Yes. Yes. Every time I go, who did the eagle? Um, I got it on Fiverr. I when I was running for Senate, I, uh, I was like, I need an image and moving image of me in armor, riding an eagle in flight, wearing armor. And I posted it on Fiverr and it was like, just to see what I would get. And that's what I was like, I'll spend 50 bucks on that. That's awesome. Yeah. You, that's the best $50 you ever spent. It literally is. It literally is. Hey, everybody, welcome to this week's edition of generally irritable. Uh, I am super excited and pleased to have my friend, Dan French joining me this evening. It was pointed out to me that the Vermont Secretary of Education is also named Daniel French. Yes. And I had people actually reach out to me and ask me how I was able to like, how'd you get him on the program? And I was like, who, what do you mean? He's an old friend of mine. You know, we go way back. He like named my business, all this stuff. And they're like, Oh, but wait, where, where is he? And I was like, Austin. And they were like, I thought he was the Secretary of Education. It was really funny. It was a very confusing conversation. The only other famous Daniel French, uh, the guy who, uh, the sculptor for the Abraham Lincoln Memorial sitting Daniel French shut up. Yeah. You're not named after said famous sculptor. Are you? Uh, no, no, my middle name is Granite though.  No, it's not. No, it's not. Don't make jokes like that, Dan. You know that I'm gullible. Uh, part of the fun. So I asked Dan here today, as you guys might be recognizing this is a little bit different than a lot of the other programs that I've had on that are focused on local politics and specifically legislation or things that are going on at Burlington City Council or in Montpelier. And I invited Dan on this evening because as part of what I try to do here, you know, the goal, the mission of generally irritable is to help facilitate and engaged and informed electorate. And one of the things that is so hard and what I found why people don't want to engage is because of the tenor of the conversations that we're having. So whether it's, you know, arguing with grandpa at the dinner table, whether it's, you know, I've had people reach out to me who've said, Oh, I would run for city council, but I'm afraid for my business or I would get involved, but I'm afraid because of X, Y or Z. I don't want to be attacked. I don't want to be harassed. You know, people have concerns. And I thought to myself, what better? Hold on. It looks like this broadcast was deleted on Facebook to string to Facebook, create a new broadcast or just remove this destination from the broadcast and re-add it. Hold on. Let me see. It's not coming on. Okay. Hold on. Dan, we're going to have to try this again. Okay. I don't know what happened, but is there, I can check it online. What's the, is it just your website? It's on YouTube and Facebook, so it's not on Facebook. Let's see if it's on YouTube. I wonder why. Because it's a problem. That's why.  Just wants to be a problem. Yeah, it's gonna make us start over again, I think. All right. Are we on YouTube? Can you tell? What's your address on YouTube? Generally irritable. I'm trying to see if we can just get it to start again, but it doesn't look like it wants to do it. There's a picture of you pointing at me on YouTube. Just grab that action. It does say live. Let's see. Let's see if this is working. Hold on. Okay, now it's working. Okay, so we're live on YouTube.  Well, you guys missed a really good introduction. Those of you watching on Facebook and those of you on YouTube, thank you for being patient while we figure out the technical issues. Look at that. Benjamin, if you're watching, did you see that? I figured out the technology all by myself. Did you? Did you, though? Didn't you just sort of look at it and wait for it to start? No, I had to go in and edit it and then remove Facebook and then add it back again, and it worked. Wow. Good for you. It's more than I could have done. I'm really impressed with myself right now.  All right. So for the benefit of those who are just joining us, I will, okay, there we go. Watch live video. So let's see. So for those of you who are just joining us, I have Dan French as my guest. No, not the Vermont Education Secretary. Dan French, my friend and mentor from Austin, Texas. Actually, you're not. You're from Kentucky originally, aren't you? I'm from Louisville, Kentucky. That's right. Oh, my goodness.  That is not my, that is not my thing. Is Kentucky considered the South? The Secretary of State of North Carolina, Rufus Edmondson, once heckled me while I was doing standup and called me a Yankee when he heard I was from Kentucky, because Kentucky was neutral in the Civil War. Oh, so therefore, that's interesting. Okay, so you're not a Southerner? Well, it depends on who you ask. The state is half Southern, half Midwestern. I think that's where you're from. Midwestern? Yeah, because it's right on the border with Indiana and Ohio and Yeah, okay. That makes sense, I guess. Anyway, so the purpose and mission of generally irritable is to help facilitate and engaged and informed electorate. So this is the part that you guys missed why Dan is on the show today. So as I said, normally we've got, you know, local politicians or things like that. We're talking about local politics. And I at stand on today because of the engaged electorate part of that mission at facilitate and engaged and informed electorate.  And one of the things Dan is really, really good at, given that he does have a doctorate in rhetoric. Did you guys know that was a thing? Rhetoric. Yes, I didn't know that was a thing until I met Dan. But one of the things he focuses on and I'm taking his class. So he's got a rhetoric class rhetoric warriors. What's tell people where they can go find the class and more information. rhetoricwarriors.com. I have two courses up now. We just launched my second course, which is converting conservatives. You haven't been successful. I told somebody today that no one was it yesterday. I said, I said, Dan would continuously message me throughout the election season with like random bits. And I said, I think he was trying out his material on me. I think I was like a guinea pig. Maybe, you know, sometimes it's just fun to just send people things. Like I offered you, offered you a slushie, I think was first if you would vote for Joe Biden. Correct. And then I upped the game to slushie and a corn dog. Yes. And I do love, I do love Sonic. Those are good offers. Those are strong offers. You know, I would do a lot for a raspberry limeade slushie with nerds in it from Sonic. I'm just saying I would do a lot. Wow, you I didn't know that was yeah, I didn't know that was a thing. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. I didn't know that was a thing either until somebody told me and it's changed my life. Okay, well, then that's my next offer.  So one of the things that I think is so important about what you do is helping teach people, you know, the fundamentals of what what the argument is and why they argue for it.  So why don't you just start Dan by telling everybody, you know, what are the fundamentals of rhetoric? And why do you think that it's so important to study? Yeah, that's a good place. So I'll do it real quick. Rhetoric is just at its foundation is just the study of effective effectiveness and messaging. That's literally the definition that anytime you go to talk, if you're going to be rhetorical, you think about what you're going to say, you design it and construct it. And then you say it to maximize your chances for being successful. And it doesn't matter. A lot of people when they hear rhetoric, the only time rhetoric makes it into the public consciousness or the media when it's negative rhetoric, like it's empty rhetoric, or it's just political rhetoric, you know, you hear that kind of side of it. And that's a small part of rhetoric, that's negative rhetoric. But rhetoric itself is everything that you say, when you're trying to persuade or have effects on people. So it's, it's literally the study of the best ways that we can talk. And is that, I mean, that really depends a lot on who you're talking to, right? So it's you can't just use the same argument for or against something with the same people. Is that right? Yeah, I couldn't offer slushies to diabetics. That would be awful. No, that would be terrible. Don't do that. You have to adjust to your audience. That's one of the principles of rhetoric.  So when you talk to a little kid, you know, I've got to adjust my messaging, change my tone of voice, the way I stand, my facial expressions, all that stuff. But it's the same way when you talk to adults, you know, if you're going to be rhetorical, you adjust to the person that you're talking to. So what do you think then, Dan, about how, you know, I titled this program, can't we all just get along the persuasion war? And so when you look at the the way that people are messaging, and let's we don't even have to pick Donald Trump and Joe Biden in that election, we could pick just politics generally. The the the tenor of the conversation is really tuned up. And people are just automatically ready to get into an argument. How ineffective is it when we all just kind of walk around and start from this place of we're enemies? Well, opposition, you know, used to not exactly mean enemy, right? Opposition meant we had different perspectives, but there were some middle ground to get in there and talk. And, you know, American democracy, especially at the government level and national level is built on the concept of compromise.  But when those trades happen, they're still middle ground where they do a bunch of work.  And that's changed. It started. I mean, it's been always part a part of politics, but it became weaponized really strongly in the 80s, like when Clinton was president and then the neocons came in under Gingrich. And they started using policies, you know, and governmental policies and things like what was called principled obstruction. So they literally, you know, set the policy of we're not going to agree with anything that Clinton wants, no matter whether it's good for the country or not, will block this for a while. And then when we get somebody in power who has more of our values, then we'll allow things to go through. And so when that happens, when you get complete obstruction, people lose their minds. Like I don't know if you've ever been just told by power, no, you can't do that. Yep. But it makes you insane. Yep. You know, and America has always had a middle space where it's not about power, it's about persuasion and compromise. But that is just, it's closed. Well, and it's interesting because it's interesting that you mentioned the 80s, like Newt Gingrich. And I think of, you know, people like Mitch McConnell being in that sort of class, or I don't know what you would call that, but that like group of people, where there's definitely that theory of obstruction when you're in the minority. And that it's like, okay, but you guys are also really corrupt. So you're trying to, you're making it look on the outside if nobody's really paying attention, like you're doing something good. And I'm using these terms really loosely right now. So just sure, this is not me defending anybody just for the record. But it's like, you guys make it look like you're doing something good, right? Like we like that Mitch McConnell, as an example, was pushing through a lot of conservative judges as a conservative. I really like that. But then you dig into him to find out more. And you realize that, you know, he's been part of shipping American jobs overseas. And he gives lucrative business contracts to his buddies in China, and all this American money is going towards crap that I don't think we should be paying for. And so it's like, these guys, like they care and like, they're doing something. But in the background, they're screwing us all over actually. So what you're saying is politicians double deal. They don't just stay with one set of values. Correct. Yeah. It's amazing. And so it's like, how do we even trust anything that comes out of their mouth or what they're saying? Well, probably you got to like the cool thing about rhetoric is it gives you a lot of software for making, you know, some more sophisticated decisions about some of this, right? Nobody ever gets trained in sort of how to kind of think their way through these things, how to look at the different things that they're saying and give yourself some space for, you know, finding maybe a better way of thinking about it. And so like what you did there was like jumping to a full conclusion about, well, none of them are trustworthy.  You say, OK, let's all agree that that's true about politics. Now, does that mean they're all corrupt and that you should lose all faith in politicians or does it mean you need to understand who they are and why they're that way and adjust? So what I one of the things I think I just heard you say was that it's not just important to learn how to persuade but also to be listening for the way that people persuade. Did I? Rhetoric is actually counter persuasion. OK. And it's even deep persuasion, which is the converting conservatives course that I teach. OK. How do you deep persuade somebody who's assumed conservative ideology and conservative rhetoric? And that's like with you.  And there's a pathway that took you over there. And to me, what's what I found very interesting is what are those pathways and if somebody like I'm not liberal or or or a conservative, you know, I don't do either one of them. I'm not libertarian. I don't do any of those labels. But if I want to bring somebody out of one of those camps, because I think they're doing either doing something dangerous to themselves or to the country or I just don't like what they think, then I need mechanisms for doing that ethically, you know, to give you and the things I push are ethical only persuasion techniques where I can tell you, here's why I think what you what you believe is flawed and I can do it in a way that doesn't just make you lose your mind so that we can have a conversation and you can understand my points. You said ethical persuasion. I heard you say ethical ethical only persuasion. That's the foundation of rhetoric warriors. So it's not about converting people so that you can take advantage of them or things like that. It's about how do we have a conversation to try to come to consensus or to move you off the line. I guess what is when you say it's only ethical. That's what I push for. It's not that's rhetoric. A good way to think of rhetoric is like Star Wars. There's the there's the force and then there's the dark side of the force. I don't know what's not the light side of the force and the dark side, but, you know, there's the white arts of rhetoric and then there's the dark arts of rhetoric and the dark arts. If somebody is using any of those, I won't vote for them and I consider them to be, you know, a flawed public figure. And so part of the goal of rhetoric war is to teach people to recognize the differences in those and then to go after the people who are doing unethical persuasion in public because it's dangerous. It's dangerous to democracy. It's dangerous to people. We lose faith in the way people talk. So like McConnell, kind of what you're talking about politicians when they they say half of what they believe. But you know, partialism of disclosure is an unethical persuasion technique. And if somebody's doing it, they should be sanctioned or censored or fined or disqualified something. What did you call that again? Which one? The you just partialism. So I give you I give you half the information or a certain percentage of the information I actually have. That's really interesting. So so we're OK. So I might be going a little bit all over the place and forgive me if I can try to under sort of like targeted. So given that, we know that politicians are probably many of them skilled. I'm going to be careful because all or nothing talking is one of those things that I have attended. I have a tendency to be hyperbolic and that's not good persuasion. But when we know that politicians maybe are not always truthful when they use this partial whatever the heck you just called it. How do we make sure as Americans, let's just say, to not buy into the nonsense that politicians are telling us?  So this is not politicians. Period. I don't. I really don't. I think that they're I think I think there are many of them who get into the business thinking that they're going to do something good, but are very misguided and have a tendency to believe things that are not so. And so and then they go out and they tell people these same inaccuracies or things or they they convince people listen to them. And so how do we as constituents listen for those things that are, you know, hyperbolic or unethical types of persuasion, things that aren't good for coming to consensus and living in community with each other? Well, of course, you take courses in rhetoric. You go to rhetoricwarriors.com.  You had to take rhetoric, logic and grammar. And until you pass those, you couldn't go on and do higher order courses because it's it's essentially, you know, logic teaches you how to find true information and then rhetoric teaches you how to communicate it. And so when people are speaking in unethical ways, you need to be able to identify those ways and counter those ways. And it's somewhat, you know, difficult. That's a sophisticated way of talking that they've developed over time. And we need more sophistication in order to, you know, call it out and counter it. So I do think it will be super helpful if people had more training in rhetoric. Do you think that that some of this has gotten worse over the years because we've taken things out of school that help teach critical thinking, logical thinking, creativity and stuff like that debate? Maybe. I mean, debates, the only kind of baby rhetoric that has survived in the curriculum, you know, and how many people actually do debate very few. I think, you know, they gutted the idea of what rhetoric and persuasion is like, you don't get talk communication in school, which is crazy because it's the core skill that gets you through life relationships, everything, jobs and we get no formal training in it. We we just assume everybody will pick it up informally by, you know, being alive. And formal classes and that stuff can be really helpful, but they have to be, you know, well done. Like I never took debate in high school or anything like that. It was boring to me. The lecturing chess. Yeah, we didn't have any. I grew up in Podon, Vermont. Like we didn't have any of those classes at all. None of that was an option. But fascinating when you get into it and you see just how, you know, you know, how sophisticated it really is in helping you through life. I mean, just being able to persuade, like take relationships again, be able to persuade your spouse. You have to do that all the time and you can either do it well or you can go to war with each other and do it horribly. Benjamin, what do you want? Literally says all of the time he says people will act out of outside of their own best interest or your own self interest all of the time.   Yeah.  Like they'll come back to it all the time, like, you know, well, this and this and this and this and the logical flow of everything. It's like, great. That's awesome that you can do that. You know, that's about a third or a quarter of what we need here in order to actually, you know, do anything and really good rhetoric isn't just logic. It has to be designed as emotional and the conversion course that I teach is basically I have a three-step process and it works. It doesn't necessarily it's not about conservatives. It's about learning how to convert somebody when it's important to you. And so like you do discovery with people. This is a normal interpersonal relationship structure. You learn about them, you listen and then, you know, you create a relationship with them that they get to where they start to trust you. You validate them. They understand you understand each other some and then they might let you try to persuade them. But everybody jumps right to persuasion and nobody wants to hear that from people they don't know. Well, that's what that's what I so that's what I was listening to you describe that. And I'm like, OK, well, that's something I can do with, you know, people I'm in relationship with or that I know. But when it's.  Is there you're going to hate me for asking this, but is there any kind of a shortcut when you don't have the time to develop that kind of rapport with someone? Yeah, actually, there's some really good ones. If you a lot of the stuff, too, I blend Hollywood and rhetoric because, you know, I was a late night writer and producer in Hollywood and I've done stand up forever and I understand kind of the flows of entertainment and public performance and really great politicians understand that too. So Bill Clinton is a great example and there's this thing of think of it this as the public private. So in private, you know, we act a certain way and we have certain skills and we know how to comport ourselves in private. We go in the public and everybody freezes up and they don't act like who they really are and they act stiffer and they act more formal, more dramatic, more serious. And Clinton was a great example of somebody who was incredibly intimate and personal when he talked in public and so it creates this sense of having a relationship with him. So so authenticity basically is really important. Well, it's just being able to communicate to strangers as if they were close friends of yours and this is a Hollywood skill like you can't live, you can't survive in Hollywood unless you create instant intimacy with people you don't know. Well, and I think my I remember having this conversation actually with my pastor and I don't remember exactly what the context of the conversation was.   And so it almost seems like we're not even like no matter how normally you might try to be the other people are coming to the conversation with some kind of a shield, if you will, or some kind of protective measure. Sure. And they should. People are dangerous. You know, and your job as a public performer or public persuader is to pierce that shield instantly. And do you want some consulting? You want some persona consulting? Yeah. On you as a politician because I watched your videos. Is that a thing you can do? Oh, absolutely. Every every public performer or public person who can make a lot of money or get a lot of power has consultants. I'll tell you a great example of this. Do you know Ron White, the blue collar tour comedian? Yeah. You know, super famous guy now. I worked with him as just a regular stand up multiple times way back in the 90s.  And he was a cowboy comic. He's from Houston and he just talked about that. And it was great comic, but he his manager brought in a consultant, an image consultant. And they remade him basically as a lounge singer. They took away the hat and all the cowboy stuff, gave him a different hairstyle, gave him a jacket, holding a glass of whiskey and a cigar, which is traditional lounge singer persona. He now he went from a fifteen hundred dollar a week, a week comedian to like 125 grand per show comedian. Just with that. The same material a lot of times.  You would never have gotten there as a cowboy comic. That's really interesting because one of the things I have talked to Benjamin about a lot and other folks that have supported me is it's like I feel like there is. Uh, like I'm the angry lady, you know, and I remember Bet me know being one time when I went to speak at a police commission meeting, he was like, just don't be the angry white lady. And I was like, I am angry. And and it is it's like. And I'm guilty of this. Like I'm laying all my cards out because I'm no different than anybody else in how to figure out and struggling with this stuff. It's why I'm taking your course and why I'm really excited about it because it is hard to not be angry sometimes.  You know, I didn't.   I think that they're misguided. But when I go into situations and I'm treated like I'm evil because of what I believe, it's hard not to react to that or to put up my own sort of mask and be like, OK, well, fine, then I'm going to be the angry white lady because you're fricking mean to me.  So a rhetorician. And I believe very much in authenticity. I believe it as a rhetorical technique and I also believe it as a moral stance in the world. I think people should be authentically who they are. You know, I think if you want to get into public, you know, you need to have control over which part of yourself that you're going to display at which times.  That's what makes you a rhetorician or a performer or a politician is you have control.  But I disagree with that. I think it needs to be done ethically. So with you, you know, ethically, one of the one of the tenets of ethics is that you are authentic. If you feel something, you demonstrate it. You don't try to hide it or fake it. So you are authentically angry. Just be with that. Well, you know, there are techniques that help you own that. That like the problem I think a lot of times is that you're you're being judged not on you. You're being judged on other things that people see as villainous around you. So as soon as you start talking in a certain way or using certain language, then they're going to import all this experience from other people and other situations. And they're just going to dump it all on you. And it doesn't really apply to you because you're a unique person with unique views on these things. But it's going to happen. So it's just a quick, easy way to judge. All the time. It happens all of the time. I mean, I had people who would email me during the campaign as an example.  And like all this stuff. And if you say you're, or if you just have an R behind your name. I mean, I had a guy in the parking lot of Lowe's and Susan Blesserhart, one of my running mates, was like, hey, we're running for office as somebody was walking by.  And Blesserhart, she's awesome. I love Susan. But this guy was like, oh, are you Democrats or Republicans? And we were like, we're Republicans.  And it's like, dude, really? Well, what did you respond with? Did you respond with anger or like outrage or shock or humor? Humor. And a little bit of humor. I was like, God, look at you and your tolerance. Thanks. No, that's not humor. That's a script. Like you can't, you can't accuse the left of being intolerant that drives them nuts. But that's the thing is they are. Like Burlington voters, Chenin County voters are discriminatory. They're prejudiced. Well, they're evaluative for sure. They, and they are prejudiced. Like there's a clean and clear judgment about the right that you're villains. And so that, how is that not discriminatory? Is it true? No. Wait. You said McConnell was a villain. He's on the right. What's that? You just said McConnell was a villain. He's on the right. Yeah, but that's Mitch McConnell. That's not me. Yeah, but they don't see you, baby. They see Mitch McConnell. That's not fair though. How is that not discriminatory? How is fair come into it? There's nothing to do with it. Okay, so. You make real quick evaluations. Okay, well, hold on, hold on. Okay, hold on though. Back up. Okay. So I said it's discriminatory. You said it's not. Then you called it evaluative. Then did I say eval, eva, whatever word you said. Yeah. Evaluative. Oh, I said it right. And then I said it's prejudiced. And you said, yes, it's prejudiced. Which that, all those three words sound the same to me. Well, they're very, yeah, very close. Like when we start playing word games, we're gonna, I think I'm getting feedback in your, am I coming across in your speaker? I can hear you fine. I can't, it sounds like I can hear me talking on your speaker, but maybe not. Oh, hold on, let me turn it down. Anybody else hear it echoing? Message me in the chat box. I just didn't wanna drive anybody crazy with audio issues. I can't tell. Hopefully somebody will tell us. Okay, I'll let you know if I can hear it again. There was an echo, but it went away. Okay. Yeah, I think when you lower the volume, it got better. Okay. So those words are all close, right? Some of them are harsher than others. Yeah. Like evaluative, you know, is judgmental, prejudice, those are all demon words, they're all demonizing words, right? So as soon as you tell me I'm discriminatory, I'm gonna import all this other stuff in there about like race, because that's the area that I can hear myself again. Dang it. Am I coming through your headphones? I don't have you on headphones. I have you on a speaker. Dang it. If I have to plug in headphones, we might have some more audio issues. Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha. Well, we'll try it again. Let me see. Gonna give it a shot. Gonna take a chance. Can you hear me now? Remember that guy? Can you hear me now, guy? Gotta get irritating. I can only make like 50 commercials before everybody wants to push you off a cliff. Flo from Progressive, are you listening to me? Well, she's done pretty well. She's not too irritating. That guy from, can you hear me now? I always wanted to just choke him and say, can you hear me now? I'm just gonna do comedy while you're doing your audio issues. Can you hear me now? How about now? Yeah, you've gone away. I can't hear you at all. Okay, I was muted. How can, can you hear me now? I can hear you now. You can hear me. I can hear you. All right. I'm gonna unplug speakers all together. Can y'all hear us? Murder comedy? What? Murder comedy. Yeah, it was murder comedy. How do you beat that? What? That's, Meena, what is, Meena just posted that comment. What does that even mean, murder comedy? Yeah. I just did a joke about the, can you hear me now, guy? And say, can you hear me now? Oh, okay. Can you hear me now? Oh my God. Okay, hopefully that's better. That actually probably is better now too, because then I can better hear Jeff if he's talking in my ear. Yeah, he says no echo, so. Okay, cool. Ben, get the thumbs up. Ben, thumbs. Yes. Okay. So, oh, that's weird. I can hear myself coming through the microphone too. That's a trip. Okay, we're good. We're good. All right. We're with you people. By the way, if you guys have any questions for Dan, feel free to just post it in the chat box. We'll read it and ask and let him know what it is and get him to answer. So we were getting on a good topic. Now I don't remember. I have to remember what we were. Discrimination. So what I was saying. Oh, discrimination. That lexicon, that vocabulary is problematic. And as soon as you say you're discriminating against me, race typically owns the word discrimination. Because I was intentionally poking people when they'd be like, oh, blah, blah, blah. And I'd be like, well, then you're just, then you're prejudiced. Oh, what do you mean? I'm like, okay. I would have valued you against using that. Okay.  I just really wanted people to understand that that's what they were doing. It's not the same thing. Like discrimination, the technical definition of discrimination, yes, that's exactly what it is. But that's not the cultural use of the word discrimination. But it's also the same. But prejudice is the same thing. It's not.  That's not fair. That is not fair.  This is not fair. That word, it was, that's been a long, a long fight.  So if I use, if I get out my thesaurus and I use a different word that means the same thing, does that work? Absolutely. Words inflame people. That's why you find neutral words that don't inflame people so they'll actually listen to you. Okay. So. So prejudice and discrimination. You've lost white lady.  See, that's great. Like, so this is the kind of thing. And I know we've talked about this before where you say, you know, you can't just use the same terms that everybody uses. Like, you know, there's a lot of times I would get really frustrated listening to other conservatives that were running for office give their answers at candidate forums as an example.  I'm trying to think of a specific example, but I'm just like, oh my God, you just said the same thing that every old white man always says that everybody gets mad about that nobody wants to hear. Cause you're talking to other conservatives. You're not talking to the moderate middle that you're trying to win. Yeah. So like, if you're going to be sophisticated, like if you're going to be professional and work hard to give people good messaging that they can, you know, that can actually move them towards where you want them to be, then you adjust. And you're like, I need to be more sophisticated in my script here. Cause I'm inflaming people in ways that I don't want, you know, to have. And so like the right has a problem with this in general that they tend to do a lot of appropriation of other, other rhetorics, other terms and things like that. And it gets them into trouble because it's not, they haven't earned those terms. You know? Yeah. Like for white people right now to say I'm being discriminated against they have not earned that term. Hold on one second. There is a sign on the door that says, do not disturb. I don't care what you want. Thank you. But I was disturbed. Benjamin, Benjamin, when are we? Don't go stealing people's words. Oh my God. I apologize. The multiple knocks, I couldn't be undistracted anymore. So, so conservatives have a tendency to appropriate other things.   It's just that, that appropriation is going to cause rhetorical problems. So when can you get, so you gave me an example like don't say discriminate, don't say prejudice or whatever, right? Is there other specific examples of things that you could highlight or like, or like general groups of things that people should be careful to avoid? Well, just like that one, if you use the word unfair, you'll probably be fine. People will be like, then they'll think, am I being? I'm so sorry, Dan. Hold on. Should I do more comedy? More murder comedy. I don't know how many murder jokes I have.  Right. I don't want dead space. Entertainers never went dead space. No, they don't. And boy, this has just been a really challenging episode. You were all up on yourself at the beginning about how tech star you were. Benjamin, this is evidence that we need to hurry up and move. We were just talking earlier about how having roommates is really annoying sometimes. So anyway, here we are. Here we are. So yeah, so like, use the word. Did you get that last piece of advice that if you use the word unfair? Yeah, that seems like, that seems like not a good word to use. Why? Nobody owns unfair. Unfair, but because, you know, people say, well, life isn't fair, you know? It's still a good indictment of people. So if you say, hey, you know, I'm applying for this job and I don't get, you know, as much consideration because I'm white and I think that's unfair. Interesting. So Benjamin has a question. And he says, is there a difference between general sales techniques and Dan's concepts of persuasion? Did you see my response that I typed to him? Oh, I'm way better. Okay, well, maybe you can, maybe you can elaborate a little bit more. No, no, that's it, that's, I'm way better. Three word response.  Really? You're not going to answer him? What's it? Well, I'm not talking about sales right now. I'm talking about, you know, persuasion. So what's the difference between sales and persuasion? So rhetoric wasn't taught for a long time and it kind of made it back into universities through business schools with advertising and marketing and sales. And so that's kind of, you know, business needs persuasion, needs it really badly. And so they've developed a lot of their own ideas about persuasion. Usually it's not, you know, it's fine. There's some really good things about sales. That's what you want to learn. But it's specific to business and it's not really specific to humanity or to politics and the things that I do. And I've worked a lot in business in the last five years doing marketing. So I've learned a lot of, you know, what needs to be done in sales. And my partner, my marketing agency is a sales guy. So I've heard lots and lots of that stuff. I think typically it needs to be thought through better that they would, you know, rhetoric's been studied for 2,500 years, sales for like, you know, a hundred. Five minutes, yeah. They could benefit from, you know, some deeper theory. So how do you maneuver? Like, is there a way to identify those verbal landmines or those language, linguistic landmines? How people respond. Okay, is there no way to know ahead of time?  Yeah, yeah, yeah. When you do enough of those things, that's why, you know, experienced politicians, by the time they get to national level, they're usually so good because they've done so much of that that nothing surprises them. They know all the landmines and they know all the good triggers too. So the right and the left have good trigger words that as soon as you say them, then you get good response from people, you know? And so part of becoming a national politician or really, you know, highly skilled politician is to learn all those words and to get very good at using them and not using them, depending on where you're at. So is it just a matter of like, I just think, you know, most people are not thoughtful with their word choice. They just say whatever comes to their mind, they just say things. Most people do their communication as expressives. That they don't know what they're gonna say until it comes out of their mouth. Yeah. That's not a rhetorician. So then I'm just trying to think of like, how does a person plan ahead to be able to have conversations that, I mean, maybe that's too much to ask.  Well, it depends on again, like, you know, what game you're playing, what field you're in, you know, if you're going across many different populations very quickly and some of them you don't have experience with, then you can only prepare so much. You can only get so much experience. I did stand up once for 200 Japanese teenagers who were in the United States doing, you know, a tour with a tour company and they bust them into the Hollywood improv and we had to do stand up for them. I had to do 10 minutes in front of 200 Japanese teenagers and they didn't speak English, you know, some of them or it wasn't their first language. Right. And they didn't understand the culture. Cultural, like nuances or jokes or people or history.  And they gave them cake and I'm like, what am I supposed to do here? You know, I could not adjust to that audience. That's too far too fast. If I had taken a lot of time and understood them and learned what they think is funny and all that, then I could have made messaging, you know, that would have fit them better. But, you know, I didn't do a whole lot of those audiences. Well, and that makes me think about like, you know, a lot of as an example, a lot of the conservatives that I see running for office, you know, we're in a very liberal area.  And if you are not prepared to have those conversations with people and you haven't taken a moment to stop and consider who your audience is, I think a lot of times it's like people don't consider who their audience is. I think that's really a big part of it. That's a more sophisticated way of doing rhetoric. Really think about your audience and pre-working so that you're ready, you know, with more script. And, you know, that's not a lot of people when they get into public jobs, like even as politicians, it's not their full-time job. They don't have training in it. They have some strong views, but they don't have the communication training, you know, to communicate those views into complicated populations. And so you're gonna make mistakes.  Start with something small that you've got control over and then move out from there. National politicians handle it with talking points. George Bush was, you know, great at this. He had a stump speech, a set of stump speeches, set of talking points. He learned them and he delivered them. Over and over, no matter what. And that's a safety net. It's designed by professional writers. You've practiced it so you know how to deliver it. It kinda annoys people in the moment that they're being given, you know, pre-written script. Right. I've heard you say this line 20 times before. Yeah, but it's still a great line and it doesn't get you into trouble, trouble. Like if you're not a good improviser and Bush wasn't, you know, he was too much of a gun slinger.  And that's what they do, bad for politicians. Which is what, okay, that doesn't, okay. Yes, but why? Like people say all of the time that they want people to be more authentic. That they want someone who will say the truth and be more plain, speak more plain English or, you know, whatever fill in the blank. And yet then when somebody comes out that's like that, it's a problem and we don't like it. People are too polished and that's a problem. Well, I think, you know, polish is something that bothers Americans. We like to see the real person and if it's polished, we assume we are not getting the real person. I watched this happen with Pete Buttigieg, who I thought was very authentic at the beginning of his exposure from, he was a mayor and suddenly he's on national TV and he over talked a lot and told a lot of, you know, really interesting details. And I liked the guy. And then when he went on debate stages and stuff, he'd clearly gotten some training. He sounded like Obama. He literally used the Obama speech delivery pattern. The cadence and everything, yep. Everything, he used the national cadence. So that may be good. I don't know, like getting him elected, that may be good. But it alienated me. And then after all that, he's come back now. And like I watched him at some of his, the hearings for transportation secretary and he's back to sort of talking authentically and he's very good spontaneously, you know, his responses sound authentic and thoughtful and he's not trying to be mean, but he also doesn't take anything from people. So it's interesting to see that difference of dialogue, authentic dialogue in the moment and prepared script. When you say he doesn't take anything from anyone, do you mean the speech pattern or what did you mean by that? Oh, I mean, content-wise, like both sides play this game of, you know, I need to catch you in something wrong. I need to stain you and slander you in some way during this interaction. You know, so they both, they do it to each other where they focus on the negative things about that person. It doesn't matter whether they're accurate or not. They're trying to focus on that because that's where they win is by lowering their opponent whenever they can. It's not an actual technique, but it's clearly, you know, a popular one. That is really a good point.  It's like- It seems to work.  Like this week they came out with, oh, Joe Biden's got a Rolex. It's like, okay. All right. So I guess like he's got a million, you know, billion dollars at home and he jumps in it like Scrooge McDuck. I don't- Well, hold on. Biden's whole pitch was, I'm not Trump. Like, come on, that goes both ways. Well, actually it doesn't. Like those are not, those are completely false equivalencies. A guy with a Rolex on his watch and a guy with a gold toilet. Oh, I'm not talking about that. I'm saying like Donald Trump being rude and like him being like, oh, Hillary's of this and you know, whatever and insulting people. Like that was also Biden's whole pitch. So Trump's pitch in 2016, and I'm speaking specifically just about election season was Hillary sucks, she's corrupt, she's a twat. And can I say that? I don't think I'm allowed to say that word. We might have to bleep this out later, but you know, she's of this and that and whatever. Vote for me, right? That was his whole pitch.  Like, isn't that the same? Well, it's the same impulse, yeah. I mean, you wanna say negative things about your opponent. Okay, got it. So why does that work? Because you can only do two things and you know, political rhetoric.  And one's easier. Is it like one is just easier than the other and that's why they stoop to that? No, they do both all the time. Trump was a great boaster. You know, I got good boast. You know, I'm the greatest president. Like a champion. More, you know, I'm a stable genius. It's endless. Like he comes from a promotional background where you can make massive over claims and it's fine. And he imported that into politics. And you know, but it's all sort of the same impulse which is to build yourself up, build your side up and to tear the other side down. Those are the two major forces in political rhetoric. In traditional Greek, it's called epidaictic rhetoric. It's praise and blame. So you praise your side. There's a great example of this from Shakespeare. Mark Anthony comes up and says, I'm not here to praise Caesar, but to bury him. And then proceeds to praise Caesar for an hour and to tear down all the guys who stabbed him. And epidaictic rhetoric is just, can I make praise stick on the heroes and can I make blame stick on the villains? So then, okay, so let's, so I want to bring this back to local politics and conversations within family. From my perspective on Burlington, Vermont. No. And it held the coat there for a while.  It's not the same place. Coat factory? I think the coat factories in like Connecticut or something. Burlington, Connecticut. That's just mislabeled unethical rhetoric right there. I'm just, I mean, Connecticut, we could lose as a state and I'd be fine with that. Really? I shouldn't say that. I shouldn't say that. That's rude. I don't really mean that. I'm only saying that. Well, I have a few reasons to say that. One is that you're the only state in the union that has not at least started the process toward passing the convention of states application. So 49 out of 50 states have at least, at least have some movement on the convention of states resolution, except Connecticut. I don't wanna report Connecticut. Come on. What's that?   Are you kidding me? They have some of the wealthiest people in the country. I don't feel bad for Connecticut. Just because they're not supporting your cause. Screw Connecticut. No, I'm just kidding. I don't really mean that. I don't really know anything about Connecticut, to be honest with you. Erica Bundy, rhetoric, you come after her, but you can't spell any of her names. No, but seriously. Oh, and Connecticut is bankrupt, apparently. That's another reason to not like Connecticut. This is a reason. Vermont stole all their money. Oh my God, don't even get me started. So how can we, so is it like, I can't tell if it's national politics has brought the conversation down into the gutter in our neighborhoods and with our families, or if it started in our families and is, do you know what I mean? Like, is there a correlative relationship or a causative relationship? Or is it just back to that same conversation, which is we don't know how to talk to each other? Well, we haven't been taught how to do political discussions. Did you ever take a course and, hey, here's how to talk to your family about politics? Again, nobody has any argument training. Or my family period, you know? Yeah, well, across the board. There is so much, more to the point, I would say it's been the opposite of that in that so much of the self-help culture and our self-centered culture is, it's about you and what makes you happy and you are the center of the universe and your truth and your beliefs and your whatever and that if people don't agree with you, well, then you should just cut them out of your life. I feel like that's actually more what's encouraged rather than trying to dwell in understanding of the people in your family. Yeah, I think that's a good, that little line that you just said, which I think is a Christian line, dwell in understanding. You know, good religions and religions are working correctly. They give you those little life instructions like that, which are incredibly powerful if you practice them. So to dwell in understanding means to sit in non-judgment, to let people say whatever they wanna say, and to, like we talked about the technique of validating it, validating them, their right to say it, their value as a person and being able to take that and that's hard for people. Well, and that's, oh, I'm sorry if I'm interrupting you, that is validating and valuing, I think is so important because it's like so many people that I talk to, it's their opinions or their political beliefs or whatever are like who they are as a person. It's almost like if you disagree with their opinion on politics or you attack their position, attack, that's maybe not the great, question their position. Excuse me.  Yeah, well, people's political beliefs, hopefully, and their social issue beliefs grow out of their core identity, who they are. So it is attacking who they are. It's going after, for you, it's going after an issue or a logic or an expressed belief and it's external. But for them, they hold these things inside of them.   That's true, but I've also had to, well, and so, okay, so this is interesting. I've also had to come to terms with the fact that people's opinions of me or opinions of my opinions don't matter and that that is not, like people not liking my politics does not decrease my value as a human being. Right, but you've trained to that. You've been in politics, you've had a lot of experience with it. You've been a lot of therapy and a lot of Jesus. Yeah, you know, I've got to get to a healthier place for this because I, and therapists learn this, like you can't absorb the emotion in every interaction or you'll explode. And so public the same thing, like you learned to just, it doesn't, you don't have any feeling from it. You let it go instantly. You're like, this isn't real. They don't know me.  And you need them in your private life, it turns out too, when you want to talk about politics over, you know, Thanksgiving dinner, but people don't have them. They're just raw and so they just erupt. It sounds like, I feel like a lot of these conversations end up coming back around to people need to deal with their mental health issues. And I'm, and I'm putting that, I'm using a broad term there, but like so much of what I feel like is, is a challenge in society right now, or in communication and relationships, is people not understanding that their value comes outside of themselves.  Your opinions are not where your value comes from. How do you not take things personally that people say to you? It's almost like our emotional issues get in the way of us being able to be present in the conversation. It's like we make the conversation mean more than what it actually means.  It's been part of your life so that you've developed some real insight into it. Some depth of experience. Most people again, don't have that. You know, like my daughter, my ex-wife is a therapist. And so my kids have all sorts of psych talk training. My daughter made a T-shirt when she was in the art program in high school and said, my mom's a therapist. How does that make you feel? And, you know, it's because they've had that training and it's helped them a lot of ways, you know, when they get into complicated emotional situations because they have, you know, some terminology for it and somebody to talk to and process it. And so again, I can't help the fact that like, I was a professor for 20 years and I just know the super value of real education. And I see people trying to work through these very difficult discussions about politics with no training and then wonder why we can't talk. I'm like, well, because you haven't been trained to and you're in a complicated explosive situation. Well, and that's the, so that the idea of validating and valuation, it seems like that would go a really long way to building that rapport that you talked about where if I'm having a conversation, even if it's with somebody that I don't know super well or don't have a deep relationship with, if I can keep that in mind that this is a person who is inexperienced in rhetoric and likely puts a lot of weight and story behind what they believe, what it means, you know. And so if I can let them know, like it's not even just enough to say like, I hear you or parroting back what they say to that you heard them, it's showing them that you're seeing them as a human being, even if you disagree with them basically. Yeah, I think that's a great technique. That's really valuable.  I'm gonna practice that. Well, you'll be accepting white lady who still has some issues that bother her and people will give you space to do that. I think you earn that by giving that kind of listening and that kind of space and that kind of respect to people. You show that to them and then you earn the right to say some of your views, whatever they are, it doesn't matter. So what do you do if you're in a place that is just like, it doesn't matter what you do, it doesn't matter what you do, it doesn't matter what you say, you're just in an area where people treat you really unfairly, no matter what, right off the bat. Is there a way? I mean, are there sometimes as a professional rhetorician? Did I say that right? Yeah, every time there's rhetorician, but it's rhetorician. No, rhetorician. A rhetorician, is there ever a time where it just doesn't matter what you do, there's no way to get through some people or some person? Well, sure. Failure is way more common in persuasion than success. I tell people to chop it up, like if there are 500 things that could be accomplished here and you get three, then that's a victory. I can't take somebody that I just meet from a belief system that they've had for 50 years over to a new belief system, but I can make them think, I was already talking to that liberal, you know? And that's a victory and I'm not even a liberal. Like, you know, for me, it's like, one of the things I do is with comedian because comedy is just a different approach or intellectual professor on the other side is, you know, it's one of those things that people, they bother them sometimes when you come from the position of expertise. And so sometimes people, because I'm also a super working class, I mean, I came from Kentucky and I was the first person to go to college. And so when they talk to me, a lot of times they're like, oh, wasn't that bad talking to that professor guy? That's a super victory in persuasion is because I got something good in them about me. Yeah. So if it was important to me and like the converting conservatives class, to make the point that I've got a program called Convert One Conservative and it could be Convert One Liberal, I don't care. But I started with conservatives. And so Convert One Conservative, you know how much energy it takes to actually persuade a human being? No. A lot. And it's a luxury and it's no fun and it's emotionally wrecking, you know? And you have a bunch of stuff that you don't agree with in order to get through that and maybe start to convert them to a different way of thinking. Wow. And it's no fun. And so just pick one, one person.  Yeah. What I would do if I were you is, so there's the traditional ways of communicating yourself as a conservative which would probably work just fine if you were in Peraland, Texas, you know? Yeah. But if you're not, you're in Vermont.   I love your red button. I've never talked to you about it. Well, it's like wild stuff that like, you know, having a flag is fricking racist and having this is like, if you believe in the constitution, it's race. What's that? I said this at the beginning of all this. You're not being judged on Erica. You're being judged on all the stuff they've seen on TV and there have been a lot of horrible people running around with Trump flags on TV. That is true. And so you're gonna be judged like that. So you don't wanna associate yourself with that.  I got a lot of crap for not being openly a Trump supporter during the campaign. You know, I had made some videos that said, you know, I did, like I did a video as an example, I didn't think Joe Biden could win the electoral college. I thought that he was gonna win the popular vote and not the electoral college. I thought it was gonna be, that was my prediction. And I made, you know, some other videos that were similar to that. But people kept asking me, you have to tell me if you're voting for Trump or not. And I was like, I am not going to let you, let the Vermont Senate, Chittenden County see be a referendum on Donald Trump. I'm not gonna do that. I am an individual human being and I have individual thoughts and opinions. And, you know, yes, I didn't say this to them, but yes, I'm voting for Donald Trump.  He is an imperfect vessel for, what's that? Why didn't you say that? Because I didn't want to have the headline be, oh, Senate candidate is a Trump supporter. Oh, yes, you did. Hell yes, you wanted that. No, I didn't. Did all the other Trump supporters who you actually want to represent would have voted for you. They did. Well, then you won. I mean, no. Yeah. Because people in Chittenden County are too prejudiced to even consider a Republican. I told you not to use that word. I know I said it on purpose. So we're about... It's unfair you didn't vote for me. I just, Dan, I just realized it's after eight o'clock. So I normally go for about an hour. Okay. I know we had some technical difficulties, so maybe that's why it went by so fast. No, it's because my stuff is fascinating. It really actually is. It really, really is. And I'm missing a couple of weeks of class. So I'm gonna have to email you about that. Oh, there you go. Yeah, we had a little glitch at one point, but just... Yeah. Did you sign up for full class or did you just sign up for the first two free weeks? The full class. Okay. Yeah, I'm super excited. I love it. It's been, it's so fascinating because, and I just, so everybody, if you have some curiosity about this, if you wanna run for office, if you just wanna be able to have a good conversation at the Thanksgiving dinner table and not scream at your sister's guest and tell them to go F themselves. Like I might've done a couple of years ago. Literally, it was not good. It used to Thanksgiving. Oh my God, it was so bad. It was before I started all of this process and really learning. And it also happened to just be like my life was really stressful at the time and things kind of sucked.  And that's one of the things. This person didn't even really care about the things that he was saying.  Like he was literally trying to make me mad. Americans love that. That's one of their favorite things to do. Oh my God. I just, so that's one of the other things I would say is if you're having a conversation with people and they're being a jerk, like they might be doing it intentionally to upset you. And so if you go with it and you just let them lead the conversation, like you're not in control of your own self. Yeah, you have the right to determine who gets to talk to you and how they get to talk to you. That's true. That is true. I don't do trolls. I don't allow any negativity. I don't take any negative feedback. I don't argue with people I don't know. I don't do any of that stuff because it's detrimental. I don't enjoy it. I enjoy talking to people that are thoughtful and interesting and I don't care if they're right or left, but I want to hear their thoughts. I don't want to hear their accusations and they're trolling. They can do that on their own. They can say whatever they want, but I'm not required to hear it. Well, and so does your class help teach people tools? I mean, I've gotten some of it, but when people go through the whole thing, do we learn tools for kind of talking to anybody? Is it, and obviously you said there's one course that you have that's converting conservatives. And so that maybe directly or sort of tailored in a certain way, but is the other class like the one I'm taking, is that, am I going to learn how to talk to any kind of group of people or community or like, well, I learned tools for communicating, I guess, is the short answer. Your question. So there's two courses. There's the master course in persuasion and there'll be a volume one and probably five volumes at some point, but it's 25 weeks. I sell it for 25 bucks because I want people to actually take it. Wow. It costs $25 to take a class from me. Hold on. Okay, hold on. What? I don't want to do the $799 master course. I don't want to do it. Okay. So now I'm mad that I got the, I know Dan discount and it was only $25. Man, I want to just give me the 25 to support you. My partner, the sales guy launched it at 99 and I'm like, I don't care about that right now. I care about, I want people to take it. People actually doing it. Okay. Sorry I interrupted you. So it's 25 bucks. Okay.  Okay. Do it. It's avoidance training. Oh my God. Oh my God. There's no reason to not do this. Okay. I interrupted you. I'm sorry. Please finish. You were talking about the tools. That's a master course in persuasion. And basically what I do is I go through again, the 2,500 year history of studying persuasion and I just pluck out what I know are the best concepts. And I write about one each week. And so like, I think you may have gotten the one about big signals, which is the whole thing with the capital, you know, protest and insurrection depending on whatever terms you want to land on it. They, it's a big signal. Like it started to fade a little because we're getting farther away from it, but it was such a huge, you know, visual. It's such a big spectacle and the colors and the close ups and the violence and all that. It will never go away. That will be, you could talk about that 20 years from now and people will know what it was. And it's so powerful that the right is going to, they're going to suffer from that.  They're trying to get away from it. And some of them are still going towards it.   And that's real rhetorical power on a national scale. Yeah. But you can construct that stuff. And that's what rhetoricians do is like, hey, I need this. I may have to take a hundred options, a hundred tries, but eventually I find something, I design something or whatever that really pops. Yeah. And it changes everything. So the master course pulls up concepts like that. The converting conservatives is more about personal conversion. Like when you talk to people one-on-one, you know, and you're trying to bring somebody either out of a political perspective or to a political perspective, how do you do it? And I've had to do some of this with my daughter. She's a spiritual millennial, you know, she's 21 and she grew up in Austin in Los Angeles. So she's as liberal as liberal gets. But she goes, she goes romping over into the far side of liberalism that I don't particularly enjoy talking to. I'm like, you can't be that reactive because then nobody can talk. You keep taking all the words, you know? And I get that we need to be, you know, expand our vocabulary to not offend some people and understand the value of that. But you can't take all my words. That's why I was like arguing with you about not being able to say prejudice.  Oh my God. But all the words, I said, I'm gonna start a segment on the news program and I'm gonna call it language police. This week on the, on this week's episode of language police, why? Because you're again, appropriating for your, even if your concept is correct, you're appropriating things that you don't deserve. Oh my God. Oh my God. Why, who's earned language? Who am I appropriating language police from? Well, yeah, I mean, I don't wanna get into a new topic, but it's the same thing, like that is not, you didn't come up with the idea of language police. You're borrowing that from somebody.  Well, that's what reparations do. You need your own unique way that avoids the negative, amps up the positive and then you've got some rhetorical energy there. You've done some rhetorical work. Oh my God, this is so much effort. Yeah, it turns out talking to public to human beings, not easy.  So I interrupted you talking about your daughter. Like, what do you do when you're talking to somebody like that? Well, you learned some rhetorical techniques for changing them. I've had to desensitize her because I don't like talking to that and I've had to adjust to her. I've had to say- So it goes both ways. Because she does professional makeup. So she's a makeup artist and she works in movies and special effects and with drag queens, and she's been in that community and knows a lot of drag queens and has done makeup for them and really knows the issues of their life and what they go through and it's important to her. So she has no tolerance for anybody who doesn't have any of that experience and doesn't have a sophisticated language to talk about it. And I'm like, again, if you want to do good things for that community, not tolerating mistakes is a bad idea. To teach people, but not with this sense of indictment and like how dare you, but more like, okay, well, let me show you something. Wow, that's probably not the right thing to say. Well, and I think that, you know, that is almost bringing us back around and probably a good place to put a pin in it is that reminder that when we insist on seeing the other person as the enemy or bad or wrong or flawed, we lose the opportunity to persuade them because instead we just condemn them. Yeah, we bash them and nobody is gonna be persuaded by bashing. No, I can tell you in all of the arguments that I've gotten in with my husband, screaming at him has never once been effective. Yeah, but it feels good. Yeah, it feels good. Okay, so rhetoricwarriors.com Yep. Is the website, is there any other place people should go to check you out, see what you're doing? Do you have like a calendar? Are you doing any standup these days? What you got going on? You know, standup died with the pandemic. Hopefully it'll come back at some point. But, you know, I, rhetoricwarriors is the main thing I'm doing right now and it's like I tweet jokes all day long at rhetoricwar, political jokes all day long. I take shots at both sides but I take a lot of shots at the right because they're easier to take shots at. They make bigger mistakes and they have bigger characters sometimes like Cruz and Holly and these guys. I'm like, so easy. And so, yeah, if you wanna, if you just want jokes, you know, about politics go to, it's called at rhetoricwar because I couldn't get warriors in there. Okay. Too long. Yeah. So that's on Twitter. We're talking about this stuff all day long at rhetoricwar or rhetoricwarriors but yeah, it's kind of my main thing right now. Okay. And then is it the same, are you on all the social medias? All the social medias. So either at rhetoricwar or Dan French. It's all at rhetoricwarriors now. Okay. Cool. And I'm not doing YouTube yet but I will be and I'm probably gonna be doing at least a week monthly or maybe a weekly newsletter. Cool. Awesome. Dan, thank you so much for being with us today, this evening, giving people some good information about talking to their grandpa at Thanksgiving and their neighbors. I'm gonna have you hold on with me just a second while I end the broadcast and make sure that we don't say anything embarrassing live. So thank you all for visiting. Generally irritable this week's episode. Next week I'm gonna have on Mary Bearworth. Excuse me. Mary Bearworth is the executive director of Vermont Right to Life and she's gonna be talking with me about Vermont's bill to add abortion to our constitution. So that should be a really interesting conversation. So thank you again, Dan, rhetoricwarriors.com. Everybody go check them out.  That's my plug for you, Dan. Thanks. I appreciate that. All right. Good night, everybody. Bye.


All over the global young people, they are demanding system change because we have a problem with the current system. So I think COVID-19 creates a new opportunity to reshaping or rebuilding our model and it's also the green recovery with green new daylight. I believe that most important is adaptation at context of Nepal and then it's building a resilient future. Why are we not finding that kind of commitment and zeal in the powers to be to tackle the climate crisis? Because really this is the bigger crisis.  Everything else doesn't matter. What I hope we can get out of this is that we can take some learnings.


We're going to go ahead and get started. Thank you all for coming on a Friday. I really appreciate everyone coming out for our talk. The title of our talk is One API to Rule Them All. I'm Keith Maddox. I'm a senior engineering lead for the Open Service Math Project at Microsoft. I'm also a co-lead of the Gamma Initiative, which we'll talk about soon. I'm John Howard. I'm a software engineer at Google working on the Easter project. I'm also a co-lead on the Gamma Project, which we'll learn about soon. Oops, wrong way. All right. Before we get into it, I just want to give a very, very brief, I promise, history of where we're coming from to give some more context on where we're going. So in the beginning, Kubernetes was launched. It gave us a conference to go to and talk about things. It had some service mesh features that has service as a resource, so I'll give you some amount of functionality there, but not all the rich functionality that we want out of a service mesh today. So pretty shortly after, new service mesh products were starting to pop up. LinkerD2 and Istio were some of the first ones bringing things like HEP and GRBC load balancing and routing, MTLS, telemetry and tracing, and much, much more. Over the years, a lot of other products started popping up as well, giving more and more service mesh implementations. This one kind of offering their own feature set and custom API. So the custom API part is really what we're going to be focusing on today. So if you look at, you know, a service mesh, maybe you want to do a canary deployment, right, and that's what you're adopting service mesh for, or some other traffic routing mechanism. In the landscape today, if you want to do that, you need to decide, do I want to do it with a virtual service, a traffic route, a service router, a service profile, a virtual router, and many, many other ones, right? So these are all real APIs to configure the same thing from different service mesh offerings. And so while they all do the same thing or roughly the same thing, they all have different communities, they all have different documentation, testing, ecosystems built around them, slightly different semantics, right? So it becomes a bit of a mess to figure out what you want to do for something that's actually fairly quite standard and simple to do like a canary rollout, right? Yeah, and so this landscape, I'll go back a slide just to really hone in on this. This landscape is a bit, is a lot to work with, right? When you are somebody who's trying to build software on top of a service mesh, when you are trying to provide tool to the ecosystem, trying to make your way through this proliferation of resources is difficult. And honestly, it prevented real innovation in the space. And so circa 2018 or so, the SMI spec was launched. SMI stands for service mesh interface and it was a, the goal of the project was to create a single set of resources of APIs that are supported by all service mesh offerings. And so we saw a good benefit success with SMI. Projects like Flagr and Argo Rollout supported the service mesh interface as a common specification for service mesh implementations to use and they would add functionality like canary deployments and progressive rollouts, A-B testing, experiments, things of that nature. And, you know, the standard looks something like this. These are both SMI resources. You've got your HTTP route group that has, matches a HTTP header for some, you know, a user agent containing Firefox somewhere. And then you've got that HTTP route referenced in a traffic split resource. And in this example, specifically, there's no traffic going to website V1. All the traffic goes to website V2, but as you can see, that's configurable and it matches the route group that we refer to earlier. And so SMI provided this, a single interface for this kind of functionality across meshes and we saw it take off. There are, Linker Diem implements a couple of SMI resources, open service mesh, the mesh I work on implements a lot of the SMI spec and things were pretty good. But over time, we started to see some cracks in the foundation. SMI, because of where it started, it made some design decisions and its specifications that were incongruent with where the community decided to go overall when it comes to routing resources. The binding authorization policy was very route and service account focused. There was no space to insert workload selectors or things of that nature. There was no content of a workload in general within the SMI spec. There is a part of the SMI spec aiming towards unified traffic metrics, but about six months after that spec was introduced, open telemetry became a thing and we weren't ready for that. We open telemetry, love the work that that project is doing. They've got a lot of exciting news that we learned about here during this conference. But, you know, we already had one direction we were going. Open telemetry went a different direction. And so there is some friction in the community at that point. We had some key maintainers move on to some other projects and we struggled to kind of gain more widespread adoption in usage and patterns to move resources from alpha to beta. And kind of fast forwarding now doing a bit of a time skip to present day. We're kind of violating the future of the SMI spec. So if you use SMI, if you've got opinions, come talk to me. Let me know. Love to get some feedback from the community there. So, you know, we've talked all about service mesh here, but if you look over into the ingress world of Kubernetes, we kind of saw the same thing happening. So from the beginning, Kubernetes had this ingress resource to describe how to get traffic into your cluster, right? And they started out with one unified API that would be implemented by a lot of different vendors. And there are tons of vendors that implement this API. But the problem was that it was so simple that it really had this lowest common denominator field to it. And there wasn't really points to extend the API for adding vendor specific things. So what started to happen was implementations would add all sorts of annotations. I think I saw Nginx as like over 100 different annotations you can add to customize things. Or they would just make their own completely different APIs. Like in Istio, that is the gateway, which is confusingly overlapping a name. But there's many other ones as well. And so we saw kind of, you know, over and over again, we saw the same pattern. Like, there's not extensions. It's not portable. We have all this kind of mess in the ecosystem. So that's where the gateway API comes in, right? This is kind of a new-ish. I guess it's actually been around kind of a while now. We were talking about this last year as well. That's been introduced into Kubernetes by a unified service networking model for Kubernetes. That's learned from the stakes of both the Ingress API as well as all the other vendor APIs that have been around for the past few years and kind of learned how users want to configure things, you know, what the right way to arrange resources is, how to correctly like give those to different roles, all sorts of things like that. And one of the key parts of it as well is that it's extensible. So while a common core will be there in the API, there's always going to be some obscure vendor thing that they want to add to these APIs, right? So extensibility is built into the core to try and ensure that we don't get that same, you know, proliferation of annotations, people forking off new resources, that sort of thing. So this API has been really successful. It recently graduated beta. There's over 15 implementations. You can see a whole list here. I'm sure more to come as well. And so this has actually been going quite well for the Ingress space. So just a brief overview. There's actually some deep dives from other talks that you can go through this week if you want to learn more. And I have a bunch of links at the end. But just an overview of the Gateway API, rather than a single resource like Ingress, it's been split up into many different resources to give kind of a role-oriented resource model so that different roles can configure different resources and they can be segmented with RBAC, et cetera, right?  And then application developers can add HTTP routes and there's also TCP routes, TLS routes, UDP routes, and even now GRBC routes to kind of go add routes to this load balancer, right? And you can see in this example, we have two different application developers living in two different namespaces that are both configuring the shared Gateway resource. Here's an example, a concrete example of what this may look like for probably the simplest possible route, which would just be exposing this food service through the food gateway. And you can see these resources are kind of interconnected by references to resources, right? So I'm gonna... No, no, I'm gonna stay on this slide for a bit and just back up and think about the narrative that we've been talking about here. These two initiatives, you know, between Gateway API and SMI kind of happened around the same time and it was a bunch of people coming together and trying to solve the same problems. And, you know, as an SMI maintainer, I became aware of what was happening over in Gateway API world for Ingress and a thought occurred to me, you know, why does service mesh networking need to be standardized in a separate workflow from Ingress networking? And so I sent... This is an excerpt from an email I sent to a lot of my very talented colleagues in the service mesh community. And I'll read it here. The features present in the spec referring to Gateway API are by no means specific to Ingress traffic. In fact, just about every project represented here in the email thread exposes near identical functionality to their users. Therefore, the greater cloud native community would greatly benefit from Gateway API being a universal set of resources to describe all Kubernetes traffic, North-South and East-West. SMI and Gateway API both sought to become standards for their respective network directions. But what we've never had in Kubernetes is a single way to describe traffic going both in and out of the cluster and across different services. And to that end, I just pulled an Avengers move and tried to get together a group of very talented people to work on this problem. I want to say, yeah, around early to mid-July, these two blog posts were authored simultaneously. One from the SMI blog, the other from the Istio blog, announcing a new collaboration between members of the SMI community and Istio as well as other service meshes throughout the ecosystem. To form something called the Gamma Initiative. Yes, it does sound like an Avengers team. I'm a big Marvel nerd if you can't tell already. And so the naming was somewhat accidental. Wink, wink. Yeah, so the Gamma Initiative, which is a long acronym that was forced in for Gateway API for Mesh Management and Administration, very fancy, was like we said, was a kind of initiative to bring all the benefits that Gateway API has started to succeed at in the Ingress space but to service mesh, right? So it's actually a very fancy name and everything for quite a simple concept. Like how do we apply these same lessons we've learned in APIs but for the mesh world? So this is not a new project or product or anything. This is more like just a group of people that have meeting every week and talk about mesh and Gateway. So yeah, like I said, our goal is to have this unified API not just across the vendors of meshes but also between Ingress and mesh, right? So if you want to do a canary rollout, for example, you might want to apply that for external traffic and also the same for internal traffic. Without a unified API between those two, you need to go learn two different APIs to solve the exact same problem. That doesn't sound great to me. So we've been meeting ever since July. We have weekly meetings. If you want to get involved, I have a bunch of resources at the end. And since we started, we've gotten a huge number of different service meshes on board. These are all the people I saw coming into the meetings, sharing these ideas, interested in implementing this. So if you look at this, this is not a group of people you typically see all agreeing on one thing. I was a bit surprised myself, but it's true. It's happening. So really the full ecosystem is starting to collapse around the Gateway API, both in the service mesh and in the Ingress ecosystem. So this is really powerful, right? This 15 seconds ago was now probably 15 minutes ago, but we have just recently emerged kind of the first big milestone for the project, which is, if you recall, I showed an HTTP route example, which is like matching and routing HTTP traffic. We just added support for really defining how that works in a service mesh, right? That's kind of the base foundation for the project so that we now have a common language that's used across all the implementations. And I'll get more into what is coming next. So here's just an example of what this may look like for a very simple traffic split between two different services. So as you can see, before we were attaching, we had this parent-ref resource attaching to a gateway. For a mesh, we attached directly to a service, and this says that all traffic going to the foo service, 90% of that should go to foo, but 10% of it should go to foo v2, right? So this enables you to do a Canary rollout. Yeah, actually, let me keep going. So one thing I want to say, we've talked a lot about, okay, uniformity between the vendors. And something I get asked a lot is, you know, I use service mesh X. I don't care about service mesh Y, right? Why do I care that they have the same API? I'm not going to run them both at once, right? And I get it, that's actually a fairly valid point, but one thing that I think has missed a lot is the value of having one ecosystem, right? So even if you only use one mesh, it's still valuable that the other meshes are doing the same thing, right? I saw a talk earlier on Flagger, which automates Canary rollouts, right? And I looked at their docs, they had a page of like the 15 different vendors they implement. They have 15 different APIs, 15 different code bases for this, like it's a huge mess for them to maintain, right? With something like the Gateway API, that can be dropped down to just one API that they implement, right? There's one ecosystem. There's one set of documentations for how Gateway API works rather than 15 different meshes trying to make their own documentation. There's one set of tests. People post tutorials, whatnot on YouTube. Those will all be Gateway API. And it's much of the same reason why Kubernetes itself has been so successful, right? It's this common set of APIs across Cloud vendors, et cetera. So even if you use one mesh, even if you don't use mesh, this uniform anyway still be great for you. Go ahead. Yeah, and hopping on top of that, I think it's important to call out that this was done in, you know, our first meeting was in July. It's now October. We do some quick math. You know, that's about three months.  This may not look like a lot for three months, but there, if we've got links on the end linking to our minutes from our agenda. And there has been a lot of conversation that's driving these changes. A lot of consideration of different methods. We've went through like eight or nine different approaches by the time we got to the end of everything to figure out what's gonna be best for you. What's gonna be best for the users in the ecosystem from mesh implementers, for end users. What's gonna be the most natural set of APIs. And so a lot of back and forth is done both on a technical merit perspective as well as a user experience, a lever experience perspective for something that, you know, is one line of code difference in a YAML file. But it comes after months of deliberation and wanting you to be a part of it. So now you may be wondering, where are we going next? We've taken care of HTTP route. There are a couple of follow-ups, PRs to clarify some of the language. You can actually go and see that gateway enhancement proposal on the gateway API website right now if you want to. There are some proposals that we are going to be adding to that to clarify some language in some edge cases. But what's next on the front here is the gateway for, you know, for the GAMMA initiative. One of the big things that we're talking about right now is authorization policy. Right now, again, similar to routing, just about every single service mesh has its own off-Z mechanism. With Isti, you've got authorization policy. Oh, I assume you've got a traffic target. I'm blanking on some of the other meshes. Yeah, what? Console has intentions, there we go. Yeah, this is still a fragmented ecosystem. If we can come up with a set of patterns on how service meshes and gateways potentially can do authorization policy, we'll be better off. And so that's one of the low-hanging fruits that we're deliberating on. Egress has come up a lot. When you talk about getting traffic in and out of a cluster, traffic going between different services, how do I limit the number of, not just the number of, but the specific destinations that a service or a gateway is allowed to send traffic to? We've kind of deferred that in our initial set of standards, but it's getting to a point where we're starting to really reexamine at what stage we need to tackle this. Policy attachment has been a huge conversation for us as well. For those of you who might not know, the Gateway API actually has a first-class idea of attaching policy to a route to any number. I think it's like seven different layers of abstraction throughout the API. And it's kind of a bit of uncharted territory. There haven't been a ton of examples of it in the wild. If I had to explain it briefly, the idea of Gateway API policy attachment is it's got a set of, you know, any CRD you could think of, any set of functionality you really want to put into a resource, but there's this system of setting defaults and of overrides that plays really well with the, I'm just going to go all the way back. It plays really well with this model with Gateway API. One of the big ideas behind Gateway API is persona-based development. And so your application developers don't need your cluster operator permissions. Policy attachment does that same thing. If I, as an application developer, want to set a time-out policy for my service, I should be able to do that without having to use cluster operator permissions and put that right in my namespace that I own. And so that contract exists already for Gateway API. How do you bring that into mesh? How do you bring that same persona-based development into the mesh world? And we're having conversations about that. Different kinds of policies you can think about us adding here. I mentioned optimization policy is one. It's kind of weird, so it's a little bit different from some of the other ones you might think of, so that might be a special case. But rate limiting, circuit breaking, all these service mesh features that you've come to know and to love and to rely on for your business critical applications, we want to bring those and standardize them and make them simpler. Maybe that's through a set of generic patterns. Maybe that's through a collection of resources at some point. We don't know yet. We take a very iterative approach to our development cycles. And one of the other really awesome things about Gateway API that makes it a great environment to do this work in is that it's got different levels of conformance and stability guarantees throughout the specification. You've got the stable and the experimental channels for different features to allow us to get work out there. Again, we've got our resources, this resource out here in three months. We're able to do that with a relatively high degree of confidence because we know we can market as experimental. And so we're going to continue to kind of move in a relatively quick pace to try to get these things out there.  That was a lot. But yeah, how to get involved. There are, like I mentioned, several resources that are available. We've got the Kubernetes Gateway API website with a whole page on things you can do in order to in order to start contributing to the specification. I'm not sure what this points to anymore. But it, yeah, that's probably just the gamma page on the Gateway API website where we have links to our calendar. We've got links to our meeting notes. You've got another link to our meeting notes there. And then, you know, there are issues. Our issues are filed under the Gateway API repo under Community SIGs. And so we're going to try to do a better job of labeling things that's good first issue. A big thanks to Shane who created a milestone to track the work that we're doing in order to get all of our gamma, our mesh working Gateway API to a point where implementations can go out and implement it. And a lot of them already have plans to do so as soon as that light gets switched on. Like we mentioned before, we have weekly meetings and we actually do something a little interesting with our meetings. We alternate them on, we alternate time slots. So I think the meeting that was supposed to be this week that we canceled for KubeCon, it was going to be at 8 a.m. Pacific time. But the next week's meeting will be at 3 p.m. Pacific time. And this is just to try to be as inclusive of other times as possible. There are people who can't make it to one so they can come to the other. And we've tried to, we've had some processes we've implemented to try to make sure we are, you know, keeping track of context between meetings. But please, if you can make it, we really love for you to join our weekly meetings. There are PRs and get that there to read on the website. And we're on the Sick Network Gateway API in Slack. It's the same community between Ingress and Mesh. Trying to make Kubernetes a better place and make it easier for everyone to use it. So thank you all. Thank you. That's the end of our talk. You can clap if you want to. So we realized that that was probably maybe a lot of new information for you. If there are any questions, we've got Mike over here who's got a microphone who can run around. So we've got one right here queuing up one behind him. So on your slide that showed all the Mesh people that were participating, you said you pulled a Marvel move, I believe, a Avengers move or whatever. What actually is the backstory? Because did it really just happen that easily or was there a little more back and forth to get people engaged? Good question. Yeah, I mean, to be honest, this was my goal ever since we first introduced the Gateway API before we even really made publicity about it. I wanted to use it for Mesh as well. At the time, Istio was really, or maybe just me personally, was really the only one interested in that. And so I really wanted to go start doing this right off the bat, but I was worried about having only one vendor behind it and that we would just accidentally make it a new Istio API that no one else adopted, right? So we really were trying to get people, actually last year I was just going around to everyone's like, how do you feel about Gateway for Mesh? How do you feel about Gateway for Mesh, right? And trying to get people on board. So it was a long process. Eventually different vendors had different reasons for why they're adopting it, right? Some of them made a see like, oh, everyone else is doing, let's go for it. Linkerdee had a great blog post about why that's not what they care about. They don't care that everyone else is doing it. They just really like the API and it solved real problems for them, right? So to be honest, it did kind of just happen, but there was a lot of work behind the scenes to kind of get everyone converged and on board. So we don't have success until we hear it. Exactly, yes. That's a good way to phrase it. We had Mike, one right in front of you right there. Thank you. Hi, so with the move to like standardize the APIs, find generic patterns, right? What do you suspect will become the decision criteria for one proxy versus another? Ooh, good question. So as far as how we're trying to design the API, we're doing our absolute best to remain data plane proxy agnostic. And that's actually a principle that also exists within the Ingress gateway API. You've got on board based implementations in Ingress gateway API. You've got like platform cloud provider level implementations like GKE, for example. You've got, you know, trying to think of, you've got Nginx, HA proxy. All those have different data planes. And, you know, one of the criteria for introducing APIs is we try as hard as we can to make it work for both of them. If it can't, there is a custom conformance level that exists in gateway API for data plane-specific implementations to host their policies, host their implementation, things like that. So we hope that we don't have to make that decision. We hope we can create an ecosystem where different data plane implementations can work together and come up with best practices for their proxy and then consumers of that proxy can use them. Hope that answers your question. Oh, hi. Just, I think maybe just related to that previous question. Yeah, do you see the gateway API as, you know, if my application is going to use service mesh that I am going to be deploying my application solely with gateway CRDs? Or do you envision it as, well, probably 80% will be these gateway core CRDs and 20% will still be vendor-specific configuration? Yeah, so that's a great question. So, you know, a core API cannot possibly have all the functionality that all of these different service meshes offers, right? That just doesn't work. So like I said, extensibility is really the name of the game. We're hoping that most of the core use cases can be defined in the core APIs. And the more specific use cases are kind of in the extensions, right? So if you're just getting started, it's probably good enough to just use the core APIs. Once you start getting into more and more bespoke requirements, you may start needing to leverage those vendor extensions. Over time, some more may move into course. That may become less and less. Right now, there's not a whole lot in there, right? That's just routing. So as soon as you want to do some like authorization policy, you'll need to reach to a vendor extension. In the future, we hope that gets less and less. Mike, there's someone right here. This is based on the slides I've seen here. The Gateway API actually means to me, at least, is not so traffic, not necessarily east-west. I may be wrong, but just trying to understand what's your opinion about east-west traffic for the Gateway API. Is it even a thing? Yeah, yeah, so that's kind of the whole reason we started investigating this work stream. Gateway initially was focused towards ingress, but from the earliest days talking to Rob and Shane and Nick and some of those early maintainers, it was always kind of designed to that mesh could work if somebody was willing to investigate it. The naming is very hard, as I'm sure many of us in the room know, and the Gateway API actually had a previous name before that. That was more generic, but that caused some confusion. And so, despite the name Gateway, we really do see the specification itself as being useful and applicable to both north-south and east-west traffic. Yeah, the reason mainly here is like, it's between complexity and making it simple. The difference between having everything being handled by, let's say, Envoy, right? East-west or north-south, ingress, egress, and internally. But then you want to simplify that and make it into a core Kubernetes API. You know, we are trying to sort that out. You know, just getting some more clarity on what exactly is the vision. Are we going to be doing similar what ServiceMesh does? And then there's a lot of questions about what is ServiceMesh now. Gotcha, okay, so vision. Yeah, so for me, I think somewhere else, I heard another question similar to this, but I personally believe that ServiceMesh will always be, implementation will always be separate from Kubernetes. Our vision is, at least for me, a set of APIs in Kubernetes to describe traffic. Those, you know, Gateway API exists as a CRD, but it's within the Kubernetes organization, which actually helps a lot with acceleration, velocity, and productivity. You don't have to go through the lengthy process. But, you know, if there is a single set of APIs in Kubernetes for routing traffic period, why shouldn't your ServiceMesh implementation understand that? And that's the vision for us, for a new person who wants to use Kubernetes. They can use, you know, ten years in the future, Gateway API will be the de facto thing that they're seeing on tutorials that they're learning. And then when it comes time for their organization to adopt a mesh for regulation for MTLS or for more powerful extensions for Canary and things of that nature, they can use those same APIs that they essentially grew up with in Kubernetes and use that for their ServiceMesh. No new overhead to go and learn a whole new set of APIs just for the base level functionality. Our goal is that people can grow with their products, and they don't have to have this high barrier to entry at the very beginning. That's my vision, at least. Anyone else? Questions? All right. Well, we ended about four minutes early. Thank you all again for your attendance. Thank you, guys.