here. Five, four, three, two. Hello and welcome to the Digital Freethought Radio Hour and WOZL Radio 103.9 LPFM right here in Knoxville, Tennessee. We're recording this on Sunday, February 6th, 2022. I'm Larry Rhodes or Doubter Five. And as usual, we have our co-host Wombat on the line with us. Hello Wombat. Hello Wombat. Yes, that is me. Hello me. Yay. And George Brown, two and a half from Brooklyn originally. Now, Tennessee. Welcome. Hi. Hello. And the John Richards from across the pond in England. Welcome, as always. Hello. And Digital Freethought Radio Hour is a top radio show about atheism, free thought, rational thought, humanism, and the sciences. And conversely, we'll also talk about religion, religious faiths, gods, holy books, and superstition. And if you get the feeling that you're the only non-believer in town, then that's very doubtful. You are not. In Knoxville, we have a group of over a thousand of us and we're just a little town in the Bible Belt. So hang in there. You are not alone. We'll tell you more about the atheist society of Knoxville after the mid-show break. Wombat, what are we going to be talking about today? Today we're talking about dietary dogma and the idea that people could be just as skeptical of what they put into their bodies as what they put into their souls should they even be proven to exist. But before we get into the meat and potatoes, I'd like to do a quick check on seeing how everyone's doing. John Richards, it's always good to see a weekly check-in. Still doing interviews, still publishing on Global Atheist News. How have you been? Yeah, I've been fine. Thank you. I've left COVID mark two behind. I'm forging ahead now. Had a great global atheist news and a great free thought hour yesterday. So just go to free thought productions to watch them. Oh, I'm plugging too soon. No, no, no. You can always plug. You're a welcome friend on the show. Though it was interesting that before we started recording, you were talking about how your daughter was learning piano.  Now I got to hear this 46 more times. Or is it sort of like, oh yeah, turn that up. Yeah, we need to get her a new thing. Like how does that work out? Because it tends to be one of those sonorous instruments that you're like, get good at it already. It's like... She's not turning into an earworm yet. It was interesting because I started off, we've got a keyboard. It's an electronic piano, does all the voices, you know that thing. And I started out because I used to, I was taught piano way back. I've forgotten most of it. You taught piano. No, I was taught piano. Got it, got it, got it. As a small boy between about six and eight. But I've, I got stuck then because my piano teacher was recommended to stop doing something. She was overworking and she stopped teaching me. Okay, okay. So, so I got stuck at that level. And then I took up guitar and, and bass. And I ended up in, up until about my late thirties in a band playing and singing. That was great. I loved it. Wow. Oh wait, I loved how you transition to yourself when we, you can't plug you when we're talking about the kid. Yeah, yeah. That was an intro. That was an intro to talking about the kid. I saw your album coming up the other frame. It was like, by the way, I have this new thing I'm selling right now. We call ourselves John Riches in the Rockstones. It's very good. No, no, no, no. Never, never did that. And the disbelievers. How about that? John Riches, one last question. I want to throw this one at you. But is London Bridge a sacrilegious song to learn how to play? Because it tends to be one of the, London Bridge is falling down. Are you filming with the song? Yeah, yeah. Okay. No, no, it's, it's fine. It's an old folk song. Yeah. And London Bridge has fallen down at least twice. I have not been aware of that. Yeah. And, and you've got one of them in Arizona. Yeah. We have a London Bridge in Arizona. Yes, we sold it to you. You dismantled it and took it away block by block and reassembled it in Arizona. Wow. Well, Larry's looking that up. You've also got the Queen Mary too. Okay, not bad. I know the Statue of Liberty came from France. So, hey, it takes the whole community. George Brown, would you mind taking yourself off mute? Give me a catch up on how you've been over the last week. Can I just say? Oh, yeah, go for it, John. I just wanted to say you have to import your history. Very true. George, how you been? I'm trying to figure out what John just meant. I don't want to explain the joke. That's a bad thing. That's bad form, isn't it, right? But anyway, George Brown, how you've been over the last week? Oh, I've been, I've been fine. I've been drinking some Pete's coffee. It takes me, it takes me seven minutes to grind each cup by hand. So, I'm getting a workout grinding the Pete's coffee. And the other thing I'm doing, you may notice me changing headphones during this program. Okay. I am attempting to understand you people better. Okay. And I'm finding, even though I'm an audio expert, connecting to computers, to laptops especially, is so frustrating and confusing that I'm really having to work at it. The only thing you have to do is get the chip in your ear that you get when you get vaccinated, you know? Oh, the other thing is, here in my county, this is the controversy. They've banned Maus, which is a book that I imagine parody is Nazi Germany. No, it doesn't parody Nazi Germany. It's the story of the author's father and the descent into fascism and murdering of Jewish people. I mean, in particular, and various other kinds of people that the Nazis found undesirable as well. So, I was told through like, toy mouth or like, cute mice, like with the aesthetics of almost looking like a children's book. Yeah. Yeah. I've been meaning to read this for over 20 years. And a fellow knocked on my door last week and handed me this copy. So, I just finished reading it. I'm, you know, I think I see what the fuss is all about. It's got some strong language on the very final page. And supposedly, there's a picture of a naked person in this book, and I have not found it. Oh, well, I'm sure people are looking for it. Yeah. The fellow who lent it to me said that he would show me where it is. He dared me to see if I could find it and I haven't been able to.  I want to know, I want to know why you get decent books to live at and I have to put up with this trash. Sure. Sure. Sure. Sure. Sure. Let's keep moving on. Larry, how you been? Oh, fine. I've been losing myself in the in 3D world, the virtual world of Quest 2. Not bad. Yeah. I love this one app called Big Screen. Oh. He said in virtual theaters and watch movies or TV shows or just videos. They also, you can build your own room with a huge screen and invite people in, watch the movies and chat so you can have friends, like from across the ocean, watch sharing like a virtual living room and watching a movie with you. You know, so having to get together. It's awesome. Yeah, keep enjoying it. I can tell you this. Enjoy your Oculus while it continues to work. That's the only thing I'll throw out at that like Facebook known for a lot of things. The integrity of their hardware is still questionable. So enjoy. Enjoy. I am. Oh, I'm having, I'm having some issues, but generally wouldn't connecting with the PC is the main thing. Okay. Okay.  I've been losing myself literally with weight loss since December and I made progress up to today of about 31 pounds since like mid December. And that runs out to an average of about two pounds a day, but I'm not tracking my weight daily. I'm doing it like once a week. I'm trying not to get stressed out on like weights. I'm making it as easy as possible. I'm not on Jenny Craig. I'm not on Weight Watchers. I'm not on Paleo. What is it?   And if you do that, you're guaranteed to lose weight. It's the same premise as making money. Spend less than you make. Yes. Yes. Yes. And so like at the end of the day, it's just an input output thing. And when I saw on YouTube that just lying down and not doing anything burns energy, I was like, what? There's a basal limit of energy that I'm burning. It's like, yeah, know what that number is.  And I'm like, is it that simple? And I've totally did it. And it's like, it's that simple. The fact is though, I've been going to work. And in fact, this is like my first XL shirt that I've worn in four years, five years or something like that. And it's fitting really comfortably. It's not like up on my sleeves and stuff. So I went to work and they're like, Hey, it looks like you're losing weight. What are you doing? I'm like, I'm just eating less than what I'm burning on a daily basis. Like I'm wearing smaller shirts. Right. Right. Right.   Just make sure caloric deficits is being maintained. Like that's that's functionally how it works. And if I eat, if I know in my head, I can eat whatever I want. I'm not under the condition where I'm craving food. So it's like, if I want pizza, I can eat pizza, but just kind of make sure I burn more energy. And the secret is to have a high activity in your life level wise. There was a five year period I was dancing on TV and I was dancing. No, you can't you can't just casually say that and expect us not to to hang on that for bit. You're dancing on TV casually on. Yeah, there was a there was an international show on the Nashville network called club dance. There was a country western show. And if you remember the old American bandstand, they had people that were regulars that would come on there and dance. Yeah, it's like soul train. Right. Right. Exactly. Well, I was I was a regular on club dance for about five years. Wow. I could eat anything I wanted to and maintain a low weight because I was burning so darn many calories. Exactly. Exactly. But people take that almost offensively. Even if you try to explain, I was just a calorie deficit. It's not that keto is necessarily a bad thing. I wasn't a kid either. I was in my 40s. So Larry, I'm trying to transition to the topic being like some people took me saying, no, it's just a calorie deficit. That's how that about that diet with the trademark name at the end of it is working. They're like, no, because this worked for me. I had a personal and true experience with this weight loss system. How dare you try to break it down into scientific terms? That's not how it worked at all. And I was just like, I kind of think it does. And then and and I've had two levels of conversations, one with people who are immediately offended with with any me not immediately adhering to their weight loss program. And if me breaking down to my simple, they're like, well, that's not for me. That doesn't work. It's like, you're doing the exact same thing I'm doing if you're way losing weight. That's how you lose weight. And then the second one is I asked people like in the process of you losing weight, like what changes have you found for you? It's like, oh, I've become way more aware of what's good to eat and what's not good to eat. I become less reliant on the government telling me what's needed to be in. I'm like, wow, you're asking a lot of questions like you must have changed how you think, you know, like health wise, like health wise, spiritual wise, religious wise, like religious wise, like, yeah, I've become even more religious. I'm like, no. If only you had the same amount of skepticism for your diet that you did for your gods. And so what I wanted to do is open up the topic of weight loss. Has anyone seen people be very dogmatic with the way how they lose weight and the idea of what kind of benefits would they get if they had a religion or a diet, if they applied dietary constraints to their religious views as well and thought about like, oh, maybe I should have the same amount of skepticism for what I consume versus what I pray to. John Richards, do you think I might be on an interesting track here? Well, you may be, but I'm just wondering, there's a mystery you could solve because all the waistbands of my underpants are shrinking. What's going on? Yeah, I've been there too. Yeah, I've been there too. Don't sell them. Don't sell them. You never know. You never know. Anyway, I've got plenty of examples of people being dogmatic about various things. It's a pre-election of the theistic mindset, but I can't for the life of me at the moment, just think of any particularly dietary related ones. Okay, that's interesting. So maybe it could just be the circles you in, but yeah, Larry, go for it. Jewish people and pork, you know, and Catholics and fish on Friday. Unleavened bread.  What's that about? It's like my pastor told me not to. I'm like, well, what's going on there? Jesus really likes wine and bread crackers for some reason. It could have been any kind of food, but he chose those two things. It's weird. George Brown, go on ahead. I thought we were doing weight loss though. Sure, sure, sure, but I'm helping you out by throwing you topics. George, what do you got? What do you got? Well, I just wanted to mention that about, I grew up about eight blocks away from where Woody Allen grew up, and then the same general neighborhood as Bernie Sanders. And there was a Jewish shopping street over where Woody Allen lived, and the Chinese restaurant there did a really great business among all the Jewish people who came in to eat pork. Okay. Yeah. Nice. I think pork is pretty good stuff. Pork is pretty good. It's kind of weird that they have renal restrictions that you can't eat pork in a lot of religious fashion. So for dietary loss specifically, I'll bring up a quick thing then. Did they come into the deli's disguised or were they out of the closet when they did it? The answer to that is too long, John. It depends upon which disguise you're talking about. I mean, because we had all the different kinds of Jewish people, including the guys with the big fur coats, the black fur coats in the summertime. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I have a sister that lives in Pakistan, and when she came to visit us for a while, she remembered we went to the grocery store. And the first thing she did was she pulled off products off the store and looked at the back, like where the nutrition facts were. And I thought she was looking at the calories and the protein content, but what she was actually looking for was a symbol on it to denote if that food was actually halal. And there's two concepts in Pakistan for haram and halal, for good food that you can eat religiously and bad food that you can't eat, or food that's deemed improper or unclean for you to consume. And there's a very specific logo she was looking for. Because we were in an American store, and it was like her first time being back. She didn't find any of that even like in the mereditarian section, Asian section, she's like, I don't think I can eat any of this food. And I'm like, what do you mean? Like it's all like there are probably ingredients in the things that do have your logo that come from things that don't have that logo on them. And she's like, I'm I'm strictly supposed to just eat these things because it's been working for me. It's the personal experience that I've had. And I've had a deep and close relationship with this system. And it's like it's almost as if we were talking about her God without actually talking about her God. And if you look at her, she's like 60 pounds soaking wet. She ended up only mostly eating eggs and chicken nuggets, only those two things for the entire time she was with us. John Richards, what's up? Well, the thing about halal is they kill all the animals without stunning them. So they're bled to death. And that's proved to be a big issue with the vegan and vegetarian sector in our society. So there's currently a bill going through parliament to try and prevent this non stunning way of slaughter from happening.  Or in the case of chickens, we do it with carbon dioxide gas, which there's a shortage of at the moment. So we got a problem. How do we stun animals in a way that's acceptable to the Muslim community and to the vegan community, which doesn't want us to kill animals at all?  Let me just finish this point. Then we get straight to John because we did go to KFC and we did get some of that wonder meat, the one that's, you know, synthetically produced from plants and then deep fried and made to look like chicken meat. And she wouldn't even eat that. She wouldn't even feed the fake bacon that we had just so she can try it because she's ingrained in herself that I don't want to even taste food that is like food that is unclean because that's in its own right unclean. And I just felt it's not so much that she's missing out, but I feel like it was so closed off to things that in her own holy sense wouldn't have any purview or perspective on whether or not it was holy or not. Like this is completely a fabrication of a food and not tied to the unclean stuff that she she has sworn herself off to. Why not try it? But I mean, it's just one of those things. George, go ahead. You want to throw in some more stuff? I just wanted to say that there was a company in the American Midwest, a slaughterhouse outfit that is Orthodox Jewish and they have been dragged across the calls about cruelty and their slaughtering method, which I cannot remember what it was, but it sounds pretty grotesque to me when I heard it described. I mean, I think when vegans say that they don't want to eat meat, they can do it on a not a political basis, but on the stance of morality and ethical level and saying, hey, I'm not eating these particular foods. Yes, I'm healthy because I'm eating a non-western diet, really. But I'm also making the choice that I'm not eating food that's caused excess harm to all these additional animals and I get that too. Listen, I totally get the reason why people do like vegan keto and if they do weight watchers, if they take more exercise diet, I get all the principles. What I worry about though is when it starts to extend away from a dietary constraint to more of a lifestyle choice and then dictate conscious moves that aren't even related to food whatsoever and more of like determining what is societally valuable or good or morally ethical or not. And I'm like, oh, whoa, whoa, this is sounding more than just a diet. This is actually sounding like a life philosophy and like, are we are we applying the same levels of skepticism to that as we would to like law or to like God beliefs or anything like that? Or are we giving anything a free pass to get through just because a lot of other people are doing it and it's particularly fashionable and makes you look good because there's a lot of things that could do that that could lead to bad stuff. Larry, do you have a final comment? Not really. There's all kinds of dietary rules out there. Some of them are based in religions, some of them aren't. It's at the mismatch of all kinds of input. Whatever gets you to your desired weight, I think is valid. But I think it all comes down to why you were talking about caloric deficit in total. Basically, that's the science behind it. John.  And similarly, in other parts of the world with other types of religion, but now we can make ersatz, a German word, meat using either plant protein or, you know, lab grown in a pet food dish type of meat. How far away are we going to have to get before they find it acceptable? Right, right. Like if you were to think about it, tribe wise, if you had a tribe that by religion rules said, don't eat other people, and another tribe that was like cannibalism is okay. The one that, you know, forbid cannibalism probably can afford more energy building schools and roads and an economy because there aren't worried about the guy behind them trying to eat them all the time. So there's some, you know, when you think about it, it's not necessarily like religion has a monopoly on not being a cannibal, like you can figure that out even from a completely secular set. But the fact that it was explicitly described in certain books of like, these are the meats that you're allowed to eat, these are meats that you're not allowed to eat was like, okay, cool.  I'll just conclude real quick. The main takeaway is that like, hey, rules have intentions behind them. And when you stray away from those intentions, now you have to ask yourself, what are these additional consequences of these new meanings that I'm giving to him? Larry, what do you think? Oh, I was just going to say that religions are dogma, not only dogmatic, but they're authoritarian. And they're pretty much authoritarian and expect obedience in every facet of life. And it would be amazing or surprising if they didn't also dictate certain foods that you could eat and couldn't eat. And you see that pretty much every religion. Right, right. And I think the intention of religious dogma is authority and obedience. It's not so much like, I really care about you being healthy and losing weight. It's like, no, I want you to listen to me. Authoritarianism. Because I wouldn't have it any other way. Right. You raised an interesting can of worms when you brought up cannibalism, because of course, you could make a strong case for the virtues of cannibalism because eating humans, you know, you're going to get all the nutrition that you need to make a human in the right proportions. Not if you're an American. Maybe not. I thought you were going to say can of fingers. You had the perfect opportunity right there too. But the thing is, thing is, of course, cannibalism was going on right up until the 1960s in the Philippines, somewhere like that. Okay. I don't know if it was religious, but they certainly thought that it was okay to eat their dead. Yeah. And not to get, this is a science issue. So I'll jump into it. But there are these things called prions, which are poorly folded proteins that are only a problem if you need those exact kind of amino acid chains as well. So like you can inherit diseases, in a sense, from protein that's too similar to your protein, because your body season is like, Oh, perfect. I know exactly where to put this. But that thing has a structural problem that can cascade into more problems around your body. If you aren't familiar with this, you may have heard of mad cow disease. It's why we don't eat certain parts of cow because there's enough commonality that can give us problems as well. But yeah, like I can definitely see some meaningful restrictions of like, Hey, don't eat this product, but cow, it can cause you harm, it can make you sick. And that that's not good for you versus a religious point of view of listen to me obey me. And by the way, don't eat this cow. But if you don't eat the cow, it's fine. Just keep obeying me. Yeah. I'll throw one last thing out too. When do you form encephalopathy? It sounds great in that accent, though. It sounds better than a power to say it. Crates filled Yakov disease. You don't want it. Let me. So I'm going to turn your audio levels a bit good lower. All right. So here's here's my other point. We have basically a culture that has a series of gods from all around the world, based on whatever geopolitical persuasion is, you might find yourself nestled into a God belief from birth, right? And as much as we are critical about, you know, whether paleo is the right kind of diet to go or veganism is actually effective or reasonable or vegetarian is the way to go or a weekend vegetarian or intermittent fasting or weight watchers or Jenny Craig. There's so many names.  That's fine. I feel like that's sort of like the atheist perspective on a lot of these things, just breaking it down into the non-fun scientific terms. But for gods, we don't really apply, I think, en masse the same level of skepticism that would afford us a more consistent dietary choices on which God to listen to by virtue of the fact that there's so many different gods to listen to. And if we were to just say like, let's just figure out what works and what doesn't work. Let's just spend one week praying to Vishnu, one week praying to Shiva. And if nothing happens, we'll just switch to the next one until one works. And then we'll be like, okay, you made it to the next level. We'll do it American Idol style. What do you think, John? Mike, wouldn't that be a good way? Certainly would. But another thought was cross my mind because if we're made in God's image, then presumably he has a diet which we should be copying. There you go. What's God's diet? And what are we going to do? Anyway, we're going to get ready for a break soon. I think that's a great point. Larry, go on and take us out. Yep. This is the digital free thought radio hour on WOZL radio 103.9 LP FM right here in Knoxville, Tennessee. And we'll be right back after this short break. Me too. Five, four, three, two. Welcome back to the second half of the digital free thought radio hour. I'm doubter five, and we're on WOZL radio 103.9 LP FM here in Knoxville, Tennessee. Now let's talk about the atheist society of Knoxville for just a moment. ASK was founded in 2002. We're in a 20th year and we have over a thousand members and we have weekly in-person meetings in Knoxville's old city at Barley's Tap Room in Pizzeria. So if you're in the Knoxville area, come by Barley's on Tuesday evenings and see if you can find the group. Look for us inside at the high top tables, usually the loudest and happiest group there. If you'd like to join our Tuesday evening virtual Zuma meeting, email us at askanatheistatknocksvilleatheist.org, or you can send it to let'schatseatgmail.com. You can also find the group on Facebook, meetup.com or just directly to Knoxvilleatheist.org. By the way, if you don't live in Knoxville, you should still go to meet up and do a search for an atheist group in your town. Don't find one. Where do you want to pick up? I want to touch a little bit more on this dietary doctrine and then we can go into some listener comments. I have a comment that I love everyone's feedback on and it's I think the government was lying to us so maybe George can get some kicks out of this. But the idea is there's something called the food pyramid. Did you ever see that growing up as a kid? You have like this pyramid that tells you the proportions of food you're supposed to eat, starting with bread on the bottom or grains and then meat, poultry, and then as you go it up, dairy, and then finally sweets at the very top of the pyramid in that small little triangle. The problem is that if you follow that kind of diet, you're actually going to have some a lot of problems because you're going to fill yourself up with a lot of simple carbohydrates that will make you feel more hungry and not feel as satiated as you want to be.  And I was asking myself, why did the pyramid look like that? And it's because we have lobbies, unfortunately, in America that dictate what the government will say. So groups of companies that have a sway on the overall messaging of these certain things and when they were making the food pyramid, it originally looked like a completely different. It was just a circle saying, these are the great foods to eat. But then the grain company came in and was like, hey, by the way, we make corn. If you say nine times as much corn as you want, we'll give you this much money. And the politician said, oh, that sounds great. I love it. And then dairy came in and was like, I know you're not supposed to drink other animal milk, but how about you put us in there too, and we can make this work out. And it completely skewed the way how I was educated on how to eat growing up. And a lot of the reasons why I was made it easy to lose weight was just an awareness of I was not necessarily being lied to, but I had very bad information that was given to me with an agenda that was not in my best interest. And so I'm wondering, I've learned that there's problems with the Western diet. You don't just eat until you're full. You don't just drink until you're thirsty. You have to eat good food. And I had to figure out what those good foods were. John, do you have a similar issue overseas? Is there a program that tells you what food you're supposed to eat? And is it accurate towards an actual healthy diet? We did. Going back many years, after World War II, we were still on a, what's the word, not a diet, but we were on rations. That's the word. Thank you. Rations right through until about 1953. And we couldn't eat sweets. There was no sugar available. Wow. Okay. And we had a generation of people that grew up that weren't obese because of the foods that were available in their childhood and teenage. And then the American big companies arrived. The first McDonald's opened in, I didn't say that, did I? The first McDogmeat opened in London with his maxi shakes. Have them so much now. And then there's a company which specializes in very sugary cola, which I won't mention the name. But I suspect that those sorts of things have been responsible for an outbreak of obesity in the U.S. of A. And it's coming here too. Right. I think so. Larry, when you were in the Navy, right? Like, was there any sort of food-based sponsors or did the military at least have a program that was, these are the foods you recommend to eat as a sailor? And this is actually better for you to eat than what civilians are eating? Like, was there any guidance in that? There really wasn't a lot of guidance.  And you can't go over to the fast food places. And you're usually out for a couple weeks at a time. So it helps tend to keep your weight down. Of course, when you're in port, a lot of sails have their own apartments. So it was just like going to work every day. So you could definitely become obese that way. But as a young man, you generally stayed active. So the younger ones didn't get very fat. Of course, the lifers tended to that. Definitely. Here's the thing that blows my mind every single time I see it. It's when you see like Olympic athletes, and then there's a banner for Coca-Cola as an ad behind them. And you're like, you said the words. Hey, I can say I'm calling them out. I'm calling out. But it's like, that is not a sponsor of a sports drink. Yet it's like a guy climbing up the mountain and there's like an ad and he reaches in his back and there's a nice ice cold Coca-Cola. I'm like, don't eat drink. He would. He would spit that out. Think about Coca-Cola. Now we've outed it. It's very clever because you feel thirsty. So you want to drink and they offer you a drink which doesn't quench your thirst. In fact, you imbibe more water needing sugar and therefore need another one. That's why that's why you have free refills. Very true. Yeah. And it's a cheap thing to make and charge money for to George Brown. I'm going to shot for you specifically against coffee. How about this coffee? Obviously has caffeine. Obviously, there's a problem. A lot of people that love caffeine. I don't have a problem with drugs in general, right? But I'm saying the idea that we have as a society deemed this, what's the right word to call it? Is it a psychotropic or is it a psychoactive drug to be completely okay? It's like, this is an okay psychoactive drug. You can have it. You can put sugar in it. You can feed it to kids. You can make candy taste after it. It's all good. But but anything else, not okay. I just find that the hypocrisy of it a little bit. Well, I want to get back to your food pyramid. Go for it, George. Because for many years, I have not trusted the food pyramid and I'm aware that politicians get bought by contributions to their campaign funds. Oh, yeah. And you know, and so the prevalence of that food pyramid has made me slightly distrustful of government agencies of all kinds. Because I can't trust the data that they're giving me. And I think it has affected my health. I think so too. I think so too. I think it's affected my health and many others as well. I'll throw this out at you as well. We can't trust, we know the government has lied. We see documents on this about the food pyramid and we know it's accurate, scientifically unsound and fabricated information. And we see the detrimental effects of it. Why can't we as a society apply that same level of skepticism to religion? Because we see in practice detrimental effects of raising kids and very close off dogmas. We see, you know, bigots fall part and parcel out of very conservative points of view, very indoctrinated points of view, or probably the other way forward. And I, well, the reason is, the reason is because there are certain agreed upon subjects which are taboo and other subjects which are not. So, for instance, you know, my religion is cool, but your religion is a cult. Right, right, right, right. It's like my drink. But we were talking about food. Sure, sure. But it's the same thing. It's the same thing. I feel it's the same thing with coffee, it's the same thing with Coca-Cola, same thing with like foods. It's like people have, they're in club and then the out club is not acceptable or anyway. But yeah, I'm sorry. You're making a great point, George. So we got listener comments too? Yes. Let's fill out the rest of the show with some listener comments. We have a couple, I'll go for it, John. Can I just mention all you can eat? Yes. That's not a thing over here. That's not a, you don't have the face? You don't, you don't find that in Europe very much. We've got one restaurant which does all you can eat for lunchtime on a Sundays because that's when they need the business. But apart from that, it isn't a thing. Very interesting. So those smorgasbord? Well, that's different, isn't it? You can pick and choose lots of different types of food and we have the Spanish tapas for example, but it's not all you can eat for a set fee. That's encouraging gluttony. Now you don't have bottomless bowls or anything like that? No. Buffet is a French word. It seems weird that it doesn't exist in Europe though. Buffet exists, but not, you know, unlimited food for a set price. I'm confused. What is a buffet if not that? A buffet is a range of food on a table that you can walk up and take from, but it's not like an all-you-can-eat restaurant where they try and force extra food on you. It's just selection rather than quantity. Okay. Okay. I think I get it. I think I get it. It's very nuanced, but I definitely feel like I get it. All right. So listeners' comments, thank you guys so much for leaving comments. I'm reading comments from my YouTube channel. Let's chat. Feel free to leave a comment on the show. We'll go over it.  And there was some, all three comments, as far as I'm aware, deal with a point that we made regarding, is disciplining the same thing as abuse? And so what the first question we had is, what if parents never knew anything better? This came from Data Straighten Room. What if parents didn't know anything better? And if they raise a kid in a specific culture, maybe they spanked the kid. Is that considered abuse as well? And so we can go on a roundtable on this first question. John Richards, if a parent doesn't know any better and they spanked their kids as a form of instilling discipline, is that child abuse? Yes. Okay.  And ignorance of a good way to behave doesn't excuse you. I actually interview people who were abused as children. And they're very angry, let me tell you. They are campaigning to try and prevent this happening and make very different parents themselves. Larry, vote at you. You also got kids. Yeah, like John said, I have to agree. There were cultures that even abandoned children, if they had too many kids or if they thought the child didn't measure up or maybe a female. I think it was the Spartans that would like to leave them in jars next to the road or something. But yeah, ignorance is no excuse. There's no shown good reason to be violent toward your child. Interesting. In my opinion, it makes us trust you. Okay. George, you have thoughts on this? You also have sons. I do. It's spare the rod and spoiled the child. You have abuse that is sanctioned by large portions of society yet. But what the bottom line of this is, regardless of what the society condones or not, the bottom line is how is the child affected? It's going to be for the rest of the kid's life. So it is abuse even though maybe the whole society agrees. Oh yeah, let's spare the rod and spoil the child. It is still abuse as the child experiences it. Okay. Interesting round table. I don't have children, though I do have pets and I've moved away from spray bottles of water to air cans and I found that to be, they're not wet an hour later and still figuring out, why am I still wet? Because they don't have a long-term memory. But if you spray the air can, they're like, what was that?  It's really good. Yeah, go for it, John. Recommendation to you, Ty. Sure. What's up? I think that small humans make the best pets. Small humans make the best pets. I can tell you this, this is going to get dark very quickly, but I can lose a cat and not go to jail. Yeah, and cats don't generally wail for four hours at a time. Right, right, right, right. They come home potty trained from the kennel. It's great. I'll throw this one a new comment. Thank you, Sandy. Should they be penalized? It's just literally that. So in the event, so to fill this out, in the event that we do realize that it is child abuse to raise your kid religiously, should they be penalized? A parent? And if so, what should be the penalty? We'll throw it up to John Richards first. What do you think? We touched on this last week, didn't we, when we decided that they shouldn't be exposed to religion except under PG guidance, didn't we? So it is okay and your rule to do it if there's parental guidance present. Are we talking about cap corporal punishment? Are we talking about raising? This is raising your child in religion. And the comment is literally just, I mean, should they be penalized? And so I'm imagining that they're referring to if the parent raises their kid in a religious environment and we do condone that as child abuse. What is the penalty for it? And or if we all agree that it's child abuse, what do you think, Larry? Well, I think that if you're caught speeding and you do it a lot, they may send you to a class to explain to you why this isn't a good idea and show you the repercussions and problems with it. So maybe something like that. We're not talking about fines or jail time or anything like that, just showing them that there's a better way. Right. And you're talking about doing that for the parents, not the kids, right? Okay. Okay.  I'm just going to show you what's up. You know, I kind of like also the PG 13 rating that we came up with before.  Don't just be some random kid walking around with this stuff.  I can tell you about a lot of repercussions that you can apply. You can ground them. You can take away their allowance. You can, you know, there are, but it takes a while for those to bed in and to be regarded serious. I can tell you about a headmaster who came and took over a school I was teaching at. And previously we'd had caning. This is going back, you know, almost 50 years when that was the normal thing in most of the Western world. And this new headmaster came in and stood up in the assembly and he said, there will be no more caning. He could have not told them. He kind of just introduced the policy and let them find out over the course of the next several months and years. But he told them. And guess what? Some of the kids had crazy and some of the kids were like, I actually respect that he came out and told us that straight out. It was the naughty ones who were completely unfettered. They wrecked the place in no time at all. I'll tell you this right now. That's not the fault of all the kids that were there, though. That's still like how do I put it? I can't make much of a time machine, but the kids that will destroy a system like that would have done so in some respect, regardless either way. And like the notion that a kid needs to be beaten in to get respect out of is one that I will frequently challenge. Absolutely. They don't need to be broken in. But if they have been broken in, lived under that regime, and then he's taken away. I see what you're saying. He creates a power struggle, something like that. So yeah, maybe there's better ways of doing it. But I think I respect the teacher who's willing to treat me like an adult from the get go, even if that may have a juvenile response. But he stopped the immediate harm and let whatever foul had happened and won't move forward from there. I think it falls right into the next comment, though. Trading Room, what's up, George? What's up? Well, I just want to make a comment that I would wish for the abusers, in other words, the parents in this situation, to somehow be educated. I think that as a society, we need to focus on abusive behavior of people who are in charge in general because there is so much of it. And now how we are going to educate the people is another story. I have no answer about how to go about it, how to get their attention. Sure. Also, I feel like you can't necessarily take away the stick and then expect completed obedience immediately afterwards. It needs to be supplicated with a less harmful system. So if he just says, I'm not going to punish you anymore and walks away and expect that to resolve things without some sort of secondary system for helping obedience, there's a problem. Though I do feel like overall between the systems of continuing harm and not continuing harm, obviously not continuing harm is the improvement. Well, we've seen this happen certainly over my lifetime as a nation because coming out of World War II, there was a lot of military released on the public and they had military rules in their heads. They'd been institutionalized and how to behave. And the rest of society at that time was very deferential. It was, yes, sir, how I would like me to jump, sir. But that has all gone away. And now we have a disrespectful society that challenges authority all the time, which is much better for progress and for change. Yes. Yeah. Okay. So like I said, it was falling right into our next comment right here from Dallas Trading Room again. Like he says, I am a 62 year old man and I was actually abused by my father growing up in the sense that he would often whip my butt with a leather belt for anything I did that he interpreted as disobedience. Why did he act like that? Because he was very neurotic. And in those days, there was the notion that a child had to be broken in, even in schools. There was, I mean, this wasn't everywhere, but there were teachers who would spank a kid's palm with a ruler or placed them to stand in the corner of a classroom. No dunce hats, guys. But as far as religion in my country, especially in the communist days, this is a common story to tell. And so feeding right into the story that you're saying, John, like the idea of like corporal punishment being done in school, I went to a school in Georgia that had that as a system. When I found out about it, I thought it was the most bizarre concept I've ever heard of. Like there was the guy who's paid to slap kids butts. Yeah, yeah. Like and then in 2020 terms, it was just like, how is that not a lawsuit every single time? It just seems very bizarre. It's like, how do you even apply for a job like that? That's great. It's Victorian. But it came out of the Victorian culture of Queen Victoria's population. Really? Okay. Okay. But yeah, like the idea of okay, this system, is it in fact abuse? And I would say yes. And if it's direct towards kids, I'd say it's child abuse, even in the event that the person's ignorant of it. And it's not so much a question of do this or without it. Everything's going to chaos. It's more of like stop abusing and try to find a better system to instill obedience, right? Because it doesn't have to be one way or the other. There's there's much room for compromise here. And I feel like while I'm on a position to tell anyone else how to raise their kid, I can at least speak for the kids on the behalf and saying they don't like getting beaten and you wouldn't like it either if you were a child in the similar situation. So we have to take care of ourselves and your child's our part of you, right? And in the sense stretching this out. So as we get to our closing terms, there is the sense of taking care of yourself through your family, but also yourself through just what you consume and eat on a regular basis, right? And I would say if you're in America and you're listening to this, the Western diet is a well known bad thing to be on in a sense. And it's not an example of like, hey, stop eating Twiggy, stop eating donuts, all that pizza and stuff like that. If you have a craving and you can go for it, do it, but do so in moderation. And if you maintain a deficit afterwards, you will lose weight. You will be healthy, or you could maintain the weight that you're at right now if you're happy with where you're at. But don't eat to excess or to satiation on bad food that America is known for because it's not good for you. That would be my final points. George, what's up? Well, the problem that I have is that who are we going to trust for dietary advice? Good question. Because there are so many quacks out there who will tell us whatever, you know, and lack of regulation for, let's say, the natural food industry or the vitamin business. I mean, it's a wild west show. Who do I trust? Boy, I'd have no answer for this. I would also throw this out to the exact same way how we deal with manners of child rearing or science.  Nutritionists follow scientific protocols and science changes, right? And so we are constantly learning better ways of how to keep ourselves healthy. And so it's not so much a matter of who do you listen to, but what's a good way for me to know true things from false things, right? And let me work. And the best way you do that is by asking questions and being skeptical of everything, not just things that you want to be true and give those a free pass. And if you question everything, and if you're skeptical of even the things that you are adhering to and because you're willing to change it for better information, I guarantee you will fall to the same objective truth that everyone else is leading towards. It's just a question of constantly being willing to question everything. And it's not a fact that it's a bad thing to do. It's actually a very healthy thing to do. So start with the healthy mindset of questioning and being skeptical first. And then I guarantee you, if you follow that pathway, you'll get to the truth. Guaranteed. You don't have to take my word for it, but don't question what I say too. Question even that. Let's see. Larry, if you got final words on the subject for today's show. Oh, you want to mute my front? I think I pretty much covered what I wanted to say about it. Okay, cool. John Richards, plug me and final words. Free Thought Productions. That's my channel. And it's where I've not only been doing global Atheist news for over a year and Free Thought Hour for more than two years in various forms, but I've also started recently doing Thought for the Day debunked. Yay. Very cool. So this is a weekly thing now too? Or is it a separate series of videos? It's almost a daily thing because the BBC churns them out every day except Sunday. And so they give me plenty of things to debunk. I'm having fun. Good for you. Good for you, man. BBC, what are you doing? What are you doing, though? Or you're like the lone soul superhero on top of that castle behind me being like, not today. Debunked man. Something like that. We'll figure it out anyway. Okay. Larry, feel free to close out the show. Doesn't do on radio. Just in that gesture. It's fine. It's fine. Well, my content can be found at digitalfreethought.com. Be sure to click on the blog button for our radio show archives, Atheist songs and many articles on the subject of atheism. I do have a book out there called Atheism, What's It All About, available on Amazon. I have a YouTube channel. Just search for Doubter Five or Larry Rhodes. If you have any questions for the show, you can send them to AskAnAtheist at KnoxvilleAtheist.org or let'schatasee at gmail.com and we'll answer them on future shows. If you're having trouble leaving your religious beliefs behind, you can get help at recoveringfromreligion.org. If you're watching this on YouTube, be sure to like and subscribe. Thank you for joining us at the Digital Free Thought Radio Hour. Remember, you can find this show on Apple iTunes, Pocket Cast, Amazon and other podcasts everywhere. Just search for Digital Free Thought Radio Hour.  The time to worry about it is when they prove that heavens and hells and souls are real. Until then, don't sweat it. Enjoy your life and we'll see you next week. Say bye everybody. Bye everybody.


Hello, today we're going to talk about simplified Kafka connection management for Node.js. I'm Michael Dawson, active member of the Node community, and the Node.js lead for Red Hat and IBM. So, the first question is, what do I need to connect to Kafka? So, I end up needing one or more URLs that point me to the Kafka cluster. I need information to tell me what kind of connection am I making, I'm using SSL or the different options about how I'm going to connect. And then I'm going to need some sort of user ID and some sort of user secret. And of course, that user ID and user secret, I need to make sure that I handle that so that it's not disclosed to people that I don't want to, because I want to make sure, of course, that only the right people can actually connect to my Kafka cluster. What does that actually look like? This is an example of some of the information that you can use to connect to one of Red Hat's Kafka connections. In this case, it's telling me that I'm using the SSL mechanism as type planes. That tells me how I'm connecting. The client ID and client secret are the information that let me connect. And then the Bootstrap server is the URLs that actually let me connect to the server itself. Now, for node, there's two leading Kafka clients. And unlike some other languages, each of the packages has their own APIs and their own way of connecting. So if you look, I have the two examples of the code to connect with KafkaJS and NodeRD Kafka. You can use, in this case, I've used the same environment variables, but the way you pass them to the client actually ends up being different. And that turns out to be, if I wanted to change from one client to the other, that's a little bit more work than I need to do. And if I'm worrying about how I get the credentials and everything into the environment, that can cause some extra complications. In terms of choosing between the clients, if you want some recommendations or suggestions, you can take a look at the reference, the NodeJS reference architecture. There's some discussions with clients of why you might want to use one or the other. Now, in that example code I showed, we were configuring through the environment, and that was setting some environment variables. That's not necessarily the most secure thing, because if I actually go, for example, if I go into an OpenShift console, I can actually fairly easily get to and inspect the environment variables, assuming I have access to that environment. But often more people than you would think have access to a particular environment in terms of being able to dump the environment, or even if, say, you're generating core dumps that you want to investigate a problem and you want to share that. So generally, it's best practice to try and avoid using environment variables, if you can. There are some things like the .n mpm package that help make you do it, to add, inject things into the environment of the running Node process versus the overall environment that make it a little bit better. But really we'd like to avoid that if we can. The good thing is, for Kubernetes, people have already thought about this, not just for Kafka, but for all sorts of different cases, where really what you'd like to do is to map this information into and make it available to containers running in a Kubernetes environment in a way that's not just injecting them as environment variables. And what's been standardized through this spec, Kubernetes spec, the K8S service binding spec, is to map them in through a set of directories and files that you can read once they're mapped into a container. They basically are mapped under a service binding route and that one environment variable is added to your environment. So that's how you figure out where the top of the tree is. And then you can go in there and get the information, which you can see before things like the password, the bootstrap servers, the passwords, the provider, sasal mechanism and all that kind of information. Now, that is good, but now you've got to write some code that's going to read those files, pull all the information together, figure out the service bindings. Why would I want to have to do that for every application that I deploy? The answer is you don't. And the good news is, is we've put together this module called KOOP service bindings. And it does actually a number of things in addition to reading those files. So it will find if they are service bindings that have been mapped in to the environment based on the service bindings route environment variable. It'll then read that data in, but as I showed you before, because there's different clients, you're actually going to want that data in a different format to pay on the client you're using. So it actually also is aware of the different clients. It knows the KafkaJS client, it knows the RJF client, and it knows how to convert the data that's read from those service binding files into the format which is specific to that library that you want to use it for. And so that makes it a lot easier to use service bindings. So in fact, you end up with code that looks something like this, which basically, you know, you require the module, you can say get binding. Of course, the air handling always tends to be for the work, but in this case, I've admitted that. And in this case, I'm just, you know, asking for the service bindings for the Kafka client, for Kafka client, because we do think this will be useful outside of Kafka. I'm telling it, my client is KafkaJS, and it gives me back an object that I can use directly with the KafkaJS APIs to create the instances and pass the credentials. Similarly, you could write the exact same code with the NodeRD Kafka client, just tell it that you're using the NodeRD Kafka client and it would pass you back an object with things in the right format there. So let's see this in action. I've pre-created in a OpenShift cluster, which is available, you can actually use it. There's a sandbox where you can get an OpenShift cluster that you can use without having to set everything up. I've pre-done that, and I've connected my Kafka instance. There's also a Kafka service that you can get and connect into your applications. And so I've mapped that into my namespace there, which you can see as the NodeJS Kafka instance. I also pre-deployed an application, which uses code similar to what I showed you before, and I'll give you links to that example later. But if we look at that, oops, look at there, I look at the logs, we'll see that currently it's basically throwing errors. And that's throwing errors because the code says if there's service bindings, use those service bindings. Otherwise, I'm going to use a default Kafka instance, which has been installed locally, and if it's there, it'll work. Otherwise, it can't connect it, and we get these error messages. And what I really wanted to show you is that the cool thing about the service bindings is not only that there's that standard way of doing it, but that there's the infrastructure in Kubernetes environments that basically lets you make it so you don't have to necessarily manage that yourself. You don't have to set those environment variables. I've mapped in that Kafka instance to my environment, and that can be done through some applying some YAML, and you can have, say, the administrators do that for you. And then all I need to do is I need to drag, oops, let's see if I can do that, drag a link, which basically says create a binding connector, and that will connect my application to that Kafka instance. And having done that, the service binding, which is installed in the environment, will automatically map those credentials in. The code, because it's using Kube service bindings, will automatically recognize that it's there, pick it up, convert it into the format that the code needs for the particular client. And now, if I connect in, and I look at the logs for that application, I can see that it's connected to the backend Kubernetes, sorry, Kafka client, and is happily publishing away to the topic that was created. So what I think is really cool about this is, as a developer, I can connect to Kafka, I write my code, I don't even really need to know about what the format and how the credentials are going to be given to me, or the format they need to be for my particular client. And I can write that code, I can check it into GitHub repo because there's nothing sensitive there. And then on the deployment side, I can simply drag a line across in the topology to basically get that connection, and I could look at this and say, okay, well, let's take a look at what that service binding is. I can see that it's like my producer backend application has been connected to my NodeJS Kafka. So really, it's simplified what I have to do to get connected to a Kafka connection. Get a Kafka connection connected to the backend server with NodeJS. So I don't want to take too much of your time today, so I'm going to leave it at that, but I'm going to leave you with some useful links if you want to dive deeper. We have the reactive example that I was using where you can go and see we have a producer-consumer and it connects to Kafka. There's the links to TriKafka where you can get a Kafka instance that you can use. The NodeJS reference architecture, which I mentioned where if you want to read about some of the different modules and stuff that our teams have had success with, you can go about read that. There's a great blog post where you can find a little bit more detail on connecting applications with service bindings. And it'll show you doing those kinds of connections. Of course, you can do them also by applying YAMLs and from the command line and all that versus UI. So it actually shows you how to do some of that, which is pretty cool as well. The link to the COOP service bindings module itself, which you might want to take a look at. And then finally, if you just want to know what we're up to at Red Hat in terms of NodeJS and all the different things that were sort of the same guides that we're putting together, you can go to the NodeJS topics on developers.redhat.com. So thank you very much for your time and we hope to see you in another installment of one of our videos.


Once you have done so, you can go ahead and load your coax machine guns and stand by for a test fire.


From Seattle, Washington, it's theCUBE, covering KubeCon and CloudNativeCon North America 2018. Brought to you by Red Hat, the CloudNative Computing Foundation and its ecosystem partners. Everyone, welcome back to theCUBE's exclusive coverage here live in Seattle for KubeCon and CloudNativeCon 2018. I'm John Furrier, Stu Miniman, breaking down all the content and the analysis, opinion, getting all the data, sharing that with you. Three days of wall-to-wall coverage, we're in day three winding down. Great event, our next guest is one of the stars of the show here, original Kubernetes pioneer, Joe Bate, also the co-founder of Heptio, recently sold to VMware in acquisition. Startup, only what, two years old? Yeah, about two years. How about two years, welcome back to theCUBE, great to see you. Thanks for having me. Google, great work you've done with Craig, with pioneering Kubernetes, Heptio startup. Yeah, yeah. Got taken off the table as you guys are ramping up. Congratulations. Thank you so much. It's been a little bit of a wild ride, I can tell you that. So first question for you is, I don't want to get into a little VMware thing, we're going to hit that up at VMworld next year, but as you look at the ecosystem of Kubernetes, I mean you got to be looking at this saying, hey we knew this was going to be big, you guys been running it with Borg and where that came from in the DNA. The magic wand almost was kind of passed out, and we're like, hey this happened. It's kind of happening in a big way. What's your reaction? How do you feel on an emotional level? What's the vibe going on in your mind right now? I mean I look at this and it blows my mind. I mean I think we knew that we had a possibility with Kubernetes to do something big, we could feel it. I don't think we ever expected this to be honest. The thing though that I think surprises me and it was both about building a startup and building a company, but also seeing the community grow is that every time you hire a new person to a startup, every time you have somebody join the community and start contributing, it's like another cylinder in the engine. And it really starts taking it in directions that you had no idea it was going to go into. And so I look around here and this is a product of a community, this is not a product of any single company, any single set of folks. I mean you start things snowballing and interesting things happen, but it really is a group effort. And it's so hard to do a startup. I've done a lot of startups, we've done a lot of interviews with startups. It's hard. You've got to start a company, you got to do all that legal work then you got to get the momentum and it's capped off by the validation certainly by VMware who announced heavily at the VM world. Pat Gelsinger said Kubernetes is the dial tone. And I'm like okay, I guess we were talking earlier it's the Ethernet, I've called it the TCP IP. So all the analogies come to this enabling kind of capability and that's where we see a lot of the value. Where do you see the opportunities for the ecosystem to innovate? I mean you're getting some clear visibility around the stability, but now value is starting to get created. What's your thoughts on value creation? Where are some areas that are right? Well I think a couple of things. I think we're at the point now where it's about how do we bring these technologies to new people, to new audiences, to folks who might not have heard about it, don't quite get it, how do we make this stuff more relevant to them? So we're moving out of this technology focus phase into a phase that's focused on solution and value that's delivered. And this isn't always about innovation and building on top, some of it is about different ways to do it and also just having these ideas just permeate, right? And as technologists we build on incredibly complicated technology. When you look at say something like AWS, right? If you were to approach that brand new without any idea of the history there it'd be incredibly intimidating, right? But it's been around long enough, it's grown organically that everybody's like, oh yeah I totally understand all that stuff, right? It just takes time sometimes for these technologies to become understood, to become part of the fabric of what people assume the technical skill set is. And I think that's a big part of what we're seeing starting to happen now too. Joe, I want to get your viewpoint. When I think about the last 10, 15 years, the whole discussion of hybrid cloud, multi-cloud, portability, even I think about things from a VMware context or from a cloud computing context. Seems like we had a lot of false starts and false expectations about, we listed a Pat Gelsinger and Andy Jassy and others talk about the three laws of the cloud. We're not changing physics. And Kubernetes is super important for multi-cloud but portability was kind of thrown out there. I want to get you help us tease out what it is, what it isn't and how do you see multi-cloud today? Yeah, so I mean, first on the topic of false starts, you know, there's this popular narrative that, oh, it's going to be this, now this is the hot thing, now it's this. And the reality is that mainframes are still around, right? Technologies don't disappear. It's an additive type of thing. So it's not like, say, for example, Kubernetes or serverless or, you know, or machine learning, right? It's like, it's all of those things working together. And I think that's, I think if you look in that way, it doesn't feel like a false start. It just seems like we're adding more different techniques, more technologies onto the pile. In terms of, you know, where I see this stuff going, I think multi-cloud and compatibility do go hand in hand. From the very start, we never wanted to pretend that Kubernetes was going to be this magic layer that was going to make differences between different environments disappear. What we did want to do, though, is actually find the commonalities and minimize the extra differences that didn't need to be there, right? And so a lot of times when I talk to customers, I don't say, hey, don't use this special, you know, service in this cloud. I don't tell them that. What I do say, though, is if you are going to start using those things, do it in an eyes-open type of way. Understand the trade-offs. Understand why you're doing it versus just willy-nilly adopting technologies because they look nice and shiny, and that's what you want to do, right? So I think whether you're adopting Kubernetes, whether you're adopting a specific cloud technology, whether you're moving to cloud versus actually building, you know, automatable infrastructure on-prem, make sure that you're thoughtful about how you enter those types of decisions. The feedback we hear from people here in theCUBE this weekend and other places as well is pick a problem to solve. Don't boil over the ocean. Get in there, use Kubernetes for what you think you can nail a problem on, iterate from there. That's the common theme. Now, as you guys pivot over to VMWare, they've been investing a lot in their strategy, obviously with AWS. RDS is now on VMWare. They look at Kubernetes as a great opportunity to bridge on-premises and cloud. So it's clear, we can see why they like it. Explain for the folks watching who are fans of you and Craig and Heptio, what's next for you guys? You join VMWare, you just close the deal.  You're in the business unit side. Just share some of the specifics that you can on what's going to happen next. Yeah, I think it's too early for me to speak on sort of a grand strategy across VMWare. I think I'm still mapping things out and understanding things. What I can talk about is the way that we were thinking about the market from Heptio's point of view and every indication that I've seen that this is actually very, very compatible for VMWare. A lot of the keynotes that you saw here at KubeCon show that adoption curve where we're in the early phase versus the early majority, that type of thing. And I think there's some truth to that. But I also think that there's an axi to that that actually isn't shown up there around the different personas that you see adopt different technologies inside of the enterprise organization. And so, the strength of somebody like VMWare and I think the early adopters for things like Kubernetes are that operator persona. And we're seeing an evolution of that persona as it starts to come to grips with the world of the cloud. We're moving from a place where things are ticket-based, human-intensive to how do we move to API-driven, policy-driven types of things. And so that's obviously where the cloud is but how do we take those learnings? How do we take those lessons and actually apply those things on-prem? And so our goal from Heptio's point of view and I think it's incredibly well aligned with VMWare and an enormous opportunity is taking the VMWare faithful, the folks who do go to VMworld that have built careers on that solution. How do we help them move their career forward, move their positioning forward in a way that doesn't eliminate their jobs but helps them actually be smart in a modern cloud, world where cloud is actually part of the landscape. We had Aparna on from Google and Aparna from your Google days and she made a comment about these new personas, new opportunities, new jobs that are opening up based on Kubernetes. Okay, great, we see some of that. And then we then rift on the idea that Kubernetes also is an uplift for existing roles, system architect, network guy, server guy. So this is, and then the VMWare operator that have been working virtual machines, this is a lift for them. Talk about what specifically is going to get them jazzed up is that the policy knobs on Kubernetes, what's going to really appeal to people below Kubernetes and what's going to appeal to the developers above Kubernetes? Well, I mean for centralized IT within an organization, cloud has been a challenge, right? If, you know, and I'm not thinking of a specific customer but it's not, you know, it's not insane to think about something like a developer who wants to write an app, they have to file a ticket, it can take anywhere from two weeks to three months to get stuff provisioned, right? And they're sitting there twiddling their thumbs waiting to actually get that stuff ready. Meanwhile, they can take their credit card, go to a cloud, get a machine up and running within 30 seconds and get their app shipped. So while they're waiting on that ticket, they can get that app shipped and then they dare their manager to deny the credit card charge when it comes due, right? That is a challenge for centralized IT which oftentimes has not had any competition. Now all of a sudden they find themselves in a situation where they're competing with cloud for the hearts and minds of their own customers for their developers. And different organizations have reacted to this in different ways. Some of them had said, you know, we're just going to explode out IT and actually say, you know, different business units, you own your own destiny there. But depending on the enterprise, depending on the goals, depending on their requirements around regulatory needs, around policy, around cost controls, around mobility of developer skills across the organization, that may or may not work for them. And so for me, the bridge forward for the centralized IT is really one of giving them the power tool so that they can actually serve their customers better in a world where cloud exists. Yeah, their job, that's their job to serve the business. I mean, like the bar has been raised, right? And so we want to help them meet that challenge. That's awesome. Yeah, Joe, I want to get your thoughts on this growing ecosystem. I said in our open this morning, we've been looking for the last five years or so, where is that independent cloud computing show and sitting here with 8,000 people, another 2,000 people in the hallways are on the wait list and things like that, it's here. And there's all of these projects, it's multiple communities come together. How does it feel that Kubernetes, was it kind of the first domino to help tip something broader with cloud native? I mean, it feels really good to be honest. I think one of the things that we saw Heptio as and I think VMware is actually in a great position also is to be a neutral party that really is on the side of customers as they enter this complex world where they're dancing with elephants that are the big cloud providers. And I think that there's an enormous appetite for customers to actually have trusted partners in that world. Now with respect to the conference, I think what I love doing is I love being on the floor here, I love talking to people, I love going to the session tracks. That's where I think the heart of this conference is. Some of the contributor community days that happen on Monday that don't get a lot of coverage. I mean, the big headlines are one thing, but there really is I think an undercurrent of community that's happening in this conference that is really something pretty special. I think that's a great point and at least what I've seen, right, those contributors, the Envoy group, tomorrow there's the operators group. This is not a monolithic community, it's not like, look, I've been in VMworld for years. It was about virtualization and primarily a single product from a single company and everything that wrapped around it. This is not a vendor doing it. There's all of these, I talk to the people that all they care about is helm. I talk about, there's all of these different pieces and many of them tie into what was going on in Kubernetes, but there's just so much diversity and it's a common ground for everybody to work together. This is one of the things that I think has been interesting about the CNCF is that there is no, you know, there is an idea that we want to create a set of projects that work well together, but there also is a realization that, you know, there is no one way to skin the cat. There is no one way to solve a problem. And so there is room for projects to disagree. There's rooms for projects to experiment. There is room for folks to try and find their audience and be successful. That's the modern upgrade in my mind to not for, not going against the open source ethos, but also innovating with it. You're balancing commercial, so you just, I think they've applied this upstream concept called CNCF where the downstream benefits for commercialization, you can still do the open source community thing while having an impact downstream to IT and just regular developers. And I think this is the trend that we see in enterprise when we talk to customers, we talk to interview people. IT has been outsourced for decades and now they're asked to be a competitive advantage.  And it's a new, it's a new reset. Oh yeah, for sure. And not throwing away networks, they're not throwing away compute and storage. They're going to change it. And I think this is really real, tailwind is, do you agree with that? Or what's your thoughts? The way I like to think about it is that, and I'm using company names here as an example, but I think there is this race between Tesla learning how to become a car company versus say like Ford or GM learning how to become a software company.  And I think there is not a CEO or CIO or board out there that doesn't realize that the way for us to be relevant in the future is to turn software into not just a cost center and something we deal with, but something that becomes a fundamental advantage and driver of our business. Every industry, media, software. Oh yeah. We're a software company that happens to do media with theCUBE. Yeah, and it's totally right. Any industry, right? This is why Amazon's getting into grocery stores. Yeah. Right? It's integration. This is a completely new horizontal dynamic with a little bit of specialism with machine learning at the Apple. We're moving to a software defined world. For sure. Joe, better great to have your commentary here in theCUBE. Thanks for sharing and congratulations on the acquisition. It's a super outcome. The numbers floating out there. It's pretty large. Good deal. We have no comment. Open source. Open source business models are changing, but the value is still the same. Those who create the value can extract it. That's the ethos of open source. Of course theCUBE as well. Thanks for watching. Stay with us for more coverage after this short break.


Hello and welcome to this session. In this session we discuss the final question which is evaluate the limit. Limit x tends to 0, 6 to the power x minus 3 to the power x minus 2 to the power x plus 1. This will upon x square. Before moving on to the solution, let's discuss one special limit which says that limit x tends to 0, a to the power x minus 1 upon x is equal to log a to the base e. This is the key idea that we would use in this question. Let's proceed with the solution now. We are supposed to find the limit. Limit x times to 0, 6 to the power x minus 3 to the power x minus 2 to the power x plus 1. And this will upon x square. Now we can write this whole to the power x minus 3 to the power x minus 2 to the power x plus 1. And this will upon x. We have limit x tends to 0 into 2 to the power x minus 3 to the power x minus 2 to the power x plus 1. And this will upon x square. Then we have limit x tends to 0. Now we will return these two terms. So we have 3 to the power x into minus 1 the whole. And this will upon x square. Or you can say we have limit x tends to 0 3 to the power x minus 1 the whole into 2 to the power x minus 1 the whole. This will upon x square which could also be written as limit x tends to 0 upon x. In this idea we know that limit x tends to 0 a to the power x minus 1 upon x is equal to non a to the base e. So using this result we can have that this is equal to log 3 to the base e into log 2 to the base is equal to log 3 into log 2. That is the required limit which is limit x tends to 0 3 to the power x minus 2 to the power x plus 1. This will upon x square is equal to log 3 into log 2. This is the solution of this question.