Hey guys, welcome to today's show. On today's show, I'm going to be in conversation with a guy called Jason Pfeiffer who is the editor-in-chief of the American based Entrepreneur magazine and we chatted together about his creative process in Approaching an entrepreneurial life and mindset what he believes are the ingredients of an entrepreneur and how to spot one and become one And also he's interviewed with The Rock. Yes, The Rock and What he learned from that interview and other great people's interviewed. It is a fantastic interview He's a very smart guy. You're gonna love it. Don't forget to leave a review in a comment I love reading them tag me into them and subscribe if you don't already. I'd love you to do that. All right. Enjoy. Thank you Hidden blessings of the pandemic my friend because everybody has a different framing of what's going on. I know entrepreneur really wired people Usually frame things like this with more of an opportunity head-on than a tragedy head-on What has been your framing any hidden blessings of the pandemic? Oh? I think so many, you know if you look back at the history of Terrible events which of course the you know history contains many of them what you see despite, you know, let's not Dismiss the terrible tragedies of all many people but what you see coming out of it is actually great innovation great opportunity Great change and an openness to new ideas It just didn't exist before and a lot of the world that we live in is courtesy of some past terrible thing if you live in a city and you enjoy the park in your city I live in New York and Central Park is an amazing place. You have the cholera epidemics of the mid-1800s to thank for that you rewind to the To the black for the bubonic plague of the 1300s and that created the Employment contract as we know it that the kind of foundation of our economy and so When I looked at this moment. I said, okay, well, here's what's gonna happen People used to resist to change and now they're going to understand that all ideas have to be on the table and That the things that they thought were maybe too cumbersome or maybe too ridiculous Are now things that might really be worth taking seriously also Barriers are going to fall barriers not just in consumer interest, but also barriers in regulation The number of Regulations that have fallen that didn't make any sense to begin with are tremendous You know now I can or I can walk up to a restaurant and walk away with a cocktail down the street I couldn't do that before why couldn't I do that before there's absolutely no good reason I couldn't have done that before but now I can and let's try to keep that and so I think that if you're an entrepreneur and you see this as an opportunity and You try to seek out where people are going and how you can be a problem-solver and a solution offer to people then The possibilities are absolutely endless. I Love that response. I think people are moving towards, you know a Stability or let's weather the storm or the resilience. Let's get better in spite of the storm I'm not surprised that your answer coming from what I've seen of you in the way You're wired entrepreneurially, but I still think that that is a rare exceptional mindset And I think that's probably been true generation. They don't you the minority of people think like you think Yeah probably You know, I mean the sure the minority of the minority of people are entrepreneurs The you know the minority of people are the genuine change makers I mean, you know if everybody was Thomas Edison, then we wouldn't know Thomas Edison's name But but if you are Wired that way if that's the way that you think and see the world Then I think that there are amazing opportunities ahead for you And you know, if that's if that's not the way that you see the world then I You know, I'm sure there there are plenty other ways to Find comfort and find value and provide value in the world But you know the folks that I'm generally speaking to are the ones who you don't need to Make the argument. You just need to give them the inspiration to keep going I'm interested in you mentioned of Thomas Edison because I saw on one of your Instagram posts about your Writer's block on the 8,000 word script and you broke the writer's block by having a popsicle break And then went back I wonder is that part of your creative process like I believe that we are most creative when we're not trying to be Is that what you were saying in that post? Yeah, so the context there that was that was something I posted last night actually funny enough I was working on a 8,000 word Script for my podcast pessimists archive. It's actually funny enough just before we were talking I was I was kind of going through and revising it and and you know, these are long they're long pieces are very complicated and I don't have you know, I don't think of it as like writer's block because I think of Writing less is a creative act and more as an act of assembly Like it's to me.  I have a 16 month old You know, you watch a little baby as they first start walking They'll just like they'll walk into walls and then they'll like hit the wall And then they'll back up and then they'll just like try the wall again You know, they'll just like keep going because they don't understand it and and I feel like our brains we'll do that we'll just get into one direction and then we'll just kind of keep pounding at it and In when we do that, I think that you need to walk away and you need to reset I often find that I do some of my greatest breakthroughs in thinking When I'm not actually working when I'm somewhere else when I'm when it's just kind of marinating in the back of my head And and that way, you know, the thing is that I think good creativity good creation is all about Pulling together disparate pieces and finding a way in which they fit, right? I mean like that's what I just talked to this guy Matt Ridley who wrote a book called how innovation works And I asked him well, how does innovation work and he said innovation works by collectives of people a building on top of each other's Work, you know, and and so you can do that with yourself, too But the problem is that sometimes we just when we're working and we're like literally working sitting down and working We are just we're slamming into the same wall over and over again And you need to step back and let your ideas connect with other things that are entering your brain You just sort of open it up and just let other ideas and other input flow And that's where I think you try to that's where I find the greatest connections And then I jot it down and then I get back to the computer and then I'm on my way That's very interesting Thomas Edison apparently mastered the art of hit negotiate, which was a An induced state of napping he got himself into I don't if you know that the term We have it here. I think it's universal when the penny drops You know when somebody gets something when the penny drops apparently came from Edison who used to be in this napping state With a penny grouped between his knees and a metal tray beneath it And if he fell into asleep, he didn't want to he just wanted to nap If he went to sleep, he would relax his body the penny would hit the tray and wake him up And when he woke up he had this flow of creativity that he didn't have when he was trying too hard Hence the penny dropping mean stop trying too hard and the penny will drop the metaphorical popsicle, you know Yeah, oh, that's funny. I the penny drop is not a phrase that's common in like in America. So but But that's interesting, you know, the funny thing right it actually Matt Ridley had made some It offered me some anecdote about Edison about how he tried like five I can't remember what it was like five thousand different kinds of filament or something before he right figured out You know, which one would work and you know, the lesson there is just like just keep going But but you know, there is a there's a funny downside to Edison You know, I'm very fascinated by why people resist innovation. That's the that's the that's the topic of the podcast that I do pessimists archive and and so at you know Edison was a You know is is credited if so many things one of them was introducing a commercial electricity and That's true Edison, you know set up this is kind of early power plant But Edison had invested all of his money and all his technology Into direct current and you know direct current doesn't actually go very far It's not it's not actually the way that most of us are like most electricity that we're all using is not direct current it's alternating current and And alternating current was championed by Westinghouse and Tesla and they started building out You know alternating current facilities and alternating current turned out to be the superior technology and West and Edison Edison actually railed against that he he fear-mongered about about alternating current and Putting out these just crazy things about how if if you know your home is connected to alternating current that everything You touch is going to kill you and it really created a ton of confusion in the marketplace And the great mystery was whether Edison actually believed that which I really just can't understand that he would because he was such a smart guy or whether he just Got so caught up in the potential losses because he had Picked the wrong horse that his solution was not to Change everything that he had done and get with the right horse and admit that he was wrong But instead to just try to stop Progress and that's something you see throughout time or when there is an incumbent which you know like electricity was moving pretty fast But you could say that Edison was the incumbent Because he was first to market the incumbent often will respond to something new Not by innovating not by trying to improve the thing that they do or understand what people want But just to make things scary and just to make just to create fear This is what the butter industry did to margarine. It's what the milk industry is doing now to oat milk and other alternate milks It's completely ridiculous and you know the the major lesson that everybody should take that by that is that it fails Every single time it fails Edison failed at that. We don't have direct current We I mean we have direct current for some things But we have alternating current the world is largely alternating current you can't do that You can't resist innovation like that. You can't stick your foot in the ground and say I'm right here Everybody else has to adapt to me. It just doesn't work that way. Yeah, Jason How would you describe what you do to a stranger? I have to think I can explain what I do to people who know what I do But if I was to meet you a stranger on a plane and said what do you do? What do you typically say to people when you describe what you do which I guess is multi-led Yeah, it is I actually have a really hard time with that. I mean, it's funny I I just what I do is is like long and And there are like different elements to it. So honestly if I meet someone on a plane I I tend to just minimize it as much as possible and then if they're interested they can ask me for more So I always just say I run a business magazine, right? And it's interesting because sometimes people be like, oh, what's the magazine and other people, you know Just don't care at all and they're like, oh, that's cool. And so but what you know, what do I the way that I think about what I do is that I Inspire people to feel good about doing hard things and That can come in many different forms that comes in the magazine that I make that comes in the the podcasts that I do the speaking that I Do, you know, I I'm very active on social media. That's not for fun That's because I see that as an extension of my brand and a way to build audience you know, I I think that the role that I play in people's lives is to Make them feel less crazy about tackling massive challenges and and so, you know The audience that I have are either people who are in the middle of massive challenges who are who I think are gearing themselves up for a massive challenge and You know that they those are people who are In they they are self-motivated, but at the same time it's funny Everybody needs everybody needs a push and I think everybody needs validation that they're not Wasting their time and they're not wasting other people's time and and even something as simple as posting my kind of Random thoughts about work as you you know, as you would see in on Instagram You know, I find just the response to that stuff is tremendous because people just people get lost and And entrepreneurship and anything that's like entrepreneurship. It's a very isolating experience of people People need something inside of that bubble of theirs that just tells them that they're doing okay Yeah, I think I think when I look at your stuff There's a lot of teaching and wisdom for life What I would call it in there might be things communication and I do these communication masterclass events around the world So communication so studying you as a communicator I feel the freshness of not just inspiration But the wisdom and the angles you come out things through I think is what would draw me to and I signed up to Your podcast and your newsletter because I love thanks. I love your take on On making complex things simple I think is a superpower especially for people in the business world and the political world who make complex things more complicated That's true. That's I appreciate that. Thank you very much. Yeah, it's you know, it's funny. I didn't Set out to do this or to be this I originally set out to just be a reporter and Then I shifted into being an editor and that was really just because that's where the jobs are in magazines And I really I bounced around. I was a local newspaper reporter. I worked at Boston magazine men's health You know, I I spent a small stint at Maxim magazine that like, you know kind of trashy men's magazine But the reason I made all those changes was because I was constantly just focused on what it is that I didn't know how to do You know, I didn't know how to communicate in this way. I didn't know how to edit in this way I didn't know how to write a 3,000 word story I didn't know how to and and then I would find that by just going around and picking up skills I was able to then apply those skills to new things that I found interesting and that I constantly pushed myself to Explore new opportunities even if it wasn't clear what the value was going to be like I didn't know what the ROI was on learning how to be a podcaster just felt like something I should know how to do and Now that I look back on it I can see how the things that I do in my current role, which I completely stumbled into that that They came from very unexpected places. So what's you know, how is it that I am able to? Pull a lesson out of everything Stubborn a lot that I'm always you know, regardless of what it is that I'm talking about I can kind of drive it towards some takeaway lesson and and the answer is because I spent a few years doing that at men's health. That's how men's health writes. Everything is very Service-oriented. It's all it's all about telling a reader how to use some piece of information I hated doing that at men's health, but the reason that I hated doing it now. I understand it because I just kind of didn't care about Weight loss tips or fitness tips But then when I found something that I did care about and I realized that I had built this instinct to be able to see something and immediately extract a lesson from it that That using this thing that I'd learned in a completely different context and applying it to a new line of work that I was more passionate about Led to something that was pretty great. And so, you know, my lesson for everybody Besides I always turn to lessons my lesson for everybody is to just be mindful of the skills that you're building You know step it from whatever context they're in because there those are two different things You can you can be at work doing something but learning a kind of core skill. That's completely transferable You should always be aware of that one of the big things I speak about in the communication side of what I do is I think the best leaders communicators Entrepreneurs business leaders are that because they have a very strong clear why that they've identified early on The why not being a product they're selling but a problem. They're solving What do you think your why is I think you've maybe mentioned it already in some of your comments But is that something you've articulated not very clear about early on? No No, not at all. It's something that I've really worked on and I have I've been trying to Put it down into as few words as possible for a while Yeah, and It's you know, it's time. It's it's it's it's honestly, it's quite it's quite difficult Because you know, like I said, I stumbled into this and but by what I mean by that is is that I was I was at Maxim and I was looking for another opportunity and as it turns out entrepreneur was looking for an executive editor Which is the number two at a magazine. I was really interested in being the number two at a magazine and so I You know I connected with the editor-in-chief at the time and we talked and she liked me and hired me and then nine months later she left the magazine and Then there was an opportunity to step in as editor-in-chief and at the time because my background was in making magazines I saw that as a magazine making job and So I when I got the job I Spent the first year really just thinking about it as how do I make this magazine better? And how do I help this brand to find itself in a new moment? because it hadn't it hadn't really gone through that process in a while and Then once I got it into a place that I was happy with I started going out in like accepting interviews and people weren't Talking to me as if I was a magazine maker They were talking to me as if I was a thought leader in entrepreneurship and and that was uncomfortable It was not a role that I was used to and it took me a long time to adjust to it at first I pushed back on it then my my wife Gave me this powerful piece of advice Which was if they want you to be a thought leader then be a thought leader and and I realized you know The only difference between someone who's a thought leader and someone who's not a thought leader is that the thought leader is okay Saying they're a thought leader. I mean, there's like no other difference. And so I started inhabiting this role and Experimenting putting things out into the world ways that I felt I could Bring value to people seeing what people reacted to and then adjusting to it and along the way trying to understand As I was doing it, you know, there's this great Hoffman has this great line about entrepreneurship That entrepreneurship is building an airplane on the way down or like jumping off a cliff and building an airplane on the way down and I felt like I was doing a little bit of that by building myself, but what the hell am I and and What I came to realize is that the thing that I connect with the most and the thing that I'm passionate about the most and also just fascinated with is Is the process of change is why people are afraid of it? how people overcome that how people create change how people create change in themselves and that I have I'm in a position to Help people do that and so, you know, I What does that mean exactly? You know as a guy who has runs a magazine has three podcasts does a lot of speaking You know, I've got a I've got a book that needs, you know, as soon as I have the time for it like everything else, you know, we'll start chugging along and And you know and some other projects, so I honestly I really do you know, like I slipped it in 10 minutes earlier You asked me something and I said I Inspired people to feel good about doing hard things like that's like a line I came up with two weeks ago that I've been like trying to trying to Work out and see if it works for me, you know, and then I I don't know I know that my I know that my why is that I I really love I really love Communicating in my own voice and being of use to people and I think that the thing that that that people need and the thing that I am most fascinated by is this is is is is how change happens and And I'm figuring it out like everybody else. I Think that phrase that you used about inspiring people to do hard things for me felt instantly like Your why and instantly what I felt when I looked through your social media Coupled to this sense of an act of service that it's packaged in in other words I didn't feel you were doing it as a hobby or an interest or I'll try this or a surpassing thing in my life I felt served by listening to you. I felt helped by listening to you and when you did interviews I noticed and You felt the interviewer wasn't making it simple enough You reset it in a way that we would understand it because you didn't feel confident They said it in a way we would understand it though. That wasn't your job That's right. Thanks for noticing that, you know, it's I mean that actually comes out of an observation that I I used to listen to What back when I had like a car commute I would listen to a lot of NPR and national public radio for those not in America and and they You know, there are a number of I Notice this thing that the interviewers do which was very impressive Particularly when they would do like a call-in show like there were these call-in shows and you know They're very intelligent call-in shows. They're not like dumb talk radio call-in shows it's always about current events and Somebody would call up and they would make some kind of rambling point because they're you know, they're not perfect communicators They're just random listener picked up the phone and then the host would always take what that person said and Reframe it in a really constructive way that advanced the conversation and then put it to the guest And then the guest would respond to that and I I remember hearing that and just thinking that is a great skill And also just a great thing to be aware of that you that if you are if you are if you have a clear-eyed understanding of what it of what your role is in any setting and also If you are serving an audience and you understand how to serve that audience and what that audience is looking for then Your job isn't just to sit there and like be a traffic cop Your job is to essentially produce ideas on the fly and make sure that they're as relevant as possible to the audience And so I listened I just was listening to I heard it over and over again And I just thought if I'm ever in a position in which I need to do that I need to do that I just need to be good at that and so I yeah, I'm always looking for those opportunities Because I feel like you know my job is to serve and create a good experience Now that memory of the car journeys and the commutes that you did and you take away from that to me speaks to The awakening of this calling to me That's an awakening of a calling that you were having back then that that stuck with you more than any other things That could have stuck with you that that was you take away if I ever get to do this I am going to do this a different way to me is is Interesting about people that have a clear calling and Track it by memories, but I haven't packaged it together I've struttled with that a lot in my life of I know I feel passionate about this But I don't know why no one else does no one else notice that what the hell's wrong with me Maybe I should notice the either but I find I'm drawn to it effortlessly When others don't see it and I walk up to realize maybe this is to do with why I'm on the planet Yeah, I love that. That's a great way of thinking about it. And that's not how I had thought of it I'll but I like that and I accept it But I I'll tell you the way that I thought about it Which was that I've always had and I think this has served me really well I've always had a curiosity about how things are made and And and you know in particular curiosity about how things are made within a within my own field and you know, I see my own field as as a field of storytelling and communications and so When I watch television, I am not just enjoying it for them I'm constantly thinking about how they Created this and the number of storylines that have been written into this and like which arcs are Completing and which arcs are not and when I listen to radio, I'm thinking about how it's produced I mean, I'm just I'm always always alert To the skill that's involved in producing the thing that I'm consuming because you know, that's how I learned to write as far as I'm concerned I don't have anybody who I Think of as a mentor or or that has served that role for me to me My the closest thing that I have to like mentors were People who did really great work at a time in which I was young and most hungry To see great skill. So for example, like Dave Eggers books. I just I just dissected them and there's a guy named nr. Kleinfeld who Who who wrote a lot for the New York Times? He still does but not I don't see his byline as much anymore But far more, you know, like the early 2000s when I when I was graduating college and and learning and I would just I Would just sit there and read what they did and then back up and say, okay, how did they do that? That was really funny. How did they do it? How do they lead into it? How did they what was the transition here? How did they get from one idea to the other and I just dissected it and I found that by being alert to the skills around you You can start to absorb some of those skills yourself Yeah, absolutely. What did you learn from the rock? I saw you interviewed him. Oh Yeah, I did. I loved him surprises um Yeah, yeah, well, so the so I interviewed him and his his business partner whose name is Danny Garcia Put them on the cover of the magazine And I really I loved them. So first of all everything that anybody's ever heard about how completely Pleasant and nice they are it is was is just true is just very true They they have a they have a reputation like nobody else for just being exceptionally generous and nice and and that came through You know the the line that I Will be repeating from that interview was they said I mean Danny had said it but she said it about both of them. They said We are not attached to process. We are only attached to outcome You know, they have an idea of where it is that they want to go and what it is that they have to offer the world And they do not care exactly what it is That they do to get there and I don't mean that in like a bad way I mean that like they're constantly revising how they work who they work with The you know the the the products that they that they put out Danny is very conscious about conscience consciously evolving Dwayne's You know work and persona in the world and and I love that because it's true You can't you can't confuse process for outcome You can't say the the way I do something is also the thing that I do because it's not those are separate things and And and so I you know, I love that they're their constant willingness to reinvent themselves You know on the fly. I don't think Jason. I'm aware of your time, but I don't think that we grow I don't think humans grow in environments that we have control over in other words to keep growing and flourishing as a human I think you have to regularly intentionally be out of control somewhere or Intentionally create discomfort for yourself so that you see what happens Curiosity will be will be contributing to that process. I'm saying that to ask you Where do you currently feel out of control that is stretching you? Well, yeah, I agree with that and you know and for what it's worth the people who I've worked with who I thought were the worst Like just the worst at their jobs the worst at interpersonal relationships Those are people who had rarely challenged themselves, right like many years ago at one magazine I worked with He was he was very high up at the magazine and and I had to work with him a lot and I hated it and And I consider him to be the worst person. I've ever worked with he was he was rude and mean and not at all open-minded about what new ways we could Experiment with putting things in the magazine He had a very fixed idea and you know, it should not come as any surprise that he started as the mag at the magazine as an Intern and he had spent, you know, 15 years or longer Just at that one place doing that one thing. He had never challenged himself He had never had to we think what he did and and what his role was and so, you know, that turned him into somebody who sucks so Where do I feel sorry? I mean, I feel stretched and honestly in every possible direction Because I'm doing way too many things so I I Feel like I don't I feel like I haven't cracked the code on on How to be me? I know how to be the editor-in-chief of entrepreneur magazine right, which is a role that I occupy and And that I'm very happy to occupy and that brings with it a level of status and access and that On top of that, I have built all these other things But I am mindful that I don't own Entrepreneur magazine and though I am very happy to be there now and we'll be happy to be there for time to come I you know, I'm not going to be there forever. And so how do I very crisply? define myself and produce the kind of work that People will turn to and not say that's the editor-in-chief of entrepreneur magazine would say that's Jason Pfeiffer and and I have so many conversations about that and I'm always thinking about it because it excites me and it also I think gets it pushes me to identify as we were talking about earlier the sort of core value the core why because When you work a job and especially if that job comes with some level of status You you know, there's a level of comfort that comes with that. You don't have to think about the why that much the why is it's just fill the role but but I don't ever want to lose sight of That I am not a role that I occupy I am in the long term a role that I create for myself Yeah, I've never believed that we are the hats that we wear But you are the same person under all those hats But if you don't know who the hell that is You default to the protection of the hat which appeals to the ego and the egoic identity And we live less and less from the soul Which I think great humans do and live more and more from title and badges and roles which protects the ego I think what you touched on there is a huge issue Um one more thing to ask you about personal development challenges Which may be to do with what you just said or all the frantic state of life you in it this season What are you doing? What's your greatest? Do you think? I'm doing this. I'm working on me in doing this a personal development challenge You feel I wish I had more time on that I'm frustrated. I can't get more attention to this about me as a human. Oh Hmm, you know, I mean the thing that I The thing that I struggle with The most and I don't know if this is an answer to your question, but the thing that I struggle the most with right now is is Built like trusting others to do the work with me. I You know every I I obviously have a team at entrepreneur. It's a small team and a great team and You know, so that that that's that is what it is But everything else I do a lot of it myself, you know, I do too much of it myself Just entirely too much of it myself Right. I write every newsletter myself.  I I I do it all myself and You know, and I do that for two reasons one I'm very cognizant of my voice and the consistency of my voice and that people People connect with me and I want it to be me But also frankly because I don't really know how to find people and build the kinds of Relationships where I can find people who can help me and I you know, I do I do you know I do have help in certain in certain places Right like pessimists archive podcast as a there's a team of there of sorts But but but the actual writing of the podcast which takes a tremendous amount of time I have I just can't figure out how to find people to help me on it and I and I think about it a lot and You know, I had I yesterday I had a long conversation with with a woman who Helps people kind of build their personal brands particularly by by kind of running their newsletters for them like Writing their newsletters for them and coming up with these systems and nurture The nurture some system. I can't even remember. She's the word nurture a lot and And it sounds great, but you know, but I'm then I'm always thinking well So I need to spend the money on this How useful is this I invest in this do I want this other person writing for me? I'm really I'm stuck I'm stuck and I and I need to figure it out because I I'm stretched way too thin and that's a problem that needs solving. So is what you do scalable Not it not not the way I'm doing it Yeah, I mean it's scalable, but it requires it'll require other people it'll require You know, it'll require going back to what what DJ and Danny said, which is DJ doing Johnson And which is he goes by DJ is the you know, we're not attached to process we're attached to outcome And I need to you know, I need to figure out what that what that new what that new process looks like Because I have opportunity. I have a book. I'm kind of having conversations with people for TV shows right now Something's got to give and and I need to figure what figure out what that is Listen, how can our listeners find you? How can they track with you? Tell us what you're up to about what you are putting out there. How can we all find you? Yeah, thanks. So well, you know, I've mentioned a couple times I'd love if you checked out the podcast pessimists archive pessimists archive a history show about why people resist new things And then, you know, you can find me on Instagram at haypfeifer and And if you go to my website Jason Piper calm You can sign up for my newsletter which is called the fight for five and that's where it's once a month Nice and easy on your inbox. And you know, I share the greatest wisdom I came across that month I think everybody should do that. I think your social media is brilliant and I've begun to enjoy a lot Thanks letter Get into your podcast. I want to thank you for your time. So I think you're a genius, whatever anybody else That's my opinion. I appreciate your time and attention. I wish you all the best with that tribe that you're raising. Oh Thank you. Thank you. I'll need it Yeah, well, thank you. Hey, I appreciate you appreciate all your great questions and insights, so it's been great Thanks, Jason. Take care. Well, thanks again for listening to today's podcast I hope you found it beneficial and I know time is precious commodity for us all But I would love if you would take the time to write a review or comment And above all, maybe subscribe to my podcast channel. Thank you


So riders just preparing themselves for their second semi-final. Buley off the inside in red, Jack Holder out of gate number two in blue. Leon Mattson, gate number three in white and Max Rick off the outside in yellow. I tell you what, this is so difficult to call. You just don't know quite which way it's going to go. Can we have one Danish rider in the final tonight? We'll just send two riders slip out with Mickelson and Hanson just missing out in the first semi. Leon Mattson taking his time with just a few seconds left there. Here we go then, semi-final number two. Greenlight is on, tapes are up, away we go. Jack Holder's made a terrific start. Ooh, Buley out of shape there. That could cost him dearly. Does he recover? No, he doesn't. He's been swamped down the back straight. Leon Mattson coming through in the second place with Rick on the outside. That does Leon Mattson a real favor now. Buley back into third place. But Jack Holder is who has enjoyed a terrific night of speedway. Looks good out in front. Leon Mattson, what a move it was out of gate number three down the back straight. Looking solid in second place. Yeah, looking solid. Scared everybody entering turn three with a front wheel in the air, a bit like Mickelson. But he's hanging onto it at the moment. I'll tell you what, Dan Buley hasn't given up with the rain coming down. It's too slippery as you go across the slick stuff into the dirt. It's hard to make up ground. And Leon Mattson, I think just riding calmly around the inside doing all of the right things. But Jack Holder chose gate two, made the great start riding superbly tonight. Holder out in front, he's going to go through to another final. He's been rock solid for the second in Cardiff and he's there again. And boy, so is Leon Mattson. Home crowd are tough to bits with that. They've got a representative in the last race of the night. But for Jack Holder, what a moment that is. And as he returned to injury, he makes two consecutive finals. And he's looked set to charge into the top three tonight. Got to believe he's going to be in third place as he leaves Reims this evening. And Leon Mattson looking very accomplished indeed. So Holder and Leon Mattson in the final. Dan Buley and Max Frick missing out there in the semifinals. Disappointment for Buley. Initially looking good there. It was tight in the first corner, but just got himself in no man's land coming out of gate two, which you can do here. Max Frick, his night has ended, but did remarkably well to make the semifinals on seven points. Picks up a handy points tally, but we'll see the semifinal once again here. Holder, terrific understaff. Yeah, Jack Holder there, right across Dan Buley.  Two wheels into the corner loses all of his speed. Leon Mattson there. I think Max Frick thought he was going to be able to get into the corner. But when you look over your left shoulder and you see Leon Mattson entering the corner with the front wheel in the air, I think Max actually taking evasive action there, just moving wide and then I was Dan Buley up the inside of him. But I've got to say, Jack Holder looks superb tonight. We know he enjoys this track, had a superb speedway of nations last year, and he really is turning on the style tonight. He is indeed, and he's looking really good indeed. Could he win his first Grand Prix of his career? Robert Lambert searching for his one as well could be quite a tussle between those two, both of them riding extremely well this evening.


In Utah, we have over 40 freeze-thaw cycles a year, and for roads, that's bad news. Because it seems that no matter what we do, water gets under the roadways. And when water under the road expands and can travel, as the weather changes, the all too familiar result is potholes. When there's enough time and money, we can get to these problems and fix them permanently. But when they're a hazard to the traveling public, we have to fix them any way we can. As soon as we can. This program covers temporary patching. The procedures to follow when safety is the major concern. As you can probably guess, this type of patching is more for protection than anything else. We're still concerned with quality workmanship. But the main thing is to get the holes filled. And even though you can consider this to be a type of emergency work, we're never in so big a hurry that there isn't enough time to put out all the necessary traffic control devices. So before you leave the station, make sure you have everything you need to do the job safely. You'll also need a shovel, a broom, a derby rake, and of course, patching material. There's nothing special about the shovel or the broom, but there is with both the rake and the material. First, the rake. Most people just call it a derby. And what makes it different from other rakes is the perforations. As you can see, the spaces in the derby are much more shallow and farther apart than they are in an ordinary rake. And when you're working with mulch, you need that extra space. Otherwise, you just pull all the large particles out of the mix. So the point is, make sure you use a derby. And that brings us to the material. Basically, there are two types suitable for patching. Granule material and mulch. Let's look at the granulotype first. Basically, it's just gravel, and the best time to use it is in bad weather. That's because moisture will not affect it. Just be sure that when you use granule material that no stone has a dimension greater than one inch in any direction. Stones larger than one inch are likely to kick out when traffic passes over the patch. As for mulch, you have to be sure to use the right type. The mulch we use for temporary patching is quite different from the mulch we use for permanent repairs. The difference is in the asphalt or oil content. In permanent repairs, we always tack the area first and then add the mulch. The tack bonds the mulch to the pavement. But with temporary repairs, we don't tack the surface. So the mulch has to have extra oil already mixed in so that it can bond with the surrounding pavement. If you use the mulch without the extra oil, there's nothing to hold the patch in place, and it'll come out before you know it. So to review, make sure you have a derby rake, a shovel and a broom, all the necessary traffic control devices, and mulch with high oil content or granular material smaller than one inch. Okay, now let's look at the procedure. The first thing to do is put up two advance warning signs on each end of the work area. But remember, that's the minimum you'll need. If traffic conditions warrant it, get additional signs and a flagger. Now as I said, the main objective here is to get the holes filled. But if you're using mulch, there are two things to keep in mind that will greatly affect how long the patch will last. First, the condition of the hole. Again, the mulch you'll use has a high oil content so that it can bond the mulch to the pavement. But beyond that, the cleaner and drier the hole, the better the bond. So if it's at all possible, take a few seconds to sweep out any dirt or water. And second, the more you can compact the material, the stronger the patch will be. So stomp the material in as you place it, and then drive over it a few times with a truck. But probably the single thing that makes the most difference to the traveling public is the smoothness of the patch. So again, when time and traffic allow, smooth the patch out with a derby before rolling it with a truck. Add as some it's said, but not as good as some it hoped. So I think we're left still with a drug that can be... So you'll probably end by placing the signs extra far apart. People tend to forget that they've been warned of the road work ahead. This is especially true when the road you're working on has a lot of curves or hills. If the motorist doesn't see you soon after the sign, the message will be forgotten. So again, keep the signs close to you, even if it means moving them several times a day. And that's the procedure. If you're using granular material, all you have to do is fill the hole and drive over it with a truck. But if you're using mulch, stomp the material in as you place it and drive over it a few times with a truck. And if time and traffic allow you to, clean up the hole first and smooth the patch with a derby before you drive over it. Finally, when you're through making temporary repairs, be sure to put up road damage signs on both ends of the area. Because even when you've done the best job possible, some of the patches will come out and the public needs to be warned of the road condition.


May God bless DAV, and may God bless the USA. The start of our 98th year last July began with your selection of our national officers, highlighted by the election of National Commander Dennis Nixon, an amputee from Vietnam who went on to serve our organization as a National Service Officer for more than four decades. A self-proclaimed, blasting, cap-biting Marine, Nixon continued his legacy of serving veterans by leading from the front at our homeless stand-down at National Headquarters. He also worked tirelessly throughout the year to ensure our organization's success in accomplishing its top legislative priorities. In February, Commander Nixon testified before Congress at a joint session of the House and Senate Veterans Affairs Committee during our annual Midwinter Conference in Washington. There, he laid out DAV's legislative priorities to lawmakers and voiced his resolve in safeguarding survivor benefits, improving benefits for women veterans, expanding caregiver benefits to those made ill in service, and implementing smart VA health care reforms. But let me be crystal clear on one point.  The implementation of the VA Mission Act in June marked the beginning of a number of critical reforms and improvements to strengthen the VA health care system. Among the main changes for veterans are the new community care and urgent care programs that now allow veterans to receive care within VA's newly established community care network. While DAV remains cautiously optimistic about these reforms, the organization will continue to solicit feedback from our membership and work closely with the VA and Congress to ensure the Mission Act is fully and faithfully implemented as intended. Our Washington headquarters under the new leadership of Randy Reese as our Executive Director kept enough pressure on Capitol Hill along with our fellow veterans groups, DAV's Benefits Protection Team leaders, and nationwide supporters for us to say Mission Accomplished in June when the Blue Water Navy Vietnam Veterans Act of 2019 was signed into law. This new legislation marks a major DAV victory for veterans as more than 100,000 veterans who served in the water off of Vietnam are now presumed exposed and may be eligible for VA benefits as a result of their exposure to Agent Orange. DAV also released a follow-up to its Women Veterans Report. The new report, Women Veterans, The Journey Ahead, spotlights how the expanding role of women in our armed forces is necessitating changes to an array of policies, programs and services in the VA and other federal agencies. It includes 45 key recommendations covering a broad range of issues affecting women veterans throughout their lifetime, including primary and gender-specific health care, mental health and readjustment services, and disability and employment benefits. DAV continues to be the nationwide leader in representing veterans in their claims for benefits, fighting to ensure they receive justice for the sacrifices they've made during service. Thanks to the help of generous donors and corporate sponsors like Handcooked Tire and ESPN, our mobile service offices visited 494 sites in 2018, allowing our service officers to provide accessibility to benefits to more than 6,000 claimants who might otherwise go underserved. Our transition service officers filed more than 24,000 claims last year and helped ensure more than 44,000 transitioning veterans were aware of their earned benefits. With nearly 1.1 million powers of attorney on hand, DAV provided representation for more than 200,000 VA claims this past year. Between all 3,942 county, chapter, department, transition and national service officers, DAV helped veterans and family members obtain more than $20 billion in benefits in 2018. This year, natural disasters once again crisscrossed the nation, devastating communities from California to Alabama and Oklahoma to South Carolina. Fortunately, our disaster relief program was there to make an impact and aid our fellow veterans on the ground by supplying nearly 4,000 drafts and supply kits, totaling more than $1.2 million. Since its establishment in 1968, DAV's disaster relief program has now dispersed nearly $13 million to veterans affected by natural disasters. You are serious. This year, our membership department ramped up its efforts to recruit from the fastest growing demographic in our country, women veterans. We did so by highlighting the impact DAV makes on their behalf and the value of adding their voices to our calls. DAV is leading the way for women veterans. They are actually helping push women's issues at the VA hospital. We still have a long ways to go, but it's getting there and I'm proud that DAV is doing that. The department also continues to provide recruitment information on social media and through our app, which can be added to any iPhone or Android. With the touch of a few buttons, recruiters can enlist prospective members to our ranks and make them eligible for a wide range of money-saving and life-enhancing benefits. For 2018, DAV volunteers provided nearly 4.8 million hours through the VA Voluntary Services Program, our local Veterans Assistance Program and the DAV Transportation Network. Vince, what does it mean to you when other people volunteer their time to help veterans? Oh, I really appreciate it. Our Voluntary Services Department also continued its effort to grow volunteerforveterans.org, a web-based resource where individuals and businesses can sign up to volunteer for veterans in their local communities. At the same time, veterans, their advocates, caregivers, and even DAV chapters are able to request help as needed, connecting those in need with those who are willing to help. When it comes to employment, we're also executing a busy schedule of 145 job fairs with recruit military across the nation this year, bringing in more than 52,000 attendees by offering military personnel, veterans, and their spouses various online employment resources as well as the opportunity to directly engage with employers who know the value of hiring those who serve. DAV continues to build its status as the most prolific charity in terms of connecting veterans with employers. Our partnership with Hiring America's Televised Veteran Employment Series is just one of the many examples of DAV's influence in this area as we continue our nation-leading efforts to find meaningful employment for veterans and their families. The Charitable Service Trust supports dozens of unique initiatives that provide ill and injured veterans, rehabilitative and emotional therapy, transition assistance, employment support, emergency relief, and a range of other services. Last year, the Trust once again received a coveted four-star rating for sound fiscal management and commitment to accountability and transparency from Charity Navigator, the nation's largest independent charity evaluator. This acknowledgement speaks volumes about the Trust's careful and efficient stewardship of donated funds as more than 96 cents of every dollar donated to the Trust went to programs that directly support veterans. In 2018, the Trust issued more than $6.7 million in grants to support our nation's heroes, their families, and survivors. DAV again co-hosted the National Disabled Veterans Winter Sports Clinic in Snowmass, Colorado. Among the participants, our 2018 DAV Freedom Award recipient, Army veteran Alex Hussie stood out as a shining example of how adaptive winter sports can make a difference in the lives and recoveries of participants. Coming here and seeing other people like him and the struggles that he goes through, I mean, it's just been an amazing experience. Actor and comedian Eric Stolhansky of Hit Movies Beer Fest and Super Troopers also showed up to the clinic to share his story of overcoming adversity as an amputee. I just wanted to be an example to show that they can still have fun, have a fulfilling life and not let it stop them. Additionally, we once again teamed up with the VA to co-host the National Disabled Veterans Tea Tournament in Iowa. Previously a local program, the national event promotes rehabilitation, fellowship, and camaraderie among disabled veterans through adaptive sporting events. We have also continued expanding our presence in the social sphere, topping 1.5 million fans on Facebook and continuing to promote our initiatives and message across social media platforms like Twitter, which grew to more than 101,000 followers in 2018, and Instagram, which is now topped 34,000 followers. Our website, DAV.org, also saw tremendous traffic with 3.2 million visitors. We also continued our partnership with A&W restaurants, which, like DAV, has been a part of America for nearly 100 years. To show their appreciation for the men and women who have sacrificed so much, A&W stores collected customer donations from early July up to National Root Beer Float Day in August, resulting in a $150,000 donation to DAV. We also continued our partnership with Golden Corral through the restaurant's Military Appreciation Night, which provides free meals to veterans around Veterans Day. In 2018, the annual event raised over $1.3 million for DAV, bringing the total to more than $15 million since the event began in 2001. Additionally, approximately 3,300 children of wounded, ill, injured, and fallen veterans are expected to attend Camp Corral at 22 locations in 19 states with the help of donations from DAV and the auxiliary. Thanks goes to all of our corporate partners for helping DAV fulfill our mission throughout the year. It is through their generosity we are able to make differences in the lives of our nation's heroes. Supporting us on this effort, the fight for caregivers, and more is the DAV auxiliary, which has had a busy year under the guidance of Commander Ellen Timmerman. Through their unmatched, dedicated service to local community veterans, Commander Timmerman, National Agent at Pat Kemper, and the rest of our friends and allies in the auxiliary stood up their own National Caregiver Initiative to assist with funding caregiver and companion activities for events like the National Disabled Veterans Winter Sports Clinic and National Disabled Veterans Tea Tournament, among others. DAV has continued to gain momentum throughout the last year with a dedicated network of members, volunteers, and supporters working diligently to keep our organization invigorated with new ideas and fresh opportunities to engage. I am proud of all we've accomplished over the past year. I am exceptionally proud of our tremendous DAV and auxiliary community and I look forward to another year serving side by side with you working together to keep our promises to America's veterans and their families.


This is a poem that ran in Bridges to Cuba, which is a website that's for Cuban American writers. And a lot of wonderful stuff has been running on there. Work by Richard Blanco and by Ruth Behar and a number of really very terrific writers. And I was lucky enough to have this piece published in English and Spanish. There, I think it was last summer, a piece is called Volver. You're returning. You're going back to where it all began. Careful to engage in the necessary oblivion of the circumstances that took you away in the first place.  You're urged to be here on the threshold of what might have been home, if not for upheaval, if not for the price of sugar and oil on the world market, if not for the assurance of safety and comfort elsewhere, if not for revolution and exile. Y aunque no quise regreso, siempre se vuelve. Here is the sea, the jeweled sea flickering with caution.  And here too is the sea, its waves knocking you off balance. You must reconsider what you know of the view and arresting Vista, the promise of atonement in your return.  Put your mouth on mine, put your mouth on mine and walk carefully this way, side to side to the water's edge, tilting our heads together, tilting our heads together to see the inner tube, the vacant skiff, the remains of a flying machine. Put your mouth on mine, breathe and don't worry about the aftertaste. Es un soplo la vida. Oh yes, you have returned and you want to drop to your knees and kiss the ground and brace the columns in the old city, the neighbor who remembers you when you were newborn and not yet in exile, not yet marked for departure by air or water, solo or accompanied, legal or illegal.  But no, don't turn your head, stay here, disseminating emotions in our shared spit.   Later, you will confuse the beginning and the end of the journey, the packing and the unpacking and the repacking of your bags. You will forget what you brought to give away and what you brought to put back in its proper place. El olvido, que todo destruye. You will be confused about what to take, what to accept, what to leave behind. You will weep while walking on the boulevards and you will notice that as you pass, the students on the seawall are also weeping, as are the young mothers in the pickpockets, the new interpreneurs and the masturbators.  We are wrecked because you weren't here. How can we have talked about progress without your input? How can we have contemplated the beauty of the sea without your voice in the national discourse? We are weeping because there's a hole in the nation where you should have been a deep and painful hole.  Now put your mouth on mine and let's tilt our heads towards the abyss and be careful not to fall. Put your mouth on mine and don't worry about the aftertaste. It's nothing. It's the taste of nothing. The wind, a gusag, a knot on the kipu.  Tengo miedo del encuentro. Tengo miedo de las noches que pobladas de recuerdos encadenan mi soñar. Tengo miedo de decirte que te quiero y no quererte. You ever feel like nobody ever understands you but you? Cultivo. Cultivo una rosalanca. Cultivo una rosalanca en junio comunanero. The sea, the blue sea, the blue sea beneath the battleships, the freighters, the cruise ships, the blue sea beneath us, beneath the empty inner tube, the vacant skiff, the remains of the flying machine. It's a short distance, a meager expanse.   You have returned to shake hands with everyone, with sworn enemies and innocents, con un amigo sincero, con un cruel que me arranca, with a carefully selected audience that has been prepared for your performance. You shake some hands with reluctance and others eagerly, but you shake and shake until someone hands you a script and then you stop and stare.  How do you read that accent? How do you bring all the eloquence of your heart to the moment when your tongue stumbles and falls like a tourist who's gone too far out in a tamarind limb? Cultivo una rosalanca, carajo. You set out to write your autobiography, which will be a collective biography of the people who were exiled with you. You want to be understood, you want to be precise, so you leave out metaphors, you leave out anything that could be symbolically confusing.  Using a long goose feather quill you write, I have come back to extend my hand and kinship you write. Sometimes the most amazing and important changes happen in small places. You write. The tides of history can leave people in conflict and exile and poverty. You write. It takes time for these circumstances to change. You write. The recognition of a common humanity, the reconciliation of a people bound by blood and a belief in one another.   It's an order, man, do you not understand? Exile is actuality, animation.  It's the journey and the entity you sleep with every night, the subject of every memo, every recipe, every instruction manual, every warranty and contract. Exile is everything, everything possible within the possibility of return. Finally, you go to that one boat house, the one you've never seen. You've read all about it in the guidebook on the bus on the way there. How it's surrounded by palm trees growing out of the water, how it's guarded by angry geese that bark when you near it. When you get there, the colors are beautiful, long splashes of orange in the sky, a circuit of white orchids ringing their bells. You want so much to feel, to gasp with wonder, to identify. You want the geese to bark, to bite your ankles and maybe draw a little blood, but they're tired. Curled like kittens on the water's edge.  You break into the boat house, which is dilapidated and slippery with moss. You let yourself fall into the moss, make a bedding from it, smoke some. You entertain yourself making nautical knots, you learn the broad, the alpine butterfly, the trucker's hitch, the zeppelin band. The wind is blowing through the boat house and it makes a lovely music. When you wake up the next morning, need a moment to remember where you are.  You will instead live today like those who never went into exile. When you peel away the moss and lift up the floorboards to get at the water, you realize the boat house has been unmoored. You lean over the edge and swatting away the geese. You drink from the sea. You drink and drink the salt water until your belly bloats. En junio como enero. This is a pain you can live with.


constitution and rights. Constitution. A constitution is a document of laws that a country follows. The US Constitution was written in 1787 to replace the laws created after the American Revolution. Democracy. A democracy is a type of government where the leaders are chosen by the people. The government of the United States is a democracy. Rules. Rules are written or unwritten guidelines that people follow. Rules tell you what you are allowed to do and what you are not allowed to do. Laws. Laws are the written rules that everyone in a country must follow. In the United States the laws that the country follows are found in the Constitution. Human rights. Human rights are things that everyone is allowed to have or do. Human rights include access to education and freedom from discrimination and slavery. Citizen. A citizen is a person who is a legal member of a country. People are citizens of the country they were born in. Citizens have certain rights like the right to vote. Citizenship.  Immigrants to the US are able to apply for citizenship if they meet the requirements. Civic activities. Events that you participate in as part of a community are civic activities. Examples of civic activities are volunteering at your children's school or in your community. Pathway. The steps you take to meet a goal are called a pathway. Students entering college choose an educational pathway that will lead to a career. Wants. Wants are things that you would like to have but are not necessary for you to live. For example, you may want a new car or a new computer but you will be okay without one. Needs. Needs are the things that you need to live. Food, power and water are examples of needs. Your needs are more important than your wants. Amendment. A change to a document is called an amendment. The US Constitution has 33 amendments. The first ten amendments are called the Bill of Rights. The end.


All right, with slight delay, welcome to the Prometheus introduction. Unfortunately, I am not Julius. Julius couldn't make it due to reasons. So I'll have to do some PowerPoint karaoke for you. My name is Matthias. I'm an engineer at SoundCloud. I, let me make my notes bigger so I can read them. All right, I work on the production engineering team, which is the successor of the team that originally built Prometheus. Yes, in the first part of the session, I will give a very brief introduction to Prometheus. This will not be an in-depth guide. We have like 30 minutes to get through everything. So we'll just be a teaser. Show of hands actually, who here is not yet using Prometheus? Ah, there's a few over here and there. All right, for the rest of you, this is gonna be a very brief refresher, and then we'll get to Bjorn, who is gonna walk us through some news and updates. We have about half an hour together. With the delay, we may not get to Q&A. If you have any questions, the Prometheus boof in Pavillon 2 is always staffed. You can always find us there and you can always ask questions. Prometheus is a metrics-based monitoring system. At the time, we created it because there was nothing that was able to monitor our growing zoo of microservices. We were already deploying to a dynamic container-based platform, and we really needed some more details than what Nagios was giving us, which was, is it up? All right. Prometheus is not trying to cover all your bases. Prometheus is a metric monitoring system. Typically, you will combine it with other systems for log collection and tracing. So, again, brief refresher. We'll take a quick look of how you build a monitoring system with Prometheus. Prometheus is a pull-based system, so everything starts with your web app or your API server, whatever it is that you are running. You add one of the client libraries to instrument your application. We have one in almost any language, and if we don't have it, someone else has built it, which is kind of neat, or you can build your own. The output format is really not that difficult. The client, the instrumentation in the client itself is very lightweight because, and that's a big difference to push-based monitoring systems, your application doesn't put anything on the network at the point of an event happening, at the point of an HTTP request happening. We're not trying to send metrics anywhere. All we're doing is incrementing some numbers in memory. So, it's blazing fast on the hot path of your application. Then, and then these current values of, typically these counters are exposed as an HTTP endpoint that can be scraped asynchronously. Now, you don't control all the software that you run.  So, there's a lot of interesting metrics in software that you don't control and that don't have native Prometheus or open metrics support. More and more things do, but if they don't, they need a little help from a friend. We call this friend the exporter and we'll talk a little bit more about exporters later today. So, in the Polar architecture, the Prometheus server is the thing that reaches out to all the things that you want to monitor. And in this example, we have only one, but you can have as many as you want. They may be interested in different subsets. It doesn't matter to the client to the thing that is instrumented, whether it is being scraped at all by how many Prometheus servers, how often. That means there is very little to configure in all of your microservices. Instead, Prometheus integrates with various runtimes, various mechanisms or custom mechanisms that you can build to find all the possible targets. And it has some rule language for filtering them and adding or like shuffling around the metadata you have about them. So, for example, typically when you're monitoring Kubernetes pods, Prometheus just fetches a list of all the pods and then this language filters it down for you. If you're using the Prometheus operator, it generates that for you, which is kind of neat because it can get very verbose and slightly tricky, but it's there. You probably want to look at your metrics. That's kind of the point. So, typically there is a web UI in Prometheus. I would really only recommend it for exploration and debugging. It is not a dashboard. We used to have our own dashboard builder, but then Grafana came around and we said, all right, this is so much better. Just use Grafana. It's the tool of choice. However, everything is API-driven, so you can totally build your own automation, your own visualization, whatever you want on top of Prometheus. Finally, of course, in monitoring, if there is a problem, we do want to tell someone about it and this is where Alert Manager comes in. Alert Manager handles grouping alerts together so that you're not overwhelmed by a million fine-grained alerts happening at once, and that is totally a thing that happens. We have a lot of alerts where we just say, all right, tell me if any of the endpoints on any of my instances has an error rate larger than 10% or 1%. You have 1,000 instances and you have 1,000 endpoints. That's a million. That can happen. Alert Manager will, if you configure it that way, group it back together and say, yo, you have a problem, here's a million things that are wrong. You may want to look into them. But it doesn't, like we used to, before this, we used to have pager storms where you would, in an incident, you would have one person just sit there and acknowledge pager duty because there was so much coming in. This is much easier to handle with Alert Manager. And Alert Manager allows you to configure routing rules to determine who should be notified and how. Refuel. All right, so next, I want to walk you through some of the key points of why we think Prometheus is worth considering or why we think it's good. First of all, the data model. The data model is simple and rich at the same time. The fundamental building block of Prometheus metrics are time series. Time series are some identifier and then a series of timestamps and values. So often these timestamps are in a regular interval, but they don't have to be and the values change over time. So what's the identity, oh yeah, and all the timestamps are just integers, all the values are float 64s so far. That will change in the future, but fundamentally this is what's happening, right? It's a series of, at this time, the value was this float. What does the identifier look like? An identifier typically has a metric name and a series of labels and label values. It's sort of up to you when you make up your instrumentation, how you split the two, what you put into a name and what you don't. As a rule of thumb, we say it should be in a label if there is some sensible way that you would want to aggregate it away. So in this example, for example, you might be interested in this single time series in particular or maybe you wanna see all the status 200s of across all the paths on all your instances, right? So that's why the path is a label here, whereas you wouldn't want to mix together HTTP requests and CPU time used. That makes no sense, so those two should have different names. That's the rough guideline we can give there. Frequently we use counters like this. They represent the total number of events since some unspecified point in time. This can be the time that your instance started, it doesn't have to be, it is absolutely valid to start your counter at a random number that you just pulled out of your hat. Or in other, yeah, so there's many ways. Typically they start at zero and they just count up over time until the instance restarts, but it doesn't have to be this way. This lets us be flexible on scrape intervals. We scrape every 15 seconds, you may scrape every minute or every three seconds, you may have different Prometheus servers scraping the same, hello, okay, yes, power up. All right, where was I? Counters, counters represent the total number of things that happened since some unspecified period of time. We never really look at the absolute value of a counter as such. We always look at how much did it change over an interval. The nice thing about this is we can be very flexible how often we actually scrape these or whether we leave out the scrape. Something happened, Prometheus was restarting. It doesn't matter, we don't lose track of the counting unless in that interval we also reset the counter, of course then the information is lost. But for the most part, we can be very flexible, we can have multiple Prometheus servers scrape the same counter at different intervals and it all still works out. So, and afterwards, we are not necessarily, as long as we scrape often enough, we can reconstruct how many requests happened in any one minute interval, 10 minute interval, seven and a half minute interval if you really want to. So that's why we use these ever incrementing counters rather than just recording the rate at any point in time. Yeah, we'll see how that plays out later. I really want to give you just a quick glimpse, quick glimpse of the query language, it can't be a full tutorial, the query language is by far the most interesting thing to wrap your head around. So this is just a sneak peek. The most important hurdle to overcome is trying to think in SQL. If you've done SQL before, some of it seems familiar and it seems like you can kind of try and translate between the two don't. That's not a helpful way to think about PromQL. Think about PromQL as managing time series and like multiple time series and matching them up and working with them. First of all, you can do math on individual time series. In this case, we're just dividing by one billion and we're filtering out those that are larger than 100 afterwards. This happens individually on each time series. So in this example, we will have, we will only see, we will first divide the file system, the bytes by one billion so we get gigabytes and we only show those that are more than 100 gigabytes. So then we can do it more complicated. So we're back to HTTP requests. There's a few things happening in this query and I want to go through them quickly one by one. Can I point? Oh yeah. All right, you already heard that we like to keep total counts. The rate function here is what looks at the time window. This is what looks at the difference between when the counter started and the counter ended. Plus it does some magic to compensate for if the counter reset in the meantime, it understands that, it understands how to interpolate values if we're asking for a time window that doesn't quite align with when we scraped. And just like the scalar calculation we just looked at, this happens individually for every time series. So we're doing this one, this rate separately for every path, for every instance, for every status, except in the second one for every status, here we're only doing it for the ones that have status equals 500. So we don't do unnecessary calculation, but we do calculate the rate individually for each of them because they will have reset at different points in time. We cannot, we can't turn this around. Then we sum over them in this case, this just gives us a whole number. So we can divide those numbers again and we get a result. In this case, so our error rate here is like 2.9%. Not good, not bad. What should we do if we try to divide some metrics that have labels? So here we are summing things up, but we are not summing over the path dimension. We are preserving the path dimension and then we are dividing the two. And then the division again happens one by one for the ones that fell out of, for the multiple series that fell out of the sum by, we divide each of them individually. Homework for you is to think about what should happen if a path only appears on one side of the division. Alerting, again, I can't go into any of the details here. The very, very short story is you write an expression like this one that only returns data when there is a problem. And if there is a problem that you want to alert someone about, alerts have labels and annotations. Labels help alert managers sort out the routing, annotations help humans sort out the resolution. Efficiency, Prometheus in itself does not scale horizontally. That's a deliberate choice. We want to keep it simple. We want Prometheus to be the very last thing that breaks. So we want Prometheus to not itself be a distributed system. In practice, you can actually go quite a long way with Prometheus without actually having multiple. The storage and collection engines are quite efficient. We have many Prometheus servers with millions, like 10 million active time series is no problem if you give it a good but not outrageous amount of memory. And a million samples per second on a single server, no problem. Memory is really your limiting factor. You need to keep up two hours worth of samples in memory. The good news is that compression is very good thanks to Björn. So we only need about one to two bytes per sample on average for typical workloads. Retention time is, it defaults relatively low. It's something like two weeks. In practice, we have not found an upper limit yet. As much as your storage can handle, we haven't found the point where Prometheus really breaks. So it's really just how big of a disk are you willing to give it? And if that's not enough, there are related projects that add scaling and aggregation across many Prometheus servers Thanos, Cortex, Mimir, all help with this. Circling back to exporters, not everything speaks Prometheus yet. So exporters help you bridge this gap from other metric systems that you may already be using from other system specific metrics like the Linux kernel metrics, the MySQL, whatever database you're using, or you can DIY it because they only need to return a number when they are being asked over HTTP. Exporters are much simpler to write than you think and I would encourage everyone to write an exporter just for fun. The result of having exporters is that Prometheus itself doesn't have to understand every possible software in the world. It's very easy to integrate it with whatever you already have without having to have Prometheus itself understand everything. So in conclusion, if you're not using Prometheus yet, but you're interested enough to watch this, you should give it a try. And if you're already using it, you should use it more. And with that, I'm gonna hand it over to Björn for the deep dive, or more like a dip dive. Yeah, I hope I'm on now. So Julian was supposed to be here. He is missing for the same reason as Julius. Now you can guess what reason that is. I'm still here, like we wanted to show off that for me, this is a true multi-stakeholder project. We are four people all from different companies. Although originally myself and Julius and Amar, we all worked for SoundCloud. That's kind of the common origin, but he's still at SoundCloud. I'm at a company called Grafana Labs. You might have heard about them. Julius is running his own gig and Julian came later to the project. I think he's the most active person in the Prometheus project right now. And he is running a new thing, Olly. Also quite interesting. So he can't make it. This is called the deep dive section. It's a bit weird that in contrast to the olden days, we now have a deep dive and intro session in the same 30 minutes, which is very short, also completely different audiences, right? But first you're all somewhere in between and you actually like this. So I decided to not dive deep into a certain topic, but just give you like a flashlight of stuff that is new. Julian is also giving a talk. He wanted to give a longer version of this at Prometheus Day, but he couldn't make it. So he will record this and share it via his blog or Twitter account. So totally look for that. It will be a nicer version of this. This is essentially just pointers. Also just looking at more or less the last 12 months and only looking at Prometheus, Prometheus, which is the Prometheus server, but that's only one component of the huge ecosystem. So there's even more than that. So it just goes through a few things. In version 2.25, we embraced feature flags. This is actually a bit longer ago than a year, but I like to give it kind of an honorary mention here because feature flags were pretty much like in Kubernetes. We should have had this idea way earlier. It allowed us to be like a bit less risk averse with new features. Originally Prometheus, half of the world is using it. So we are fairly conservative in terms of stability and breaking people. So now we have feature flags. One reason to have them is to be really explicit about experimental features. So we had this before. We just said, we had this feature. Don't use it in production. It will change anytime, but people just used it in production because they didn't even know it was an experimental feature. So now you have to switch it on with a feature flag. Marks that really clearly, that is one reason to use them. Also we can use a feature flag to introduce a breaking change without having a new major release because you switch it on deliberately and then you have a new behavior which is breaking, but by default you don't switch it on. In this case, if we like the feature and we have a major release, like in 10 years or so, we have Prometheus 3, then we can make it a know-of and it's just on forever. Similarly, if an experimental feature that is not breaking is fine, we just make it the default and then the feature flag becomes a know-of as well, but it will still work, right? It will just warn you. And then the final reason to use a feature flag is when you really want to change the behavior in a way that wouldn't even go into the next version. It's just a different mode of Prometheus. If that feature becomes stable, it would become a normal flag of changing behavior. I have examples for each of this in all the new features here. So what's new in Promptuel? By now they look kind of incremental those changes, but if you use them, it's kind of great. The first thing is here, we allow negative offsets now. Offset allows you to query something in the past. Now you can query stuff in the future, predicting the future, yay. Of course that doesn't work even for Prometheus, but sometimes you run query historical queries. Like you are interested, it's like the temperature per last month. How did it compare to the average around this evaluation time? And then you kind of from your point in the past, you look into the future and use a negative offset. Similarly, we have an app modifier where you can kind of pin parts of your query to a certain point in time. They're even like helpers. This is the end of a range query if you're on a range query. So this is pretty special, but it allows a number of things. This query, for example, finally solves the surprisingly hard problem, how to draw the top five lines in like traffic or whatever. It's a bit more complicated. There is a link here. It's also clickable if you look at these slides in the PDF where there's a blog post explaining this. This is Boston Caches. So we Caches could assume that you never look into the future. And so we thought it might be a breaking change, but in the end, we decided not. So it became stable as now default. You can just use it in the newer version. Trigonometry happened finally. It's a bit of a problem that people want all kinds of functions. And we don't like one to implement a million functions from PL, but this finally made it. So you have sine function, cosine, even a 10, two, which has two parameters and we use the promcule label matching. It's a bit weird, but if you really need this, you will appreciate it. Happened 2.31. This converts from normal degrees into radians, which is the default. And people use promiscues to monitor wind turbines, which is pretty cool. Present over time is also a nice little thing that tells you if there is a sample at all in this time range, there are use cases for that. Most of you haven't run into it, I guess. So this is a biggie agent mode. It's also an example for a feature flag that will become just a normal flag because it just changes how Prometheus works. There's some irony. Matthias mentioned this.  But nowadays everyone wants to use like cloud providers for your monitoring. So you can still do both kind of with Prometheus. It's also ironic that all the cloud metrics cloud provider ingest Prometheus metrics now, which was supposed, it was created to kill them, right? And now we all love each other again. But like, yeah, so you can mix a match, but if you're really relying on your cloud provider, it feels like, why should I run a fully fledged Prometheus setup? So now you can just slim it down with the agent thing. You have no local storage, only the wall. You have no valuation engine. It all consumes fewer resources. And the only thing it does, it sends everything via remote right to your metrics provider. Could be actually quite cool. Like a lot of our customers are doing this and I wouldn't do it, but I'm also like very conservative, esri-ish. Anyway, remote right receiver, that's kind of the flip side of that coin. At some point we realized we need like just 10 lines of code to let Prometheus read its own remote right protocol. This turns Prometheus into a push-based monitoring system, which should never happen, right? So this is why it was a feature flag initially because we were really like kind of concerned. People would abuse this. They will assume Prometheus is now a push-based monitoring system. I still don't recommend this for like production, but it's just nice. You want to just ingest something that comes over remote right, just in a toy test setup. Want to play with something or you have just a tiny amount of metrics, then it might just work. So it's now stable. So it's on by default, but please don't try to ingest humongous amount of production metrics in this way. Okay, what else do we have? This is, that was great fun. We had a year, almost a decade long discussion about should we expand environment variables in our config. Many programs do that. Prometheus has this purity ambition that you have one and only one way to configure things and this is in your config file. If you really want to just write a wrapper script, they will expand the environment variables and then write out a config file. But so many people wanted it. So we had a long, long, long discussion. And finally we settled on, it should be allowed in the external label section and only there, which is the most requested use case for that. Personally, I would have done it more, but now I don't want to open up this. Kind of works again. So it is still a feature flag, why? Because somebody might have had a dollar curly brace, like not meant as an environment variable, but as the real thing. So it is, strictly speaking, a breaking change. Unlikely that somebody's doing this, but with, I don't know, trillions of Prometheus users, it might happen. So it's a feature flag until Prometheus 3, which will happen in 2031. I don't know, no timeline. Okay, this is an interesting one. And Julian, I will cut this really short because we are short of time. But this is all for downstream distribution and library users. So normal users will notice nothing of this, but Julian was really, he did a lot of stuff here and it's a little Twitter storm about this. And he will certainly talk about this in his longer version of this. So it's essentially, finally you can use Prometheus code base more or less properly as a Go module. You, the UI, which has a million react dependencies is packaged as kind of some pre-compiled source package. So it can hopefully be packaged in Debian probably. We published photo buffers on, what's his name? I will just get that right. Buff.build, right? And what was the middle one? I can't see this on my notes here. Ah, plug plugins, that's the coolest thing, right? So you have build time plugin system Prometheus binary grows and grows because you support a huge amount of services carry mechanism and every services carry mechanism comes with a huge client library, Azure, GCP, whatever. So this is the main reason why the Prometheus binary is big. Most people don't care, but some do. So you can just switch this all off at build time and then you have very slim, nice, small Prometheus binaries. All right, what's coming? Very quickly, the most important thing in my view is the new false high resolution histograms. Very cool stuff. I also have worked on it most of the time. It's my heart and soul into it, so I'm clearly biased. But Ganesh, who also worked on this will give a very, very cool talk later today. Please all go there. Also alert manager, I will see more love now. The current maintainer has more time and my colleague Josh will also work on it, gives the talk here pretty cool example for something outside of Prometheus. If you wanna look, I know I haven't done this, but we have loads of design dogs in the pipeline. A lot will happen. You can see this in our documentation. We also want a more formalized proposal process for new stuff. Another new thing is important for Julian. He will maintain this. We will do 2.37 will be a long-term support version where you get security updates for a longer time. Also very cool. And I think that should be it, right? Yeah, thank you very much. Do we have...