So I know you've heard about this. I mean, everyone's heard about this. So what happened the first time that you smoked the toad medicine? I just felt this white light, this solution of myself. It's like a cultural meme on the Simpsons. Look the toad, and have a psychic look at the things. Fraktals, and sacred geometry, and energy. But did you know it's freakin' real? The most important thing that I felt was the reclamation with my breath. OK, Rack, I want to show you the product of the collect of the medicine of this year. This is what the natives and us have collected so far. And I want to explain to you the process of how we collect and do the medicine. So that looks like a lot of medicine. This is a lot of medicine. This has been collected of maybe a thousand of toads. A thousand toads? Maybe around 10 days. On today's show, which is long, long overdue, and I have to apologize to Niles and Rack for taking so long to get this out.  Here's a clip from an interview with Niles. What do you think of that science of entheogens? Each of the different entheogens has kind of a different flavor to them. So it's been spoken of, for example, but like psilocybin mushrooms are very like cosmic and alien. And then the other type of DMT, which we highlight, which you mentioned as the white light in episode one, is very much like this kind of haydron of hyperspace that merges into the guy in, you know, Godhead type dynamic of fusing back into the light. And then other indigenous medicines such as like peyote and the cacti have a very kind of masculine desert energy to them. And it's probably several things of what you hit on there. One is probably like the history and the genealogy of your people, where your people come from, what you resonate with in terms of which medicine maybe your ancestors practice with. Welcome to Skepticoe, where we explore controversial science and spirituality with leading researchers, thinkers, and their critics. I'm your host, Alex Sekaris. And today we welcome Niles Heckman to Skepticoe. Niles is a truly amazing filmmaker, documentarian in an photographer and a bunch of other stuff. You're going to see in a minute the stunningly beautiful documentary series he's done, Shamans of the Global Village. He's also a blogger, a podcaster, communicator, and I'm popping up his website here. But there's so many interesting things to talk about. He likes to put it in this category of ageless wisdom. Some people are calling entheogens the topic that we might pigeonhole it into. But there's all kinds of stuff related to this that I think are just particularly interesting and really respect the deeply intellectual way he's taking this, trying to tie it with other things and contrasting it with what some people in the occult community are saying and all that. And I really appreciate it, the broad perspective that he seems to be bringing to all this. So Niles, it's really cool to have you on. I'm so glad we connected. Welcome. Yeah, thanks Alex. I will not be spending this conversation trying to convince you we are biological robots in a meaningless universe. Okay, no good. You're nice enough to do a little survey that I have, which is always good because I do sometimes find myself talking to people and not realizing that we're kind of on a different page. So it's kind of a good grounding thing. You know, so I thought we would jump right in and talk about this film series that you've done, Shamans of the Global Village. It's, like I said, it's quite extraordinary. Do you want to tell us a little bit about your background Niles, how you came to do this particular work? And then I thought we'd play a short introductory clip from it. Yeah, sure.  And it's kind of like being a writer. It's like, well, then what's the subject matter of what you focus on? And depending upon the depth of the subject matter, there's a lot to pull from something. So what I more really am is an esotericist. I don't necessarily put that front and center on the website. But because esotericism is essentially the inside, like you should see the outer work manifesting with what's correlating with what's going on with inside you. So all of my overarching body of work focuses on, yes, themes of maybe what might be thought of as hopefully some level of ageless wisdom or spiritual philosophies. What was your background and how long have you been doing this? I've been doing it for about, I think 2012 was actually a year, a significant year where some things really clicked over for me. I'm in my early 40s now. So it wasn't like I was some star child at 12 and was getting downloads from astral dimensions. You know, I definitely have had in the last, it's now practically 2021 at the time of this conversation. So I've had the last eight years of really starting to focus on developing my craft personally, taking the body of work from a past career skill set, which involved working in essentially the formal structures of entertainment industries in very high level professional capacities. And then applying some of that professional capacity to this content that is of higher, you know, higher or more sophisticated content. Hold on, I gotta drill in there because you have to know that buzzers are going off in people's head and they're going to want to know more about your move, your segue from the entertainment industry. It's like, yeah, why do you give up a very high paying salary to do something else? I mean, it's usually, it's not an overnight thing either. Why does somebody transition from one career air quotes to another? But the most simple answer to this is that basically I wasn't using a large part of my skill set. It's like I had a very professional, desirable job within framework within the high end commercial industry in Los Angeles. And basically the post production industry of Hollywood. And I also had done some work on game cinematics because games are very, these days, you know, the games are so cinematic these days that it's like cinema and games are influencing each other and it's all blending together. So I did a variety of capacities within those fields. And occasionally I will still freelance very rarely in that capacity. It's not like we overnight turn off one spicket and go into something else. And it's very technician based. It's very like assembly line based no matter what. So it was like, I spent years and years just feeling like I was out of alignment and depression in life is usually a call for course correction. So I wasn't fully depressed. I mean, I certainly appreciate the levels of professional work ethic within various industries, whatever your industry. But most people know that with informal structures of an industry, it's not going to fully utilize your creative skill set.  It's a very slow transition phase. So I did find ways to create other income streams doing things that were more of independent substance and depth. And then thereby it's like you leave a much more lasting body of work. And you know, a lot of my work focuses on this kind of trifecta of spiritual growth and then some level of equilibrium because equilibrium is a kind of a stepping stone to what's called the great work. And then those external manifest manifestations which should lead to creative outputs. So this trifecta has led to me becoming much more individualized. Like I think we're all ultimately trying to do, right? You're trying to become much, you're trying to have a much more lasting legacy with what you do in terms of a body of work or some level of perennial wisdom or insight or sharing, you know, making your life mean something, not just be an assembly line robot at whatever glorified level that might be. Nice. Okay. Let's see the product of that, if we will, or one of the products of it. Indigenous people across the globe have used sacred plants and animal medicines for millennia to heal, illuminate and connect them to the web of life. Traditionally, each culture had a healer that works on behalf of their patients, what we call the shaman. And now we find ourselves in a global village. Is it any wonder that we need our own healers that understand the deep power and sacredness these ancient earth medicines can reveal? My name's Rakhazam and I'm an author, filmmaker and shamanic facilitator. Join me as I interview and sit in ceremony experiencing healing medicines with western shamans across the globe. Watch first hand as I document a modern shamanic resurgence being passed on from indigenous tribes to a new wave of medicine people working in the 21st century. This is Shamans of the global village. Hey man, that's a heck of a trailer teaser kind of tee it up thing there. Tell us what's going on there with you and Rakh and that first one in the series that you did. Yeah, so this show is basically an independently made documentary series and it's essentially a collaboration between Rakhazam whose voice you heard there as the host of the show and myself and we created it in 2016 with just the two of us. We created it in 2016 with just this pilot episode on a very shoestring budget. We went down to Mexico with one of the tribes there and shot it and it was a long process. I mean, we're kind of figuring out what it ultimately was going to be but then it came out really good as essentially a pilot episode of something that is not professionally funded. It's just something that's made independently and like all documentary filmmaking it's just like a question about how does a documentary even get made in the first place? So if I'm going to do something outside the formal structures of the industry it's like and do something that's on a shoestring budget. You might as well make something that's essentially what I would say is very paradigm destroying or very leading edge in terms of its wisdom and content and not something that you would find at first pull from a streaming service or necessarily a Hollywood studio. So you're going to get things in this series that are I don't want to say necessarily the pretentious thing of like never been filmed before but you're definitely going to see things that are a timeless way that indigenous people have always used these practices that necessarily haven't had a spotlight put on them. Right? So it's like we might as well focus on something that is a actual phenomenally deep spiritual practice and combine that with some level of high production value to create something that's hopefully novel and original. Yeah I get all that and so I think it's great and I really enjoyed it and it was very well done beautiful cinematography excellent sound like all the stuff I mean you guys just did a great job on it. I think the shaman thing and the entheogen thing one of the beauties of the kind of explosion of the alternative media is we all kind of know that or at least know that much more than we ever did. What you brought that I think was particularly interesting we can dive into the content a little bit because I think people find it really interesting in episode one you actually do you know the DMT they get from the toads you know we've kind of heard this but you guys go there to this guy in the Sonoran Desert this doctor and you know show how they're actually extracting it and then processing it and I think people will find that part of it really interesting and then Hegel's really deep into it in a number of kind of anthropological kind of exploration of you know the cultures down here have lost this but I can trace it back and some of the art and stuff like that I mean you really do go deep and then you also go into kind of the experiential part of people using this ceremonially or but we don't know it is used in a ceremonial fashion in the documentary but I don't know that it's limited to that so there's just you know dive into that first what are people responding to in that episode one in the the toad-based DMT experience yeah well let me I guess I should back up a little bit because it's relevant to your show and kind of a pre a question that you had asked me before we hit record here which kind of lends into what I'm specced skeptical about and it's somewhat of like my a life philosophy or what we might call like a cipher formula for decoding many of the world's problems which is would also somewhat encapsulates my work and it's funny I've been writing an essay on this and I'm thinking it could be called something like the bi-directional law of non-correspondence or the scale law of obviousness or something but this is essentially my world premiere here so chime on in also if you want to add anything to this at any time but we have a a dynamic that exists in society through the eons where there's essentially small structures that are natural systems that have gone large over time right and large typically has led to massive problems when more small structures were more the natural way so I kind of use this comparison of like small to big or bottom up to top down or maybe like inner to outer or sometimes you could say of it as like decentralized to centralized or individualization versus collectivism or what I would actually say from a spiritual perspective is more esoteric versus exoteric so shamanism is what I'm going to get at which being with the being a key correspondence to something that's related to like small level spirituality but in terms of big structures in society today we have something like let's say if you're more right leaning in your politics a lot of more right leaning people have identified something like big government which is this centralized government governmental form of power and without getting you know a wash and the spaghetti sauce of the politics of something you know we can say that that can lead to any side of a political aisle with you know what we have in terms of like communism or fascism or even kind of post truth corporate consumer capitalism or plutocracy any sort of centralized governmental power structure but what you don't necessarily ever hear is then the other side of the spectrum is big corporations right we have a massive consumerist commercial culture these days which max you know it's full it's it's sole profit or the sole reason for existence in a large structural reason is to maximize quarterly profits we have boards of directors who demand endless financial growth on a planet of finite material resources and you know these systems are are pro privatizing gains and socializing losses it's oftentimes done at the public purse and you know we it's a system that's used to this this kind of governmental corporate large scale structures designed to just get working class people in fighting you know the two sets of people on opposite sides of the political aisle that each make $50,000 a year even less you know are in fighting when they are not looking up at the guy in the high rise building that's making $11,000 an hour with a team of lobbyists in Washington so we have this very much like corporatized government dynamic and then we can carry this big scale system stuff into like big money as well which like we have a centralized federal reserve an aristocratic class that you know is engaged in like medieval feudalism of what has left us today within today's society massive amounts of wealth inequality you know there's a website called lcurve.org that you can go to check some of that out that's very eroding to our middle class and you know let alone poor people which is indigenous people you know indigenous people are very much on the bottom of a social economic totem and then we get into another big system something like science and I know Alex you've talked a lot about science from you know getting consciousness wrong in the sense of that but a lot of much of big science systems within formal structures are very materialist materialistic and demonstrably expensive with the development of the atomic bomb or the Large Hadron Collider and you know a lot of scientists within formal structures care seemed to care as much about keeping tenure as trying to actually really develop something that's on the leading edge and of course there's an old phrase that says like science advances one funeral at a time and then in terms of something other bit another big thing in terms of like big religion or what we might call big spirituality we have this cult of religion right which is this I think at one point I heard you say Alex you specifically that the difference between difference between a cult and religion is just the number of subscribers right so we have a religious construct that's essentially around today that's really just made by man to reduce larger spiritual concepts into pre-packaged sets of moral doctrine which people buy wholesale and we've had a very much imperial takeover that with Constantine you know weaponizing the bible in Rome and you know turning things into like literal readings of the scriptures much of which are very barbaric at face value and we have you know there's dogma with you know Large G God and the outsourcing of things in terms of like heaven and hell or outsourced external what it's essentially happened is we've externalized things into corporealized deities and these structures are very patriarchal they're very dominant they're very disempowering to women you know you look at something like the burqa and fundamentalist Islam and then within these formal large structures large structures of religion we have pedophilia there's mega churches I was in a I went to a wedding recently in Alabama that was at a mega church and oh my gosh dude it was like the most commercial the place looked more like a shopping mall than it did to do with anything within spirituality and I occasionally will also get these adverts on linkedin which is you know this work based social network for job postings that I kind of peek at and every once in a while with a bunch of corporations or big tech companies they'll be like a church that's seeking out something so that that is not a spiritual entity that's a commercial entity and we have you know TV televangelist preachers that do this massive fundraising and have huge 14,000 square foot houses in Texas and fly on mega jests you know we have you see the negative aspects of big religion with it within the politics of the Vatican or something like Israel and then what that essentially is is a separation between the exoteric the outer forms of religious doctrine and dogma versus something that's more esoteric so then if we take these small systems if we take the same look at all these structures from a small perspective like looking at something like small government you know we go back to government we look at like small local community governance right knowing our local representatives funding your local schools local library local infrastructure and then we go to all bullshit that doesn't that doesn't work I mean you know what the thing as I was listening to that when I was watching the movie and I was struck by you know kind of the politicalization of it the unavoidable I mean you I respect that you're attempting to grapple with rather than sidestep the political issues but I don't understand why the hell so many of you guys you guys in your camp in the esoteric camp in the entheogen camp in the spirituality camp which I consider myself part of but why so many of you are left leaning progressives and why you're not stark raving over the top libertarians I mean you do realize that that they are right now conspiring to take away all your rights to access all of this stuff and that just because Obama is going to stand up there and take the fucking vaccine in the arm it is the ultimate play and the I don't understand from a political standpoint to kind of cut through the whole essay why you're not standing shoulder to shoulder with the gun toting prepper in Austin, Texas I'm not a gun toting prepper in Austin, Texas but I understand that sensibility much more than I understand this oh well you know this globalization is really going to work out in the end kind of thing yeah I mean I would say that from a centralized perspective of any sort of power structure you know you don't want to globalize things and I would probably it's funny I might identify a little bit more with the gun toting person in Texas as well being you know not by any means against the Second Amendment but I mean I agree dude it's like I don't I don't mean to make it a specific political thing that wasn't the intention but what I am trying to just correlate is the difference between like a small structure versus a large structure regardless of and keeping that as I would hope apolitical as possible and don't get me wrong Nels I appreciate where you're coming from and I really mean that and sometimes I don't know I come across the wrong way I'm engaged in this conversation meaning that I respect where you're coming from and I want to dialogue with you I want to know where you're coming from more so if I am pushing against you that's okay it's just to get to this kind of next level and so I guess I would return you to this point because I think it's really salient to the work that you're doing I have become rather conspiratorial over the years and science is what drew me to conspiracy because I didn't understand biological robot in a meaningless universe it seemed kind of crazy to me and it was only by investigating it that I realized the absurdity of that and you're dealing with a lot of absurdity in your film your film is constantly brushing against and directly kind of calling out this craziness that we live in and I love in episode one you know he's saying we do live in a crazy world so you have to enter into that space first before you can even consider the shamanistic kind of way but I digress slightly science and this in-your-face materialism contradiction to consciousness is what led me to conspiracy but now that I'm in conspiracy what I see as conspiratorial is this desire to control our consciousness and that desire seems to be directly in conflict with ultimately where you're going so you can say that the UN has given this guy the past to drive around fuck that shit it ain't gonna happen they're gonna try and take all this shit away from you and that isn't even at this point they've already said put the fucking mask on I mean there is no more dramatic in-your-face again kind of reckoning of what's coming then put the fucking mask on and we don't need any science to support it we're doing it by edict how do you think you know toad gland DMT and the peyote is gonna stand up to that it can't it's in a much larger context of control yeah I mean again you're talking about the a centralized power structure that's you know dictating something on us from a perspective of what is a larger scale system yeah I mean I would say in terms of like a small systems dynamic with science is that there is a difference between a mandate from on high top down versus like somebody that is within a personal science dynamic right like an independent researcher that's doing things with an open-ended discussion related to science maybe working more off the beaten path with their exploration within something you know they might respect the scientific method but then they know that within the structure of where they're working they can't necessarily do the full spectrum of their scientific research but then they're knowing that on their own they can do this type of thing so I would see that I mean I think that we saw that within somebody like Nicola Tesla or Wilhelm Reich and that I would even go so far to say do that ancient practices something like even astrology or alchemy you know al chemistry were also engaging in the scientific method so there's a difference between doing something more independently that's more kind of metaphysically based versus something that's yes the negative aspects of what you just hinted on but I mean in terms of also like let's say let's look to something like a smaller systems dynamic within spirituality for example so rather than looking at like literal holy books as these black and white doctrines that are to be handed on down we then can look at something that's maybe existed from the eons like myth and allegory and this starts to get into more shamanic based practices right which is the esoteric core of many many faiths through time even prior to what would be the Abrahamic faiths and I would say that you know you look at at something like formal structure of religion a lot of that has been a co-opting and takeover of shamanic practices that are from way many eons ago right or other practices that were more people based from the land like the druids or you know more gnostic based practices even something like the witches of the past which a lot of people have this kind of Hollywoodized version of what a witch was from the past when in reality it was just typically a more land owning woman and then shamanism this starts to get into more shamanic based practices and for people that don't really have reference points on what shamanism is or what it's why it's important or what it's about and to kind of lead into what your questions about made is that you know shamanism is as old as the hills and it's about a spiritual practice that's directly related to your personal direct experience and connection with you know gnosis or some level with the with the divine and so that's why I think it's nice to just kind of put this encapsulating philosophy on something for people to have reference points and why a lot of my work focuses on these themes of hopefully what is some level of ancient or ageless wisdom which gets into direct experiences with higher states of consciousness and that's something that we've seen through ancient civilizations in the past and why outside of just the first specific episode of the show and the fact that at the time of this recording we've done two episodes of making it because it's something that we're making slow drip each episode can be as complex to make as a feature documentary film the importance of shamanism and why it's a crucial dynamic to a healthy community of or civilization as we say is that there's two specific reasons why people might engage in shamanic practice is one is for healing which isn't just necessarily a physical healing it can also be a mental healing but then also for the expansion of consciousness and those two things are kind of correlated with mental healing and expansion because yes we do live in a very contractive culture so that's why it's a it's a key thing that is being very much rediscovered right now that's existed through much of time so now let me kind of continue to poke away in my skeptic style here because I sent you a couple of shows that I've done on shamanism and one in particular is very very interesting to me and I think it kind of in a roundabout way gets to this thing we're ping-ponging back and forth but I feel like we're not really nailing down so I interview this guy Dr. Brian Hayden super well-respected you know in the Canadian anthropology royal society so credentials and stuff like that and he wrote a book about I guess you could say shamanic self aggrandizement so he went and studied all these native cultures groups and he studied the shamans in them and he said a lot of times what this is all about is this sage on the stage which are all way too milly rift cultish self aggrandizement where the the shaman goes into the goes into the sweat lodging comes out and says hey Niles man I've seen it I talk to the spirits and dog you and believe what they told me they told me that I should be hooking up with your wife all month next month and that's going to give you some great powers and you're going to go out there and you're really going to hit it on the next big hunt so this is an anthropologist going this is just what the data shows this is what's out there this is what happens now my push back to I think that's an I think that's an important point that's an important point that's a data point and this guy's done a good job of documenting it the flip side of that which I was pushing him on is that okay but Brian are there really extended realms of consciousness where these spirit entities do exist and he has to go well you know I don't know I've investigated and then when you push him hard enough he goes yeah I do believe they are he says professionally as an anthropologist inside of my community talking the talk that I'm forced to fucking talk I can never say that so this is a both and kind of what look at shamanism that I guess I want to throw on the table because it's not all you know unicorns and rainbows absolutely not there's some really negative things within even tribal cultures you know I mean in the two times I've gone into indigenous tribes they have beautiful things about them they have this rich animistic history of living in balance with nature and growing up with that and having more of an ecological framework and an animistic mindset on living in harmony but then also they have major they can have major problems as well they can still be patriarchal and have negative aspects there's you know really douchey wishy washy gropey you know pseudo shamans that are in Santa Monica yoga classes versus some that's a huge difference between an actual and they're not just in Santa Monica they're down in the in the villages that you drove through with the plastic coverings on the window they're right there too they're absolutely and it's good point you raise because just like within a religious structure I mean sometimes you know we'll see within you know I always I always oftentimes use the sturgeon's law dynamic of 90 percent of everything is crap so if something's real it can totally take the pressure but within formal religious structures too I mean it's not fair to say that all of its garbage every once in while you will find a fantastic person that is within working within theology and you know a lot of the base original Christ teachings are very beautiful teachings so to give something a more mature and sophisticated populace recognizes subtlety and nuance and we can see that a lot of the times when structures are so misappropriated and there's been a big marketing job over time that's not good so within shamanism which is something that has always been more of a bottom-up dynamic with like tribal indigenous people there's been a lot of criticizing of that of the eons for the negative aspects of what goes along with it and it's very true that when you get involved with these things that it's very serious stuff there's a huge reason why shamanic we use the proper turn of calling them an entheogen instead of just a psychedelic drug which has a lot of negative connotations around it but entheogen just means awaken the divine from within but it's important to if somebody's going to have an entheogenic experience to not just do it wishy-washy in a framework that's not a proper set-in-setting or container to do it within and to do it within respect and honor and ideally within some lineage of somebody that has a proper transmission with the indigenous people and so that's what we try to do within the show is highlight somebody that has been trained within the the lineage of the tribal people and hopefully the tribal elders and you know nobody's perfect but that's kind of the there's a huge difference in who you highlight because it's just like going to the doctor it's like you want to convent who you're going to work with before you have an experience with somebody yeah but Dr Octavio on the first episode he doesn't have that lineage he I have to say comes across as an incredibly deep and just profoundly connected kind of person I don't know what he is but he has a background of drug addiction as well which when he when that was revealed was kind of surprising to me but you know actions speak louder than words his long standing work with all sorts of different people who particularly people who are disenfranchised I hate that word down there but you know he seems to be walking the walk and that's awesome but he doesn't have that lineage so I just you know I'm not just trying to be it's just not that simple in my experience and let me through before I before I even let you respond to that I'll throw another one on the table that I think again draws that out a little bit further you reference Rick Strassman Dr. Rick Strassman and a lot of people who've having been a cursory knowledge of DMT in the spirit molecule know his book in his documentary of that name but look where Strassman is now he's been off for years doing this esoteric Christianity kind of thing in a very I don't want to the very kind of hard to understand way he seems to be somebody who's completely taken in in a different direction add to the fact that his actual research laboratory work with DMT stands in contrast with a lot of the set and setting ritualization of ayahuasca and other DMT tradition so there's a lot to unpack here it's not it's it can't be packed into an hour documentary which you did but yeah I mean that's why it would ideally be a series but it's a good point you raised because I mean spirituality I would I would be so bold as to put forward the dynamic that a spiritual life is a truthful life and ideally in the difficulties of modern society today it's like we're not going to go back to all necessarily solely chopping wood and carrying water and living in this way that indigenous people from the past have lived but they had a great connection from the past and with them that we can still glean some insight with in terms of the way that they had a relationship with essentially power plants and animals and those those ability to have a huge and very quick example for having giving people an experience that's an initiatory experience and in much of today's society you know we have no level of initiation into adulthood no level of like spirit quest or some level I mean it seems like the only initiation that college gives had these days is like drinking alcohol you know mind contracting sanctioned liquid drug alcohol out of red plastic cups so I would the reason that we highlight the importance of something like entheogenic use along the spiritual path it's not the only it's not an end all be all of your spiritual life it's just an important key perhaps a moment of some level of initiation into higher states of knowledge or insight or depth is that it gives you that level of some level of stair stepping into adulthood much like the Native Americans did with various initiatory practices or also with how how many civilizations of ancient time did this where you know that there'd be the temple of elusus or the oracle at Delphi where they would have these people with pilgrimage to these places and have these massive life transforming experiences that aren't going to you know make your life perfect by any means but based upon what you put in is what you can get out of them and if you if you are really having massive negative suffering in your life these things aren't an end all be all and they're not certainly a one-stop shop but they have a potential for a huge amount of individual healing if somebody is ready to to heal themselves or do the work on themselves so that's oftentimes why we highlight that they are so important and yeah that's that's what much of my work as oftentimes touched on with the show and elsewhere and conversations so what do you make of the of the science that is now emerging surrounding entheogens I think a lot of people including myself are encouraged that you know some people are looking at this seriously and studying it seriously because we don't want to throw out some of the things we can learn from the scientific method and how to control experiments and how to test whether because claims are being made that this is you know like like the claims that you just made it can be efficacious in clearing depression for example it can be efficacious in helping people overcome drug addictions well these are that that should be an answerable question you know we can do rather kind of well understood controlled studies right now and get to the answers of that what what do you think of that science of of entheogens which is you can find all over the internet where people are having serious you know conferences at medical university of Pennsylvania and their doctors and phd's who are getting together talking about this stuff is that of interest to you at all and how do you see that fitting into your your view of the world yeah it is that interest it is very much of interest and it's a good point you raise and to kind of go back to your previous question Alex which I didn't do a very good job of asking when or answering when you have a clinical setting it's a lot different when you know things have been put into a scientific dynamic where you're doing like some sort of research program and in a more medical based building versus doing something that's more in a tribal setting or if it's very unlikely that somebody would have a direct tribal connection to a shamanic experience but it is likely that there's this people are doing more psychedelic tourism I got to kind of bump in there a little bit because stressman's work contradicts that right because stressman's work he's just pulling in people off the street more or less in New Mexico and giving him DMT and they're going to the Amazon in that extended realm and they're seeing the same spirit beings and they're seeing some of the same they're also seeing ET which I don't know you don't really talk about non-human intelligence but they're also seeing the other thing that I guess is missing and it was curiously missing in a lot of the work that I've seen so far is that some people see this connection with this extended realm as being much more connected and mediated by spirit entities real entities that do have certain powers and attributes and have some role to play in this at least some people believe in interfacing between that extended realm and this realm so you know three points I guess I'm making there one is why are stressman's people connecting with some of the same Amazonian shamanistic entities in their experience in New Mexico when they don't even have any background in that and then two what are we to make of the of the spiritual part of this and the spirit entities that many are reporting are connected with this realm because you're kind of doing the blob of consciousness white light there's just one thing that don't pay any attention to the spirits thing well that's that's for episode one and just to give some context the way that we hope to structure the show going forward is that each episode focuses on a specific medicine with a specific medicine practitioner and for those that aren't familiar I mean there's different each of the different entheogens has kind of a different flavor to them so it's been spoken of for example but like psilocybin mushrooms are very like cosmic and alien and there's two types two more two primary types of DMT one which is found in the ayahuasca vine which is NN DMT is very cosmic and I'm sorry it's not cosmic but it's very like jungle feminine energy ecological energetics and then the other type of DMT which we highlight which you mentioned as the white light in episode one is very much like this kind of hey drawn of hyperspace that merges into the Gaian you know Godhead type dynamic of fusing back into the light and then other other indigenous medicines such as like peyote and and the cacti have a very kind of masculine desert energy to them and it's probably several things of what you hit on there one is probably like the the history and the genealogy of your people where your people come from what you resonate with in terms of which medicine maybe your ancestors practice with there's us being you know of European descent Alex you know there were practices in Scandinavia from eons back that use like the aminidium muscaria mushroom which is that black and white or I'm sorry that red and white mushroom which we see on all the Christmas cards and things like that so those are things that based upon where you're probably from you have some resonance with and then also in terms of yes you're there's probably something with the dynamic of your people's history and the resonances of the kind of reality tunnel of your culture from what you get based upon the experience so if you were to take and if you were to have some sort of ayahuasca experience even in some sort of starchy clinical setting you'll probably still get some of those resonances of the rainforest especially if that's maybe where you're kind of original ancestors were from a lot of the work that I'm grounded in and extended consciousness stuff is grounded in the near-death experience science and the one thing I like about that is we can collect that data in a rather systematic way and look at it in a scientific way if you will and it comes back and it's all about spirit entities it's about ancestors that are there in spirit form that are waiting it's about for other people it's about other entities that are dark and malevolent and so I just don't like softening up on the edge of the question which is are there spirit entities in these extended consciousness realms and what do we mean by that when we say there are spirit entities because we hear this a lot you know and you'll hear a lot this from science types that are one step away from really denying consciousness and saying consciousness is an illusion and they'll say well you know maybe you're patterned by that and you'll see Jesus if your parents were raised you that's just speculation now that's a question we could ask and research but we can't just use that as the default answer oh of course it's just a cultural overlay well go improve it and go prove why people in other cultures see Jesus and go prove why people in this culture see Buddha or see some indigenous god it's not as clean as people like to make it out and Gregory Shushan is my Dr. Gregory Shushan is my go-to source for that yeah well spiritual out I mean the real spiritual connection to some higher vibratory space or higher data connection whatever flavor that's coming in whether or not it's some you know meditative experience that you're having or you've been hypnotized or you've undergone some sort of you know intake of a shamanic medicine it's all spiritual of course I mean it's all connecting you to some level of higher noses or higher consciousness and and in that expansion we're dancing around this is there are there demons yes I mean certain things have happened where people I think people get what their framework what it's it's like a lot of these things don't necessarily give you what you want and they give you what you need so sometimes people have had can have very trying experiences and there's a specific reason why an element of their life why aren't your answer in that why are I'm just I'm just curious I'm not trying to be a jerk about this are there demonic entities are there angelic entities because whenever I say that you're echoing it back to me as well people can kind of in that blob of consciousness out there they can kind of see it one way or see it another way and and I'm not saying but I'm not saying there there are or they're not I'm saying but that is a fundamental question in this whole thing is are these kind of freestanding conscious beings like if your wife or whatever or your friend was standing there you would say that is a manifestation of consciousness in a certain way that I identify as an individual and a lot of people will say well there's a spirit being that is demonic that has manifested in a particular way and that is a you know freestanding being what do you think about that I think that if you say is it a demonic entity or an angelic entity I mean that's of course using a structured language that is very religious based but sure I mean absolutely people can encounter anything that can be very trying and difficult and shadow based versus more light based so there's specific I've never had any experiences that have been very extremely negative all of my experiences have been very expansive and beneficial so I guess you could call those more angelic but in terms of there's a specific plant called salvia divinorum and I've heard that a lot of people's experiences on salvia are like it sends you to kind of the gates of hell it's maybe what is described as like an ordeal ritual where people go through this extremely negative trying experience and then it's almost like you're so glad you didn't die that you're so happy that you have what you have in your own personal life and it allows for a great introspection and appreciation for what you it gives you a different sort of framework by having such a dark negative experience so a lot of all of this though is about you know coming to more know yourself and having appreciation of what you have when you come back from a trying difficult experience and especially something that can be so expansive has that benefit if you're willing to to go through it what do you think people are experiencing when the experience ancestors in this extended realm yeah that's an interesting question I mean I've never had any direct contact where I got like great grandparents downloads or anything like that you know it's all that's an interesting question I mean I think that there is a dynamic where we can say that you know you're getting insights from the ancestor spirits and whether or not they're part of your immediate family or just somebody that you have some resonance with and there was some specific reason why in an expanded state that chose to contact with you in that regard whether or not it was saying like I somehow related to you or it's somehow a knowledge of a deeper connection with you had that was that was somebody that was very special in your life like you know you lost a parent very early and now you're getting an insight on somebody that left you early I know a gal that had a has a son that's very special needs almost to the point where he can't communicate verbally and she had an experience where he basically was talking to her you know allowed her to have such an unbelievable deeper connection with her son that was so profound in life changing for her so that was kind of a beautiful example of somebody gets not necessarily what they think they're going to get but something that it finds a way to communicate with you in a very profound way to help kind of show you something that you didn't otherwise see is it kind of a way to objectively look at yourself okay so asking the same question in a different way do you believe she was connecting with that soul that spirit of her special needs child do you believe that person who felt the presence and the voice and the sometimes the appearance of their grandfather grandmother do you believe that they were connecting with that consciousness beyond bodily death or do you think that was a manifestation of just their own kind of stuff I think that when you're beyond the five senses you are connecting directly to like a higher version of this other person right like you could say like there's the self that's the the avatar on the chess board and then there's your higher self it's kind of like our minds are a branch of the larger divine mind and when we get into this dynamic which can be a big gobbledygook of like we're all one you know it's like you and I are two separate corporeal entities but ultimately when we get into our higher selves it's like we are all part of this higher divine mind so yes in that sense she's probably connecting to the higher self of this person that's passed on which is you know very correlated with with the higher version of you as well it's almost like you get direct data download from a higher level consciousness state that you're both outside of your corporeal being in a in a direct communication it's like you have direct connection to one another okay great my grilling is almost over what about you mean like you mean like aliens separate outside of us type feel exactly I mean it's kind of well reported and it always you know you answered the survey and I just really appreciate you again folks this is me this is how I do it it doesn't mean that this guy isn't fantastic in his films and I bought both of them and they're very affordable 10 bucks you can buy it download it you can even share it with your friends for 10 bucks well worth it great I purchased both of mine courage you to to do both of them and the first one is fantastic I can't believe you guys did that on the kind of budget you said because cinemagraphically you just look at and go wow this is a major Hollywood thing but we're running out of time so let me hit you with that one ET I don't understand where people are coming from when we now have we're in post-disclosure right so we have the videos yes it's been on like the government what's that it's been on like mainstream media practically yeah as if that was the ultimate measure of all that is a measure of is that it's a rollout right that it's a sigh it's been off that tells you that that is now that has now reached the level of a psychological control operation that's all that means given that it's been revealed to that extent I don't understand people who are still on the fence about non-human intelligence and in particular in these extended realms where ET seems to be playing around all the time and you know the whole I've referenced this all the time people get tired of it you look at M.K. Ultra and you look at those experiments that there's good reason to believe that one of the primary driving forces for them even getting interested in mind control was that they had encountered non-human intelligence they understand that they understood that the communication was telepathic and they understood the power of that and they said we gotta figure out what's going on in this kind of extended understanding of consciousness so I don't understand the ET fence sitters of which I kind of think you're one the dynamic that is most interesting to me is when people are actually out physically looking for craft or things or crop circles and the thing that's most interesting is when they do the thing where they meditate beforehand which to me tells me that they're a little bit more into the dynamic of realizing that it is not just purely a material thing I mean obviously I think that we do have intelligences that are extraterrestrial or not that are coming from some alternate place and then they can you know you can have an orb of materialize into the into the physical realm and create a crop circle or something like that what about people what about people that claim to have been raped by the lizard people is that outside of your crazy line yeah I've never had any experience nor have I spoken to anybody that's done that but I who knows it's probably the same thing as how you could identify that there is such a valid thing as like a real exorcism that can happen and that's not just a thing see I think a lot of people are unfamiliar are just unaware of the evidence for that and and because I like kind of jumping to the end game there because then it's easy for people to go oh yeah raped by lizard people get it how crazy is that but deconstruct that so you start deconstructing that you go okay what about the abduction phenomenon you go oh wow well there happens to be extremely well documented cases people who didn't even know each other meet and they were you on the ship I recognize you on the ship yes I had missing time people come back with their clothes on and put on the wrong way a spouse will notice that their other spouse was gone for a missing period of time collectively people are seeing things together and having this missing time experience and then there's direct reports of people having these experiences there's implants there's all the rest of this there's a well documented history of lost pregnancies that are unexplainable there's a whole body of research like that so when you start putting the case together that way I mean I just interviewed Whitley Strieber who I have the ultimate respect for and he goes oh yes sexually assaulted by aliens that was the very first encounter that I had and what I reported in communion so Whitley is not known to be kind of a bullshitter and he's been around for a long time and he's documented his stuff better than anybody it's a blind spot that again we shouldn't allow to persist within this community that's interested in you know ancient wisdom and theogens and stuff we have to factor that in or we're just turning our head away from something let alone like I said Strasman all day he saw aliens all his people saw aliens you know it's a really weird one too is cattle mutilations that's a very strange one but you know to add to this point one thing that is a very thing to be cautious of is that if somebody has a a lot of these things can be done in what's called a gestalt right like a group dynamic where you can have there's group meditation circles where people meditate together and have residences with one another's meditations they seem to see the same things there's dynamics where people have they have some sort of ayahuasca experience in groups I have learned for sure is that if somebody is in that group that has a lot of life problems there are dynamics where yes you can have some energetic from somebody if you don't know much about them and they have a lot of damage or life trauma things can brush off onto other people in an experience so I'm very wary of who I would sit with in a circle I want to know that they're very honorable people that have done a lot of work on themselves and have balanced and lives of honorable behavior and there's been a couple dynamics where I could have sat with somebody who I knew's life was a mess and I wouldn't do that I wouldn't do that because I know that there has been experiences or there has been times in the past where we've heard interactions where somebody has had something grasp on to them or jump on to them that might have been baggage or negative energetics from another person so these are all things that are again should be part of a mature culture and society that teaches people about some of these things that we don't just have to kind of flim flam through or find by just negative having it happen the hard way right something that we can learn about through people that have a lineage of transmission of wisdom from elders that teach these things about you know living in harmony with nature and then knowing what the plants are and how to use them and knowing that there is a place obviously for modern medicine very much has its pros and cons but then there's also a place for some of these medicinal practices that heal through higher states and the pros and cons of those things and both sides of the aisle again folks our guest has been Niles Heckman I think he just got to check out these films and all his work but this particularly this series shamans of the global village we played a little bit of a clip at the beginning but you really have to see it and if you're at all interested in this stuff you're going to love it because it's a look into it at a level that I just haven't seen especially in a form where you can get through an hour and really have a lot to to think about and explore so Niles it's been great having you on what else can we tell people what what else is going on when is episode three going to happen yeah we were going to do it this year but of course COVID took kind of a large don't pull over that so it's delayed probably until who knows when but the ideal way that we would do it is we'd kind of do episodes three and three back to back cost effectively you know Peru is a little cliche these days and a little bit like I saw some onion title about like you know how tech CEOs were going down to Peru regularly and that dynamic but you know we probably will inevitably have a stopoff in Peru even though our spiritual journeys by no means end in Peru sometimes people find themselves in Peru so that might be a episode three and four with San Pedro and the Sacred Valley in ayahuasca but you know yeah who knows I mean that's the thing about the show is that a lot of people if they're interested in knowing more about the lineage of entheogens and seeing what these practices look like seeing what happens with people that are doing this in a tribal context instead of just like you know your SCSI Chicago apartment doing them in more of the lineage with the tribe that's why we highlight this that's that's what the show can do is to show people actual context and to show highlight some of the importance of how these things have been used traditionally so uh yeah thanks Alex it's a pleasure chatting to you man I know that uh you've been doing this show for a while and it's it's it's great to not only have heard past episodes but also be a part of the show as well so always a pleasure my good man Thanks again to Niles Heckman for joining me today on Sceptico there's so many uh topics that we bounced around and covered and I really did give him a hard time on a bunch of topics but you know he's strong guy he can stand up to it but the overall I just got a stress I mean I don't want to go up with some hard-ass question because man hats off to these guys and the work that they're doing it's just incredible so what do you think about the prospects for and theogens as a legitimate healing medicine in the way that we think about healing medicine let me know your thoughts jump on over to the Sceptico forum come over to the forum anyways I got some cool shows coming up well I don't know if they're cool or not I go off on these little tangents I think they're interesting but I have some shows coming up that I think he'll enjoy stay with me for all of that until next time take care and bye for now


Hello there. My name is David. I have played Roblox since 2014, but now. I'm not sure right now. I don't feel safe on the platform anymore. It started in 2017, but only now I can tell my experience to everybody reading. I was on Roblox playing a tycoon with my friends when it happened. I got a message in my inbox and it was dark. Here it is. Time came. Come with us. It will be fun. The message was by a guy called, Sivrabithn, translated from Cypher 2, Breakdown. As I visited his avatar, I felt pretty uncomfortable.  The thumbnail had a red background with white sparkles.  I followed it and it was a bad idea. The wall extended for almost forever. As I was about to abandon all hope, I saw the end. I was excited about it. I walked 45 long minutes and finally I can find what's at the end. I went closer and then a loud sound started playing along with a grey background with white text appeared. This is the text. I din't move you wanna get the full whic excel comp, give music need grow. Mostly it's gibberish, but the last lines translate too. Smell the pain. There's also more text on the upper part of the screen which reads as follows. Bsimrab, Siksyp, close to Rua Webno. Translates, too. Our Sucker Son of a biscuit demerred. Also, the game crashed. I wasn't able to move my mouse. I had to press ctrl-alt-delete to force it to close. After that I was spooked. So I went back to the guy's page and saw him in a group called, Mugen. I clicked it and I saw other people which they also had other games like these. I checked out another guy called, Vem Gwarden. His game was called, AXS Versionist. It's an oddy where you have to jump from bricks sticking out of the wall and to get out of that zone. After getting up I saw a black sphere on a narrow bridge. And it made the bridge collapse and fell down where I got jump-scared again by a loud scream. The text reads, Hi Wami Kazozu Aiyo. Translates to, I don't count. And same as before it crashed the client and I had to use task manager to close it down. Next I looked at zero underscores 005 who had a game called, Sandobedu. Translates to, Sandbag. When I joined it was really dark, a high tone beep playing along with the only thing you were able to see was a stone with a red star symbol on it. When touching the stone, it crashed the game like normal and displayed in red text. Alikazard is immortal, along with more screaming. Task manager is your only option for closing it down. I joined another game called, Smoked Hiking Hat by an an an an an an an an an an an an an an an an an an an an an an an an an SS. This one was bright but it still was creepy with the thumbnail of the moon. I saw ledge and jumped and landed on another ledge. This one had a huge rock tied to a small stick. When approaching the stick it caused the stone to fall and almost killed me, but I only was damaged and now I had half of HP left. I jumped on the other ledge and saw a huge meadow with a small button on the ground. When stepping on it I saw another stone with a creepy smile on it. Touching it crashed my game with the screen going black. The final game was called, Vesta said. Translates from Hungarian to, Lus, my zhql. The thumbnail had a sphere with a creepy smile facing the screen. Joining the game I was spawned in a beam light and I was now playing as what their community knows him as Mirror Man. On the arena there was a blue sphere that would go from corner to corner trying to finish me. But I outsmarted him a lot. There was in one of the corners was the sphere from the thumbnail. I got it and pushed it onto a platform and caused a blue ball to take damage. He then started to chase me and I accidentally touched him causing me to die and display another crashed screen with loud ear bleeding screech. The text reads as follows. Wana shiwado to sukarutengi shiaotusi utabini on a g-magigagana saritimisu anamukadesu. Translates to, every time I try to help you, the same mistake is made. And I used Task Manager again to end task which closes roblox down. I wasn't able to do this anymore. I was now shaking. Questions began to flow in my mind on what should I do next? Should I quit roblox forever? Should I continue? Should I run away? After that I looked at my inbox and saw another message from the guy who sent the message originally. Never tell anyone that I exist. Never tell anyone what you have experienced. I need to remain in absolute obscurity just like my friends. If you don't say about what you saw, you will be safe and we won't do anything to you. But if you decide to do the opposite, well you will have a lot of problems. Since then I had nightmares for weeks. I always felt uncomfortable when I would play some games alone. I started playing roblox less and less time after that experience. And now I'm telling you my experience to you. Never join these games!


We sit here today in Portland with an auditorium full of float center owners, float researchers, float tank manufacturers, float tank associations, and generally just fanatics in the world of floating. A community of people that seems to have discovered a secret calmness in the world of otherwise great calamity and chaos. We're all here today because I think we all feel a drive, a force that has been pushing us all since the time that we first stepped into one of those first salty chambers. A force that drives us all to tell every person we meet and every person that we see on the street about floating and about how much that it can impact their lives. It's this drive that brought us all here today. The dedication to giving floating to the world the way that tanks have given to all of us. The undeniable force that pushes us all to build float tanks and start centers and push forward research and legislation and as each of us pushes with as much energy as we can we begin to build up steam and steam has been building. We can all feel it. We all know that it's happening, it's the reason that we have so many people here today. In 2010 a float summit was held in London, it was the first conference of its kind in the float community in almost 20 years and it was attended by just over 20 people. We sit here just two years later with 165 people in this auditorium right now which I actually just found out about five minutes ago from Peter Sudfeld and Rod Borey that this is the largest float tank conference that has ever happened. So congratulations to all you guys for being a part of it. While these numbers may seem a little small in comparison to the giant industries that kind of dominate the public spotlight that we know of in our world, the rate of growth that we see in this field of floating I think is tremendous. I mean to go from 20 to 165 in two years is something that I think is hardly rivaled by many other industries in this world and so we should all feel proud of that. And this growth is going to continue and we're here to guarantee that it's going to continue. We've all flown and driven and bussed and biked and hitch-kiked from across the world to gather in this auditorium to guarantee that that growth is going to continue. Because time and again we have managed to demonstrate that as a community we are more powerful than us as individuals. By helping each other out with our knowledge and experience we all gain and we all grow and this too will continue. This quality of sharing and generosity is embedded in us from being in the tank. It's what's brought us here. It's what makes us drawn to each other. The force that has pulled us into this shared space. Look around you here in the auditorium. These are your people, your fellow floaters. These are the people that make it seem like no matter where in the world you've traveled from, be it Sweden or Poland, Australia or Taiwan, that you have in fact been traveling not farther away but closer.  We are the people that are laying the foundation of an industry that is ready to explode and together we can make that foundation strong. So welcome everyone. Welcome to your conference. Welcome to your community and welcome home. We have an awesome lineup of people today and I'm just going to get right to it and say let's have a freaking conference.


The Global Flood Awareness System, GLO FAS, was designed to provide an overview of upcoming floods in large world river basins. The system uses distributed hydrological simulation of numerical ensemble weather predictions with global coverage and compares these forecasts to climatological simulations to detect probabilistic exceedance of warning thresholds. The system was evaluated over a two-year test period and a case study of the Pakistan flood in summer 2010 was conducted. Results showed that hazardous events in large river basins could be skillfully detected with a forecast horizon of up to one month. Additionally, it was found that an accurate simulation of initial model conditions and an improved parameterization of the hydrological model were key components to reproducing accurately the streamflow variability in the many different runoff regimes of the earth. This article was authored by L. Al Fieri, P. Burak, E. Dutra, and others.


So welcome to my talk, autoscaling Kubernetes deployments, a mostly practical guide. So hopefully this is the one you're actually meant to go to. Just a little bit about me before we start. I'm a software engineer at New Relic. I work on the Pixi open source project. Pixi is a CNCF sandbox project, and it basically provides observability for your Kubernetes cluster, and it's super cool. So please check it out. I love observability and performance problems, and prior to that, and partially because of that, I formerly worked in the data space, and what we see with observability is a lot of the same problems and observability are data problems. So that's the uniting thread behind some of the stuff I've worked on. So today's talk is all about autoscaling Kubernetes deployments. So first, we'll briefly touch on, what is Kubernetes autoscaling and why would you do it? Then we'll cover more detailed stuff like, what are the different knobs that Kubernetes autoscaling provides us with? You have to know the right bottleneck in your application in order to make your autoscaling as performant as possible. So then we'll cover selecting the right autoscaling metric for your application. Then finally, I love to push the boundaries of the technology I work in, and it turns out you can make a Turing complete autoscaler for Kubernetes. So we'll be showing that at the end. So let's get started. So when you're sizing an application or Kubernetes cluster, how do you decide how many nodes there should be?  How do you know how many resources to give a pod? These are not obvious questions, or these are obvious questions maybe, but they don't necessarily have obvious answers and the strategies that people take for them vary. For example, there is the methodology of doing a completely random guess and hope that it works. You copy pasta from some other thing that I've already deployed on your cluster. This is one of the most common ones in my experience. You might be one of those people that is always thinking ahead and you're always proactively iterating.  But mostly in practice, we reactively iterate. We see, oh shoot, my application is down. Oh my gosh, the pod, it's using all the CPU it's given. Incident, autoscaling is intended to help solve some of these problems, and Kubernetes provides really, really good support for autoscaling. The thing is that the ideal resource allocation completely depends on your workload, and these workloads are spiky and often unpredictable. Here we have a screenshot of a workload that we're running. You can see that the traffic can be over 10x at one point what it is at a different point. And a lot of times these spikes will bite you when you least expect it. It's not something that you can always plan on.  You have latency problems and even outages. This is a big no-no. But on the other hand, you can't just go allocate everything under the sun either. It's really expensive. Kubernetes provides three types of autoscaling. We'll give a quick overview of two of them and then focus most of our time on the third. First, there's the cluster autoscaler. This adds and removes nodes to your cluster based on resource utilization like CPU. Next, there's the vertical pod autoscaler. This adds resources like CPU and memory to your existing replicas or pods, also based on resource utilization. Finally, we have the horizontal pod autoscaler. This is going to be the one that we focus on most in this talk because it's extremely powerful. It adds additional replicas to your deployment, etc. It also can look at resource utilization, but the really cool thing is you can actually define your own metrics that you want to scale based off of. This makes it one of the most powerful features of Kubernetes in my opinion. Also, I know that the font might be, I try to blow it up where possible, but for the people in the back, the slides are available on the talk kind of sked thing, so if you want to follow along, I feel kind of bad if you can't see it. So let's quickly touch on the cluster autoscaler. I just wanted to give some quick tips for each of these scalers. So one thing that you have to know with a cluster autoscaler is you have to set the pod resource requests and limits. Otherwise, the cluster autoscaler can't really know how many nodes to add or take away. You also need to make sure that your resource requests reflect your actual usage. If I have a pod that's only using 10 percent CPU, and I've requested 100 percent CPU, the autoscaler is going to treat it like a 100 and not like a 10, potentially leading to unnecessary waste and lack of utilization. You also want to make sure you specify pod disruption budgets. This one's really important for the cluster autoscaler, because when the cluster autoscaler adds or removes nodes, it's going to reschedule the pods in your cluster. And if you have a high availability system or if you just have a pod that you need to make sure a different one's running before you move the second one over, the pod disruption budget is the best way to make sure that these workloads can be transitioned to the new nodes safely. You also need to make sure that you don't do what I had this morning, where you try to scale beyond the limit that your cloud provider is actually giving you. You don't want to say, oh, you can go up to 100 nodes and your cloud provider nerfs you at 10. This is something that's really important and can definitely cause an incident if you're not careful. One thing to note is that the Kubernetes contributors, in their documentation, they note that they've tested this cluster autoscaler for up to 1,000 nodes with 30 pods per node. So if you're running a mega workload that's bigger than this, you should keep that in mind when using the autoscaler. Next, let's look at the vertical pod autoscaler. By the way, there is this really hilarious TikTok that I saw for Kubernetes that was showing the difference between the vertical pod autoscaler and the horizontal pod autoscaler in terms of glasses of water. So definitely check that out if you're a TikTok user. So with the vertical pod autoscaler, you can still set a resource cap with the vertical pod autoscaler. So when it's adding something like CPU, you'll set a cap so it doesn't just grow the CPU indefinitely. You may see a container restart or your pod get rescheduled because it's adding more CPU. Maybe it needs to be moved to a different node to have that amount of CPU. You want to use the vertical pod autoscaler in conjunction with the cluster autoscaler because otherwise, you can have a situation where you're scaling up your deployments altogether needing many more resources than before. And you're also going to need more nodes to run those resources. And finally, you can't autoscale resources like CPU and pod for a given replica and add replicas with the horizontal pod autoscaler at the same time for the same metric on the same application. So whether you're going to make your existing pods bigger or add more pods for a given deployment, you're going to want to pick a lane and choose either the horizontal pod autoscaler or the vertical pod autoscaler. And then finally, I don't know the exact specifics, but they know in their documentation that this has not been tested on large clusters. So it's something that you'll always want to test on your own application. OK, finally, we'll talk about my favorite, the horizontal pod autoscaler. So this provides so much flexibility for metric selection. It's not even funny. And every application is its own special snowflake. So you can give it its own corresponding special snowflake metric. But you're going to want to check your service client affinity policies to ensure even low distribution. You don't want to scale up your application from two replicas to 100, only to discover that the first two are still getting all the traffic. That would be a complete waste of resources. Also, you need to make sure you set resource requests when you're scaling on CPU and memory. Horizontal pod autoscaler, when you're scaling on something like CPU, looks at the percentage of your request that you're utilizing. So if you don't have a request, it's never going to autoscale. And finally, as with the vertical pod autoscaler, we can't use these two in conjunction for the same workload on the same metric yet. But that is something that the contributors are working on. So let's get to it. So I have a demo of horizontal pod autoscaling on CPU. I heard there's been a little network connectivity, so I recorded it, which also allows us to watch it on fast forward. And this demo exists on the Pixi demo repo, so you can actually do it yourself and try autoscaling on various different metrics. And I'll try to narrate for the people in the back because I know the font's a little bit small. OK, cool. So what we have here is I'm actually showing a view in Pixi. It's just completely defined by a script that I've written. And I'm showing a view of my application before autoscaling is added. So just for the people in the back, the upper left quadrant is requests per second for my service. The upper right quadrant is the HTTP latency. And there's three lines because we have P50, P90, and P99 latencies. The bottom left, we have the CP usage by pod. And on the bottom right, we have the number of pods for the service. Since this is before autoscaling, it's stuck at 1. So we're going to use Pixi to observe what's happening in the cluster as we autoscale up. So we're going to watch this. And what we're going to do is use my favorite low-generating application called Hey. And it basically is going to allow me to spam a ton of traffic to this endpoint. And this endpoint's an expensive endpoint. It's very CPU-intensive. So that's why we're going to scale on CPU. So I'm spinning up 20 concurrent clients, each sending one query per second, which is a lot for this service. And in the bottom left, what we can see is that one replica is running right now for my Echo service. And the beauty of this is we can jump ahead and let the autoscaler do its thing. Oh, look. We have four new replicas. It's responded to the load. And now we know that this deployment needs more resources associated with it. So we can look in Pixi to see the spikes. Now the load has ended on the application. But we can see the request per second has gone up. The HTTP latency has gone up, too, because the autoscaling hasn't kicked in yet. CPU usage has gone up. These latencies are very problematic. So we're counting on the autoscaler to quickly adjust so that we can get to much more user-friendly latency. We'll jump forward again, and the load has ended. So what we can see is that it added three pods in response to the latency that we had. And it wasn't running for very long. But you can see that near the tail end of it, the latency went down a lot. So it did its job. If this had been a persistent spike, then we would have seen much better latencies as a result of this autoscaling. And we'll come back to this view later for other use cases. Oh yeah, so this is just a screenshot of what we saw. So you might be wondering, how is it that the horizontal pod autoscaler figures out how many replicas it needs to add? And it's a very simple equation. It basically takes the ratio of the current value for your metric that you've defined, like CPU or throughput, divided by the desired value for that metric. And then that's what it uses to determine the right number of replicas. So it's a lot more than just the metric. So what knobs do we have? We have lots of questions. Like how do we set the minimum and maximum number of replicas? How often do we look for changes in the metric? I might just have a super transient spike that I don't need to autoscale on. But transient to me might be different than transient to you. That might be something you want autoscale on. How quickly we want to add or remove pods? And each time we add or remove pods, do we want to cap the amount of change that we allow at any given period? So on the right, what we have is a chart of my metric. And then slightly lagging that is the number of pods. So when you cap the number of pods, you're basically squishing this curve. And I like to look at input and output waves because I come from the harbor space. So what we see here is that for the same metric, you can squash down the maximum number of pods and put a bottom on the limit as well. And this is good when you have resource constraints or you want to provide a certain guarantee that at least a certain number of replicas are running. You also might add a stabilization period, which basically says, I don't want to make changes too quickly. I want to wait before making a change to make sure that it's actually something I need to scale on. Now looking at this chart, you might say, hey, but this looks strictly worse than the one on the left. There is this period of time here where we actually don't have enough pods based on the metric that we've defined. And it might be wondering why would we even do this? The reason is it reduces the pod churn. So for example, consider a waveform like this where the metric is going up and down and up and down and up and down. If we were to do the naive thing here and just add pods as soon as we can, as many as we can, you're gonna be churning all of these pods again and again and again. It's not efficient. It would be much better to take almost like a low pass filter approach to this.  You want your car to provide a smooth experience. And in the same way, you want your auto scaler to be smooth as well. So if you were to set a stabilization period for this, you could actually keep the same number of pods instead of having it go back and forth. This would be better because it would be ready for the spike to happen again in the near future. It's a similar thing with capping the max pods to add or remove for a period. Once again, if you look right here, it would look as if this is a strictly worse outcome than the one on the left. Because you have a period of time where you don't actually have enough pods for the metric that you're looking at. So this is something that you can just configure in the auto scaler like anything else. It's all specified in the YAML. But consider a workload like this where you have a very brief, very transient spike in the metric. You do not need to spin up all of these pods just for this temporary spike. You probably want to react in a more limited way until you have more information that this is actually a persistent change in your workload. So that would be a use for capping the max step size both up and down. And you might set these differently. You might say, hey, I want to scale up really quickly, but I want to scale down slowly because I have trust issues that the actual spike has gone away. All right, now let's get into some more of the meat. Selecting an auto scaling metric for your application. So because the horizontal pod auto scaler is super, super powerful, it gives you lots of options for these metrics. So let's go over what they are. The first one is the one that's shared with the cluster auto scaler and the vertical pod auto scaler. It's built in. You don't have to do anything special to use it other than write a YAML file. Basically it says that you can easily scale on resources like CPU and memory that Kubernetes already has definitions for. Number two, and this is one that we have lots of great demos on and that demos repo I told you about is the custom metrics API. Now this is a user-defined metric, which means that you get to say what you want this metric to be. These are metrics about Kubernetes resources. So you would define a metric for a pod or a service or something like that. They have to be associated with a particular resource. I've made all kinds of these. You can do latency, you can do throughput, you can do the depth of your queue. Really you can do anything that you have defined as the critical thing to scale on in your application. Finally, we have external metrics. This is another user-defined one, but the difference here is that these do not associate with a particular Kubernetes resource. This might be a business metric, like the number of people that are using your application right now. There are so many possible bottlenecks in your application. CPU, obviously. Memory, duh. Network, people don't always think about this one as much, but I've seen it happen in practice. The number of worker threads, maybe you only have two worker threads at once and this pod can simply not take more than that. It's just the way it is. Maybe it's using the GPU or something like that. The number of outbound connections. It might not be the case that your deployment is the bottleneck. There might actually be a downstream dependency. It would be completely pointless to scale up on something like CPU when the thing isn't even CPU bound. Queued up as we mentioned, this is another big one that we see in practice a lot. There's so many more. The best metric depends on your workload. It's really important to characterize your workload before choosing a metric to autoscale on. And that's where using open source tools like Pixi can help. So let's look at an example application. So in the upper left, it's the same view as the one we showed the video of. Request per second. It's also showing errors per second in green. So what we're seeing for this application before autoscaling is the request per second is going up to about 25 when it's hitting load. And when that happens, we're seeing a five second latency. This is probably unacceptable. It might be fine for your workload, but let's just imagine it's the common case and this is unacceptable spike in latency. But the weird thing is we're seeing a low CPU. The CPU is hitting 8%. How is the latency so bad? That's because this is one of those workloads that actually has a queue latency. It puts items in a queue and then it processes them at a certain speed. The latency is not actually in the CPU or resources that you would expect. But after we autoscale on latency, we can see that we've added a certain number of pods. It's reached five and this has had a huge impact both on the request per second, which is now four X higher and on the latency, which starts off at that five second problematic zone, but then it drops to two, which is a huge improvement. And the CPU usage is stable as well. So this would be a good example of a case where you really have to think through the metric that you're autoscaling on. Let's take another example. This is a really problematic workload. It's maybe a little bit hard to see, but over 90% of these requests under load are errors. And the latency drops when that starts to happen. What's going on? For this workload, CPU is really high. So what's happening in this workload is that there is a certain capacity that it has and it starts turning away requests as soon as it reaches that capacity. So let's say I can only handle 10 things at once.  When that happens, the latency drops because it's actually really fast to say no, go away. It's a lot faster to do that than it is to actually do the work of the request. So if we were to scale on latency here, it would actually do the inverse of what we want. We don't want to scale on latency when latency is actually lower in our problematic state. So what can we do instead? We can actually scale using a custom metric for error rate. So this is something that we built out in the Pixie demos as well. You can actually look at the error rate in your application and provide a custom metric to Kubernetes based on that. So what we see here is that in the beginning, most of the requests are sending errors. It's saying I'm full, I can't take your capacity. But after we auto scale, it adds nine more replicas and we see a huge drop in the number of errors. We see the latency rise as well, but that's expected. More of these requests are actually being handled. Okay, so now for something totally deranged. So for those of us who are a little bit far away from our CS classes, let's review really quickly what a Turing machine is and what Turing completeness is before we get into it. A Turing machine is capable, it's a theoretical idea and it's capable of any computation given enough time and tape. What do I mean by tape? A Turing machine takes an input program and it does the computation and it writes an output value to theoretical tape. And something is a Turing machine when you can do any possible computation on that thing. So for example, if all I had was the ability to add one, that wouldn't be Turing complete because that instruction is not complex enough to do any arbitrary computation that I might wanna do. But there is something that is an instruction that would be Turing complete on its own. This is called sub-leck. Actually, I'm not sure how it's pronounced because I've only read about it. So if that's completely wrong, I apologize. But anyway, sub-leck is a one instruction set computer and it's sufficient for Turing completeness on its own. It may be very convoluted, but you can actually write any program you want using exclusively sub-leck. What does it do? What it does is it says, I'm gonna compare two values and subtract one from the other. If that is less than zero, I'm gonna jump to my next instruction provided in the command. Otherwise, I'm just gonna continue on with my program like normal. I'll leave the proof of why this is Turing complete to the mathematicians. So how are we gonna make a horizontal pot autoscaler Turing complete? What we're gonna do is have this horizontal pot autoscaler evaluate a different sub-leck command every interval that it's queried for its metrics. So we'll take a sub-leck program, we'll execute one instruction at a time, and then we'll set the number of output pods. And that output pods is the result of the computation. So you can think of the tape as the time series of the number of pods over time. And that's what the output value is. How do you get the input program? Well, I had to get it a little bit creative. This is my input program. We'll split on X. Now we have a series of numbers. There's three input arguments per command. So this is my result. So you can specify a deployment name like this and say, I wanna autoscale on this deployment, and that's how the autoscaler loads in the input program. Like I said, this is totally deranged. And just a way of demonstrating the power of the horizontal pot autoscaler. How do we set the certain number of output pods? What we do is we take this equation and turn it on its head. The autoscaler looks at the current number of pods and it backwards calculates what the metric value has to be to ensure a certain number of output pods. So let's take a look at it and see how it actually works. And I'll try to narrate it for the people on the back. And we're gonna put this at two X because that is the power of a video. So this is a completely open source thing. You can look at it and try it out yourself. So I've created my metrics API server. I have a deployment which has a funky name like we saw. And what we're gonna do is we're gonna watch the output number of pods over time and make sure it hits the values that we want. You might be wondering what this program does. What it does is it prints out high and ASCII, but it could do anything. So basically 72 is gonna correspond to the ASCII value for H, capital H. You can see next the autoscaler has computed a value of 105. It's happened really fast because I've sped it up. So you can see now it's hitting this value up here. Well it's actually 107 because I add two to every result so we never have a negative result. But the point is that we're seeing the number of pods here hit the result of this computation. So it started out 72 or 74 once you add two. 105 or 107 once you add two. And then the program is gonna terminate. So there you go, this autoscaler outputs high. Okay great, so this is kind of the end of the prepared remarks, but I just wanted to give some shout outs. To the Kubernetes SIG instrumentation, they've made it so easy to get started with defining your own custom metric for horizontal pod autoscaling. So definitely check them out if you wanna do that. Also check out Pixie, which I use for a lot of these demos. And then finally, thanks to Jan Adogan who made this awesome load generator. If you have questions raise your hand. Okay one over there. Oh I forgot to say also we have swag at the back for the Pixie open source project if you wanna pick it up. Hey there, thank you for your really great talk. I have a question. Did you use the vertical autoscaler also an open shift? Do we have experience of that? Using autoscaling with open shift? Yes. So I don't have direct experience using it with open shift but I assume that it would work just fine because it should support most Kubernetes features and this is a built-in Kubernetes feature. But if you wanna give it a try you can try that Pixie demos repo that I mentioned and you can just deploy it on your application and see if it works. You have a question? You didn't say anything about the limit. You said about the request and not the limits. I know limit is a bad usage. It's supposed to be deprecated I think but we need to say a few words so people won't use it. Yeah, that's a good point. Oh that was more of a statement than a question. Yeah. At the back where you're leaving could you keep the noise down? Some people are still trying to follow along. Thank you. Who's got a question? No, no more. Yeah, you need to hold your hand up, hi. Okay, so what's gonna happen when Altoscaler hits a limit of some resource on the cluster? So are you saying that it's targeted at a value above the limit of the cluster resources or when you're saying it hits the limit that you have set? The limit of the cluster resources. Yeah, so what you'll probably see in that scenario is that the pods, at least the horizontal pod Autoscaler will be pending. And so that's why it's really important to always check your auto scaling policies with the limits that you have especially with your cloud provider because you don't wanna get a bunch of pods stuck in a pending state. One more over here. Hi Natalie, thanks first for your great and structured talk. One question and lessons learned. So using the HPA with a sidecar proxy like we have one pod ending up having two containers like Istio. So the HPA is always using the average of the predefined metrics. So I could have Istio using 200% of the requested CPU and my application only 50. So I end up with a very messed up state. Do you have a lessons learned there or like best practices? Yeah, that's a really great point. I think that it really depends on what you wanna scale on. Like if you're trying to look at the joint utilization of the entire pod across containers then the built-in behavior can work just fine. But in your case, if you care a lot more about one of those than the other, you might wanna create a custom metric for the one that you care about because it's your way of specifying the exact thing to behave with. Okay, I'm gonna read out. Oh, I think there was one behind you actually. I'm still gonna read out a question from the online. A lot of people following along online and some of them have asked questions. Oh, great. So first one was could you reshare the demo URL? Maybe you could just put that slide back up. Oh, yeah. And the second one was is it better to use a small number of large pods or a large number of small pods? That is such a good question and there's not really one size fits all as an answer. It's something that really depends on your application. So what I would generally say is that if you have a lot of small pods that can be really good for a more stateless application and a more stateful application. You might prefer to size the pods bigger but that's just something that I've seen in practice. It's not a one size fits all. I think that the more that you can build your application to scale out proportionally to pods rather than having one mega pod that's more of a pet, it's more canonical to do it in more pods rather than just one mega pod. But there are some cases that you run into where you have a stateful application and you really do need a certain amount of heavy resources for that pod. Thank you, next question. Yeah, so you said the resource for HPA is important. So is it recommendable to mix together with the cluster autoscaler with HPA? Yes, those two can play together. The only ones that you have to be careful about are the vertical pod autoscaler with the horizontal pod autoscaler if you're scaling on the same metric. Hi, so do you have experiences or strategies for predictive autoscaling as well and not reactive on metrics? So what you're trying to say is like as opposed to responding to a change in metric that you've observed, you wanna actually predict that the metric will rise and then autoscale based on that. Yeah, it's a really interesting question. I think that probably the best practice for that today is try to create a custom metric that actually does that prediction and autoscale based on that. And that's something that the specifics of how to do that would probably depend on what you're predicting. But at the end of the day, a prediction is just another metric. Hi there, sorry if I missed this at the beginning, but how does this differ to using something like, say, KEDA to manage the autoscaling of pods? Because KEDA supports kind of custom metrics through Prometheus. So I was just wondering what advantages does this have over KEDA and vice versa? Yeah, for sure. So I think that what I've covered today is the stuff that's built into Kubernetes. So it's the stuff that if you're using Kubernetes, anyone can use. There's cloud providers with their own node scalers. There's KEDA also provides great autoscaling. So what I would say is, if you're just looking to use the Kubernetes API, you would use these things. But if you're already a user of something that provides autoscaling, you'd have to compare it against that and see which features meet your use case the best. And I realized that that's a non-answer, but it's the kind of thing that everyone's situation is very different. Okay, I think this is going to be the last one. Hi there. Is it possible to scale using multiple metrics or do you just have to choose one? It is possible to scale using multiple metrics. And what you can do then is say to the autoscaler, how do you want to decide which one wins? So you'd have to set a policy. And that policy would tell you when the two things disagree which one to defer to. Okay, thank you very much. Okay, I think we're at time. Thanks everyone.