So thank you for coming, everyone. Welcome to Minimalistic Best Practices and Kubernetes Operators. Somebody should have given this talk a shorter name. Whose fault was that? So my name's Jonathan Burkhan. I work for IBM.  So before we get into that, though, I want to introduce myself, tell you who I am, and maybe why you should listen to me. So like I said, I work for IBM, specifically as an open source developer. So I actually contribute to open source full time as my job. And for some reason, they pay me to do that. So right now, I am a steering committee member for Operator Framework, which is a incubating CNCF project that is not part of Kubernetes itself. It's sort of its own separate thing. But everything we make is related to Kubernetes. We make a bunch of tools for writing operators and upgrading operators and distributing operators and doing all kinds of things with operators. So I remember the steering committee there. I'm also a maintainer of one of the subprojects, Operator SDK, which is a CLI tool for scaffolding operators. And in previous lifetimes, I worked as an open source contributor to Kubernetes, various parts of it itself. And then before that, I worked on an open source platform as a service called Cloud Foundry. And then there's just the link to the Operator Framework website. If you're interested in operators and somehow have not heard of it, check that out.  OK, so before we get into the meat of it, let's talk about what is an operator? Because these are kind of a complex topic. Maybe people are not familiar with exactly what they look like on the inside. So show of hands, who here has ever written an operator, worked on an operator, deployed an operator, used an operator? OK, so it looks like pretty much everybody at least has some experience. You've got some rough idea with what an operator is. But just for completeness sake, I'm going to go over it in sort of brief terms, my understanding what an operator is. So if you have used Kubernetes at some point in your life, you have probably done something that looks like the top workflow, where you use kubectl, you have some specification of some Kubernetes resources contained in a YAML file, and you say kubectl create this, or kubectl apply this, or kubectl patch this. And that's how you interact with the system. What that actually does is it just writes a line to the et city store. It's just writing data to a database somewhere. And what actually makes that become reality is a process called a controller.  So when you say kubectl create pod, that's really just writing a line to a data store somewhere. And then there's a pod controller somewhere in the cluster that is sitting there watching that table. And it says, oh, something changed.  I'm going to go do some things that will eventually result in a container that looks like the pod you requested existing somewhere in the system. OK, so what does it have to do with operators? So an operator sort of concisely summarized is just replicating that exact same workflow that Kubernetes already uses internally to manage its core resources for your resource. So you're going to create a new type by extending the API of the cluster. And then you're going to be able to kubectl create your thing. And there's going to be some controller for your thing that exists somewhere in the cluster. And it's going to see that, that something changed. And it's going to go make that happen, whatever that means for your thing in particular. So this is just sort of a quote I wrote sort of concisely. Summarizes this. An operator is a design pattern for creating software to run on Kubernetes. So really, it's an architectural pattern. It's an idea. It's not a specific concrete thing. Rather than statically creating our application out of native Kubernetes resources, we extend the kube API by making our own customer resources and controllers that govern their behavior. And as a caveat, I will note, it is technically possible to write operators that do not, legally speaking, follow this strict definition. But I am almost all of the ones that I see interact with in my day-to-day life follow this definition. Some kind of application you want to run on Kubernetes, you want to package it as an operator. And this is accomplished by teaching Kubernetes to fish rather than giving it a fish. What is an operator in more literal terms?  Literally, though, it is a custom resource definition that specifies the form of one or more custom resources that the user will interact with, create these things, to cause stuff to happen. It is a controller implementation. It is a server that runs in a container, usually on the cluster somewhere, that sort of manages the behavior of those resources. That controller is usually implemented very literally again as a Docker image. You have to write a bunch of kube in a bar back that controls access that the controller uses to see and watch and create things. And then it's about 10 metric short tons of kube yaml that encapsulates all of the above. So when we talk about minimizing our operator, these are generally the things I'm going to be talking about, usually ways to make these smaller, ways to make these smarter. Honestly, for a lot of this stuff, you can just cut out 90% of the stuff that gets blasted all over your operator when you use something like operator SDK to generate it. Because operators are really not a one size fits all kind of solution. You really need to think about what you are trying to do, what you are trying to accomplish, and how that relates to these various pieces. And this is not the simplest of tasks, because operators, like Kubernetes itself internally, are a very complex topic. There are a lot of moving parts. Those moving parts are running on top of other moving parts. When you move those parts, the other parts move, and then it makes other parts move. So a little change can propagate a lot of complexity. Additionally, they're sort of a very admin level thing. They're big and scary. They do things like have access to maybe all the secrets on the entire cluster, and you really don't want to mess around with stuff like that. And the person whose responsibility is to write it, generally a Kubernetes application developer, they're usually a very expert on their application and its domain specific knowledge, but they maybe aren't exactly an expert in Kubernetes itself. Why would they be? They're writing their app. They're not a Kubernetes developer. They don't just sit around and think about operators all day like I do.  They're gonna turn their thing into an operator, and then they're gonna go back to working on their thing. So I've tried to condense some of the knowledge, some of the wisdom that I've gained from my time working as a contributor to operator framework and do some sort of rough guidelines.  These are more general principles. Now some of them are actually really simple and the two in particular, very easy to implement and will give you a huge bang for your buck if for some reason you weren't already doing them. So let's get into that. Right, the solution. So what are we gonna do? Keep it simple. There isn't a need to reinvent the wheel for a lot of these.  We really want it to run the first time or at least if it doesn't run, make sure it's not our fault. So a lot of that stuff you can get rid of if you know what you're doing. Some of the things I'm going to suggest are actually going to be to add complexity, which you might say, that's not minimalistic. How does adding complexity? You're making things bigger. You're making things more complicated. There are a couple of things, especially if you do them at the start of writing your operator instead of at the middle or at the end, that are gonna save you a lot of time and headache later on. So in my estimation, that makes it worth it. And also if you haven't written an operator before, I realize some of these things I'm going to suggest might not make much sense. I might be using words that are not familiar. If you aren't super familiar with like how the internals of a controller works or stuff like that. If that's the case, stick with me. At the end of this talk, maybe go, I've got some stuff linked at the end that'll point you to a couple of tutorials that you can stand up a basic operator. Do that and that should give you enough information to be dangerous. Come back, watch this. Hopefully it should make more sense. Okay, so let's dive into it. Let's start with the CRDs. So a CRD, a custom resource definition, specifies the structure of a custom resource that will then exist on the system. They are sort of the heart of your operator, even though the controller is the stuff that actually goes and makes the magic happen, the CRD is really what specifies the API that the user is going to interact with. You're making a new Kubernetes resource, they're going to Kube CTL created just the way they do everything else, they're going to write it in Helm charts, they're going to do all kinds of weird stuff with it, but they're going to interact with it by creating these objects. So really, this is where you need to start thinking about how the API of your object itself works. You want to be very considerate when you add things to it, because adding things is really easy, but taking things away is pretty difficult, unless you like opening up and doing mutating webhook migrations, which that's my favorite thing to do on a Saturday, but might not be yours. Additionally, if you just do the shortest, simplest path, every time you're like, oh, we need to add this new setting, stick a bull that controls this one, feature gate and forget about it, you're going to have eight million bulls in there by the end. So add things, yes, but be aware. Try and keep things versatile. It's much, much easier if you implement things in a way where you can add new features by changing content, things that are defined in the content of the CRD rather than by changing the structure of it, and that's going to be way easier because then you can just roll the controller, you don't have to go through a messy migration path. It's going to make things in your life simpler and easier. Another thing to keep into consideration is that anything that your CRD depends on, if your controller needs to look at it, needs to touch it, needs to do noodley things to it with its controller noodles, you're going to have to give it permission to do that, which may have some ramifications that you're not really aware of. I mean, okay, it's going to have to have access to it, so that's pretty simple. But if you end up, I don't know, watching all of the pods on a production cluster in your controller, that means your controller's going to get an event, anytime any pod changes anywhere in the system, you're not going to have a fun time. So that's just something to keep aware of, although this is something that you can control at a couple other steps, which I'll talk about later on. And then finally, especially for the CRD itself, it would really be a good idea to stick to a Kube-like API because really what you are doing is you are just extending the Kube API itself. It would be good if you kind of stuck to the way things are supposed to be there. What does that mean? So Kubernetes itself is a declarative system. It's not an imperative system. It means you interact with it by just declaring state and then hoping eventually, sometime later, things will happen that will make that state true. So you really want to stick with declaring form, not having buttons, don't have buttons, don't have annotations that cause things to happen when they're created or weird stuff like that. Use the spec and the status, the spec is the way information flows into the system, status is the way it flows out. Yeah, stay away from annotations. I don't know why everybody loves those things so much. Okay, so once you've got your CRD hashed out, that's really where you start. Controller's the next bit and the controller itself is really just the reconciliation loop and a bunch of, you know, cruft around that. So briefly, if you don't know what the reconciliation loop is, your controller is sitting there watching the table for your CR or whatever. Every time it receives an event, usually, which is when something changes, it's gonna fire and say, okay, this is the desired state of this object, this is the actual state of the system, I'm gonna try and move it from one towards the other.  It's generally a good idea to keep things simple, though. What does that mean in this in particular? Keep the steps small. You don't want to say, okay, somebody instantiated a new instance of my object that is made of these hundred different parts, I'm gonna go make all of those hundred parts at once. It's a bad idea, because you're probably gonna get to like part two and everything's gonna be different by then.  If there is something that's like 98 steps that you're really sure I need to do those all at once, something that is sort of possible, maybe a better way to do that, is to implement long workflows outside your controller itself. So particularly if you're interfacing with some off cluster system, some API somewhere to provision resources, some are off the Kubernetes cluster, that's the sort of thing that we see that often has a big lag time, oh, go provision this thing and eventually it'll come back. You can implement that off the controller itself, have some API that the controller will hit and return, don't sit there and wait for it to happen, because like I said, stuff will change. Relying event driven reconciles, this is one that just boggles my mind every time I see someone do it. So Kubernetes, like I said, small iterative steps, you're supposed to be watching the tables, things change constantly. The default sync period for an operator is, I think operators to KSS, that's 10 hours by default. People seem to like to set that to a really small number so that the controller is sitting there watching and doing things. No, don't do that, don't touch that. If we could remove that, that would probably be a good idea, but people seem to need it.  And you can reason about the behavior of your operator because you know the domain specific knowledge, you say, oh, we went and hit that off cluster API that's gonna provision a server that's gonna take 15 minutes to come into existence because it's, I don't know, a bare metal server made by monkeys running in hamster wheels. I don't know, but you could build that in. You could say, okay, we know it's gonna take 15 minutes, so requeue after 15 minutes, don't bother trying to reconcile this again. And that adds up. You can filter events, you can use predicates. There's lots of ways to cut down on the traffic coming in that's gonna fire all these reconciliation loops. And that also sort of applies to your traffic that goes back in, out of your controller. You can use patch if you are just making small changes, especially if you've got sort of a simple operator, one CRD, one set of controllers. There's apply, if you've got multiple things crashing around at once. And there's server side apply now, which is even fancier. And then finally, don't update the status if it hasn't changed.  And nothing that's observable has really happened yet, so there isn't really a need to write the status back. You can just exit. And these sort of lead us into the next thing, which is minimizing the API load. So your controller itself, you're gonna need to, you know, make sure that's running and perform it internally. But you really also need to be a good citizen of the cluster as a whole. And here's this first bullet point. This is one of the things I was talking about earlier. This is one of the simplest things you can do. This is literally a one line change.  If they aren't on right now, I want you to promise you're gonna go and edit that line because operator SDK uses controller runtime, so does cube builder. Those implement plugin points for Prometheus by default. So if you have Prometheus installed in your cluster, it's a one line change. And this is going to save you so many headaches because there are so many things that are not able, you can't predict these, you know, at design stage and they can change depending on what's running on the operator, there can be all sorts of bottlenecks. You could say, I've got all these reconciliation loops that are piling up because something's logged jammed, the pods on the, you know, some other resource because there's other things going on. This is a production cluster, I don't know. And it can be very difficult to reason about that ahead of time and it can be impossible to figure that out even if you have the, you know, running cluster because you don't know. You don't know where it is in the reconciliation loop. You don't know that, you know, we've got 10,000 things queued up at this one specific step and then they all just kind of hang there for some reason. But if you turn on metrics, it's going to be really easy to figure this out. So please do that. And that's going to save you a lot of trouble. It's going to help you fix these bugs and these bugs generally are going to also make your operator a better citizen of the cluster itself. So everybody else will be happy too. Oh, I'm going to fall down these stairs. Okay, watches are expensive. So your controller is sitting there on the cluster watching generally, you know, the table for your custom resource. But it also might depend on other things that you need to watch.  But like I said, you really don't want to watch all the pods in the cluster. So you got to be smart about it. These add up.  So this is something you want to be aware of and you want to be clever. Especially if you've got multiple controllers in a single operator that are related, you can make them share a cache. That cache, you can filter it and all of this stuff is going to cut down. Yeah, okay. It's going to cut down on how much stuff you're asking for. It's going to cut down on how much stuff your operator is going to have to care about. Although this is also something you've got to be aware of because if you filter it wrong, your operator is basically going to be dead to the world and it's not going to work. A bunch of these things can actually be short circuited and implemented, or at least you can be forced to implement them. If you do the other thing that is sort of a short and sweet recommendation, which is namespace scope your operator. So by default, operator SDK is guilty of this. If you say give me an operator, you're going to get a cluster-scoped operator because that's simple-ish. But is it good? Is it the best solution? Maybe not, but it is simple. If you namespace scope your operator, though, and this is, again, one of those things that's way easier to do if you do it at the start instead of start with cluster-scope and then move there later, this is going to force you to do a bunch of the stuff that I've already mentioned. It's going to force you to only care about the resources in your namespace that you're operating in. It's going to, therefore, your watches are going to be cheaper because they're only going to be watching things in that namespace. You're going to be more performant because you're not going to be ballooning up with all of your weird watches based on how much other stuff running on the system.  Like it's going to be way easier to upgrade because you can roll stuff one namespace at a time that's not going to affect other users. It's going to let you do all kinds of weird multi-tenancy things like maybe you've got different versions of the operator or different tiers that you want to be available for different people, and it's going to be way easier to control access to that instead of just having cluster-level R back or requiring some kind of third-party sign-in to be plugged into the system. Finally, I would like to mention this. This is sort of beyond the scope of this talk, ha-ha. Multi-cluster scope is the thing. So rather than having one operator installed on one cluster, you could have a single operator installed on multiple clusters, and then you wouldn't even have to have controllers on those other clusters at all. That's kind of complicated, and I don't know if it would be my recommendation for someone just starting out, but I would like to mention it because there's a lot of scenarios where that ends up being more efficient. R back. Okay, so operators are low-level, cluster admin kind of things. They're scary. And like I said, operator SDK, we're guilty of this. When you make a new operator, when you scaffold something out, we're just going to liberally hose it down with a bunch of cluster admin privileges that you probably end up not going to use. So I would say probably like 90% of those can probably get removed. So yeah, I would definitely go through there and really think does your operator really need that? Secrets and cluster-level watches or cluster-wide watches, rather, are generally the sorts of things you want to avoid, which if you implement as a namespace operator, it's kind of fixed up for you anyways. And this is also sort of a security vulnerability concern because this means you're going to have to have a new security or a service account that has all these privileges that belongs to the controller, but if other users were to somehow get access to that, it creates a security vulnerability in the cluster that you have to then keep up with. And then finally, the controller itself is running in a container, which means there's a bunch of container stuff you can do that you probably should already be doing, but might not be, to make that simpler, smaller, faster. Again, a bunch of the stuff that gets generated by default is just we're going to shove everything into that image that we think you could ever use. But once you've got your operator, you know what you need, you could probably remove 90% of that. Start with a minimalistic base image, only include the things you need. Have multiple build stages so you can have all the build artifacts you need, build whatever your thing is, remove those so they aren't included in the final product. This again is sort of simplistic stuff that if you're running applications in containers you probably are already familiar with, but it works on your operator too. Okay, so to summarize, first two points. If you remember nothing else from this talk, do these two things. Turn the metrics on your operators, thank me later. Make your operator namespace scoped. Now, this can be kind of finicky to do if you've already got your operator, I've done it once just for fun, it wasn't that bad. It wasn't that bad.  Yeah, filter events with credit kits.  Cut out the cruft, a bunch of the stuff that's going to be included in your operator by default doesn't need to be there, you can get rid of it. Many of these fixes are multiplicative. If you namespace your operator, but then also bother to go and implement filters on the watches, you could cut this even down even further, maybe you've got a bunch of pods running in your namespace operator but you really only care about the ones that are running this one particular part that exposes events that need stuff to happen in the reconciliation loop. You could filter it down even further so it's only those pods you're actually getting events for, et cetera, et cetera. And all this stuff adds up, because if you do that and then you have a bunch of these operators deployed in different namespaces on your clusters, you're going to be a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of the load that you used to be when you just had one size fits all, cluster operator, watch everything, grab everything, read everything. A little forethought goes a long way. This is maybe not the most helpful advice. Think about this at the start rather than in the middle but it's what I can offer. And then finally, is some familiar with the CoreCube API helps a lot, so like I said, a lot of the people that write operators are application developers. They don't necessarily the most familiar with the Kubernetes API itself, but it's all very extensively documented. I think I've got some links to some of it in here. Yeah, so first link, operator framework is the thing I work on, it's got a bunch of tools that are super helpful if you haven't heard of them. And then I've got a link to the API conventions from the SIG architecture docs. This is sort of a cliff notes of like, why is the Kubernetes API the way it is? What style should you be shooting for? This is probably my first recommendation for if reading material sort of summarizes a lot of the things I have just said and this will help you twofold. It'll help you one, cause you'll understand like how Kubernetes works and how you can use Kubernetes itself better. And you'll be able to emulate that style when you actually design the API of your operator itself. And then the third link is just, that's the CUBE API specification itself. It's really more of a reference document, not very light reading, but you know, if you're into that, it's certainly very informative. And that is it for stuff that I have. I'd like to take questions now. Hopefully this thing doesn't explode. Can I get the microphone?  Oh, is it? Okay, yeah, questions. Greg, talk to Jonathan and thanks for working on operator framework I'll be using for a little bit. One question that has come up for us working on an operator is how do you actually test it? Test the operator? Test the operator. So if I come back six months later and I've got a bug I need to fix and I want to prove that bug exists in my code and test it without needing to spin up a lot of infrastructures. Is there a possibility for that? Without spinning up a lot of infrastructure. Now you're getting difficult. Well, my recommendation again would be you should have done all this already. So why are you asking now? So there's a couple things you can do. You could have unit tests and probably should for all the stuff in your operator itself. In terms of actual integration level tests and end tests, are you familiar with Scorecard? The OpenSSF project. No, the one that's part of operator framework. Oh, no. Okay, so operator framework has a solution for you. It's called Scorecard. What is Scorecard?  Scorecard, go do my thing. And it actually has a bunch of tests built in by default that are actually useful. That'll test to make sure the API specification for your operators are flexible, that everything is plugged in and connected and then you can build more on top of those that are domain-specific ones. So that would probably be my best bet would be take a look at Scorecard. Awesome, I'll check that out. You're not a plant, are you? Ask me questions that are easy. When you talk about the namespace scope operators, do you mean like having namespace scope permissions or running the operator once per cluster and namespace permissions or running the operator in each namespace? Or, and then the question would be if on the scalability side, on the watchers and all that, if I'm watching multiple namespaces instead of cluster-wide, am I using more resources on the API level, more watchers, more memory, more everything? Okay, when I say name, when I say namespace scope, I mean namespace scope the operator itself. So this means that an instance of your operator, Fubar is gonna be, I'm gonna make an instance of it that exists in some namespace banana.  And the upshot of this is, is like I said, it forces you to do a bunch of the things that I just mentioned that are really good ideas to do. Anyways, and then you're gonna have multiple of your operators deployed on the cluster. You're gonna have one in banana, one in cherry, one in durian, one in whatever fruit that starts with E. And you're gonna be able to manage those separately. So you're gonna be able to upgrade them separately. They're gonna reconcile separately. And if you do your homework right, this will not be a big resource hog, but that can also be finicky depending on what exactly your operator is doing. Okay, so you're saying, pack my customer sources in one namespace where the operator lives instead of having them spread out across multiple namespaces, if. No, no, no. So by default, if you just like say, make me an operator, this is my CRD, it's gonna just blast that. It's gonna be a cluster wide. It's gonna be on the cluster level API. Everybody can see it from everywhere. But if you namespace it, then it'll only exist in one namespace at a time. So you'll be able to make foobar in banana namespace. And there'll be a foobar in cherry namespace that is not technically the same custom resource. So you'll be able to manage them, do things to them separately. Does that make sense? Yeah, but we have a specific case, but I think we're gonna add a lot. Everybody always has a specific case. Okay, any other questions? Come find me afterwards, by the way. I'd like to chat with you. Nobody? Okay. Okay, well, if that's the case, thank you all for coming. I'll be around if anybody would like to chat more about operators. Thanks.


So why would a guy say he wants you and then pull away? If you've experienced this, I'm sure this is rather frustrating. And I wanted to lean into this conversation because this seems to be the significant or the predominant narrative going on today when it comes to dating, mating or relating, those are in relationships. And so before we answer that question, I think it's really important to ask some qualifying questions. That's right, some qualifying questions. And let's lean into this for a second. So one of the qualifying questions might be, what's the purpose of dating? Like what's the real purpose of dating? And another qualifying question might be, what's the purpose of a relationship? Now, purpose is different than the actual experience. The dating experience certainly is getting to know someone. There's no doubt about that and have a good time. And yet most folks hyper focus on having a good time and do a very poor job of actually getting to know someone. In addition, most human beings have a terrible capacity to determine who they're actually compatible with. And worse, many people in the dating marketplace have really no clue as to what they want. See, here's the thing, ladies. And since I speak to women about men, what I'm about to share might be slanted in that way. And let me also say, it can completely be the other way as well. But most men really have no clue as to what they want or who's truly compatible with them. That's right. Because they're hyper focused on just having a good time. They're hyper focused on the physical aspects of a relationship. And when I say hyper focus, that means their consciousness is more centered around the idea that chemistry equals relationship success. And the reality is, is that these days, it's very hard to feel that elusive chemistry with someone where you're both mutually feeling it outside of sexual chemistry. That's right. Because there can be sexual chemistry with a person and not the same emotional, intellectual, creative, protective kind of chemistry you might experience with someone. I go into that much greater detail in my private coaching. By the way, if you want some support in that area, check out the link right here to schedule a free discovery call with me to see if working with a coach is right for you. So, I say we're going to do a clarifying question. The other clarifying question is, what's the purpose of a relationship? What's the purpose of a relationship? Like, why are we doing this? Why are we, when we've agreed to, we're dating and now we've agreed to some level of monogamy and exclusivity, why are we doing this? Like, what's the purpose of it? I think these are really important questions. So today, before, I think it's really important to reverse engineer this because this will give you clarity as to why a man might say he wants you and then pull away, okay? Because here's the thing, most folks don't give much thought to this. In fact, the other night I was with a group of even my contemporaries, we get together once or twice a year and I was proposing what I'm about to share with you all and it's kind of rather interesting because many of the people in the dating relationship world focus on the attraction piece of a relationship without the really understanding of what's the whole purpose of this from, and that's why we're gonna reverse engineer this because the attraction piece is the beginning but we have to start with the end in mind to get a better sense of this. So relationship readiness, the relationship hierarchy looks something like this, okay? At the top is marriage, okay? Now for those that are in their 20s and 30s, marriage might be incredibly important to them because they might wanna start a family with someone.  It's after baby making years before retirement, most are in their 40s to their 70s, okay? So for them, marriage has a different connotation because roughly 75% of singles, and this is anecdotal, who are over 45 are most likely divorced. So marriage might not be on the top of their pinnacle for them. And yet marriage is the top pinnacle. What that means is it's fully committed, you've merged your lives together for the most part in most cases. The second top of the pinnacle of the hierarchy is living together, kinda like what my sweetheart and I are doing right now, we're living together, okay? That's certainly a level of commitment, especially if you share expenses, you're investing, you're both on the lease, that sort of thing. In some cases, people move into someone else's home, in our case, we've decided to get a home together, okay? Which in this benefit, when you do that and you've agreed on how the home should be operated instead of the other person's home as being the primary way it operates, what I mean to say is oftentimes women move into men's homes and the way they run their home is something you have to meld with instead of in our case, we blend it together. I just wanted to draw attention to that. Now the third hierarchy is those people who are in a relationship where they spend one, two, three, four days and nights a week together doing shared activities, hobbies, mutual interest, spending time with family and friends, traveling together, teamwork, building skills both in their personal and their professional life, intimacy, both physical and emotional intimacy, leading to one of those two categories that I should just share, okay? That would be the third. Now at the bottom of this hierarchy, let's look at the bottom of the hierarchy because what I'm about to share next is gonna make total sense as to why guys come on strong and then pull away, okay? At the bottom of the hierarchy starts with cyber relationships. That's right.  I've spoken to women who have spent one, two or three years literally having a text message relationship with someone. They think they're in relationship with them. And what I mean to say, they are in relationship with their screens, with their screens. Now, most of the time, these tend to be long distance dynamics, meaning there's usually distance of more than a few hours away. Sometimes it can be local, but for the most time, it's usually those long distance dynamics that end up in cyber relationships. These are relationships that typically, the bottom of the hierarchy are the relationships that have dead ends, okay? The next level is the friends with benefits. You know, I once shot a video that said women, many women are in what I call a friends with benefits relationship, but they don't really know about it. They actually are, they believe they're in a relationship, but to the guy, it's merely a friends with benefits.  Now, the third type of third at the bottom of the hierarchy is situationships. These are people that are engaging in connecting with one another without any real label associated with it, without any real discussion of monogamy, without any real discussion of exclusivity. In fact, these days, most people enter into the dating process, going from dating into a situation ship, and one person believes they're in a relationship, and the other person's like, look, I don't wanna label on it, I don't wanna commit to exclusivity or monogamy. And so that's why it's called a situation ship. Okay, so we just discussed the top of the hierarchy, and we just discussed the bottom of the hierarchy. Let me tell you what's in between. The space in between are casual relationships. That's right. I would say well over 50% of those folks who are in a relationship right now, if you're watching this and you're in a relationship with a man, there's a good chance you're in a casual relationship with them. Now, casual relationships might have the agreement of monogamy and exclusivity, it might. You might even call each other, boyfriend and girlfriend, okay? The reality though is there's real no direction in this relationship, there is no real commitment to some sort of future in this relationship. Now, many might be saying, well, Jonathan, I really don't know if I want to commit to someone fully in a relationship. You know, here's the problem today. When we engage in a relationship with someone, when we give our heart, body, body, and our spirit to another human being, when there isn't defined or it really has no direction, it oftentimes ends up in some level of calamity because the minute there's a bump in the road, one of both people leave the relationship. That's right, when the minute there's a bump in the road. Now, most folks who choose casual relationships oftentimes the ground underneath them isn't solid. What I mean to say is, especially for men, maybe they have financial issues, maybe they have a contentious ex they're dealing with, maybe they have issues with their children, maybe they have health issues, maybe their life is in some level of chaos. And while ladies, I know you're beautiful human beings and you go, oh my God, if I can just nurture this guy, I see the potential, the men whose life underneath them, the ground underneath them isn't solid, make oftentimes for weak people to invest your heart in because they're gonna possibly most likely pull away or disappear. So why is it important to understand this? Because folks, if the majority of you are experiencing casual relationships, then it's gonna be difficult to actually lean into something more substantial in a relationship. And the reason why men will say they want you, they say that they come on, they're very strong in the beginning because from a biological perspective, we men are driven by lust and limerence, lust or limerence. Limerence is extreme infatuation. It's the chemicals being released from our brain that says we really like a person. And in those particular cases, we are operating from a kind of a rose-colored glasses until we actually get to know a person. And then once we start to get to know a person, we will oftentimes start those people that the ground underneath them isn't solid will start bumping up against their edges of their capacity to actually lean into a healthy, happy relationship. See, here's the thing, folks. We are swimming in a sea of dysfunctionality, human dysfunctionality. I'm talking about emotional maturity and relationship skills. If you're not familiar with my chart on emotional maturity and relationship skills, and this is not a fact, this is merely an opinion, I believe roughly 20% of the population has clinical issues to some degree. That doesn't mean they're not capable of being in a relationship, but I'm just saying they're going to be problematic in relationship. And while I say 20% of the population is healthy, and I'm being rather generous there, most everybody is dysfunctional.  And the minute that edge is bumped up, he'll start pulling away. Because the real challenge for you ladies, see, women are more apt to be, this is, I'm not saying this is an absolute, women are more apt to be nurturing and more agreeable in a relationship. And they're more apt to want commitment because women tend to bond physically through sex. That's right, women tend to, not always, but they tend to. Men don't bond through sex. Men bond with a woman when he feels like he can trust her. But trust is about, first, being in a good place within himself to be able to trust another person. But ultimately a man will bond with a woman and bonding happens through, as I said earlier, social activities, hobbies, mutual interests, spending time with family and friends, traveling together, teamwork building skills both in your personal and your professional life. And more importantly, play, play. This is why folks when you're in a situation ship, when you're in a friends with benefits, when you're in a cyber relationship, there's not the same level of physical play. And I'm not talking about playing monopoly or going to the swing set at the playground. I'm talking about flirtatious physical play with one another. That's, and by the way, laughter, in addition is a huge important route that needs to be established to build trust with someone. This is why the surface level relationships aren't really going anywhere. They start off strong because we have to get the engine, we gotta get your engine running for you to like us. Okay? And we say a lot of flamboyant words to make that happen. And then you like us and yet we're not capable of being in a relationship. I'm not talking about me personally. I'm talking about the male species, if you will. So what's the antidote to all this? What's the antidote? Folks, I am here to profess a serious hardballing in the very early stages of a relationship. And that hardballing is you establish your standards right from the get go. But many of you don't know what your standards are. It's interesting when a woman reaches out to me to do private coaching. One of the things I've come to realize is most women don't know what they want. They all think they know what they want. And I say this because once they've gone through my proprietary coaching program, they all say to me the same, Jonathan, why didn't they teach me this in school? Why didn't my parents teach me this? Oh my God, you made me think. Because the old narrative, I say the old narrative was women were dependent upon men and chemistry equaled relationship success. That's an old narrative. And by the way, that's not a proper narrative. It's just an old narrative. Women are no longer dependent upon men. So you have the opportunity to choose who you want to invest your heart in. Don't be sucked in by the person who says a few nice things in the beginning. You have to do a better job of vetting them. And I've got to tell you something. We are swimming in a sea of strangers. My girlfriend and I were watching a show. What the, who the bleep did I marry? These are women who married men that turned out to be psychotic people. And these are women that they've all got sucked in in the beginning. Now I'm not saying we should approach relationships with a defensive posture, but you know what? And I'm going to talk about hardballing in a second. You know what? I'm really here. I think we should do background checks on people. That's right.  Folks, you know, I'm a big proponent of everyone reading the book, Eight Dates by Doctors John and Julie Gottman before having sex, chapter one at the minimum to understand trust and commitment. Because the minute you give your heart, okay, the minute you give your body to someone, and I want to read a meme I posted on Instagram. By the way, there's a link to join my Instagram account, but this was from the movie Vanilla Sky. This was, and by the way, I want to share something with everyone. If men, if women, if let's say 50% of women were psycho, just play with me for a second. Let's say they were psycho. In other words, a man has a one and two chance of the woman he has sex with that could turn out to be psycho. Do you think he might do a better job of vetting the person? Yeah, I would think so. And I'm talking, because in the movie Vanilla Sky, Carmen Diaz is, I believe, there's Carmen Diaz and Tom Cruise. This Tom Cruise sleeps with this woman, basically uses her for the most part, under the guise of, I've got issues and I've got problems and I can't be in a relationship with you. And then she literally kidnaps him, if you will, in the car and during the car ride, she says, don't you know that when you sleep with someone, your body makes a promise whether you do or not.  My point in sharing this story is there's little or no consequence for a man to profess his desire for you and then discard you at the same time. There's no consequence. Now, I'm not suggesting there should be a legal consequence for them or not, but it used to be, remember coming back into the olden days, when people lived in a small town, if someone was gonna date my little sister, I would have a shotgun out, point it, I'm never a big brother, I'd have a shotgun pointed at his face and saying, what's your intentions with my sister? In other words, if he was out of integrity, there was a consequence. And what I mean by out of integrity first, it starts by being in integrity with yourself, not you and certainly him. And if you're choosing strangers, you have no idea about their character. You know, I have one client who met a great guy and by the way, she got fixed up by someone, by a friend of hers. Happened just few weeks after we finished our coaching together. She got fixed up with a guy who gave a kidney to a total stranger. He gave a kidney to a total stranger. What does that say about a person's character? And she didn't hear it from him, she heard it from her girlfriend. Now it's interesting in the TV show, Who the Bleep Did I Marry, a man might tell a woman that and say, oh, wow, what a man of integrity. You know what, I'd want documentation.  In addition, I think when I talk about hardballing, look at, remember I said the relationship hierarchy is marriage, living together, or at least two, three, four days together weekly? That's the standard that you start with and only choose people who agree with that same standard. Because, oh, well, I'm open to a relationship, a guy might say I'm open to a relationship. What does that mean I'm open to a relationship? There's a big difference between someone who goes, I want a fully committed relationship with someone that leads to this versus I'm open to a relationship. Let's not put labels on this. Let's just see where this go. Let's take it slow. Folks, I'm here to say, I'm like, I'm in the belief system now, jump in the deep end and see what happens because most likely it's gonna fail, okay? But I'd rather know sooner rather than later if it's gonna fail. What I mean to say is the dating process can drag things out for one or two or three years with no end at sight. I'd rather know in the first 30 days if this has potential. Start by, and the new term is called hardballing, I call it laying your cards on the table, I call it radical honesty. By the way, you should see a link below. I now have a store with coffee mugs that say radical honesty. Anyway, so why does this happen? Because most men who are operating with the ground underneath them that isn't solid choose casual relationships because they haven't defined what it is they want. And my hope is you understand this hierarchy and make a choice for yourself. Do you want marriage? Do you want living together or do you want something significant? And by the way, the two, three, four days and nights a week together isn't a guarantee but it's certainly a much greater standard than the cyber ferrins with benefits or situationships or even the casual relationships that people are experiencing today. All right, I think you get to just to where I was going today. All right, for the folks who follow my work, my live streams, this is a time for Q&A. If you have a question for me, write the word question and post the question there after or in the chat box, there's a dollar sign you can purchase a super stick or super chat. All the monies from the super sticker super chat goes to a scholarship fund in the name of my son Connor Asley. That's a picture of him right there in the Obey shirt. He's my son who passed away four and a half years ago. And in his honor, I've started a scholarship fund to donate to causes like the Hoffman process and Insight Institute personal development workshops. So it helps defray the cost for those who want to do these types of experiences. I've done them both and I highly recommend them. If you're listening to the replayer watching the replay, there's a super thanks below and you can purchase a sticker there as well or purchase a super thanks to donate to the Connor Asley scholarship fund. All right, I think it's time for questions. Again, write the word question and post the question there after. It makes it easier for me to see in the chat box. And let's get going here. Rena says, take it slow, write not at our age. It's not a dress rehearsal. Exactly, exactly. What I mean to say is for those of us who are baby boomers the days in front of us are much shorter than the days behind us.  Anyway, let's see what else we have. Linda says, from my personal experience, men truly love bitches. You immediately elevate in their eyes. Now, I'm a big proponent of the book.  Yes, I like the idea of the empowerment in this book. Listen, empowerment isn't being in your feminine energy.  That is what's attractive to men who are also in those same spaces themselves. Men who, as I said earlier, the ground underneath them isn't solid, they are usually going to fold with relationships with women who are more in their empowerment, rather cut to the quick, in my opinion on that. All right. Again, write the word question and post the question thereafter. I wanna give Elena a big, gigantic, Jonathan Barahug of appreciation. You sweetheart, you created this graph for me, the three types of people actively dating. We'll talk about that. So I wanna give you your morning prop, but thank you. All right. Christina, can men in their late 50s decide in one meeting if they're attracted to you? They are so non-committal. Well, attracted certainly. We know who, here's the thing. I'm gonna take a line from the movie when Harry met Sally. It's a line where Harry, Sally says, can men and women be friends? And he says, no. And he goes, why? Because you wanna sleep with them. He goes, she goes on to say, what about the unattractive ones?  Sexual attraction for men, the barrier to sex can be very low for a lot of men. What I mean to say is what they're attracted to. I think the question you're really asking is, can a man know she's the one in the first meeting? So I'm thinking of my beloved there. There's a picture of her. On our first date, I knew she was a woman of class. In other words, as I talked about in the bitch, babe in total control of herself. I knew she was a woman of class. So I set her apart from those women that I thought were just, you know, a lot of women come across sexually to men. They use their sexual prowess to entice us men. A lot of men call that the low hanging fruit. I knew she was the top of the tree on the first date. Okay, our first meeting I should say, because it wasn't a date, we actually met as friends. What I realized after our date, that this is someone I genuinely liked. And although I did a pullback, because when you're so entrenched in your life, being a certain way, being on the hunt and prowl, it sometimes it takes a little time for a man to really go, oh, is this someone I really want to invest in? And when I sat with it for about 24 hours, I said, yeah, I want to see her again. And I invited her to the wedding I was going to the next day. My point, and it was after that, I go, I would like to explore this, simply explore it. We were both then upfront about wanting to explore a fully committed relationship when the next time we saw each other. In other words, we laid our cards on the table. This is what we're looking for. Either we, we basically talked about marriage and living together. We knew that that is something we wanted. And by the third time we saw each other, we made a plan to put that in place. And now we live together. And this all happened within a six month period of time. There was a plan put in place. I didn't know it on the first date. I certainly knew that it was worth exploring. However, it was exploring with intentionality. And because of the distance, quite frankly, it worked in our favor because it kind of hyper focused our relationship. I think if we'd lived near each other, we might have done the back and forth for a lot longer, which is fine too. And this is where it's complicated because she wasn't fully committed to where she was living. When two people are fully committed to where they live, then they do the back and forth for a much longer period of time. She was non-committal where she lived. I wasn't fully committed to where I lived. In other words, we weren't fully entrenched in the places that we lived at that moment in time. And we agreed to build a home here together. So I hope that helps answer your question. Thank you so much for that question. I really appreciate it. All right. Hey, I wanna thank Meg for the $5 Super Sticker. Big hugs to you. Thanks, Meg. All right, and he says, question, is it too late after you've been in a relationship and he has already stepped back? Is it too late? Okay. I think your question is, is it too late to rekindle it, to repair it? Here's the thing. This really boils down to what do you want? What do you really want? Do you really want a fully committed relationship? Then I would, if that's the case and this person still is interested in wanting to make it work, I'm gonna come back to this book, Eight Dates by Doctors John and Julie Gottman. I'm also gonna recommend this book for those of us in midlife. It is making your second marriage a first class success. Now it doesn't have to be marriage, but what I love about this book, it's the idea is to figure out but what it does, it lays out the basic framework for a healthy, happy relationship.  But Jonathan, that might scare a guy away. It only scares the wrong guy away. Ladies, you are oftentimes stifling yourself. You're afraid to speak your truth. Folks, when I wrote my book, what the heck is self love anyway? A journey of personal development, self-help and spiritual work. By the way, there's a link below to get all the books I recommend. Chapter one is speak your truth, do it with kindness. Because in chapter nine, if it's sincere and from the heart, you really can't say or do anything wrong to the right person. Folks, I'm here to say ladies, establish your standards and boundaries right from the beginning.  Ladies, I know you all love the idea.   Men are rather clueless. They're winging it. You are in charge of your relationship destiny. Establish your standards and then stick to it with your boundaries. All right, Annie, thank you so much for that question. Question, do you recommend letting a guy upfront that you don't plan on sleeping with them for 90 days or 100 hours of face to face time or do you keep it hidden? Great question. I love this one. So, I don't like establishing upfront rules. I don't let the minute you tell a guy, hey, it's gonna be 90 days before we sleep together or we need 100 hours of face to face time, that's a turn off. It would be a turn off to me either as well. What I prefer, and if that is your standard. Now, my standard for sleeping with someone is following my acronym called CARES, C-A-R-E-S CARES. CARES. The C stands for have sex when you feel comfortable.  Number two, or the A stands for be aware of the consequence. In other words, if you attach very early on with a guy, then my suggestion, if you attach, if you're aware of that, then take longer time before you commit to that or before you sleep with them. The R stands for learn his real intentions. By the way, that can happen rather quickly when you've done a vetting process, when you've done a background check, when you maybe even done an STD test. These all give you indications of their real intentions. The E stands for exclusivity.  In other words, make sure you feel safe and then from a cooties perspective, for those that grew up in the 60s, we heard the word cooties, or the 70s, meaning diseases and also pregnancy and that sort of thing. Be safe, C-A-R-E-S. So, do you have to wait 90 days or 100 hours? No, you do not. I know plenty of people have had sex on the first date and they've been married ever since. Those are the exceptions, not the rule.  In other words, don't go to the, tend to have more breakfast dates, tend to have more early afternoon dates, maybe picnics, spend time, not in each other's homes until you feel a level of safety and trust with a person. But I don't like establishing that rule because it's a turn off, okay? It's a turn off when you say, this is my rule. Now, if he starts pushing sex, you have to ask yourself, does he seem more interested in sex or does he seem more interested in you? Certainly kissing, foreplay, going the first, second, or third base is pretty common before sex to feel a sense of sexual energy between the two of you. But if he's predominantly pushing sex, by the way, if he's pushing sex and doesn't get it, he most likely will disappear if he's only in it for the short run. Or you can simply say, I'll have sex when I feel a sense of trust and commitment with a man. I'm open to sex when I feel a level of trust and commitment from a guy. That's when I'm ready for sex. I don't have a timeline. That's when I choose sex. Sherry, I hope that answers your question. Thank you so much for that one. I really appreciate it. Thank you so much. All right, let's keep going. Denise writes, question, please talk about the money issues men and women asking for money after months of communication. Okay. What I'm assuming here in this question, this is in a cyber dynamic. In other words, it's all communication via text, email, or maybe possibly telephone call and they ask you for money. That is a scammer. Anyone who asks you for money and you're not either living together or in a fully committed relationship where you're spending three or four days and nights a week together doing shared activities, hobbies, mutual interests, spending time with family and friends, traveling together, teamwork, building skills, both in your personal and professional life, intimacy, both physical and emotional intimacy. Do not give money to anyone until you've established a deep root of actual trust. Ladies, many of you are delusional thinking you're in a relationship when it's simply over the phone and it's usually some Nigerian scam artists. Folks, do you know how often my photos get stolen? Literally every single day my photos are stolen used to con women out of money. They even use my name and I can't do anything about it. Fake YouTube profiles are created with my name and people are sending you a WhatsApp number to try to convince you to send them money for some program you think you're getting from me. Unless you're getting it from this channel or my website, all of that is scams. Anyone who asks for money, whom you've never, until you built a relationship with, don't ever do it. Does everyone agree with me? Let me know, John, say it right there, John. I will never give money to a man who's not my actual boyfriend. And what I mean by actual boyfriend, you've spent at least 100 hours of face-to-face time, probably more like 500 hours of face-to-face time. All right, is this sinking in? Is this resonating with you? Please let me know. Thank you, Denise, for that question. Patty or Pretty wants to respond to Sherry. Sherry, that's a bad idea to me. Best to express an interest in a man and tell him what you want to take things slow. Besides practically no man tell us I wanna marry you in that timeframe as well. Good point. Hey, Elena, thank you so much. Again, I appreciate all the cards you've sent me. All right, I'm D. Shields, writes. Question, are 10-year relationships with marriage a bad thing? Especially when you know they're not marriage-ready financially in therapy. You know, listen, folks, I have a philosophy and that philosophy is centered around partnership, okay? Partnership with one another. I believe at the longest you should ever wait to develop partnership with someone is one, maybe two years. And what I mean to say is partnership is integrating your lives fully and most likely living together. Not everyone can do this. I get that, but for the most part, I'm a big proponent of that.  Either we're like, okay, so coming back to my beloved life. We agreed to move in together because we had this distance.  I never wanted to do a long distance relationship. We agreed to, in our case, we agreed by the 45th day we were going to explore a fully committed relationship which included living together. So we didn't really have a very long distance relationship for a very long period of time. But what I learned in this experience is the minute you live with someone, you really get to see who they are as a person for the most part. It's hard to hide who you are when you're with each other on a regular basis. I know a lot of people in midlife move, by the way, one of her good friends moved in with her boyfriend after seven months of dating to actually live in the complex right next door to us. Listen, I'm only saying this. I know many of you can't because the way your lives are established and their lives are established, but the real, by the way, isn't the whole purpose of dating is to get to know someone? The fastest way to get to know someone is to live with them. And I know you're gonna say, but Jonathan, I can't. Well then, remember I said, what's the point? What's the purpose of dating and what's the purpose of relationship? If you're not at least going to be married, living together, or at least establish three or four days and nights a week together, what's the point other than a casual relationship where you get some of your needs met until it falls apart? Because casual relationship, the minute there's a bump in the road, they usually collapse, not always most of the time. So when someone says 10 years before they're ready, I wouldn't wanna invest 10 years of my life on a maybe. That's like, and by the way, the likelihood is, listen, if someone said, here's an investment and a piece of property, there's a one in 10 chance it might make some money. Would you wanna invest in it? It was a one in 10 chance. I wanna, before I invest any of my money in something, I'd like to have a much stronger, I'd like to see a track record. That's the thing, at least investing in the market. There's a track record where with a human being, look at the person's track record. You'll probably find that they have a terrible track record. All of us do. We wouldn't be, well, we wouldn't be where we're at if we didn't have a terrible track record. So I wouldn't wanna invest in a person that has a poor track record. And if they have financial problems, they're in therapy.  Is that the person you wanna be with? That's a question you have to ask for yourself. I am Dee Shields. Thank you so much for that question. I appreciate it. All right. Power of Chee says to Denise Richards, that sounds like a Tinder swindler stuff. I agree. All right. Pretty ask, question. Do you have any books that you think is good for working through potential mommy-daddy issues? Well, I certainly would recommend reading two books. I would recommend reading the book Attached by Amir Levine and Rachel Heller and Getting the Love You Want by Harvelle Hendricks and Helen Hunt. All the books I recommend are in one of the links below in the description of this video. Also, I would highly recommend for you to individually read the book, The Hoffman Process. The Hoffman Process. This does a deep dive into healing childhood wounds and traumas and adult traumas that causes to have negative patterns of limiting beliefs in our life. I highly recommend this book as well. Okay. It's a great question, pretty. Thank you so much. Annie says, thank you. I appreciate that. Chrissy Yu says, question. I had a boyfriend where we were in a committed relationship and when I would point out behavior that I had a problem with, he would want to break it off. Why would he do that? This is a person most like, well, first off, it depends on how you did it. Okay. I think some women, and by the way, this is not you. Some women, all they want to do is point out the problems with the guy they're with and the man doesn't feel that he's being accepted for who he is. Okay. This happens frequently. Let's say it happens a third of the time. Two thirds, and by the way, I'm making up these numbers. Two thirds of the time, you'll find that a woman is pointing out something that she doesn't feel good about in the relationship. It might be, for example, you only seem to call me at the last minute and then all you want sex. Well, I think we already know that narrative, but what you might want to do is establish a boundary that's not okay. Now, that's just an obscure one because that does happen frequently. I think most bad behavior that we're most, I think the most frequent bad behavior centers around contempt, criticism, defensiveness, and stonewalling. Let me repeat that. Criticism, contempt, defensiveness, and stonewalling. I would highly recommend folks write this down. The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse by John Gottman. Google that right now. The Four Horsemen, someone write it in the chat box. The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse by John Gottman. G-O-T-T-M-A-N. That is understanding these. Now, when you've expressed your feelings around this and I'd highly recommend, when you're gonna express your feelings, read the book Nonviolent Communication by Marshall Rosenberg. It should have been called Compassionate Communication. Why do I recommend this book? Because it's all about understanding the nature of how we oftentimes communicate in both a victim capacity, but also in a confrontational capacity. Now, another great book to read would be I Hear You by Michael Sorensen. The Surprisingly Simple Skills Behind Extraordinary Relationships. Why I'm recommending these books is to get a handle on all of this. So when you're prepared to have a conversation, you've studied this. And by the way, you can go to YouTube and find a lot of videos on the same books I've just read shared with you. But again, the link's below to get all the books I recommend.  Oh, that's so embarrassing. The light here got me hot. So anyways, Chrissy, why would he do that? Because he doesn't feel accepted. But at the same time, it's because he's most likely incapable of accepting that he might be problematic in the relationship and people that can't be introspective and check in with themselves there, oftentimes run. Probably not a very healthy relationship in other aspects. And yet, folks, many of you, it's funny, my girlfriend shared something with me. I'm gonna talk about this frequently. Many of you focus on the one thing you like about the relationship and with that hope that all the other problems of the relationship will be accepted. I'm gonna repeat that. You hold hope on one thing and accept all the bad things. Folks, it's like looking at, listen, on a dating profile, if you saw 10 pictures and you saw one good picture is in nine terrible pictures, you're like, he's gonna look like the good picture. Folks, that's holding hope. You've gotta see the entire picture and then make a decision. And by the way, check out the link to a free discovery call with me to see if I can help you in that capacity, see the big picture. One of the things I do for clients is what I call unpacking session. Get inside a guy's head where we unpack the relationship to determine if it's really right for you. So I definitely recommend that as well. All right, thank you so much for your question. I really appreciate it, Chrissy, you. Jonathan Asley, no Netflix or chilling. I actually, my girlfriend and I love Netflix and chilling. So that's how we feel about it. Catherine W says, question. If you are new to dating someone, when do you think is the right time to bring up a reading book, eight dates together? Well, first I would read chapter one by yourself, certainly before you ever allow that penis inside the vagina. I would recommend that. I would say if there's an agreement to explore a fully committed relationship, radical honesty should be on the forefront and this book lays out a beautiful methodology for radical honesty with one another. So when you agree to explore a relationship together, but I would first read chapter one about trust and commitment before that penis gets to go inside the vagina. All right, Sherry just sent a $4.99 super sticker. Thank you so much. Charlie Brown says, I agree with you, Jonathan. Thank you. Laina says, I agree with you, Jonathan. Thank you. Definitely agree with you. Thank you. Denise also says, I agree with you. Thank you. Polly writes, question. Is anyone like me not online dating and hoping to meet someone naturally? My limited experience of it is awful connected with arrogant, unkind, uncaring men who've been online for too long. You know, I look at online dating swipe apps as a spoke in the wheel. Now, given that roughly probably 50% of all new relationships are happening through an online connection and for the younger demographic, it is much closer to 75 to 80%. I think if we dismiss this, look it, I would have never met my beloved if it wasn't for match.com. So it's hard for me to dismiss online dating.  And you have to be stronger than you have to have thick skin. If you don't have thick skin, look it. Organic meeting is challenging at best. I'm not saying that it doesn't happen, but organic meeting is rare these days. Used to be, like I look at my son, there's my son, Colin, when he was in college, he was surrounded by single eligible women, all his age, and they were in the same, there was 30,000 students at the college he went to. So you had an abundance of opportunity. After COVID, most people don't leave their home.  Probably not a good person to go on a date with. Then I'm gonna say to you, it's about using the tool of online dating with more consciousness. And that starts by establishing clarity. This is why when I work with women over and over again, literally the minute they make the investment in my coaching program, all of a sudden I get calls all the time, Jonathan, I met a great guy, Jonathan, I met a great guy. Jonathan, I met a great guy and they know the difference. And most of the time it's online dating. So I understand your frustration, believe me, I have cursed online dating a thousand times. Same time, it's hard for me to knock it when I met this beautiful sweetheart that I have. All right, thank you so much for that question, Polly. I appreciate it. All right.  To the extent that I'm an authority, I'm a person who has spent 20,000 hours coaching in the last 15 years. I have over 3,000 hours of personal development, workshops, trainings, videos, books that I've accumulated and read. I mean, hours of absorbed information. I also have a neuro-linguistic programming certificate. I've gone to a number of high level workshops like the Hoffman Process and Insight Institute and I study relationships. So I'm here not, listen, I don't wanna profess that I'm an expert in any sense of the field compared to a doctor, but most therapists don't focus on the dating, they focus on individual healing, which I'm, here's my authority. My whole channel is about promoting personal development and individual growth, taking empowerment of your life. And I wrote a book about it after the loss of my son. So I think life experience has its own level of authority in it. I'm just simply, it's the world according to Jonathan. You can take it or leave it, folks. This is just my vantage point of how I see the dating, mating and narrating narrative. And it just happens to be a lot of people agree with me. So I think that's my authority. Thank you so much for that question. I really appreciate it. Raquel says, Jonathan, you are sensible and realistic advice. No fluff, no sugarcoating. I like the way you say things, not just what you say. Many women need this reality check. So coming back to the previous person's post. I hope my content speaks for itself. So thank you so much. All right, Corny Cobb is in the house and she's got a personal question for me. How does your girlfriend feel about your shroom journeys? Have you ever done it together? I'm gonna say she's accepting of it and out of courtesy to her without her permission, I don't wanna answer that question, okay? But I will say this, folks.  I happen to be an open-minded person and I don't believe the United States holds the claim to being the most enlightened and awakened culture. Certainly from a financial sense, maybe. Many South American cultures have used ayahuasca and psilocybin as an awakening to their consciousness. And this has been going on for thousands and thousands of years and it's a natural plant-based medicine.  Please forgive my judgment. But at the same time, spiritual awakening can happen in a variety of different ways and believe it or not, two of our most horrific legal drugs are alcohol and tobacco, okay? And let me not get started on how the drug industry pumps disgusting things into human beings. So anyway, so to answer your question, I have to ask her first to be able to answer that question. Thank you so much, Cornie Cobb. And I'm open to any personal questions for the balance of this conversation if you have of me. Thank you so much. Power of Cheese says Zaynep, on love is blind is super critical and insecure. Zaynep, yeah. Folks, I've been into this show, Love is Blind. It's funny, cause I have a dear friend who has a very popular podcast called Dates and Mates. I was with her last night with a group of relationship coaches. She's very familiar with the Hollywood scene and most of those shows are superscripted. But what I like about these shows, it gives you a glimpse into something very unique. These are people that connect without seeing each other and they build a strong attraction for one another much like what happens with long distance relationships. And then they're put into a blender, if you will, of living together to see if it works out. And within 30, five to 40 days, they have to make a decision. I like that concept. I'm like, let's just jump in the deep end, see if we're gonna work out together. And then rather than our current dating process that is long and drawn out, only to end up in the same place. That's anyways my two cents on it. So yes, love is blind as a show, my girlfriend and I watch frequently or at least we've finished it Mark. Courtney Cobb says the four horsemen of the apocalypse contempt, criticism, stonewalling, and defensiveness, defensiveness. Maryon says, Mary now says, question. I realized that the man I was dating is not good for me and decided to walk away. Yay, but already got attached to him emotionally with my heart. What is your advice on how to heal myself?  I would immerse myself into personal development workshops, self-help work and spiritual work. I would also invest in my physical health like yoga or some sort of physical exercise to release. Now, emotional release work, Google emotional release work because you can actually identify what is the pain that's causing you to be attached to this person and release this. I would look into emotional release work. Also, the Hoffman process is a great place to go and find your center. So great question, Maryon, thank you so much for that question. I really appreciate it. Oh, thank you so much for the $3.99 Super Sticker. Connor Asley Scholarship Fund will appreciate it. There's a picture of Connor right up there. It's one of my favorites of his. Okay, let's go swim in, let's go swim in. If you have a question, write the word question and post the question there after. We have a conversation going here. It's hard for me to track. My God, my tummy is rumbling. I am says, you are experts in relationships are less about credentials and more about experience, exactly. Wow, my stomach is really rumbling. Okay, Jonathan, do you also counsel men on dating, love and relationships? If men find me, I will absolutely counsel them, absolutely. I just tend to, women tend to be the ones who gravitate towards my work more so than men. Carly Brown says, Jonathan, you are right. Especially about the drug industry. Thank you so much, Corny Cobb says, thank you for your answering my question. By the way, Corny, feel free to ask another one. Meg says, I love Demona Hoffman and dates and mates. Folks, Demona is a dear friend of mine. I think I've been on her podcast the most of any of her guests. Go to dates and mates. By the way, she has more of an entertainment spin but she is a great human being and I love her. So glad you like her, Meg. Pretty disabled says, question, has a woman or women ever asked you on a date first and how did that make you feel? First off, I've had several women ask me on a date first and I loved it. My sweetheart wrote me first on match.com and I loved it.  Oh my God, Jonathan, when a woman does that, that intimidates a man. What is intimidation? Intimidation is he pees his pants. Did I pee my pants when a woman asked me on a date? No, I didn't pee my pants. This narrative that this is intimidating the man, it takes away their power. No, men are scared too. Listen, alpha arrogant men aren't scared.  And they put a bravado to hide that fear and they collapse later in the relationship. But a good red-blooded, healthy human being wants to feel desired. It's a good thing. I did a video on this just recently. Can a woman ask a man out on a first date? The answer is astounding. Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. And it's happened to me and I've loved it. But at the same time, I also, when a woman is too forward, okay, so let me differentiate this. When it's too much, it's overwhelming. I think there needs to be a nice balance. I've talked about this in many videos. I think a relationship should look like two cars traveling down the street together at the same speed. She makes effort, I make effort. I make effort, she makes effort. She makes effort, up, up, up, up, up, up, up. You get the gist? By the way, I would highly recommend reading the book.  Highly recommend that. All right, thank you so much. Polly says, I'll take the world according to Jonathan. Straight, talk, honest wisdom, love that you're referenced here, sweetheart. Thank you so much. And it says, oh my God, this is such great advice. Yes, to the personal healing. I'm in a full agreement. Yvonne says, no balls, love is brave, courageous, communicates concerns, entrenchments, working together. Exactly. Connie says, thank you for your insight to online dating. I tried a few, but haven't found any guys even worth meeting in person. Arrogant, immature, sex-only motive of. But I'm encouraged by you, keep trying. By the way, folks, I've met arrogant, entitled women, gold digger types that are only looking for a free meal. So men might be looking for free sex. And there's a lot of women that are looking for a free meal out there. So anyway. Question, once my partner did ayahuasca, he became totally detached and uncommitted. He said, nothing is real, it's an illusion. And we got awful. And he got awful, rejected all structure. And this work. So each person's journey to enlightenment has their own twists and turns. You know, I often times wonder if we're living in a matrix. I oftentimes wonder if we're living in some sort of simulation. Or if we are oftentimes living in a dream. And when we pass away, that white light is waking up to a new reality. I oftentimes wonder that. So I take that with a grain of salt. And at the same time, I recognize that, you know, we might be spiritual beings experiencing a, having a human experience, okay? By the way, I forget where that is quoted from. We are all spiritual beings having a human experience. Can someone figure, Google that real quickly because I forgot where I heard that. So with that said, you know, we all have the way we view the world through our own prism, our own reality. This person had a shift of awareness. And for a while, that person might explore that. I know that when my son passed away, when Connor passed away, I began doing plant-based medicine journeys using psilocybin once a month.  And I wanted to get some understanding of the meaning of life and more importantly about death. And so I started to do a deep dive into my own spirituality. I also looked at Ram Das' work, understanding that death is the barrier for us to really fully living life.  That's why I'm interested in Eastern philosophies. I'm interested in Buddhism and much of what the Indian culture studies because, you know, each person has their own journey. So this happened to him. He's on his own journey. It might be that you two are now ready to part ways. You might be going, or you might want to find out more about what he's genuinely feeling and having deeper conversations about it. That's an invitation you might have. So I think this is a great question that you've offered Stephanie and thank you so much for opening it up to the group. I really appreciate it. Chrissy Yu says, can you give examples of a man who is immature emotionally? Well, okay, great question. So someone who criticizes other I think is immature emotionally. Someone who has contempt for others. Someone who gets defensive quickly. Someone who stonewalls, meaning they avoid dealing with problems. Those are some levels of emotional immaturity. I think people who are overly judgmental, people who overly have resentments towards people, people who constantly feel guilty about their experiences. Those are levels of emotional immaturity or at least a lack of emotional maturity. Emotional maturity is about leaning into, leaning into the difficulties that we face as human beings is our own ego muddies up our thinking. Remember I said earlier how we all view the world through a prism? Okay, so I can look at a prism. I go, oh, look at that beautiful green inside of there. But you can be looking at the prism and go, oh, look at that beautiful blue inside of there. We see the world differently. And so some people view the world from a pessimistic or victim consciousness. And there's other people that view the world through some level of optimism and victor consciousness. And I just happen to be attracted to people who are optimistic and have a optimistic with compassion and common sense and also have victor consciousness, not victim consciousness. Christie, you thank you so much for that question. I hope that helped out. Gorni Cobb says, what do you like to eat for breakfast since I mentioned that? I typically don't have my first meal. I do intermittent fasting so I don't have my first meal for a while. But I had a, yesterday I completely skipped a meal because of what was going on in my day. So I'm rather hungry right now. No food in the house. My girlfriend's out of town. Personal question, what are you and your girlfriend's favorite activities to do other than what favorite foods and drinks? And what are your favorite foods and drinks? Okay, so, I think we're both kind of homebodies at this point in our lives. So one of the things we love doing is binge watching reality TV only because we like to explore the human behavior from it and we have discussions about it. We also watched an interesting show recently called For All Mankind on Apple TV. And we also watch documentaries frequently. One was about the nexium cult. One of our favorite activities is traveled. We literally, so we have three trips planned in the next 60 days. We're going to visit our family for the holidays. We're going to New Year's Eve cruise and then we're gonna do a cruise through the Panama Canal at some point. I don't wanna share the dates. But my point is, I think travel is probably, and then spending time with family and friends. She loves my son and she wants him to come over frequently. He lives just in the building next to us. So, and we like, I like inviting her children over as well. So, and then friends, you know, we do occasionally get together with friends. When I say occasionally, just it's been timing oftentimes is the issue. But, and then we like to go foods. She likes a healthy lifestyle. I tend to have a healthy lifestyle and she bought these Cosmo drinks that we, like their pre-made Cosmo drinks and we usually have a Cosmo once a week, although I'm more of a Baca martini guy. So thank you so much for that question. She's a wine connoisseur, if you will. Not a connoisseur, but she has what the wine she likes. Annie writes, question. I know you mentioned before, but what book do you recommend to find reasons we gravitate towards the wrong person? Even if we know it, how to fix this? Again, the two books I recommend is, bear with me every one, one second. I recommend reading Getting the Love You Want by Harbaugh Hendricks and Helen Hunt and Attached by Amir Levine and Rachel Heller. Take a screenshot right now. Okay, write down these books. And by the way, there's a link below to get a copy of these books. Just click the link in the description. Thank you, Annie. Pam says, I love your morning videos. Makes my Saturday. Thank you so much. Denise says, we're all looking for love. Give us a hug. I'm gonna give you a big gigantic shot at the bear hug if I have your permission. Ah, question. How do you best travel on a two lane street in a relationship without giving more than the other one? Great question. Let's come back to this book again. Folks, I highly recommend reading the book. If the Buddha dated. This is a great blueprint to travel down the road as a two lane street, if the Buddha dated.  It's about mutual exchange. It's about teamwork, you know? I think it's important to develop that, you know, what I think is lacking today in relationships is a level of teamwork.  She usually reminds me, she reminds me of a couple other things. She's always thinking about my best interest. I get up early in the morning, I put on her, I get her ice pack ready for her because she has a sore shoulder and I do that and I make her coffee in the morning. We operate as a team. Folks, you know what's missing today in relationships is couples that operate as a team. Sometimes it's mostly the women giving more to men. But, you know, I was talking to a client recently and she was telling me about her boyfriend who comes over and helps with electronics in the house and helped with gardening and did physical manual labor for her. That's, he was operating as a team. He was operating, in other words, as a team. In other words, as you are like, I want to help your life be better for you. That's what this is all about. That level of trust where the other person's best interest is in your best interest. So, but check out that book. I highly recommend it. Catherine, thank you so much for that question. Oh, Annie just wrote. We are not human beings having a spiritual, we are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience. Pierre, I can't say the name. Folks, take a screenshot of that. Thank you so much. I really appreciate that, Annie. I'm gonna put that up on the screen one more time. We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience. Pierre, I can't pronounce. Oh my God, I gotta ask my son. He knows French, so thank you so much. Let's see. Annie says, quote is from this person, was a French philosopher, paleontologist, Jesuit priest who thought deeply of the meaning of our existence and relationship with the divine. Oh, I love this, I love this, I love this. I need to study that more. Thank you so much. Mary Ann says, question, what led you to believe that we return on earth after death? I believe the same thing until we are pure, that's until we are pure, what's going to keep coming us back to the right light at a learning lesson. So one of the things I've studied folks, and this might be a turn off for many of you who are religious, but I've studied a book. I've done three years studying the book called A Course in Miracles. Look it, you can think this is bullshit, I get it, but what I appreciate about the book is to me is understanding the difference between separateness and forgiveness. Separateness means we are separate from other human beings and separate from a divine consciousness. I call it God, universe, spirit or Gus. When we believe we're separate from that, that's where a lot of our pain exists. In addition that we are separate from other human beings and much like the butterfly effect, what happens when a butterfly flaps his wings in South America causes a hurricane here. It's we're all interconnected. That's my belief system. When my son passed away and I did the psilocybin journeys, I truly believe I had many visitations from him. It's what encouraged me to write the book. He was the impetus of my book, What the Heck Is Self Love Anyway? After he passed away, there's a picture of the back cover with him. Oh, that's the back cover of the book, by the way. Well, I share this with you is for months on end, he was letting me know that he's okay on the other side if that's what it is the other side. And a journey about six, eight months ago, he said, dad, stop bugging me. I'm doing fine where I'm at, stop bugging me. That's the message I got. Could I have made this up in my head? Yeah, it's quite possible. I'm living in my own delusion but we all live in our own illusion and delusion and fragmented world. So what if that's what I believe? I pay my bills on time. I do my best to be an integrity with people. I operate from a premise of doing my best always and being transparent and authentic and vulnerable with those people I love, even my channel here. So everyone's entitled to their own view of the world. That happens to be my view of the world. And it goes against conventional wisdom people, but you know what? Spend time in South America and in India and you might see that, you know what? Here in the United States isn't all that spectacular. It's great, I'm grateful for it, but it's not as spectacular until you've actually experienced other parts of the world. At least that's my invitation for everyone. Thank you so much for your question, Marianne. I appreciate it. Rose, or I'll get to Denise in a question. Rose says, how can a voided female resist the urge to avoid a new relationship? Cher said it best in the movie, Moonstruck. Snap out of it. How can you best do it? A friend of mine once said, love is a risk, but it's still the best game in town. You know, I do believe, by the way, I do believe most humans lack a level of discipline. And so I would encourage you to focus on doing inner work to heal that peace in you that might be struggling and then dive into, don't dive in naively. I don't, you know, I mean, my father used to say, you can put your faith in Allah, but don't forget to tie up your camel. The American version is don't, you can put your faith in God, don't forget to tie up your horse. But do inner healing and then take a risk, but a sensible risk, okay? Rose, thank you so much for that question. Denise writes, I know this is obviously one-sided, but why do your, why do, but why do your best relationships end? They're not a best relation, well, because it experienced all that need to experience and then the person is already for a new experience. That's why it ends, in my opinion. Thank you so much for that question. Bella writes, question with online dating first, and you're pretty unsure, but it's okay. Do you give it a second to see? I always believe, you know, if someone's interested in seeing you a second time and you, by the way, your first, second, or third date, be curious. Be curious. See if you have an emotional connection, sometimes a first date can go lame. So yeah, I'd say be curious, unless you're totally revolted by the person then don't see them again. But yeah, I'm totally encouraging that. Boy, my pit stains are bad. I don't wanna show it to everyone. Ah, let's keep swimming. All right, this will be the last one from Corny Cog. Could you talk about your career navigation in the early adulthood? When did you enter into the insurance industry? Folks, just to give you a little background on my experience. So I grew up in the, I was born at the tail end of Baby Boom, right at the Gen X period. Grew up in the 70s, graduated high school in the 80s. My programming, my programming was simple.  That was my programming. And the job at that time I chose was the insurance industry. That's the one I fell into. And I lived that script perfectly, not having a clue how to be a good husband, not having the clue of who was right for me. And I did meet a very fantastic woman, but we weren't right for each other on a variety of different levels. I was still a child when I met her, emotionally speaking.  This life experience hasn't settled in yet. And during the crash of 2008, I lost my quarter million dollar a year job and I got wiped out in the market crash. Seven figure wipeout. And I found myself living at home with my mother and father in my 40s. Just turned 40. And I was depressed. And online dating was my drug of choice. It was my serial dating was my drug of choice. What I didn't realize was all of this serial dating was preparing me for my now new profession because I had a knack of helping. Really, I wasn't even online dating. I was just making friends online. And a lot of women would ask my advice and opinion. So then I began sharing my opinion about men and then studying relationships. This was over 15 years ago. And I became fascinated with human behavior. And so I immersed myself into so many books, so many workshops, so many trainings that I just started to share my opinion. And people started to pay me to get my opinion. And then I established myself as a coach. That's the trajectory. The insurance business happened my chance and it played well in that point in my life. And at the same time it taught me one of the most fundamental principles I teach in my private coaching is called radical honesty, pre-qualifying your prospects. So my insurance industry experience also prepared me for teaching what I teach in my private coaching. By the way, there's a link right here to get a free discovery call with me to see if working with a coach is right for you. By the way, all the links I recommend below. Join my group, schedule a call with me, follow me on Instagram, check out my book. And my hope is that I provide value through these videos because I get a kick out of doing this. I really do appreciate all the love and kindness and support. But most importantly, I appreciate that you think you feel that this is making a difference in your life. If this is, if my content is making a difference, please write that down in the comments below. Please let me know that I'm making a difference in your life. And my hope is God universe spirit. I set an intention for all those who follow me to find themselves that juicy, delicious relationship where they can do a deep dive into radical honesty with one another, where they can lay their cards on the table, where they have great chemistry with one another, that they communicate in a fun, friendly way with one another in a safe capacity. And they blend their lives together and they share the same values and they can build the deep roots of trust that occurs through social activities, hobbies, mutual interests, spending time with family and friends, traveling together, teamwork, building skills, both in your personal and your professional life, intimacy, both physical and emotional intimacy that leads to either moving in together or getting married. That is my intent for you. For everyone, God universe spirit, I wish that on everyone who follows my work. All right, folks, I think this will be a great place to wrap up today. Thank you all for the love and kindness and I'm gonna send you off.  I'm gonna reach into the camera and give you a hug of love if that's okay. I'm gonna ask you to turn this on a pet, teddy bear or pillow and give Iter them a hug of love because hugs are a great source of love. And let's face it, we could all use more love in our lives. I wanna thank Sunny and Roller Girl. Hey, we haven't seen you in a while, Roller Girl. Annie, Jenny, Margaret, Denise, Catherine, Wanda, Stormy, Corny Cog, Powerachie, Mary Ann, Pretty, everyone, thank you so much. Wishing you a fantastic day. Bye now.