Hello there, my beautiful, lovely, talented, fierce internet friends. Welcome back to my channel. Thank you so much for joining me here today on Footless Show. I am Jo. I'm missing a foot, hence the channel name. So today we're going to talk a little bit about why homeschooled Christian girl got into full contact MMA cage fighting, what my experience was like as one of only two or three women ever in a gym of like 50 or 60 guys. At a time where being a woman in the sport was not super duper accepted and my overall experience with MMA fighting. So as we dive in, if you want to give this video a thumbs up, it really helps it get out to more people. If you do want to subscribe, if you felt like doing that, I am almost to 150,000 subscribers here on YouTube, which is mind-blowing and I'm so grateful. And if you want to help me get to that next milestone, go ahead and hit subscribe. I think it's here, might be over here. I think it's here. So without further ado, let's dive in. I do need to set the story up a little bit because I never would have thought that in my life I'd walk into an MMA gym, much less join one. As I said, I was a sweet little homeschooled Christian girl. Not that any of those things would exclude you at all from this sport, but you don't find many people with that background in MMA. At least you didn't at the time that I was training. This was back in 2012, 2013, early 2014. And some really important context for this story is that the time of my life when I walked into altitude MMA, I was at the darkest place in my life. I mean, I can say this from the bottom of my heart. I would not be sitting in front of you here today if it was not for that gym. In all honesty, I'm really certain that I would have lost my fight with depression and I wouldn't be here.  It left me a broken mess. I had no idea who I was or what I was doing. I didn't feel like I had a voice. I was terrified of everything and everyone. I didn't know how to make it to the next day. I didn't want to make it to the next day. And that is when my friend Chris, who is an acquaintance, came over to my house to pick up a backpack that he had left. Seems like a mundane enough day. And he told me, Joe, I've really gotten into graffiti art lately. And there's this gym I've been told about that is really good graffiti art. You should come check it out with me sometime. And I was like, okay, cool. I'd love to go look at some art. That was the premise for walking into this place. And the place happened to be a mixed martial arts fighting gym, which sounded really intimidating to me. But I was like, all right, Chris, we'll do this. And he got me to sign up to like, check it out and do like a quick little class with them, like their intro thing so we could get in the building. And we went with another friend of ours. And this gym was situated in a not great part of town. Sincerely, my entire time there, I was never comfortable doing more than walking from the parking lot into the building. And that was it because it was surrounded by areas where a lot of bad things, unfortunately, were happening.  And I see my friends and we go in and we go through their little like introduction to boxing class and check out the art. And I can sincerely say that from the moment I walked in those wide swinging glass doors and I was met with the smell of 50 sweaty men and mats that needed to be cleaned probably more often, I was, I was home. Like I sincerely felt home, which was bizarre considering that nothing about that situation related to anything in my life up until that point. But I knew it was the place for me. At that point in my life, I was going to school, I was working three jobs to attempt to eat. I didn't turn my heat on for part of the winter because I was so broke. Hey, I had a fireplace. I didn't freeze the death. Everything worked out okay. But somehow I found a way to get the gym membership fee, which was like a hundred bucks a month, an awful lot of money, especially at that point in my life, because I knew I needed to be there. And I honestly think that that was some of my survival instincts kicking in because I needed something.  So I joined and I started going every day to Carlos's boxing class at 6pm. And I've mentioned this in other videos, especially on my other channel, TraumaTalk, but having a reason to make it to the end of every day, having a reason to get up and want to die and feel just empty and numb and awful and in so much pain every day. But to think I told people I would be at this six o'clock class, I know if I can make it to that class, it is so mentally and emotionally and physically draining and exhausting that all I have to do is make it to six because then I have class and then I'll be so exhausted that I'll just pass out and I'll wake up and we'll do this again. And that was a pattern that I followed for a while was just making myself muscling through to six o'clock to like a go to the gym. And what I learned pretty quickly is that martial arts for me, fighting for me made the rest of everything else disappear. It makes sense when you think about it, but when you are fighting someone, like when you are full contact fighting someone, you're not thinking about being depressed. You're not thinking about all of the difficult things you've experienced and not knowing how to get through them and just anxiety and all of that. You're just thinking about making out of that fight. You're thinking about what the next move is and are you executing this properly and all of that. And it was life changing and life saving to me to have a breath of air, to have an hour every day where I could just be. I could just exist. Eventually I got enough courage to try out the jujitsu class and that was when my passion really came alive. I love, I love, love, love jujitsu. It is one thing that I still have been able to do after my amputation. We'll talk about MMA and my amputation here in just a moment. But like I said, I was one of three women total who I knew at that gym during the entirety of my course of being there.  Women were not super accepted in MMA at this point. If you were a woman, it was really hard to try to find an MMA gym. I eventually found out, but this place was really accepting of me. But even with that being said, one of my boxing coaches told me, Joe, as a woman, you're going to have to work twice as hard for half the respect. That's just the way it is. And I was like, okay, turns out that that was pretty legit for a long time. If I ever got partnered up with a guy, they would sincerely smirk. I remember one guy in particular who got paired up with me and just started kind of giggling. I was like, all right, I guess let's do this. Because I don't think women were taken particularly seriously. The men there were delightful. They were good people for the most part. But I definitely didn't fit the stereotype of who was going to be training. And it took a while to, I guess, convince people that I was serious about what I was doing, that I loved the sport that I belonged there. And I just kept going with it until people stopped giggling at me. I remember dreaming about the day that women would be in the UFC, but Dana White, who was the owner of the UFC at the time, had been on the record saying women will never be in MMA. And during my time training, I actually saw that change. I actually saw the first female fight in the UFC, which was so inspiring to me because that's what I wanted to do with my life. I wanted to fight for a living. Now, that didn't work out, which we'll go into, but it was an honor and it was really cool to be a part of this sport as it was becoming more welcoming to different types of people. I really appreciated that. I really appreciated being a part of that. Now, traditionally speaking, going to an MMA gym is not the place to meet the love of your life, but I did. The owner of the gym invited me to go visit a Jiu Jitsu tournament with the team one day. It was pretty early. It was like the first few months that I was there. And I was like, yeah, let's do it. I want to, like, bond with these people a little bit more. And so I rode up with them. And when we got up there, there was a second car. And I noticed that there was this guy I didn't know. I hadn't seen them before. This just super, super cute, confident guy hanging out with our team kind of across the way. And I remember eyeing him over the Jiu Jitsu mats and being like, I wonder, I wonder who he is. I wonder what his story is. It ended up that we started connecting and talking and he made me laugh. And we started making fun of different things at the Jiu Jitsu tournament. Long story short, he sent me a Facebook friend request. We started chatting. And then a few weeks later, we were dating. And then a few years later, we got married. And now we are coming up on our fifth wedding anniversary. The majority of my relationship with Brian, my husband, how we like established it, how we got to know each other was from training and training and training and training together. I'm so grateful for that really unique experience. He was a great teacher. He was a great coach. He knew a lot more about Jiu Jitsu than I did. He'd been doing it for many years. And we ended up getting really tight with the owner of the gym. And he gave us a key to the gym so we could go in before anyone else was there. So I'd get up at like 6 30 a.m. And I'd meet Brian at like 7 15.  And then we'd train with Jiu Jitsu. And it was amazing. I don't think a lot of people meet their spouses by fighting with them on a mat. I wouldn't necessarily recommend that. But for us, it really worked out wonderfully. So going back to 2012, when I started really training and realizing that I loved this, that this was like a piece of who I was. This was a piece of my heart. For a long time, I felt like I didn't fit the stereotype of someone who would be into fighting or whatever.  I've never been in a fight in real life. But when you start training, you come to pretty quickly realize that those things are not parallel. Having a space where you can put you're all like literally all of yourself into something for a few moments is so beneficial, is so healing. I couldn't recommend it highly enough to anyone who is interested in any kind of martial art, especially like a contact martial art where you are you are fighting other people, you are working with other people. It is so healing. Mixed martial arts fighting was one of the ways I started reconnecting with my body after the trauma that I had gone through. I definitely had moments of just losing it in the gym being triggered, having really a really hard time fighting dudes, right? There are definitely some parallels to what I went through where it got frightening in moments. But for the most part, it was so healing to regain confidence in what my body could do to stop hating it because of the things that had happened to it and start using it to learn something. And let's just make it clear. I still know nothing. I still know absolutely nothing compared to really skilled fighters in the world. But to be able to walk around with the confidence of knowing that I I've choked people out on the mat who are literally twice my size because I knew what I was doing and they didn't have any training really helped the way that I carried myself started giving me a little bit of confidence in myself. I think more than anything it just changed the way that I walked. I felt like I could sort of look people in the eye a little bit more. I was less ashamed of everything I was. And here's the other thing. It was a family to me. When I went through the trauma that I experienced a lot of it was tied to the church. Previous to that, my entire life was my church community and it became so fractured and so painful and so difficult because of what had happened that I really didn't have that community anymore. And that definitely contributed to my feelings of isolation and loneliness and to have this gym of random people from every walk of life. I can't stress that enough. There were people there who were professional businessmen who like walked in wearing a suit and went and changed their gym shorts in our dirty bathroom. And then there were people who lived, you know, right down the street and came from really challenging circumstances. But everyone was united on the mat. And something that I think is fantastic is this phrase that the bat makes you honest, right? Because you can't pretend to be someone that you're not. You can't pretend to be extra macho or whatever. When someone's arm barring you on the mat like you can't, it reveals true colors of people. And it shows vulnerabilities and builds a lot of connection when it's done appropriately. And this patchwork quilt of people who I got to know and got to train with and got to grow with became like family to me and I needed that.  But to be able to put gloves on and train and learn about the lives of the people who I was training beside was incredible. To have a purpose, to have a goal, something I was working towards was life-saving. To have a reason to make it to the beginning or the end of a day, even if that reason was just a silly boxing class or a Muay Thai class or whatever, I will forever be grateful for. I'm not going to go into the full story of why this gym closed but the circumstances under which it closed were not good. There ended up being a lot of drama and a lot of bad things that happened in this community as more people came in and more people came out and more people showed their true colors and eventually it led to the owner deciding he was done with the whole thing and shutting the gym down when it was very successful. The stuff that happened was that serious and maybe one day I'll go into that story but around that time is when I had to stop training anyways. I started having significant issues with my head and of course with my ankle. I was getting really bad migraines almost every day. I didn't know what was going on. We didn't know what was going on. It took a while to figure out pieces of it and figured out how to treat it but getting hit in the head certainly wasn't helping and my ankle was starting to give out more and more and become more painful. Just to clarify, the ankle that was previously attached to this limb was really messed up. It was really messed up when I was training but I think I wanted it so bad. I needed that community. I needed that piece of feeling alive for a second that I just fought through literally and figuratively a lot of the pain but it did take a toll on my body eventually. Thankfully a couple years after Brian and I left altitude we found a jiu-jitsu gym to train with here in town. Amazing people. I just went on a hike this morning with the women's team which was so cool. I've not actually been training jiu-jitsu yet since my amputation but I'm getting back there soon and I can't wait to show that with you guys but you know quarantined social distancing. We'll get back there eventually but I cannot do Muay Thai or MMA or anything like that because of my amputation. Looking back at those years of my life where I got to train with those people. I got to train at that place. I got to learn so much about myself and heal. Even though it was not perfect like I said there was there was drama and other stuff that happened. When I look back all I feel is incredible gratitude. I remember I got to go back the day that the gym closed. The owner invited us to be there and the mats were already out and some of the stuff was moved out. I remember thinking like this is a piece of my soul.  I'm so grateful that I got to be there. It gave me purpose. It led me to meeting my husband.  Sometimes home and community can be found in very different places, very unexpected places. I was a homeschooled girl with an upbringing that had absolutely nothing to do with fighting or MMA or boxing or anything like that and I found an actual home in a real community in MMA. No matter if we've kept in contact or not if you are someone I trained with there who we were friends please know that you made a real impact on my life. You gave me community and hope at a time when I had none and I will forever be grateful. If MMA is something you've ever been interested in I cannot recommend highly enough that you check it out. I loved Jiu Jitsu. I love Muay Thai and way beyond the physical aspects of things. It gave me so much so I'd highly recommend checking it out if you've ever been interested in martial arts. Do it! I'm a big proponent of that. For people who like it or think that they might. So that is the story of the time that I was an MMA fighter for a couple years.  Of course I had tons of sparring in the gym. I wanted to but my body prevented me from doing that so I never got to actually live out my dream of being a legit fighter but I was a legit fighter. I just didn't do it in front of an audience. We still spent a lot of Saturday nights watching the UFC with friends. A lot of our friends are from Jiu Jitsu and I'm so grateful for each and every one of them. Thank you for allowing me to share a piece of my life that really excites me that really makes me tick. I talk about all different kinds of stuff on this channel. Mostly amputation related things but there's so much more to my life and fighting and Jiu Jitsu are huge pieces of that for me. I can't wait to bring you guys back to the Jiu Jitsu gym with me when I'm able to start going. God that will be an amazing moment. So thank you for spending a few minutes out of your day here with me today. Thank you for my patrons for sponsoring this channel, for sponsoring this video. You mean the world to me. I'm so grateful for your support. I don't take it for granted. I'm grateful for each and every one of you. Thank you. If you're interested in joining my Patreon, check out the link on screen or down below. There are a number of perks potentially available for joining depending on what tier level you join at.  You also get some behind the scenes videos and things of that nature. So check it out linked down below and to you watching this video right now. Thank you so much for spending a few minutes out of your day here with me today. You could be anywhere in the world doing anything and you chose to spend it with me and I really really appreciate that. I love you guys. I'm thinking about you and I will see you in the next video. Bye guys.


This is Moskva, guided missile helicopter carrier operating in the Mediterranean under initial voyage in 1968. She is of a new breed of warship, which the Soviet economy is now willing to support. She foretells that tomorrow's Soviet seaport will be characterized by more sophisticated and capable ships, operating at greater distances from the motherland. The navy of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics is in current standing. The second ranking navy in the world. One by one, ship by ship, Soviet seapower shows the flag, makes its presence felt. The Red Navy today has strategic mobility. It moves ships great distances from home ports and transfers them freely between the Baltic, the Arctic, the Black Sea and throughout the Mediterranean. The Russian system of interconnecting internal waterways permits the transfer of submarines, destroyers and small ships between the Northern Fleet, the Baltic Fleet, the Caspian Flotilla and the Black Sea Fleet. The Northern Sea Route provides even more mobility during late summer and fall. The Northern Fleet, based on the Murman Coast, is the primary Soviet fleet. It ships and submarines cruise the Arctic and the entire Atlantic. Aircraft from this Northern Region can fly as far as Havana and have been seen on reconnaissance flights near Newfoundland. The Soviet Pacific Ocean Fleet operates from a system of bases from the polar regions down to the Kuriles to Vladivostok. The rise of the Russian Navy parallels the emergence of the Soviet Union as a strong competitor for world markets. The rapid expansion of her seapower has enabled Russia to project her national interests around the world. Under Tsar Nicholas II, a major power and a ranking world naval power, Imperial Russia boasts two main fleets, the Baltic Fleet in the West, in the South the Black Sea Fleet and Caspian Flotilla, in the East, the Amor River and Siberian Flotillas. In the Imperial Fleet of World War I, the Tsar can count some eleven breadnoughts, twelve battleships, twenty-two cruisers and at least 56 submarines. This fleet will be surrendered, scuttled or sunk, in the years of revolution which will sweep away old Russia, the Royal Family, the Tsar, Tsarina, Crown Prince and four Royal Princesses. Princess Anastasia, a young girl, roller-skating on the deck of the Royal Yacht and across Europe at Sarajevo, Archduke Ferdinand walks to his destiny and at Europe is at war. Russia fights a desperate war. In the South, the Black Sea Fleet mounts a successful and pivious assault against the Turks. But Russia finds herself caught off in the open Mediterranean by guns and mines in the tricky straits. The war is unpopular at home. Leadership at home and on the battlefield is inept. Russia suffers more wounded, missing and dead than any other combatant. Her casualty rate 76%. The October Revolution, 1917, highlighted by a Navy revolt. The sailors at Kranstad Naval Base march on the Winter Palace. In this Soviet-phoned version, the cruiser Aurora, standing off in the nether, fires on the palace. The revolution is in motion and within months, the Tsar and his family are murdered. The Revolution becomes a civil war. The battle rapids for three years across the motherland. Admiral Kolchak aboard one of his ships. He receives heavy Allied backing as he leads the White Russian forces in Siberia. He will be defeated and executed by the Bolsheviks. One of the most famous sailors of the Revolutionary Navy, sailor Hiro Dibenko, he addresses his men. He and his comrades will emerge from the civil war with what a shell of a Navy. In the Black Sea, a Russian battleship is torpedoed and sunk by a Russian destroyer. Seven battleships, two cruisers and eight destroyers, submarines and other ships are lost at Sevastopol. Two-thirds of all the warships at Novorossiysk are run aground or blown up by their crews. Of the once-proud Baltic fleet, only a handful of ships survive. But worst days are to come. March 1921, again at Kronstadt. Sailors revolt in the Second Rebellion, this time against the Bolsheviks, demanding reforms promised by the Bolsheviks but not delivered. In these government films, the Red Army storms the bastion Kronstadt over the frozen Gulf of Finland. The defenders hold off three attacks and when overrun, the survivors are shot. The Navy, dishonored and all but destroyed, stands condemned. And Lenin not only distrusts the Navy but doubts its usefulness. 1924, Soviet Russia gains recognition from Western powers. But the father of the revolution, Lenin, is dead. The curtain falls on the first act of the Communist experiment. Stalin begins the next act as he sets in motion his iron rule. By 1927, two reconditioned Tsarist battleships operate in the Baltic. A small defensive Navy begins to emerge. Under Stalin's regime, the first five-year plan begins in 1928 to build up Russia's industry and her defenses. The Navy receives low priority. Its first new ships are destroyers, torpedo boats, submarines and cruises for defense of the homeland. Battleships and aircraft carriers will have to wait for later years. Aircraft construction and parachute training are a part of the new military build-up. It becomes a public sport as well. In 1932, the Imperial Japanese Army invades northern Manchuria. Stalin orders the build-up of the Pacific Ocean Fleet. 1933, the start of the second five-year plan. The Soviet Union emphasizes construction of a submarine fleet aimed at becoming the largest undersea force in the world within five years. The Stalin White Sea Baltic Canal is completed and Stalin is aboard the flagship of the new northern flotilla on the first trip from Leningrad to Murmansk. For the first time, the canal offers Russia an exit from the Baltic to the White Sea and to the North Atlantic, free of foreign control. We are very happy today because one of the hopes which I cherish for 16 years has been realized. And I believe sincerely that the most compelling motive that has lain behind the conversations which was successfully concluded yesterday between Russia and the United States was the desire of both countries for peace. The desire for the strengthening of the peaceful climate of the civilized world. With new naval bases in the Arctic and Pacific, the 17th Party Congress calls for an all-out warship building program as part of the third five-year plan. Three former Kazaris battleships are modernized and fitted with larger caliber main guns. The construction of six heavy cruises is ordered but old suspicions from Kronstadt still persist. Commanding officers of Imperial Navy background are particularly pressured to conform to communist doctrine. The Commissar, an officer second in rank only to the captain, is aboard each ship to ensure party loyalty. In the 1930s, naval officers regained status and some independence from the Commissars. But this is short-lived. The shadow of the Great Purge falls upon the nation and the Navy. The Great Purge, the years of terror, Stalin's enemies, real and imaginary, are executed. Over half of the members of the 17th Party Congress are shot. Hundreds of thousands fall in the bloodbath and the people fearful of the truth must pretend it isn't happening. The estimate? Half of the Red Navy's officer corps is dead. The Commander-in-Chief of the Navy, purged. Commanders of the Baltic Fleet, the Northern Fleet, the Black Sea Fleet, purged. All eight admirals alive at the start of the Purge are liquidated before it ends. August 24th, 1939. The Soviet Union and Nazi Germany sign a non-aggression treaty to invade Poland. Stalin follows suit and occupies eastern Poland. His memoir, Dick, is vital. Move on the treaty port of Danzig and take ports in the Polish corridor. Further north along the Baltic, Stalin forces Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia to give up bases to the Red Army and Navy. Now, the Soviet Union wants finished naval bases in airfields. But Finland resists and the Russians strike across the border. For 105 days, the Finns hold. And then, the end. Overpowered, outgunned, but not outfought, Finland grants Soviet demands. Now, on the brink of Hitler's invasion, three five-year plans have seen the queues laid for over 500 warships, including 82 destroyers and 14 cruisers. More than 300 of these ships are already in commission. Pride with the Fleet, however, is the largest submarine force in the world with 200 submarines and almost 100 more under construction. The naval air arm, 2,000 aircraft, but inferior, woefully antiquated. No match for German strength. Anti-aircraft artillery, a dramatic increase in number, but fleet bases are judged vulnerable to air attack. Russian strategists fear the overwhelming strength of the Luftwaffe will imperil fleet operations. In 1940, the Soviet Union occupies all the Baltic states. She also moves on Romania. The lower Danube is now in Russian hands. On the eve of the German attack, Soviet shipyards are busy, 219 ships under construction. Here lie the dreams of the Soviet Navy of the future. Here are hulls of great cruisers and battleships, which will never be completed. Many of the Nazis will seize as they slash into Russia. Soviet fleet bases are vulnerable from the land. The German plan, cut off, isolate and eliminate the Red Navy as a factor in the war. The Navy turns to defense and to amphibious operations in support of the Red Army. The 10th Army Corps is evacuated from the Hanukkah Peninsula and from Tallinn on the Baltic. In the South, the Black Sea Fleet Infantry serve with the Red Army as it is driven toward the Caucasus. Thousands are cut off and taken by the Germans. During the first years of war, Soviet naval operations at sea are confined to minor actions, patrol and supply of bases. In the North, the Finns quickly cut the White Sea Baltic Canal. With the Germans, they blockade the Gulf of Finland, largely containing the Red Submarine Fleet. A few break the blockade in the shallow Baltic, but throughout the war, Russia's huge submarine fleet is of little use, except for limited action north of Norway and the Arctic. 1944. The Red Army is solidly on the offensive. The Navy supports in over 100 amphibious landings on inland waterways, behind and on the flanks of the enemy. In the South, landings in the Crimea. In the West, long-sound island landings, two of the largest Soviet amphibious operations of the war. River flotillas aid the army. They range and control the Danube, the Nippur, the Volga and other key waterways. But during all of World War II, major Soviet surface units do not fight a single battle, either in coastal waters or at sea. Aircraft account for more than one half of the enemy ships sunk. Naval aircraft fly over 5,000 sorties and destroy over 5,000 enemy aircraft. Although the Soviet Navy wins little as a result of naval action during the war, it gains important strategic prizes in the post-war world. They regain the former Baltic states and all East pressure, formerly part of Germany. The Black Sea fleet now controls the mouth of the Danube and enjoys access to ports in the new satellite countries of Romania and Bulgaria. The Danube and the Baltic states against the Japanese in the Pacific. It now has control of parts of Manchuria, Korea, all of the oil-rich island of Sakhalin and the strategic Corral Island chain. But the Red Navy's greatest gain is the opportunity now to finally exploit its long-planned role as a dynamic force in a broad national strategy. With the fall of Germany and Japan, the USSR is no longer surrounded by powerful maritime enemies. Now she may begin again to rebuild both her economy and her Navy. The Soviet Union immediately registers all captive ships. And again, the Soviet Navy must for the time being concentrate on coastal defense with promise of major warships to wait, but not for long. The post-war Navy places the Soviet naval officer in a special class. A conscious effort is underway to create an elite corps and foster naval tradition even in the cadet corps, usually drawn from officers' families. East European satellites are directed to rebuild shipyards and provide ships for the new Soviet merchant marine and high-seas fishing fleet, while Soviet shipyards will concentrate on warship construction. Polish, East German, Bulgarian, Romanian, Yugoslav and Albanian ports will be built to Soviet ships. 1953 and Stalin is dead. Khrushchev rises to power and with him come vital decisions as to the level of technology to be employed in the Navy of the future. Now the Soviet Union looks to nuclear power. It develops long-range cruise missiles launched from aircraft, ships or submarines, as well as submarine-launched ballistic missiles. But Soviet sea power progresses in a pattern of nuclear power. Warships are just one part. What emerges is a collective national force, a balanced modern merchant fleet, oceanographic service and high seas Navy all under unified government direction. In the early 60s the Soviet merchant fleet is in 11th place among the fleets of the world. 1965 the merchant fleet of the Soviet Union now ranks in sixth place. There are now almost 1,400 sea-going merchant men. The 1980 goal is to more than double the size of the present merchant fleet. Over 80% of this fleet is less than 10 years old and the Soviet Union is striving to attain the capability of carrying 75% of their trade in ships flying the red flag. These ships call it some 800 ports in 90 countries. To service the world markets the Russians have over 300 tankers. Western suppliers have been dislodged from their long established markets by these ships. The Soviet high seas fishing fleet is the most modern in the world. With 4,000 vessels its catch has more than doubled in the past 10 years. This fishing fleet supplies the needs of a great many emerging African nations. Senegal, Ghana, Nigeria, Congo, Liberia Sierra Leone, Guinea and Egypt. Part of this huge state-owned enterprise is stationed in the Atlantic within 100 miles of Boston. Its units operate on station for months at a time. The Soviet Oceanographic effort employs over 150 ships and 2,500 scientists and technicians. In the past decade the Soviet Academy of Sciences has made important gains in Antarctic research. High studies and marine life observations are being made in the vast areas to support the Soviet effort in oceanography. There is an extensive network of marine scientific stations along the vast Soviet coastline. North of Japan, special research attention is given to the Kurail Island chain. To complete this balanced ocean force the Red Navy under Fleet Admiral Gorshkov is organized in four main fleets. The Northern Fleet, the Baltic Fleet, the Black Sea Fleet and the Pacific Ocean Fleet. The Soviet Navy makes random changes in the pendant numbers of submarines and ships as they transit freely from home waters. On occasion, numbers are even painted out. Mobility is the key to the present-day Red Fleet. Now, by using ports in client and satellite countries they have better access to the North Atlantic and Mediterranean than in years past. In the Mediterranean, replenishment anchorages provide logistic support for human anchorage. Two Dawn-class tenders support submarines, cruisers and destroyers. Depending on the season and the political climate the Soviets have deployed 30 to 50 warships and auxiliaries from the Black Sea and other fleets to the Mediterranean. Today, the Soviet Navy is benefiting from the far-sighted planning of the 50s. Their submarine force is the largest in the world and is nuclear-powered. 35 can fire ICBMs from beneath the sea and over 40 can fire the cruise missile. The naval air arm has some 800 fixed-wing aircraft including 150 helicopters and 500 jet bombers most of which can fire cruise missiles. This task force patrolling the Mediterranean reflects the success of the Soviet fleet-building program. A product of the early Khrushchev era is the Kinder-class guided-missile cruiser. Her armament includes surface-to-air guided missiles for defense of her task force from air attack. Among 200 destroyer or escort ships in the Red Fleet six or more of this class are operational in 1969. Another new design in the modern Soviet Navy this Kashin-class guided-missile frigate. The largest warship in the world having gas turbine propulsion she is capable of 35 knots. This is Moskva she is the largest Soviet Navy ship armed with guided missiles, guns, torpedoes and helicopters boasting an impressive array of sophisticated electronic sensors she represents the current high-water mark in Russian ship design. Today Soviet ships can patrol off any coast in the world they may be oceanographic research ships merchant vessels, fishing trawlers submarines or surface warships but they are all part of the same maritime force. Closely commanded through a modern system of communications they can respond rapidly anywhere in the world to any situation. This has been the rise of the Soviet Navy of Soviet sea power. From the Tsarist fleet of 1917 to the present modern mobile well-coordinated ocean force and this ship Moskva symbolizes a challenge a challenge of Soviet sea power to western preeminence on the oceans of the world.


The Landsat 8 operational land imager, OLI, was radiometrically calibrated prior to launch in terms of spectral radiance. The radiance calibration was performed with an uncertainty of 3%, the reflectance calibration to 2%. On orbit, multiple calibration techniques indicate that the sensor has been stable to better than 0.3% to date. This article was offered by Brian Markham, Julia Barsi, Geerke Farron, and others.


Hello everybody, welcome to episode 2 of Cloud Native Classroom here on Cloud Native TV. My name is Kat Cosgrove, and before we get started, I have to warn you that this is an official CNCF livestream event, which means that the CNCF code of conduct is in force here. So be nice, don't say anything crude, and just generally behave. But we are watching the Twitch chat, so if you have questions for me or for my guest or just in general about whatever, let a rip, we will see them, and we will be happy to answer you if we can. I am joined today by Ted, one of the founders of OpenTelemetry, who's here to help me understand what observability means, and also how OpenTelemetry can help. How you doing, Ted? Doing great. Nice to meet you, Kat. Great to be on the show. Glad to have you. It's a big help. There are so many things in the CNCF sandbox. I'm a CNCF ambassador, and I can't keep track of them. I don't know if you're doing any better as somebody who actually supports one of these things. But what actually does observability mean in a Kubernetes context? What problem are we solving here when we talk about all of these different observability tools? Yeah, so observability means monitoring, despite all the hype. That part hasn't changed. It means when you're running your system, you're going to have problems, and then you're going to have to fix those problems. Observability is the piece between hearing that there's a problem, investigating the problem, and then you've got to go and solve it. So it's the hearing about the problem and investigating it part. In order to do that, you need to have some kind of signal coming out of your system to see what it's doing. And I say it's like it hasn't really changed because running your system hasn't really changed the same bugs that there ever were. In that sense, observability is not new, but there is some new tooling available. And that's actually what OpenTelemetry provides. OpenTelemetry is the part of an observability system. You can think of observability as two parts. There's generating the data and sending it somewhere. So that's telemetry. Like look up the Webster definition of telemetry. It's sending signals and observations about a remote object to somewhere where you can analyze it. So OpenTelemetry is just generating that data and sending it somewhere. It's not analyzing the data. So analyzing the data sold separately. And that's actually a new thing though. Because in the past, usually someone would make a tool, whether it's like a closed source thing like AppDynamics or New Relic or it's an open source thing like Prometheus. It's like cool. You make your analysis tool and then you need to offer people instrumentation packages so they can go out and generate metrics and logs and things. And so it's kind of like a unified stack. You generate the data to send it to the thing that analyzes the data. And that creates a lot of vendor lock-in in a way that's really pernicious. Even with open source stuff, it's not just like vendor for money issue. It's just instrumenting your system is what we call a cross-cutting concern.  So you end up with just approximately a hajillion logs and metrics calls just all of your system. And then if you want to use a different tool to analyze that data, it's like we have to go re-instrument all of that stuff. And so that's kind of like one of the core problems we were looking at. And then the other issue is this sort of siloed approach we've had. Because every tool analyzed one type of data. Maybe it's a metrics tool that makes metrics dashboards. Maybe it's a logging tool that stores your logs and lets you search through them. Maybe it's some kind of profiling tool. Everyone makes like their tool and then the instrumentation for that. And a side effect of that is all of this data is siloed. It's not good because the reality is we don't use these tools separately. When you're trying to observe a system, you have this cycle you go through of first noticing you have like an alert, like a metric. Here, I've got, can we share my screen? I've actually got like some slides about this. So you go full screen on me. There we go. So like the way we really tend to do this is like some metric goes squiggly. And you get an alert. You want to know why it's squiggly.  You kind of squint at them. And then you try to figure out which other metrics went squiggly at the same time. Like in the past, I've literally like, I will take a ruler or a piece of paper or something and just line it up on the dashboard and be like, what other metrics went squiggly at the same time? That's the way you're phrasing this a lot. Because it's like, it's not, let's not be highfalutin about this. Like that's, we're just like, this went squiggly. This other thing went squiggly. Okay. Those seem to correlate. What might that mean? And you start thinking, well, it might mean this or that. And so you start going through your logs to see like, well, what are the transactions? Like what are the chain of events that may have caused this problem? You might start looking at your configuration files and be like, it's something misconfigured somewhere is like, are these Kafka nodes configured differently from these other ones? And so you're trying to take all these different data sources, configuration data, all the resource data about all the different machines you're running. Logging data, aggregate data, like metrics. And you're trying to find correlations between all these different kinds of data. And once you've started to find some correlations, you start to build a guess about what the problem might be. And then at that point, you can try to go verify whether your guess is correct. And hopefully it is.  And what's difficult about this process is people tend to spend a lot of time trying to find those correlations. Yeah. So I mean, that's a really labor intensive process. It's really labor intensive. Just finding the logs, just finding the logs, for example. Literally, where are they? Where are the logs? When you've got like 100 machines and they're all handling thousands of requests at the same time, your logs are just this blizzard of stuff. And even if you have them in a system that can index them, what index are you actually going to use to find just the logs in that one transaction? Yeah, that's not really helpful for an actual, for a human. We do it, but we end up spending a lot of time when we're observing these systems actually just trying to find the data and collect it. It's one of those pain points that you get used to and you don't realize it's unnecessary. I was this is sort of like when good code formatting tools started to show up. I feel like the go programming language really kicked this into high gear. But where you just get used to the idea of just like format your code. You don't think about it.  And some of you are like, why am I pressing Tab all the time? And like, this is terrible. I don't want to do this. And so I feel like what you're getting out of open telemetry is the kind of correlations and indexes across these different types of signals so that you can feed it all into one tool that can cross index all this stuff. And if you have one tool that can do that and the data is actually structured into a graph, it's actually like properly structured data with a lot of semantic meaning. So you can see this is an HTTP client request. And this is like a Kafka queue and all of that. Then you can start applying some machine analysis to that data, which means the machines can start finding these correlations for you. And so you can say, look at some metrics and then be able to say, okay, I see the spike here in my metrics. What are example traces that are associated with this spike in my metric? I just want to see rather than try to guess and go figure it out, just show me the actual transactions that we're generating this metric, for example. So having all these different data types connected into a proper data, into a proper graph, lets you do this kind of automated analysis. People are going to try to sell this AI ops and it's just going to think for you. And that's not true. It's not going to do that very well. But it will be able to automate a lot of this digging around that currently has to go through a human brain. And once you get that off of your plate, it's really liberating. Because you can start testing your hypotheses very quickly. You don't have to think, well, if I want to check that, that means I've got to go dig around a bunch. It's going to take me 15 minutes to get all that data together and then grep through it. So I don't know.  And if you can just click through really quickly, then you're spending much more of your time actually just trying to analyze the data and making guesses and verifying them. So that's one of the big value propositions I think open telemetry is bringing. And by doing that in an open source way, we're essentially trying to create a standard by getting all of the big players on board to agree they're all going to generate and consume this data. And doing it a way that's stable and neutral enough with the right kind of dependency chain stuff which I can dig into. But basically we've made it potentially consumable for open source libraries as well. So if you have a library that's going to get shared in a bunch of different systems like a web framework or a database client, you can actually instrument that library yourself with open telemetry. And then when it plugs into an application with other libraries using open telemetry and the application itself using open telemetry, they all automatically start talking to each other. That's actually really rad because I'm deeply lazy, incredibly lazy.  Or at least do less busy work, do fewer boring repetitive things. So this is appealing to the lazy part of my brain in a pretty big way. Yeah, I think that aspect is going to be really helpful. And the whole thing is built on top of what's called distributed tracing, which used to be seen as a niche tool. But basically what distributed tracing is, is it's a context that follows your code as it's executing. So for people who have, I feel like this is CNCF land, so there's probably a number of Go developers.  I'm not a huge fan of the fact that you have to hand it around by hand. But I don't disagree with you. I don't write Go personally. Like I know it, but it's not. I actually, I have a YouTube video that's like a rant about context that just really digs into that particular issue. It is a bummer you have to pass around by hand, but it is great that there is a canonical context object. And everyone has agreed, like this is where you put your stuff. And so that allows you to hand things like open telemetry constructs that have to follow your code, just go into the context object. And those objects we call spans are what generate this graph. So they have what's called a trace ID. Could probably just draw this, but let's see. Let's see here. Let's do some drawing. While Ted's pulling up the drawing app, just a reminder to click the follow button so that you can A, use the chat, ask us questions. Please do ask us questions. Even if they're not related to open telemetry, if you have questions about Ted's virtual background or my hair, that's fine too. This is a real background. This is my living room. Oh my God, really? See, look, it's real. Your living room is incredible. Oh, thanks. Wow. It's just, it's so perfect. I assumed that it was a virtual background. That's wild. Wow, good job. Yeah, this is just, I just camp out in here all the time. You've designed it so well. I had to make it pretty. Yeah, very pretty. Anyway, follow us on Twitch so you can talk to us and also so that you know when we're live next. Let's do some drawing. Yeah, okay, Doug.  Okay. So you have like Operation A calls Operation B, which calls Operation C. And then that makes like a little network request here. So this makes like a network request to this other service, which then has some more operations and then, you know, maybe it makes some more requests to other things and so on and so forth. So you've got this kind of chain of services and you've got the user coming in here, you know, clicking buy or whatever it is that's kicking all of this off. And so in all of these operations here, you have events, which are basically like logs. So you have all these little events happening. Boop, boop, boop. You know, request started, request finished, all of that kind of stuff. What you have with open telemetry is this concept called a span, which says all of these events are in one operation. So let's call that a span and a span has an ID. And all of these spans are connected to each other, where each span has a parent. So you have a parent ID. Sorry, my handwriting is terrible. No, it's fine. And then so that's the basis of your graph is you've got each, each thing's got an ID, it's got a parent, right? Basic graph. And then this whole overall graph has an ID for the entire transaction, which is called your trace ID. Okay. Somebody is asking what you're using to draw, by the way. Oh, I'm drawing in Photoshop right now. I like to draw up on procreate in iPad. That's like my favorite thing. If I'm on desktop, they pay for the Adobe thing. So I use it. Right. Yeah, of course. Yeah.  Got it. And so this, this blob of data can then be associated with every log operation, which has actually, let's call these attributes. So like span attributes, metrics, and then anything else you might end up generating. So span attributes are things like the, the operation, the duration of the operation, the start time, and then a bunch of indexes that you might want to have on all of the different events. So for example, if you have an HTTP request, there's, you know, things like, you know, what's the method? What's the URL? What's the status code that was returned? All of that. Did this operation succeed? Did it fail? Those kind of attributes are collectively applied to all of the events that would occur within that particular operation. So we call those, we call those attributes. And then the logs themselves, these also have attributes. So it's attributes all the way down. Likewise, the metrics have attributes all the way down. Yeah. But if you make it, the point is once you get tracing set up, then anytime you make a log or anytime you make a metric, it automatically gets this, these IDs stapled onto it. And so this allows you, if you find one of these things, for example, like if you're looking at like the log that's like this thing blew up, like, so maybe it's, it's like kaboom here. Oh no. And you're like, okay, so I got this, I got this event, but I want to know like what, what happened here? Like what kicked this off? I may not have all the data I need here. I may want to know something that occurred somewhere else. For example, there might be some correlation that's happening, like this blew up.  And you're like, wow, we're getting a bunch of errors and being able to quickly see like all the errors are coming from one project. That would, that would tell you a lot. Immediately. Yeah. That there is a problem specifically here. Yeah. Or latency has gone through the roof. Like I keep your Kafka queue is backing up and noticing like all of that delay is happening from Kafka node six. That kind of stuff is going to, to really rapidly, rapidly help. And I should mention, in addition to these spans, so this is the kind of transaction context. So we call this like, like this is, trace comp, here we go. So this is what we call trace context. We also have all of this stuff here, which are called resources.  So all of your resources and also config, like you can put all of your configuration information into this stuff. So you're able to, to kind of cross index, not just looking at the transactions, which are kind of like every time this runs what happens, you're also then looking at what are the services, what are the resources this transaction was associated with. And so having all of that data together lets you move around a lot. And this includes metrics, right? So if you generate a metric somewhere in here, that metric is going to automatically get associated with, you know, the machine that it was generated from. And then it's also going to, every time you say, count that metric, it's going to get associated with the transaction that caused that count. And so these are what are called exemplars. And that allows you to, to kind of, if you have a tool that will do this, bounce back and forth between like looking at your metrics and then just looking at the transactions that cost it. Wow, that's cool. So yeah. That's open telemetry in a nut cell. Yeah. And that's open telemetry in a nut cell. Is like, that's the value prop. The other value prop, like I said, is by doing this in like an open source standard approach. And by standard, I mean, we're convincing everyone to use it and we're developing it in a manner that's really focused on long-term stability. Like we're never going to ship a 2.0 of any of our stable interfaces once they become stable, you know, Microsoft is talking about baking open telemetry into Word and Windows and things like that. So you're talking about software that has a shelf life of like 20 years. So that's the sort of time scale of like stability and support we're thinking about. And that's what's going to allow open source software to be like, well, you know what? I could instrument myself rather than having instrumentation come as a plugin that kind of hooks in, which is how it currently works. You can say, well, I'm going to instrument my database client or my web framework myself. And then I'm going to ship a playbook to my users. So let them know I provided them all these configuration options to let them tune. And I'm providing them this observability data and I'm going to give them a playbook that says, you know, when you see these kinds of squigglies, it means, you know, you should tune these knobs. Right now playbooks are something SREs just make for themselves. But my hope is in the future, the people who write the software will be able to hand you the playbooks. So yeah, those are the big goals for the Open Telemetry Project. Those are big goals. But so this is something that like anybody can just take a crack at themselves, right? Like if somebody wants to go wire up their personal project with this, they can just let it rip. Yeah, tracing is stable. So it's totally fine. Once any look at any client that comes out, once it's hit 1.0, that means tracing is stable. We're working on the metrics API right now. So that'll be stable by the end of the year. And we're also working on on blogs. So you can you can essentially log using the tracing system today. Sick. Yeah. This has been this has been really, really great. This has been really helpful, especially for me. I hope it was helpful for the like 30-ish people watching us. But for me, it was useful because I didn't really understand what Open Telemetry did before this, which is the whole point of this show. Because I genuinely do not understand any of the projects I'm inviting on here. That way it's more authentic.   But we are running out of time. So before we go, is there anything you would like to shill for? Yeah. So I would like to shill in general for the Open Telemetry community. We're very, it's a very open community. We hang out on Slack, the CNCF Slack, any channel that starts Hotel Dash. There's an open general Open Telemetry channel. You can say hi, but we work in SIGs just like Kubernetes. And so all the SIGs have a channel. And the SIGs often meet every week on Zoom. So there's a calendar. And all of that information is in, if you go to our GitHub org, there's a repo called Community. And that has all the info. For KubeCon coming up, just sneak preview. We're going to try to do a live Open Telemetry community day. It won't be part of KubeCon because we want to not require a KubeCon ticket and to keep the cost low for attendees. So it'll probably, we have to work the details out, but it will be very cheap to attend. And it'll be like a one day on conference. Basically a big community get together because we haven't seen each other because of the pandemic. So have a look out for that. We should hopefully be announcing that soonish. So if you're thinking about going to KubeCon or just are in LA for some reason, you should come by and say hi. Brad, well, thank you so much for joining me. I really, really appreciate it. Everybody on Twitch who's still watching, the next show on Cloud Native TV is tomorrow at 1pm Pacific time. It's the fields tested with Kazzlin Fields. She is walking everybody through it while she deploys a personal blog on Kubernetes because what do we love? Overengineering simple things. I do at least. So go see Kazzlin tomorrow. I will be back week after next. And Ted, we'll see you on Twitter. Thanks so much. Bye.


Boston University's dance theater group hosted Motion Art, a night of various artistic performances at the 808 Art Gallery. The idea is that art can be performances, not just paintings. We wanted to try something new and performing in an unconventional space, so we checked out the gallery and decided this would be the best place to hold it. We really wanted to bring different art forms together, which is exciting because not many times do we ever have the opportunity to do this, and we really enjoyed being able to bring visual art music and dance in one space. I was really excited to perform tonight because we had a chance to collaborate with a bunch of different art forms, like the singing group, musicians, the artwork on the wall we got to collaborate with and then dancing with our bodies, so it was awesome to bring all that together. The Motion Art show included performances by various dance and singing groups. Many of the dances have been rehearsed for weeks. One piece was completely improvised on the spot, another was learned just an hour before curtain. So the last piece we did, we had a choreographer come in, actually an hour before the show started, and we learned a piece of choreography, it was about four or five minutes long, and we were really nervous because we had just learned it, but it was awesome, it was really cool and I think the audience enjoyed it. Although the performance is over, the dancers say they'll be back at the studio tomorrow rehearsing for the next one. Reporting for BUTV News, I'm Malia Moses.