello, translator. Now, why is your handle translator? Is that what you do for your job? Yes, exactly. In what language do you translate into English? I do. I do translation from English to Arabic and vice versa. Arabic. Excellent. And where are you? I'm Egyptians. I live in Cairo. Cairo. Yeah. You've had a busy couple of years. Oh, yeah. And what is happening in Cairo right now? Well, you tell us. You look out your window and tell us what's going on in Cairo today. As usual, demonstrations and protesters are flooding, flooding into the streets asking and demanding some demands. And as usual, the government also does not respond to any one of them. So we're still rounding toward each other in the same circle. Translator, does that happen every day? It's pretty much every day, right? Actually, yes. Since two years ago. Right. Since two years ago, we've sensed out what we so called the revolutions. So called the revolution having Egypt. Right. Oh, the Arab Spring, we call it here. Did you... So Caroline reported on the President Obama's State of the Union speech last night, and he did talk a little bit about the Arab Spring. And Caroline did the main story for VOA. So remind us, what did the President say about the Arab Spring? Did you listen to it by any chance, translator? Absolutely not. He really didn't touch as much as we thought on the Arab Spring. He did talk a little bit about terrorism. But he did say, you know, that he supported everything that was going on in the Arab Spring. The changes. The changes, right, right, right. Yeah. But he talked more about Afghanistan and... Actually, we know, we heard from the Egyptian, the American embassy here and the ambassador. She is meeting with the Egyptians, opposition members and the Egyptians members from the government. She tried to make any reconciliations and the compromise between them. And also, I know that the Congress is also trying to help Egypt in the economic situations and so on. But actually, I didn't listen to Mr. Obama last night. You can go on voanews.com. We have a lot of coverage there. Look for Caroline's story. And, you know, truthfully, though, the State of the Union is really for the Americans. It's to give our state of our country for the next year in it. Pretty much tells what Mr. Obama is planning for this year. It's never... Well, it depends on the time that the State of the Union is given and what's going on in the country at the time. But lately, it hasn't been really heavy on foreign policy. And last night was true to form. It was very heavy on the economy, jobs, and also gun violence, which we're having a problem with here in this country. But let me say something I heard actually from Mr. Obama. Maybe two days ago, when I was searching to be our special English, I downloaded ESA. He was asking, in his speech, he was asking, asserting to the Republicans and the democratics to gather their opinions together and put the people's work against in order to help the American economy to recover. This is something very, very, it was very amazing, actually, as we here in Egypt suffering from the opposition, from the opposite, as the oppositions and the government, it does not sit on the same tables asking and negotiating with each other. This is actually what we did not see till now. Right, right. And although, isn't there been a lot of criticism that there's not enough, what we call bipartisanship between the Republicans and the Democrats and... Reaching across the aisle. And they all, they both have their individual plans, but they need to compromise. That's the real key. And I think you're learning that, too, in Egypt. You're seeing your government needs to do that as well. Well, translator, it's been a pleasure talking to you. And we're going to go on to our next... Take care. We're going to go on to Ahmed. Well, Ahmed. Hey. Hello, Ahmed. Can you hear us? Hi, how are you? Hello. It's good to talk to you. Well, I'm from Iraq. From Iraq. From Iraq. Good to have you. Where in Iraq? Yeah, I'm from Iraq. Excellent. What part, Baghdad or another city? Basra. I'm from Basra. Basra. How are things? What's going on in Basra today? Well, it's going well. Nothing new. Everything is okay. For me. What do you do there? Do you work or do you go to school? Well, I'm a pharmacist. Pharmacist. Do you work full-time as a pharmacist every day? Uh, more than. Do you work daily every day? Is it a full-time job as a pharmacist? Yeah, I work daily. And where did you learn English? Well, I'm learning English in school, but I've tried to develop myself by learning by internets. Oh, that's good. And you listened to learning English? To the special English? You know, we did a story actually in special English on how to become a pharmacist in the United States. And I was surprised, I shouldn't have been surprised, that at the amount of education, because it's not a medical degree. It's a different kind of, you know, degree. But the number of years of training required to become a pharmacist in the U.S. Can you tell us a little bit about the requirements to become a pharmacist in Iraq or in Basra? How many years of schooling did you need? Well, I don't hear what you say, because internets are weak, so. Okay. How many years did you go to school? To become a pharmacist. Well, I ask you to read the question, I don't hear well. Okay. It sounds like we're having a problem with the connection. We were saying about how many years, but we've got, Prashan has been trying to call us a few times. So Ahmed, we're going to wish you well in your work as a pharmacist, and we're going to go on. Ahmed, we're going to be on weekly, so call back. That's right. And, okay, let's try to go to... Oh, okay, we're going to take... Said. Said. Hello. Hello, is it Said? Hello. Hello. You're on with Avi and Carolyn. Is it Said? Hello. We can hear you. Where are you calling from? Oh, I think we're getting a picture. I'm from Iran. From Iran. Iran. We're in Iran. Yes, yes. It's great to get a call from there, because often it's difficult to call on Skype out of Iran. So tell us about yourself. Welcome to talk to us. Thank you. Said, can I call back in two or three minutes time? Sure. Sure. We will wait for you. Yes, you can. Thank you. We'll check back in. Please do. In the meantime, we're going to talk to Bonita. Hi, Bonita. Hi, Bonita. Beautiful picture you have. Hi. There you are. Hello. Hi. Hi, where do you live? Yeah, I can see you. Great. She can't. Oh, you can't. It's because we're doing this on Ustream, so that the camera is being used for that. So remind us, I believe we've talked in the past. So tell us again, where are you from? I'm from Uzbekistan, Tashkent. Tashkent, yes. Tashkent, yes. So how have you been all this time? We're actually preparing to do, to actually create a real weekly show of this. We've talked about this for a while. There's been a lot of interest here at VOA. For us, for Callen and myself to do this every week, we're going there. We're trying to schedule a real studio. And we'll have a topic. And we'll have a topic. We'll have a question of the day and a topic. And did you know that we have one today? Yes. Perfect date. Yes, that's right. Sentence, date, topic. So what is your perfect date, Bonita? My perfect, you mean for me, any date would be perfect. It's made from the bottom of the heart. Oh, that's from the bottom of the heart. Okay. And would it be going out or staying inside? Anything would be good if it's with a person, with Mr. Right. I take it you haven't met Mr. Right yet. Yes, yes. Have you ever asked Mr. Right out, someone who you thought might be Mr. Right? You know in this country, women do ask men out on dates. It's something new, you know, and some women don't like to do it. But And I think among younger people, I get the sense from what I read that they don't even necessarily call it a date anymore.  Okay, now really, actually, I never asked a man or my Mr. Right to go out. But I was the first one who called. Oh, good. I was the first one who called. So, yeah. And I'm married now. So that's why I'm telling this story. How many years, how many years have you been married? Nine. Congratulations. So what do you do on your anniversary of your wedding date? You mean nine anniversary or 10th anniversary? Well, I guess a 10th is going to be big ones coming up. You've got the 10th. Yes, it will be only in a year and a half. So I haven't thought about that yet. But if you planned it, what would it be, Onita? That would be something great.  So I think it will be something like that. And my husband, he also prefers to stay at home. So we'll arrange something very intimate and romantic. Sounds good. Your English is excellent. Are there any local traditions? Tell us about the traditions for a Valentine's Day in Tashkent or in Uzbekistan. Actually, we don't celebrate it here. Frankly, I think it's another holiday here. It's a birthday of famous poet Babur. He's called Babur. But youth, yes, among youth, is widely celebrated. I mean, not officially, but I would say in public, not in public, in between people. Yes, I don't know how to say that. Between individuals, casually. Yes, yes, between people. Onita, I hate to cut us off here, but we're getting a call from Iran. And we were waiting for this caller. So we will talk to you again. Happy Valentine's Day to you. Thank you. Happy Valentine's Day to you too. Bye-bye. Okay, let's call our friend back here, our caller. Let's see. Okay, we're going to try to re-establish our call. We had a call. Let's video call it. You hear me? Yeah, let's try that. Let's see if we can... See if she's there. All right, Saad. Can you hear us? Hi. Oh, there we go. There you go. You just called us a minute ago, right? Tell us again where you're calling from. I told you Iran. Okay, just double check. Because we've been getting a lot of calls, I want to make sure you were the right, the person who just called from a minute ago. So tell us a little bit about yourself. What do you do in Iran? Actually, I'm an office worker, 34 years old, and I'm married. And my son is coming in less than two months. Oh, wow. Congratulations. Congratulations. Do you have a name yet? Do you have a name for him yet? Yes, I may name him Sina. Is that your first child? Is this your first child? Yes, I've been married just for two years. Oh, yes. So many more, right? How many more?  How many kids do you and your wife anticipate having? How big a family? Actually, I think we like to have two babies. Maybe after my first baby, so maybe in two or three years time. That's a good plan. Maybe a little girl. Yeah, that would be nice. That would be great. Now, you said you've been married two years? Yeah, for two years. And so, you know, we're talking about dates today. You know, in America, we celebrate Valentine's Day. It was Valentine's Day. Right. Tomorrow on the 14th, right? Yes. So when you take your wife out, where do you take her on a date? Do you have dates? On the weekend or for a special event? What's a special event like for you and your wife? Actually, for the end of my life, I mean, the best thing we usually do is walking. We just go walking and sometimes we eat out. Excellent. Yes. And you're like, I could say this as a parent, your life is about to change. And I think you'll be strolling. But it will be three of you walking, and it will be a great experience. It really will. Yes. So I've got a question. Are you teachers? Only through Voice of America?  I mean, too. And for the last 20 years, over 20 years, have been here at VOA working in news for people learning English. I used to work in newspapers and wire service and covering, you know, news for native English speakers and for international audiences. But this has been a great experience meeting English teachers. I've met so many English teachers over the years that have taken classes, actually a few classes on teaching, teaching English. And so in a sense, we help people learn, but we're not officially licensed teachers. And I'm the same way as Avi years in the business, in the media industry. But I did teach at the college level. I taught news writing in Richmond, Virginia at. I didn't know that. Yes. That's really cool. Virginia Commonwealth University. So I do have teaching in my background, but that was for a short time. Teaching isn't my first career. My first career is television. And I am married to a teacher. So I am a school teacher.  What?  Oh, just here at work. No, just here at work. I probably spend more time with Avi than I do with my husband. No, that's some time. I mean, you were, well, Carolyn was, you were here till three or four this morning. Right. For a, for a, um, three hours of sleep. So that's why maybe I'm a little bit, what we call slap happy. Or punch, punch strong, giddy. Punch strong, those are. Carolyn was reporting on President Obama's State of the Union speech last night. So she pulled together the main VOA video story, TV story about the speech. I don't know if you heard it or read about it in, in the news. Yeah, that's days. And Ron was mentioned in the speech. Why don't you remind us what did the President say? Right. The speech he was speaking about North Korea, and the nuclear device that was, that was exploded the day before the speech. And then he mentioned how North Korea is isolating themselves by doing this. And then he mentioned Iran. And Iran must learn to negotiate. They must learn to tap down their nuclear ambitions too and rather negotiate with countries. So that was the mentioning of Iran. I mean, the State of the Union speeches, Carolyn was mentioning with an earlier caller, is mostly aimed at a domestic audience. Understandably, it's a chance for the President to talk about the condition the State of the Union at, you know, any given year. And so especially in recent years, because of the recession and high unemployment rate, State of the Union has really emphasized economic issues. Jobs. Jobs. But also this year, President talked a lot about gun violence. There were a number of people, invited guests in the audience in Congress, victims or family members of victims of gun violence because of the horrible shooting at the elementary school in Connecticut and other recent shootings that have brought attention to this issue. And many people in the audience were wearing ribbons. Green and white and black ribbons as well. So there were various colors of ribbons and that meant that you were supporting, well, you were in sympathy with those who had been touched by gun violence or you yourself had been touched by gun violence this past year. I thought, no, this is. Yeah, it was an interesting speech because it really included a lot of issues. It did. It wasn't quite the kind of situation I know when your president recently appeared in Parliament and played that video and caused quite a stir. And we don't tend to have things like that here. I'm really sorry. But are we talking about politics or... No. I don't know how we got on that. Well, let's go back to Valentine's Day. We don't, you know, we'll talk about whatever people want to talk about. So, but you see, that's the journalists in us coming out. But not to talk about politics. That's fine. That's fine. Your English is really good. I mean, I feel like I'm speaking to a native English speaker because you're doing so well with your English. Yes. You know, actually, I've been practicing for almost 10 to 12 years. And I know it. I mean, you know, I've got the talent to learn languages. I can speak a little Arabic too. And I speak Kurdish too. Oh, my gosh. Great. It's born. Yes. Yeah. Actually, I was born in Baghdad. Yes. Yes. Yeah. But you know, my great-grandfathers were from the Kurdish part of Iran, so we were exiled to Iran in actually when the Saddam was president. Right. Yes. That's it. It's a little complicated. So when did you come back to Iran? 32 years ago. 32 years ago. And how did you meet your wife? Yeah. Aha. Yes. Actually, she's my cousin. It's just a typical marriage. You know, here we usually do not. Actually, nowadays it's changing, but I decided to marry in the traditional way because I was married once. I got a divorce, and then I decided not to be friends. I mean, just I asked my mom to find me someone. I met her, we talked, and then we married. I think this experience was better than the first one. Wow. First of all, yes, we were friends and we, unfortunately, we didn't succeed. Has she been married before? Ah. Has your current wife, has she been married before? No, no, no. That's the first time. And do you have children from your first marriage? No, no. We were married just for nine months. Oh my, quick. Yes, yes. And did your wife, like, had she also gone to her mother and said, I want to get married the traditional way, or was she looking, or? In Iran, or let's say in Middle East countries, men propose, not free men. What's so typical here, probably, I think it's positional. You know, even if the girls love you, they just try to get your attention.  Uh-huh, yeah. That's great. Great. Well, good luck to you.  Can you name my son? Do you remember my son's name? Can you spell his name?  I like to see it, and then I remember it. Yeah, yeah, there is a desert between Israel and Egypt, which is called Sinai, I think in English. Yes, yeah, this is Sinai. Yeah, this is my son's name. Oh, so that's S-I-N-A-I. It would be in the English. Ah, Sinai. It's pronounced differently. What? We pronounce Sinai. Ah, Sinai. Sinai. Yeah, but you're pronouncing just different accent. You're pronouncing the second accent. Exactly, yes. Well, great.  All right? Congratulations, Saad. Take care. Thank you. Bye-bye. Nice talking to you. Nice talking to you, too. Bye-bye. Okay, well. It's in English, very well. Very nice, very good. Well, we're going to wrap up this edition of Talk to Us. Now, we have a name. It's been fun. We have a name for our show. We've got chocolates. Yeah, we've got... Oh, you know, there's one thing I wanted to mention. This is something interesting that you can learn. Do you see the X's and O's there? That's something that maybe... Oh, the X and the O. In fact, you know what, listen. New English learners might not know. We're going to do this. Let me take one more caller. Let's call her here. Usama. Hello. Hi, Usama. Where are you calling from? I'm from Australia. I'm from Australia. I'm from Australia. Welcome. Great. This, here's a good question for you. So now, I don't know if you can see our video. Probably not because we're... There we go. All right. Okay, okay. But we... Caroline is asking the letters X and O. If you see XO in like a note, if someone signs a letter with XO, XO, what do you think that means? XO. The letters X and O. X and O is something in the past, no? It's something in English. I think it's probably just for our language. I don't know. It's... It's a deal of language I don't know. Like I do... Well, it's hugs and kisses. This is the first time I heard it. I heard it. First time you've heard of it. That's good.  Wait a minute. I thought the X was the hug. Oh, no, because the O, that's your arm. Your arms that form the O. Okay, I just learned something. So I always thought XO meant hugs and kisses because usually you don't say kisses. Well, maybe people do, kisses and hugs, but if you sign a note to a sweetheart, to someone you like, you could sign it XO or a series of XO, XO, XO. XO, sorry, XO, yeah. Those letters. So it's not the mean kiss. Oh, what does it mean?    You could put that. You could sign a greeting card with that in place of love and then your name. You can put an X in it. Or both. You could put XO. You could say love and XO, XO, you know, and then put your name at the end. When can I use this? Well, do you have a girlfriend? Or a wife? Do you have a girlfriend or a wife? Yeah, and you know, it's often used on texts these days. I see it a lot on texts. No, no. Without it, without it, only X out. Yeah, that's right. You're right. You could say, you know, if you're making... I don't have anything like a friend. If I want to tell her I love you or something... That's right. Well, I'm curious. In Arabic, is there a similar greeting at the end that would be equivalent of a salutation like that? Of sending, you know, to say kisses, hugs, something. Is there a similar... A symbol. A symbol. A symbolic way of expressing love like that. Oh, okay, okay. If the good word, I can use it as a sign. There is a sign, but it's hard to tell. It's hard to describe it up there. Yes, yes, sorry, sorry, sorry. You can email it to us. That's right. Or write it down and hold it up to your camera. So, you know, so we can see, but... Can you see me? Yes. Yes, we can see you. Absolutely. What does it say on your coat? It says something on the left side of your coat. What does that say? Yeah. It's right by your shoulder, right here? Our audience can see you, but we can see you. It looks like you have a coat with words on it. No, it's because we're capturing the video of us on Ustream. So, Skype and Ustream don't work well together with the camera. So, what are... Are you a student or you look very young? How old are you? 22. 22? How do you do? 22 years old. What do you do? What do you do work? Do you go to school? No, I just... I'm just a student. And sometimes I work. Sometimes, not always. And what... When I go to work. Well, that's... Well, can you repeat that? The voice cut out a little bit. Can you say that one more time? What? Sorry. The last... We heard that you were a student and you work some time. But then you said something about giving something maybe to your girlfriend. I don't know. Yeah, I don't know. We don't want to put words in your mouth. What did you just...  But we didn't hear it because the Skype cut out a little bit. But what... I said I am a student. Okay, and sometimes I go to work when I need some money. Oh, okay. You go to work when you need money, sure. And what type of work do you do? Sorry, I can tell you. Where do you work? What kind of work do you do? In the 7th commission, I do more work. Some commission, but what type of... Yeah, education. Education. Education? It's... We're hearing like every... Education commission. Education commission. Well, do you know... Are you going to be doing anything for Valentine's Day tomorrow? Is... Are you familiar with that? No. For tomorrow? Sorry, I didn't understand your question. Well, tomorrow is Valentine's Day. For people...  But you mean Valentine's Day now? It's right. Tomorrow is Valentine's Day. Are you going to be doing anything special with anyone for Valentine's Day? Yes, yes, yes. I mean, going with my girlfriend for trips. A trip? Yeah. Where? Yeah. Where? Going someplace special? Yeah, yeah. In my country. At the place in my country, yeah. The place in my city. Ah, so... Place in the city. I want to ask you if... What do I think about my English? Because I want to test me. What do we think of your... Your English? That's right.  Because, really, I have been studying Greek since last year. I have one year only. Osama, your English is good. It's just the internet connection is not good. And that's why we don't understand you. Everything you're saying that we can hear, we're understanding every word. I think your pronunciation is good. Your right intonation and emphasis on the right syllables. So, in terms of speaking it, I think you do a very good job speaking English. I don't know about your reading.  Okay. Keep practicing. Well, Osama, we've got to wrap up here. And we will wish you and your girlfriend a great Happy Valentine's Day. A good time in the city tomorrow. A good time in Algeria, some place special. And we're going to, when we're done here, post the video of today's episode or this show. It was fun. On our YouTube channel. It was fun. A lot of news, a lot of exciting comments. We'll let you know. We'll post our plans for Talk to Us on our Facebook page. And hopefully we'll have the show ready to go in just a few weeks. And we want to thank you all for tuning in. And Carolyn is reaching for... Happy Valentine's Day. Wishing everyone who's people, careful with their thorns on there. But... Happy Valentine's Day to everyone.


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Hello Adele. Good morning. Good evening. How are you? Is it have the cost? Great, but that's not possible. You cannot have your cost as minus Chilbal how how can I get the CMA material? Good morning, Malik from Pennsylvania Staying safe in Iowa. Let me get you the the link for For the for the CMA somebody is asking for the CMA material. Let me get you the link for the CMA Testing in 15 days any advice Amber? Could you tell me how well are you prepared not prepared? You tell me So I can give you more advice. Are you prepared? Are you looking for some help? I just recently uploaded two hours plus Answering BEC questions previously released and maybe an hour of simulations you want to take a look at those But if you tell me what you are using I can give you more Advice you tell me which exam course you are using and how are you studying so I can advise you a little bit better Good morning or good evening. Hasheet. Hi, Vanessa. Good morning, Vanessa. Georgia. Good morning from Pennsylvania I guess you guys are up Studying early in the morning on Sunday, right? I Thought I will just stop by and say hi to everyone and here's the CMA. Why don't I just add the Give me one moment here. Let me just add Add another add another screen so I can share screen and I'm gonna be sharing so for the person that asked for the CMA basically My website and have a library of material and the CMA will be Show you how you'll get there just refresh this So if you go to the catalog main catalog, I have a CMA. Let me take a look at the CMA. There we go Here's the CMA. So here's the CMA link so you can access my information through the CMA Hi, Mohammed Aiden. Hi, Nathan first steps for a third year accounting students Should I begin preparing for the CPA by the end of the fourth year? Absolutely, Nathan, you want to do that You want to start preparing for the exam by the end of the third year what you can do as you start your fourth year Let's have a meeting one-on-one. So you tell me which courses you are Strategically, what's the best way to start? So for example, if you're taking all the things the last semester We want to take advantage of that and do what and Take the other thing exam if you are taking something else, you know financial accounting taxes we can we can Strategically we can strategically Plan this good morning. I Hi, let us good morning. You're up at six. Well, I couldn't get up that early today It's nice. It's a nice weather today in Philadelphia Amber perfect. I'm using becker and glimes studying is tied due to busy season and kids My weak point is memorizing the formula for cost and different various analysis. Well, Amber I can tell you memorize is not the solution There is no way someone can easily memorize the information in other words if you're trying to memorize That's a bad idea. Why do I say this because you can never Give me one moment, please you can never memorize the formulas perhaps you have to understand them and I'm not sure if you're aware of my BEC material or not, but let me show you real quick Let me go to the Website here and I can show you What I have and what I can offer you in terms of additional resources Just give me one moment here There you go Give me one second. Let me stop sharing then reshare again and it should work Why is my it's kind of my my screen is stuck give me one moment Remove this. Okay I'm gonna share my screen again Okay, so whether you are whether you are using becker or glimes if you go to my BEC section Let me show you real quick and I have a supplemental course for glimes as well So let's take a look at becker for the sake of illustration I Am I try to watch when I can you got to watch because you have to understand that memorizing you can't repeat Them by using memorization there's so much information So if you go to my becker BEC Let's assume we're talking about cost accounting It's aligned specifically like becker and by the way today I added those questions how to solve AI CPA MCQs I added maybe over two hours of video lessons that I prepared last night plus Additional simulations here how to solve previously released AI CPA simulation, but if you go down to cost accounting I have all the cost accounting Explained you cannot memorize the formulas. You have to understand the formulas. You cannot use your memory on the exam day That's gonna be very Hard drive you want to understand it You want to be like a CPU rather than a hard drive on the exam So you can process the information rather than using your memory because there's so much to memorize So if you're not take a look, let me just I'm gonna send you the I'm gonna send the link of my BEC lessons all of them BEC courses and if you want to you know take a look at Take a look maybe it's helpful the last minute since this is a link then I'm gonna post it in my LinkedIn chat This is my BEC lessons. I'm gonna post it here as well. I strongly suggest not to rely on your memory This is what I can tell you Hi, will you post videos about BEC SQL Sims? I read it really I do I also added I forgot to mention I also added SQL including I believe I did one or two Sims in the explanation When I explain SQL I used like a An exercise then I added the stem. So yes, if you go to my course, I do have a set about SQL You really want to understand SQL? Okay Basic they're still testing basic for now, but you want to understand them. Yes I do have those videos plus MCQs and those are recently updated But so if I'm preparing to take one of the new discipline, they will be replacing the EC What do you think it's smart to take the first round when they start allowing people to take in January? Or should I wait to take it later in the year when they release more? information about how to study that's a good question Good question, but you have to understand we already know what's gonna be on the specialization So yes, you can wait, but for example the bar I can tell you what's on the bar What's on the bar specialization is? governmental accounting Advanced accounting which is what's being removed from far plus managerial accounting cost accounting finance and Other topics. That's not IT. That's being moved from B. E. C For TCP, you're right There are gonna be some planning issues that we did not cover before but we kind of have a good idea Same thing with information system and controls. I will avoid if you're not a information system and Information systems and control I will wait We're giving us some ideas on the questions that they are releasing on the D. E. C But yes, if you want to take the bar, we already kind of we know 95% what's on bar and we are already familiar with that For the TCP, maybe we have 70% down for the information systems and control. I will wait I will wait until maybe mid-year or the end of the year Yes, if you're not a bar go ahead and take it We already kind of or not we we know in a sense that the people in this business know Based on the blueprint, what's gonna be tested? Good morning, David. Good morning Vanessa, I want to start studying for the CPA. Where should I start my question to you? What would you stand now? Did you register for the exam? Are you studying? Did you select the topic you get a little more where to start you could be Nazba where you haven't applied yet or you study you tell me a little bit more about In what sense were to start do you need help applying for the exam that you already apply you qualify? Do you have a course so on and so forth? There's so much I can talk to you about this but give me more information You're most welcome Amber. It's worth the investment. Take a look at my material that might help you with the understanding Shilpa. Hello, sir. Is there any age limit for pursuing CMA and CPA? How will this help for working professional? Well, there's no limit legally anyone can take the CPA or the CMA exam They don't care whether you are 60 or 16 for that matter but whether that's a good option for you or not that's something you have to kind of Think about it for yourself. You have to make some reflection Is it worth making this investment if I make this investments? What are my options? Do I have a prior experience that with this with my with my certification and leverage my experience? This is basically personal more than a Question I can answer but for any personal any personal questions what I'm gonna do I'm gonna post my late calendar. So if you would like to we can you know Take make an appointment one or one we can have a zoom and I can give you a little bit more information because your question is very general General in nature that's specific also to you But the the answer is there is no age limit But is this the best thing for you? That's a different question Adele, what is the first thing I have to do to check the company performance from a financial statement? Well It all depends. What are you looking for? Are you auditing this financial statement? Are you looking to invest in this company? Are you looking to lend money for this company? Are you what's the purpose of the? performance analysis There's so many different ways. You can look at the performance If I start BEC is it possible to get the exam in December first of all Might be too late to register to register for the BEC. I read. Oh, you register for the exam. There we go If you register for the exam Okay, and if you register for the exam register for the exam Yes, it is possible everything is possible But it all depends whether you are working or not and if you are working how many hours can you develop for the exam itself? Everything that's possible. The answer is yes. It's possible. It's possible for you. That's a different story Good you register Vanessa. I qualify but not sure which course to purchase Well, Vanessa, there are many courses and if you see on the screen And what I have on the screen now is a bunch of courses that I supplement So you can take back here. You can take widely you can take line You can take different courses and whatever whatever course you take Don't worry in a sense that I can supplement any course you take But if you want one-on-one meeting, I have a better decision which course to take You can I just posted my calendar you can you can post it I don't want to push any course in particular way suggest to you Vanessa to sample them And just because you sample them, it doesn't mean you're gonna get a good idea because they make you sample only one or two lessons In not all lessons are like those one or two lessons So I would say sample them to get a feeling what the software looks like with their system looks like which one you are comfortable with I would recommend the climb. I would recommend backer. I Would recommend Wiley, but you have to it's a personal preference It's a budget also how much you want to invest the courses that I would recommend backer climb Wiley Roger and if you're in India, I would recommend miles of those are the things that I would recommend don't go with Courses that are not in quote national. They are well known because you get to pay for and I also Supplement these for if you want additional help. I have supplemental That's as much as I can recommend as buying the course and if you want more Make one-on-one Appointment on zoom and I'll be happy to talk to you Um, that's what had lectures have any study resources material for new discipline Good question, but so far had lectures of the supplemental course supplemental means I follow The course the main course and right now no other course publisher discipline now I could it's coming up on Tuesday, which is October 3rd. They're gonna they have an announcement They're hinting that they're gonna be publishing the new material once they publish their new material And I can basically start to organize my material, but yes, I do have the material But it's not organized in the course. It will be organized soon. So once back at Islam I believe miles is also making an announcement on Tuesday as well. So once those Announcements are made I can follow but the material is there if you look at the blueprint Let me let me share with you something about the new CPA exam because what I did I've series my videos on YouTube I'm just find them and share them with everyone But I go over what's covered and every specialization and I'll tell you for example this information can be found You know in the old material work, but it can be found in the old material. So what I did I just posted only then as well Just posted a YouTube playlist where it shows what's covered on each specialization Give you an idea where the information is located Some do you suggest to take for now or after the change some after the change if you're waiting for now I will wait after the change especially especially if you don't like governmental accounting or you are reading governmental and we can consolidation and advanced accounting but if you are if you are comfortable with governmental accounting and Consolidation or now and take bar in January But some I believe you already ask the EC right if you pass the EC don't take far now wait Before because the reason I would recommend our now the only reason would recommend it is you're studying for governmental in consolidation Then you take bar in one I believe you asked you asked You already passed the We can confirm this or not, but I remember you I remember your name very well I believe you did that species you don't have to worry about this as a financial manager adult It all depends on your needs. There's I don't know how you would start. What is your need? Are you a manager? Are you an owner? What is the need for analyzing financial statement? There's no answer for that It's what's your need and you approach the financial statement from that name That's far have others have any study resources for the new discipline. I'm considering taking either ECP or IS The answer is yes And I posted the link, but I don't have any courses already organized for that. Hi Shahid lots 9001 Hello, I have specific question about PV of a bank loan if a five-year bank loan or seven Okay, that's that's fine. I don't answer these questions That's why I have lectures to help you compute this Can you tell me what the changes the CPA exam in 2024 other than will the change and be easy? Muhammad what I just posted is a YouTube playlist And I have all the changes and details for every section explaining blueprint by blueprint go over each line Telling you what the changes so go look at those five videos and that's your most welcome once again If you want more information make a private appointment You're most welcome Papri you're most welcome some if you can't be seen don't take part in 20 24 You don't regular far take the new lighter version of fall. So no don't take far wait Wait, and if you're you can study for Studying watch the videos that is posted on YouTube the link that I posted on YouTube because you don't want to study Conceptual framework because that's not being covered on part anymore You don't want to study governmental accounting advanced accounting like kind exchanges so there are certain topics being removed You want don't want to spend time? studying down Okay, absolutely We have Malik I have registered for the DEC exam Before use that lecture have any advice specific rules who are not English native speakers Oh, no, no, no specific no specific advice for non-English native speakers You are in the same boat as anyone else in a sense that It's no different whether you are whether your English is your first language or not You have to learn the material and material is an English you have to learn it They're gonna ask you the questions You have to be comfortable with the concept with the theory and you'll be able to answer the questions So being English is not a native language is not I don't believe it's a factor in Passing or not passing and maybe a little bit longer to understand certain topics But the material is the same that the material Your performance should be the same English does not be a problem for you in my opinion Let me take a look at my I want to make sure I am being told so my Facebook Life is working as well Because I'm also in this one Facebook. I don't see is anyone on Facebook if you're on Facebook and watching please let me know because I try to Go on Facebook linked it on YouTube We have 20 people attending now any questions any comments anything anyone with any questions any comments So that's good. We spend 20 minutes. We'll just wait for another couple minutes if there are no questions I will call it for the day and again, I will appear on the regular basis Subscribe to my YouTube You're aware of it. Uh, sometimes I announce it ahead of time sometime. I don't because I feel like you know, let's go live I just wanted to go live and just a kind of you know who are currently studying life and That's that Wait another minute if there are no comments. I will call it for the day. I'm always here if you need any help Let me once again share my My Calendly in case someone would like to have one-on-one One-on-one Is it possible to have a meeting tonight? I take a look at my Calendly and if it's available again Adele You have to understand I Help people pass the CPA exam and accounting courses I'm not sure what you are looking for if you are looking for If you are looking for what type of what type of advice you are looking for You are looking for some type of advice at work analyze financial statements I will try but most likely I can't help you with that because that's not my specialty Do you know NY extended for 30 months? Not yet once we know, you know, we'll let everyone know Malik Thank you very much for the LOL Any other comments anything before we call it for the day Excellent excellent Student you will have First of all right now right now you can access you can access my lectures Two lessons free. That's one thing to have plenty of lectures online that are free Okay, two three the good news is soon. I will have a free trial for two days.  You can have three days access or money back. It's not satisfied if you're not satisfied You can get money back. That's fine. Somebody's not satisfied. They can say I don't like it money back And they can view the lectures beforehand You can always do the lectures if you don't like it don't subscribe But if you subscribe the assumption is you viewed the lectures and you like it So you can view the lectures before subscribing on the website, I have additional resources Icpa questions video on how to solve problems questions simulations But if you don't like my lectures, don't subscribe. It's free anyway So on YouTube you can view those lectures and decide whether it's a good option for you or not nevertheless Soon within 48 hours, you'll be able to have a free trial for two days You're not thank you. Thank you Go to thank I'm so happy to hear that Malik that you know my my material is helping Can you drop calendar here, please? Absolutely. Let me drop it again And this is for I believe for For link then And here's my calendar, please let me know if it appeared only then because I cannot it's different system Could you confirm whether you have it on if it appeared or not? Pyro, what are you studying for Pyro? Can you tell me what section you are studying for which CPA review course? Because I can send you the course now and you can Sample whatever you sampled in the side Okay, everyone. Um, there's no comments Give me one moment. Let me just connect this There we go My CPA exams on January, which is the next three months. How should I start from today's study plan? Well, do you have a course? Do you have a CMA course? That's my first question for you. Do you have a CMA course? And if so, what you should do you should also With your CMA course supplement with my material So just go with your CMA course. I'm not sure if you have one or not You do have one just take a unit by unit study that unit finish it move on to the second unit So on and so forth and since you are asking that somebody asked about the CMA earlier again I guess we have two people studying for the CMA today in this meeting Let me let me share my Everyone I'm looking up. That's what I'm looking up. I'm looking at the other screen to get my CMA link There we go I'm gonna post it in link then this is the CMA link if you want to use me as a supplemental This is the CMA All right, everyone I will see you I'm available anytime on Calendly just follow my social media. I post on regular basis daily Your basis is daily more than once a day. You're using hot. That's fine. You could use hot and use my supplemental material With hot as well That's All right, everyone. Good night. Have a great sunday. You are on the u.s Those first goes if you're in india night Your time zone is different. Have a great night And we'll see you soon Stay safe