The experience of Cisco, which is a very large company, participating in open source. And we had a lot of different kinds of conversations here this time, other times, about that experience. So I'm not wanting to get so much of the nitty gritty of the sort of traditional blocking and tackling, learning to engage with the community stuff, because we have a number of panelists who have actually participated widely in communities in moving forward the world in open source. What I'd really love to do is to get some questions from you guys about the panels like this. The kinds of questions you have about the work that you're actually doing in the community rather than the, what is it like to be in a big company? So to begin, what I'd like to do is offer our panelists the opportunity to introduce themselves in a little bit of what their experience has been and the kinds of communities they've worked in and the kinds of things they've worked on. And you're free to proceed in whatever order but I'm going to bet on moving that way. Sounds good. Thanks, Danian Hansen. I'm a software engineer with Cisco and I currently work on the Kubernetes project. I've been involved in containers for about three years. I am leading a team of engineers that is adding IPv6 support to Kubernetes. If you were in this room a couple hours ago for Thomas Graf's presentation on Kubernetes and IPv6, Thomas and I work very closely together in the community. So it's been a really exciting project in the sense that it's not a Cisco-only project. It's a Cisco-only effort. It's representation from a lot of different affiliates that have been able to add this support to Kubernetes so it's a real open source success story. All right. Hi, I'm Charles Echoll. I'm a software engineer by, I guess, education and training and been doing that for the majority of my career. Working with open source a lot, starting in like 1999 when I think open source really first, at least in my mind that's when it kind of first came into the masses. And done a lot of work with standards as well throughout the years. The area where I've been working is mostly around communication software, initially more like traditional telephony systems and voiceover IP and video conferencing. And that's what brought me into Cisco. And now I work in DevNet. That's our developer network. And I have the role of representing to the external development community what Cisco is doing in open source and in standards, helping you understand where we're contributing to open source and to standards, how they manifest themselves in our products and solutions and how you can work with us and how we can help you to build on top of the products and solutions that we provide using the APIs that are there. And when the code's open source, I think that makes it even easier for us to work together. Hi, everyone. My name is Serpil Bayraktar and I'm a principal engineer at Cisco in chief technology and architecture office. I've been working in the networking industry since early 1990s before the internet was commercial. My expert, mostly as a network engineer. My expertise is in IP routing protocols. I've been with Cisco for six years and in the last three years I have been, my team and I are running an open source project called Streaming Network Analytics System or SNAS. SNAS.io. What we do, we tackled a problem that was not really solved in the last 20 years in networking to get a very special kind of data from the network, meaning BGP data, which is stateful and different than the other ones in real time. And it's been very interesting and rewarding to work with the open source community. In May, our project moved under the Linux foundation family. It's been also interesting for me to go through that process. I'm also the founder of woman in technology at Cisco where every month the technical woman at Cisco get together to talk about what's going on in our industry. I don't think this is working, is it working? I'm off the hook. Hi there, I'm Ann McCormick. I'm a tech lead at Cisco, software engineer. I've been working at Cisco for maybe two long, some might say, 11 years. I've been working with OpenStack for the last three years and attended, I think, five different OpenStack summits. What I work on particularly is MetaCloud, which is an on-prem managed cloud solution that Cisco offers. So we go to the customer site, install the hardware, get the infrastructure working, install OpenStack on top of it, and then continue to maintain it as a service going forward. And particularly what I focus on is networking in OpenStack. Thank you so much. So start thinking about the kinds of questions that you would be interested in having answered by our... I wanted to open up with a question. To express it, but why?  Who wants to go first? Okay, we'll rotate as to who has to go first, so. Okay, why? I'm gonna take that as why am I involved in... Oh, okay. I'm gonna take that as why am I involved in OpenSource and kind of why am I passionate about it? And I think for me, things got started. I mentioned back in 1999, I went to go work for a startup company. We were in, we called ourselves VoVita, and VoVita came from the name Voice Video and Data. We were going after making software for communication, voiceover IP stacks. And Linux was kind of the thing at the time, so we thought we'd build everything on Linux. OpenSource was seeming really cool, so we thought we'd open source everything we did. Protocol stacks, our soft switches, we called it. Everything was out there in the open. I didn't have any idea how we were gonna make money or be sustainable, but it was fun. We were doing great things and people were excited about what we were doing. And I remember people would heckle us about our name, like VoVita and they, like is that, Velvita and they called us the cheese company. And we kind of took that to heart and we decided, well, we'll name our releases after cheeses. So our first release came out, it was kind of rough. It was, you know, some would say it stank. So we called it Stilton. We thought that was a very fitting name for our first release. Fortunately, things got better and better and eventually we came out with the release that we thought was, you know, getting to be a little more sophisticated. We called it Bre. And then I remember going home afterwards, it happened to be my sister's birthday and her name was Breanne. But we always called her Bre. And to me, this may seem stupid, but it was kind of special that the name of our release, it was in all the files, it was in the software. And then I could go and I could show her what I was working on at work. I'd never shown my family the code I wrote. Here I thought it was special because I could show her, hey, here's this release that's named after you. She's my kid's sister, so she was really young and she was kind of touched that I could show her this and then we could actually like build it and run it and use it to make a call and make our home phone ring.  I'd never shared anything like that with my family, with my sister. And it kind of dawned on me how cool this open source software was. The fact that it made what I did that tangible and to share with my family, with my friends, with the rest of the community. And loved it ever since. Excellent. So who's up next? I can go next. So I guess there are different reasons why you would go open source when I look at some of the reasons why people did open source in the past is that you're dealing with a very pressing issue that involves multiple entities, maybe a whole industry, you wanna go fast, you wanna be agile, you wanna apply it to a lot of places. And the problem space that I was dealing with involved legacy and new networks across industries and all types and sizes of networks. So we really wanted to look at the problem holistically without the restrictions of any of the vendor specific targets, like one product in mind. It was too narrow for us. So we wanted to collaborate and be very transparent with the community of the system that we were building. We wanted to get that feedback fast and honestly. So through the open source, you kind of bypass all the regular process channels and you go directly to the members and the users and it's been really, really rewarding. Originally we were a standalone open source project just on the site, but in May we did move under Linux Foundation and the reason for that move is that once you have something that solves the original problem and you have a framework, it doesn't end there. It actually begins. So we wanted to be part of the ecosystem of projects who could really benefit from what we built. We wanted to provide that service to them and we also wanted to understand what else was going on in the industry, whether what we built is really enough future looking. So it's been a very productive and useful approach. So monetization I think comes after when you're dealing with a really big problem and so far it's been a really good journey. So I'm gonna take that with my OpenStack glasses on and say why is Cisco doing OpenStack? I've been hearing the terms waves of the internet. The first wave was when we were building the infrastructure and of course Cisco was deeply entrenched in building that and the protocols, defining that being in the standards bodies, IETF. The second wave is cloud. So now we're not so concerned about the infrastructure. It's there, it's great, it's working. Now we wanna build on top of it. We wanna look at things from an application point of view. So the innovations really are happening at that level now and why particularly OpenStack is because it's a leading open source cloud infrastructure. So I think it makes sense for Cisco to participate in that and that's it for me. I'll take the why and say why IPv6 for Kubernetes. I was presented a unique opportunity to kinda have a blank canvas about eight or nine months ago. And so we were going, our group was going through a transition and our management team came to me and said okay we wanna start getting involved in open source container projects. Can you help lead a team and then figure out where and how and why? And so this why question is I asked myself why quite a bit during this process. And so as I looked through the container landscape, again I had a background of a couple of years in containers before this came about. And so I honed in on Kubernetes and for multiple reasons I saw it as kind of rising to the top as that container clustering system. How do I run containers at scale across multiple hosts in my data center or across multiple data centers? It was going from Docker to Kubernetes because Docker solved that problem how do I take an application and make it easier to deploy, manage, maintain on a single host but as everyone started drinking the Docker Kool-Aid that's really when the conversation started turning to Kubernetes. And so I honed in on Kubernetes and I asked myself why across three primary spectrums is okay if we're gonna contribute to Kubernetes why do we contribute to Kubernetes? Why do we use IPv6? And I said to myself well IPv6 was important to the Kubernetes community so I checked that box. And I said okay well IPv6 is important to Cisco we're a networking company we have a rich tradition in IPv6 so to me I was able to check that box of why IPv6 for Cisco. And then I think most importantly as a customer like if you're not solving a customer problem you're not trying to help a customer then why are you doing this? It could be great for the community it could be great for Cisco but ultimately if you're not helping a customer out then why are you doing this? And we were fortunate to actually have multiple Lighthouse customers that wanted this functionality they wanted IPv6 their big IPv6 shop across their data centers they're moving forward with Kubernetes and they're saying to us they're saying to the community where is IPv6 in Kubernetes? And so that's what essentially brought us to contributing IPv6 to Kubernetes. And this is an effort that started at the beginning of this year and it's really great to see the team and I going from sitting on the sidelines to actually being highly involved in the SIG network community if you're familiar with Kubernetes it's such a big project so much going on they break the project up into SIG special interest groups and again we went from not being involved at all in the SIG network group to being highly involved in IPv6 being probably the number one feature that's gonna be coming out in the 1.9 release. Again it's not a Cisco only kind of thing which to me is one of the big drivers of open source. This isn't something that Cisco is doing we may be highly involved in it but again there's affiliations Google, Morantis, Andrei who is up here I mean the list goes on of contributors in the community both in Kubernetes, CNI which is another project that's very important to Kubernetes networking, Sky DNS for Kube DNS and so it's just been really a great ride over the last eight or nine months going from what do we do here to actually starting to paint that canvas with the picture and now we're just putting kind of the finishing touches on that picture. Thank you all. So for those of you who seem to be in other situations you are aware of this and this is also true in the panel and so I have a very expansive, we don't even have a singing mic. We don't even have a mic, correct? Awesome, are you recording? Is that what you need? All right so for the audience at home. So I have a very expansive view of panels. Everyone likes to think of panels as a collection of people up on stage and we have a very distinguished collection of people up on stage. I tend to think of panels as including the audience as well and so the question I really want to pose to you guys in the audience is why are you here? Why did you show up here? What are the things that you're really interested in coming to understand from being here? So please speak up, raise your hands, let me know. Yes, money's good. That's a really good question. Really quickly, does anyone on the panel want to respond to that and sort of describe their experience inside Cisco because we've got many different viewpoints here? I guess I could just say sometimes I think of open source like TreeHuggers, it's a utopia, everything, we all love each other and get along. But the reality is we need to make money, right? I mean we all work for companies that need to make money so I think it's a very big concern. How do you monetize that? How do you come to panels and summits like this and not appear as just a vendor trying to sell hardware? It's a very difficult balance. I like to think we're doing it well, but. Sure. So I've been involved in open source within Cisco for five or six years and I remember the first year or so it was very difficult. The company at that time just didn't get open source and so a lot of my time was spent actually just internal discussions, internal meetings of explaining why open source and that it's not a threat to you, right? So from me speaking personally, how to do open source to me is it's not rocket science. You know, what I like to do in life generally is if I go to do something and it's new to me, I always try to kind of look around and figure out has someone done this before? You know, and so when you look at open source, there may be a lot of different open source contributors out there and companies that contribute, but for me personally, I look at the likes of Red Hat, the likes of CoreOS, companies that have built a successful business model around open source software. And I think if you spend that time to look at, well, how does Red Hat do this? How are they so successful in these open source projects but still a very profitable company and you spend that time to see how they do it? You could almost use that as kind of your recipe for Ericsson or whatever company that you work for. I think when I look at open source, Cisco's been involved with open source for a long time, but most of the focus on internal, say policies and that type of thing was around compliance. Really it was about licensing things correctly, contributing as you're supposed to to meet the licenses that you're using, not using licenses in software packages that you shouldn't use in certain ways to kind of more of a protect yourself type of mentality. But that's what's been pretty strong at Cisco for a long time. It was only kind of more recently that I think Cisco engineers had been contributing to open source, but it was on sort of a, and still it is to a large extent, it's very disaggregated. Cisco for those of you who are not as familiar with Cisco corporate it's, to me I think one of the things I really like about it is how disaggregated the company is. It's actually, you'll see people in Cisco have no idea what other people are doing and sometimes they're doing sort of conflicting or duplicate things. We'll find out about it at conferences like this. That's one reason to do open source. I actually see what that happened to you too. And it's from an employee point of view, it's very empowering because you can go off and do things. And I think so far with open source contribution it's worked out quite well at Cisco because the employees have had the best interest and been educated and more or less contribute to open source well. However, I think there's a lot of room for improvement. We don't have any sort of like central open source office, maybe we should, but we love that disaggregatedness too. I don't know if there's a trade off there. So I think we have room for improvement, but as long as people are doing the right thing in the open source community, it seems to be working so far. That's how I would describe it. So to answer your question, how does open source work at Cisco, I think the answer depends on your group, first of all. So it really depends on where you think the real monetization come from. So we're tackling the infrastructure problem, the collection of stateful data that's in the hundreds of millions of objects. If you think about routing, the number of prefixes you collect, and if you wanna do it in real time, which people do all kinds of workarounds like dumps and other ways. So I mean what I wanted to say about the groups is that I'm in the Chief Technology and Architecture Office, which is not necessarily a product group. And our job is to really see where we should invest, what the framework work should look like, and the monetization really is going to come from the applications that are built on top of it. Cisco, just like any other company, will have to write the right type of applications and services and monetize it in the long run. I think, I see open source as a long term investment in a way for the company. Just like when the internet was first starting, Cisco was very much involved with the IETF, leading the technology, they didn't have to, but they were, they had an interest in it. Lots of people spend lots of time there. It was a very loosely coupled standards organization. It still is. That's why it's request for comments and not like some big ITU standard. The reason why Cisco contributed, they wanted to have the technical lead and they wanted to be the experts and they maintained that expertise within the company and they knew exactly what products to build on top of what was discussed and developed. Open source is in a way the same way. Cisco alone cannot build this big infrastructure because it's a multi-vendor problem. It has to be sold as a multi-vendor solution and it is an industry changing project in my opinion. It's very small and it's not very well known yet, but the fact is that people gave up on the problem that we're trying to solve, which is the collection and presentation of a very high volume of data in real time to the applications. Applications and services are where the real interesting stuff is going to be. We do have some IP, by the way, that we protect through regular methods. That doesn't stop us from filing for patents, but making the code available to other users and get the feedback, I think puts us in the right track for the eventual real application landscape. Excellent, so we know I'm an issues here. Why are you here? Yes, you. You did raise your hand, right? Okay, good. So really quickly for the home audience, the question was what other kinds of future projects do you think that Cisco will be involved in going forward? What other kinds of things do you have your eye on on the horizon? I guess anything to do with networking. We have our eyes on. And the other thing that I see across the company is the analytics and apps. Everybody has their eyes on that. I don't know if it's been resolved and I'm not aware of project names to tell you, but I see a lot of movement towards data analytics and applications and especially in the networking area where we have the expertise. Maybe this isn't really so much an open source project, but a way of working with open source, the standards and work that Cisco's done, say in IETF and I've been doing a lot of work with standards with open source and Cisco's been very supportive of me in doing that. Trying to bring those two things together, combining open source and standards. And I think part of the thing there is there's a lot of networking technology that's backed by standards. Now there's a lot of work being done in open source. You really wanna make sure open source works well with those standards. IPv6 support in Kubernetes is a good example. Take some of the stuff that came out of the IETF or networking, make sure it works well with open source. I think you're gonna see more and more of that. So it's not kind of like, here's the old way of doing things or whatever that was more standards-based and now it's all open source and standards aren't needed. I think it's in Cisco's best interest that those two worlds come together and we'll continue to see more work bringing those two worlds together. We had a really quick question here before we continue with this. Yeah, that's a good one. So I wanted to actually elaborate. I want you to elaborate on that. I confess I'm a standards guy. I work for the telco industry. So for telco and communications, as we go to the software-dominated future, what kind of things are best to do in open source and what kind of things are best to do in standards? And like as a company, where do you plan to put energy into open source versus into establishing standards? Thank you. So I would say, especially in terms of open, this is interim. Yeah, what I'm pushing for is not so much in either or, but that vote. It's not, oh, do I take this to standards? Oh, do I take this to open source? I would say work on it within the standards, but then don't just work on it in the standards for three years and think the open source community is gonna wait for you to three years later, come out and say, here's the standard, now go implement it. No, start working on it in the standards, be in parallel doing open source reference implementations or an open source project implementation of it. Have the two feet off of each other. So at the end of the day, you not only have the standard, but you have an open source implementation of it that people can start to use, extend, whatever, bring in to meet their needs. So yeah, that's the way I look at it. I guess one thing I can add is that we wanna see the standards making faster decisions, adopting newer technologies, and SISCA has a lot of interest. All see her actually does hackathons at IETFs, that's a new, so we're trying to really bring the standards bodies up to today's standards in terms of agility and technology. There is still a lot of influence the standards bodies have, and there's a lot of use for that. I don't think we're ready to abandon that. That's a good question. I can tell you which one is more sexier, and you can guess. Well, I can just go back to Charles point of, it's not one or the other, it's doing both, right? Is that the standardization process is long, and I go back and look at SISCO's history as, okay, let's work in the standards, but let's develop this needed functionality, and then when the standard is ratified, we will add that and VLAN tagging with ISL, and then with 802.1Q as standardized, we added support for .1Q, and it eventually became the default instead of ISL for VLAN tagging. How that relates to open source, it's going to be on a case by case basis, right? Is this functionality that is being standardized but is also implemented? Well, is that implemented in an open source project that we're leveraging for our products? Okay, if so, then let's go ahead and implement that standard in that open source project, and then consume that into our product. If it's vice versa, and it's functionality that's in our own software, it's still the same approach. It just comes down to where do we actually then implement that standard open or closed? Yeah, I mean, I think it's a gray area. A good example is CNI, the Container Network Interface. It's not necessarily a standard, it's an open source project that's trying to standardize on how containers interact with the, with networking in a containerized environment. Docker has lib network, right? And so a Docker, if you've got Docker, Docker swarm, you use lib network. If you've got Kubernetes, Mesos, and I mean, CNI is really starting to be adopted but neither of my standards. Do one of those eventually float up and be a standard? I don't know, I'm not involved in the standards committee, but I think, again, just going back, looking at history of, okay, we've got to implement this functionality somewhere, preferably an open source software instead of closed source software. And let's make sure, let's work with the standards committees and try to bring about a standard that everyone can follow, yeah, so. So I think the other thing is that it depends on the area, right? There is no point in for me to have an open source project for BGP. BGP is handled at IETF, it's very well handled, all the stakeholders are there, that's the place to do. Now, my project is routing streaming network analytics and we actually work very closely with the IETF because we use BGP monitoring protocol. So that's not even really part of our open source engagement. But IETF, there was really no forum or area to build this framework for us. So it seemed like the code piece, really, we had to take it out of the standards. Otherwise, we could never make progress, it depends. Can you build the community faster than the standards groups to mobilize? I think it depends. But I'm very into interactive audiences, so. In the NFV space, right? And then this is kind of the beginning, although I guess NFV started like maybe five years ago. There's been standards started and it was going slow and now there's open source, multiple open source communities, right? And it's kind of a competition. And open source is different, you can leverage it into your product and all that stuff. But if I look at it just from an interoperability and open this point of view, some people say, well, as things get more software, why write a spec on an API when you can just have code and then you know it works, right? So in terms of interoperability, is there certain kind of things that are best to just do an open source for interoperability or is it better to do it in standard? The protocols obviously you do in standard. I was gonna say, for protocols, there's no point. Yeah, I think looking at protocols is actually a good example. If you look at like networking, right? I mean, look at, we have OBS, we have OpenSwitch, we have EPP, we have proprietary implementations, many, many of them. Fortunately, they can actually interoperate and co-exist because there's those underlying standards. So there's an example of, perhaps one day there'll be one open source switching platform at hopes it's VPP that just rules everything and then the standards don't really matter because the whole world runs on VPP. But maybe that's not what's gonna happen and maybe there's gonna continue to be a mix. So even with open source implementations, it's still fantastic having that standard basis behind them. One forward to rule them all in the dark and spine them. Yes, I'm gonna give you a mic. Thank you. Thanks. So just curious about your company's open source strategy. So let's say you have an internal project, you found it interesting and you consider to open source it. So what's the consideration before you open source it? Let's say the FIDO work very, very nice before you open source it, what kind of the, what made you make the decision to open source it? What are the considerations? So normally I prefer to have the panel answer and you will. Implied thread intended. But I will actually address this one a little more directly because I was very intimately involved in the open sourcing of VPP and FIDO. A conversation that I have repeatedly with executives inside Cisco is bringing back the fine point that we're in the business from a Cisco perspective of creating value. And we have a historical tendency to think about clutching intellectual property as the only way to create value. And the truth of the matter is that it is often the case that you create more of business value in your company by letting go of certain things. So you can look at the landscape and say, okay, there are market transitions that are happening where customers are demanding that things are based on open platforms based on open source software. They're not saying that they won't pay you for things. They're saying that they don't want to be locked in. You have places where the innovation that is necessary to make it through the complex transitions that we're dealing with more and more quickly, like the transitions to cloud native and microservices can't be done by any one single vendor. We have to have a place that we can collaborate together on them. And so you build a case around the value creation of letting go. Now then there's a whole lot of mechanics around things like making really certain that you are completely beyond reproach in terms of the providence of the code that you release. I can't tell you how many annoying code scans that I've read through just to make sure the endless array of false positives were in fact false. So there's a lot of mechanics to it as well, but the fundamental thing that has to be worked out is what is the business value case that you make to your executives? And how do you help them make that transition into the new world of thinking about things? And now back to the implied threat to the panel. Yeah, I'll give you another example. It goes back to the way I came into Cisco. I mentioned getting started in open source at Voveda and we were open sourcing everything. And Cisco acquired us. And after they acquired us, now they had to decide what to do with this code. And Cisco wanted to have a voice over IP solution. And but they decided, you know what? These guys are already open sourcing stuff. We're going to continue to open source it because yes, while we want to develop a voice over IP and hopefully a video IP solution, we want that whole industry to grow. So we want to put all this stuff out. It's like a toolkit to help others create voice over IP solutions. Because if the industry moves from traditional telephony to over IP, that's good for Cisco. We sell more routers and switches. We'll make money on that. If we also sell the best voice over IP solution, great. If someone else does, great. So let's put it out there as open source. So that was a decision way back then on that open source project. And just another way you can look at it. What is it? Where are you driving value from? And that can influence your decision. Just really quick, one thing I wanted to add there is there's also a benefit to open sourcing things, which is you can, assuming that you can build a developer community around the technology, you can actually accelerate development and innovation. All right, so we love you people up front. But we haven't heard from the people in the back. So why are you in here there in the back?  That's a good answer. You wanna say something? No. Okay. Awesome. Anyone else in the back? Why are you here? I know some of you. I can guess. Don't make me guess. Come on. Okay, I'm very close to calling names. So do volunteer. Yes. So I'm here, because I'm curious to hear some of your stories. I know we don't have much time, but what is the hardest experience you've gone through trying to convince people about open source within the company, and why it's so important? So the question is, what was the hardest thing about going open source? To explain the value, why we're doing it, why we wanna do it, and this more future-looking aspect of the open sourcing, what it will bring to the company. Because it's a traditional company. Everybody is used to building a product and selling it, and you're done, and you collect the money, but now we live in a very different world of subscriptions and memberships and services. And we're going through that transition just like any other big company, and we had to convince that this was the right way for us to proceed, and we had to have conversations about how we're gonna bring back money and value to the company through open source. But it's a lot of tension in the company, and I think it's a very healthy tension. It has to happen. I think another thing that's challenging is to have people just kind of bite off that chunk of work of open sourcing. And not just open sourcing, but open sourcing, say correctly, right? It's, because the last thing we wanna have people do is just throw open source out there and then be like, yeah, yeah, we don't care about that. I remember someone saying like, okay, well, we were working on this, and now we decided we're gonna cut that project on our team, but we're gonna open source it and hope that the community takes it over. It's like, no. Because that always happens. The only way we're gonna open source this is if you agree you're actually gonna put more people on it so we can help develop a community around it. So I think getting people to think about that and understand the value, the real value of open source is that they're good open source community members and they open source correctly, I think it's just one of the biggest challenges because oftentimes once you start talking about that, then you end up scaring them away or, so I think that's one of the tough balances. Also, we don't have the cleanest, it's probably a huge understatement, we don't have the cleanest open source contribution process really. It's not the most streamlined and not easy to navigate. So a lot of people just don't wanna bite off that complication of having to do the right thing, check with other business units to make sure that they're not killing their business model or whatever, do the right due diligence. That's, to get people to open source correctly is still can be a challenge. Okay, so we have just been told by our lovely minders that we have hit our time. So I want to thank our distinguished panelists for their contributions to the conversation, it's been excellent. I'd like to thank you as the audience for participating as part of the panel, and I would like to thank everyone for indulging my impish desire to see if I could run an entire panel on a single word. Oh. Ha ha ha.


I'm a historian, so I'm interested in the whole paleo thing as a social movement. So where did it come from? Where we are today and where it might be going in the future. And today I want to talk specifically about what has happened over the past five years. To proceed, I actually want to go back, I want to go back in time about five or six years ago to 2013. And I want to talk about the media stereotypes and the reality back then. And then I want to compare that data from 2013 to a new online survey we ran in 2018 last fall. And then I want to talk about what changed and then what stayed the same over that five year period. And then in part three, I'm going to wrap things up in a short conclusion. Okay, so I want to apologize right up front. I'm going to show you a lot of data and a lot of graphs. So to simplify things, I've decided to highlight seven takeaway points. I think these seven takeaway points represent some of the most interesting and important findings from our study. Okay, so part one, let's go back five or six years and talk first about media stereotypes. All right, so quickly certain stereotypes begin to emerge. So we see the individual is male, he's white, and perhaps a bit underdressed for the occasion. This next one is an idealized image here.  Speaking of meat, again, we see relatively young white male this time eating raw meat. And then this might be my favorite, the dude who was allergic to shirts. This is from the GQ online dating guide. I think the impression we're supposed to get at this young man is rather vain. So if we put this all together, I would summarize what we were seeing about five years ago for trading the media as, you know, people who are vain, single, young white men who eat meat. And I was like, is that true? Is that representative of the ancestral health community? So back in 2013 with some co-authors, I ran the first academic survey of the paleo community. Here are the details. It was an anonymous online self-selected survey. We had about 4,000 people participate. Pretty good number for an online survey. And here were some of the major results. So this is the reality part. Majority were women. They were middle-aged. They were white, 92 percent white, highly educated, relatively affluent, rather being single, two-thirds are in a committed relationship. They earned quite a bit of money. And we saw high avoidance of legumes and grains, but not of dairy and alcohol. And then finally in terms of motivation, people said their primary motivation for going paleo was either to lose weight or to resolve health problems or concerns. If you want to read more about this, we published our findings in the Journal of Evolution and Health back in 2013, and you can easily find that online. All right. So I knew back then that I wanted to run a follow-up survey five years later. So 2018 rolled around. I contacted my co-authors. I said, hey, you all want to do this again? They said, great. So last fall, we ran a follow-up survey. We distributed it and marketed it in the same way. But interestingly, we only had 1,500 respondents this time. So we can talk more about that at the end. So far fewer number of people completed the survey, even though we tried to distribute it in exactly the same way. Can't really say why the change. OK. So now I want to go into what stayed the same over the five-year period, statistically the same, and what changed. So I'm going to spend much shorter time on what stayed the same, because I think what's changed is really interesting. All right. So things that are the same, again, majority female, vast majority white. These are people who respond to the survey. We saw the same amount of strictness per week. People reported eating paleo 87% per week. Same. About 60% of people said they consumed safe starches, which we defined as sweet potatoes, white rice, stuff like that. The belief in evolution was the same, which was a little surprising to me. 66% of respondents said they believed in straight evolution with no influence from God. By the way, that's way, way higher than the US national average, like three times higher. Sleep was the same, which was a little surprising, right? It seems like there are more demands on our time, social media, et cetera. So people were sleeping the same. And then in terms of where respondents were from, the same top countries and states showed up. You can see that at the bottom of the slide. Okay, I want to shift gears and talk about things that were statistically different in 2018. All right. First, age. So the average or mean age went up by five years. So as a whole, the paleo movement now, or the people who respond to our survey more specifically, are now on average five years older. So these are Gen Xers, born between 1966 and 1980. These are middle-aged people. If we graph that, chart that, it looks something like this. So we can see the whole movement has shifted older over this five-year period. And this leads me to take home point number one, right? Paleo people who respond to our survey on average are older. Now there could be a couple explanations for that. I'm going to return to this point at the end. But it appears as though fewer young people are joining the movement, or fewer young people have joined the movement recently. All right. So now I want to go into a bunch of other demographic information. And this is where we get into lots of graphs. So we asked about education. I'll give you a second to digest this slide. The orange bars are always 2013. And the blue bars are always 2018. And the orange bars tend to be on top. And obviously the blue bars are underneath in each category. So what stands out here is how people have become even more highly educated. So we see 77% of individuals hold a four-year degree or higher. 6% have PhDs. The US averages under 1%. And as a whole, with a broader context, only 3% of Americans hold a bachelor's degree. Only 33% of Americans hold a bachelor's degree. So 33% of Americans hold a bachelor's degree as a whole. Yet 77% here have a four-year degree or higher. So this is a pretty remarkable number. And this is take-home point number two. So the very, very high level of education. Income. We see a similar kind of thing. So what stands out here to me is the very large number of people who earn, or who have household income, above $100,000 a year. 50%. And at the same time, the national average is only around 30%. So there's what we've seen is, and over the five-year period, we see more people making more money. Look at that above $250,000 row. So I think the take-home point here is that respondents to our survey were quite affluent, especially if we take into consideration that the median national household income in the United States is approximately $60,000 a year. All right, family structure. Again, we didn't see a whole lot of single people. And in fact, we see more people in a committed relationship and more people with children. So 74%, almost three-quarters of respondents, are married or in a committed relationship now in 2018. So take-home point number four. Paleo peeps are committed, right? The national average is somewhere around 56%. Well, that number's a little old. All right, food avoidance. So what are people eating? What stands out here to me is that fewer people are avoiding legumes, right, more people are eating legumes, and more people are avoiding dairy and alcohol. Why is that? We were unable to determine that from our survey, but I think those results are pretty interesting. Supplements. Again, we see a range of different supplements here. The two biggest differences have to do with fish oil, fewer people taking fish oil now, and more people taking magnesium compared to five years ago. Motivation. So what are people's? We ask people to identify their primary reason for going paleo. And this is what we see. Again, the top two responses from 2013 dominated, and those were weight loss, although slightly, but significantly fewer people are doing it for weight loss, and more people on the top are doing it to recover from illness, yet those are the two biggest ones. Overall, 53% go paleo to lose weight or recover from illness. Why the change in that direction? I'm not sure in terms of weight loss. It might be because of the popularity of low carbohydrate diets, in particular keto, and the carnivore diet. So maybe people who are interested in alternative diet paradigms are shifting to other things to lose weight. All right, this was interesting in this time of talking about climate change. Not a single person in either survey selected environmental sustainability as the number one reason for going paleo. So I know people care about this issue here. I know it's an important topic. I've heard people talk about it here, but it's not showing up as the primary motivator. All right, take home point number five. Majority of people are going paleo to resolve health issues or to lose weight, not because of environmental concerns. Then we asked about difficulty. How hard is it to live a paleo lifestyle? And what we see here is that in general, people reported that it was pretty darn easy to maintain a paleo lifestyle. 70% said it was very easy or somewhat easy. So it was a little surprising to me. In terms of the change, we see that top row, a significant number of people said it's very easy now. After five years, to maintain this paleo diet, there could be a whole number of reasons for that, which I don't have time to go into right now. Obstacles. So what makes it difficult to live a paleo lifestyle? The biggest decrease we saw over the five years was too expensive. So fewer people think it's too expensive. That might be because of lower cost paleo foods or it might be because people now are earning more money, as we saw in a previous slide. And more people said, man, it's a bummer to give up our favorite non-paleo foods. CrossFit. We asked about CrossFit in both surveys. There are 5% fewer people doing CrossFit, maybe older people are not as into CrossFit. So we saw a drop from 16% to 11%. All right, health outcomes. So we asked a bunch of questions about how has the paleo diet changed your health? This is going to be a scary graph. Here we go. Can't talk about all of it now. But overall, we see people reporting improvement in really all of the categories. Overall health, mental performance, athletic performance, need for medication, et cetera, body composition. But the biggest change we saw had to do with blood chemistry. So the question of blood chemistry, what stands out is that far before fewer people knew were unsure about their blood chemistry, but now five years later, a lot more people know about their blood chemistry and they say it has improved. Again, why is that? It's hard to say. Maybe there's greater access to health care. Maybe there's better recognition of the importance of doing routine blood work. Maybe changes with the Affordable Care Act has made it more accessible for some people. Again, we can't tell exactly from our survey. All right. So we also asked some new questions on this survey. All the information I've presented up until now, they were the exact same questions on both surveys. Same wording, same choices, we kept it the same. But we asked a few new questions that we either didn't ask last time or we were trying to get at what might be happening now or in the future. So one of the questions we asked was about political party affiliation, particularly in the United States. And there seemed to be kind of like a myth or an urban rumor that people who impale you were primarily live and let live libertarians. So what we see though is that there's really a pretty diverse spectrum of political beliefs here. Democrat, independent, libertarian, Republican. So you see a pretty good amount of political diversity in the responses to this question. Just to give you some reference points, the national averages in 2018, national averages in the US, 30% Democrat. So it's very close to the national average for Democrats. And the national average for Republicans in 2018 was 26%. So there are significantly fewer Republicans who responded to our survey. So take home point number six, people who completed our survey are pretty politically diverse, which was a bit of a surprise for me personally. All right, so then we also surveyed people who were paleo but are no longer. So we wanted to find out if they're not paleo anymore, then what happened? Why did they leave? What are they doing? So we asked them for the primary reason for stopping paleo. And give you a second to digest this. And for me, the top four reasons are interesting. So 38%, they said they changed to a new specific diet, which I'm going to talk about those diets in a minute. 11% said limited food choices. 9% said lack of motivation. And then 8% said no specific reason. So turning to new specific diet, so we asked if you are not following a paleo diet, are you following some specific diet? And what we see here is that 40% reported no particular diet. So did these people go back to eating Twinkies for breakfast? I have no idea, but this was super surprising. 40% say, hey, I'm not following any specific diet right now after being paleo. 13% said low carb, 10% said keto, and then Mediterranean vegan, vegetarian are way further down the list. So this was really surprising to me, really remarkable. All right, so I think this is another really important point. We asked folks, how long have you been living a paleo diet in terms of years? 1, 2, 3, 10? And what we see here is a pretty remarkably equal distribution in terms of the number of years people have been following a paleo diet. So it ranges somewhere between 9% and say 10% or 11%. And again, the distribution here is pretty interesting. So some people have been doing it a long time. Some people have been doing it a medium amount of time. And some people have been doing it a really long time, short time. But what stands out here in particular is that 33% of respondents joined within the last three years. OK, so within the last three years, 33% of the people who responded to the survey said, this is when we joined. This is when we started. Now, I want to compare this to five years ago. And five years ago, 85% of respondents had joined within the past five years. That's a huge difference. And when we re-ran this survey, I was really curious what we were going to see here. Because back in 2013, what's really interesting about this, this 85% number, was that there were a lot of people joining. Like, wow, the growth was amazing. But it was also very new, right? So growth, yet novelty, a lot of new people doing it. So the question that was in my mind for the past five years was, are people still doing it? Did they stick with it? Right? So I want to come back to that thought here at the end. But what we do see here is that there have been far fewer people joining recently. All right, take-home point number seven is that people are going paleo at a much slower rate compared to 2013. Again, 33% compared to 85%. Bonus take-home point. So we looked at the age of the people who joined within the past three years in 2018, right? And actually in both years. And we see that on average, they're about three years older. So the people who have joined recently are on average older. And I think that is significant as well. All right, I'm getting to my conclusions here, wrapping things up. I want to summarize the findings here in two or three slides. And I want to start with what has stayed the same to emphasize this. So again, contrary to the media stereotypes of before, and I would argue this media stereotypes have continued over the past five years. We see that a majority of respondents are women, overwhelmingly white. They're pretty strict.  Actually, that's about an hour more on average than Americans get per night. So paleo people are sleeping more. And the same countries show up and the same states show up as being the primary location of people who respond to our survey. All right, and here's the difference. The difference is summarized. As I mentioned, I've mentioned all this before, but to reiterate, to summarize, folks are older. They're super well educated compared to the national average. They are much more affluent. They're in committed relationship. They're eating some less dairy and alcohol, but more legumes. They're consuming less fish oil, but more magnesium. There's less crossfit. We see a pretty high level of political diversity. And we see what I think we can interpret as fewer and older people joining the movement, or at least those who responded to our survey. And this leads me to the final point, is perhaps things are not the paleo movement or the ancestral movement as a whole is not as big right now and is not growing as fast, which leads me to my final slide. Has there been a paleo decline? And if so, what has been the cause of that decline? Those are difficult questions to answer. The way our survey was designed, I cannot say the paleo movement is smaller, because it was a self-selected anonymous study. So it can't make a claim based on our survey data that it's smaller, but based on other things that I've looked at from new books and book sales and web traffic and a whole bunch of things, it seems like perhaps the movement's more mature, but not as big and not growing as fast. And a future avenue of my research is to think about and write about, has there been a decline? And if so, why? And I'd also love to hear your thoughts on this. Do you think there has been a decline? And if so, why? So with that, I will thank you for your attention and thank you to the people who helped with the project. So thanks for that, Hamilton. So I'm open to the idea that it's declined just because there's always excitement at the beginning and things eventually decline. However, this is paleo distinct from keto and carnivore because there's so much excitement, especially with the keto and smaller degree to the carnivore, that it's hard for me to believe that ancestral thinking is shrinking. Yeah. Thank you very much for that question. And I think it's a very good one. And I think perhaps there's two ways of thinking about it. Perhaps one way is to think about that there was this popular movement. Maybe you could use the word fad, right? There was a certain fad aspect to the movement where there were some early adopters and some popularizers, and it took off, and then it peaked, and now it's sort of slowed down or stabilized. So I agree with you there that I think maybe there's this fad component, but, but, but I think the underlying evolutionary principles to health, nutrition, disease, they are not going anywhere. They are here for the long term. And we've seen over time conventional medicine pick up these ideas, get on board late. Circadian rhythms, the saturated fad may not be so bad for you, the importance of the microbiome. So all these things that the paleo community has been talking about for years, seven, eight years, right? We increasingly see now incorporated into the mainstream. So I totally agree that the underlying principles are here to stay, but whatever this social movement was with the people who were popular and wrote the books and had the websites and identifying as paleo seems to have changed. Like, paleo just doesn't seem as cool to me right now. Keto's cool, carnivore's cool, right? But for whatever reason, this brand Keto, like, is not as cool. Thanks Hamilton, that was great. And yeah, I had a similar set of thoughts, too, I guess, about whether paleo, if it is losing some of its powers and identities, nonetheless diffusing, it's infecting wider society more, in which case I'd be very happy with that outcome, right? But I also have a thought about identity, because when somebody makes a dietary transition, it seems like the identity is very important. They happen to exercise abstentions, withhold certain foods, learn new skills. And so that sense of, OK, I'm doing this and this is who I am now is much more of a support base. And then as it becomes habitual, maybe you don't kind of feel the need anymore to call yourself anything in particular. It's just the way you eat. So I mean, I wonder about whether some of the people who said that they're no longer paleo because they're not doing anything in particular might nonetheless also be still eating pretty well as a result of having gone through that experience. Yeah, I totally agree with you, right? So as you just said, if it becomes normalized for you, you no longer see it as this special unique thing in your life. So I think we have seen that normalization and maybe that helps explain the more equal distribution and how long people have been doing it. Again, I think there's a kind of lack of a better word, maturity in the movement, your stability in the movement. What will happen going forward? I'm not so sure. But thank you for your comment and question. I think it's obvious from your survey that paleo is the path to being smarter and going more money. Making more money. But my other comment is, is that even though we live in a small town, the local grocery store, we can get in everything we need to have a paleo lifestyle. And so I agree with your thing. It's kind of become mainstream. So consequently, it's not so noticeable as it was when all that stuff was hard to get. Yes, yes. And I think I totally agree with you. And I think this is represented in the survey responses of how easy it is to be paleo. So bunches of people who respond to the survey are saying, it's pretty darn easy to do this today. So I do agree with you. I live in a small town. I can eat paleo. But I will say this. Just recently, I live in a small town in upstate New York, kind of in the middle of nowhere, really mediocre grocery store. But it has a little magazine like Isle. And just recently, guess what magazine showed up in there? Keto Magazine. Big glossy Keto Magazine. There's no paleo magazine. Never been a paleo magazine there. Lived there for 10 years in this area. But now there's a Keto Magazine. I was like, whoa. I loved your presentation, anecdotally. The fish oil and magnesium thing, I think, is probably the education of the community by people like Cressor and Master John. But the numbers didn't quite jive with my anecdotal experience at Paleo FX, particularly the age and the numbers. So I quickly reached out to Keith and Michelle Norris, owners of Paleo FX. Yeah, sure. They're over at Mindshare right now. So what I got back from them is the numbers in 2015 were around 3,000 attendees. By 2017, that had jumped up to 6,800. 2018, 7,500. And last year, or this year, they were 8,128. That's great. Thank you for sharing those numbers, because I've been trying to get the numbers from them for quite some time. Yeah, so I'm glad now that we have it recorded and official. Thank you. They're crazy busy trying to organize their lives. One of the things I said, can you share a couple of specifics? 67% women, 38% between the age of 26 and 35 with children. 29% of those women are 38 to 55 with businesses. And 33% are men under the age of 27. So they're tracking the demographics. They just got a new tool. And she was trying to figure out how to access it today. So she just said she can't get to everything, but they do have it now. And I think they're willing to share it. Oh, that's great. I appreciate you sharing that information. And thank you for that. I think clearly they've done a good job of bringing in what's probably a younger component or segment of the paleo population. Like, I've been to Paleo FX. It's a great time. There's so much going on. It's a lot of fun. So it makes sense to me that it's bringing in a good number of people and a good number of young people. Thank you so much. Great. Sorry, I really enjoyed what I saw. I got here late in the intro. What were the selection criteria for who you sent the surveys to and how many you responded and how many did you send? Yeah. Because I have a specific question about some of the data that you showed. Yeah, sure, sure. So we sent it out, we distributed over social media and we used the same 25 prominent organizations and individuals in the Paleo Sphere to promote, distribute and market the survey. We timed it for a specific release date. It ran, the 2018 survey ran for 13 days. So it was a self-selected anonymous survey. So we don't have data on the distribution of who received it versus who took it, right? So there are some definite methodological limitations to this kind of online survey, okay? Well, I was particularly interested in like one third of your responders don't believe in evolution and I wondered if the outset, did you ask a question? Do you understand this definition of evolution or what does believe in evolution mean? And for the one third that don't believe, could you elaborate on that a little bit? Sure, yeah. Absolutely, it's a great question. So we use the standard Gallup poll question and evolution that's been used for, I don't know, 20 years, 30 years. And there are three choices on that standard Gallup poll question. And one is I believe God's created humans the way they are. Number two is I believe in evolution but evolution was guided by God. And then number three is I believe like just strict evolution without any intervention from a divine force. And 66% of respondents chose the third category in our survey, right? That people believe in evolution with no divine intervention. So that's why I said strict evolution on that slide. I hope that answers your question. Okay. So it's just in light of the paleoethics numbers that just came through and the growth in products. And main question I'm having is why did fewer people complete the survey? Because to me that's the real thing that you can definitely say that completing a paleo survey is less popular this year. And it's a real question I can think of a lot of potential explanations. I wonder what you've thought about that. Sure. I do not know why fewer people complete the survey. And as I try to make clear, I'm not claiming the paleo movement is smaller because fewer people complete the survey. I am not making that claim, okay? I cannot explain why fewer people completed the survey. We tried very consciously to distribute it in the same way, but social media and internet habits have changed, right? So we tried to use all the major social media outlets to do it as we did previously. But in the end, we had far fewer responses come in. And far fewer people we contacted, let's call them influencers for lack of a better word, agreed to help promote the survey. Now, why did they refuse to promote the survey? Like, I don't know, maybe they're into keto now instead of the whole paleo thing. Or maybe I'm just a lot less popular now than I was five years ago.  I can't answer why. Sure, sure, yes.


Hey everybody, it's John Farr back with another virtual classic Tuesday from the Bedford Playhouse. Tonight we're featuring a movie that's near and dear to my heart, from 1946, the best years of our lives. I first saw this on television when I was pretty young, and it blew me away, and it still does. Before getting into how the film came about, I want to tell you about the man behind it, Samuel Goldwin. By 1944, Sam Goldwin had been a major player in Hollywood for decades. Along with David O. Selznick of Gone with the Wind, he was the most powerful independent producer operating outside the major studios of the day. Goldwin was, in fact, one of the true pioneers of the movie industry. He was born into abject poverty in Poland in 1879, and he arrived in America 20 years later with virtually nothing. His anglicized name was Samuel Goldfish. Over the first decade of the 20th century, he became a successful glove salesman in upstate New York. And early on, he saw the commercial possibilities in what was then called moving pictures. Though in 1913, he went into the picture business himself, producing the first feature film made in Hollywood, the Squaw Man, directed by Cecil B. DeMille. Two years later, Sam became partners with theatrical producers Edgar and Archibald Selwyn. They called their company Goldwin Pictures, combining the names Goldfish and Selwyn. Well, Sam liked the name so much, he had his own name legally changed then and there to Goldwin. In 1924, he sold the company, which was folded into Metro Pictures and Louis B. Mayer Productions to create the studio known as Metro Goldwin Mayer. The studio would always carry his name, but he never actually worked for it. By this point, Sam was tired of having partners and his various partners might have been tired of having him. Thus, he decided that going forward, he would operate on his own as an independent producer, calling all the shots himself. Well, over the next 35 years, he worked just this way with his own talent under contract. A colorful character over the years, Sam would become known for his mangling of the English language. These were known as Goldwinisms. Here are just two of his most famous lines. Include me out, and a verbal contract isn't worth the paper it's written on. Well, these lines made Sam Goldwin sound like a comical figure, but make no mistake. He was savvy, tough, and again, he exerted complete control over his films. So by 1944, Sam had been married to former actress Frances Howard for nearly 20 years. It hadn't always been an easy marriage, but he really trusted her judgment and they had a great partnership. Well, Frances had read an article called The Way Home in the August 7, 1944 issue of Time magazine, profiling various servicemen returning from the war. It really moved her, and she passed it on to her husband, suggesting the subject matter would make a great film. Well, Sam was noncommittal at first. It was all just ruminating in his head, but he quietly registered two possible titles for a movie, Home Again and The Way Home. Then he heard that the widely respected writer McKinley Cantor was coming to Hollywood looking for a film project. Cantor would go on to win a Pulitzer Prize for his book, Andersonville. Well, Goldwin showed him the Time magazine piece and commissioned him to write a story and screenplay treatment, and he was paid $20,000 for that. The end result was a novel written in blank verse called Glory for Me, about three soldiers coming back to the same town after the war. Goldwin loved it, but he felt he needed a top screenwriter to transform it into a strong shooting script. He then approached another Pulitzer Prize winner, Robert E. Sherwood, whose script for Hitchcock's Rebecca had been Oscar nominated back in 1940. Well, Sherwood had quit screenwriting for the duration of the war to serve as one of FDR's top speechwriters. Sherwood agreed to come on board once his latest play premiered on Broadway. Goldwin also needed a top director, but thankfully he already had one in William Wyler, who'd been under contract at Goldwin since the mid-30s. Before the war, the two men had made movies together like Doddsworth from 1936, Wuthering Heights in 1939, and two years later, The Little Foxes with Betty Davis. Now, for most of the war, Wyler had been in his native Europe, going along on bombing missions to shoot all the action. The most famous result of this was Wyler's 1944 documentary Memphis Bell, A Story of a Flying Fortress, which was highly praised on release. Obviously, nature of this work was extremely dangerous, but it also brought Wyler very close to the young pilots, navigators, and warriors whose heroism he captured. The noise in those unpressurized planes had left Wyler almost completely deaf. He came home with just enough hearing in one ear to keep directing films. And with the war still a fresh memory for him, the only story Goldwin had that interested William Wyler was McKinley Cantor's Glory for Me. So by the time Robert E. Sherwood actually sat down to start writing the script, he had met with both Goldwin and Wyler. Perhaps he was simply out of practice, but very soon Sherwood felt blocked. He was particularly worried that by the time the film was released, the story would seem hopelessly out of date. Goldwin knew he was struggling and invited him out to work at his private home in Los Angeles and talk through his issues. Well, somewhere along the way, Sherwood had a breakthrough. One morning he came down to breakfast and talked Goldwin through the whole script virtually just as it would end up on the screen. Goldwin found roles in the script for many of his contract players. For Fred Derry, the bomber pilot who comes back to a failing marriage and a dead-end job as a soda fountain attendant, he cast Dana Andrews. Andrews had become a star in 1944 playing opposite Jean Tierney in Otto Preminger's classic Laura. Virginia Mayo would get to play Fred's flusy wife Marie while simultaneously shooting a Goldwin comedy called The Secret Life of Walter Middy with Danny Kay. On many days, she had to rush from one set to the other and alternate playing two very different characters. Farley Granger was initially slated for the part of disabled soldier Homer Parrish and newcomer Kathy O'Donnell would play Wilma, Homer's girlfriend. Finally, Teresa Wright was cast as Peggy, the grown daughter of the eldest soldier Al Stevenson. Her character's romance with Fred really anchors the story. To play her parents, Alan Milley, Goldwin had to go outside his own stable and approach veterans Frederick March and Myrna Loy. Well, March was now past his leading man days and so he eagerly accepted the part. But Goldwin worried that Myrna Loy might not be such an easy sell. He didn't think her part was too small and turned it down. Still a big star, she was best known for her wildly popular films with William Powell including, of course, The Thin Man. Well, it turned out, Loy had read the McKinley Cantor story and loved it so she quickly took the part after making sure she'd get top billing. Well, one last minute change on the casting front would actually do wonders for the film. In the original script, Homer Parrish returns home with a spastic condition caused by battle trauma. Weiler was concerned that actually portraying this on screen might be too much for audiences. But he had no alternative in mind until he happened to see a short film called Diary of a Sergeant about the rehabilitation of wounded veterans. There in the film was Harold Russell, who'd lost both of his hands and some dynamite he was holding during a training session exploded. Well, he had since mastered the use of the hooks that you see in the film. Weiler decided to test Russell for Homer and found he was a natural. But what he also liked about him was how gracefully he accepted his disability. One of the ironies of the story, of course, is that out of the three returning soldiers, Homer, the most visibly disabled, makes the most positive readjustment. Once finished, Sherwood Screenplay for best years of our lives was over 200 pages long, nearly twice the length of an average script. But neither Goldwyn nor Weiler saw much fat to cut. So finally the Hicks accepted it would be a long film, just 10 minutes short of three hours as it turned out. The best years of our lives was a uniquely personal project for William Weiler. Of all else, he wanted the film to feel totally authentic and to reflect an almost documentary style realism. For his actors' wardrobes, he insisted they buy regular clothes off the rack and wear them for several weeks off camera before shooting. He also demanded that the whole crew be comprised of military veterans. He then added new elements to the script drawing from his own wartime experiences. So during the war, Weiler flew in the very same planes that Fred Derry piloted. He personally knew several Fred Derry's. So he seized on the opportune discovery of an actual airplane graveyard nearby using it to create perhaps the film's most powerful sequence when Fred visits it. As you'll recall, the open space is filled with lines of old B-17 and B-25 bombers that overnight have become obsolete and irrelevant like Fred himself. Then there's an incredibly touching moment when Al and Millie first glimpse each other down a hallway after a very long separation. Weiler's own reunion with his wife in 1944 had unfolded just like that. Finally, the scene when Fred gets fired for punching the customer who criticizes the war effort to Homer. Weiler himself had socked a hotel doorman for mouthing off in the same way. These personal touches really add to the emotion and the essential honesty of the film. Goldwyn and Weiler were also extremely fortunate to have Greg Tolan on board as cinematographer. Tolan was already famous for having taught a young man named Orson Welles how to use a camera on a little film called Citizen Kane. He'd also worked on quite a few Goldwyn productions in the past, including two directed by Willie Weiler, Wuthering Heights and The Little Foxes. One pivotal scene in Best Years features Tolan's trademark use of deep-focus photography where objects in both foreground and background stay in focus. It's when Al and Fred meet at Butch's Bar and Al tells the married Fred to stop seeing his daughter, Peggy. Fred agrees to call her and heads toward the phone booth. Then as he enters the booth, we see Homer come in and go over to talk to Butch, who's played by singer-songwriter Hoge Carmichael. Well, in a single shot, we can observe Fred talking to Peggy in the background of the booth as Butch and Homer perform a sloppy duet of chopsticks in the foreground. By the way, a quick word on Hoge Carmichael. He wrote some incredibly popular music back in the day, including Stardust, Georgia on My Mind and Skylark. He'd made a very successful movie debut two years earlier, crooning with newcomer Lauren Bacall in To Have and Have Not. The Best Years of Our Lives was finally released to wild acclaim at the end of 1946. Bosley Crowther of The New York Times had this to say, It is seldom that there comes a motion picture which can be wholly and enthusiastically endorsed, not only as superlative entertainment but as food for quiet and humanizing thought. The film was a box office smash earning a whopping $11.5 million in North America over its initial run. That's huge. Now, part of this came from raising ticket prices due to the movie's prestige value and also its length, which meant fewer showings per day for exhibitors. At the 1947 Oscars, The Best Years of Our Lives won seven statuettes, including Best Picture for Sam Goldwyn, Best Actor for Frederick March, Supporting Actor for Harold Russell, Director for William Weiler and Best Screenplay for Robert E. Sherwood. And Harold Russell became the only actor ever to win two Oscars for the same role. Thinking he'd never get the votes to win the competitive Oscar, the Academy voted him a special one for bringing hope and courage to his fellow veterans. After this, Russell went back to college, earned his degree, and over time became a tireless advocate for the disabled. The other key players had more good movies ahead of them, particularly Weiler. But for most all of them, The Best Years of Our Lives reflected, if not a peak in their careers, certainly a special moment of triumph. Really, Robert E. Sherwood should never have worried. In the nearly 75 years since its release, the film has never once felt out of date. Thanks for joining me, everyone. See you back here soon. Okay, and now we're going to invite John to join us. Hey, John. Hello. So just a reminder, everybody, please feel free to post your questions at the Q&A button as we go along. We did have a couple of questions that were submitted in advance, which I will actually start with. So, John, right off the bat, someone had asked the question that given the subject areas of post-traumatic stress disorder and the plight of veterans returning home from the war, is such a contrast to the more standard feel-good patriotic theme films that came during and after the war? Did this make this a target for, say, the House Un-American Activities Committee? No. I mean, you have to understand the more upbeat patriotic war films were really done as propaganda during the war. And that was a very different thing. This was much more along the lines of All Quiet on the Western Front, which showed the trauma of modern warfare just happened to be the First World War. And that came out in 1930. So that was just as talkies were beginning. And that was really showing the trauma of the front of the battlefield and what it does to men. World War I was a very different kind of war than any other war. All wars were obviously terrible and awful, and the Civil War was so costly and so bloody, but the mechanization of warfare really came through in the First World War. And so that was what All Quiet on the Western Front was about. This really is no different. It just happens to be exploring that same theme in terms of the Second World War. But the movies that were made during the war were really propaganda films to make the public support the effort. And those were very different kinds of movies. And in fact, after the war, if you look at the types of movies that were being made from 1946 on, let's say well into the 50s, it was a much darker time with the atomic bomb, a reality, a lot of uncertainty, the Cold War. It was the time of film noir. Much sort of darker, more cynical view of humankind at that point as a result of the war. So I see this as very, I see best years of our lives as really very, very different and distinct from the more propaganda, a propagandistic films that were being made during the actual war. How do you think the film sets the tone for later films like on similar subjects like The Deer Hunter and Coming Home? There's an old saying, I don't know whether it's a Hollywood saying or broader than that, but there are no new stories. So, you know, I bring up all quiet on the Western Front, best years of our lives, and then those movies coming home in The Deer Hunter, which are really on the same theme of what the agonies and the horrors of war, which those who have not experienced it can never even begin to imagine what it's like or how it can absolutely traumatize one's psyche and one's ability to function. By the time Coming Home and The Deer Hunter came out, you know, it was how they treated those issues and those stories. It wasn't that the idea of battlefield trauma, whatever we call it, didn't used to be called PTSD, but it was the same, I won't say it's the same thing because, you know, it's all, I don't want to make it seem like it's, you know, I don't want to trivialize it. But it wasn't a new theme to be explored in films. What war does to a man particularly in the 20th century? Is there any significance to the fact that Dana Andrews character outranks Frederick March, even though he's younger, and he's less successful in civilian life? That's a really interesting question. Here's, here's what I think. You have Dana Andrews who's obviously a lot younger.  In fact, a lot of those guys were a lot younger than Dana Andrews was in that movie.  And the training that they underwent was such that they were going to get advanced very quickly.  I've read the character of Frederick March out is that he's a much older guy. And he may have, he may have been in the first war as a kid, you know, in the last few months of that war, maybe, maybe not. But he isn't going to be a pilot. He's too old. So he probably had to struggle to even get accepted, but he wanted to do it and he volunteered and he enlisted and he didn't go into a special officers program. So that wasn't that wasn't that uncommon actually. In fact, it's a really great part of the story because you have this contrast between this great hero, this pilot, who comes back and you know, has a dead end has dead end prospects. He was a soda jerk, whereas you have Frederick March he was a little older and just wanted to enlist and did. Didn't even bother to, to, to, you know, try to become an officer but wanted to serve and was in the infantry. He comes back to a cushy job in the back. But it's not that's not at all unbelievable in the context of the time. Now we have a couple of questions that have been submitted now by some folks who were tuned in this evening. Can you talk a little bit about the naturalism in the film, compared to some of the work that Weiler did later on specifically referencing the spectacle of Ben Hur. This is a much quote unquote quieter movie. How, how deliberate was that style. When he, Weiler was a director who liked to think that he could do anything. And when you look at his filmography, he was pretty much right. So when he took Ben Hur in 1959 he wanted to show the world that he could make a movie like Cecil B. DeMille. He wanted to do a spectacle he wanted to show that proved to himself and others that he could do a spectacle.  But But Weiler, you know, for him it was about the story. And this was a very unusual film for him because it was so personal and I said that in my introduction. He had just come back from this experience himself it was a it was in his immediate past that he had been in one of these bombers I mean what are we talking to two years and he had seen all of this up close. So the idea of dramatizing what these people that he hung out with in his life and death situations, what it was like to go home. After this amazing traumatic war experience was really really really close to his heart and so, and he had a certain view of it which is, he didn't want it to be romanticized too much. He wanted it to feel very real. And I refer to a documentary style or documentary like realism. And he wanted that. People don't know this but in those days, when you did a set to make the set look better and to make the whole film look glamorous, everything on a set, let's say it was a living room. It was a little larger than it should be. If you go on the set you look at everything looks just a little bit bigger, because it photographs better. Well for this movie he didn't want that. So everything is photographed at actual size. It feels like you're watching, this always felt to me like you're watching the story of real people and real families and, you know, Myrna Loy is so wonderful in it. You know, she sits so saying, you know, I love this man. He's back after this experience that I wasn't there for so I don't know what happened. And he's drinking too much and he's behaving a little oddly, but I love him so much that I that I'm going to be there for him and I'm going to understand it or I'm going to try to understand. That's that was like there was no. That was not a Hollywood, you know, romanticized role that was real that felt very real and I think that's what the film offers today. I think that Weiler wanted that for that particular film and every different film he did. He had a different idea about, but he he often said, Listen, 80% of it is the script. 80% of it is the story. If I've got that. And I've got good actors, I can do this. I mean, I can do it but he wasn't. He wasn't like Hitchcock and I don't mean this to put Hitchcock down but he wasn't sort of, you know what you're going to get with a Hitchcock film, because Weiler did a lot of different different kinds of films. I mean, Roman Holiday is one of the great romantic comedies of all time, wasn't known for romantic comedies, but he did them. And he did all sorts of different kinds of films he was probably one of the he was one of the greatest directors of all time. And he was very tough on actors. And he would never give them direction it drove. He wouldn't give them very specific direction he'd say do it again. Do it again. So when Myrna Loy who'd never worked with him went on this film. He was known as, you know, 40 take Willie, you know, and do it again, just do it again. Well, what do you want me to do different just do it better. That's what he would say to him. And she was terrified but she was actually pleasantly surprised on this particular picture so that was good. Hope that answers the question. Do you have any insights about the musical composition for the film was it Oscar nominated or did it receive any awards. That's a very good question. I can look that up right now. I think it I'm going to find out right now. If I'm not mistaken, it was Hugo Friedhofer. It's a very nice. It's a good score. And it adds a lot. But it's not a score that tends to be that, you know, there's not what people think of the movie and say, you know, it's the it's the music. But actually it was Hugo Friedhofer, and he did win an Oscar. So he did what he won an Oscar for best scoring of a motion picture film. What it is it's a it's a score that feels right for the film. It's got the movie I don't know why it's one of the reasons one of my favorite movies is that it has tremendous humanity and it's a very moving. To me at least I mean I'm emotional watching that movie that movie makes me extremely emotional and the and the and the score for the Friedhofer score really does add to it. It's a very moving movie about about people, and it's about people and it isn't just about the people who returned from the war different and need to try to figure out how to readjust it's about the people who stayed behind who have the people they love come and they're sitting there going who is this I mean they're not the same and that they are confused and and nervous about how do I, you know, how do I deal with this and how do I change to be right for this person. So yeah that guy won an Oscar. This gorgeous. Speaking of writing in that era, the relationship between Hollywood and writers in other genres playwrights like Robert Sherwood is amazing and includes some really incredible names like Robert Sherwood. When did this start to change you don't see that too much anymore. Well, in fairness, I mean that was sort of are also part of Sam Goldwyn's MO. He wanted always to make a pictures a a list pictures. He didn't, he wasn't like a studio that you know most of the studios had different levels of films that they would do they would do the be pictures, the pro whether or they were called programmers, and then they'd have their a pictures and and they would be selling the theaters basically a package, and you'd go in and you'd have the newsreel you'd have a newsreel and you'd have a be picture that was a serial. You know, half an hour or whatever, and then you'd have your main feature. It's all about a pictures and so he put a big premium on having the best writers available, working for him. And having said that, it is true that in those days, the scripts and the store there was much more of a focus on script and than there is today. Part of it is that in those days, people read more. So literature and words, language, complete sentences, like words of more than two three syllables were more common. And today. I mean it all everything started with with Star Wars, you know, back in the late 70s, and in terms of the kinds of movies that Hollywood wanted to make and how they introduced those movies how they distributed those movies how they promoted those movies. And over time with the advances in technology. The movies have become more comic book like they're more about how scenes are shot. They're more about visual effects. They're more about kinetic action all the time. And the scripts. There are exceptions. I mean European films, I would say, a really good European film or Asian film that the international films still are more I think story and script focused. But it's really hard for me sometimes to either I'm, I'm watching a new movie and I'm listening to dialogue and it's just, it's not it just doesn't have that the creativity and the cleverness. And the nuance that some of the great older movies had sad, very sad. Next question is nowadays we're led to believe that the spirit and economy of the US was a boom time for returning veterans and the public in general was this movie portraying a view of reality, or was it showing the plight of those few who found it to help to return to positions or find decent jobs. You know, there, there was the GI Bill. There was opportunity there was you don't worry that Fred is going to have a, you know, I don't worry that Fred Dairy is going to eventually be okay. But don't forget this is 1946. Back. And so, could you predicted a booming economy the growth that would happen and the No, I mean it was all, it was all going to happen. So, but there were opportunities. And, you know, the United States was coming into its I mean you know today we call the the Fred Dairy generation, the greatest generation I mean these was my father. He came back from that war, and he got on the GI Bill anyway was able to go to law school. So, but that wasn't everybody. I mean not everybody was able to do that. It was open to certain people there are various different reasons why certain people couldn't take advantage of it or didn't take advantage of it. There were opportunities and and the United States as a world power was at that moment, really for the first time well more than I would say more than ever as far as I can. A test was at the top of the heap in terms of being the ascendant world power. In World War One, they were, you know, there, we were a young country with lots of resources and people and, but after World War Two, when we won that war with our allies, we were, we were top of the heap. And then we had that we had that going forward for quite a long time. So there was a lot of opportunity. You don't worry that Fred and Peggy are, you know, he probably ended up becoming an insurance man and having a good career and then good home and family you don't worry that he's not going to make it because they were, I mean not withstanding some of the awful things that happened like the, you know, the McCarthyism and all that stuff. There are a lot of opportunities in America America was was about to go into into a big growth phase. Are you familiar with the book and or documentary five came back, which talks about wireless war experiences, among other directors. Yes, recommended. Yes, I recommended I recommend the film I recommend the book. It's it's he and some of the other great directors like John Houston and George Stevens, all these wonderful directors of Highlands Golden Age wanted to find a way to record what was going on in the war, and they each found their ways to do it and this this book and documentary basically traces these these amazing directors, and what each of them did, and what they brought back. It's wonderful. I'm glad that was brought because that is it's fabulous. You talk a little bit about this the cinematography is incredible, not only the ability to draw the audience to the important details or the character, but the images seem so clean sharp that they draw and hold the eye of the audience better than other films that in memory. You talked about Greg Toland a little bit you. Yes, or anything else to add about him. He was the best.  There was no one better with a camera than Greg Toland. I would ask you all to, to, you know, look him up and look at and look at the look at his filmography. Again, I mean I go back to the story of what he did for and how lucky was was Orson Welles I mean he was a a precocious 25 year old theater director who came out to Hollywood and get was given carte blanche to do his movie. He had but Greg Toland to teach him how to hold it what a camera does. He had no damn clue. So you look at some of the movies that he did, all of which have a very haunting and arresting sort of visual style whether it's citizen Kane or weathering heights. The grapes of wrath. You know, it goes on and on he did the Bishop's wife. A golden film that I love I'll just mention this because before you know it will be it'll be December and it'll be Christmas time. Everyone thinks to watch it's a wonderful life every year but watch the Bishop's wife. It's a wonderful life is great but we've all seen it 30 times or I have. The Bishop's wife is a wonderful Christmas movie with Kerry Grant and Loretta young and David Niven. That was Samuel Golden. That was Greg Toland doing the cinematography.  The westerner. The westerner met so I mean that he did. He did so many dead end is a wonderful early Bogart film. He, he was the best. He was the best there was. And, but again, like why learn that's why they would work well together. It wasn't like, All right, if it's great told and it's going to look, you know, it's going to be just this way. And I've said that he he really he understood the story understood the material, and then he would do whatever needed to be done. But his use of deep focus photography was was. I mean that was a real innovation that he that he mastered I love that scene where you're watching, you know them playing chopsticks and but in the background where you're really looking is Dana Andrews talking to Peggy. And you're having to imagine what what what he's saying to her. And you later find out but it's it's really it's an amazing moment, the way that whole shot is framed. Okay, I invite people to keep asking questions. We've been going at a pretty good clip here if you have any more please post them. Anyone about Dana Andrews sort of flies under the radar. This is probably the role he's best remembered for. Can you tell us a little bit more about him. He was very good he, you know, he, he was struggling for years. You know, he started out doing something else. And he, you know, he came from a family with not a lot of money and then he decided when he was late 20s, early 30s it wasn't just like, you know, leaving high school to become an actor he just all of a sudden decided.  And, and then he started, you know, it's again a lot of these these stories are familiar where you just he just kept at it kept at it kept at it. And I am hold on I want to tell you some of the movies that you know he had some small parts. There's a wonderful comedy called ball of fire. That was Sam Goldman. So Sam Goldman basically put him under contract finally but he wasn't a star right away. So he was in a movie called ball of fire. Which was a Gary Cooper movie. And he plays a gangster. And he does not it's not it's not a big part. And the other movie that he was in the following year that I loved but again not a huge part is the oxbow incident.  And that was directed by William Wellman and it starred Henry Fonda. That was 42. Yeah, but again it was a featured role. So, but he kept, you know, he kept working kept working kept working and then he did Laura. And he plays the detective and Laura directed by Otto Preminger and that was a smashed that was that was a smash. And then he did, you know he was in a great movie called fall an angel, a walk in the sun a Western that I'm actually getting looking forward to watching called Canyon passage. Then he did best years our lives and then he turned around and did a very good early ilia Kazan film called boomerang. Did a picture with Joan Crawford called Daisy Kenyon. Another movie that I love from 1950 is called where the sidewalk ends a very good noir again with Jean Tierney. He had a drinking problem. And over time, he became the word was out on him and he was known to be unreliable. And then the, the roles were not as the movies weren't as good and the roles weren't as good. He was working. And I think he, he had a brother named Steve Forrest, who was on TV was a TV actor. Several brothers but his heyday was really from 1944 to 1950. I mean that was when he did all his best, his best work. Questions to anybody else would like to post a question for John. Please go ahead and do so. John you forgot to mention that boomerang was the first film shown at the Bedford Playhouse when it was first. Oh my God, how could I forgotten that. Yeah, it was and it's a very good movie. If you all haven't seen it in your area Kazan fans. You should definitely catch that one. I mean Dana Andrews is always very good. It was just that he had a terrible, terrible alcohol alcoholism issue. But he's wonderful in this. I had such a good time seeing this movie again. Seen it many, many, many times over the years but hadn't seen it in a while saw it with one of my sons who've never seen it loved it, which is saying something for black and white film that runs two hours and 50 minutes. I'm so glad you all watched it and it's a movie that I that I always return to. Alright, it looks like we don't have any other questions so thank you again john. We should announce to everybody that john is now taking a very well deserved summer break. And hopefully when he comes back. It will actually be at the theater, not wood. Let's hope. In the meantime, we're going to keep the virtual playhouse going and in a couple of weeks. We're going to have a conversation about some like it hot with Marilyn Monroe and Jack Lemon and Tony Curtis, directed by Billy Wilder whose birthday was yesterday. I don't know if you knew that john, did you know that. Oh, it would have been 114. It would have been 114 if he was still so we want to thank you very much for coming tonight. And john have a great vacation. Thank you. When you're rested up will come back and we'll start doing some stuff on the big screen again with a little bit of luck. Look you forward to that. Alright. Thanks again for attending everybody have a good night. Thanks everybody.