Well, it's still the breakfast and plus TV Africa and we're looking at a fast major conversation. Today's World Mental Health Day and it's a day that's been mapped out. It's an annual event every year. Octobar the tent is meant to create awareness about mental health around the world and mobilize efforts to support those experiencing mental health issues. A oherwydd, o'r anioedd anolion, sy'n 2013, y pethau'r Mhenthal Held 2022 fel yw'r anodd Rhywun Hywyddiadol, yn hyfrifio'r anodd Held neu'r anodd hynny, yw'r anodd hynny'n hyfrifio hynny, yn ymgyrch yn hynny'n hyfrifio hynny'n hynny, ymgyrch yn hyfrifio hynny'n hyfrifio hynny, ond mae'n gyflwyngau yn y pethau hynny, Yn hyn mae'n gilydd ar isio'r ysgolennu, ym iawn... Thanks for joining us this morning. So quickly, there's been a lot of conversation about mental health and every other time some people would make statement about, this is my mental health issue, it's a mental health concern, what exactly is mental health? Mental health is a person's emotional, psychological and social well-being So when a person is able to function adequately in the different aspects of their life. So how do we know that the person is functioning adequately? So when a person is able to be productive, if a person is able to socialise properly, if a person is able to monitor their stressors adequately, and not necessarily just snap based on emotions. So one can say that this person is mentally fit or healthy. So you're looking at the conversation now. Some persons, according to the WHO, that's the World Health Organization, there's been a lot of reports saying that one in six working age adults are estimated to have a mental disorder and globally 12 million working days are lost every year on the account of depression. Would you like to share your thoughts on the statistics or this revelation from the WHO? Yes, so depression is one of the most common mental health disorders around the world. And in Nigeria as well, a lot of people have depression, but then because depression is not something that you can see just from a person's face, a person can go into depression and then they are able to function, but then on the inside they are suffering. Depression can make the bits in so many different ways. So yes, a lot of people are suffering from depression and anxiety because depression and anxiety go hand in hand and it's the most common mental health disorder. Do you care to explain depression and the anxiety and how that actually functions? Okay, so depression is loss of interest. Depression is loss of motivation. Depression is constant worry of the future but not being able to have the energy to take action, like work on new problem areas and how anxiety comes into that is when a person is worried about their future but then they are not able to work on it, they get more anxious because you can't do anything because you are depressed about it. And a lot of people are going through this but they don't necessarily know that they are going through this. You just find yourself, you are no longer interested. You find yourself withdrawn, you no longer want to go out to events or socialise with family members or see your friends anymore. And sometimes there can be a source as to maybe somebody is having financial struggles and then you just see them slowly deteriorating. They are not hanging out with people. You can't take action to do your daily task or it's slower for you. You don't have any motivation and all of that. So that's what depression comes in. So every other time we talk about mental health and mental health disorder there's always the focus on depression. Is depression the only mental health disorder that we have? There's a lot of mental health problems. Like I said, anxiety also, there are different types of anxiety. Somebody might have post-traumatic stress disorder. That's an anxiety type of anxiety. There's ADHD, there's attention deficit hyperactive disorder. So any person is too restless and they are always hyper. They have inattention. So there's also schizophrenia. So there are different kinds of mental health disorders. I think in Nigeria there might be like an ignorance to the types of disorders and how it affects people everywhere in the world, not just abroad, it affects people in Nigeria also. So yes, there are different types of mental health disorders. So I like to pay attention to the theme for 2022 mental health concern and what have you. And he says that make mental health for all a global parity. So it brings us to the crux of the conversation of whether Nigeria as a country is paying attention to mental health. Do you think that we're paying attention to mental health issues? I think there has been some form of improvement over the years but then I think there's a lot of ignorance still. At the workplace, your colleague might be struggling but you might not necessarily know. So there's so many different things that affect a person's mental health. Work stress, traffic and all of that in Nigeria for one. But then I don't think that we are there yet in terms of are we paying enough attention to people's mental health, even children get affected by mental health as well. So I don't think we are there yet but then there's been significant improvement over the years. OK, so because on this particular day I think it's very significant and I'm sure that you want to agree with me that it's important for us to talk about how we can savage the situation, what we can do to improve what we haven't been doing. I'd like you to talk about what we haven't been doing as a country, as individuals and difference fair. OK, at the country I think it's a situation where the government will probably need to invest more into the health care centre so that people can have accessible mental health treatment. As individuals it's about you taking care of yourself, being aware of yourself, self-awareness, being able to regulate, being able to speak to a professional if you need to. I think everybody needs to speak to a professional at some point. You never know what you're going to speak to somebody, also looking after yourself, going for exercises, trying to socialise the family members because those can be ways of coping when you're dealing with stress all in your life. So, I mean, as brilliant as that sounds, but I don't think that that's very realistic. Really? Yes, because if you live in Nigeria and if you live in this culture, you want to agree with me that that's really not the case for a lot of peasants. We live in a culture where the world will be, we're very conserved as a conserved society. Over time, you have the issue of personality playing a major role where people would want to preserve themselves and not just be out there with whatever you have. So, the culture of silence has constantly dominated this particular system. I really don't know about all the cultures, but I'll speak for the culture we're in. So, people don't like to talk for several reasons. Others will not want to feel like, hey, I'm vulnerable or putting on my problem there because we're talking about all of the stress and all the peasants don't want to talk about it because they feel like they probably might just be nagging and they might just be whining and sounding very weak. So, culture of silence is a very big issue if you talk about mental health because you have said it's okay to speak to professionals. How many professionals do we have? We even have a culture where we can actually say, hey, I have to go visit a psychologist or go visit someone and talk about whatever it is. So, how do we get through all of this? I think you'll be surprised at the amounts of people that are seeing therapists nowadays. I understand that in Nigeria, like you said, we are very conservative. However, I think seeing a therapist is in this confidentiality. A therapist wouldn't share what you shared with him or her to anybody else except they have your permission. Also, I'm not asking people to share with just anybody. You have people that are safe people because it's not everybody that can handle when you are talking about something traumatic or something difficult. You're being vulnerable. So, having safe people is very important. So, that's the answer to that. All right, so moving forward now, I'd like us to also talk about what we can do on a larger scale. Yes, I know that you've talked about having the hospitals and also having centres where people can actually visit. But looking at the cost of it, I know a lot of people would say that having to visit a psychologist is not cheap. So, for those that you have, we're not also talking about the stigma so every time we talk about mental health, there's also a stigmatisation around it and people will think that maybe when you're on the streets and you're very careless, you're not able to coordinate. But people will think that if I say that I'm going to be visiting a psychologist, someone might think that I'm crazy, that I'm mad. We don't use that word. No, but these are the languages. The perception. So how do we fight against this perception? Does hindring people going out to seek for help? I think so, creating more awareness and then making people aware that it's not just people that have difficult issues that need to see a therapist and then also being aware that you can't control what people think about you so worrying about what somebody else is going to say because you're going to see a therapist. The benefit is in your own life, not the other person's life so if you're able to see a therapist for your own benefit then why not do that, regardless of what people are going to say on the stigmatisation. But then I think so, the stigmatisation, it's a difficult one to shake because there's always going to be that perception. There's something really wrong with this person but then there's always a solution for things so even if you're going to the toughest times there's always going to be a solution. So let's talk about what individuals can actually do on this particular day now to help themselves. I think so what people can do is, you can research, research, the internet is very... But not everyone has access to the internet. As much as this sounds very good and okay. If you look at the country, we understand that society is divided towards the haves and the haves not. And so you can expect everyone to be at the same position. There are a lot of persons right now as we speak who don't have access to us and who cannot afford to have or enjoy this conversation and gain the knowledge and all that's been put out here this morning. So that's also a big issue. So how do we reach out to this category of persons? I think so as organisations or mental health facilities creating more awareness, going out to talk to people, going to orphanage homes, going to places where people don't necessarily have help and then providing maybe a discounted treatment for them is beneficial so they have the awareness and then they can seek if they need help. But then on the other side, if you have access to these things, doing your own research, I think just even searching for mental health facilities in Lagos now you have a different range of facilities that you can go to. There's so many sites that point you to different therapists as well. So I think there are options. It's just if you look right, you find where you're looking for. So what are the causes? If we talk about mental health and the fact that some people are not stable, you have different issues, what would you say is the cause of mental health issues? It's the cause of mental health issues. I think childhood trauma, things that happen in your childhood because there are lots of things that happen in your childhood. What kind of childhood trauma? So it could be anything. It could be from people not your parents not giving you enough attention. It could be from seeing your parents fight every day. It could be from teachers mistreating your school. It could be from bullying. So there are different causes of mental health disorders or issues. So how do we prevent it? I think, like I said, creating awareness. I think people being more mindful of how they treat other people and how their behaviour is affecting the next person. And then parents also being aware that you're raising people and then they are seeing what you're doing also important. So people being more self-aware, being able to manage their emotions, being able to self-regulate by themselves. So you're able to understand, OK, I'm making a mistake or I'm doing this and it might affect the next person in any negative way. But you cited an example of family setting, family scenario, where children could actually have, at the end of the day, once upon a time were all children, you were a child. There was a child. And we're still children even though we're not adults now. The question is at what point do people understand that experiences and actions could actually lead to this kind of negative effect on the people around them, especially as children. And this would have a long time impact. So at that point is a foundational issue. You say that it could be caused from trauma. It could be as a child. It could also be as an adult. So how do we all of us manage it as a child, as a parent, as a guardian? What do we need to do? I think self-awareness is very important. And then forgiveness also plays a role in all of this because to be able to deal with some of the traumas that you have to learn to forgive. I think as parents it's, like I said, it's very important for you to be aware of yourself and how your cousin and impact on your child or whoever is around you. Because as infants, children's personalities are developing. Your temperaments are developing. So if a child is around a parent that is not necessarily giving them attention, the child might feel like they have a problem because their parents don't necessarily want to be around them. So parents just need to be more aware, individual needs to be more aware and deal with their own traumas before you start families, before you get into relationships because when you are not in a good place mentally, it can affect your relationship with everybody. It could be your husband, it could be your children. So as an individual, you need to pay attention to yourself. Look after yourself. Look after what you are thinking about. Am I thinking negatively all the time? Do I have a positive outlook? Or am I thinking negatively? And if you are thinking negatively, that affects your behaviour and your attitude eventually. So just being aware of yourself, your emotions. So let's bring it back to our current reality. I mean, we're talking about Nigeria. If you look at it, almost every other time that you turn on, the social media is there, you turn to the left, there's a report of a young man who's brutalised his wife or a young man whose mother, his son or daughter or woman was actually done something very nasty and not morally right. Even with the law, it doesn't sit well. You hear of the inflation rates, you look at the current reality. There's so much that's going on. And so how do people manage their mental health in the midst of negativity and all of the happenings that will be going on? I think so. There's always going to be stressors. I think what I encourage people to do is focus on when you can't control other people. You can't control the... That sounds like... It's very simplistic but the truth is that a lot of our solutions are very simple but people don't necessarily think that that would be the solution because sometimes the problem is so big but then I think the solution is so small but the truth is that you can't control other people. You can only control what you're thinking about. So if I'm letting the stressors of life affect me, how I see myself and how I see the world in general is going to be negative. If I'm looking at it negatively, so you need to be very aware of what you're thinking. It's very important because, like I said, if you're thinking negatively, it affects how you're thinking about things, it affects your attitude and your behaviour. Then you find yourself snapping at shots on the road but then if you don't let things get to you, you have your positive outlook on life. It's about choice. It's about you choosing, really. So being aware and then choosing, okay, regardless of what's happening around me, I choose to be happy, I choose to see the light at the end of the tunnel. So that goes a long way to a very critical, critical situation because it sounds very pretty when you say it as you're saying it, but let's even look at someone who's not... We're looking at a very critical situation. How does a man or a woman who... I mean, we're talking about family setting now. They are not able to provide the next... They're not sure where the meal will be coming from, a loss of job and all of that and then they have a family indicator for. How can they still maintain a positive outlook? How did they even come to this point where they understand that they were supposed to be self-aware, were supposed to understand that it's our choice? Someone is hungry. I think obviously, if you do not grow up knowing that it would be difficult to adapt to that as an adult, but you need to learn... So the thing is to learn how to problem solve also so that you're not... Because of the stressors, you don't say, okay, life is bad.  You have to keep moving. That's the thing about life. You don't give up.  I choose to be happy and I choose to keep making the effort and trying and trying. I think so when a person stops and gives up, that's when the depression can't really kick in or whatever it meant to... So the last one, because we've been told to wrap up now, some people say that mental health disorder issues have led to suicide, which is like the peak of it. Do you think that that's the case? I think so. When a person is suicidal, their brain is not necessarily functioning in the right way because they've tried so many things and it might not have worked, but then, yes, it's possible to come into sight as a result of like this. Well, thank you so much. Barra Weaver, we have to go at this point in time. We appreciate your presence at this morning. Thank you very much. We have been looking at the issue of mental health. It's World Mental Health Day and we have been talking about the fact that, as a country, have we paid attention to the issue of mental health as our country, as a government, as individuals and what can we do on this particular day? Thank you. Once again, Barra Weaver. She is a clinical psychologist. Olive Prime, psychological services. Thank you for being with us. We'll take a break now. When we return, we'll be looking at all theft and pipeline fandalism. Stay with us.


All right, we just got the thumbs up. Are y'all ready for OpenStack? Woo-hoo. Who thinks they're ready? Obviously, if you thought you were ready, you wouldn't be here, right? One person's ready. Sweet. So my name is Nikki Acosta. I'm a Cloud Evangelist. I spent some time a few years at Rackspace, just as OpenStack was being born. Scott came and joined the team as well. Shortly thereafter, we left to a little startup named MetaCloud. We were there for a whopping three months before we were acquired by Cisco. But if you've been in the OpenStack community for a while, you might have heard of us and we're not scary people, so you can always say hi. You're only allowed to tweet good pictures of me, by the way. Don't do that double chin shot. It's terrible. It happens all the time. Do you want to introduce yourself? Well, she did a fantastic job of mostly introducing me. These days at Cisco, director of our market strategy, and so that means I get to spend a lot of time talking to customers and prospective customers and partners with Nikki around the world. So we tried to consolidate what we've learned over the past nearly five years in this space into a talk that we call Are You Ready for OpenStack? We hope you enjoy it. Yeah, I work on that too. So being at MetaCloud, we worked with a lot of web companies that were born on the web, used cloud from the get-go, and now that we're at Cisco, we work with a lot of companies in the enterprise space. And the conversations that you have with stars versus enterprise obviously are vastly different. And so the intent of this presentation was to boil down the key points of conversation and the things that we cover and the objections that we ever come and try to help people get in the mindset of being able to get to a point where they can use cloud correctly. So that was the sort of reasoning behind it. We're going to talk a lot in the context of private cloud. We're also going to talk in the context of this being for the enterprise. So without further ado, we'll start off with some statistics. Spend outside of IT is at 38%. So you think about IT departments in large enterprises, they used to have all their spend there and now they've got bring your own device and they've loosened up a little bit, but that's a big number for IT. IT is losing control over what's happening in the information space within their own enterprises. So that's just something to think about. And that came from Gartner Symposium. 30% of IT spend is on private cloud. That's a huge number, gigantic number. And that's an increasing number we heard from Al Sadowski yesterday in the Ask the Analyst session. And here's the most staggering. The private cloud failure rate is 95%. And there are a lot of reasons why that is, but the two biggest are going to be a failure to change the operational model, a combination of doing too little and failure to change the funding model. So a lot of people kind of still getting their heads around, okay, I'm going to get this private cloud. What do I do with it? How do I operate it? How do I make it work within my enterprise? So let's start with, there's kind of two parts to this. There's the technical aspect, but then there's very much an important piece is the cultural aspect of open stack readiness. So let's start with the technical chops. And those of you, maybe in the US, maybe in Canada, have you guys heard of Jeff Foxworthy? The guy who did, you might be a redneck if. So it's kind of along those styles. So if you're using public cloud, you might be ready for open stack. And the idea here is, we kind of looked at all the customers we've spoken to and tried to put this list together. So if you're using public cloud, Amazon, open stack cloud providers around the world, very likely you've already adopted the tools, you've adopted the mindset, you've adopted the architectures for your applications. That said, we do see plenty of people that just treat it as VMs that they can get on demand and still do it the old way. I call it kind of virtualization on cloud. So this is a usually statement, not a guarantee statement, but if you're adopting public cloud and you're doing it at scale or you're doing anything like that, we see a lot of customers that come to us that started at Amazon and now have moved some or all of their workload back. So if you're using public cloud, you might be ready for open stack. If your apps and your data speak rest. Who speaks rest? Anyone? Two people. Two people or maybe three, four. All right. So if your apps and your data speak rest and look, this is no big surprise. If you've already API enabled the way all your apps and your data components talk to each other, very good chance you're gonna be ready for open stack. This is about distributing. This is about microservices. This is about all the things that separate all your components so that you can properly distribute them, scale them, deploy them and manage them and patch them and upgrade them. This is a path to get there. It's not the be all and end all. Anything to add to that? No. Wow, all right. If your apps need resources, not hardware. You might be ready for open stack. Pet versus cattle. Pet versus cattle. All right. So if your apps need resources, if your apps need resources, not hardware. What do I mean by that? Well, if we look back 10, 20, 30 years in IT, it was always I would either have some hardware that was very specific in my data center and I would say, all right, well I'm gonna make my app work on that or I was gonna build applications, your by platforms and then be really, really specific to IT about exactly what I needed. I need this model number. I need this exact switch. I need this exact configuration. This many Gs of network, right? I need all this stuff. And so in cloud, when you start to think that way properly, you start thinking about the resources those collections of hardware provide to you through your cloud. What are the capabilities I have there as opposed to the actual hardware? So if you're thinking about it in terms of resources, not hardware, you might be ready for open stack. Who thinks about it in terms of resources? Six people. Who thinks about it in terms of hardware? Everyone else. If you want automation, but not virtualization. Say it with me. You might be ready for open stack. All right. So the idea here, it's day three. I'm gonna try to have a little fun. The idea here is that there are plenty of people we talk to that when they think about cloud, they think, hey, this is a replacement for my virtualization stack or maybe I had what I call first gen private cloud where I took virtualization and I just added some self service to it. And so we try to get people to think further, right? The whole idea behind cloud is what you do with it, not what it is built with. Open stack's an amazing set of tools and projects that you can turn into cloud capabilities. But if you're not taking advantage of that, if it's truly just virtualization to you with a shiny layer on top, I would argue why use open stack? Just use virtualization, right? Don't put yourself through the overhead if you're not gonna actually take advantage of it. One of the ways you take advantage of it is by automating, heavily, heavily automating all aspects of your processes so that you can move faster. Docker, Docker, Docker, Docker, Docker, Docker, Docker. It wouldn't be a talk at the open stack summit or any other conference in this industry if we didn't talk about containers. Nikki added a little branding there with the Z. If you're doing containerized things, Docker, Rocket, Kubernetes, you pick your favorite buzzword, Magnum. If you're doing anything container related and you're already thinking about how do I take these little pieces and move them around and deploy them and scale them and connect them and automate them, very likely might be ready for open stack. Again, it kind of goes back to the previous slide. If you're thinking about it still as the container is just a replacement for my virtualization, maybe you don't need open stack. Maybe it's not the right thing for you. Maybe you just need a place to put your containers and all these technologies work great without open stack as well. But if you're thinking about it, I'm automating it, I'm treating it as resources, I'm doing all these things. As these things start to come together, more and more of a chance you might be ready for open stack. And if you're curious about containers, little shameless plug here. I did an OS pod. I run a podcast with a guy named Jeff Dickey from Redapt. We sat down on Monday with Adrian Otto, the PTL for Magnum, and I asked him like the very basic level, okay, explain that to me in easy terms. And he did a really good job. It's about a 30 minute podcast. So if you're curious about that, check it out on OpenStackPod. We have a Twitter handle as well. If you're automating all the things, all the things. All the things. You might be ready for open stack. So we've talked about automation, we've talked about containerization, we've talked about that. Many people just think about automation and we did a DevOps in the enterprise panel yesterday that also got recorded. All these things get recorded so you can find it on the YouTubes afterwards. But one of the questions I asked panelists were in the early days of DevOps, before it was even called DevOps in many cases, it was about automating your infrastructure, your configuration management on your boxes, on your VMs, then getting your infrastructure actually stood up. So here's my stack and I'm gonna define it. I'm gonna have a couple of database servers and some middle tiers and some top. Deploy that for me. Now we're seeing for the past couple of years this real trend to do it at the application layer. Automate your testing, automate all the things. So if this is the model you're moving towards, open stack might be a great solution for you. You can also automate against bare metal, you can automate against public cloud, you can automate against lots of things clearly. But if this is the mindset you're in, if this is where you're headed, you might be ready for open stack. And there may be instances where open stack may not be ready in general. And I think one good example of that is absolutely the Neutron project. I mean there's, depending on the vendor that you choose and how you're implementing Neutron, if you're implementing Neutron, that's one space that I think is still highly variable in terms of enterprise use cases. Just because enterprises come with a lot of networking expertise and old ways of managing things. And so that's one area that I think open stack is making it easier to consume those APIs and to get the expected results. But that might be kind of something that you may hold off on and until you get really good at automation with testing applications and other things is then start to look and get familiar with Neutron and just SDN in general. Yeah, I mean the value of Neutron, SDN really comes from once you automate all the things. When you can deploy an environment to development, test, QA, production all the way through your life cycle that feels exactly the same. And depending on who's your underlying hardware provider, like if it's Cisco, you can actually deploy the same hardware configuration in all those environments with code that you've automated, that becomes really powerful. But until you're automating it, it's almost impossible to get to be the same. And so that's where automation really comes into play. The power of the integrations that open stack has, the power of Neutron, the power of all the things start to come together for you. Automation's the key and it's clearly one of the most hyped things. You can't go into a single session without hearing about automation and DevOps, but it really is kind of the linchpin that ties a lot of this together. If your apps handle failure. You might be ready for open stack. Netflix, we've been hearing the story for many, many, many years, but I think they were one of the first named case studies out there where they said, not only does our app handle failure, when I say app, I don't just mean the piece that streams.  And the reason they're able to do that is because they built into their applications the capability to know when things go down. One of the questions we get probably most frequently is, well, today my hardware or my virtualization layer or some other piece of infrastructure handles my failures. My apps don't do that. I rely on the infrastructure. Well, that app might not be ready for open stack. That app might not be ready for cloud. That app might not be ready for automation. It's about picking the right apps or being in the right mindset to say, I recognize that my apps don't do these things today and putting them in open stack is actually going to take me back if you're not just in terms of how resilient they might be, not because open stacks prone to failure, but because your app was not written to be aware. It relies on the hardware, it relies on the virtualization layer that are now extracted from you, right? And so if you're building apps that handle failure themselves, assuming all your hardware is ephemeral and will just go away at some point, you might be ready for open stack. So now we're going to shift, now that we've talked about sort of the technical aspects, we're going to shift and talk about the cultural aspects. And over the last few days, this is something that I think we've all been hearing about quite a bit. We saw the stat earlier about the number of private clouds that fail, and a lot of it is just due to the fact that the processes aren't in place, the operational model is not in place to make it successful. So, yeah, sure. So we'll switch sides here. And if it seems like this is a really polished talk that we've given a thousand times, that's because we just finished these slides about an hour ago. And that's not our SVP in the back, so moving on. Pay no attention to the man in the suit. So automating all the things is very much a technology and culture shift. And what I mean by that is you can adopt open stack, you can have APIs, you can have all of the self-service access that you can possibly dream of. But if you don't have the tools in place around the applications and how you architect those applications and test those applications and deploy those applications, then it's pretty much all for nothing. Part of the beauty of cloud and being able to move faster is in the automation. And it's very much, it's very hard to take traditional teams that have been working with traditional infrastructure on the network and the storage and the compute side and expect them to just kind of know exactly what to do when you give them this cloud to use. And so a lot of times we'll see teams, the most successful teams that we've worked with, they usually start with a project in mind and then target a cloud with that application in mind versus the other way, which is IT goes, builds a cloud and says, hey guys, we have this cloud we want you to use. Here you go, you can take it and run with it. If your goal is fast, then you might be ready for open stack. It's really, really, really difficult to put a price on agility. It's one of those intangible things that you say, okay, well, cloud might make us go faster, but if it makes us go faster, we can get features out to our customers faster, we can scale faster, like what's the actual cost of that? And it's kind of a crystal ball, right? You can't just say, oh, it'll help us be more agile and that's gonna save us X percent. With our customers that start out, either moving workloads or writing, something that they have moved from virtualization or from bare metal over to cloud, they always come back and they tell us how much they're saving or how much more efficient they are, but it's very hard to get that up front. And so we find a lot of customers that we talk to when we're talking to them about agility and their cost driver or their main driver is cost, there's a little bit of kind of a bad lens which to look at cloud. Like if you're looking at cloud as a way to just move faster and get software out faster in the hopes that you're not gonna fall behind, okay, that's good. But if you're looking at purely as a cost saver, may not always be cheaper. In fact, it might be more expensive, but hopefully the idea is you're doing a lot more with it. And one of our favorite quotes was actually from Chris Launey from Disney who was on stage, I wanna say it, the Atlanta summit a few summits ago and he was talking about Disney's relationship with OpenStack and how they've been on this journey for a while and worked with the MetaCloud team. And he said that if you can give your developers enough fast, right, it's not about good, fast or cheap anymore, you give them enough fast, they'll make their own good and cheap. And for them it was all about how fast can we go? They were really good fit early for OpenStack and have been very successful. You could do this one, this is a good one. If the thought of a run book makes you ill. Yes, if the thought of a run book makes you ill, you might be ready for OpenStack. And what I mean by that is that traditional enterprise application management, data management, systems management typically has a run book. You name your servers, it's the old pets and cattle analogy. You take care of all the processes and there's really very often not a lot of automation or if there is automation, you've documented that automation in a run book along with the steps to do it. And so if you're still thinking in this mindset, this is not how you move fast, right? There's a fine line between documenting how I manage my systems and actually documenting the steps to manage them, right? And one is something you can do in an automated way that's documented. The other one is just a mindset of human process and that's not how organizations move fast, that's not how you take advantage of cloud or OpenStack. And so I would argue if that's how you need to run your business, either for regulatory reasons or because you just haven't evolved the culture of your organizations, you might want to consider how much value you're going to get out of OpenStack. And if you'll be one of those stats on that first slide that's not the 5% we were successful, right? If opening a ticket to get resources sounds crazy. You might be ready for OpenStack. So we were talking to a prospective customer a couple of weeks ago and I think our jaws hit the floor a little bit. We were talking about how provisioning and self-service access and setting quotas and all the great things that you get with OpenStack and their question was, well, how do I integrate that into my ticket request system? And I'm like, wow, you're missing the point. That's the whole point of cloud. That's the reason why your developers are using Amazon or another public cloud and you don't know about it is because they don't want to wait to get what they need to do their jobs. So that's the mindset. If you're thinking, oh, well, I'll have my developers log in and they can get the request and then we'll process the request. If you want to do that on a tenant basis, great. But the whole point of cloud is to move fast to use the APIs. And if you're having to submit a ticket to get a virtual machine, then there's probably a deeper issue and that's probably a trust issue more than anything else. If your developers are involved. You might be ready for OpenStack. We talk to a lot of data center teams and IT teams. And it's interesting the questions that IT teams will ask you versus the questions that developers will ask you or application teams will ask you. And we have found that the most successful deployments that happen for our customers are when those teams are in the same room making the decision together. If we're talking to a data center team, they're concerned about the hardware that it's on and the networking components. And they might have some questions about the OpenStack bits and how the storage is configured. But when you're talking to application teams, their needs are so much different than the IT teams. And so if you're really going to build a cloud, which for all intents and purposes is for developers, then you should have your developers involved in your decision making process. Because if you don't and you turn this into an IT PEP project and you build a cloud hoping that somebody's going to use it, then you might fail. There might be that request to have a ticket that you have to enter before you can get access to resources. And so if your developers involve in that decision making process early on, you can get a lot more of the requirements out of the way, and you can come to a solution that I think both sides will be happy with. And for us, we deliver OpenStack as a private cloud solution in your data center as a service. It's a very different kind of model from a lot of the other OpenStack offers that are out there. And for us, our whole thing is we deliver a public cloud experience to your developers privately. So we have to make sure we're checking the boxes with the IT teams. And that is who Cisco traditionally has sold to. So that's where we have our relationships. But as soon as those boxes get checked, yep, this will fit well in our data center, this works. The next conversation is awesome. Let's talk to your developers. Let's make sure that the capabilities this thing is going to provide are the experience they're looking for, are the features they're looking for, can them automate, can let them do all the pieces that they're looking to do that we talked about earlier. It's so critical. If your training budgets have increased, you might be ready for OpenStack. So one thing that we find quite often, as well as we talked to some companies, is that they have that if we build it, they will come. Kind of talked about that a little bit earlier. If you don't have an inkling of what your current skills are and how you're going to get those skills up to speed to operate in a cloud model, then you're going to fail at private cloud. If you're not familiar with automation tools, if you're not familiar with agile development, if IT and developers aren't talking to each other, and both of them are getting the training that they need to make the project successful, it's going to fail. And so we have spent a lot of time, after implementation, training our customers to know what to expect from the API calls, to know what to expect as far as the monitoring that can happen, and what happens when you architect an application and hardware fails, for example. More so than that, the configuration management tooling, you have to have that. If you don't have that skill in-house, it's going to be very, very, very difficult for you to find that skill set. Because that skill set is incredibly high in demand right now, and it's expensive to get. And so we have found a lot of companies that have actually taken the training, they've asked for the training budget, they've taken their teams, they've put them in a room for a week or more, and given them all the training on all the tools that they're going to need. And then they give them time, it's kind of expected, they give them time to kind of play around with these tools and get familiar with them. Without those tools, your cloud is not going to work properly. And to be clear, we're not talking about open stack training. This isn't how to build or run or architect your cloud. This is how to build the apps that will go on the cloud. Because the reason private clouds fail is because no one uses them the way they expected to. And they don't have the training. So as you're picking your vendors and who you're going to work with and which data centers you're going to put this in and what apps you're going to target in parallel, start training your teams on the modern DevOps tools, the automation, change your processes, change the way you audit your applications. All of that training for all the different teams involved is what will make your private cloud successful, your open stack deployment successful in your organizations. A few more slides and then we'll take questions. So get your questions ready. What have we learned? What have we learned? What have we learned? Your mindset matters way more than your platform. Yeah, we used to show a slide that was the LEGO Death Star. If you've ever seen this thing, we've given it away at some conferences, like 7,000 pieces. Most of them are curved, which is really cool, not too many curved LEGOs. And that's what we as IT have been buying for a very long time, are these kind of very put together platforms. Cloud is not that, open stack is not that. It's more a collection of LEGOs that you can do anything with and they're all rectangle for the most part. You can build anything you want. And so that mindset of how do we give our people those building blocks? How do we give them the freedom? How do we give them the training? How do we let them automate? How do we do all these things? That's what's gonna make cloud successful for you and hopefully in turn, that cloud is an open stack powered cloud. But the what it's built with, what version of open stack am I running? How exactly is Nova configured? We've spent all week talking about this as a community here. All of that, you just put it aside until you figure out all the things we talked about that would make you ready for open stack. Because if you can't figure that stuff out, none of the technical bits are gonna matter. And that's the mindset over platform. So take off your developer's handcuffs. No, this is all you. No, please. It's a mind shift that again, web companies get, startups get. These are very small teams that have to move fast and have to scale fast. They let their developers, they enable them to build great things. They enable them to respond to customer demands. We had a customer who was able to roll out a new feature in an hour and a half. Like you don't get to do that if there's so much process baked in in between that, that it takes a week or eight weeks to get the resources that you need to be able to build that function. And so there's a big focus lately on developer productivity. This is where productivity is balanced with take the handcuffs off. You hire smart people for a reason. Trust them, set some guardrails, but trust them. And Adrian from Netflix, who many of you have probably heard speak over the years. He's since left and now he spends his time talking to CIOs and other people and they always say, you know, you built such amazing stuff but Netflix, I don't have those kinds of developers. Like how do you find those people? And he's like, well, actually I found them. They were working for you and I hired them away from you and I got out of their way and they built amazing stuff for me, right? And that's the whole idea. Take off their handcuffs and they'll do cool things for you. That was a Monctoberfest. Last year. Which Monctoberfest is a fantastic conference if you haven't been there, put on by the Red Monk team. Be ready to trade process for speed. Yeah, so that goes back to the run books. That goes back to all the human steps involved in the ticketing system, right? So we're kind of summarizing the things that we've talked about here and that you have to decide. Like everyone talks about how they want to move faster with cloud and innovate faster and do all these things but they're not willing to actually get rid of the 20 years of IT SCAR tissue process that are in the way. And so when we say take off the handcuffs, most of the way you will be able to take off the handcuffs is by taking like 25 steps back from how you run IT and just flat out getting rid of a bunch of process that doesn't make sense anymore. If you can automate, if you can put great QA and testing into a button instead of a six month human process, right? If you can do so much of that, architect your network with the click of a button now with SDN and things like Neutron, do you need all those processes? Do they even make sense anymore, right? Are they from the 80s? Like let's really decide as a company if speed is important to trade off this process and that's how you get there.  How many people represent vendors in the audience versus like users? That's awesome by the way. It wasn't too many summits to go, I would have asked that and all the hands would have gone up and now it's just a few hands. We get a lot of RFPs come into us for cloud, for OpenStack, for data center transformation, all of these types of RFPs and almost none of the things we've talked about in this presentation are in there, right? The requests to make sure they can accomplish all the things we've talked about are nowhere to be seen and I have a habit of when I respond to RFPs to add those things in there and check the boxes because at least then they'll think about them, right?  Doesn't matter if you pick OpenStack or anything else in the world, I happen to be biased again towards OpenStack but just putting out an RFP isn't gonna change your culture, that's the hard part, that's the journey. Lighting up a cloud, we do it in two weeks from order to production, like that's the easy part, it's the culture that's hard. Your developers aren't looking for self-service, they're looking for cloud. So when we talk to larger companies especially about what they're looking for, again they're focused on a lot of different things, namely they've been hearing that their developers are spending money in a public cloud and they want a way to be able to have those people self-serve their access to resources. So we get developers that love the aspect of self-service but when they go to get this cloud maybe there's not APIs, maybe those APIs are restricted, maybe something's hidden and that's not a good way to operate. I would say at this point we have enough know-how and you've seen enough topics at the OpenStack Summit to know that it's not so much about OpenStack but what people are actually doing with OpenStack and the value of what cloud can provide is the value is coming higher and higher up the stack. And here's an example of that. I did a couple of summits ago, for a few summits in a row I did an OpenStack jobs report and this is from indeed.com, Simply Hired was the other one I pulled from and OpenStack jobs from two years ago have increased, the number of listings have increased by 221%. That is a huge amount of jobs that are available, that are empty right now because there's not enough expertise to go around. You think that's great, you think it's grown fast, awesome. Look what it is for DevOps. DevOps in OpenStack were kind of born at the same time, right? This whole idea of DevOps was basically came around when cloud became available. And so you see the growth for OpenStack expertise but now you're starting to see the demand for DevOps expertise. Not, how are you building a cloud? What are you doing with your cloud? But what are you doing on top of your cloud? What about the apps that you're delivering? How are you automating? These are the factors that are going to make your cloud successful and it's also going to be the factor that drives revenue at the end of the day. One last one for you, there's also Docker containers, because you know, containers. So you're seeing a huge, huge, huge. And I specifically put Docker containers because if you just put Docker, apparently you get like all kinds of port jobs for like seaports and stuff. So I had to put Docker containers on there but you're seeing kind of an explosion that too. And so while OpenStack, there is steady and increasing growth, really what people want to do with it is becoming more important. And that's for any cloud platform, public, private, what have you, the value is kind of moving up the stack. And so in closing, it's not so much are you ready for OpenStack but are you ready with what you can do with OpenStack? It's culture, it is the technology, but it's also figuring out how to bring teams together, how to start thinking differently, how to be innovative without slowing down your progress and other parts of the business. And that's the important part is getting it all to work together and really having executive leadership sponsorship too to make this successful. A lot of people will see the cloud spend go up and they're like, what value are we getting out of this? And if you're not measuring that, the budget's pulled for those types of projects as well. Anything in closing? Questions? No questions, none? It's after lunch, somebody's gotta have a question. Yes, sir. Question.  That actually seems like a pretty high bar and it feels like not a lot of people would truly be ready for OpenStack. Do you see that and where do you suggest people start? Repeat the question? Yeah, so the question for the recording and everyone else in the room, the list seems like a pretty high bar. There were a bunch of things on the list, many of which most of you probably couldn't check all of them off and that's okay. I think that if there's a few key things on there, prepared to change the process around how you think about IT, prepared to start automating, prepared to focus on fast over control and process, I think those are the key things.  And by the old thing, I just mean the way we run IT. And so if you can check off a few of those, you're definitely on the right path. But get the executive support you need to start changing the entire picture of how you look at this to be successful long-term. Yeah, I talked to eBay also on the podcast. They were nominated for the Super User Award. And I said, man, y'all have been at this OpenStack thing for a long time but where on earth did you get the skills that you needed to be able to now have hundreds of thousands of virtual machines and cores running in OpenStack?  And so they brought in all these grads and he said the grads that we hired three years ago, even two years ago are now our rock star engineers. And it's because they didn't come in with all of this pre-existing programming. It's almost like you have to forget some of what you know and in a lot of ways start fresh. And it's not easy to do and it's not cheap to do, but I mean, it's gonna be really hard to find OpenStack expertise. And so we're starting to see a lot of companies really start taking the time to ask for the budgets and invest in training for the employees. And that's coming through Chef and Puppet and some other OpenStack vendors that provide training on not just how to operate the platform because there's plenty of those, but how to properly architect applications on top of OpenStack. Other questions? Yes ma'am. So how do you balance compliance and standards and certification type obligations with moving fast? It's a balance that there's certainly plenty of good examples of companies that are required to do those things executing well, whether it's something like PCI, whether it's big pharma, banks, but there's plenty of examples of people being successful both with cloud and OpenStack. You have to pick where you start, right? And so if you're manufacturing, right, there's probably a third of the apps that you use that could easily be moved into a model where they're quickly deployed, quickly iterated on, quickly innovated on, automatically sent through that process with cloud. And then there's probably some that can't. Pharma's a good example. You validate a system during R&D and then it can't change for the 10 year cycle of that R&D all the way through to the production life cycle of the drug, right? Can't change without going back through a complete revalidation of every line of code in the system, right? And so it is a balance. Doesn't mean that that's not, moving fast to one industry is not necessarily moving fast to another industry, right? If your development life cycle is 10 years and you can shorten that to nine and a half years, that's fast, right? If your development life cycle is six months and you want to shorten it to six hours, that could be fast for another industry. So fast is a relative term and I would encourage you to look at what can be really fast without disrupting some of the other sides to your business. I'll put it this way. If PayPal can run 90% on OpenStack, other folks can do it too. And that might not mean moving everything to cloud. You might have a ton of stuff that's still on dedicated infrastructure, on a lockdown network somewhere, but there's probably components of applications that you could actually move to cloud while leaving other components that require different types of security in another component of the data center infrastructure altogether. And this might be a shameless plug for Cisco, but I would encourage you to pick a partner, I'll just say generically a partner, that really understands the regulated space and controlled industries and validation and all those types of things to assist you in your journey. Any other questions? We have two minutes, anything else? This side of the room's been very quiet. This gentleman here in particular has taken lots of pictures, so I feel like you must have at least one question. And we will post these slides, both on SlideShare and the video goes on the OpenStack YouTube channel. Is that a question? No, you're just getting that after lunch stretch in. I hope you had a good conference and you're enjoying Vancouver as much as I am. Thank you. Thank you so much.


Good morning. It's a beautiful glorious Monday morning. Yes, I know. Glorious Monday morning is an oxymoron, at least where I come from. So today we are going to discuss issues which are at the heart of psychology, including sharks, politics in the United Kingdom in the 18th century and similar relevant hot button topics in contemporary psychology.  Here's the problem. Social sciences. That's really an oxymoron. If it's social, it can never be a science. If it deals, if it has to do with human beings, it can never be a science. Why? Search my channel. There are a few videos I've made about why psychology and social sciences by extension are pseudo sciences, fake sciences, pretend sciences. But regrettably, because they carry forward this pretension to science, these disciplines of study, these literary endeavors hamper and obstruct themselves. And so this is a bad thing. Rather than own up to their limitations on the one hand and to their strong points, forties on the other, these areas of study pretend to be sciences. And by doing so, they tie their own hands and they disable many of the research directions which could have been profitable and productive. One of the main problems in social sciences is that they reflect social mores, cultural values, contemporary preferences, beliefs, even conspiracies to some extent. So social sciences are what we call culture bound. They reflect the here and now. They reflect what people believe, what people aspire to, what people hope for, what people are afraid of, rather than any purported or objective reality. And so one of the main errors in social sciences in general and psychology and history, by the way, in particular, is called presentism. And it is a topic of today's interminable Monday lecture. History professor and British social scientist Arthur Maui argued that, and I'm quoting, a grasp of the fact that past societies are very different from our own, and very difficult to get to know, is an essential and fundamental skill of the professional historian. Anachronism is still one of the most obvious faults when the unqualified, those experts in other disciplines, perhaps, for example, psychologists, attempt to do history. Now presentism is the imposition of current ideas, contemporary values, existing knowledge, preferred perspectives at any given time in history, into imposition on depictions and interpretations of the past. It is when we take our beliefs and we attribute them to the past, when we take our values and we judge the past in light of these values. When we have a worldview and we somehow develop the superstition that this worldview is objective, measurable, has always been here, and that humanity throughout history has always had this worldview.  Anachronism, both parachronism and prokronism, by the way, there are several types of anachronism. Anachronism is a chronological inconsistency in some juxtaposition of peoples, events, objects, language terms and customs from different time periods. I don't know, an 18th century nobleman texting would be an anachronism, or a 19th century Inuit in the North Pole watching television, that would be an anachronism. Or tending to believe that we have always had the same view of childhood, that's an anachronism because childhood is a very, very new concept. Or to say that the maternal instinct, whatever it may be, has always been with us and that the mother's role has always been the same throughout history. That's an anachronism. These statements are untrue. They also reflect profound nations, profound ignorance. And so the most common type of anachronism is an object misplaced in time. But it could be other things, for example a verbal expression out of its time, a technology, a philosophical idea, a musical style, a material, a substance, a plant, an animal, a custom, anything else associated with a particular period that is placed outside its proper temporal domain. This happens all the time in psychology. We tend to believe, even if we don't verbalize it, even if we don't openly admit it, we tend to believe as practitioners and teachers of psychology that things have always been the same, that a mother has always been a mother, a child has always been a child, a father has always been a father, collectives have always been more or less hierarchical, etc, etc. These assumptions are wrong. When Margaret Mead traveled to American Samoa, she discovered that the very construct of adolescence is probably mostly Western. Today, there's some revision of her work, and we know that adolescence does exist, even in primitive societies, but definitely not the way we conceive of adolescence in Western civilization. So, when you as a psychologist, as a therapist, as a practitioner, as a psychiatrist, as a professor of psychology, and I'm a former visiting professor of psychology, and I teach psychology, when you make these hidden assumptions, even if they are unconscious, even if you're not aware of them, you're misleading, you're leading people astray. You must always ask yourself, is what I'm saying right now, is this observation, is the design of this experiment, is this study, are these outcomes or conclusions? Do these things that I teach, are they influenced by who I am, when I am, in which period of history I'm embedded, where I come from, where I reside right now? My cultures, the cultures I've been exposed to, the societies I'm a part of, mores, values, beliefs, and norms. And if the answer is yes, I am being influenced, what you're doing is you are misleading people, you're not teaching, you're definitely not teaching science. Regrettably, this is the case 99% of the time. Let's take the example of motherhood and fatherhood. Everyone in his dog will tell you nowadays, laymen and professionals and scholars alike will tell you that a mother and a father are crucial to the healthy development and personal growth of the child. Absent one of these, a paternal figure and a maternal figure, there is going to be trouble, there's going to be dysfunction later on in adulthood. Is this true? No, it's absolutely not true. Even in contemporary psychology we know that the role of the mother in the formative period up to age 36 months far outweighs and is far more critical than anything the father has to offer. So even within contemporary psychology, this politically correct symmetry, this woke equilibrium, mothers are as important as mothers and fathers are both needed. It's not supported. It is not supported by science, by studies, and by many schools in psychology. For example, object relations. In object relations the emphasis is on the mother 100%, but it gets even worse. The father's role throughout history has been changing dramatically. And so there have been periods in history where the father was utterly unimportant in the first few years of a child's life, not only unimportant but absent. And yet, these children grew up to be well balanced, healthy, functional. Let me tell you a bit about the history of the biography of Cyrus, known in Hebrew as Korish. Cyrus was the king of the Persian, the emperor of the Persians, and he had a childhood typical of his peers. I'm reading to you from a book titled Persians, The Age of the Great Kings by the author Lloyd Llewellyn Jones published by Basic Books in 2022 last year. And so I'm quoting, pay attention to the way Cyrus had been brought up. Until they turned six years old, Persian boys were raised among the women and girls, and they barely saw their fathers or had any other adult male company. So the strong empathy created between mothers and sons became a defining feature of their subsequent adult lives. In societies which valued gender segregation, sons tended to fill the voids in their mother's lives. Today this is known as parentification, and it is frowned upon as a pathological and dysfunctional feature of improper parenting. But it was the bon ton, it was the thing to do in ancient Persia. I'm going to read this last sentence again. The strong empathy created between mothers and sons became a defining feature of their subsequent adult lives. In societies which valued gender segregation, sons tended to fill the voids in their mother's lives created by husbands who were literally or emotionally absent or preoccupied.  Finally, the day came for Cyrus to be taken away from the women's tents. He was six years old at the time. There was no choice, there was no discussion, and perhaps he cried as clinging on to Mandane's mother's veil with his soft little hands, he was passed into the arms of his father. His hair was cropped and he was thrust into the brooding society of the menfolk and into the rough and tumble world of horses, hunting and warfare, and of finding faults, punishments and the flexing of muscles. It must have come as a shock to Cyrus as to every Persian boy to experience so swift and resolute a departure from all the comforts he had known. So, incestuous bonding with the mother, parentification, no father figure until age six, none, no male figure until age six, and yet Cyrus is known to have been a well-balanced, mentally healthy, rigorously truthful, value-upholding, upright, morally upright men, a saint in many traditions. It seems that everything we think we know about proper parenting and good enough mothers, so maybe it's questionable. Definitely many cultures and societies throughout the world and in different periods of history have contested this. So what is it that we are teaching in psychology? Is it science or is it white, straight, middle-class preferences? I'm not sure of the answer regrettably. Let's take another example. Abuse, more specifically narcissistic abuse. The phrase I coined I introduce the very construct into the literature and the online sphere. Abuse in general and narcissistic abuse in particular are frowned upon. They are socially unacceptable and condemned their bad things. They are being even criminalized as we speak. And yet throughout history some of the greatest names have been rampant, rabid abusers. And this was not held against them. It was part of their allure, part of their mystique and part and parcel of their charismatic magnetism. One prime example of this is Picasso. The book is The Art of Love, the Romantic and Explosive Stories Behind Arts Greatest Couples. It was authored by Kate Bryan, published by White Lion Publishing in 2019. Here is what she has to say about Picasso. Although Picasso was a singular modern genius, who could be generous and affectionate, he was also a volatile and difficult man. He left behind him a trail of devastation as he moved on to new sources of excitement, quickly tiring of wives and lovers and overlooking his children and grandchildren. And then he met Francois Gillon. Gillon and Picasso spent 10 years together between 1943 and 1953. She was 40 years, that's four zero years, his junior. They had two children, Claude and Paloma. For Picasso, Gillon represented a safe, idealized retreat from reality. With Gillon, he could be pure, brilliant sunshine and with others, moody and belligerent. Picasso was a temperamental genius. He gorged on his own intellect and simultaneously delighted and loathed the unfaltering respect he received from all corners. His world was psychophantic.  He was cruelly delighted in seeing a heartbroken Marie-Thérèse Valterre and Dora Maher, two of his lovers, in a physical fight. He often tested the limits of Gillon's affection for him, and when she refused to take the bait, he would scream that she was called calculating and unkind. His biggest disappointment was that he could not fully command, contain or understand Francois. For the last two years of their relationship, Gillon was exhausted and unhappy. Picasso, ever the sadist, was badly behaved and unsympathetic to her ill health, caused in large part by being denied rest in a disruptive household. Eventually, she made the decision to leave. Despite Picasso's threatening, you headed straight for the desert. In the same way that she entered the relationship with her eyes wide open, she left it, knowing that Paris would be a poison challenge for her. She relocated to New York where she lives to this day. Still painting at the age of 97, having outlived the great force in her life. I think she died. I'm not sure, but I think she died. As well as a lifetime of painting, Gillon also created a beautiful and compelling memoir, chronically in her decade with Picasso. He tried to ban his publication in 1964, but he failed. He would always take on Gillon and never understood why he could not win. He was a man that famously thought women were either goddesses or doormats. But what he failed to grasp with all his macho ego was Gillon's fundamental position. It's a bad idea that women have to concede. Why should they? That was not for me. Probably I was a bit ahead of my generation. Gillon spoke to Picasso only once after she left him on the telephone after her book was published. Her accomplishments post Paris are many and she has been firstly vocal about them, so as not to be seen in his shadow. However, there's no escaping that one of her life's great victories was to be the only lover to outmaneuver Picasso. Another period a hundred years ago, when abuse was considered a legitimate coinage, a legitimate form of interaction between men and women, Gillon was the exception, not the rule, and she feels to this very day in need of justifying herself. When we demonize abuse, when we cast it in scientific terms of dysfunction, or in psychoanalytic terms, we are scientifying a value. We are pretending that a social moray, that a value system, that our current contemporary preferences, the ideology we are all subsumed in, the interpolation of society itself, we pretend that these are objective truths that have been the same throughout history and that can be observed and measured in a laboratory. That is rank nonsense. The rise of the construct of abuse and narcissistic abuse, my small contribution, has to do with the rise of feminism, with the emancipation of women, with the egalitarianism that is engulfing society, with our emphasis on equity, with our desire to eliminate power asymmetries and discrimination. These are all very noble goals. I am all for them. I have contributed my share to use an understatement, but this is not science. This has nothing to do with science. It's social activism. It's political. It's a political movement. It's identity politics. Call it what you wish. It's a woke movement. I don't care what label you slap on it. Psychology, it's not. Science, definitely it's not. And yet we keep pretending that it's both. I'm going to make an interlude here just to demonstrate how universal themes that run through history are accorded a different treatment depending on the cultural, social and historical context. Darya Żukowska, my collaborator in Poland, the psychologist, published this on her Instagram. It's a poem by Wiszlała Zimbowska. Wiszlała Zimbowska. I hope I pronounced it correctly. I think Polish, the Polish language is a crime against humanity. But she won the 1996 Nobel Prize in literature for good reasons, it seems. Here is her poem, 1962, titled Drinking Wine. And as Darya Żukowska says to my mind, this is a gist of narcissistic love. Listen well. He looked at me, bestowing beauty, and I took it for my own. Happy, I swallowed a star. I let him invent me in the image of the reflection in his eyes. I dance, I dance in an abundance of sudden wings. A table is a table. Wine is wine. In a wine glass, which is a wine glass, and it stands standing on a table. But I am a phantasm, a phantasm beyond belief, a phantasm to the core. I tell him what he wants to hear about ants dying of love under a dandelion's constellation. I swear that sprinkled with wine, a white rose will sing. I laugh and tilt my head carefully as if I were testing an invention. I dance, I dance in a stounded skin in the embrace that creates me. Eve from a rib, Venus from seafoam, Minerva from the head of Jove were much more real. When he is not looking at me, I search for my reflection on the wall. All I see is a nail on which a painting hung magnificently. She deserved the Nobel Prize. Stunning boy. And it captures indeed the exact concept of shared fantasy. How the narcissist idealizes you and then makes you see yourself through his gaze. And as you apprehend yourself through his gaze, you fall in love with yourself. You fall in love with his gaze and you fall in love with him for having allowed you to see yourself this way. It's a magnificent song. I read it to you in order to demonstrate her attitude. It would come perhaps as a shock to some of you, but she is very positive about this experience. Her attitude is positive. She doesn't see anything wrong in the shared fantasy, in her analysis. In the way he forces her to conform to his expectations and the way he sees her.  Everything that I describe as negative, as threatening, as ominous, even possibly criminal. She sees as positive, as wonderful, as a phantasm to be cherished. She dances. She dances. She's happy. She feels created. She feels alive. In his gaze. Narcissism has undergone a transformation, it seems. When this strong, expressive woman regarded narcissism as a positive experience, or being with a narcissist as a positive experience. Today, the universal idea, universal conception, is that it is a very negative experience. And yes, I was the first to describe this in the early 1990s. But I didn't pretend, I didn't pretend at any point that what I'm saying is science or objective. Even though I've gained access to almost, to more than 2000 narcissists and studied them in depth. I still don't pretend that it's a science. In today's environment where men and women are equal, equivalent, they have the same power and in some respects women are superior. In this environment, the shared fantasy, which was essentially and originally propagated and perpetrated by men, can have no place. Abuse can have no place. So, as women become more masculine, self-described as men. As they adopt masculine or manly values, they become more and more narcissistic and more and more psychopathic. And at some point we will have to apply the same criteria to them as well, because they are becoming the abusers. So, what is it all about? Values, ideologies, beliefs, reflections of changing social dynamics and trends. Nothing permanent, it's all ephemeral. It's all contingent on, I don't know, the next pandemic or the next world war. Post-nuclear war. I think many of these questions will be moot because masculine muscle power would be needed. I mean, give me a break. None of this is cast or set in stone. This is just us talking about our preferences and priorities and wishes and hopes and dreams. It's just us trying to survive. It's just us fighting off predators and abusers and enemies and haters. It's just us that we use fancy words. $10 words doesn't make us scientists. This makes us pretentious or pompous, but not scientists. Allow me to proceed. There's something called semantic change. There's a branch of linguistic known as diachronic linguistics. Words change their meaning. One process is known as pejoration. It's when a word that used to denote something acceptable, commendable, has become a curse word or a derogatory word. And melioration is the opposite process where something that used to be negative is not considered positive. Let me give you two examples. The word nice. The word nice today is a positive word.  That's a nice meal. This is a nice city. This is a nice requisition or a nice article. Nice. Nice is positive. I am not aware of any interpretation of nice that is negative. And yet, for many, many centuries, nice was a highly negative word. It meant foolish.  If today you say about someone, he's a nice man, you mean he's kind and empathetic. And a potential mate, potential intimate partner.   Let's take the word silly. Silly today is a largely negative word. It means foolish and sophisticated. Largely negative. It has some positive connotations or comic connotations. So you could be silly. But it's largely positive. It's largely negative. I'm sorry.  Silly. In the past, the word silly meant happy, fortunate. If you said about someone, he's a silly man, you meant he's happy probably because he has good fortune.  So the meanings of words change all the time. And this is known as semantic change or semantic shift in diachronic linguistics. This is very important to understand. We'll come to it in a minute. And I want to give you another example. It's from a book titled Our First Revolution by Michael Barron, published by Crown Publishing Group in 2007. Many of you, especially those in the United Kingdom and those who have studied the history of the United States, have heard the terms wigs and tories. Wigs and tories are terms still in use when describing the political scene in the United Kingdom. But wigs and tories were originally insults. A wig was a Scottish term used for horse thieves and applied to Presbyterians. I'm not sure which is worse. Tori was an Irish term used for outlaws, criminals, and applied to Catholics. Why am I mentioning all this? Why am I mentioning the shifting meanings, even lexical meanings in dictionaries of words? Because as we speak, narcissists and psychopaths are being glamorized, glorified, exalted, and elevated in multiple settings, especially in Akadem. In Akadem, there is a group of scholars who describe narcissism and psychopathy as positive evolutionary adaptations. They talk about high functioning narcissists and psychopaths and how they are indispensable to the progress and march of the species, how they're saving us in effect, and how in certain professions being a narcissist and a psychopath is an advantage.  It runs against every single study we have.  So we are in the throes of redefining the word narcissist and the word psychopath to mean something positive. As narcissism and psychopathy spread and they are spreading, they are wildfire, it's a pandemic. As they spread, we would need to legitimize them or excommunicate half the population. It's impractical to excommunicate or to shun or to ostracize so many people. So what we're going to do, we're going to redefine narcissism and psychopathy as positive, high functioning, evolutionarily valuable adaptations. Indeed, in 2016, new scientists, the science magazine in the United Kingdom had a cover story. Parents teach your children to be narcissists. It's starting. Finally, the field is riddled with persistent misinformation, myths and legends. This is also true in medicine by the way. A recent study in medicine has shown that the practitioners of medicine, general practitioners, surgeons, specialists are 17 years behind cutting edge, bleeding edge, no edge. It's the same in psychology. A lot of nonsense. A lot of nonsense online of course, where the vast majority of information is misinformation by people with zero credentials in the fields they claim to be experts in. But also misinformation and disinformation in textbooks, in faculties, passed on as that much poisonous hemlock to the next generations. And misinformation is everywhere. It's very difficult to get rid of. And I'm calling my friends, the sharks, to a test. Quoting from a book titled Why Sharks Matter, a deep dive with the world's most misunderstood predator, by the author David Schiffman, publisher is Johns Hopkins University Press last year, 2022. And here's what he has to say. There are also sharks that live in freshwater. No, I'm not just referring to the bull shark, which Discovery, Discovery's shark week programming wrongly claims year after year is the only shark that can enter freshwater.  This guy is saying the Discovery Network, television, Discovery Television. In its prime program on sharks, known as shark week, has been getting, has been getting its facts wrong year after year and perpetuating the misinformation to millions of viewers over multiple generations. Discovery Channel says that only bull sharks live in freshwater. That is not true. That is misinformation. That is misleading. Because there's another shark, at least one other shark that inhabits freshwater. It's the glyphys shark, sometimes known as the river shark. They live almost their entire lives in freshwater. Schiffman says, unfortunately, river sharks are some of the most critically endangered sharks in the world, in no small part because they live closer to humans than ocean-dwelling sharks do. If we can't get our facts about sharks, right. In the most important television program on sharks, in the most important nature channel after natural geography, what hope is there to get our facts straight in psychology? Zero hope. The amount of sheer, inane nonsense, misinformation, disinformation, myths and legends is so hugely overwhelming that I could safely say that nine, nine out of every ten, ten things you hear, read or learn are wrong. They contradict and conflict with studies, most studies. So tomorrow I'm going to post a video about the toxic self-help industry. This video today is an introduction to the philosophy behind my attitude towards self-help. It's a toxic scam inhabited and populated by mostly con artists. And they are capitalizing on psychology's pretension to be a science, the gullibility of the consumers of psychology and the intellectual laziness of the overwhelming vast majority of practitioners of psychology, whatever they may be. Thank you for listening.


It's the cube Here is your host Jeff Frick. Hi Jeff Rick here with the Cube We're in Santa Clara, California on the ground at Ixia's Office a new office at the re-modeling a lot of exciting stuff going on and we're really excited to be joined by Bethany Mayer CEO and President of Ixia welcome. Thank you very much. Thanks for joining me here at the office Absolutely, so you've been on the Cube a ton of times your big Cube favorite Women in tech so now you've got a new adventure. So tell us a little bit about Ixia and what's going on here, right? So, yes, I recently joined Ixia CEO Wonderful company has a great heritage and really strong IP Has always been ahead of the technology trends because of what we do and really the focus here at Ixia is on driving Application performance for our customers as also security resilience for our customers So two very key things that we provide validation for and optimization And I know you're super technical dig down a little bit deeper and talk about some of the secret sauce or the ways That you're helping customers achieve that. Sure. So we have three big customer segments. We Sell to the network equipment manufacturers. We sell to carriers and we sell to enterprises and we have a very very strong Presence in the in the network equipment providers In fact we're number one in that space and what we do which is primarily testing their devices and Validating the devices that they build so whether it's you know one gig ten gig twenty five gig forty gig a hundred gig All of those things have to be tested and our products provide that with the carriers We have we have virtualized our products so that we can help them when they virtualize their networks We're there to validate those networks and test those virtual network functions So they perform as well and we also provide security resilience in that we can test for Architectures that could possibly be breached by unknown attacks and then finally in the enterprise We can also validate the design of their networks so test that and we can monitor and Secure the performance of their network so we offer a lot a lot So you a self-prescribed woman of the valley beyond just being a woman in tech We're talking a little bit off-camera. So you've been at this tech thing a long time I wonder if you can give some perspective on on really some of these these trends that are really taking hold and kind of a Critical mass of Moore's law all over the place in open source and virtualization and as virtualization has moved from Compute to store to network right and give kind of your perspective on how this changing the world and how it's still Really crazy and exciting place to be it is really exciting actually I gave a talk yesterday on disruption and what's going on and there are lots of disruptors open source and The and what it creates in terms of changes in business model is a huge disruptor Because people are not only utilizing it to build products internally. They're building businesses on it So they're curating open source and they're using it to build products, which is really cool So that business model is beginning to to morph also Virtualization is huge. I mean everything is virtualized except the network Which finally is getting virtualized and that's going to have a huge change and has had already a huge impact on the network Manufacturers equipment manufacturers as well as all of the customers out there who are making that change Whether it's enterprise with SDN or whether it's carriers with network function virtualization Everyone wants to utilize the benefits of virtualization And the other big disruptor is internet of things so we do a lot of device testing So that's not just not routers and switches. That's handheld devices right and that's also Ethernet in cars and so there's a huge trend towards internet of things and all of that will have to be validated and tested Which is exciting for us, but it's also, you know really exciting for what that will bring to the valley in terms of new technologies It's it's crazy. We were at this little show location and and in context world a couple weeks ago And it was interesting zebra technology and old RFID barcode reader is now getting new life and new applications And leveraging internet of things and sensors and RFID tags and new applications specifically are talking about sports and tracking people And so it's a pretty it's pretty crazy time both with new technology as well as using old technology in new ways So let's talk about how you got into this thing you you were a polysine major And then you went into Lockheed and something happened in there How did you switch from being a polysine major to being a networking guru? So some of it is job experience. I have to say So Lockheed was a really interesting place where I became a project manager for classified products one of the classified products I happened to work on was the F1 17 a stealth fighter and I managed the Radar absorbing material on the windows of of that product and others like it And that was really exciting and really turned me on to wow technology is cool and interesting and exciting And I want to do more around this area And so I left there through a friend always through a friend someone went somewhere and And headed to Apple where again the technology was so exciting. I participated in the early phases of the laptop Industry in that we were building power books and I was involved in the power book Manufacturing and then moved at Cisco, which what my parents thought was a food company Cisco with an ass as opposed to the sea Was the company that I happened to go to and that in its Cisco I I got more training so I actually was trained and I did The courses that you take for being certified in a Cisco as a Cisco network admin I did not take all of them. I'm not a certified CCIE Let me be clear, but I need to take several of them and I began to actually help design and build product Which was very exciting for me, and then I just continued on there I think networking is very exciting always have but also the technology World is really cool, and I've learned a lot and just enjoy it tremendously So it's been a good career been a good ride So you're a big proponent of women in tech. You've won a ton of awards. You speak a lot Not only are there not a lot of women in technology traditionally, but they're probably even fewer in defense So how did you find you know being able to be accepted and make some traction and gain some ground in that world? you know I think that to some degree not to not completely but to some degree technology has a meritocracy to it so people do notice if you perform well and So I've been fortunate that the people that I've worked for have noticed that and have helped me progress in my career And then the other thing I would say is You know if a woman feels like they're not progressing they need to make a decision about you know Should I stay at this company? Should I go somewhere else to make my progression? Is there any concern about bias and if so maybe there's another place for them So I think you have to think carefully about the environment you're in what you're doing How you're performing because hard work absolutely is key key component of it and and all those things together can combine for good Decision-making about your career You're saying too that you really need to manage the process yourself You have to take ownership of it and if it's not working out then you got to go find something different I consider myself a free agent so I Guide my course myself and that's how I've always done it and it's actually has been a good thing for me And then talk a bit a little bit about the role of mentorship too because mentorship is very Very important both as specifically as having a mentor to look up to and kind of look out for you But also in terms of a mentorship role for people to look up to you know I wonder if you can speak to some of your mentors of people that looked out for you or you looked up to and Or some of the things that you're doing back the other direction now that you're CEO and president sure So I have had several mentors both men and women I would say fairly early in my career. I met a really extraordinary woman Judy Estrin Who is the former CTO of Cisco and also a serial entrepreneur? And I've been very fortunate. I actually worked in one of the companies that she created I also just became more a friend of hers And she has helped tremendously in terms of my understanding of the technology industry and just giving me advice on what to do And what my next step might be But she's a huge inspiration to I mean, this is a woman who's founded I want to say five maybe six companies at the last one she sold to Yahoo Tremendous technologists. So she was a great inspiration for me and a very good mentor And then at HP I had an excellent I would say mentor and sponsor which was Dave Donatelli so I worked for Dave Donatelli for four years at HP and He was the individual who both put me in the role of running all of marketing for the enterprise Division, but also put me in the role of the HP networking General manager and that was a big jump for for him and You know luckily I succeeded 12 consecutive quarters of growth, which is great But he had to make that decision. So I have much He's a wonderful person that way He makes choices around performance and accountability and I really appreciated that. That's great When Dave's another great Cube alumni and we actually we just saw him last night at an event in San Francisco So he's he's he's still around and we're kind of waiting for him to land somewhere So so final final thing before we go. So again, you're very active in in the women in tech and the girls in STEM I wonder if there's any particular organizations that you'd like to highlight For either young girls women family that they should maybe get involved with or with or consider getting involved with To help them out. Absolutely. So when I was at HP We founded the Women's Innovation Council, which was a group of a lot of women CIOs, which again are rare breed But there are several out there and brilliant women And we all started to look at how to help girls come up through technology One of the groups that we have worked with is called girls who code And also girl geeks all great organizations that help girls starting in elementary school Learn about technology and math and how exciting and important it is and to really think about a career in technology So we have worked with those. I've worked with them wonderful organizations would highly recommend them. Awesome So Bethany, thanks for taking a few minutes. I'll do your busy day getting this your new position going with XE exciting times I'm Jeff Frick. You're watching the Cube. We're live in Santa Clara on the ground at XEA. Thanks for watching