Hello, everyone. Nice to see a pretty decent crowd. My name is Dan Norris, and I'm here with my colleague, Jonas Burgess, and we're here to talk to you today about Get Ups for the Edge, delivering WebAssembly with Argo CD. So a quick overview of what we are going to cover for this session. I'm going to give you a brief overview of what WebAssembly is, a brief intro to the CNCF project, WasmCloud, that we both work with. And then I'm going to go through how we integrated both WasmCloud and Argo CD. We'll talk a little bit about kind of what that looks like and why. We'll also talk about how we actually were able to extend some of those capabilities into Argo CD using a custom Kubernetes operator. And then I will go through a live demo about all this sort of comes together by using Argo to drive a deployment using a WasmCloud application to over 30 plus edge locations. Just kind of demonstrate what all this looks like. All right. Can everybody hear me okay? Just making sure. Cool. How many of you are familiar with WebAssembly? Just getting a quick show of hands. Okay. There's a couple. Couple. Cool. How many of you are using WebAssembly in production? We got one. All right. Two. Yeah, I got a couple of hands. All right. So WebAssembly is a portable binary format for executing applications. It originally was developed for browsers. It was essentially the idea was that in order to build more complicated applications, more performant applications in the browser, you'd use something like WebAssembly to be able to bring in foreign languages that are languages that are not JavaScript, such as, you know, any number of languages. So you could use Rust, Go, see things like that to build very complex applications on the browser side.  And so browsers, they had a couple of things they had to get up, get right about WebAssembly. First of all, because there's more than one type of browser, they needed to be the format for the format to be portable across browsers. And because of the environment that it's running in, it also needed to be secure. So the sandbox model that WebAssembly had to develop as a result of that is such that instead of taking capabilities away, like we do with containers in order to secure containers, in the case of WebAssembly, you actually have to give it permissions. So the idea was that you write software once, and then you can deploy it in any number of places as long as you can run WebAssembly. And on top of that, because we are in browsers, these applications also, there's a kind of a strong preference that these applications are small, right? Like if you have desktop applications, application or container, those tend to be in the hundreds of megabytes or even gigabytes. Whereas in the browser case, you can't be downloading, let's say, two gigabytes every time you're loading a web page. That wouldn't really work. So in our demo application here, one of the components that actually is powering the demo is just 700 kilobytes. And so you can imagine that's quite a bit smaller than your average container, for example. So before we kind of go further, we do have to talk a little bit about what's really exciting and interesting about WebAssembly. So the idea with WebAssembly is that it is fine-grained sandboxing, and the idea is that you essentially have what's called components. So these components are the container core WebAssembly module, right? This is where your business logic is for your application. But on top of that, these modules also, or these components, sorry, also have the ability to define their imports and exports. And what this allows you to do, essentially there's an interface that you define. And what this allows you to do is it allows you to compose together components or WebAssembly code that's written in different languages. As I mentioned earlier, you can compile any number of different languages down to WebAssembly as a deployment target. And because of that, because of the interface driven nature of WebAssembly components, you can compose those together. So you can imagine, in this case, we have a Rust application that's exposing some set of functionality, so it exports that functionality. And then we have a Go-based application that actually is importing that functionality, so making use of that functionality. So these are, you can imagine you have basically two libraries or a library in Rust and a program in Go. And the Go program is using code from the Rust library. And they don't need to know that they are written into two different languages because they have this shared interface that they're basically using as a way to link together. So that's really cool. So before we dive in further, we should mention Wasm Cloud as well. It's a CSEF project. And it's essentially an application platform that's designed for you to be able to deploy and run WebAssembly components across Cloud, Edge, and so on. We have developed our own orchestrator that helps us do that. And there's also an underlying everything due to the distributed nature of wanting to be able to cross from Cloud to Edge. We also have a seamless compute mesh powered by something called NETS, which is a CSEF project. Really cool technology. I'm not going to go too much into NETS, but you'll see later as Dan goes through the demo what that allows us to do, essentially. So just to kind of recap, what does all this mean? Why should you care? So WebAssembly allows you to target any number of different environments as long as you can have a WebAssembly runtime, which our project CSEF Wasm Cloud actually embeds one of those called WasmTime. You can essentially run your workloads anywhere. It could be running on your Smart Fridge. It could be running on the Edge. It could be running in the Cloud. As long as you can execute WebAssembly, you can target it. And then Wasm Cloud takes that a little bit further by bringing the WebAssembly components aspect, which allows you to compose software written in different languages together without them needing to know that they are different kinds of software. So that's pretty cool. So that's kind of a whole lot of maybe some kind of novel text. So you might be asking yourself, like, that's all great. A lot of little maybe component things you're trying to squish together. How do you deploy any of that? And I bet you'll be shocked to know the answer because it's Argo. So we ended up kind of spiking on this a while back. And we kind of settled on Argo CD as a way to be able to deliver some of these applications, particularly for people who were already running Kubernetes.  There's obviously other good ones, right? Like Flux is solid. But we kind of settled on Argo just because of the functionality. And it really let us integrate our WasmCloud deployment and kind of the capabilities we already had with tools that everybody in the ecosystem is already familiar with. So it kind of seemed like a no-brainer. But how does it actually fit together? Because we mentioned that WasmCloud applications, you know, their WebAssembly, they're kind of their own thing. But the WasmCloud project actually ships with a, effectively, it's a CRD. It's actually just a YAML format. And we'll kind of, I'll show you a little bit what it looks like later. But it's based on this spec called the Open Application Model, OAM. There are other projects in the CNCF ecosystem that use this. So it's kind of like a little bit of an application standard. But basically, that allows us to plug into our own orchestrator that we had kind of written. Because again, these things can run anywhere. They can be on Kubernetes. They can be on Nomad. They can be on bare metal. They can be on little IT devices. Who knows where, right? So we kind of needed something that was a little bit smarter to understand how to place those and how to move things around. We've actually given a whole talk about this. I'm not going to go into it if you're interested. It's on YouTube. I gave it at Wasm Day actually in Chicago this past year. But because of having this YAML manifest, we can teach Argo basically how to use the Kubernetes API to manage and deploy these manifests as if there were any other CRD. It's none the wiser. In order to do that, we had to write our own operator. Effectively, we had to implement the APIs underneath the hood to interact with Wattom so that when you apply this manifest in a cluster, it's actually able to take that and run the correct commands. So a little bit of a graphical illustration of what this might look like from a workflow perspective. So imagine, like anyone else probably in this room, you might be running some sort of project. You've got it all checked into Git. You check in this YAML manifest. Argo receives that event. It knows that, oh, hey, something changed in the manifest. You've already provisioned that application just like you would any other Argo app. But what happens, which is a little bit different potentially depending on what layers of the stack you're familiar with, is Argo then basically syncs that CRD. So it's kind of out of the picture at that point. But this operator that we wrote actually takes over at that point and starts issuing commands to this Wattom observer process basically that could be running kind of anywhere. That's like the lattice interconnection. And that starts relaying commands to all of the various, we call them wasm cloud hosts, kind of like cubelets. But that relays sort of start and stop commands to make sure that its own reconciliation loop is bringing everything to the forefront. All right. So Dan mentioned the operator. That is kind of a key component that we had to develop in order to make this all work. We had originally started down this path of developing an operator as a means to allow our customers to run wasm cloud hosts on top of Kubernetes using just the CRD. They could say, hey, I'd like to deploy a set of hosts and make sure that those are always running. So we developed the CRD for that. And as Dan mentioned, the wasm cloud host just for everyone's identification is our version of cubelet essentially. So it's a program that executes WebAssembly applications or WebAssembly components. But in the process of doing this work, what we realized is that we could also use this as a way to bridge the gap between running or issuing commands to run WebAssembly applications from within Kubernetes because a lot of our customers are already using GitOps tools like Argo. And so they're asking us like, hey, rather than having to force myself into learning a new tool or using different interface, can I just use Kubernetes for this and Argo for this? And the answer is yes, turns out. In our case, because we're operating the WebAssembly ecosystem, we end up bringing a lot of rust because a lot of the platform is written and it's essentially in rust. So we chose to go down the path of implementing this operator action in Rust. And just to kind of give you an idea of what this looks like, this is a little bit small view into it. But you know, we can run kubectl get applications. And in this case, these are not Argo applications. These are WebDAM applications. So they are WebAssembly applications that are being queried from the kubectl as if it was just another construct within the Kubernetes ecosystem. And just to prove that to you, here's a quick, just a snippet of the actual file that defines an application. And as Dan alluded to earlier, it's using the OEM specification and the application kind where we're just saying like, hey, this is an application. And you'll see later on a little bit more about what actually goes into this manifest. But just to prove that it is actually not an Argo application, but it's a WebAssembly application. So Argo and the operator, like as I mentioned earlier, we wrote this in Rust. And so when you're writing software in Rust, one of the things you'll quickly learn is that it's kind of off the beaten path, especially in the Kubernetes ecosystem. There are some benefits to doing this approach. We are using a Kubernetes focused library called kubrs, which essentially allows you to interop with the operator framework, like with the operator constructs, but also very easily defined things like CRDs by using macros instead of having to do the code generation that you end up using in some let go. So there's some benefits to it, but there's also a lot of lessons learned there. So one of the things we, at the time when we're implementing this, one of the things we've ran into actually was Argo was, it was, maybe still is, requires you to present an open API v2 endpoint for the resources that it wants to talk to, as opposed to open API v3, which seems to be where the Kubernetes project is moving. So when you're in the go space, controller runtime actually takes care of this. Controller runtime being one of the popular frameworks for building operators or controllers in, for Kubernetes. And that's really nice, but unfortunately Rust, we don't have such an equivalent thing. And the Rust ecosystem specifically is not super keynote open API v2. So there's, there's a little bit of a here be dragons exercise left for the reader type of thing that we learned. The other thing that you have to be aware of is you are at least in our approach, we had to end up having to create an aggregated API server, because we're talking to a system that's external to Kubernetes. So that was another detail that was a little bit of a learning exercise. So that's all just to say this is not necessarily the, the easy mode, easy path, but going through this exercise was actually really valuable because we learned a lot more about the internals of the system and how Argo interacts with the, with the underlying platform. So there's definitely some benefits to it.  All right. So we're going to go through, and I'm going to show you a demo actually of all this kind of being fit together.  The difference is we're going to use, it's a wasm cloud application. So we're going to deploy it to over 30 edge locations running in a cloud platform called fly.io. Just really quick, easy sort of cloud to work with. So to give you a little bit of a sense of what the application is that we're going to be deploying. This is going to be a wasm cloud based application, right? Running on a host. I've already pre-provisioned these just for the, for time's sake. They spent it pretty quick, but you know, demos and whatnot. But what's going to happen is I'm going to navigate my browser to a page that's going to be hosted out of basically some of these wasm components. And so it's a little, the architectures may be a little bit different than what you might be kind of thinking of when you think of just kind of like one binary kind of throw it somewhere, because we're actually running three different components to serve this application. So on the right side, when I navigate my browser, there's a distinct component called the HP server provider, which is providing that capability of being able to receive and relay HTTP responses and requests right to the outside world. The actual business logic of this application is kind of implemented in this like hello actors kind of what I called it. What that does is it receives the request, which is an HTTP request, and it's going to go through and generate a web page kind of on the fly. And what it's actually going to do is it's going to show what region this particular web page is actually being served from. But it knows nothing about that, right? It actually does not have the capability to make an external call on its own or to, you know, read something in the file system. We didn't give that capability. What it does is it effectively makes an RPC call to another capability, what I call the fly.io metadata provider, very clever naming. And that basically gives it the response of like, Hey, this is your region. You know, this is a little bit about sort of where you're running. The actor then basically packages that together in a website and sends that out. So all this happens really quick. Again, these are all really lightweight. That hello actor is 700 kilobytes of code compiled. So it all is like pretty straightforward and nicely packaged, I should say. So with that out of the way, hopefully that's a decent enough overview I'm going to actually go through and we're going to walk through this together. So I went ahead and as I mentioned, this is our cloud platform just because it's like easy to demonstrate. So I went ahead and pre-populated a whole bunch of wasn't cloud hosts in fly.io running. So this particular one here, right, I've labeled them with where they're running just to distinguish them. So this is running CDG. That's the airport code. This is actually somewhere in Paris. Hopefully I actually don't know where it is, but it's definitely in France. So you can see as I zoom out, these are all the various hosts that are kind of wired in all at the same time kind of into this wasm cloud cluster. So we're going to end up connecting to this one just due to the way that fly.io's edge handling logic works because they try and route to the nearest place. So I also have Argo running. This is Argo running basically on my laptop in a little kind cluster. And so what I'm going to do is I am going to let me apply it. We're just going to deploy just an Argo application, right? So this is a repository. It's online. The link is going to be at the end. But it's an application that I already have running out of GitHub, right? Just happen to give it a path to where this enamel file is being served out of. Hopefully that's big enough. If it's not, make some noise and I'll make it bigger. But you know, straightforward application here, right? So that's already shown up, right? You can see it's just been applied into the cluster. So we're going to go ahead and we're going to just click sync, right? No reason not to have done the automated sync. It just was easy for the sake of demo purposes for you to see it all kind of go live. So that was about as quick as it really needed to go to be able to relay that command. Now, what did this deploy? What it actually is managing, whoops, not cargo, because I can type live. It is managing this OAM manifest, right? I'm not going to go into the details of like sort of all the different fields because you can read about that on your own. But if you look at this on the surface, right, this is effectively just a CRD, right? Actually, Kubernetes reads this as if it were a CRD. We registered the type and all that stuff. So it is literally one. You know, it's got, it's a kind of application. It's an OAM spec. You know, it's got a name. And the other thing that to take away from this, right, is it's deploying a series of components. Whoops. That's what happens when you do a live. So it's deploying three different pieces, right? That hello actor here scroll down a little bit further. This HTTP server capability that I mentioned, right? That's being served as just its own asset. And then that metadata component. So these are the three different pieces that compose my app and Argo was able to stream that out, right? So going back to my browser, if I just navigate to, oops. Uh-oh. It's the risk of doing it live. Check the UI. Yeah. Let's see. No, let's see. It's up. It's doing this thing. I think it just hasn't quite fully synced everywhere because when you have 30 locations, it takes a little while to sort of turn through. It's probably, I think it just needs to finish deploying all that. Maybe it works. There we go. Look at that. Just needed a little bit of time. Thank you. Thank you. Appreciate you bearing with me. So this is being served from that actor component, right? It's telling us that it is running out of the CDG region. And to prove to you, this is running in multiple places. What I'm going to go ahead and do is using tail scale fantastic service, by the way, to connect to an exit node I have set up somewhere else. And it's running out of Germany. But if I refresh this page, you see that it's now serving traffic out of Amsterdam. That's a property of fly. I didn't actually do any of that. They kind of have this whole edge routing thing. But again, this is the same application being served out of all these various different data centers, right? And we used Argo to, whoops. Didn't want to do that. We used Argo right to just one click deploy that. So that's as easy as it really can get, really. So if you want to learn more, and I think this was interesting, right? We are, I mean, we're Cosmonic. We have our own booth, K37 on the sponsor showcase. But we have a couple other things going on throughout the conference, right? So the Walsham Cloud project, soon to be incubating, CNCF project, please. That is, we're going to have our own session on Wednesday. What is that, three to eight? Also, we have kind of like an intro to WebAssembly components being put on by our colleague Brooks and someone else, Michael U.N. from the Walsham Edge team. That's another CNCF open source project. So highly encourage you to check that out. If you want to know even more, we've got some, you know, a lot of resources to use online, right? The open source project page is wasmcloud.com. You know, read through the docs and kind of learn a little bit more about what that is, if that's interesting to you. We also have a blog post that also goes through kind of at a high level, some of the things that we talked about today with Argo CD and Walsham Cloud. If WebAssembly itself is interesting to you, definitely check out the Byte Code Alliance. They're the industry group that's sort of pushing the standards forward. There's like, I don't know, 30, 40 different members, like big names you've heard of. It's a good group. And then if you want to see the code for what we deployed today, it's on github, github.com, Protocron, which is my username, Argo CD demo, but you know, you can pull the slides and you should be able to click the links later. With that, I think that's all we had. So we're open to questions. We'll be standing over here and we'll be outside if you have anything else you want to know. Thank you for your time.


Hey all Chris and Josh's case break back once again. We've got to do one last thing here We have a randomized one card. You might have just seen it for a second We have all 30 names here. We have to randomize since it's not technically on the Yankees checklist despite may appearing like it is It's this Jason Alexander Assistant to the traveling secretary number to 99 Got to put this in the randomizer at the end. This is what we're doing it for here now Let's go back to our Our sheet here, so we'll pull all 30 names here. This will go to one person Have our fresh list our fresh dice So Kevin down to Justin will roll just the two dice at the one time One and one two perfect just like that. Good luck guys. Snake eyes. Here's one and here's two top name Oliver Flash that to that the end Oliver will get it very nice Oliver congrats That nice Jason Alexander number to 99 And your way. All right. Thanks very much all Chris from Josh's case breaks calm


Thanks, Melina. And thanks for this exercise in humility. I get to follow a Pulitzer Prize winner, an NFL player, James Beard award-winning chef and writer, and then I get to speak to somebody who is officially excellent, like actually for her culinary contributions to the United Kingdom. The queen appointed Chef Romy Gill to the most excellent order of the British Empire. I will strive for excellence my whole life and never be appointed to any order of any nature. At her restaurant, Romy's Kitchen, Chef Gill serves a singular Punjabi Bengali-inspired cuisine that's captured imaginations and I think asks some really vital questions about what it means to cook British food. I'm going to try to ask her some of those questions today. Please welcome Romy Gill. Thank you. Hi, Chef. Hi. Are you nervous? We were, but after all the amazing, you know, what we listened, it was so emotional. Yeah. And we thought we're going to have some positive. Yeah, I thought you were going to say after all the mescal shots you were feeling OK now, but I think, yeah, I agree. After the ice cream. After the ice cream. Yes, give me some sugar rush. If you don't mind, can we just start at the very beginning? Will you tell me a little bit about how you grew up and got into cooking and food? I came to UK about 25 years ago. I'm a self-taught, so I didn't go to any culinary institute. And when I moved to UK, you leave your family, you're excited about, you know, a different culture coming from a different place. And when I came to UK, I got really, really excited about so many various things. But then I missed my family, my friends I grew up with, the food I grew up with. And my husband could see how I was getting a bit depressed, you know. And he said, let's take you out to Indian restaurant. And I tell you, I was super excited. I was so happy that I'm going to Indian, eat Indian food. And I went to the Indian restaurant. This is no joke. Every curry tasted the same. So it was 10 pounds of lager and a curry. So if you know lager means beer, so it's 10 pounds of lager and a curry, kind of each tasted the same. And 25 years ago I decided I'm going to open a restaurant. And my husband looked at me and then about five years ago I did. So how old were you when you moved to the UK? 22. Yeah. And what brought you? My husband is a chip designer. He designs computer chip. He came to study here. And while he was doing his masters and he got a job and I followed him here. And so at what point were you already cooking, I mean you said yourself top, but were you cooking at home? How did you decide that you would begin cooking professionally? So when I was growing up, I did not like to go in the kitchen. I was very chubby. I loved eating food. I don't know what you're talking about at all. Used to say come and help me. And any excuse, I would run away and pray cricket with my brother. So I would say I tend to enjoy cooking, I loved eating. What was fascinated was India is such a big country. It's the regional food, the traditions are different, the cultures are different. Every household cooks food so differently. So talk about your specific household. I hate the idea that this happens to a lot of cuisines where you have a huge country and a super diverse, rich culture and then it's like, oh, it's Indian food. There's more than one Indian food, right? So what was it like? What kind of food did you grow up eating? My dad worked in a steel plant from Punjabi family, which is not India. But my dad worked in West Bengal, which is East India, if you know the map of India. So people came from all over India to work there. So I grew up in a Punjabi household family into very lentils, a lot of vegetarians eating meat in the weekend kind of stuff. And Bengali eat staple diet is practically fish and rice. They eat a lot of fish, fish every day. And I loved eating fish. I think in between Punjabi and Bengali, I fluctuate. I was just talking to Pratik. Pratik is an amazing chef from India. And I was talking to him and I said, I fluctuate when I want to be Bengali. I want to be a Punjabi. It depends what mood I am. So bring me back to that first Indian meal in the UK, ten loggers and a curry. Like, did you leave that saying like, I'm opening a restaurant. This is this is a nightmare. Or like, what happened between that experience? Was it just like you kept missing this variety and diversity of cuisine or talk me through your process there? I think now in the UK, we have this amazing multicultural community, amazing, amazing Indian food and diverse food from all over UK, from all over India. But what I started doing, started doing parties at home, cooking for people, starting my own little catering business, making sauces and you know, I just wanted to do it. I didn't want to open a restaurant which I didn't know anything about it. So I kind of started from my kitchen, that's my name of my restaurant, it's Romi's kitchen. It meant, because I started it from the kitchen. And it just became big. And I wasn't scared to ask people to give me opportunity. Don't pay me, just give me an opportunity. I used to go and work in the restaurants, I want to learn. Or cookery demos or go to cookery schools and teach and learn from people. I think that was kind of my journey. I started writing to people. And what kind of places did you go to learn? Did you feel like you wanted to learn specifically from Indian chefs? Or was it different than that? Did you want to learn a more general approach? I didn't go to any Indian restaurant, I just went to Indian restaurants where I wrote to them and then they really helped me with my success. And for me, my success completely changed. Alan Jenkins is sitting somewhere. He's the editor of OafM.  And eventually, I think he gave up. He thought this moment is not going to give up. Is that true, Alan? How would you dream if you have a mentor? I think mentor is really important in your life. And then there are people who will mentor you, train you, and which I do to the women in the industry now. And I think that's really, really important. So I think I know a little bit about the idea of Indian cuisine in England. But painting me like a more of a picture than that first meal, like why did you think that, what hole were you trying to fill there? What did you want to do differently than other people? What was missing from your experiences there? What did you think you were going to bring to people that you were feeding? See, when I had the first meal, I still remember that my fingers were pink when I came back home. Shouldn't be pink, you know? What? So it's the coloring they use in the restaurants. I think it's changed from 25 years, it's changed, we have some fantastic restaurants. And I still have the sweet, horrible, gel-frazy, so-called curry, which I had. And I just cannot, and announced with full, so thick, that I needed to learn how to cook it in the tandoor, so I can do any kind of nouns you want me to do, you know? I can make them, but the nouns need to be crispy, they need to be light, they don't need to be doughy. So that kind of stick to my mind. And in my restaurant now I have very traditional recipes and I don't think everything, I just hate the word apente city. I think there's no word as apente anymore because we live in a world where people come from all over the world and learn from different traditions. And I took on the traditional recipes, like I serve octopus in my restaurant. So I'll do tamarind octopus with punch foreign. Punch foreign is a five spice, which Indian five spice, whole spice. So I'll do some things like that, but I keep my traditional recipes that I grew up with, the family I ate at home and I all went to my friend's house. So kind of, you know, put that in my restaurant. Do you feel yourself having to deal with different expectations of what you're going to serve when people come to your restaurant, do they expect what they're used to, tikka masala and things like that and soft nouns? I think when I opened five years ago, people did. And when Vendalu, people like, I only came to this country when I came to UK. Vendalu's very Portuguese going dish and it's cooked with pork and, you know, it's very vinegary, it's got the red cheese and it's very much in Bombay and Goa, they're served. And if you go to any parts of India, they wouldn't even know about it. So it was like madras chicken. I don't know what madras chicken is. I have no idea, you know. And tikka masala or bolty, bolty means bucket, right? So they were maybe they were asking you for a bucket of tikka masala. I don't do that. Does that bother you at that point? Were you offended by that? Or did you feel like you were upset that people were coming to you? Or did it not move you like that? I think when I feel quite fierce at times when I was asked to put loads of chilies and one of my front of the house, they kind of push pulled me because I get so, you know, chilies, yes, there should be chilies in the food, but it shouldn't be overpowering, right? Isn't it? What is the deal? It's the same thing with Chinese food. Like people come in and they're like, I want the extra spicy. I want the Chinese spicy version, the Thai spicy version. Like white people are sorry. So like into how spicy the food is, right? Seems a little spooky. I had a beer before I came here. But it doesn't, it didn't upset you didn't force you to change your cooking or did you find yourself making these kinds of concessions? And okay, okay, we'll do it really spicy. Like what? I don't want to do it. If you want extra spice, I'll give you some chilies that we do in India, like onions and chilies on the side with lemon. I'll do that. But I literally had to throw one guy out of the restaurant because I could not take it anymore because he wanted more chilies, more chilies, more chilies. And I said, look, there is another restaurant very near to me that serves that. Please go there. So I had to say that. I think you have to have that be very strong. So, you know, there are very few Indian women in the industry in the UK, probably all over the world, very few.  You need to be different from others. Do you think it would have been harder in a bigger city or was it harder in a smaller city to break through as a woman, an Indian woman? I think I did the right thing being in a small town. Started my career from there. London would have been a lot expensive, isn't it, Alan? The prices are just, the rates are so high. And every second there's a new restaurant opening. So I think it would have been harder there. In the states where you can hear from my accent I come from, restaurants, even if they're opened by people who have grown up and been born and spent their entire lives in America, if they're serving a cuisine that's not what people would consider to be American, they get penned into this term, ethnic restaurants. Is this a thing that you feel happens in the UK like that although curry and Indian flavors and ingredients are so intrinsic to the cuisine there, it's still like a separate conversation? See, when my dad, my dad's a great cook, he always said that cooking is all about getting a meal on a table. It's about everyone has a fascination of food, right? And food allows us to explore different cultures, methods, tradition and techniques. I think there is a lot of negativity around hospitality industry but also it gives me, this is where I belong. If you're telling me to go and work somewhere else I can't, this is where I am. I'm happy here, I love what I do. And I find really positive things as a commercial kitchens are some of the most successful, integrated multi-culture, environmentally. It's just the honesty and don't need to be born with the culinary skills of that tradition. You can learn in the kitchens. So for me to go and learn something else like I now have a very, very good friend who is from Japan and he taught me how to do, how they do their food and their techniques.  And there's another after culture who's an amazing chef in London. He taught me how to plate. You know how if you want to plate, you need to plate this way. I think you learn, you kind of become, you know, every single day if you learn, you're gonna learn how to do it. I think that's a great point to make that. I know that we're in an incredibly tumultuous and really terrifying time and that the industry has these fundamental problems that are creating inequities and discrimination. But this is also the industry that you can walk into a restaurant with no skills and start from the very bottom and work side by side with people from 58 different countries and people who speak different languages and feel welcome, right? Like I think that's something really special about the world you work in. I think sharing food, you know, it breaks the barrier of the language. You put the food on the table, everybody will come together, no matter what language you speak. Food speaks the language, you know? For me, I really wanted to say something about Anthony Borden. I absolutely loved him. And he said once, said that I am an advocate for anything it is to be a move, walk in someone else's shoes or at least eat their food. It's all about exploring the world. Love in your heart and acting in your pocket, you can't go wrong. Yeah? I think that, I think that sure words have been spoken. I think, yeah, I think that without movement there's no cuisine, right? There's no food if people don't interact and share ideas and ingredients and move from place to place. You would never have opened a restaurant, right? Had you not moved. Do you think if you had stayed in India you would have gone into cooking? No, when I was doing after LA A-Levels I wanted to be in the hospitality industry and that's in no way, because you wouldn't exist because you wouldn't survive there. Still in India, the hospitality industry, we have a bunch of female chefs in India. Reality TV is changing it, but it's very much reality TV, you know? But the real chef women who work or men who work in the industry you can count on your fingers. Yeah, that's, I think it's a common story in this industry, right? Parents who don't want their kids to go into this because it's not, there's no guarantees and it's such a difficult thing, but you decided to do it anyway. What did your family think of you cooking your, the food that you grew up with and serving it to people in England? I think my dad and mom came and they were really, really proud of me and if I want to mourn, I mourn to Alan about something. I think him as my dad. And I just absolutely love him and I really want to say something about Dal Saladino. He's sitting somewhere as well. Dan, can't see him. Oh, there. Dan is a producer, editor from Radio 4 BBC and I bugged him as well, wrote to him and I had to prove to him that actually I can cook and I am good at it, what I do. And he gave me my first break on radio about a couple of years ago. So I present quite a lot on radio for now. So he is one of the guys who is very dear to me and helped me in my journey. Please big hand for him, please. What did these emails look like? What were you saying to them? Because I bug a lot of people and nobody responds when I'm like put me on the radio. What were you asking them? What was the opportunity that you were asking for? See, I didn't want it to be maybe I have more dreams. I had a dream. I came from a very small town in India and a small town girl can have a dream, yeah. So I came here and I opened a restaurant and I just didn't want it to be, that's it. I wanted more.  I have two teenage daughters and trust me, it's a really hard time at the moment. Teenagers, I was a teenager once and I phoned my mom and she said, well, grow out of it, you were worse. So, you know, so I have to live by that. I think I wanted more and I think because my husband is very supportive, he's supportive, Indian men, not many Indian men are very supportive. So he was very, he's very supportive and my daughters were very little when I opened. And you know, if you don't have the support of the family and friends, it's impossible to do what you want to do. And I wanted to kind of have that actually a woman who was a mom, who was a housewife can actually have a dream, can achieve these things. And that's why I wanted to be, you know, talked about, I wanted to write recipes that I grew up with.  I couldn't write, I wasn't a great writer at all. I write now. But he said write, even if you want to swear something, if you had a hard day at the restaurant, write every single day. That helps. Everybody, there's a writer in you. What do you write about every day? Is it like about what's happened or is, are you writing?  You're just writing like Star Wars fan fiction and stuff like. I don't have time to watch TV. By the time I go back home, literally I'm a zombie sometimes, two o'clock. And then I have to get up at six o'clock for my kids to, I want to see my kids. I want to, that's the only time I see them in the morning. So I want to see them. I want to make the breakfast for them. This is all makeup, by the way. If I look like this, I've had two hours of sleep. So this is all makeup. And it's good quality makeup. This is also, there's no makeup over here. This is all beer. This is what you get. I think it's really interesting. There's this conversation or fallacy, I think that goes around that it's like, having a family is one of the reasons why women have to like depart the kitchen, right? My opinion is that having a child, having a family should be just as difficult for a male chef as it is for a female chef, right? Like why is it automatically the female chef's role to take care of the kids? Thank you. And you've done it a little bit differently than a lot of people. I don't think a lot of people had a family and then said, you know what? Like I'm gonna do one of the craziest things people can do and start cooking. At the age of 40, I did it. Right. And I mean, if that does prove like that is a fallacy, I don't think anything else will, right? Like you did it and I'm sure it was hard on the family, but like you said, like it's support and you have to have... I think you have to have support. You have to have the drive and you want to cook for people. You can't just stand and paint your nails and that's it. You want to cook. You want to be there for your chefs, right? You want to listen to somebody who's having a hard time at home or something. You want to be there for them because I think it's so, so important, I think. And I'm very... I look after my staff really well. I pay them well, I look after them. I think those are the very important things.  What are the things from your experience that you want to make sure that your cooks and your staff are instilled with? If they're gonna go off and do something of their own, what do you want to make sure that they take with them to the next generation and the next restaurants and everything that's gonna come back to you in a lot of ways? See, I don't have any Indian or A Southeast Asian working in my restaurant, I'm not being racist, sorry. It's just that I cannot find any Indians working in there and I don't want to wait for somebody to come from India or Pakistan or Bangladesh to work in my restaurant. I want to train the younger generation we have in UK because in the colleges, they're not trained properly. So, want them to train because we eat different kinds of cuisines, why not train them from basics? So, I train every, you know, my kitchen porter, she was amazing, amazing, amazing, and I taught her how to cook. She can make kilannans and she cooks all for me and then I had, you know, a lady who's just left me, I was devastated because she wanted to move to near her parents, she was from Poland, but she could cook exactly the way I wanted her to cook and he couldn't make different between my curry and her curry, you know? That is it. I think that's really amazing because, you know, I say she goes to open a restaurant, I think she's gonna wrestle with these questions of, well, what are you doing cooking this food? It's not yours, but you're sharing it, right? It's culture is a shared thing and misappropriation is a terrible thing, but it's also, we can't put up all these walls between you're not from where I am, you can't cook my food, right?  Why, but at the same time, I'll tell you, respect the food of that country. Please. You know, if you cannot respect the food of my country, please don't cook it. I mean, that was a great way for us to end, but do you got anything else you wanna say to the folks here? No, I'm glad to Molina and, where is Rene, to invite me here and give me this opportunity. I was crazy within these things, you know, it happened and I'm really looking forward to listen to the other speakers here. I'm thanking all the crowd here. It's been an honor to talk to you. Thank you so much. Thank you.


Transcribed. Now listen to Father Knows Best, starring Robert Young's father. A half-hour visit with your neighbors, the Anderson. Brought to you by Crosley, makers of pace-setting products for happier living. Crosley Automatic Television. Oh, boy. Beautiful Crosley-Schelvedore refrigerators. The world's most convenient. Wonderful Crosley Automatic Electric Rangers. Crosley-Schelvedore freezers, color-style radios, and many other leading home appliances. Back in the days of ancient Rome, folks used to go to the Coliseum to watch a gladiator fight a lion. That must have been quite a tussle. Almost as spectacular as the struggle going on in the living room of the White Frame House on Maple Street, where a man is fighting with a newspaper. The man, Jim Anderson, 160 pounds. The newspaper, The Springfield Clarion, six-and-one-half ounces. Where in the name of Count Founded Caesar can't find anything in this mixed-up pile of junk they call a newspaper. What in the world do they do with this thing? Too bad he's losing. Let's look into the kitchen where two of the younger Anderson are engaged in the battle of the dish-band. Like this. Why do I have to dry dishes? Where's Kathy? I told you about it. I skewed Kathy tonight. It was very nice of you to volunteer to help Eddie, who volunteered? I was drafted. Margaret, where's the rest of the paper? It's all there in the living room, Jim. Drying dishes is not a man's work. Look who's a man all of a sudden. Eddie, don't argue with him. A family like us ought to have a dishwasher. We have. I'm it. I mean an automatic. Seven nights a week. How automatic can you get? Watch the dishes. Oh, grown. We ought to have an electric lawn mower, too. I could use the motor when I'm not mowing the lawn. Which is 365 days a year? Children, if you're going to argue, you'll just have to... Margaret! I'm busy in the kitchen, dear. What is it? Margaret, where's Kathy? I dismissed her from drying dishes tonight. She has something very special to do. Like getting out of wiping the dishes. But I'm sure that's not what you had in mind. Well, there's something mighty strange going on in this house. What do you mean, dear? The financial page is gone out of the paper again. Last night the financial page was gone. Night before the sport page. Every night for over a week. Betty? I don't know anything about it, Father. It wasn't me, dear. Well, somebody's taking them out. Every night some page is missing. It's aggravated, especially the financial page. I don't understand it. I certainly haven't much use for the financial page, Jim. Or the sport page either. I didn't do it. Betty didn't do it. You didn't do it. What would Kathy want with two-week financial pages? She can't even spell financial. Neither can you. I can't see why she'd do it. I can't possibly see why. She seems to be very busy on some great project lately. She goes around in kind of a trend. No, it couldn't have been Kathy. Jim, I don't know what to suggest. Well, I do, and I think I'm going to enjoy it. I'm going to call my old pal Fred Mattson down at the paper and make a complaint. Fred Mattson, the editor? Certainly, I pay the full subscription. I want a full paper.  I am not. I've been waiting for a chance to bend his ear about something. How do? I'm going to call him right now. You want to hear me polish him off? Come on, listen to him. Jim. Come on, this is going to be good. Mother, about to keep scrapping the dishes before they're ran. Okay, you don't have to make a federal case out of it. See, I think Fred's number's in the book here. Jim, why do you have to call Fred Mattson? I can't be in charge of missing pages. Margaret, when you buy a shirt and a button's missing, do you call the button so or on it? The what? Suppose you buy a loaf of raisin bread from the bakery and there are no raisins in it. I don't see what buttons and raisins have to do with Fred Mattson. You're missing the whole point. If the raisins are missing, you don't call the person who stuffs in the raisins.  So? So, if the buttons are missing from my paper, the raisins, I mean the pages are missing. I don't call the paper stuffer.  Jim, you're doing this just to provoke him. You're supposed to be friends. We are friends, but Fred just loves to rid me every chance he gets. It's a friendly feud. I'm sure I don't understand. Women never do. Last month, when one of my salesmen called him about renewing some fire insurance on his building, did I hear about it? Wow! Why? The renewal wasn't due for two years. Boy, did he jump on that. Anxious Andy, he calls me. Jump the gun, Jim. Now, will I get back at him? I wish you'd please hold off until I at least ask Kathy. I'm sure she had nothing to do with it. Oh, this is going to be good. Fred, I'll say, what's the matter? Paper shortage? Then I'll say, don't look now, Fred, but your sport page is slipping. Oh, that's the silliest thing I ever heard. I'm going to find Kathy. Betty, bud. Yes, mother? Have you any idea where Kathy is? No, I have a mother. Oh, that's him. Fred Mattson. Jim Anderson. Yeah, Anxious Andy. What's the matter down there? Paper shortage? She was in my room once this afternoon. Dropping the financial page, are you, Mattson? I'm probably too late, but I'll go look. I'll go. You'll finish wiping the dishes if it takes you all night. Get to work, flow poke. I don't see what Dad's so steamed up about. Financial pages. Holy cow.  Well, it's better than that junk that you read. I don't read junk. Dear Miss Fairfax. It's not Fairfax. I am a beautiful girl of 16. Bud, don't be silly. I am madly in love with a handsome lettuce picker. Oh, Bud.   Please answer this before my true love dies of old age, signed Puzzled Heart. What in the world are you doing? Who me? Never mind. Where's your mother? She's looking for Kathy. Oh, well, I've got something real choice to tell you. Jim, Jim. Right here, Margaret. I knew you shouldn't have called, Fred Mattson. Why not? I enjoyed it. Oh, dear. I'd have been on the phone yet, but he hung up on me. Couldn't take it. Anxious Andy is right. Look here. Oh, what's this? Only your precious missing pages. Where did these come from? I told you it was Kathy. It wasn't Kathy. Betty, I found these in your room beside your typewriter. Oh, boy. Bud, leave the room. I can't, Dad. I have to wipe the dishes. Mother, you certainly don't think... Oh, Betty, let's not get excited. You just had to call Fred Mattson. Margaret, what Mattson doesn't know won't hurt him. Betty, the missing pages themselves are nothing. It's just... Father, please, I... It's just that sometimes we do a little thing and we hate to admit it. It's not the thing itself, but it just, well, it builds up. Sure, I know. You start out stealing pins and the first thing you know... Bud, leave the room. What can I do? Go look for Kathy. I never get to wipe the dishes. Kathy! Kathy! It's all right, Princess. I'm not going to school. Jumping creepers, I didn't take the papers. Betty, the evidence... What could I possibly want with financial pages? I don't know, but...  Well, there's a sport pages. Sport pages. Look at those pictures. Wrestlers. You. Well, then, who is a... Wait a minute. Wait a minute, Jim. Look on the other side of the pages. Oh. Story writing contest for children between 8 and 10. On every single page, look. Final week of contest brings wealth of manuscripts. But it must have been Kathy. Grand prize winner to be announced Saturday. Daily winners exhibit mature talent. Kathy! Kathy! She's entered this contest and was typing her story in my room. You want me, Mommy? Here I am. I found her lugging bird seed up to the attic. Kitten, you've entered this story contest? I'm going to win a typewriter. Jim, why did you have to call Fred Natson? He had it coming anyway. Then you did take those pages, Kathy. Oh, sure. The rules and stuff were all on them. Thank goodness that settled. Grab the dish towel, bud. Give me a chance. You should have asked your father, dear. As a matter of fact, it's not important at all. I'm very proud of you, Kitten. Now I can have a typewriter for my very own. Oh, yeah? How do you know you'll win it? My story is a lot better than those that have been printed. I'm sure it is. Anderson is quite a name in literature. You know, Hans Christian? Oh, we aren't in a relation to him. Are we? Ask your father. Are we, Dad? It's entirely possible. Anyway, I'm going to help Kathy with her story. Oh, that wouldn't be fair, Daddy. It's the rules. Rules? Of the contest. I'm not allowed to color rabbit with any of the family. Not allowed to what? Color rabbits. That means get any help. Oh, I think you mean collaborate. Collaborate. And the story has to be a true story. I see. Well, I just thought... I'll win it anyway, Daddy. Yeah, her. Never mind, boy. I'm sure you will, kitten. The first prize winner is going to be announced on Saturday. That's just fine.  Oh, it's a real sweet story. That's good. That's the kind I like. What is it about? It's a secret. Maybe you could just kind of give me a hint. I might just make a suggestion or two. It wouldn't be fair. Is it about us or the house? Jim, don't be so inquisitive. I'm not inquisitive. I'm just enthusiastic. You'll find out what it's about Saturday. I don't see why I can't just glance over the story and make a suggestion here and there. I wish you'd be as anxious to help me when I have to write something for school. I'm always willing to help any of you kids anytime. You know that. No, kitten. Certainly, but I've never refused you when you asked, have I? Well, I've got a project now. I could sure use some help. All right, son. Tell me what it is. I'm your man. Will you really take over, dad? I said I would, didn't I? Okay. Here you are. What's the dish towel for? That was my project. I was wiping the dishes. Wait a minute. Thanks a lot, dad. You promised him, daddy. Swindled by my own son. And now here is our very special guest, lovely and talented Hollywood star Margaret Lindsay. Good evening. You know, I wish you could watch me on the Paul Winchell and Jerry Mahoney TV show because it's so easy to show you why Crosley Automatic Television is the world's finest. For example, with Crosley, you just turned one control knob, the exclusive Crosley Unituner to select the channel you want. The result?  And that's true even in areas where reception is generally poor. And with Crosley Automatic Television you never have to jump up to match the picture to the sound or get rid of picture disturbances or adjust the controls to keep the pictures clear, strong and steady. Crosley, you see, does all those jobs for you. Crosley TV automatically makes all adjustments.  But you see for yourself how true that is. You visit your Crosley dealer tomorrow. See Crosley Automatic Television in action. Admire the beauty of the authentically-styled cabinets. You'll be convinced. Here's the finest in television, priced to make you doubly happy. There's an old saying to the effect that he travels fastest who travels alone. If this is true, the youngest Anderson is bound to set an all-time speed record, which is working a considerable hardship on the other Anderson. Well, all but one. On this Saturday afternoon, he's not concerned about anything like this. Bud? Yeah, just a minute, I will. Well, what? Oh, I don't know, whenever you say Bud like that, you want me to do something. I want you to get your feet off the back of the Davenport for one thing. Why do you always have to get your feet up over your head when you're reading something? My feet? Don't look at them like you'd never seen them before. They are yours. Yeah, I guess they are. Hello, feet. Bud, don't be facetious. What's that? It's what you're being. Now get up and get busy. You promised to gather up the old magazines and put them in the garage today. Okay. Did you know that grasshoppers live longer in the tropics than they do in colder climates? Bud, you're not supposed to be reading the magazines. Holy cow, everybody else gets to read them. All I do is carry them out. Well, start carrying. Where's Kathy? She's sitting around some place waiting for the paper to come with that story. Now, Tralicia's excited. We all hope her story wins.  Writing that gooey love stuff. What makes you think it's love stuff? Probably starts out with a hero saying, I love you, my angel eyes. What did you say? Nothing. Margaret, I'm home. We're in the living room, dear. Hi, Abad. Hello, honey. Hello, dear. Well, how's the literary family? Where's Kathy? Have you heard anything yet? Heard anything? Heard newspaper. I thought maybe they'd call if she won. The day's the day, you know. I know, dear. We haven't heard. I thought they might want to take pictures or something. She probably didn't even come close.  Hey, Dad, did you know that grasshoppers live longer in the topics? I'm sure if I were a grasshopper, I'd head south immediately. Where's Kathy? Bud, if you don't take the magazines out right now, you're going to wash and wipe the dishes tonight. I can't. Joe Phillips and I are going to color rabbits tonight. What? You know, help each other on some problems.  All my life, I've never been facetious. Now twice in one afternoon. What's he talking about? I don't know what's come over him. Bud, do as you're told. Okay, okay. I haven't been able to do a thing with him this afternoon. Well, kid, go through pages. It's a funny thing the paper hasn't called. If Kathy won, I mean. Well, dear, maybe she didn't win. After all. But there seemed to be no question in her mind. I think you'd be more disappointed than Kathy. Well, it's just that I'm enthusiastic about my family. You can't blame a man for that. How was your golf game today? Huh? Oh, very good. Did you see, uh, Fred Mathen? I certainly did. I let him have both barrels again. Oh, Jim, you didn't. He came in with 103. I told him to print that one on his missing sport page. Jim, you shouldn't. Why not? What does he know? You shouldn't have done it. Didn't he say anything? Oh, he mumbled about something loose in my attic. What a comeback. What a snappy retort. He's probably figuring some way to get back at you. No, I don't think so. Say, wait a minute. Wait a minute. Do you suppose he would purposely keep Kathy from winning that prize? Jim, he probably doesn't even know Kathy entered it. He's the managing editor, isn't he? Probably one of the judges. Well, he certainly wouldn't stoop to... I'm not so sure. Jim, he wouldn't. You said yourself it's just a friendly feud. Maybe this is going beyond the friendly stage. If he brings my daughter into it... Jim, please. Wouldn't that be a sneaking, underhanded trick? Jim, calm down. I am calm, but believe me, if I find out that he... Oh, Jim, for heaven's sake. What a petty thing to do. Hello, Daddy. Oh, hello, kitten. Gee, Daddy.  Me? No. I'm all right. Uh, how is my favorite daughter between the ages of eight and ten? Fine. Daddy? Yes, kitten? What makes you so red in the face?  Well, kitten, have you heard from the paper about whether you won or not? I don't have to. I know I'm going to win. Well, I certainly like your confidence, but it seems they'd notify you of the... It'll be in the paper tonight. Pretty soon. Kathy, if it should happen that you don't win... But I'm going to. Your father means that there should be a slip-up or something. There won't be. I only wish you'd have let me help you. It wouldn't have been fair, Daddy. The rules. I might have added just a touch of color here and there. But this story had to be true. And if a story is a true story, you don't do anything to it. Of course. What? You just say it the way it is. Margaret, did you hear that? Naturally. Now, there's a great rule for good writing if I ever heard one. Kathy's developing a remarkable mind. Believe me, there's nothing loose in her attic. Oh, it's just a figure of speech. That's funny. Funny? Attic, I mean. That's the name of my story. The Secret of the Attic. Secret of the Attic? Well, is it about something that happened in the attic? Jen, don't pry. I'm not prying. I'm just interested. Attic. I can't imagine what could happen in the attic. It could very easily rain in the attic, since you haven't fixed the roof. That could happen. Rain in the attic.   Say, that's rather good, isn't it? Is it that, Kathy? No. Oh. When did you find out about this, I mean the secret? When I was taking the bird seat up to the attic one day. That bird seat I won. Oh. Is it about the bird seat?  Margaret, if Kathy feels she wants to consult me about things, if she feels like telling her own father what her story is all about, she has a perfect right to it. Haven't you, Kathy? No. Jen, I've never seen you so insistent. Who's insistent? I want it to be a surprise. Then maybe you shouldn't have mentioned it in the first place.  The child wants it to be a surprise. Let it be a surprise. It's like Christmas, Daddy. The story? No. I mean, you never let me open any packages before Christmas morning because then it wouldn't be a surprise. That's right. Forgive me, your daddy is just so proud and excited.  I mean... You run along now, Kathy, and let Daddy rest a while. Okay. I'll let you ride in my new typewriter, Daddy. Bless her heart. If she doesn't win, it'll be just... She will. When you know something, you just know what I get. It's amazing, a child's confidence. Well, I guess I'll go and clean up. The paper should be here before long. I'll see if she doesn't win. And I find out that Fred Mattson is behind it. Jim Anderson. Dad! Hey, Dad! Yes? Come here a minute, Lydia. Don't shout at me, Bob. If you want me, you come here. When will kids learn that parents are not supposed to jump at their beck and call? I swear... If you want me to save these old financial pages out of the papers? Of course not. Just thought I'd ask before I took them out. There's no interest to me anymore. Take them out. The only paper your father is interested in is tonight's. I don't see why everybody's so excited about Kathy's old love story. Bob, what makes you think... Angel eyes, scar of my dreams. Bob! Words from your lips like the falling of rose petals. But Anderson, where did you... Yes, where in the world did you get that silly drivel? Silly, Jim, it's... What kind of trash have you been reading lately? Oh, well, I just happened to be... Bob, have you gotten into the attic trunk? Attic trunk? Jim, that came from the love letters you wrote me 20 years ago. They were in that trunk. But Anderson... I didn't look in any trunk on this. Those very words, where did you find them? Well, I just happened to look in Kathy's room. Kathy's room? And I was just looking around. What for? Well, I got to wondering what her story was about. And I happened to find a letter... Jim, for heaven's sake, do you know what this means? It means that Bud is entirely too curious. Now, look here. Jim, what'll we do? Well, there's no particular harm. Jim, don't you see the connection? Kathy's story, the secret of the attic. Your love letters, they're going to be published today. Oh, no! Hi, everybody, what's all this? Hey, bring me the phone. Bring me the phone. Who in the world can you phone? Father, how can I bring you the phone? The cord's fastened to the wall. Never mind. I'll call Fred Manson. Apologize. Jim, it's too late. Betty, go find Kathy. This is the silliest, Pamela. I've got to stop the press. I'll call Fred. I'll crawl. Humiliate myself. It's too late. The paper will be here any minute now. I'm ruined. It will be all over town. Jim, there's a chance that Kathy didn't use those letters. You want me, Mommy? I'll be the laughingstock of the town. Kathy, you found some of Daddy's letters in the attic. I was putting the bird seed in the trunk. Ridiculous in the streets. What's the matter with Daddy? Your father is sick. Of course, on my own guitar. There's the paper. I'll get it. I will. Jim, maybe she didn't win. No difference. Ruin man, all over town. Well, I'll be doggone. Look at this. Story finals won by Kathleen Anderson. I told you I would. Oh. The secret of the attic. But maybe you better not read it. In a quiet corner of our attic lives a couple named Jim and Margaret. Corner of the attic? They will never have to work hardly at all, for they will have enough bird seed to last in the rest of their lives. I thought this had to be true. It is. Wait until he reads farther down. Rest of their lives. Jim and Margaret are two little birds who have built a nest there. I think they are swallows. Kathy. I named them Jim and Margaret because those are the nicest names of parents I know. Why kitten? I think they will soon be parents as they are sitting on an egg. What kind of a story is that, bird? What kind of a story? Only the most wonderful story ever written. I knew she could do it. Kathy, Angel, it wasn't much. Sure wasn't, but... But, Kathy darling, we thought, I mean, how in the world did you pass up daddy's letters? Well, Mommy, I thought that was a secret between you and daddy. I don't think it's right to tell other people secrets. Kathy, you're marvelous. You're so right. To one and all, never meddle in the secrets of others.  To all of us. Now, Kathy, I'm going to get comfortable while you read us the rest of your wonderful story. You know, friends, you can't really enjoy television at its finest if you're forever jumping up and down to adjust the controls. That's why the biggest thing in television today is causally automatic television. Television that adjusts itself automatically to give you the clearest, brightest, steadiest picture in television. And that's true even if you live in a so-called fringe area. Once you've selected the station you want, you just sit back and enjoy the show to your heart's content. There's no getting up to eliminate picture disturbances or keep the picture steady or fiddle with the sound. No, sir. For when the picture's right, the sound's right automatically. Yes, visit your causally dealer tomorrow. Watch causally automatic television in action. Compare the beautiful, authentically-styled cabinets. You will say, here's television at its finest. Price to make you doubly happy. Evening has drawn its sheltering cloak around the White Frame House on Maple Street. And tonight, with a celebrity in the family, the order of things has been slightly changed. Like this. Hey, Dad, how come you and Mom are doing dishes? Well, Betty had a date tonight. What about Kathy? We can't very well ask a prominent authorist to dry dishes. I think she earned the evening off. She writes some junk about a couple of little birds. For this, you want a typewriter? That was a surprise. Maybe I'll write a story. Once upon a time there were two ostriches. Look, if you're going to hang around, there's another dish towel there. I'm going. Jim, I've been thinking about those letters in the trunk and some of the things you said in them. After 20 years, do they sound ridiculous? No.  Thank you, Jim. Margaret, you can hand me the potato masher now. Add exciting new color to your home. Enjoy radio reception at its best with Crosley's exciting new color-style radios. Tone engineered to give you full, rich sound from stations near and far without fading or blasting, these radios are setting the pace in radio reception. Decorator designed to bring gay new color to your home. 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Please welcome Jan Verlinden with IMPROF combats ageism. Hello everybody. Thanks for coming to the talk. So I will have 10 minutes at the latest 50 minutes talk about ageism. I will not take anything on the slide so I will keep to my time of 10 minutes or 15 minutes. So what is ageism? In short it is discrimination on basis of age. It can be younger people, but I will focus on older people. The causes of that discrimination are stereotypes and prejudices that are internalized personally, individually and socially. Those stereotypes and prejudices are invalid and very thorough scientific studies prove that. I will refer often to studies, to books, to very famous psychiatrists. They focus on the mental growing, the mental state of older people. So I will very little, I will refer to my own experience because I want to refer to very professionally executed studies. So how big is the problem? I just cite the World Health Organization that say 50% of the population is agist against other people. So it's a huge problem. Number of stereotypes, I will cite again Beka Levy, a very famous profession and psychiatrist. So what are the stereotypes? I mention here the 14, I'm not going into every 14, but older people are unable to learn, are bad drivers, lack creativity, suffer from mental illnesses that can't be treated, aren't effective in workplace, don't benefit from healthy behaviors and so on. And those prejudices live in our society, especially in our Western society, so Western Europe, USA. It doesn't need to be like that. For example, in Japan they have a complete other attitude to older people. They have now about 37,000 centennials, so people that are older than 100 years old and they are treated like movie stars there. When is their birthday, the mayor comes, they come on television, they get a present of the federal government, so it doesn't need to be like this, this is Western. So what are the areas where their discrimination on ages older people is manifesting? I'm not going into all of them, for example, advertisement. We are, the Western world is concentrated on younger people being young, that's for the Western world beautiful, but that's a stereotype. Mental health care, I'll give you one problem. Ashton Applewhite is an activist in the USA on ageism. She wrote a fantastic book, a fantastic website where she explains everything and how thorough the problem is. On health care she says ageism, that means less treatment, worse treatment, or often no treatment at all. And this is not fiction, this is real now. So what does ageism provoke in Jews? So I cite here again the World Health Organization, because I want to refer as often as I can to official studies not to my own experience, but because I suppose the worst case scenario that even you will have internalized some of the stereotypes mentioned. That's why I do not want to refer often to my experience, but to really scientific studies, or as in this case the World Health Organization. What cited here? If you individually or in your culture socially internalize and all those stereotypes, your behavior will give damage to the older people. And it is in all those areas I mentioned. So if everybody has those stereotypes and those prejudices, the older people they feel not incorporated anymore in society. They feel like being cast away, they believe in the productive society. So they feel not accepted anymore because they are not productive, which is not true. So the older people who really, because of that, get a low syllabus team by study and again it's thoroughly examined. They live seven and a half years less older than other when you have a positive attitude. It erodes solidarity between generations. Of course if you have the stereotypes that older people are like disposable waste than the younger people, and sure when you have those stereotypes already in education it happens that when you, the teachers, when they talk about older people it's often or always in a negative sense. They say, yeah, they are not creative, they cannot think anymore, they are often sick, they have mental illnesses that can't be cured, which is not true. But that has an enormous effect on the behavior from young to middle age. When you do not use the capacity and all the qualities that the elders still have that's even the most regrettable damage that ages and provokes. Now we start on the good news. So the good news is Dr. Koh is a famous psychiatrist and geriatrician.  And he concluded, I just cite him, I just quote him. He says there is an untapped wealth of creativity and intellectual potential for older people, I mean older than 60 years old, even older than 50, 60, 70, 80 and 90 years old. The brain does not degrade. He says, yeah, one of the reasons of that is that people who are older, older than 60, they say, yeah, I retire so now I do what I like to do. So otherwise when should I do it? And I don't care if anybody laughs at me. And that's exactly the mindset that is very nice to have when you train them in improvisation. Duke University did also very thorough investigation and they came to the conclusion that older people use their right brain which is the brain of intuition, creativity. They use it more in a synchronized way with the left brain which is the brain, half of the brain of mathematical and the ratio. And Dr. Cohen says about that, for me older people they move to all wheel drive with their brain. Because they have a lot of experience and we will see that the brain grows. The stereotype that the brain should degrade is a stereotype, it's not true. So he says everything, every activity that uses the both sides of the brain is chocolate to the brain. Art is like that, improvisation is like that. That's the next link to improvisation. So I like the expression chocolate to the brain because I'm from Belgium. So, in pro, pride in pro is chocolate to the brain. Keep that in mind. So, as the Nepal white also mentions in their book, especially in emotional realm older brains are more resilient because they have a lot of experience. So the aging brain and emotional maturity, they adapt better which is surprising but it's based on studies, not just on feeling or working with them and thinking that they can adapt better. No, no, they studied it. And they have a better, the aging brain search for a better level of well-being. She also talks about the cognitive reserve, that's the fact that the neurons can grow and they connect better. So from left to right and right to left. And you can attend that on the condition that they do something challenging. They maintain a social network and they do regularly exercises on that. And again, that for me it's a very compliment for me the definition of doing improvisation. So that's the real, even a former link to the applied improvisation. That the brain grows if they do something challenging, if they do that in a group, like in improvisation sessions and training. And they exercise regularly, not one time but every week, one hour, that's already enough, I think. More is better. So here we come to the link with improvisation, applied improvisation. I cite again Viola Spaulding. She talks about if you go, if you do her exercises like she instructs us in her books to do. And she says, yeah, you come into your intuition state of mind. She calls it X area and there in that state of mind, the culture, the race, the education, psychology and age doesn't exist anymore. So I again quote her to say already she think because one of her other saying this improvisation is meditation in action, which I think really it's true.  So here, even if you follow exercises or the Spaulding for Johnstone, they are different. They use different words or expressions, but ultimately they work on the state of mind of intuition and your own self. So my message from this talk is as an applied improvisation practitioner you are in a very privileged position because you have the tools or from Johnstone or from Viola Spaulding. Those are just a number of examples, but you are in a privileged position to do something about ageism. If you are interested in it, it can be on the side of the people who have contact who are working with older people to do something about their prejudices and stereotypes. Or you work with themselves, with the older selves to get rid of their low self esteem as they, the stereotypes, they internalize it and they partly or that I've seen in my sessions with older people I can see the damage really done by ageism and they, but you can, you have the tools. So you are in a privileged position. My final thoughts is first, examine your own stereotypes. I will give the references in my last slide. It was for me astonishing to see how much I was still inherited by the stereotypes and prejudices about older people. Older population is at least 25% or more of the society. If you count then the people who work with older people, then you come to 35-40% of the population, so it's a huge market. Working with them is easier and more satisfying because of the reasons I gave or the experts gave. In my opinion, art quality is not age-related, so go for performances. They can do it, even if they are 70, 80, 90 years old and they are eager to do it. These are some books. Ashton Applewhite is on the list of 100 most influential women, so she's excellent. Her website, the books, if you are interested in working with older people, then you should at least read one book. It will give you a great insight on how much stereotypes and prejudices we have in our culture and in our education. Okay, if you have questions, I'll stay here on the conference until the last day. Here are two pictures of two beautiful people. I, in McKellen, is 82 years old. Her and Mirren is 78 years old. And look at that. If you ask somebody what you think of her and Mirren, the moment he says, yeah, she looks really beautiful for her age. Well, that's ageism because beauty doesn't, it's not connected with age, how old you are. You are just, that's the number on your passport and everybody is beautiful, young baby, middle age, and if you're 90 years old, you have the physical construction of somebody from 90 years old, but that's beautiful also. That doesn't need to be compared with somebody of 30 years old. That's ageism. Okay, thank you.